Tag Archives: Lebanon

Where America and Iraq converge

Petraeus and Crocker told it like it is, and made clear the need for patience.

Gen. David Petreaus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker’s long-anticipated Congressional testimonies this week were edifying on two levels.

First, they told us a lot about the complex and challenging nature of the war in Iraq today. In their presentations, the two men did not simply inform the Congress of the estimable, indeed amazing progress that coalition and Iraqi forces have made over the past several months since the new counterinsurgency surge strategy was adopted. They also highlighted the enormity of the challenges facing the US and their coalition and Iraqi allies as they look to the future of the country.

The two men did not deliver their remarks in isolation. Their appearances on Capitol Hill came against the backdrop of shrill denunciations of Petreaus specifically and the war in Iraq in general. Those denunciations were orchestrated by deep-pocketed left-wing anti-war activists, and by Democratic politicians who apparently march to the beat of the activists’ drummers (and bankrollers).

The Left’s preemptive condemnations of Petreaus, and the Democratic politicians’ continuation of the Left’s attacks inside the committee chambers exposed the troubling direction that American politics have taken in the six years that have passed since legislators from both parties stood shoulder to should outside the Capitol building on September 11, 2001, and sang "God Bless America." And as Petreaus and Crocker’s reports on the situation in Iraq today and the prospects for Iraq in the future make clear, the Democratic Party’s embrace of radicalism has strategic repercussions for the prospects of the war in Iraq and for the future of global security as a whole.

As Ambassador Crocker explained, after 40 years of Ba’athist tyranny, Iraq emerged in 2003 as a traumatized and fractured society that today is still grappling with basic questions regarding its identity and its aspirations. Its ability to come up with reasonable answers to these existential questions is limited by the war now besetting it. The forces battling in Iraq of course seek through force to provide answers to those basic questions – and their answers obviously will not be good ones for Iraq, for the Middle East or for the world.

Petreaus and Crocker explained that in general, the US and its allies face two distinct enemy forces in Iraq today – al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranianbacked Shi’ite forces. As the stunning reversal of the security situation in the al-Qaida infested Anbar province over the past several months shows, US forces have made great progress against the first enemy.

The US wisely capitalized on tribal leaders’ disaffection with al-Qaida barbarism and worked with them to launch an offensive against al-Qaida forces and to bring the Sunni tribes into the political processes in Iraq. As a result of this cooperation, terror and insurgent attacks in Anbar, which as recently as last December was considered "lost," have gone down some 80 percent. Tribal warriors have joined the Iraqi security forces by the thousands. And for its part, the Shi’ite-dominated central government in Iraq has embraced the Sunni reversal and is providing monetary and other assistance to the Sunni leaders in Anbar province.

On the other hand, there has been no decrease, indeed according to Crocker and Petreaus there has been an increase in Iraniandirected attacks in recent months. Characterizing Iran’s role Petreaus said, "It is increasingly apparent to both Coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups [Shi’ite militias] into a Hizbullah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalitions forces in Iraq."

The disparity between al-Qaida’s defeats and Iran’s Shi’ite countersurge tells us something important about the difference between statecontrolled operations and operations by nonstate belligerents. It is true that al-Qaida in Iraq has direct ties to Syria and Iran. Its leaders have ties to Syrian intelligence; its commanders in Iraq are largely directed by al-Qaida’s Shura Council in Iran; and it receives arms and funding from Teheran and Damascus.

But still there is a major difference between Iranian and Syrian sponsorship of al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranian support for the Shi’ite militias there. Iran and Syria view al-Qaida as a proxy of convenience. Although its war in Iraq serves their goal of preventing a post-Saddam Iraq from developing into a coherent, multi-ethnic, stable state governed by the rule of law, al-Qaida is not an Iranian (or Syrian) organization. From their perspective, its contribution to the war effort against the US and its Iraqi allies is good for as long as it lasts.

In contrast, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the Dawa Party and the Badr Brigades are agents of the Iranian regime, as are Hizbullah and the Iraqi Special Groups.

Petreaus noted that both the US and the Iraqis were surprised by the depth of Iran’s involvement in the war. But they needn’t have been. Iraq and Iran, with their historic competition for primacy in the Persian Gulf and within Shi’ite Islam, have always been integrally and competitively linked. In the 1980s, recognizing the hostility of both countries to US national security interests, the Reagan administration wisely adopted a policy of dual containment toward them.

Unfortunately, in 2003, the US ignored the interconnectedness of the two countries’ fates, and so it adopted divergent policies toward them. While Iraq was confronted, Iran was ignored. Over time, the US policy of neglecting Iran was eventually replaced by a policy of appeasement. This divergence in US policy toward the two countries enabled Iran to renew its traditional bid for control over Iraq just as it was making moves toward regional domination through its nuclear weapons program, its cooptation of the Syrian regime, the expansion of its military and political influence over Lebanon through Hizbullah, and its sponsorship of the Palestinian war against Israel.

Iran’s offensive moves in Iraq point to one of the most basic strategic complexities of the entire battle in Iraq. Iraq does not exist in isolation. It is part of the Arab and Islamic worlds. The pathologies plaguing post-Saddam Iraq are not merely the consequence of his brutal totalitarianism. There are also consequences of the pathologies that have taken hold of the Arab and Muslim world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 90 years ago. As a result, the American goal of shepherding the development of a democratic, stable post-Saddam Iraq governed by the rule of law, while the rule of the jackboot, the mullah and the imam remain the order of the day in neighboring countries, has always been problematic.

With Petreaus and Crocker’s openness in acknowledging Iran’s central role in the war in Iraq, we are seeing for the first time an admission that it is counterproductive to view Iraq in isolation from its neighbors. And this acceptance of the regional nature of the war exposes one of the central risks inherent in the US’s current counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

Perhaps the central component of the US strategy for stabilizing Iraq is the organization and training of the Iraqi army and police forces. While the majority of Iraq’s security forces are loyal to their commanders and to the central government, and support the coalition forces they fight alongside, many Iraqi units have been infiltrated by enemy forces – most prominently, by members of Iranian-sponsored Shi’ite militias.

As Petreaus and Crocker warned this week, if the US Congress or the next administration decides to pull the plug on American-led efforts in Iraq, the results will be horrendous. Both men warned that a rapid withdrawal of US forces would likely cause the disintegration of the country, and Iran can be trusted to snatch key pieces of Iraq for itself. But beyond that, a US withdrawal would set adrift nearly half a million US-trained and armed forces who will undoubtedly seek out new sponsors.

The implications of the disintegration of the Iraqi forces for regional and indeed for global security are terrifying to imagine, and the policy ramifications of such an eventuality are clear. If the US plans on a quick exit from the country, the best thing it could do is to stop training and arming the Iraqi army.

This brings us to the strategic danger implicit in the raw hostility and irrationality of the American Left toward everything related to the Iraq campaign, which was expressed so openly in Congress and in the liberal US media this week. When a formerly responsible Congressional leader like the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos prefers belittling Petreaus and to calling for speedy withdrawal of US forces and a "diplomatic surge" involving negotiations with Syria and Iran over accepting the responsibilities of US global leadership in time of global war, it is clear that something horrible has happened to the Democratic Party.

As The Wall Street Journal put it on Tuesday, the hard Left, which seems to have been catapulted to the leadership of the Democratic Party, "sees politics as not so much an ongoing struggle but a final competition."

The Journal continued, "Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy."

Much criticism has properly been heaped on the lap of the Maliki government in Iraq for failing to make critical political progress that could improve the long-term prospects for post-Saddam Iraq. Governmental competence is imperative because as Petreaus explained, "the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power at resources."

Petreaus continued, "The question is whether the competition takes place more – or less – violently."

What is notable about Petreaus’s statement is that it can be equally applied to all countries. Politics and warfare are both about the relative distribution of power. What separates democracies from tyrannies and failed states is that democracies determine power’s distribution through deliberation and debate while tyrannies and failed states are governed by the rule of the gun and the laws of the jungle.

That the political party now in control of both houses of Congress, and well-positioned to form the next administration seems to have discarded this basic truth is far more dangerous for Iraq, the Middle East and indeed the entire world, than the chronic weakness, incompetence, double dealing and corruption of the Maliki government or of any successor government.

The strategy that the US has adopted in Iraq, which has met with such success in the brief time it has been operative, is a long-term strategy. Unless the Democrats regain their senses, it will be difficult for anyone to trust that the US won’t simply abandon Iraq, and with it, its responsibility as the leader of the Free World in the midst of a global war.

Of men and mice

IDF soldiers are the bedrock of Israel’s livelihood.

One by one the warriors ascended the stage Sunday evening to receive their commendations for battlefield valor and heroism during the war with Hizbullah last summer. Showing no emotion, they stood stiffly at attention before IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi as an announcer recounted how each one in turn eschewed his own safety and voluntarily walked, flew or rode into enemy kill zones to save wounded comrades and defeat the enemy.

The ceremony in Tel Aviv, broadcast live on television, was deeply inspiring. As Ashkenazi said, the 38 men – four of whom were killed in battle – who received decorations for heroism are the best of Israeli society. And as Defense Minister Ehud Barak noted, Israel’s neighbors should beware. If they dare to wage war against Israel, it is these fearless warriors, who already proved they will stop at nothing to complete their mission, whom they will face in battle.

The warrior spirit, so evident Sunday night, plays a decisive role in the lives of line soldiers and their commanders. The education combat soldiers receive from their parents, and the training and personal example set for them by their squad, platoon, company and battalion commanders all lead to a situation where heroism is a natural component of the IDF’s fighting units. By exposing this fact, the awards ceremony was a source of inspiration and relief.

But the ceremony was also frustrating. The majority of the decorations were given for acts of heroism related to the evacuation of wounded soldiers from battle under heavy enemy fire. Most of those battles occurred between two and five kilometers from the border with Israel. What they demonstrate is that Israel never effectively controlled the battle space it fought on.

This was not the fault of the forces on the ground. This was the fault of the General Staff that sent those forces into battles undermanned. It was the fault of the General Staff that undervalued the strength of Hizbullah units; failed to understand its battle schemes; and mismanaged the fighting. Disturbingly, aside from Ashkenazi, who replaced disgraced Lt. Gen Dan Halutz as Chief of General Staff after the war, almost all the commanders who displayed such incompetence last summer remain in their positions.

The General Staff of course, was not alone in its incompetence. It was led by the most ineffectual government Israel has ever seen. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government squandered the unprecedented international support that Israel enjoyed on July 12, 2006 when it properly decided to go to war after Hizbullah attacked northern Israel with rockets and missiles and kidnapped IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

The government failed to understand the regional character of the war and so refused to attack Syria. It ignored the gravity of the situation and so refused for weeks to call up IDF reserve forces. Then after belatedly calling up the reservists, it delayed ordering them into battle until international support for Israel had all but disintegrated and the government had already decided to sue for a cease-fire that left Hizbullah intact as a fighting force and as a political force in Lebanon. In so doing, the government ensured that the heroism of Israel’s forces could not be brought to bear in a manner that could enable Israel to emerge victorious from the war.

Like the General Staff, the government too remains in power. By losing the war despite our soldiers’ competence to win, the Olmert government surrendered the power to shape Israel’s strategic environment to the country’s enemies. And our enemies have lost no time in initiating changes in the Lebanese, and indeed regional landscape. These changes ensure that when Israel’s warriors are next called to fight, the enemy forces they will face will be far more powerful and dangerous than those they faced last summer.

Since last August’s cease-fire, under Iranian direction Hizbullah has operated on three levels at once. First, Hizbullah has reasserted its control over the border towns in southern Lebanon. Hizbullah has prevented Christian Lebanese, who fled the fighting last year, to return to their villages and so has ensured that the population along the border area is loyal to its forces.

Through a campaign of constant intimidation of UNIFIL forces, amplified by occasional armed attacks, Hizbullah has effectively destroyed any will that UNIFIL forces might have had to prevent Hizbullah from reasserting control over southern Lebanon. Hizbullah’s control over UNIFIL is made clear by the behavior of Spanish forces. After six Spanish troops were killed in June when their patrol came under attack, the Spanish government held open talks with Hizbullah and Iran to ensure the future protection of its forces.

Hizbullah has not limited its operations to the border zone. It moved most of its arsenal and positioned most of its forces north of the Litani River. There, the Iranian government has invested tens of millions of dollars in buying villages outright from Christian and Druse landowners to expand Shi’ite control of the country to the Syrian border through which arms are moved daily, unopposed.

As Amir Taheri reported this week in The New York Post, some 50% of lands in the Druse village of Sraireh have been purchased with Iranian funds by Hizbullah. The Druze/Christian village of Chbail has similarly been bought and others, along the border with Syria, are being targeted for purchase.

Politically, Hizbullah and Syria have actively worked to undermine the US-backed Siniora government. Here, the Lebanese military "victory" Sunday against Syrian-backed guerillas in the Nahr el-Bared camp is notable. It took the Lebanese military nearly four months of fighting to take over the camp. One hundred fifty-eight Lebanese soldiers were killed in the confrontation against a mere 360 Syrian-backed guerrilla fighters. Most of the guerillas escaped unscathed on Sunday morning as Lebanese forces moved into the camp.

The Lebanese army’s pathetic performance at Nahr el-Bared tells us something important about the loyalties of the Lebanese military – 40% of which is Shi’ite. During the war last summer, Lebanese forces openly assisted Hizbullah in identifying and marking Israeli targets for missile attacks. Since the war it has paid the pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.

The questionable loyalties of the army extend beyond its soldiers. Army Commander General Michael Suleiman enjoys warm relations with Syria. As Barry Rubin reported yesterday in The Jerusalem Post, the Syrians are supporting Suleiman as a potential candidate in the Lebanese presidential elections scheduled to take place on September 25. With a "glorious victory" at Nahr el-Bared behind him, Suleiman is being hailed as a national hero.

The Olmert government announced last week that tensions along Israel’s border with Syria have decreased markedly. Barak and Olmert proclaim that war with Syria which seemed imminent in July has been successfully averted. But even if this is true, it is far from clear that the abatement of tensions works in Israel’s favor.

Syria’s apparent decision not to launch an immediate attack on Israel does not signify a loss of Syrian will or interest in attacking Israel. Today Iran and Russia are tripping over each other as they line up to provide Syria with advanced weapons and modernize the Syrian military. Their assistance ensures that when war comes, Syria will perform well.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Russian military advisers are training Syrian forces on the ground in Syria. As Ma’ariv reported Friday, Russian advisors are involved in improving Syria’s signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities. If plans go through for the Russian Navy to station its forces at the Syrian port of Tartus, the Russians are scheduled to secure that port with advanced land to air PMU-2 ballistic missiles that will cover most of Syrian airspace.

At Sunday’s ceremony, the members of the General Staff looked visibly ashamed as the stories of the heroism of the forces they sent into misguided battles were recounted. To their credit, at least the generals, including Halutz, showed up for the ceremony.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert couldn’t even do that much. Just as he refused to attend the official memorial service for the war’s dead in July, so Sunday, Olmert was too busy to attend the ceremony.

Israel owes its survival to its warriors. But for them to successfully defend the country against the expanding regional threats, they must be led by commanders and politicians who are worthy of their sacrifices.

Coalitions, good and bad

Building and maintaining coalitions is one of the most difficult tasks of a nation at war. On the one hand, a state must ensure that its coalition partners share enough common goals and interests to ensure that their cooperation is effective. On the other hand, a state must constantly weigh the political and diplomatic benefits of maintaining its coalition against the price it must pay in terms of military effectiveness by delegating responsibility to others.

The price of maintaining coalitions is starkly exposed by the British military’s failure to rein in radical Shi’ite forces and Iranian influence in Basra, the Iraqi port city and oil hub. The question of whether having coalitions advances a nation’s interests at all is brought to bear in Israel’s diplomatic and strategic handling of its relations with the Palestinians and of the emerging situation in southern Lebanon.

Tuesday, a US intelligence official was quoted by the Washington Post saying, "The British have basically been defeated in the South." The Post article goes on to explain that the British "are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as ‘surrounded like cowboys and Indians’ by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional US Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months."

The British defeat in Basra was eminently foreseeable. Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003, some 100,000 Iraqi exiles who had lived in Iran since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s entered the city. Under the command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, during their time in exile, these Iraqis had organized a number of militias, including the Badr Brigade, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party, as well as several smaller militias. Muqtada el-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, although Iraq-based, was also supported by the Iranians.

These Iranian-backed forces were the most organized groups in the city in the chaos that engulfed Basra after the regime fell. Capitalizing on their organizational advantage, the groups volunteered to serve in the police and security services the British were raising to run the city. So it came to pass that within a short period of time, radical Shi’ite forces, backed by Iran, successfully took over Basra.

This radical Shi’ite takeover precipitated a reign of terror and intimidation in the city. As freelance reporter Steven Vincent chronicled before he was murdered in Basra in August 2005, the militias instituted a Khomeinist regime in the city, replete with death squads, generally comprised of off-duty policemen, which executed hundreds of civilians they accused of ties to the Ba’ath Party; the brutalization of women caught unveiled in public; the takeover of Basra’s university and hospitals; and the extortion of businessmen in mafia-like protection rackets. All the while, the British turned a blind eye to the devolution of the city into an Iranian enclave.

In an interview with the BBC, Air Chief Marshall and chief of the British Defense Staff Jock Stirrup made clear that Britain never considered it its business how post-Saddam Iraq developed. Insisting that the British mission in Basra has been a success, Stirrup allowed that one’s judgment of the British mission depended on "what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place." As he put it, Britain viewed its mission as limited to getting "the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run this part of the country, if they chose to."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government is keen to withdraw Britain’s remaining forces from Iraq in the fall. Given Britain’s performance in Basra, a British withdrawal would probably advance rather than harm the US’s strategic interests in Iraq.

And yet, for all the difficulties that the British forces in Iraq have created for the Americans (and for the Iraqis who are interested in living in a free society), there is no doubt that both countries perceive themselves as strong allies. To this end, the Americans refrain from publicly criticizing the British military’s dismal performance. For their part, the British have made clear that they will withdraw their forces in a manner that will minimize embarrassment to the US.

The Anglo-American alliance is a clear example of a true, but problematic partnership. In contrast, the Olmert government’s representations of Fatah and Egypt as Israel’s coalition partners against Hamas on the one hand, and the UNIFIL forces as Israel’s coalition partner against Hizbullah on the other hand, are a sham.

The Olmert government’s policies towards Hamas today are driven by its presumption of a partnership with Fatah and Egypt. The government asserts that both Fatah and Egypt share Israel’s goal of limiting Hamas’s power to the Gaza Strip in the short run and overthrowing the jihadist movement in the long run. But reality tells a different tale.

This week, we learned that the $100 million that Israel transferred to Salaam Fayad’s Fatah government last month was used to pay the annual salaries of soldiers in Hamas’s army in Gaza. Then too, this week it was reported that far from eschewing Hamas politically, Fatah is engaged in intense discussions with Hamas towards the establishment of a new Hamas-Fatah government. Far from cooperating with Israel in weakening Hamas, Fatah is actively maintaining Hamas’s strength.

Then there is Egypt. Although successive Israeli governments have insisted that Egypt is a moderating force on Palestinian society, for the past seven years, Egypt has worked steadily to strengthen Palestinian terror forces against Israel.

This state of affairs is most blatant in Egypt’s embrace of Hamas through its hosting of Palestinian "unity" talks for the past seven years, and in its facilitation of the weapons flow into Gaza through Egypt. That Hamas itself views Egypt as an ally rather than a foe was made abundantly clear this week when Hamas leaders offered to transfer control over security forces’ headquarters in Gaza to Egypt as a first step towards reconciling with Fatah.

Then there are the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. Speaking to Kadima party members Wednesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged that the security situation in northern Israel and southern Lebanon has never been better. Olmert added, "The commanders of the international forces say so, too."

In this statement, and in countless similar statements he has made over the past year, Olmert has presented UNIFIL as a friendly force which shares Israel’s goal of neutralizing Hizbullah. But here, too, reality tells a different tale.

During last summer’s war, UNIFIL directly assisted Hizbullah by reporting IDF troop movements in real time on its Web site. Since the war ended, UNIFIL forces have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah’s massive rearmament.

Under the protective cover of UNIFIL forces, Hizbullah has reasserted its control over the villages in the South and prevented their Christian residents who fled during the war from returning home. Hizbullah’s unqualified control over south Lebanon is attested to by foreign visitors who report that they must receive Hizbullah travel permits in order to enter south Lebanon. Then too, this week Lebanon’s An Nahar newspaper reported that Hizbullah was moving to extend its independent telephone network to the south. Needless to say, UNIFIL has taken no action to prevent any of this.

UNIFIL’s treatment of Hizbullah demonstrates that like Fatah and Egypt, UNIFIL does not construe its interests or goals in a manner that adheres to any Israeli interests or goals. Indeed, UNIFIL’s assessment of its goals and interests are antithetical and hostile to Israel’s national security interests.

Yet Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and their cabinet colleagues consistently represent UNIFIL as an ally and have worked fastidiously to strengthen it. During the ceasefire negotiations last summer, the government insisted on enlarging the UNIFIL force and extending its mandate. After the war ended, in the interest of strengthening UNIFIL, the government made no effective protest against UNIFIL’s inclusion of forces from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, whose governments are allied with Iran.

UNIFIL’s mandate expires on August 31. Next week the UN Security Council is scheduled to convene to extend its mandate for another year. Rather than acknowledge UNIFIL’s institutional hostility towards Israel, the Olmert government supports the extension of its mandate. As The Jerusalem Post reported this week, the government even hopes that UNIFIL’s renewed mandate will empower it to increase its presence in Lebanese villages – as if there is any chance that UNIFIL would use its widened role to fight Hizbullah.

Due to the rampantly anti-American atmosphere in Britain and to Britain’s refusal to view the threat that Middle Eastern rogue regimes pose to its national security in the same way as the US perceives the threat, there have always been tensions in the countries’ alliance that have led to their starkly different strategies in Iraq. The main reason that these divergent strategies receive attention today is because the US military’s recent successes in Iraq make Britain’s failures impossible to ignore.

The administration changed course in Iraq because domestic pressure forced it to acknowledge that its previous course was failing. So indirectly, it was public pressure on the administration that exposed the operational disparity between the British and the American militaries. The exposure of this disparity is now forcing the administration to contend with the fact that the coalition with Britain is not as useful as it had hoped. No doubt, as a result, the US military will soon be forced to operate in Basra regardless of whether the British remain in Iraq or withdraw.

Sadly, in Israel, the Olmert government refuses to acknowledge, let alone respond to domestic criticisms of its mishandling of the situation with the Palestinians and its mismanagement of Lebanon. Rather than acknowledge that Fatah, Egypt and UNIFIL share none of Israel’s national interests, the government continues to embrace them and hopes that no one will notice that its imaginary coalition partners endanger, rather than advance Israel’s national security.

America’s best friends

Two major arms sales were announced over the weekend. First, the US announced that it is planning to sell Saudi Arabia $20 billion in advanced weapons systems, including Joint Direct Attack Munition kits or JDAMs that are capable of transforming regular gravitational bombs into precision-guided "smart" weapons.

Largely in an attempt to neutralize Congressional opposition to the proposed sale, the Bush administration also announced that it plans to increase annual military assistance to Israel by some 25 percent next year and that it hopes that next year’s increase in assistance will be maintained by the next administration.

The second arms sale was the reported Russian agreement to sell Iran 250 advanced long-ranged Sukhoi-30 fighter jets and aerial fuel tankers capable of extending the jets’ range by thousands of kilometers. Russia’s massive armament of Iran in this and in previous sales over the past two years make clear that from Russia’s perspective, all threats to US interests, including Shi’ite expansionism, work to Moscow’s advantage.

On the face of it, these contrasting US and Russian announcements seem to signal that geopolitics have reverted to the Cold War model of two superpowers competing for global power by, among other things, assisting their proxies in fighting one another. Yet, today the situation is not the same as it was before.

Today, the US finds itself competing not only against an emergent Russia, but against Iran, and the Shi’ite expansionism it advances. Moreover, it finds itself under attack from Sunni jihadism, which is incubated and financed by Saudi Arabia, America’s primary ally in the Persian Gulf.

The US’s proposed arms sale to Saudi Arabia has raised pointed criticism in Israel and among Israel’s supporters in the US. As senior defense officials told The Jerusalem Post Monday, the JDAM sale to Saudi Arabia constitutes a strategic threat to Israel which has no way of defending itself against JDAM capabilities.

To assess the reasonableness of Israel’s opposition to the proposed sale, and to understand the sale’s significance against the background of emerging regional and global threats to US national security interests, it is worthwhile to revisit US actions toward Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War when checking Soviet expansion worldwide was the main goal of US foreign policy.

The US held Israel at arms length until after its stunning victory against Soviet clients Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six Day War. In the aftermath of Israel’s victory, the US realized that Israel was a natural ally in checking Soviet power in the Middle East. As a result, in 1968 it began providing Israel with political and military aid. This policy paid off in spades in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in the 1982 Lebanon War when the IDF handily beat the Soviets’ proxy armies. Indeed, from the US perspective, there was no downside to supporting Israel. Israel’s patent lack of expansionist ambitions ensured that the US would suffer no ancillary blowback for its support.

The US-Israel alliance’s central weakness was US’s perception of Saudi Arabia as its strategic ally. This weakness came to the fore most prominently in 1981 with the Reagan administration’s decision to sell AWACs spy planes to the Saudis. As is the case with the US’s current proposed arms sale to the Saudis, back then Israel perceived the AWACs sale as a strategic threat to its national security. Yet, since checking Soviet expansionism and not securing Israel was the US’s primary strategic aim, and since the US perceived Saudi Arabia as an ally against Soviet expansionism, the Reagan administration pushed the sale forward against Israel’s strenuous objections.

In the end, the AWACs were not used against Israel. Yet by the same token, they also did nothing to curb Soviet expansionism or advance any other US interest. During the 1991 Gulf War, the Saudis played no effective combat role against Iraq.

The main Saudi contribution to the US’s victory in the Cold War was its willingness to finance the mujahadeen in Afghanistan who fought the Soviet invasion. There can be no doubt that the rout of the Soviet military in Afghanistan played a central role in causing the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But there is also no question that the blowback from the war in Afghanistan has been enormously detrimental to US national security and to global security as a whole.

The mujadaheen’s US-armed and Saudi financed victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan fed the aspirations of Saudi supported Sunni jihadists. It spawned al-Qaida and provided arms and combat experience to forces that would come back to haunt the US.

So as far as the Middle East and Central Asia are concerned, a primary lesson of the Cold War relates to the relative weight the US can securely place in its alliance with Israel on the one hand, and its alliance with the Saudis on the other. Israel used US support in a manner that advanced both Israel’s national security and US geopolitical interests with no blowback. The Saudis were either inconsequential, or advanced US interests in a manner that caused enormous blowback.

Today as the US faces Russian hostility, Iranian expansionism and Saudi-financed Sunni jihadists, it remains afflicted by the Cold War dilemma of the relative importance of its alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia. On the face of it, given that today the potential for blowback in supporting Saudi Arabia is far higher and eminently more foreseeable than it was 25 years ago, it should seem clear that in assessing its strategic assets and interests in the region, the US would place far greater weight on its alliance with Israel.

Unfortunately, today the Bush administration is behaving counterintuitively. It pursues its alliance with Saudi Arabia with vigor while eschewing and downgrading its alliance with Israel.

The administration’s hostility toward Israel is not limited to its intention to arm the Saudis with weapons capable of destroying Israel’s strategic assets in the Negev. It is also actively pressuring Israel not to defend itself against Iran and its proxies. Since the Second Lebanon War last summer, the US has pushed Israel to take no action against Iran’s proxy Hamas on the one hand, while pushing Israel to empower Fatah, which has its own strong ties to Iran and to Hamas, on the other. By pressuring Israel to enact a policy of capitulation toward the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, similar to its capitulation to the Palestinians two years ago in Gaza, the Bush administration is advancing a policy that if implemented all but ensures Iranian control over the outskirts of Jerusalem and Amman.

There are two principal causes of the US’s coolness toward Israel and warm embrace of the Saudis. First, the administration’s failure to achieve its goals in Iraq strengthened the influence of the Saudi’s Cold War proponents. These proponents, led by former secretary of state James Baker’s disciples Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, advance their Saudi-centric agenda while paving the way for a US withdrawal from Iraq without victory. In the Baker camp’s view, the best way to facilitate a pullout is by strengthening the Saudis so that they can perhaps prevent a post-US withdrawal Iraq from devolving into an Iranian colony.

The second cause of the administration’s hostility toward Israel is the Olmert government’s irresolute handling of the Second Lebanon War last year. As was the case 25 years ago, so too last summer, the administration supported Israel against the wishes of the Baker camp. Yet when unlike 25 years ago, last summer the Olmert government led Israel to defeat in Lebanon, it weakened the standing of administration officials who view Israel as a strategic ally and oppose the Saudis, while strengthening Israel’s Baker-inspired foes who view Israel as a strategic liability.

The Olmert government’s enthusiastic embrace of capitulation as a national policy toward the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria merely serves to strengthen the US view that Israel is a strategic liability rather than an asset.

Yet the lessons of the Cold War, and those of the past 15 years remain clear. The Saudis remain at best fair-weather friends to the US, while Israel’s strength or weakness directly impacts US national security and geopolitical interests. As was the case during the Cold War, so too today, the US’s best option for checking Russian and Iranian expansionism and neutralizing Sunni jihadists is to back Israel.

If the US were willing to understand the clear lessons from its Cold War experience in the Middle East, it would not be pushing Israel to weaken itself still further through land giveaways to Iran’s Palestinian proxies. It would not be actively undercutting Israel’s national security by supplying sophisticated weapons to the Saudis. It would be admonishing the Olmert government for its irresponsible behavior and exhorting Israel not to go wobbly because it is needed for the larger fight.

Iran 2, Israel 0

Jafar Kiani was an anonymous Iranian prisoner until earlier in the month he became the first Iranian to be stoned to death since 2002.

Iran’s decision to revert to domestic barbarism is just one aspect of the regime’s strategy for terrorizing its people sufficiently to quell all pockets of resistance to its rule.

The regime’s determination to prevent an internal rebellion is an integral part of its larger plan to cast aside all obstacles to its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Iran already possesses what it needs to make nuclear bombs. What it needs is time. Last summer’s war against Israel was timed to provide Iran with a respite from international pressure. Hizbullah’s abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser took place the day before the leaders of the G-8 were scheduled to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. By ordering the assault on Israel, Iran diverted their attention away from its nuclear program.

Ever since the war, the Olmert government has declared that the war split the Muslim world into two camps – the moderates and the extremists. Operating on the basis of this perceived split, Israel has sought to build a coalition with the moderates in the hopes that such a coalition will block Iran from acquiring the bomb.

A year after the war, the time has come to make a renewed assessment of the situation. Are moderates blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? If not, what has transpired?

A good place to start the analysis is with an item that appeared on both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s to-do list this week. Both leaders telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan to congratulate him on his Islamist AKP party’s electoral victory on Sunday.

Turkey is perceived as the paragon of Muslim moderation. Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and President Shimon Peres have all stated that Israel does not have a problem with AKP’s Islamist character. Indeed, in a bow towards Turkish friendship, Olmert revealed last week that Turkey has been facilitating talks between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights.

Yet Ankara’s readiness to encourage Israel to hand the Golan Heights over to Iran’s client state does not necessarily indicate that Turkey is Israel’s friend. Indeed, since the AKP rose to power in 2002, it has distanced Turkey from both Israel and the US while warming Turkish relations with Iran and Syria.

Starting with Turkey’s refusal to participate in or support the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, recent years have been marked by steadily increasing Turkish hostility. Two weeks ago, to Washington’s dismay, Turkey signed a $3.5 billion gas deal with Iran.

As to Israel, Erdogan was the first leader to host Hamas terror masters after the jihadist movement won the Palestinian elections in January 2006. During last summer’s war, Iran shipped arms to Hizbullah through Turkey. Turkey’s leaders have repeatedly declared their support for Iran’s right to develop its nuclear program.

IRAN’S COURTSHIP of Turkey is but one aspect of its foreign policy. Over the past several years, Iran has built webs of alliances with other states, alliances that have significantly deepened since last summer’s war.

In the first circle, Iran has its clients – Syria, Hizbullah, the Shiite (and increasingly the Sunni) militias in Iraq, and the Palestinians. Just as these forces fought together last summer, so they will fight together in the future. Ahmadinejad’s visit to Damascus last weekend was strikingly similar to meetings he held with his terror underlings before last summer’s war.

In its second circle, Iran has cultivated strategic ties with countries in Latin America, which, led by Venezuela, share its hatred for America. These ties serve three purposes. First, they provide Iran with a global deterrent against the US. Second, they provide Iran with ready support in diplomatic forums. Third, they build support for Iran among the "progressive" set in the US and Europe.

In Iran’s third circle of alliances are countries like Russia, China and Egypt. While all these states publicly oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, they effectively block the international community from taking effective action against Iran’s nuclear program.

In the meantime, Israel’s coalition of moderates has failed to materialize. The leaders of the sought-for coalition, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, refuse to take any action against Iran. Indeed, they effectively support Teheran. In February, Saudi King Abdullah feted Ahmadinejad during a state visit. The next month, by mediating the formation of the Hamas-Fatah government, Abdullah enabled Iran’s Palestinian proxy to gain control of the Palestinian Authority. As for Egypt, it is using Iran’s nuclear program as cover to advance its own nuclear weapons program.

Then there are the great powers and foremost among them Russia, France and the US. Any UN action against Iran must be agreed upon by all three. And there is little chance of that ever happening.

Russia is Iran’s ally. Russia supplied Hizbullah and Syria with arms and intelligence during last summer’s war. In the intervening year, Russia has sold advanced weapons systems to both Iran and Syria. Last weekend’s report in the Arab media regarding Iranian financing of Syrian purchases of Russian jet fighters, tanks and missiles is part of this overall picture.

Israeli analysts scoffed at the report, noting that the billion dollars Ahmadinejad pledged is insufficient to purchase the weapons he outlined. But those weapons will not all be going to Syria. Last April Iran and Syria signed an agreement essentially merging their militaries. Iran’s Defense Minister Mustafa Muhammad Najjar told reporters in Damascus, "We consider the capability of the Syrian defensive forces as our own." He added that Iran "offers all of its defense capabilities to Syria."

While Russia is selling the weapons to Syria, a Russian military official said of the aircraft, "The Syrians will be getting the top line of Russian aircraft through financing by Iran and [will] share some or most of the platforms with the Iranian air force." Jane’s Defense Monthly reported that at least 10 of the artillery-missile systems will also be transferred to Iran.

Russia also acts as Teheran’s diplomatic shill. During a summit in Teheran last month Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, "We do not see any kind of threat from Iran." In a subsequent visit to Israel, Lavrov insisted that Russia’s arms sales pose no threat to the Jewish state, and anyway, the only way for Israel to ensure its security is to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria.

But the Olmert government refuses to acknowledge that Russia has reinstated its Cold War hostility towards Israel. It vapidly praises President Vladimir Putin for his "positive role" in the region and continues to adhere to the line that Russia will agree to UN Security Council action against Iran.

Then there is France. Last summer France displayed open hostility towards Israel in its representation of the Lebanese government in which Hizbullah was then a member at the UN ceasefire talks. On the other hand, in 2005 France joined forces with the US to expel the Syrian military from Lebanon after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Israel hoped that with Nicholas Sarkozy’s victory in the presidential race, France would take a more pro-Israel stance. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Sarkozy has warmed French ties with the Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah axis. Sarkozy legitimized all three when he invited Hizbullah representatives to participate in talks he held with Lebanese factions outside of Paris this month.

Additionally, early this month France led 10 EU member states in meddling in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The foreign ministers of these largely Mediterranean EU member states sent a letter to Quartet envoy Tony Blair, demanding, among other things, that Israel agree to the deployment of international forces in Judea and Samaria, and that Hamas be invited to participate in an international conference on the issue.

As France treats with Iran on Lebanon, the US follows a similar course of engaging the mullah on Iraq. After his meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this week, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker announced the formation of a joint US-Iranian security committee which will discuss Sunni terrorism in Iraq.

Apparently in the interest of advancing America’s "security cooperation" with Iran, the State Department refused to raise the issue of the five American citizens being held hostage in Iran at the meeting. And with the prospect of diplomatic "progress" with Iran on Iraq in the air, the US certainly doesn’t want to rock the boat by pursuing the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Indeed, Iran’s carrot and stick approach to powers like the US and France form a fourth circle of ties. Iran has worked to neutralize threats from these countries by attacking their interests in other spheres: Lebanon, in the case of France, and Iraq, in the case of the US. Given both countries enthusiasm for "engagement," it seems that the mullahs have hit on the right approach.

ISRAEL HAS experienced some achievements regarding Iran over the past year. The UN Security Council did pass two sanctions resolutions against Iran. With the active lobbying of opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, many US public employee pension funds are moving to divest from companies that do business with Iran. And this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that like his predecessor Tony Blair, he will not rule out the option of using military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Yet despite these achievements, Iran has made steady progress with its nuclear program. Wednesday Ahmadinejad announced, "Iran will never abandon its peaceful [nuclear] work." Sunday, a senior Iranian official told The Independent that with almost 3,000 centrifuges operating at its nuclear facility at Natanz, "We have at the moment enough centrifuges to go to a bomb."

Back in Israel, this week Olmert made clear that he wishes to advance contacts with the Palestinians towards an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. His advisors told reporters that Olmert is moved by his desire to get beyond his failure in last year’s war and the criminal investigations into his shady business dealings. He wishes to be perceived as a statesman.

Of course if Olmert truly wishes to be seen as a statesman, then he shouldn’t be concerning himself with Israeli withdrawals that will only strengthen Iran. He should change his strategic focus to Iran which threatens to wipe Israel off the map.

Despite his government’s protestations to the contrary, there is no coalition of moderates to work with against Iran. There is no coalition at all. And time is not in Israel’s favor.

If Olmert wishes to gain the public’s support, and even admiration, he must quickly build and deploy a military option for destroying Iran’s burgeoning ability to destroy the State of Israel.

Enlightenment’s Dusk? The West’s Decline and Islams Stormy Rise

The topic at hand is of grave concern for all of us, irrespective of what faith-tradition we adhere to, or even if we choose not to belong to one. Its importance does not merely arise from the events of September 11, 2001, but these events, what followed and where we find ourselves have given greater credence to Samuel Huntington’s prognosis of the “clash of civilizations” than the efforts of those to be dismissive of his analysis and warnings.

We need to pay close attention to the role of ideas in shaping history even as the unfolding of events shape ideas in ways unanticipated. I like the phrase Richard Holbrooke used in introducing Paul Berman’s book, Power and Idealists, “the savage intersection where theories and personalities” collide. “Enlightenment’s Dusk? The West’s Decline and Islam’s Stormy Rise,” I take to mean as that moment in our contemporary history when we stumbled into the “savage intersection” where ideas that went into the building of the modern world of science and liberal-democracy are in collision with other ideas hostile to this world as represented by the West. In this collision to which we are witness there will be unforeseen consequences as there were in past collisions, and unanticipated developments will place tomorrow’s generation into situations resulting from decisions of the present generation in response to the events of 9/11.

In the millennium year of 2000 Jacques Barzun published his chronicle of ideas in the making of the West over the past five hundred years titled From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Barzun’s narrative begins with the generation to which Martin Luther belonged. Luther’s posting of his 95 theses on the door of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg in October 1517 was a seminal moment in the history of the making of the modern world, sparking as it did the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was carried forward into the period known as the Enlightenment and then followed by what Marshall Hodgson, in writing The Venture of Islam, described as the “great western transmutation” that placed Europe ahead of all other existing civilizations. Barzun’s choice of the word “decadence” instead of “dusk” is pregnant with allusions that would have been otherwise missing, for “dusk” foretells of the “night” ahead arriving as a closure to any history with a distinct beginning. “Decadence” suggests that closure is not a given, that though age brings infirmity and the passage of time breeds corruption, that ideas and the accompanying human spirit can become revitalized, and that in the Biblical sense an Abraham of much advanced age can still bring off-springs into the world and with them his world’s renewal.

The slogan of Enlightenment was given by Kant. “Enlightenment is humanity’s departure,” Kant declared, “from its self imposed immaturity. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not lack of intelligence but failure of courage to think without someone else’s guidance. Dare to know! That is the slogan of Enlightenment.”1 Not only man alone without intermediaries may reach God directly as Luther proclaimed, but man alone aided only by rational thinking can unlock the mysteries of God’s creation as Newton demonstrated.

Enlightenment was the opening wide of human intellect to reach for the stars and beyond. Its premise was the unlimited power of unfettered reason among free individuals. Reason and Freedom would be the two faces of the Enlightenment’s coin, each supporting and enhancing the other’s widening horizon. Both on their own were fragile and precariously situated; but together they would be nearly invincible in the making of the modern world. In the five centuries since this adventure began the ideas of Reason and Freedom have had innumerable collisions with countervailing and hostile ideas. There would be moments of grave doubts about the survival of Enlightenment’s ideas from enemies who placed the authority of the collective – be it of the church, the general will, class or race – ahead of individuals to be free and to think for themselves in constructing a society where Reason and Freedom remain protected and are unassailable.

Of the West’s decline and Islam’s stormy rise, I will place “decline” and “rise” within quotation marks. For the past century, at least since Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic ruminations in The Decline of the West published in 1918, western historians and philosophers in regular intervals have speculated on West’s passage to some end state of irreversible weakening. The story of ancient Rome’s decline and fall stalks such speculation which, ironically, is also an attribute of the modern West’s resilience. Hence, “decline” is more apparent than real, though concerns about the loss of vitality are genuine.

Islam, unlike Christianity, has yet to have its own reformation. Here it should be noted that “reform” of a faith-tradition accompanying an institutional framework of order is neither an event nor an instant in time but a process deeply frustrating, confounding, ugly, prone to violence, and of end state not entirely predictable. Luther posting his 95 theses stands out in the flow of that long winding process of Reformation in Europe as does the royal prerogatives of Henry VIII’s break with Rome when refused annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine and establishing the Anglican Church, and so does the Reign of Terror in France that made a mockery of a revolution in the name of the Rights of Man.

It might also be said that 9/11 for what it now has come to represent, an episode of the intensity of turmoil inside the world of Islam, is indicative of the unpredictable nature of the reform process at work. The stormy “rise” of Islam is the action-reaction of Muslims as they seek either to embrace or to resist and reject the modern world. Europe’s reformation process took place over a period when boundaries separating civilizations and continents were impenetrable to a sufficient degree, and even adjacent cultures could be closed to each other. The squeezing of the world of Islam is taking place in the full glare of globalization, and the world that Canada’s Marshall McLuhan imagined as a “global village” is one we inhabit in which boundaries have dissolved and no culture can remain unaffected by what occurs in another.

When we speak and write of Islam, as we do for example of Christianity, we mean simultaneously a faith-tradition with its non-negotiable core doctrine and an institutional framework of socio-political order built by human enterprise in the name of that faith-tradition. This distinction needs to be kept in perspective for much confusion is generated by conflating the two. In discussing Islam we mean generally more or less what Muslims do in practicing their faith-tradition as they variously understand its meaning provided primarily in the Koran taken by them to be divinely revealed words to Muhammad. But the practice of Islam comes in great variety as there is much diversity in ethnicity among Muslims. The world of Islam is not monolithic though its domain is vast. Yet Islam as a monotheistic faith-tradition belongs to the family of faith-traditions which includes Judaism and Christianity. We know from experience that no quarrel tends to be more difficult than the quarrels within a family as what is common gets neglected and differences are amplified.

Mohammed Arkoun of Berber-Algerian origin and professor of Islamic studies at Sorbonne, Paris, observed, “Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant forms is the only religion which, in what it has rejected and what it has accepted, has been continuously exposed to the challenges of a modernity which was forced and which developed in Europe and exclusively in Europe until the Second World War.”2 Arkoun will not quibble if I extended Europe to include the United States and Canada. The point to note in Arkoun’s observation is that Christianity’s experience in the development of the modern world has important lessons for other faith-traditions whose followers are in various degrees yet to make as full a transition from pre-modern to modern world as Christians of Europe did. This lesson bears upon Muslims with urgency and with demands that Jews do not confront in the like manner.

Christianity influenced and shaped the moral foundation of the modern world even as it retrenched and conceded space to secular thought in the realm of politics. Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason contends, “Christianity created Western Civilization… Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists.”3 Stanley L. Jaki, the Hungarian-born scientist and Benedictine priest, similarly but less stridently has pointed out the “science” we are familiar with and which has been central in the making of the modern world is uniquely European, and this “science” owes its “viable birth in a Europe which Christian faith in the Creator had helped to form.”4

In the long arc of history the world of Islam for several centuries in the medieval period, from the 8th to the 12th, stood ahead of Christian Europe in terms of civilization. This was the period dominated by Muslim thinkers of Arab, Persian, Turkish and Afghan origins within the commonwealth of Islam. But within this period a confrontation among Muslims took place between men of doctrinaire faith and men of rational thought, and the doors of reasoning in matters of faith and law were closed. It brought to an end development in science within the world of Islam situated at the crossroads of civilizations and the role of Muslims as the bridge between the ancient world of Greece and the modern world’s awakening in Europe.

The world is constructed and reconstructed by ideas. This notion is inherent in Islam as the Koran insists people observe nature and its working and see in them signs pointing to God as the Creator of the universe and the world in it. But once the dictates of authoritarian politics in the Muslim world shut the door on speculative reasoning, the creative impulse dwindled at a time when Europe was to take its “great leap” forward. The result was a breach opened between Europe and the Muslim world; it would soon become a chasm and the present widening distance between these two worlds – one modern and the other pre-modern – seems insurmountable. Abdus Salam, the first Muslim scientist to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979, reflected upon this parting of ways. Salam remarked,

[A]round the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history.

But about the same time there was also created – and this time only in the West – a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton’s Principia, published in 1687. Newton’s work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals. I would like to describe the fate of the technology which built the Taj Mahal when it came into contact with the culture and technology symbolized by the Principia of Newton.

The first impact came in 1757. Some one hundred years after the building of the Taj Mahal, the superior firepower of Clive’s small arms had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the descendants of Shah Jahan. A hundred years later still – in 1857 – the last of the Mughals had been forced to relinquish the Crown of Delhi to Queen Victoria. With him there passed away not only an empire, but also a whole tradition in art, technology, culture and learning.5

The emergence of the Muslim world into independence and statehood in the middle years of the 20th century after over two hundred years of European control is one motif of Islam’s “stormy rise” and Europe’s retrenchment, not “decline.” But the Muslim world was not alone in this emergence into independence and statehood; India’s independence, China’s nationalist revolution under the banner of Marxism, and the gradual withdrawal of European powers from Africa are all part of this singularly over-arching narrative. What makes Islam’s “stormy rise” noteworthy is the close proximity of the central core of the Muslim world, the Arab-Muslim Middle East, to Europe geographically and historically, and its many threads of relationship with Europe. This intricate web of history places the Middle Eastern societies in a special tension with Europe that is not similarly present in the story of modern India, nor China.

There is the memory – however vague, uncertain or imprecise – recalled when a Muslim mind is scratched of a past when the Islamic world was at par with Europe, and even in some respect ahead. This memory works in many different ways to question, obstruct, rattle, and also defeat efforts of that segment of Muslims who want to engage with the modern world, learn from it, adopt its ways and make the social transition from the traditional pre-modern arrangements to the modern world of science and democracy. This is what we are witnessing in large measure in Iraq and Afghanistan where the collision between the modern and the pre-modern world due to circumstances that brought about 9/11 has been the most dramatic. This is in part what Mohammed Arkoun was referring to for Muslims to learn from Christianity’s long standing experience with modernity and the process of modernization; instead openness to learning in the Muslim world is under siege.

Let us take the past fifty years. In 1957 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Canada’s foremost scholar of Islam and comparative religions, published Islam in Modern History. Smith had traveled in the Middle East before the Second World War, and lived and taught in Lahore of pre-1947 India. He witnessed India’s partition, followed closely the developments in Pakistan, and his book was an effort to put in perspective history’s challenge for Muslims as they were beginning to work out their place in the modern world. Smith wrote,

The massive certainties of the nineteenth century have given way to the bewildering complexity of the twentieth. The resurgence of Asia has included the strenuous, gradual emancipation of Asian countries from European political control, an emancipation now almost but not quite complete. A radical modernity in living, Western in provenance, has shown a continually expansive, determined, seemingly irresistible penetration of all areas, including the Muslim. In this process it would be difficult to overestimate how fundamentally involved the Islamic societies are; in the cities psychologically and culturally, in all parts economically and administratively.6

Smith was a student of Sir Hamilton Gibb, the doyen of Anglo-Islamic scholars of the first half of last century. In 1932 Gibb published a study, Whither Islam, in which he wrote,

The most remarkable feature of the Moslem world in these early decades of the twentieth century is not that it is becoming westernized, but that it desires to be westernized. It would be difficult to point to a single Moslem country which entirely rejects the contributions of the West in each and every field of life and thought.7

Between the two observations of Gibb and Smith the world was politically wrenched out of its moorings as a result of wars and revolutions. The Muslim world was deeply affected by these events as were other cultures. Independence came, or was won as in Algeria, and the ruling class in the Muslim world made a bid to establish political order and engage with tasks that Smith described. But other forces were also at work abroad and domestically. Cold War logic on either side of its divide lent support to ruling elites across the Muslim world as they placed their survival in power ahead of the need to work out some institutional arrangement allowing for participation of the widest segment of the population in meeting the requirements of democracy and socioeconomic progress. Domestically the ideas of secular nationalism morphed into the politics of religious exclusion, and the insistence of religious authorities that the political order of Muslim societies conform with the legal principles of Islamic law (shari’ah) worked out in the early centuries of Islam between the 9th and the 11th century.

The rulers of the Muslim world in the decades after Smith’s landmark book was published went into retreat from their early adherence to the “desire,” as Gibb had written, of making their societies “westernized” or “modernized” in the vocabulary of later times. The retreat was occasioned by military defeats in Muslim encounter with non-Muslim countries – Israel and India, for instance – due to inherited grievances from colonial years. It was also as a result from the loss of legitimate authority, as in Iran of the Shah, of those in powers confronted by populist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan.

By the end of the last century the guarded optimism of Gibb and Smith had faded. Paul Kennedy, a Harvard historian, in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century published in 1994, summarized differently the situation of the Muslim world. Kennedy observed,

It is one thing to face population pressures, shortage of resources, educational/technological deficiencies, and regional conflicts which would challenge the wisest governments. But it is another when the regimes themselves stand in angry resentment of global forces for change instead of (as in East Asia) selectively responding to such trends. Far from preparing for the twenty-first century, much of the Arab and Muslim world appears to have difficulty in coming to terms with the nineteenth century, with its composite legacy of secularization, democracy, laissez faire economics, transnational industrial and commercial linkages, social change, and intellectual questioning. If one needed an example of the importance of cultural attitudes in explaining a society’s response to change, contemporary Islam provides it.8

Those Muslims most acutely tormented by the collision of their inherited world with the modern world are, and not surprisingly as witnessed in similar circumstances with other people, members of the social elite educated in the traditional value system of their society and exposed to the currents of modern thinking. It is from this class the opposition has come to the modern world based on identity politics. It is the much privileged children of this class whose alienation morphed into the politics of terror. Their rage would have been of little consequence but for the upheavals inside the traditional world of Islam resulting from the relentless pressures of globalization. They succeeded in fusing their anger and resentment against the modern world born of failure and defeats with the protests of uprooted peasantry and unemployed workers in sprawling urban ghettoes of failed economies into the making of populist movements within the Muslim world.

Khomeini and Osama bin Laden are the two faces of Muslims irrespective of their differences joined together in the fight against the modern world, as are the faces of Mohammed Atta, the lead pilot of one of the hijacked airplanes on 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al Qaeda mastermind of global terrorism in the name of Islam. In the opposite end are Muslim faces in the crowd of those rallying in support of democracy and the modern world as in Turkey and Lebanon, Indonesia and Iraq, or forced into silence as in Iran. Marshall McLuhan would remind us, what occurs in one corner of the global village will invariably affect other corners since the global village is now wired and connected. This was the lesson of 9/11. This is the struggle in which the West has been drawn: its battlefields today are in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the West can no more afford to turn its back on this struggle in our interdependent world than Muslims can opt out of being engaged in bringing their societies to adapt to the requirements of science and democracy.

For the West the confusion is how to assist Muslim countries make the transition into modernity as much out of historical necessity as self-interest in terms of security. For Muslims the confusion is how to restore the centre to their civilization that collapsed a long time ago, and to reconstruct it in harmony with the modern world. So long as the world was predominantly an agrarian economy, Muslim civilization maintained vitality. Once the Europeans pioneered the making of the industrial civilization, the Muslim world fell behind. For Muslims the need is to acknowledge that they have to learn in new ways how to hear and understand the words of the Koran in the dramatically altered conditions of the world they inhabit if they are going to contribute as a people positively to its advancement as once in the past other Muslims did.

 

This paper was originally presented as a talk at the 2007 Civitas Annual Conference, May 4-6, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Mr. Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a syndicated columnist in Canada and the United Kingdom.  A Muslim native to Calcutta, India, and a noted Islamic scholar, Prof. Mansur has written extensively on Islamic extremism and the challenges facing contemporary Islam.

 

Notes

1. Quoted in Barzun’s From Dawn To Decadence (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. 441.

2. M. Arkoun, “Is Islam Threatened by Christianity?” in Hans Kung and J. Moltmann (eds), Islam: A Challenge For Christianity (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1994), p. 54.

3. R. Stark, The Victory of Reason (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 233.

4. S.L. Jaki, The Road of Science And the Ways To God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 243.

5. Z. Hassan & C.H. Lai (eds), Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Ltd., 1984), pp. 48-49.

6. W.C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 298.

7. H.A.R. Gibb, Whither Islam: A Survey of Modern Movements in the Moslem World (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1932), p. 319.

8. P. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1994) p. 208.

 

On enemy propaganda, Pentagon tells it like it is

Three cheers for Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman! With top White House officials acting like henpecked husbands as they quaver in fear of upsetting the Senate Armed Services Committee majority, the Pentagon policy chief tells it like it is.

He told a very prominent and very aggressive senator that her campaign rhetoric “reinforces enemy propaganda.”

It’s about time the administration took on the people who are trying to do to Iraq what they did to South Vietnam: run their mouths without a care about how they might play into the enemy’s propaganda strategy.

Edelman told presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that her cut-and-run talk was helping the enemy. “Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Edelman said in a June 16 letter obtained by the Associated Press.

The cut-and-run rhetoric opened the way for the Hanoi communists to conquer South Vietnam. It rewarded Hezbollah for killing more than 240 of our servicemen in a single Beirut attack. And it gave Islamist thugs the confidence that by brutalizing the dead bodies of our Army Rangers on CNN, we would become demoralized and quit. Just as it is encouraging the Islamist terrorists to murder our servicemen every day in Iraq with roadside bombs.

“Such talk,” Edelman warned Clinton, “understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.” If the Senate majority party is working as hard as it can to force us to withdraw, then why should our nominal Iraqi allies cooperate with us? And why should the enemy let up its made-for-TV attacks?

Calling Edelman’s comments “at once outrageous and dangerous,” Clinton’s office says the senator is going to complain to Edelman’s immediate boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

War drums in the Middle East?

By Clay Varney

As the dog days of summer begin to make their presence known here in Washington, the White House has been busy battling members of its own party over the course of the president’s strategy in Iraq. However, the current action in the nation’s capital is obscuring some more menacing developments in the Middle East. As the temperature spikes here, the ominous situation in that volatile region appears to be picking up the pace.

The Turkish army has reportedly placed 140,000 troops along its border with northern Iraq. In what may be the latest outbreak of fighting in a long insurgency dating to the 1980’s, Turkey may be looking to invade the Kurdish areas of Iraq in the north in order to combat the presence of the PKK, a terrorist organization that often launches cross-border raids and bombings, and potentially more long term, in order to have a say over the status of Kurdistan’s political status within Iraq. This region has so far been the most stable area of the country. Such a Turkish invasion would of course destabilize Kurdistan and severely complicate relations between the United States and Turkey, two NATO allies. Whether or not the Turks would need or even seek American approval before such an invasion remains to be seen.

This summer might also witness a repeat of the Hamas putsch in Gaza replayed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, in its strange alliance with General Michel Aoun, a Christian, has made no secret of its desire to overthrow the democratic and Western-backed government of Fouad Siniora. Lebanese politics have increasingly begun to look like a Mafia clan war, as several anti-Syrian politicians have been assassinated in what is an obvious attempt to chip away at Siniora’s majority in parliament. However, certain developments have led to open speculation that an outright civil war or an attempt to topple the government by force is likely to soon break out. The Middle East Media Research Institute has reported that Syria has ordered its civilians residing in Lebanon to return home by July 15. Further, it has also been widely reported that Hezbollah is busy rearming and returning to its positions in southern Lebanon behind the ineffectual backs of UNIFIL. A rehash of last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah could also be in the offing. Finally, Syria has also decided to remove military checkpoints on the road to the Golan Heights. These checkpoints have been in place for 40 years.

On another front, the Iranian regime’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons continue apace. The government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently instituted gasoline rationing among its civilian population, triggering massive popular unrest. Though in some venues this has been interpreted as a method for allaying the population’s reliance on subsidized gasoline, such measures may in fact be intended to ensure that the military possesses enough gasoline in any upcoming conflict. In related news, the United States Navy has dispatched the USS Enterprise to the Persian Gulf, which would be its third aircraft carrier in that tiny body of water.

Back in the United States, the threat of a terrorist attack has reached a disturbing level. ABC News reported that al Qaeda is in the midst of planning a “summer spectacular,” a large scale terrorist strike akin to 9/11. The level of intercepted chatter and intelligence is said to be on the level with that which occurred prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the recent plots disrupted in the United Kingdom, it has become increasingly apparent that the menace of Islamist terrorism is not going away any time soon.

Clearly, these developments should not be taken lightly. The United States, whether it wanted to be or not, is now engaged in a shadow war with Iran and its allies, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. The previous discussion does not even mention Iran’s obvious interference in Iraq and its obvious supply of weapons to insurgent groups that have used these weapons to kill American soldiers. The course of this summer will have a huge impact on the region, as it will likely determine which side has the upper hand, America and its allies, or an expansionist Iran. Despite the concern in Washington over Iraq strategy, Congress must be careful to not see the forest for the trees. Though Iraq is a vital part of the United State’s current struggle, it is just one part of a larger battle, an encounter against an increasingly assertive Iran, whose people are beholden to a regime imbued with a dangerously apocalyptic worldview, preoccupied with trying to expand its power in the Middle East at American expense.

“Fixing” US-Latin American relations

 

The Menges Hemispheric Project is always monitoring the latest legislative events regarding Latin America.  Nancy Menges, Editor in Chief, has already testified in Congress and the Project is sometimes asked to name experts for the panels or testify through staff members.  The current discourse is quite vibrant.  

On June 19th the House Foreign Affairs Committee debated how to "fix the broken relationship with Latin America". We decided to give our readers excerpts of the introductory remarks of Rep. Lantos (D-CA) and the response of Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN).  These show that our topics shape the discourse and deliver early insider views.  

The typical party affiliations are an inextricable part of the average debate but the topics, as highlighted by representatives from both sides of the aisle, have picked up on the growing concerns about increased anti-Semitism in the region as well as Ethanol, Free trade and Chavez; the Democrat chairman Lantos and the Republican Dan Burton highlight the topics which have been brought up by our writers.

Federal News Service:

June 19, 2007 Tuesday

HEARING OF THE HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE; SOUTH AMERICA AND THE UNITED STATES: HOW TO FIX A BROKEN RELATIONSHIP; CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE TOM LANTOS (D-CA); WI .

House Committee on Foreign Affairs

Congressman Tom Lantos, Chairman

South America and the United States: How to Fix a Broken Relationship

Opening Remarks of Chairman Lantos at hearing.

Hugo Chávez’s anti-Americanism could not have come at a worse time for our relationship with our neighbors to the south. Chavez jets off to visit the most reprehensible despots in the world – in North Korea, in Iran, in Cuba – probably just because they have been identified by the United States as rogue regimes. He signs arms deals with these and other countries in a quest to militarize Venezuela to the teeth for no discernable purpose. And he makes friends with despicable perpetrators of violence: Ahmadinejad in Iran, Nasrallah of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad of Syria, and the late Holocaust denier Norberto Ceresole of Argentina. I am deeply disturbed that anti-Semitism is on the rise under Chavez, accompanied by support for Islamic terrorist groups.

With his own people, Chávez angles toward his own brand of authoritarianism. Chaotic, retributive land seizures in Venezuela have led to violence, injustice, and crop shortages. Recently, Chavez crossed yet another dangerous line: curtailing freedom of the press. He closed the independent television station RCTV in a bid to consolidate power and squelch opposition. An international backlash and ongoing student protests seem only to have emboldened him. No sooner did he shut down RCTV than he threatened to do the same with Globovisión, the last remaining TV channel he does not yet control.

Confounding the problem is the gutless response of the Organization of American States, which held its General Assembly days after the closing of RCTV and could not muster the courage to express even a word of concern. Adding salt to this ulcerating sore, OAS Secretary General Insulza just days later practically ripped up and tossed away the hemisphere’s main pro-democracy instrument, the Inter-American Democratic Charter, saying he doesn’t believe it should be used to pressure OAS member states. This whole episode is a stark reminder that the United States can no longer even mobilize the regional body established to address this sort of outrageous maneuver by Chavez.

The sapping of U.S. influence in this region has had wide-ranging ripple effects.   In Chavez’s shadow and with his oil money, the democracies in Ecuador and Bolivia are becoming increasingly undemocratic. Both countries have recently turned on their own media, and both are in the process of altering their constitutions. In Paraguay, we hear similar echoes.

Argentina is in many ways living in its past and grapples daily with the shadow of its 2001 economic collapse.   President Kirchner’s government has presided over a significant turnaround – with more than eight percent annual growth over the past three years – but he seems to listen to Mr. Chavez’s advice with alarming regularity.

There are governments in the region that are strongly democratic. These countries ought to step into the vacuum and re-claim regional leadership from Chavez.   Brazil and Chile, with two strong and visionary leaders, are the standouts.   Peru and Uruguay also hold considerable promise.  

Colombia is on the list of standouts as well, and President Uribe has made significant strides in providing security for his people.   But his troubles at home are significant, with corruption and the drug trade all too powerful. He has more than enough problems to keep him busy without saddling him with the heavy lifting in the region that used to be the role of the United States.

All of these countries show that responsible governments can and should boost economic growth and reduce inequality without enacting authoritarian policies. Our ability to shepherd them into the power void will go a long way toward reestablishing our positive influence in South America.

We have ignored South America as a partner for far too long. We have allowed Chavez to define us to our neighbors. That must stop before we reach a point of no return, a South America where most national leaders resort to the political expedients of coercion and authoritarianism.   We share central values with the rest of the region: democracy, open markets, and free speech.

REP. DAN BURTON (R-IN) :

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Regarding our influence in Central America and South America and trying to change governments, I’d just like to remind the panelists that Fidel Castro tried to cause revolution throughout Central and South America, and he was successful somewhat. He sent Che Guevara down there, and Che Guevara unfortunately got killed or fortunately got killed depending on how you look at it. And right now we have Hugo Chavez who’s a blood brother of Fidel Castro, and he has used millions and millions of dollars to influence the elections in Bolivia and Nicaragua and elsewhere.

And I don’t hear a great deal of mention about that. It’s always the United States and how the United States is interfering. We have a vested interest in democracy and freedom in our hemisphere, and I don’t see anything wrong with the United States being concerned about who is put on the U.N. Security Council that may be an impediment to freedom and democracy in this hemisphere. Venezuela obviously would be an impediment. Chavez wants to do everything he can to drive us nuts, and he to some degree has been successful. And he continues to keep his country in an uproar by going on television every other week or every week and saying that we’re going to invade and we’re going to try to kill him.

So he’s not a dumb politician. He’s pretty smart. And one of the things that I have a concern about regarding Iran being involved in South America and Central America is they are in the process of developing a nuclear capability. Chavez is right now buying weapons systems, submarines, airplanes, guns, everything else he can get his hands on with the money he’s getting from us and elsewhere. And if Iran is able to develop a nuclear capability, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Chavez would try to get some kind of a nuclear capability in his country to further influence the United States and our activities in Central and South America .

And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s extremely important that we do pay attention to Iran’s involvement with Chavez, because Chavez now has a history of trying to build up a real military capability, and he’s in the process of doing it right now. Iran is developing a nuclear capability, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to stop them unless we take very strong action because many of our European counterparts aren’t being cooperative in trying to put economic and diplomatic pressure on them.

Regarding our energy problem, we do get quite a bit of our oil from Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere in Central, South America . As a matter of fact, my information is we get almost half of our oil and gas from South America . And it’s extremely important that we recognize that fact. And that’s another reason why I really believe my colleagues ought to take a hard look at energy independence. We’ve been talking about that since Jimmy Carter when we had those long gas lines. Now we have gasoline — $3 plus per gallon and going up, and we know we can get between $1 and $2 million barrels of oil a day out of the Anwar, and we’re not doing anything about it.

We know that we could drill offshore around the southern coast of the United States and get oil. As a matter of fact, Cuba has cut a deal with China, and China’s going to be drilling within 45, 50 miles of Cuba, or 40 miles inside that agreed to zone, and there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll be drilling into some reserves that probably are in United States waters, and they’ll be getting those away from us. So I think we ought to take a hard look at — and we’ve got an estimated 500 year supply of natural gas, so I just say to my colleagues I think we ought to start looking at energy independence so we don’t have to deal with these problems down the road.

And finally, these free trade agreements — I want to just say to my colleagues or my friends on the dais there, or at the witness table — we really need to fulfill our obligations on the free trade agreements. Poverty is one of the biggest problems that Latin America has, and that’s why these radical leftists down there have been successful and will be successful. We’ve got to create an environment where people can get jobs, and the best way to do that is to extend these trade preferences and to have more free trade agreements, not less.

The Chile free trade agreement, for instance – we’ve seen trade between us and Chile increase by 154 percent since that agreement went into place. Our exports to Chile have gone up by $4 billion in three years. Their exports to the United States has gone up by $6 billion, and that means jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs fight poverty, and when you fight poverty you fight the radicals. And that’s why it’s extremely important that my colleagues on the other side of the isle pay attention to these free trade agreements and these trade preferences, because if they kill them they’re playing right into the hands of the leftist-like Chavez down there.

Olmert’s international coalition

Today Hamas consolidates its power in Gaza and plans its next moves in Judea and Samaria. Fatah – its main competitor – has collapsed.

Fatah was plunged into a state of organizational shock last month after its US-trained militias surrendered control of Gaza to Hamas and its US-benighted commanders fled the area.

Although with sufficient bribes for its angry followers courtesy of Israel and the US, Fatah may be able to temporarily resuscitate itself (at least until its leaders feel secure enough with the size of their Swiss bank accounts to decamp to Borneo), Hamas’s consolidation of its control over Gaza has nonetheless sealed Fatah’s death warrant.

In the course of its jihadist putsch in Gaza, Hamas took control not only of Fatah’s US- and European-financed military arsenal and the CIA and MI-6 intelligence gathering equipment Fatah was lavished with. It also took control of Fatah’s intelligence files and the personal files of Fatah leaders. This means that Hamas now has complete documentary evidence of Fatah’s corruption; its involvement in terrorism; and its double dealing with the West, with rogue regimes like Iran, and with terror groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida.

There can be no doubt that under the tutelage of the Iranian and Syrian intelligence directorates, Hamas will use its treasure trove of information in a manner that will block any move by Fatah to renew its support bases in Palestinian society.

Hamas’s intelligence windfall will similarly prevent Fatah from significantly resisting Hamas’s consolidation of control over Gaza and the expansion of Hamas’s rule to Judea and Samaria.

Two examples of Hamas’s use of information to date suffice to make this point clear. First there is Israel and the US’s favorite Palestinian "straight-shooter" Salam Fayad. Fayad – a former senior official from the terror-linked Arab Bank and the current prime minister of Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Judea and Samaria government – served willingly as finance minister in Hamas’s government before the Gaza takeover.

Claiming that Fayad was a personal friend of hers, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored her own government’s boycott of the Hamas government to meet with Fayad when he visited Washington in the spring.

Sunday Gaza-based Hamas terrorist and parliamentarian Yahya Musa accused Fayad of corruption. Referring to him as "the head of the thieves," Musa claimed that Fayad is "suspected of embezzling $36 million from the Agricultural Development Company."

Musa also hinted that Fayad has personally overseen the finance of terrorism by stating that he "used to channel public funds to Fatah."

The second example is Hamas’s use of information on Fatah commander Muhammad Dahlan. On June 15, Hamas took control of Dahlan’s palatial residence in Gaza. Hamas claimed it found a suitcase filled with gold, forged Pakistani and US passports and the identification card of murdered IDF border guard Nissim Toledano. The last find is particularly revealing.

Since 1994 both the US and Israel ignored mountains of evidence of Dahlan’s involvement with terrorism. Both governments have clung to their support for Dahlan despite his close relationships with senior Hamas terrorists like Muhammad Deif and his own forces’ direct involvement in the murder of Israelis. The fact that Dahlan had possession of Toledano’s ID card shows just how ill-advised this support for Dahlan has been.
Toledano was kidnapped on his way to his border guard base in 1992. His mutilated body was found near the Dead Sea some days later. Toledano’s abduction and murder became a pivotal event for all that would follow in the region.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. In response, the Rabin government deported 417 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon where they were quickly taken under the wing of Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In 1994, in the wake of the Oslo peace process with Fatah, Rabin allowed the 417 to return to Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Once back, they immediately fomented a terror onslaught against Israel the likes of which had never been seen before. It was the returnees who organized the first suicide bombing beginning in April 1994.

The fact that Dahlan was in possession of Toledano’s ID raises the question of Fatah’s involvement in his kidnap and murder and casts a pall over the entire attempt by Israel and the West to make a distinction between Hamas and Fatah terrorists.

There can be no doubt that more information about Fatah leaders (and their business and other connections with Israeli political leaders and others) will follow – as suits the operational interests of Hamas and its Iranian bosses.

In light of this it is clear that Fatah can be of no use to anyone any longer. Indeed, those who work to strengthen Fatah may well be opening themselves to blackmail and public humiliation at a time and place of Hamas’s choosing. So not only is Fatah a dead horse, it is a dead horse rigged to a land mine.

Yet for all that, supporting Fatah and Abbas remains the central goal of Israel’s government. This week Israel handed some $120 million over to Abbas and Fayad. Next week it will release 250 Fatah terrorists from prison. Last week Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embraced Abbas at Sharm e-Sheikh after expounding on Abbas’s greatness with US President George W. Bush at the White House the week before.

Olmert and his colleagues portray Abbas as a central member of a camp of "moderates" which includes the Saudis, the Egyptians and the Jordanians. All these so-called moderates are supposed to form a coalition with Israel, the US and the EU against the "extremists" in Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah and Syria. Unfortunately the camp of moderates is a fiction. Jordan is so frightened of a jihadist coup that its government statements are barely distinguishable from Muslim Brotherhood press releases.

Over the weekend, at Egypt’s invitation, Hamas terror forces deployed along the Gaza border with Egypt. For its part, Saudi Arabia oversaw the formation of the Hamas-Fatah "unity" government last March which subordinated Abbas and Fatah to Khaled Mashaal and Hamas. The Saudis have embraced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his maiden visit to the Sunni Islamist capital, the genocidal, messianic Shi’ite Ahmadinejad was kissed, and hugged, and held hands with King Abdullah.

For her part, rather than condition any further US support for Fatah on credible steps to fight Hamas and its own terror networks, Rice is redoubling her pressure on Israel. Rice is planning to use $86 million in US-taxpayer funds to have Lt. Gen Keith Dayton train Fatah forces in Judea and Samaria. That’s the same Gen. Dayton who trained and armed the Fatah forces in Gaza who cut and run rather than fight Hamas last month and so surrendered their US-supplied weapons to Iran’s proxy without a fight.

Additionally, Rice is aggressively pushing her plan to force Israel to negotiate and conclude a treaty with Abbas that would involve an Israeli pledge to surrender Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah. This is the same Fatah whose membership is revolting and bolting and the same Abbas who Fatah members are revolting against.

As for the Europeans, newly appointed Quartet envoy Tony Blair is set to begin negotiating with Hamas in his planned visit to Gaza next week.

While like Rice, Blair has repeatedly claimed that the absence of a Palestinian state is the cause of all the troubles in the Muslim world today, a week ago a Blair adviser went a step further. According to media reports, the official advised the Israeli government that as far as Blair is concerned, Israel is responsible for the global jihad because of its refusal to surrender to Palestinian terrorism.

The only reasonable explanation of the Olmert government’s behavior in regards to the Palestinians is that the government hopes that by appeasing the US and the rest of the gang on the Palestinian issue, Israel will receive their cooperation in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, here too, all evidence points to the conclusion that Israel has not received anything on the Iran front from any of the relevant actors in exchange for its willingness to let Hamas take over Gaza and continue to finance and arm Fatah terrorists.

Over the weekend Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Foreign Minister met with Iran’s ambassador to the Kingdom and reasserted Saudi Arabian support for Iran’s pursuit of "peaceful nuclear technologies." The Saudis and the Iranians also agreed on the need for Islamic solidarity against the "enemies of Islam."

As for the Egyptians, not only are they, like the Saudis now openly moving to get nuclear capabilities of their own, the Egyptians are responsible for enabling Hamas to take control of Gaza. In spite of repeated Israeli entreaties, Egypt has never lifted a finger to prevent the flow of arms and terror personnel across its border. To the contrary, it facilitated Gaza’s transformation into a jihadist hub. Since last summer’s war, Egypt has moved towards reestablishing full diplomatic relations with the Iranians.

Today both the US and the Europeans are poised to set aside the option of escalating sanctions against Iran for its refusal to end its uranium enrichment activities. Over the weekend, their representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency debated a plan to take a break from escalating sanctions if Iran agrees to stop expanding its uranium enrichment. That is, the US is presently considering a plan that would allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium without facing effective international sanctions as a result.

The tragedy of this situation is that a coalition could be brought together that would be capable of meeting both the Palestinian and Iranian threats to Israeli and global security. Friends of Israel in Congress, the Bush Administration and the US policy community would be happy to work with Israel to counteract Rice’s failed policies.

Unfortunately, Israeli leaders capable of appreciating and acting on this fact are nowhere to be found in the Olmert government.