Two Front Struggle
Now Playing: What we really face around the world...can we stand up against such opposition ?
Topic: Middle East
May 20, 2005, 7:56 a.m.

Our Two-Front Struggle

Pre-modern plus postmodern equals riots in Afghanistan.

One recent Newsweek story alleged — or fabricated — that a single Koran was desecrated by an American soldier in Guantanamo Bay.

The unsubstantiated rumor led to rioting and death in Afghanistan and general turmoil and rage across the Islamic world. Mullahs issued fatwas and the more lunatic even declared a "holy war." What explains the unsubstantiated story and why the hysterical reaction?

The superficial answer is that we now live in a globalized village — united by the marriage of satellite communications with cheap consumer goods. Someone sneezes in Texas and a few minutes later a villager in upper Russia can say "bless you." What an "in-the-know" Beltway insider conjures up as buzz in the "Periscope" section of the magazine for his American readers can cause death and mayhem hours later 7,000 a miles away in the Hindu Kush.

Yet there is something far more to these bizarre events than mere "interconnectedness," or even media-savvy fundamentalists who have got the hang of Western telecommunications and know how to use them to stir up the mob.

There is not a necessary connection in the Middle East — or anywhere else — between the occasional appearance of technological sophistication and what we might call humanism, or the commitment to explain phenomena through reason and empiricism. We forget that far too often as we kow-tow to extremists and seek to apologize or fathom the holy protocols surrounding a religious text.

In the West, the wonder of a cell phone in some sense is the ultimate expression of a long struggle for the primacy of scientific reason, tolerance, critical consciousness, and free expression. That intellectual journey goes back to Galileo, Newton, and Socrates.

Everything from CDs to Starbucks that we take for granted is a representation of millions of past Western lives. These forgotten scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, along with other reformers in politics, journalism, economics, and religion, created our present liberal environment. Only its institutions led to our prosperous modernity.

Without them, thinkers cannot discuss ideas freely. They will not find legal protection for their accomplishments, status for their contributions, and profit for their benefactions — and thus would end up hopeless and adrift in a society such as present-day Syria, Iran, or Egypt.

That long odyssey is not so in the world of bin Laden or an Iranian theocrat — or the ignorant who stream out of the madrassas and Friday fundamentalist harangues along the Afghan-Pakistani border. These fist-shaking, flag-burning Islamic fascists all came late to the Western tradition and now cherry-pick its technology. As classic parasites, a Zawahiri or al-Zarqawi wants Western sophisticated weapons and playthings — without the bothersome foundations that made them all possible.

An Afghan who riots because he learns of a rumor in a Western magazine, and those like him who explode and behead in Iraq, are emblematic of this hypocrisy. Nothing they have accomplished in their lives, either materially or philosophically, would result in a free opinion magazine, much less the technology to send out the story instantaneously — or, in the case of al-Zarqawi, to have his murdering transmitted globally on the Internet.

Instead, our Afghan rioters, and the Islamist organizations that have endorsed them, live in the eighth century of rumor, sexual and religious intolerance, tribal chauvinism, and gratuitous violence — but now electrified by the veneer of the 21st-century civilization that is not their own, but sometimes fools the naive that it is.

Yet all the illumination in the modern world — neon, fluorescent, or incandescent — cannot light up the illiberal Dark Age mind if it is not willing (or forced) to begin the long ordeal of democracy, tolerance, legality, and individual rights.

Despite cheap, accessible, and easy-to-operate consumer goods imported from the Westernized world, the thinking of a bin Laden or Muslim Brotherhood still leads back to swords, horses, and jihad, not ahead to iPods and Microsoft.

They want such things to use to destroy, but not along with them the institutions like democracy and freedom that would allow such progress in their own countries — and shortly make al Qaeda and the fundamentalists not merely irrelevant, but ridiculous as well. Thus, we can understand the increasing hatred of the United States and its policy of democratic idealism abroad that threatens to put them out of business.

As we learned on September 11, they try to kill us now with our own appurtenances before they are buried themselves under modernism, liberality, and freedom. That really is what this war is about: a last-ditch effort by primordial fascists to prevent the liberalization of the Muslim world and the union of Islamic society with the protocols found in the rest of the globe and which many in the Middle East prefer if given a chance.

Only democracy and freedom, not Western money or cheap guilt, will remedy the deep sickness of radical Islam that now so tires and sickens the rest of the world that daily has to watch and endure it.

For a suicide bomber like Mohammed Atta, the more he bumped into the West and used its bounties, the more he despised us for his own hypocrisy of enjoying what his culture could not make or allow. There was no law forcing Mr. Atta to go study in Germany or visit the United States or to wear Western clothes and use our technology; he did so on his own free volition — and later despised himself for doing so.

The Saudi insurgents who now volunteer to blow themselves up in northern Iraq, like their spiritual kindred suicide bombers on the West Bank, are not poor villagers content to plow ancestral fields and follow the tribal and religious rhythms of a timeless Middle East.

No, they are usually upscale and spoiled, or at least middle class, educated, and with some disposable income — the prerequisites to allow them contact with the West and almost immediately to incite their sense of envy, self-loathing, exaggerated entitlement, and ultimately nihilism at trying to destroy what they hate and lust for and cannot destroy.

Second, there is a certain mental disease here at home — long chronicled in Western literature — that encourages the Afghan rioter's love/hate relationship with things Western. After all, we have developed a culture in which a Newsweek writer grasps that if he scoops a story that the United States military is insensitive to the "other" and, better yet, religiously intolerant, he finds a certain resonance within our own elite. If that slur turns out to be wrong, well, his intentions were at least "noble" and there are likely to follow little consequences in his own circle that is far away from those soldiers who pay for his lapse on the ground in Afghanistan.

Note also after the riots how few Americans announced their immediate scorn for silly rumors about our own POW center in a time of war — especially when it is housing Afghan terrorists who helped kill 3,000 of our own innocents. Can one imagine fundamentalists in the Bible Belt rioting and shooting should they hear an unfounded rumor that an American prisoner in Riyadh, charged with complicity in killing thousands of Arabs, found his Old Testament trashed by a Saudi guard — or a Saudi official promising to apologize to the Western world should a miscreant guard be culpable?

Was the Church of the Nativity carefully treated by its Islamic intruders — or did the desecration cause rioting and holy-war warnings across Christendom? It is just this imbalance that our elites do not talk openly about, but that outrages the populace who tires of it.

So we do not dare remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for, given that we have expended lives and treasure in Afghanistan to improve a country that once helped to butcher us. Most of those rioting and killing idolize bin Laden. The problem is not that they are confused, but that they express exactly what they feel — and that is a deep hatred for Western liberalism, manifested on their now sacred day of September 11. We don't say such rude things, not only because it would be stupid politics, but because we don't quite believe them ourselves anymore.

In that sense, we can be as warped as the Afghan rioter. Westerners have their own delusions. We seem to think that our neat gadgets also equate with an ability to refashion human nature or that a fascist abroad needs to know how much we care about his hurt.

There is a sort of arrogance in the liberal West — the handmaiden to our own guilt and self-loathing — that strangely believes we are both to blame for the ills abroad and alone can solve them through handing out money. Almost all of the pathetic rhetoric of al Qaeda — "colonial exploitation," "American hegemony," or "blood for oil" — was as imported from the West as were the terrorists' bombs and communications.

Some Western intellectuals, I think, need a bin Laden to illustrate and confirm their nihilistic ideas about their own postmodern society, just as he needs them to explain why his culture's failure is not its own fault. So just as al Qaeda will always find an enabling Westerner to say, "You lashed out at us in frustration for your unfair treatment," so too a guilty Westerner will always find a compliant terrorist to boast, "Yes, we kill you for your sins." America was once a country that demolished Hitler and Tojo combined in less than four years and broke the nuclear Soviet Union — and now frets and whines that a few thousand deranged fascists want an apology.

Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.

The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."

And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.

How truly sad.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Cause for Joy in Iraq
Now Playing: Hope for less bloodshed in an area of terrible conflict !
Topic: Middle East
After decades of war in Iraq, a cause for joy

Jonah Goldberg

April 8, 2005

For the most important belligerents in the Iraq war, the war ended with an enormous victory this week. Shortly after Jalal Talabani was sworn in as the new president of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari was appointed as the new prime minister. Saddam Hussein, who reportedly watched much of these proceedings from his jail cell, must have snapped his plastic spork in his apple brown betty at the news. Mr. Talabani, you see, is a Kurd and Mr. Jaafari is a Shiite.

In a very real sense, George W. Bush didn't start the war in Iraq. He finished it. For decades, the Kurds and the Shiites fought bloody wars for self-determination, often with the United States standing in the way. In 1975, for example, Henry Kissinger helped broker an accord between Iraq and Iran that left the Kurds high and dry. Without the backing of Washington and Tehran (then run by the Shah), the Kurdish rebels were pulverized. A little more than a decade later, the U.S. supported Saddam during the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, in which 100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children were killed, in some instances with chemical weapons. Our policies were not intentionally sinister; there were strong national-interest arguments on the other side. But certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, America comes up short in moral calculus.

We lost even more credibility in 1991, when America fought a just war in the name of national self-determination - but only for Kuwaitis. Sure, we encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up, but when Saddam slaughtered them with his helicopter gunships, we stood back and did nothing.

America established the famous no-fly zones in the north and the south in order to end the slaughter and keep Saddam in his famous "box." For some bizarre reason, most Americans took the status quo in the 1990s as a state of "peace" between America and Iraq, despite the fact that Saddam tried to have the first President Bush murdered and we bombed the dickens out of various military installations in Iraq repeatedly throughout the decade.

America had no peace treaty with Iraq. We had a ceasefire. Saddam consistently defied the terms of that ceasefire, so we bombed him for it. After he tried to murder George H.W. Bush in 1993, we lobbed cruise missiles at him. In 1996, Saddam invaded the no-fly zone in the north, capturing Irbill. We bombed and extended the no-fly zone even closer to Baghdad. In 1998, Saddam refused to comply with the U.N., so the U.S. and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox. More bombing. And so on.

This didn't necessarily go unnoticed by the American press, it just went under-noticed. For example, in 1999 the editors of the Chicago Tribune decried the paucity of information about what they called "America's Other War." "We know there's shooting going on, but to what purpose?" they asked. "What is the Clinton administration trying to accomplish with this low-grade war?"

Interestingly, the one group of people who understood clearly that there was a war on was the hard left, which consistently held rallies, sit-ins, tofu-marshmallow roasts, etc. against America's war "on" Iraq. Despite their dishonest and/or disputable assertions about who was to blame and what the repercussions were, the leftists understood that economic sanctions, military patrols of their airspace, and, of course, bombing were not acts of peace. The funny thing was, the moment George Bush started talking about finally pulling the band-aid off, the left immediately started griping about how we needed to give "peace one more chance." The French, who had been working tirelessly to end the sanctions regime, abruptly claimed the sanctions had been working great. (We now know why some French officials liked the sanctions, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) Suddenly, sanctions and no-fly zones weren't the stuff of war, but the stuff of peace.

In other words America's war with Iraq overlaid an older war - or wars - within Iraq. Ibrahim Jaafari and Jalal Talibani were both anti-Saddam combatants long before America was anti-Saddam. Jaafari had been the spokesman for the militant Dawaa Party. He went into exile in the 1970s when Saddam crushed it. Talibani headed one of the two main parties seeking an independent Kurdistan.

The hope is that Messrs. Jaafari and Talibani have seen the light and understand that rather than fight a sectional conflict, the brighter future lies in uniting their country. They certainly seem to be saying the right things in this regard, and there's good reason to hope they mean it. More important, and more telling, is that these men attained their positions through an imperfect but nonetheless historically heroic democratic process. Mr. Talibani is not only the first Kurdish head of state in the region, he's arguably the most prominent Kurdish Muslim leader since Saladin. Jaafari, whatever his faults, represents the democratic aspirations of the majority of Iraqis.

This is truly joyous, exciting stuff to behold. It wouldn't have happened were it not for George W. Bush, and that fact seems to blind many from appreciating it.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

?2005 Tribune Media Services

Arab Spring continues
Now Playing: Can the momentum continue ?
Topic: Middle East
The Arab spring continues in Lebanon

Charles Krauthammer (April 1, 2005)

WASHINGTON -- Say what you will about Bashar Assad, dictator of Syria and perhaps the dimmest eye doctor ever produced by British medical schools, but subtle he is not. Since the huge street demonstrations against his occupation of Lebanon, three terror bombings have occurred there, all in heavily Christian, anti-Syrian neighborhoods. Only slightly less subtle was the nearly half-million-man Beirut rally demanding Syria's continued occupation staged by Syria's Lebanese client, Hezbollah, followed by the ``spontaneous'' demonstration Assad orchestrated for himself in Damascus.

Then there is this week's public admission by a captured Hamas terrorist in Israel that he was trained in Syria. This is the first direct account of such active involvement by Syria, although everyone knows that the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad are headquartered in, and assisted by, Syria. Everyone also knows that Syria is abetting the terrorist insurgency in Iraq.

Syria made its intentions unmistakable when Assad sent his prime minister to Tehran to declare an alliance with Iran when world pressure began to build on Damascus following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

All this regional mischief-making is critical because we are at the dawn of an Arab Spring -- the first bloom of democracy in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and throughout the greater Middle East -- and its emerging mortal enemy is a new axis of evil whose fulcrum is Syria. The axis stretches from Iran, the other remaining terror state in the region, to Syria to the local terror groups -- Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- that are bent on destabilizing Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and destroying both Lebanese independence and the current Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement.

Iran is the senior partner of this axis of evil. Syria is the crucial middle party allowing a non-Arab state to reach into the heart of the Middle East. For example, Hezbollah receives its weapons from Iran, shipped through Syria. And Iranian Revolutionary Guards are stationed today in the Bekaa Valley, under Syrian protection.

The alliance goes back a long way. Syria under the Assad dynasty was the only major Arab country to support Persian Iran against Arab Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. They form a true axis because, unlike the 2002 State of the Union axis, all of the parts are connected and working with each other. The last axis of evil -- Iran, North Korea and Saddam's Iraq -- was evil but no axis. They were more like points of evil with North Korea included, as I wrote at the time, as a concession to ethnic diversity.

Today the immediate objective of this Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas-Islamic Jihad axis is to destabilize Syria's neighbors (Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority) and sabotage any Arab-Israeli peace. Its strategic aim is to quash the Arab Spring, which if not stopped would isolate, surround and seriously imperil these remaining centers of terror and radicalism.

How then to defeat it? Iran is too large, oil-rich and entrenched to be confronted directly. The terror groups are too shadowy. But Syria is different. Being a state, it has an address. The identity and location of its leadership, military installations and other fixed assets are known. Unlike Iran, however, it has no oil of any significance. It is poor and the regime is weak, despised not only for its corruption and incompetence, but also because of its extremely narrow ethnic base. Assad and his gang are almost exclusively from the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot considered heretical by many Muslims and representing about 10 percent of the Syrian population.

Syria is the prize. It is vulnerable and critical, the geographic center of the axis, the transshipment point for weapons, and the territorial haven for Iranian and regional terrorists.

If Syria can be flipped, the axis is broken. Iran will not be able to communicate directly with the local terrorists. They will be further weakened by the loss of their Syrian sponsor and protector. Prospects both for true Lebanese independence and Arab-Israeli peace would improve dramatically.

As Iraq, in fits and starts, begins finding its way to self-rule, the center of gravity of the Bush Doctrine and the American democratization project shifts to Lebanon/Syria. The rapid evacuation and collapse of the Syrian position in Lebanon is crucial not just because of what it will do for Lebanon, but because of the weakening effect it will have on the Assad dictatorship.

We need therefore to be relentless in insisting on a full (and as humiliating as possible) evacuation of Syria from Lebanon, followed by a campaign of economic, political and military pressure on the Assad regime. We must push now and push hard.

?2005 Washington Post Writers Group

Israeli v. Palestinian strategy
Now Playing: When there is hatred, How much of the truth lies beneath the surface !
Topic: Middle East
Sharon's terror masters

Caroline B. Glick

March 19, 2005

During the course of his negotiations with Damascus-based Palestinian terror masters in Cairo this week, PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas made two revealing statements.

First, on Tuesday, Abbas said that upon receiving security control of Jericho from the Israel Defense Force, he would release from custody all of the Palestinian terrorists who have been incarcerated there since May 2002. Those terrorists, who were transferred to Jericho from Yasser Arafat's Ramallah headquarters as part of a British and US deal with Israel, include the assassins who murdered Israel's tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi in October 2001 and Fuad Shubaki, the PA's chief arms purchaser who oversaw the Karine A terror weapons ship purchase from Iran that was intercepted by Israeli commandos on the Red Sea in January 2002.

On Wednesday, Abbas went a step further. He told the terror masters who are now based in Damascus that after the exit of Israeli forces and civilians from Gaza and the transfer of control over the international border with Egypt to the PLO, they would all be invited to move their headquarters to the Gaza Strip.

That is, Abbas said that in the aftermath of the implementation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to forcibly expel 8,000 Jews from their homes and end all IDF counterterror operations inside Gaza, Abbas will respond by transforming it into a base for global terrorism. This offer can be viewed as particularly credible given that it was made in the presence of Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Mualem, whose government is now facing increasing international condemnation for enabling these global terrorists to operate in its capital.

Surprisingly, the Israeli government reacted with near hysteria to Abbas's statement about releasing the terrorists in Jericho. Government members and spokesmen took to the microphones immediately after Abbas's statement was published and said that if he dared to free Ze'evi's killers, Israel would contemplate ending the peace process and hunt them down.

The government's reaction was frankly inexplicable, given that Sharon and his fellows have given credence to Abbas's demand that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its jails. Acting on this demand, the government has already released 500 terrorists from prison and is planning on springing another 400 in short order.

Indeed, every single demand that Abbas has made on Israel, like every step he has taken to placate the various Palestinian terror groups, has been met with understanding by Israel. Israel has accepted his policy ? practically if not publicly ? of taking absolutely no action against any terror organizations, leaders or infrastructures.

After all, if it hadn't, the government would not be transferring security responsibility over Palestinian population centers to the PA as it did in Jericho the day after Abbas's statement about the prisoner release.

Israel has accepted Abbas's demand that it stop trying to catch terror fugitives. Israel has accepted his demand that it allow the Palestinian mass murderers who violently took over the Church of the Nativity in April 2002 to return to Bethlehem from their European exile and receive amnesty for their crimes.

The government has made no protest against Abbas's order to execute 15 Palestinians who are accused of having helped our security forces fight Palestinian terrorists. And Israel has made no protest over the fact that according to IDF sources, wanted Palestinian terrorists are being sheltered in Abbas's offices in Ramallah.

Given all of this, why should the government care if Abbas lets Ze'evi's murderers and Shubaki leave Jericho? As it stands, their incarceration has been a farce. Journalists have reported repeatedly since their transfer to Jericho of their relative freedom within the compound. More than being imprisoned, they are being sheltered there from Israeli forces.

Of course the answer is public opinion. The Israeli public would simply not accept such a concession by the government and it would fall.

Given the government's fear of the public, it becomes clear why it is that Israel's leaders have been mute about Abbas's declared intention to turn Gaza into a new Afghanistan.

Since Sharon announced his withdrawal and expulsion plan last year, the point has been made repeatedly that the only thing that prevents Gaza from becoming a capital of global terrorism is the IDF troops stationed there and controlling the international border with Egypt.

Last summer Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, who headed Israel's Southern Command from 2000 to 2003, wrote in the Middle East Quarterly that if Israel transferred control of Gaza's border with Egypt to the Egyptians or Palestinians, Gaza would become a "mini-Afghanistan."

Former director of Military Intelligence Research and Assessment Department Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ya'acov Amidror has warned repeatedly since Sharon unveiled his plan that in the absence of the IDF, Gaza would become a focal point for global terror groups from Hizbullah to al-Qaida.

Sharon has ignored all such warnings, has fired cabinet ministers and cut short the service of the IDF's Chief of General Staff and the head of the Shin Bet security agency who have doubted the wisdom of his withdrawal policies and he has plowed ahead, demonizing and criminalizing his detractors.

So what do we expect Sharon to do now that Abbas has announced his intention to prove all Sharon's critics correct? The only thing he can do, if he wishes to continue to force through his plan, is to keep his head down and hope that no one notices what is happening. In this bid he is being ably assisted ? to the point of ostensible collusion ? by the Israeli media.

Not only has the government made no comment on Abbas's offer to move global terror masters from Damascus to Gaza, but the Israeli media, to their shame, have had a near complete blackout on the issue. None of the television stations mentioned it in their news broadcasts Wednesday night. None of Thursday's newspapers had any report of it. Israel Radio devoted less than one minute of laconic coverage to Abbas's offer 10 minutes before the end of its two-hour-long morning news magazine Thursday morning.

Israel's overwhelmingly left-wing media's lockstep support for Sharon's withdrawal plan is being matched by the support Sharon is enjoying from the left wing of the American Jewish community.

According to a report this week in The Forward newspaper, Americans for Peace Now, like the Israel Policy Forum, two of the most left wing groups on the American Jewish political and organizational spectrum, are now actively colluding with the Israeli Embassy in Washington and consulates throughout the US to combat opposition to Sharon's policies among American Jews and American Christian supporters of Israel.

On Monday, Ambassador Danny Ayalon participated in a forum on Capitol Hill sponsored by American Friends of Peace Now together with the PLO representative to Washington and the Jordanian and Egyptian ambassadors. In June, Vice Premier Ehud Olmert is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Israel Policy Forum's annual dinner.

In an interview with The Forward, Arye Mekel, the consul-general in New York, said that neutralizing opponents to Sharon's withdrawal policy is "the No. 1 priority on the agenda of the consulates at the moment, and it's the task that is keeping me the busiest."

In their discussions in Cairo, the various terror chieftains have been employing the explicit vocabulary of jihad to describe their various positions. On Thursday, Islamic Jihad and Hamas reportedly accepted the idea of a "thahadiya" or a temporary cessation of attacks for a defined time period. In jihad rhetoric, the purpose of a "thahadiya" is to regroup to enable the forces of jihad to fight their infidel enemy more successfully in the next round. The significance of the resort to jihad-speak has been completely ignored by the Israeli politicians and commentators praising Abbas's policy of mainstreaming violent terror organizations.

One of the most absurd aspects of the Cairo discussions as a whole is that in all its concessions to the Palestinians since Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat last November, Israel has justified its moves to the public and to the Americans as payback to Abbas for his achievement of a cease-fire with the terrorists. And yet, if he already has a cease-fire agreement, why is he negotiating one now? And again, if he is a peaceable man, why is he employing the language of jihad together with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad?

And further, why is Egypt being praised by Israel and the US for hosting this terror parley, whose clear aim is to legitimize terror and whose direct result is Abbas's offer to turn Gaza ? where Egypt has supposedly agreed to block terrorists from entering after Israel withdraws ? into an epicenter of global terrorism?

Unfortunately, the answer to all of these questions ? unasked by the Israeli media ? is internal Israeli politics. Once Sharon abandoned his natural support base and preferred instead the embrace of the Left, he has boxed himself into a situation where he can do nothing except advance the Left's agenda of appeasing terrorists.

In moving down this road, Sharon, like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak before him, rendered his political fortunes completely dependent on the whims of the terrorists. As a result, he cannot admit that what Abbas is doing is not simply antithetical to peace but also manifests a strategic threat to Israel's security ? and indeed, to global security. If Sharon were to tell Israelis the truth about Abbas and his terrorist chums or about their Egyptian sponsors, he would be admitting that all his detractors in his own political camp were right all along.

Given this state of affairs, the inevitable conclusion is that the only thing left for the Israeli public to do is to demand new general elections.

With Sharon now fully committed to a policy that is manifestly dangerous to the state, he must be replaced by a leader who has not so committed himself. It is the only chance that Israel has to prevent the establishment of a new base for global terror on the outskirts of Ashkelon.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where this article first appeared.

?2005 Caroline B. Glick

Influence of One Person
Now Playing: Never doubt the possible effect of one outspoken voice in this world !
Topic: Middle East
The Sharansky moment?

Caroline B. Glick

March 5, 2005

JERUSALEM, Israel -- In the history of Israel's relations with the US, there has been no precedent for the influence that Israeli Minister-without-Portfolio Natan Sharansky has had on US foreign policy. While in the past Israeli leaders have worked closely with their American counterparts, no one other than Sharansky has managed to actually influence the way that American policymakers think about foreign affairs or perceive the role of the US in the world.

Today it is beyond debate that Sharansky has deeply influenced US President George W. Bush's thinking on international affairs. After reading Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy, Bush told The New York Times that Sharansky's worldview "is part of my presidential DNA." This Sharansky-inspired "presidential DNA" posits that the Arab world's conflict with Israel, like its support for global jihad, will end when the Arab world democratizes. In Sharansky's view, once Arabs are governed democratically, they will not wish to sustain the conflict.

If Sharansky and Bush are correct, then the past week has been one of the greatest weeks in the history of the Middle East. Syria's puppet government in Beirut has resigned and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is being squeezed from all directions. He has declared that he will end Syria's occupation of Lebanon and has turned over Iraqi Ba'athists to American forces in Iraq in the hope of stemming the seemingly inexorable demise of his regime. Egypt's dictator, Hosni Mubarak, under attack from Washington and from his democratic opposition ? that for once is being supported by the Western media ? has announced that he will enable other candidates to run against him in the upcoming presidential elections.

Empowered by the support they are receiving from the US, rather than declaring victory and quietly going home, democracy advocates in these countries are ratcheting up their pressure and demands. Damascus's announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Lebanon was met by a Lebanese demand that Hizbullah be dismantled.

In an interview Wednesday with Al-Jazeera, Druse opposition leader Walid Jumblatt said of Hizbullah and its claim that Israel is wrongfully controlling the so-called Shaba Farms on the Israeli-Lebanese border, "What are these [Hizbullah] fighters doing for us? They want the Shaba Farms. Let the Syrians present documentation that the farms are even part of Lebanon. The Israelis say that they were taken from Syria and we have no proof of anything. And what will happen after the Shaba situation? Will Hizbullah's people continue to walk around armed in Lebanon and serve the Syrians?"

What is happening in our neighboring lands is nothing short of a revolution. There has never before been a situation in the Arab world where so many people have been willing to stand up to their regimes and demand their freedom. Although the Arab revolution is only in its earliest phases ? and it is impossible to foresee what will transpire in the coming days, months and years ? the very fact that the Arab world has responded so dramatically to the Iraqi elections at the end of January and to Bush's call for democracy seems to be a full vindication of both Sharansky's political theory and of Bush's decision to graft it onto his genetic code.

But other events from this past week would seem to cast a pall on the excitement. On Tuesday, Israeli Arab parliamentarians Ahmed Tibi and Muhammad Barakei, while participating in an Arab League conference in Abu Dhabi, told their colleagues not to normalize their relations with Israel. According to a report in the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, confirmed by the Ynet Web site, at the conference, held under the aegis of the Abu Dhabi Center for Strategic Research, the two told their audience that Israel was manipulating the world into believing that it was advancing the cause for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, but it was actually entrenching its control over the West Bank and abandoning the cause of peace.

Tibi told Ynet, "The Sharon government is not worthy at this point of any diplomatic prize. The depth of the peace will determine the depth of normalization. And at this point there is no peace and therefore normalization can wait."

Barakei said, "I said these things in reaction to signs of normalization [between Israel and the Arab world] that is totally unjustified."

That these politicians ? who owe their positions to the fact that they live in a democracy ? have called for the Arab world to continue its rejection of their own country would seem to put a damper on the notion that democracy can bring an end to Arab rejection of Israel. Indeed, as an Arab colleague remarked recently, "The reformers in the Arab world hate Israel just as much as their leaders whom they are trying to overthrow."

It is more than likely that the anti-Semitism with which the Arab world has been inculcated for the past 100 years will not disappear even if the Arab world becomes democratically governed.

But that is not the main issue.

Sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is still a potent force in Europe and yet Europeans, whose countries are now entrenched democracies, are not planning to go to war against Israel. Their national identities are not defined by their hatred of Jews or of the Jewish state.

The reason Arab anti-Semitism is so powerful a political force today is because the Arab world is ruled by dictators. These men need an external bogeyman to excuse their failure to bring freedom and prosperity to their people. If Arabs are afforded the freedom to determine how they wish to live their lives, it is likely that social anti-Semitism will not be sufficiently powerful to provoke them into going to war against Israel.

Aside from anti-Semitism's apparent incurability, the fact of the matter is that in Israel's immediate vicinity, the democratic revolution now sweeping neighboring states has been smothered. Tibi and Barakei's statements may seem out of place during this revolutionary moment, but what they represent more than anything else is the failure to apply the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine to the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians today, four months after Yasser Arafat's death, perceive Israel as weak. In a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 74 percent of Palestinians said that they see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to destroy the Israeli communities in Gaza and the northern West Bank as a vindication of terrorism as a national strategy. The Palestinians stated that they do not believe that Sharon would have ever presented the plan if it hadn't been for the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

It is this perception of Israeli weakness and terrorist strength that undoubtedly prompts the opportunistic likes of Tibi and Barakei to side with them against Israel. Just as every time Israel opens negotiations with the Ba'athists in Damascus, the Druse on the Golan Heights hold parades in honor of the Assads, so today, when Israel looks weak, Israeli Arabs want to make sure that the PA sees them as loyal to the cause. While they can rest assured that a democratic but weak Israel will do nothing to punish them for their treachery, they cannot risk supporting Israel as it strengthens and legitimizes the terror-supporting, quasi-tyranny next door in the PA.

Ironically, it is Israel's democratically elected leadership that has been most opposed to the notion of Arab democracy. Sharon and Vice Premier Shimon Peres have passively and actively colluded with those who reject the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine in the US State Department to ensure it remains unapplied among the Palestinians.

Sharansky wrote in his book that when he presented his ideas to Sharon, the prime minister told him that they "have no place in the Middle East." One of Sharon's advisers reportedly said that Sharon "views Sharansky's ideas with scorn." Peres, the father of the idea of replacing Israel's Civil Administration in the territories with a PLO dictatorship imported from Tunis, has spoken vacuously of the need to build an "economic democracy" ? rather than a political democracy ? among the Palestinians.

And the result of Israel's rejection of Palestinian democracy and its consequent effective abandonment by the Bush administration is the continuation of Arafat's dictatorial and terror-supporting regime in the territories. On Thursday, Yemen's news agency reported that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to meet with Hamas kingpin Khaled Mashal in the coming weeks.

Abbas's decision to engage rather than fight terrorists has enabled a precipitous rise in the terror threat to Israel's population centers around the West Bank. During his election campaign, Abbas embraced Fatah terrorists in Jenin led by Zakariya Zubeidi. Two months ago, the IDF arrested Zubeidi's brother, Jibril, who is a member of Islamic Jihad. The arrest led to the uncovering of a Hamas factory in the Jenin area for the manufacture of Kassam rockets that Jibril and his associates had planned to fire on Afula in northern Israel. And Abbas plans to enlist these men into his "reformed" security services that are set to be trained and equipped by the US, Jordan, Egypt, Russia and the EU.

Israel's decision to prefer the rule of Arafat's deputy to genuine democratic transformation in the PA has paved the way for the international community's embrace of Abbas. Rather than demand an accounting for the billions of dollars in international aid that were stolen by Arafat (and by Abbas and PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and their associates), in London this week the international community pledged to transfer more than a billion additional dollars to the PA.

Buoyed by this unqualified support, Abbas is now demanding that the international community drop the demand that he fight terrorists and enable the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state immediately. The EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, has already accepted this position.

So in the space of one week, we see the consequences of both the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine and the appeasement-based status quo in action. While the region's war-torn, radical and terror-engendering history tells us what the ultimate consequences of the status quo will be, we have yet to harvest the fruits of the Bush-Sharansky-inspired revolution.

The main question we should be concerning ourselves with now is whether the revolution will be extended to the Palestinians or whether ? once Sharon-Peres-style appeasement is grafted onto its genetic code ? the revolution will fade away and be forgotten.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post where this article first appeared.

?2005

Bush was Right
Now Playing: Taking a difficult stand can really pay off in the end !
Topic: Middle East
The Arab Spring

Jeff Jacoby

March 11, 2005

"It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right."

Thus spake columnist Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star, author of such earlier offerings as "Incurious George W. can't grasp democracy," "Time for US to cut and run," and, as recently as Jan. 25, "Bush's hubristic world view."

The Axis of Weasel is crying uncle, and much of the chorus is singing from the same songsheet.

Listen to Claus Christian Malzahn in the German news magazine Der Spiegel: "Could George W. be right?" And Guy Sorman in France's Le Figaro: "And if Bush was right?" And NPR's Daniel Schorr in The Christian Science Monitor: "The Iraq effect? Bush may have had it right." And London's Independent, in a banner Page 1 headline on Monday: "Was Bush right after all?"

Even Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and an indefatigable Bush critic, has learned the new lyrics. "Here's the great fear that I have," he said recently. "What if Bush . . . has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may . . . implode."

For those of us in the War Party, by contrast, these are heady days. If you've agreed with President Bush all along that the way to fight the cancer of Islamist terrorism is with the chemotherapy of freedom and democracy, the temptation to issue I-told-you-sos can be hard to resist.

"Who's the simpleton now?" crows Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times. "Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?" On the radio the other day, Rush Limbaugh twisted the knife: "The news is not that Bush may have been right," he chortled. "It's that you liberals were wrong." The gifted Mark Steyn, in a column subtitled, "One man, one gloat," writes: "I got a lot of things wrong these last three years, but, looking at events in the Middle East this last week, . . . I got the big stuff right."

Well, I'd say I got the big stuff right too. And as a war hawk who backs the Bush Doctrine, I find the latest developments in the Arab world especially gratifying. But this triumphalism makes me uneasy. This is the Middle East we're talking about, after all. And we have been here before.

It was only 22 months ago that Bush flew a Navy jet onto the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and emerged to tell the world, "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." War hawks and Bush supporters were ecstatic, but thousands of US and Iraqi deaths later, it is all too clear how premature that "Mission Accomplished" exultation was. Likewise the rapture that greeted the signing of the "Oslo" accord in 1993. When Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands, they unleashed a euphoric certainty that Israeli-Palestinian peace had been achieved at last. In retrospect, that euphoria looks not just ridiculous, but tragic.

None of this is to minimize the extraordinary changes unfolding in the Arab world. Iraq's stunning elections have given heart to would-be reformers across the region. In Beirut, tens of thousands of anti-Syrian demonstrators brought about the fall of Lebanon's pro-Damascus quisling government. (As of Wednesday evening, however, the Lebanese parliament was poised to restore the ousted prime minister.) Saudi Arabia held municipal elections, the first democratic exercise the Ibn Sauds have ever allowed. On Monday, hundreds of activists demanding suffrage for women marched on Kuwait's parliament. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak has promised a genuine (i.e., contested) presidential election -- something he rejected just a few weeks ago as "totally unacceptable." And Syria's military occupation of Lebanon is drawing such international condemnation that Bashar Assad, the Syrian dictator, has begun to pull his troops back to the Bekaa Valley.

It is being called an "Arab Spring," and Bush's critics, many of whom snorted when he insisted last year that "freedom is on the march," are right to give him credit for helping to bring it about. What his allies need to bear in mind is that cracks in the ice of tyranny and misrule don't always lead to liberation.

In 1989, a global wave of democratic fervor brought tens of millions of anti-Communist demonstrators into the streets. In Eastern Europe, that wave shattered the Berlin Wall, freed the captive nations, and eventually ended the Cold War. In China, by contrast, it was stopped by the tanks of Tiananmen.Square and the spilling of much innocent blood. In history, unlike in nature, spring is not always followed by summer.

"At last, clearly and suddenly, the thaw has begun," said President Bush on Tuesday. Let us pray that it continues, and that the long winter of Arab discontent is finally giving way to a summer of liberty and human rights. There will be time enough for gloating if it does.

?2005 Boston Globe