CHAPTER XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY
We must stress again that international terrorism should never be seen as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon arising directly out of oppression and misery. International terrorism and national liberation struggles are always mediated through a level of clandestine organization in which the efforts of intelligence agencies come decisively into play. Many international terrorist groups are false-flag operations from the very beginning. Others assume false- flag status as the result of coordinated arrests, assassinations, and takeovers by intelligence agencies. Even where there is an authentic national liberation organization, intelligence agencies will create false-flag operations under their own control to mimic it, perpetrating atrocities in its name in an effort to isolate and discredit it. Here again, deception and dissembling are the rule.
Again and again, terrorist groups with US-UK backing have intervened against progressive nationalists in the Arab world, and in favor of their Islamic fundamentalist competition.
Recruiting for terrorist groups once they exist is another matter. The ability to recruit is profoundly influenced by the prevalence of misery, poverty, and oppression. Here we must account for the relative economic and political distress of the Arab world, and of parts of the broader economic world as well. What we find are the fruits of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The political climate in the Arab world today cannot be understood as the outcome of autochthonous factors, as thinkers in the Oswald Spengler Kultur tradition like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis would have us believe. These experts prefer to forget that the Arab world they see before them has been occupied, trampled, and manipulated by two centuries of European intervention, going back to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Neocons such as Lewis and Huntington also prefer a radically anti-historical approach, according to which anti-western Islamic fundamentalism, especially in its terrorist emanations, is simply a self-evident fact. But it is not a self-evident fact, as we now will seek to show.
What needs to be grasped is the fact that US policy, like that of the British Empire earlier, objectively favors the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism can mean many things, but here it is taken to mean an anti-western theocratic regime in which the Islamic clergy, mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs as they may be, play the leading role. We must recall that, until the Ottoman Empire was destroyed by the British and the French during the First World War, most of the countries of the Middle East had been subject to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, who was simultaneously the Caliph of Islam. The Ottoman Empire claimed to operate according to the Islamic law, or sharia. For centuries, the British had cultivated the smaller ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire with a view to inciting them to rebel against the Ottoman Sultan: thus, the British began working with the Serbs around the time of the American Revolution; they helped the Greeks to become independent after the Napoleonic wars. Under Lord Palmerston in the 1830s and 1840s, the British introduced the ideas of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. At first, British Jews were not interested: Lord Rothschild, it was said at that time, wanted a seat in the House of Lords, not a seat under a palm tree in Palestine. Later, the British developed a presence among the Copts, the Armenians, and others. The French posed as protectors of Christians in the Levant, and became the backers of the Lebanese Maronite Christians.
During these years the British Arab Bureau and the British Indian Office carefully profiled the Arab psychology and ideology. Their starting point was that the Arabs would inevitably become hostile to British colonialism, and that nothing could be done to prevent this. However, these British orientalists also concluded that it might well be possible to provide synthetic ideologies for the inevitable Arab revolt which would help to make it self-isolating, abortive, and impotent. An obvious way to do this was to make the revolt not specifically anti-British, but anti-western and anti-European in general, lest the Arabs be able to ally with Russia or Germany to eject the UK. The Islamic tradition offered the raw material for the fabrication of a synthetic ideology of Arab rejection of the west to which today's more fantastic ideologues of the Arab and Islamic worlds are much indebted.
When the Ottoman Empire took the German side during the First World War, British Col. T.E. Lawrence was able to incite the Arabs of Hedjaz (today's Saudi Arabia) to rebel against the Ottoman sultan. The British in effect promised that all Arab lands occupied by the Ottoman Turks would be turned over to the Arabs when the war had been won. However, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British also promised part of this same territory to the Jews for their homeland. To make matters worse, the British and the French also promised most of these same lands to each other in the secret Sykes- Picot agreement.
Precisely because it was imperial, Ottoman imperial rule had not been conducive to intellectual or material progress -- as had been understood by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini and Nicholas Cusanus in the latter half of the fifteenth century when the Ottoman domination was beginning. The Ottoman peoples did not participate in the European reformation and the wars of religion, notably the Thirty Years War, which had convinced Europeans that political solutions and war-avoidance were better than hecatombs of slaughter waged by doctrinaire religious factions. Ottoman economic development also lagged behind that of Europe. Because of these conditions, there are basically four types of regimes which are currently possible in the ex- Ottoman territories. These are:
1. Reactionarv Monarchies -This was the variant at first favored by the British when they occupied various Arab states under the League of Nations mandates after 1918. Working with the House of Saud and the Hashemite family, the British promoted monarchy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. These regimes, like that of King Farouk in Egypt, were widely viewed as corrupt puppets of the imperialists who were not interested in national progress, but rather in amassing private wealth. In Saudi Arabia, for example, human chattel slavery remained legal until 1965, and was widely practiced after that, especially in households. Household slavery also remains common in the Gulf emirates, and explodes onto the local pages of the Washington papers every now and then when a visiting diplomat from the Gulf brings a personal slave or two on a diplomatic mission. Ironically, chattel slavery was abolished in Kuwait thanks to the Iraqi invasion of 1990, but was then re-established with the help of Bush's Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Tarpley 1996) Most of the Arab monarchs were overthrown, although monarchy still hangs on in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and among the petty princelings of the Gulf: Iran, although not an Arab country, was ruled by an emperor until 1979. Clearly, these regimes are not suitable for the task of economic development and general progress in their countries.
2. Modernizing Nationalist Regimes -- These may be democratic republics, but they are more likely to be military governments possibly evolving into plebiscitary forms of democracy. They may call themselves Arab socialists, as Nasser did. The best hope the Arabs had of sharing in the level of scientific and technological progress attained in the most advanced parts of the world was offered by nationalist regimes whose program was one of economic development and modernization. The first example was that of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, who created the first permanent republic in Asia, the Turkish Republic of 1923. Rejecting the sultanate and the caliphate in favor of the Turkish nation, Ataturk implemented the separation of mosque and state, making Turkey a modern, secular republic. He introduced the Roman alphabet in place of Arabic script, outlawed the veil for women and the fez for men, and promoted the European hat as the "headgear of civilization." Harems were discouraged, while women were given the right to vote and held public office. Ataturk introduced the Gregorian calendar, the metric system, and family names. A dirigist Five-Year plan for economic development was introduced in 1933. Public law was based on modern European criminal and civil codes, rather than the sharia. Ataturk saw religion as a matter of purely personal and private belief and preference, and all religions were tolerated. Ataturk would have to rank at or near the top of any list of the nation-builders and modernizers of the twentieth century. Among his other achievements, he helped Turkey to be the only defeated power of World War I which escaped fascist rule. In retrospect, if there was one experiment in the Moslem world which the US should have supported, it was that of Ataturk. If his ideas had prevailed more generally, there could be no talk of the clash of civilizations today. Given this impressive record, how did the Allies of World War I, including the United States treat Ataturk? They tried with every means possible to overthrow him, to isolate him, and to carve Turkey into a series of petty states. In the Peace of Paris in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles with Germany was bad, but the Treaty of Sevres which was imposed upon Turkey was an act of grotesque lunacy. It was clearly the peace to end all peace. Turkey was supposed to be divided into French, Italian, and Greek zones of occupation, while the Bosporus and the Dardanelles were occupied by the British and French. There was an attempt to create an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia. The British and French even attempted to lure the US into taking over a piece of Turkey, but in those days the US was smart enough to decline. That was fortunate, since Ataturk was able to defeat the armies the Allies threw at him; he was able to guarantee the national independence and territorial integrity of Turkey. His brutal treatment of Greek and Armenians, who were fighting for the Allies, must be seen in this context.
3. Hereditary Dictatorships -- These hereditary dictatorships have emerged after the fall of monarchies, and sometimes occur as a degenerate form of the nationalist-modernizing state. Key examples are the regime of Hafez Assad and his son in Syria after 1963, and indeed that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, with the first being far more odious. Hafez Assad ruled a murderous, pervasive police state in which the minority Allawites ruled over a resentful majority. Yet, Assad always the darling of New York and London: Kissinger once said that he hoped God would forgive him, but that there would always be a soft spot in his heart for Hafez Assad. The regimes of the Assads in Syria, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and of the mercurial Colonel Qaddafi in Libya can be assimilated to this group.
4. Fundamentalist Theocracies -- The leading example is Iran, which is enough to show that this form cannot be effective for national development in the hostile climate of globalization. In 1978, President Carter's National Security Director Zbigniew Brzezinski, anxious to avenge Soviet support for North Vietnam against the US in the recent Vietnam War, was convinced by British Arabists and orientalists that Islamic fundamentalism could be used to destabilize the five large Moslem-majority republics of Soviet central Asia -- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Khirgizia, and Turkmenistan. This outlook could also be employed to disrupt the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus -- notably in Chechnya. In this way, Brzezinski argued, Islamic fundamentalism could become the definitive "bulwark against communism." In order to provide a powerful center from which this new ideology could radiate, Brzezinski and Carter connived to foment a typical CIA "people power" pseudo-revolution, this time with Islamic fundamentalist overtones, in order to overthrow the Shah of Iran in 1979. The Shah was personally in many respects a monster, and his Savak secret police were as murderous as any in the world. However, the Shah was bringing in European construction firms to create infrastructure and whole new cities; a good example was the immense building operation at Bandar Abbas (today Bandar Khomeini) by the Italian civil engineering firm Condotte d'Acqua under Loris Corbi. But since the Shah could not tolerate free political activity, he had no effective mass political party to support him. The chosen instrument for the Shah's ouster was the benighted Ayatollah Khomeini, a figure of ineffable darkness, worse than Savonarola. Let there be no mistake: Brzezinski did everything to overthrow the Shah, and then to make sure that no secular politician like Shapour Baktiar took power in his stead: US Air Force Gen. Robert Huyser from Al Haig's NATO staff was sent to Iran with the message that only Khomeini would be acceptable to the United States. (Dreyfus and La Levee 50-53) The rise of Khomeini represented a novelty in the recent history of the Middle East: it was a theocracy of the Islamic clerics or mullahs, bankrolled by wealthy bazaar merchants and related interests. The ascendancy of Khomeini meant that Iran's economic and cultural development was frozen -- or in reverse -- for most of two decades. But Khomeini's Iran did become a center of propagation of lslamic fundamentalist ideology, just as Brzezinski had intended, although the Soviets were not the only ones to pay the price. Soon the US-UK intelligence agencies were able to play Iraq against Iran in the 8-year long Gulf War of the 1980s, which wrecked and bankrupted both societies even further. The Israelis were so pleased with this war that they wanted it to go on forever, while the Iranian mullahs organized suicidal human wave assaults by little children against prepared and fortified Iraqi positions.
Despite neocon blathering about democracy, and Bush's so-called Middle East initiative, the US never had any serious plans for democracy in Iraq. To begin with, the US cannot seriously be described as a democracy; the US is currently an oligarchy in Plato's precise definition of a "constitution teeming with many evils ... based on a property qualification ... wherein the rich hold office and the poor man is excluded," a system favoring "the member of a ruling class -- oligarchy." (Republic 544c, 550c, 545a) Sure enough, the regime created by the US in Iraq in the spring of 2003 was an ... oligarchy, composed of twenty-five handpicked puppet oligarchs with a weak revolving presidency. Such arrangements have been perpetuated after the alleged restoration of Iraqi sovereignty. US interference in post-communist Russia favored oligarchical domination through the Yeltsin coterie in a similar way. As of right now, there is probably not a sufficient material-economic basis for western-style democracy in Iraq, although after several years of economic reconstruction there might well be. But in any case, it is clear that the US as presently constituted is no longer a progressive force on the world scene -- which was not always the case in the past.
The open secret of the post-1945 world is that the US and the other NATO states have systematically and implacably opposed the reasonable alternative of modernizing secular nationalism among the Arab and Islamic states, while favoring the fundamentalist alternative, the more benighted the better. Modernizing secular nationalists are by far the most effective adversaries of the imperialists -- they have the potential to score real political, diplomatic and cultural gains for their countries. Theocratic reactionaries are easier to isolate, since their appeal is more circumscribed. In practice, Washington and London have always fostered the rise of fundamentalists, while attempting to eliminate modernizing nationalists.
It must be added that while fundamentalist figures like Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran were baneful from every point of view, there are today perfectly reasonable figures who identify themselves as Islamists -- people like Adel Hussein of Egypt and Hassan Turabi of Sudan. These figures seem to represent something of the progressive impulses of the 1950s-1960s, expressed today within the dominant Islamic idiom. Significantly, these figures are incessantly vilified and targeted by imperialists of all stripes. If reasonable policies were ever to re- emerge in the west, reasonable Islamists would have no trouble in finding modes of cooperation.
Despite US-UK hostility, Arab leaders of the Nasser type had some margin of maneuver as long as the Soviets offered some kind of an alternative to Washington and London. But as the USSR weakened and finally disintegrated, this margin grew narrower and finally disappeared in 1991, when the Soviets could do nothing for their former ally, Iraq.
Iran -- After World War II, the first attempt to renew the progressive nationalism of Ataturk came with the rise of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran. Mossadeq's program centered on the 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, known today as BP. With the breaking of the British protectorate in Iran, the fledgling CIA of Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt organized a military coup against Mossadeq, which was followed by a restoration of imperialist control over Iran's oil, and an era of political reaction under the Shah.
Egypt -- In 1952, a group of nationalist army officers ousted the notoriously corrupt and inept King Farouk. A coup by junior officers brought Colonel Gamal abd el Nasser to power. Nasser's progressive nationalist program was based on the expulsion of the British occupation forces, followed by the nationalization of the Suez Canal, with the canal tolls being used to finance the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Upper Nile. The Aswan project was key for flood control and hydroelectric energy, on the model of FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority. After the British were gone, Nasser seized the canal with great fanfare, becoming an Egyptian national hero. Nasser was quickly opposed by British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden and the Dulles brothers, and soon became the target of a British-French-Israeli intrigue: Israel would launch a surprise attack across the Sinai, and an Anglo-French task force would seize the canal under the guise of restoring order. This crude conspiracy led to the Suez crisis of October-November 1956, and was seen as a personal affront by US President Eisenhower. After the USSR issued a unique nuclear ultimatum to the British and French, threatening London and Paris with nuclear destruction, the US and the USSR joined in the UN Security Council to vote against the old-style Anglo-French imperialists and their Israeli auxiliaries. The US position in the post- 1956 Middle East was founded on the broad sympathy won when Washington torpedoed the adventurous plans of the British and French imperialists. Sadly, those gains were totally squandered during the subsequent decades, as the US itself assumed the role of the chief imperial oppressor of the Arab states. But in 1956, Nasser's Egypt had clearly emerged as the leading Arab state. Egypt became the nucleus of an attempted re-unification of the Arab world in the form of a secular United Arab Republic, which Syria and Yemen joined, and towards which Iraq gravitated for a time. Nasser used his radio, the Voice of the Arabs, to condemn the Saudi monarchy for its practice of chattel slavery, especially of black Africans. Egypt became the target of another Israeli pre-emptive attack in the June 1967 Six-Day War, and was unable fully to recover in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was orchestrated by Kissinger. As for Nasser, he was hounded mercilessly until he died in 1970. He was replaced by Sadat, who ousted the Soviet advisers Nasser had brought in. But even Sadat was too much of a nationalist for the Anglo-Americans: he was assassinated in 1980 by a group which included al-Zawahiri, today alleged to be Bin Laden's right-hand man and personal physician. Despite his role in the Sadat assassination, Zawahiri was able to live openly in London for years. This suggests that Zawahiri is indeed an asset of MI-6.
Iraq -- When the British seized control of Iraq in 1919, they installed a reactionary monarchy of the Hashemites. In 1958, the puppet monarch King Feisal was assassinated. General Kassem became prime minister and instituted a program of modernizing reforms, including the progressive constitution of 1959. The 1959 Iraqi constitution and other Kassem-era legislation made literacy compulsory, abolished slavery, and guaranteed equal rights for women. The impact of these reforms was permanent. To cite only one example, during the mid-1970s the Iraqi Ambassador to Rome was a highly intelligent woman, Selima Bakir. As any Iraqi nationalist would, Kassem assumed the position that Kuwait was an integral part of Iraq. In this he was correct since Kuwait had been illegally detached from the Ottoman Empire by the British in 1899 to prevent the German-sponsored Berlin to Baghdad railway from ever reaching the head of the Gulf. In 1962 the British fomented a revolt of the Kurds under the Barzani clan, and Kassem was assassinated in 1963. With the death of Kassem, the chance for successful development in Iraq was severely limited. The positive features of Iraq during the Saddam Hussein years were largely inherited from the Kassem era.
Pakistan -- The great opportunity for modernization in Pakistan came under Ali Bhutto in the mid-1970s. Bhutto was determined to advance his country to the leading edge of modern technology with a peaceful nuclear energy program in the Eisenhower Atoms for Peace tradition. He was soon confronted by Kissinger, who threatened to make a terrible example of him unless he desisted from his ambitious development plans. Shortly thereafter, Bhutto was overthrown by the US-supported coup of General Zia ul Haq. Bhutto was framed up on various charges and hanged by the new regime in accordance with Kissinger's earlier threats. Bhutto's wife and children later took refuge in West Germany. Fundamentalist tendencies have grown in the era following the death of Bhutto.
Kosovo -- When the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began to break up in 1991, the ethnic Albanian Moslem population of the province of Kosovo under the leadership of the secular nationalist LDK party responded by a highly effective non-violent self-organizing process, which allowed them to defy the Serb occupiers for most of the rest of the 1990s. Using the tools of passive resistance, the Kosovars created their own parallel government, including their own school system, their own separate elections, their own public health system, and their own parallel system of economic enterprises. The leader of this magnificent effort was Ibrahim Rugova, who made pilgrimage after pilgrimage to Washington during the 1990s, always sporting the Parisian red silk scarf which was his trademark. But the US was never willing to lift a finger for Rugova and the eminently reasonable LDK. When Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia declared independence from Serb- dominated Yugoslavia, Rugova hesitated: the Kosovars, unlike the others, had no guns, and the US had never provided them. In 1997, the neighboring state of Albania, with which the Kosovars wished to be united, disintegrated as the result of the collapse of a series of Ponzi-scheme financial speculations. As the Albanian state collapsed, its weapons depots were looted, and many of these weapons soon found their way across the border into Kosovo. This engendered the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a very dubious outfit composed of narcotics smugglers, Islamic fundamentalists from Kosovo and abroad, and out-and-out terrorists. As the KLA's clashes with the Serbian police and army increased, the Serbs responded as any occupier would, and atrocities on both sides became the order of the day. In the event the US, in the person of Madeleine Albright, became the direct sponsor of the terrorist KLA. Starting in March, 1999, the US and NATO waged a criminal 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, one of the great acts of international vandalism in the late twentieth century -- all in support of KLA-related demands. As for Rugova and the LDK, they were trampled, and the US depended more and more on the KLA.
Afghanistan -- This country was able to manage some slow modernization during the 1950s under King Mohammed Zahir, who had assumed the throne in 1933. Afghan development has always hinged on a large hydroelectric and water project in the center of the country, which has never been fully carried out. The King was deposed in 1973, and by 1978 there emerged the progressive regime of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a pro- Marxist poet and novelist with very special talents. Taraki legalized trade unions, instituted a minimum wage, and promoted housing, health care, and public sanitation. He favored improvements in the status of women. Taraki tried to eradicate the cultivation of the opium poppy, which had made his country the world's leading producer of heroin. Taraki also cancelled all debts owed by farmers, including tenant farmers, and began a land reform program to break up the holdings of absentee landlords and latifundists. Taraki thus offended the feudal interest, which was strong in the country. Brzezinski regarded Taraki as a Soviet asset, although he was largely indigenous in origin. As Brzezinski later boasted to the Nouvel Ohservateur, US destabilization teams launched a clandestine operation against Taraki in early 1979, prominently playing the Islamic fundamentalist card. In September 1979 there followed a US-backed coup by the CIA asset Hafizulla Amin, who executed Taraki and rolled back his reforms in the name of setting up a fundamentalist Islamic state in the service of the feudal landowners. Amin's reactionary measures resulted in a backlash against him, and he was himself toppled within two months. In the face of renewed assaults by Brzezinski's opium-poppy mujaheddin, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979. During the various phases of the Afghan war that followed, the CIA always supported the most benighted, the most reactionary, the most opium-mongering factions -- especially their favorite, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA was looking for forces of absolute self-isolating negativity, incapable of getting along with Iran or anyone else. In the decade of war that followed (December 1979-February 1989), Afghanistan was economically and demographically destroyed. The second generation of Brzezinski's mujaheddin, the Islamic fundamentalist students or Taliban, assumed power in 1994. Like Pol Pot in Cambodia in the wake of Kissinger's bombing destruction of that country in the 1970s, the Taliban represented an unspeakable retrogression towards barbarity. But, just as Kissinger and G.H.W. Bush had supported Pol Pot, the Bush 41 administration found many ways to support the Taliban, who were viewed as ideal because of their inability to ally with Iran or any of the ex-Soviet central Asian republics. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, the US taxpayers paid the salaries of the entire Taliban government in 1999. (Parenti 65) And under Bush 43, this support became even more explicit, as UNOCAL lobbyists sought a deal with the Taliban to build their oil pipeline to central Asia. During this phase, Kissinger, neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, retired State Department anti-terror official Robert Oakley and Leili Helms (daughter of the former CIA director) were successfully lobbying on behalf of Unocal. The goal was to keep the Taliban regime off the State Department terrorist state list, since listing there would have blocked any pipeline deal. In his first spring in office, Bush offered a large grant to the Taliban. This caused columnist Robert Scheer to comment: "Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. The gift ... makes the US the main sponsor of the Taliban." ("Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001)
Palestine -- After Israeli had occupied the west bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza strip and the Sinai peninsula in June, 1967, the Israelis found themselves ruling over some two million Palestinians. Under the United Nations system it is illegal to annex territory acquired through armed conflict without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, which in this case was not forthcoming. Rather, the UNSC passed resolution 242, calling on Israel to withdraw to the internationally recognized borders as they had been before June 1967. (In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush spokesmen accused Iraq of having violated some 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions; they conveniently forgot that Israel was the all-time champion in that department, since Israel is currently in violation of some 30 UNSC resolutions regarded the territories it has occupied since 1967. But the US never proposed war to enforce compliance with those resolutions.) The Israeli occupation of conquered Palestine was oppressive and humiliating, and a national resistance soon emerged in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Its leader was Yassir Arafat, a secular nationalist more or less in the Nasser mold. Since the PLO had few weapons, and since the Israeli army was a dominant presence, the PLO began doing what the Jews had done between 1945 and 1948 against the British occupation of the same territory: they launched guerilla warfare, which the occupiers quickly labeled terrorism. The official Israeli line was that there was no Palestinian people, but this was soon disproved. From the beginning, the Israeli Mossad was active in conducting provocations which it sought to attribute to the PLO and its peripheries: attacks on airliners and on the 1972 Olympic games in Munich are therefore of uncertain paternity. The more horrendous the atrocity, the greater the backlash of world public opinion against the PLO. There is no doubt that the Mossad controlled a part of the central committee of the organization known as Abu Nidal, after the nom de guerre of its leader, Sabri al Banna. In 1987-88, just as the first Palestinian intifada uprising was getting under way, there emerged in the occupied territories the organization known as Hamas. Hamas combined a strong commitment to neighborhood social services with the rejection of negotiations with Israel and the demand for a military solution which was sure to be labeled terrorism. Interestingly enough, one of the leading sponsors of Hamas was Ariel Sharon, a former general who was then a cabinet minister. These facts are widely recognized; US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurzer, an observant Jew, stated late in 2001 that Hamas had emerged "with the tacit support of Israel" because in the late 1980s "Israel perceived it would be better to have people turning toward religion, rather than toward a nationalistic cause." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 21, 2001) In an acrimonious Israeli cabinet debate around the same time, Israeli extremist Knesset member Silva Shalom stated:
"between Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas ... Arafat is a terrorist in a diplomat's suit, while the Hamas can be hit unmercifully." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 4, 2001) This tirade provoked a walkout by Shimon Peres and the other Labor Party ministers. Arafat added his own view, which was that "Hamas is a creature of Israel which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities, and mosques. Even [Israeli Prime Minister] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarak." (Corriere della Sera, Dec. 11, 2001) With incredible arrogance, the Bush administration has pronounced Arafat as unfit to be a negotiating partner. In effect, they are choosing Hamas -- or worse, an act of incalculable folly for Israel and for the United States as well.
This list could go on and on. In Bangladesh, Kissinger persecuted Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League, the leading nationalist force on the scene after independence in the early 1970s. In Lebanon, Kissinger did everything possible to destroy the 1943 multi-sectarian constitution and set off a civil war. Later, when Gen. Aoun, a Maronite Christian but much more a Lebanese nationalist, attempted to save the country's independence, he was sabotaged by the United States.
The flip side of this pattern is the brutal treatment meted out to those in Europe who have wanted to make development deals with the Arab states on the obvious basis of mutual advantage. A celebrated case is that of Enrico Mattei, the president of the Italian state oil company, ENI. Mattei was famous for challenging the Anglo- American Seven Sisters oil cartel's dominance of Arab nations by offering the Arabs an alternative partner and a better deal: a fifty- fifty split in place of the lopsided 60-40 or worse profit sharing offered by the Anglo-American cartel. Mattei's private jet was tampered with by the CIA, resulting in his death in a plane crash near Milan in October 1962. The German banker Juergen Ponto was interested in financing development projects in the Arab world and in Africa; he was eliminated by the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1977. It is evident that the Baader-Meinhof was acting as a false-flag operation for CIA and MI-6. There were some thirty attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. There were many motivations for this, but a prominent one was the pro-Arab diplomacy of the French government.
Given the implacable US and NATO persecution of progressive Arab nationalist leaders, this breed has tended to disappear entirely from the scene, With the remaining choices narrowed to reactionary monarchies, such as the Saudis, repressive dictatorships, such as that typified by Hafez Assad, or experiments with Islamic fundamentalism, it is not surprising that many young Arabs regard the fundamentalists as the viable option. If the western powers do not like this, they must be reminded that it is they who have, with their mindless imperialist arrogance, rendered the progressive nationalists almost extinct.
As I stated in 1994 in my address to the Inter-Religious Conference in Khartoum, Sudan, the basis of Christianity comes down to the two great commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love of God is a matter of faith, about the details of which it may prove impossible to agree. But where agreement is eminently possible is the second sphere: love your neighbor, the Golden Rule. In today's world, love your neighbor means good works in the form of large-scale economic and infrastructural development projects to tackle the still-unfinished business of the post-1945 world: the integral scientific, technological, and economic advancement of the former colonial sector, of the third world. Here Christian charity converges with Moslem social solidarity, with Confucian benevolence, with the similar imperatives in Buddhism and Hinduism, and with the imperatives readily embraced by secularists of good will.
Not so long ago, the world witnessed United Nations Development Decades, oil for technology conferences, and related international efforts to promote world economic development. Today such efforts have disappeared. All that remains is globalization, which is destroying the Arab and Islamic worlds in the same way it is destroying every other part of the planet. Deranged thinkers like Huntington, Brzezinski, and Kissinger imagine that their crude geopolitics is a clever, even cunning pursuit of US imperial self- interest. In reality, their policies are suicidal. If we wish to identify some policies which have actually worked well for the United States in past years, the census looks as follows:
The Monroe Doctrine, for establishing the United States as a supporter of the rights of small nations to the freedom of the seas, and as an opponent of European colonialism.
The Atlantic Charter of 1941, for proposing the Four Freedoms -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want -- as the basis for the postwar world.
The Bretton Woods system of 1944-1971, for using New Deal methods to foster the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen.
The Marshal Plan of 1947, for providing a model of economic reconstruction for war-ravaged Europe, and for preventing a resurgence of economic depression in the US.
The US response to the 1956 Suez crisis, for repudiating imperial domination of the Middle East, and advocating fair treatment for the Arabs.
The strong world position of the US in the third quarter of the twentieth century was largely due to these policies. Today's neocons and their fellow travelers are structurally incapable of advocating anything so effective. New leadership in the wake of the expected US party re-alignment is required. These policies must of course be supplemented by the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state in the west bank and Gaza, made viable by a comprehensive economic development program from which all states in the region, including Israel, should benefit. In the meantime, the US must drop its double standard on terrorism: Israel's policy of targeted assassination of its opponents without benefit of judicial process is the essence of state sponsored terrorism, no matter how many times it is endorsed by Cheney. The US has armed Israel with $70 billion worth of weapons, including the F-16s and missiles which are used to kill Palestinian civilians in direct violation of US law. All such US aid should be used as a lever to secure Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution. These steps would go far towards inhibiting terrorist recruitment.