WORLD AFFAIRS

The terror of war

A year since September 11, 2001, the true character of the 'War on Terror' has become clear: far from being a war in the cause of civilisation, it is one between the United States and Israel on the one hand and the entire Arab world on the other.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

LAYING out the parameters of the next phase of the "War on Terror", military strategists in the United States have been urging that all the political objectives that are sought in Iraq could be quickly accomplished through the use of "smart weaponry". The figures they quote are compelling evidence of the new directions in which the U.S. war machine has evolved since the Cold War. In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. depended overwhelmingly on air-power, but no more than 5 per cent of the munitions used in Iraq were really "smart" ones. In comparison, no less than 95 per cent of the air-dropped munitions used in the ongoing Afghan campaign have been of this category. "Smart weapons" enable smart political strategies. And with a renewed air campaign, a discrete insertion of special forces and local sustenance from dissident Iraqis, the objective of "regime change" in Iraq could be achieved with minimal casualties on the U.S. side.

TANNENBAUM ALLAN/ GAMMA
The twin towers of the World Trade Centre merge with the clouds.

As the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the U.S. approached, the public mood in that country, though primed by a continuous stream of bellicose rhetoric in the mass media, was uncertain. The proposition that Iraq should be the next target and that the U.S. should, if necessary, go it alone in hunting down and eliminating President Saddam Hussein and his regime, was once considered almost axiomatic. But by early September, there was a dramatic drop in public endorsement of the unilateralist sentiment.

Just a short distance from Iraq, another dimension of the war on terror was on display before a morally obtuse world: not the remote and sanitised brutality of "smart" weaponry, but the intimate cruelty of the bulldozer. Interspersed with air and armoured attacks on Palestinian civilian centres - typified by the one-tonne bomb that was dropped in Gaza city recently to eliminate one Islamic militant and ended up killing 15, including nine children - Israeli forces have now launched a home demolition operation that is unprecedented even by its own ferocious standards (see separate story). Since reoccupying the West Bank in June, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been conducting search and seizure operations at random, taking hundreds of people into custody. Relatives of suspected militants have had their homes demolished and been threatened with expulsion to the Gaza Strip.

In mid-August, the Israeli High Court shredded all residual democratic pretence by denying the right of judicial review to those whose homes had been earmarked for demolition. The IDF can now carry out home demolitions without the need for evidence or warning. Even the policy of punitive population transfer has been resumed with a new resolve after a brief pause and a pretence of examining the legal niceties.

General Moshe Ya'alon, the Chief of Staff of the IDF, recently spelt out a paranoiac vision of the stakes that Israel had in the new phase of the war on terror. "When I look at the overall map," he said in an interview to the Israeli weekly Ha'aretz, "what disturbs me especially is the Palestinian threat and the possibility that a hostile state will acquire nuclear capability." In more specific terms, Ya'alon was confident that Israel had the answers for the worst that the Hezbollah, the Islamic group operating in Lebanon, or the two recalcitrant states of Syria and Iraq could do. But the Palestinians, he contended, posed an "existential threat" which was all the more dangerous in being invisible, "like cancer". From this diagnosis, Ya'alon proceeded to the antidote: "There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy."

If home demolitions on a mass scale and punitive population transfers constitute "chemotherapy", then the world community could well ask what the more durable cures for the "cancer" afflicting the Jewish state could be.

The answers can be easily extracted from the sub-text of the Israeli General's remarks: "The campaign is between two societies that are competing for territory and, to a certain degree, for existence. I don't think that there is an existential threat to Palestinian society. There is an existential threat to us. They feel they have the backing of a quarter-of-a-billion Arabs and they believe that time is on their side and that, with a combination of terrorism and demography, they will tire us out and wear us down." Israel, in this highly politicised General's reading, faces a "reverse asymmetry": it has no desire to "annihilate" the Palestinians, who however still refuse to recognise the right of a Jewish state to exist in their midst. The ongoing struggle is the most "important confrontation" that Israel has faced since the "War of Independence" in 1948. And victory will only be achieved when it is "burned" into the Palestinian consciousness that Israel would not be defeated by violence.

Clearly, the General chooses only to address directly the threat posed to Israel by terrorist violence. How he proposes to deal with the dangers posed by "demography" remains unspecified. But if history is any guide and ongoing operations any indication of future resolve, then the solution of "demographic judaisation" or, not to put too fine a point on it, ethnic cleansing, of the occupied territories is the likely recourse. Facing the greatest challenge ever to its existence, Israel may just decide under the cover provided by a war against Iraq to complete the job it began in 1948.

There are ample suggestions in the General's remarks that the war drums beating in Washington and the heightened rhetoric over Iraq's supposed capability to deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD), are only a camouflage for Israel to pursue its own interest. On the dangers posed by Iraq for instance, Ya'alon is dismissive. "Iraq's capabilities," he said, "are shallow compared to what they were in the Gulf War. They are not capabilities that give me sleepless nights." There could always be the worst-case scenario of Iraq launching "a missile or a plane" in the direction of Israel. "But we have good answers to that," said the General, "and the threat itself is limited."

Ya'alon's rather odious metaphors about the Palestinian threat drew a few feeble protests from liberal circles, but Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was quick to endorse his views. The political leadership in Israel - such as it is - clearly is of the same mind as the military in its assessment of the Palestinian threat. Curiously, on an issue that belongs more firmly within the orbit of professional military judgment - such as the magnitude of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD capability - the political leadership has a view that is quite at variance with that of the Israeli military.

Speaking to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Knesset in mid-August, Sharon described Iraq as "the greatest danger facing Israel." Asked specifically about the possible role that Israel could play, especially in the event that a U.S. attack would impel Iraq to launch a missile at Israel, Sharon was vague: "We do not know for certain if the U.S. will attack Iraq. Iraq is a great danger. We are not intervening in U.S. decisions." He did assure the Knesset committee though, that "strategic coordination between Israel and the U.S. has reached unprecedented dimensions".

Shortly afterwards, it was reported that Sharon had sent a message to the U.S. administration urging decisive action against Iraq. No purpose would be served through postponement, he said, since that would only make a "convenient environment" for an attack more unlikely. Sharon's spokesman Ra'anan Gissin explained that further delaying the inevitable would only "give (Saddam Hussein) more of an opportunity to accelerate his programme of weapons of mass destruction". And Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, now a pathetic political shadow, weighed in with observations that if taking on Iraq could be "dangerous" now, it would be only more so later.

MID-AUGUST saw the cresting of the bellicose rhetoric on Iraq which had been running far ahead of military preparations or political coalition-building. Then began the drift towards reality as the right-wing clique that had been arguing the case for "regime change" saw public support vanish. This was a consequence partly of the mundane worries among ordinary U.S. citizens about the economic woes that buffet them.

Equally, the fissures that opened up within the Republican foreign policy establishment, reflecting a bizarre inter-generational argument between President George W. Bush and his father - U.S. Presidents 43 and 41 as the media would put it - engendered considerable doubts among the public.

Leading the charge for the elder Bush was Brent Scowcroft, a retired army General who was his National Security Adviser. Writing in Wall Street Journal, Scowcroft rubbished the right-wing claim that the Iraqi regime was connected to the September 11 attacks. Months of assiduous conspiracy-mongering by neo-conservative think tanks such as the Council for Security Policy (CSP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) were disdainfully waved aside as Scowcroft argued the commonsense case against invasion. It would, he said, jeopardise the coalition built in the war against terror, alienate the Arab nations and draw the U.S. into the quagmire of engineering political change in a milieu that it understands little about.

Scowcroft's intervention forced into the open the divergences of opinion that had been played out through competing media leaks. And the line-ups were clear. On one side stood the right-wing ideologues who had held relatively junior if pivotal positions in the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s, who had connived at Israeli atrocities in Lebanon, trampled upon the U.N. system and set new standards in unilateralist arrogance. On the other side stood the professional diplomats and military commanders who in the 1990s had worked out a new idiom of global engagement from a position of overwhelming military strength, nurturing an illusion of the U.S. as a responsible leader rather than a reckless bully.

James Baker, the elder Bush's Secretary of State, soon pitched in, arguing that "regime change" in Iraq could not be "done on the cheap". "Covert action has been tried before and failed every time," said Baker, in an unwitting admission of the crude espionage operations the U.S. carried out for close to a decade under the guise of U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq.

And the only realistic way to effect a "regime change" would be "through the application of military force, including sufficient ground troops to occupy the country (including Baghdad), depose the current leadership and install a successor government". There would be casualties on both sides, including among Iraqi civilians, and the U.S. would be faced with the problem of "how long to occupy a big, fractious country and what type of government or administration should follow".

PERSONAL invective, reserved till then for those on the liberal fringes of the American political debate, soon began to fly among rival factions of the conservative establishment. Reaching for the most powerfully evocative word, redolent of allied timidity in the face of Nazi provocation, Richard Perle who heads the Defence Policy Board in the Pentagon, accused the critics of the invasion plan of "appeasement". Chuck Hagel, a senior Republican legislator and Vietnam war veteran, responded by inviting Perle, a right-wing zealot whose hand has been evident in most extremist prescriptions in the recent past, to prove his patriotism by joining the first expeditionary forces into Baghdad. William Kristol, Editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, weighed in with the warning that any retreat from the stated resolve to depose the Iraqi regime would constitute an irreparable loss of face for the U.S. and Laurence Eagleburger, another former Secretary of State, rounded off the debate by characterising the proponents of an Iraq invasion as "devious and dangerous".

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney stepped in swiftly to arrest the alarming drift towards moderation. Using a turn of phrase which could well have been scripted in Tel Aviv, he warned in the course of an address to U.S. war veterans that "the risks of inaction (were) far greater than the risks of action". Directly addressing the concerns raised by Scowcroft, Cheney served up a self-indulgent testimonial to the U.S.' benign intentions: "Another argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world and interfere with a larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true. A war against Iraq would be one not of conquest but of liberation."

Cheney's most visible ally in talking up the case against Iraq is Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has often in the recent past pre-empted U.S. foreign policy through offhand remarks in public. Early in August, he effectively rubbished President Bush's repeated assurances to Arab leaders about a Palestinian state being established within three years. Far from a state, said Rumsfeld, he could foresee "some kind of entity" being established within his lifetime. And in a calculated affront to the universal commonsense view that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip constitute occupied territories that must be vacated, he referred to these areas in the same controversial speech to U.S. servicemen, as "so-called occupied territories" which had fallen under Israel's control as a "result of a war, which they won".

Rumsfeld has of late been talking up the threat from Iraq and talking down U.S. isolation, using trite analogies with Nazi Germany and the lone stand that Winston Churchill took. But he typifies another instance of the close association between zealotry in the cause of Israel and excessive enthusiasm for war against Iraq. It has taken merely a year since September 11 for the true character of the "War on Terror" to crystallise. Far from being a war in the cause of civilisation, it is a war between the U.S. and Israel on the one hand and the entire Arab world on the other. And the goal, at least as far as the U.S. and Israel are concerned, is little less than a "final solution" to the problem of Palestine.

WITH all the talk of Iraq being a threat to the region, its immediate neighbours - Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, all close allies of the U.S. - have repeatedly warned against any invasion plans. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has put out the bluntest warning, which is equally an intimation of his own vulnerability as one of the U.S.' main clients in the region: "If you strike Iraq, and kill the people of Iraq while Palestinians are being killed by Israel, not one Arab leader will be able to control the angry outburst of the masses."

The neo-conservative element in the U.S. clearly has little time for this variety of argument. Recent events indicate that it is willing to disrupt all its existing alliances in the Arab world and propose a heavy blanket of U.S. military coercion over recalcitrant states, all in the cause of Israel. Early in August, The Washington Post broke the story of a classified briefing at Perle's Defence Policy Board by Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec, which painted the Saudis as enemies of the U.S. and principal sponsors of Islamic terrorism. The U.S., the briefing urged, should demand that Riyadh cease all sustenance of Islamic fundamentalist causes. Failing this, it should seize Saudi oilfields, freeze Saudi financial assets and in the extreme case, partition the kingdom and ensure a friendly regime in the oil-rich eastern half.

The leak of this classified briefing, obviously authored by some of the practitioners of old-world realpolitik on Perle's agency, was deeply embarrassing, especially since it came after a group of private litigants filed a suit in a U.S. court, claiming $3 trillion as damages for the September 11 attack and naming three members of the Saudi royal family as respondents. In a damage limitation exercise, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., the ever loyal and ingratiating Bandar bin Sultan, was invited to President Bush's Texas ranch for a day-long visit at which the entire range of hospitality was laid out. But even Bandar remained sceptical at the end of it all, and reports have now emerged that Saudi investors have begun signalling a loss of confidence in their future relationship with the U.S.

Western analysts have estimated that Saudi investors withdrew a total of $200 billion from U.S. financial markets in August. This is over half the volume of capital that the U.S. needs to import annually to sustain the rapidly fading economic miracle of the 1990s. If sustained over time, the withdrawal of Saudi investments in the U.S. could have damaging consequences.

The coalition does not define the mission, said the unilateralist zealots after September 11. Rather, the mission defines the coalition. Today the mission is little less than ensuring the survival of Israel. The IDF chief's paranoiac rantings are not without foundation in the anomalous realities of Israel's existence. A recent report of the Israeli National Security Council recommended - 54 years since the state came into existence - that Israel must now emulate every other nation in the world by defining its boundaries. This is a matter of the country's survival as a credible political unit, since time and the demographic clock are working against it. The day is not far, warned the National Security Council, when the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea would be predominantly Arab. Rather than persist with a state of indecision, the Israeli government should opt for any one solution: a two-state situation where boundaries would be mutually agreed, a unilateral separation on the basis of Israel's own definition of its boundaries, or a single state of "Greater Israel".

Faced with the need to take a decision of historic import and immense future consequence, Sharon and his Cabinet funked out. Sending in tanks and attack helicopters, is in comparison, the easier option. And if the U.S. could be induced to bring its formidable military power to bear against the most isolated and vulnerable Arab state, that could conceivably afford the Israelis the opportunity to shoot their way out of an acute existential dilemma.

A year after September 11, the U.S. is torn between conflicting compulsions. But its organic solidarity with the state of Israel is likely finally to prove decisive.