The terrorist attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 may or may not prove a watershed. It will not be if the Western reaction is confined to Osama Bin Laden, his followers and Afghanistan, leaving other hotbeds of Moslem terrorism untouched. But now there is at least a small chance of a policy reversal sharp enough to check a deadly historical trend. Superficially, the US request to Israel to renew urgently its "negotiations" with Yasser Arafat is a bad omen. It can and may be interpreted as readiness to reward terrorism in the Middle East while condemning it in America and Europe – a course fraught with great danger for those promoting it. Arafat is an unrepentant terrorist with the deliberate murder of US diplomats on his record and the self-declared goal of destroying the Jewish state. Israeli negotiations with him are no more justifiable than US negotiations with Bin Laden. However, there is a bare possibility that the US is merely seeking to keep the Arabs quiet while its completes its preparations for war.
Even more astounding and dubious is the American attempt to rope Moslem states sponsoring terrorism into a "coalition against terrorism." By now both the PLO and Syria have declared themselves ready to take part and may well expect to be rewarded for this. If this is the poisoned fruit of an appeasement policy towards Arab terror while singling out Afghanistan and Bin Laden for exclusive blame, the West may well die of it in the long run.
The Twin Towers-Pentagon attack requires rapid action on several fronts – not least within the United States. It was carefully prepared over a relatively long period with the active or passive involvement of selected small sections of the Arab-American population. It is already known that Egyptian and Saudi Arabian nationals took part in it and that some of them received training as pilots in the US. But concentrating on these groups only is self-defeating. They are no more anti-American than the Hezbollah, the PLO, the Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Islamic fundamentalist or radical Arab movements. Operating for many years in the US and protected by its freedom of expression, some of these raised large sums of money to finance terrorism elsewhere. As terrorism against unbelievers is popular in the Arab world - especially when it is successful - it will now be much easier to recruit their members and sympathizers for more terrorist acts. The minimum requirement to prevent this is their internment.
There is evidence that during the 1990s the CIA was penetrated by many double agents serving Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Israel sent a secret delegation to the US in March 1997 to warn Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger about the Islamic Jihad cells, but nobody even agreed to hear it or read the material it brought, on the grounds that this "might interfere with the peace process and spoil US relations with Egypt." Since President George W. Bush left George Tenet and his team at the CIA, the total failure of American intelligence services to come up with advance information concerning the attack on the Twin Towers is not surprising. So much for the contribution of the Middle East "peace process" to the security of the United States…
The immediate US reaction reported by the media was an air attack on Kabul. This may have helped to raise internal morale, but served no useful military purpose. Bin Laden does not live there. An operation aiming to destroy his training camps in Afghanistan and uproot the Taleban regime makes sense, but will do very little to prevent Islamic terrorism against the US in future – even if Bin Laden is killed – unless the Arab terrorist movements mentioned above are also hit hard enough to lose faith in the success of their cause.
Moreover, the terrorist movements are not the only potential source of danger to the West. The states sponsoring them are more dangerous, since they are more likely to produce or acquire sizeable quantities of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt possess chemical weapons and the potential to produce biological weapons at short notice. Iran, Iraq and Syria are strongly anti-American, as is Pakistan, despite the help it received from the US in the past. Egypt’s regime is not, but public opinion there is hostile and the possibility of a fundamentalist coup must be taken into consideration.
The only one of the above states that can be of real help to the US in destroying the forces of the Taleban is Iran. It has a long frontier with Afghanistan, far more easily crossed than the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It has been hostile to the Taleban for a long time. Some believe it might even use its own forces for attacking it. However, President Khatami would be taking a big risk if he tries to agree on this with the United States or to provide the "Great Satan" with air bases. He has no authority to act in this sphere without approval from the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who controls the armed forces. Even if Khamenei grants it, he may balk at American conditions (e.g. stopping support for the Hezbollah) and demand a pledge that his ally, Syria, and the terrorist movements it supports be left alone. Yielding to him would mean that, in exchange for a Taleban-free Afghanistan, the US ignores more than half of the most dangerous anti-Western terrorists in the Middle East.
If the West intends to hammer away at Afghanistan while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil and its pro-Moslem tilt, it risks being the star actor of a Greek tragedy in which the Gods make the unfortunate rulers mad before they destroy them. The West can neither buy the Arabs who hate it by sacrificing Christian Lebanese and Israeli Jews nor suppress terrorism by embracing states and movements sponsoring it. Creating such a coalition may repeat the failure of the elder Bush’s coalition to suppress the terrorist regime in Iraq. Instead, it should hark back to the World War II and remember how it was won. Some of the same ruthlessness is needed now. The enemy is no less dangerous and even more fanatic. Waiting to be hit by Moslem nuclear bombs because one does not wish to be ruthless with states sponsoring terrorism, to shift to non-oil energy or to interfere with the profits of tycoons who do not even care for the economies of their own countries is no prescription for the survival of Western civilization.
President George W. Bush has no easy task. To win this war, he needs to clean out the Augean stables at his intelligence services and put as many as possible of the Arab-American agents and potential agents for the enemy under lock and key. Some new blood at the State Department not contaminated by longstanding yet outworn policies that can still provide a share of Moslem oil wealth for some multinational corporations but no longer help the US economy and have begun to endanger America’s security would also help. And then - when he is ready – the Moslem terrorists and the states aiding them must be hit, simultaneously or one after the other, but so hard that their confidence in their ability to destroy or seriously harm the United States and its allies is utterly broken.
NOTE: It is to be hoped that aggression by Moslem states and terrorist movements against non-Moslem states will be treated by the West with less leniency, not to speak encouragement, after the terrorist outrage in New York and Washington DC. Moslems usually regard their terrorists as "freedom fighters" when they act against unbelievers.
3. The Cure the West Rejected
