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Title: No Longer Safe
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: May 1993
Language: en
Topics: Middle East, US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199305__/
Notes: Published in Z Magazine.

Noam Chomsky

No Longer Safe

1. “The Current Crisis in the Middle East”

For some time, I’ve been compelled to arrange speaking engagements long

in advance. Sometimes a title is requested for a talk scheduled several

years ahead. There is, I’ve found, one title that always works: “The

current crisis in the Middle East.” One can’t predict exactly what the

crisis will be far down the road, but that there will be one is a fairly

safe prediction. That will continue to be the case as long as basic

problems of the region are not addressed.

Furthermore, the crises will be serious in what President Eisenhower

called “the most strategically important area in the world.” In the

early post-War years, the US in effect extended the Monroe Doctrine to

the Middle East, barring any interference apart from Britain, assumed to

be a loyal dependency, and quickly punished when it occasionally got out

of hand (as in 1956). The strategic importance of the region lies

primarily in its immense petroleum reserves and the global power

accorded by control over them; and, crucially, from the huge profits

that flow to the Anglo-American rulers, which have been of critical

importance for their economies. It has been necessary to insure that

this enormous wealth flows primarily to the West, not to the people of

the region. That is one fundamental problem that will continue to cause

unrest and disorder. Another is the Israel-Arab conflict with its many

ramifications, which have been closely related to the major US strategic

goal of dominating the region’s resources and wealth.

For many years, it was claimed the core problem was Soviet subversion

and expansionism, the reflexive justification for virtually all policies

since the Bolshevik takeover in Russia in 1917. That pretext having

vanished, it is now quietly conceded by the White House (March 1990)

that in past years, the “threats to our interests” in the Middle East

“could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door”; the doctrinal system has yet

to adjust fully to the new requirements. “In the future, we expect that

non-Soviet threats to [our] interests will command even greater

attention,” the White House continued in its annual plea to Congress for

a huge military budget. In reality, the “threat to our interests,” in

the Middle East as elsewhere, had always been indigenous nationalism, a

fact stressed in internal documents and sometimes publicly.[1]

A “worst case” prediction for the crisis a few years ahead would be a

war between the US and Iran; unlikely, but not impossible. Israel is

pressing very hard for such a confrontation, recognizing Iran to be the

most serious military threat that it faces. So far, the US is playing a

somewhat different game in its relations to Iran; accordingly, a

potential war, and the necessity for it, is not a major topic in the

media and journals of opinion here.[2]

The US is, of course, concerned over Iranian power. That is one reason

why the US turned to active support for Iraq in the late stages of the

Iraq-Iran war, with a decisive effect on the outcome, and why Washington

continued its active courtship of Saddam Hussein until he interfered

with US plans for the region in August 1990. US concerns over Iranian

power were also reflected in the decision to support Saddam’s murderous

assault against the Shi’ite population of southern Iraq in March 1991,

immediately after the fighting stopped. A narrow reason was fear that

Iran, a Shi’ite state, might exert influence over Iraqi Shi’ites. A more

general reason was the threat to “stability” that a successful popular

revolution might pose: to translate to English, the threat that it might

inspire democratizing tendencies that would undermine the array of

dictatorships that the US relies on to control the people of the region.

Recall that Washington’s support for its former friend was more than

tacit; the US military command even denied rebelling Iraqi officers

access to captured Iraqi equipment as the slaughter of the Shi’ite

population proceeded under Stormin’ Norman’s steely gaze.

Similar concerns arose as Saddam turned to crushing the Kurdish

rebellion in the North. In Israel, commentators from the Chief of Staff

to political analysts and Knesset members, across a very broad political

spectrum, openly advocated support for Saddam’s atrocities, on the

grounds that an independent Kurdistan might create a Syria-Kurd-Iran

territorial link that would be a serious threat to Israel. When US

records are released in the distant future, we might discover that the

White House harbored similar thoughts, which delayed even token gestures

to block the crushing of Kurdish resistance until Washington was

compelled to act by a public that had been aroused by media coverage of

the suffering of the Kurds, recognizably Aryan and portrayed quite

differently from the southern Shi’ites, who suffered a far worse fate,

but were only dirty Arabs.

In passing, we may note that the character of US-UK concern for the

Kurds is readily determined not only by the timing of the support, and

the earlier cynical treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but also by the reaction

to Turkey’s massive atrocities against its Kurdish population right

through the Gulf crisis. These were scarcely reported here in the

mainstream in virtue of the need to support the President, who had

lauded his Turkish colleague as “a protector of peace” joining those who

“stand up for civilized values around the world” against Saddam Hussein.

But Europe was less disciplined. We therefore read, in the London

Financial Times, that “Turkey’s western allies were rarely comfortable

explaining to their public why they condoned Ankara’s heavy-handed

repression of its own Kurdish minority while the west offered support to

the Kurds in Iraq,” not a serious PR problem here. “Diplomats now say

that, more than any other issue, the sight of Kurds fighting Kurds [last

fall] has served to change the way that western public opinion views the

Kurdish cause.” In short, we can breathe a sigh of relief: cynicism

triumphs, and the Western powers can continue to condone the harsh

repression of Kurds by the “protector of peace” while shedding crocodile

tears over their treatment by the (current) enemy.[3]

Israel’s reasons for trying to stir up a US confrontation with Iran, and

“Islamic fundamentalism” generally, are easy to understand. The Israeli

military recognizes that, apart from resort to nuclear weapons, there is

little they can do to confront Iranian power, and are concerned that

after the (anticipated) collapse of the US-run “peace process,” a

Syria-Iran axis may be a significant threat. The US, in contrast,

appears to be seeking a long-term accommodation to “moderate” (that is,

pro-US) elements in Iran, and a return to something like the

arrangements that prevailed under the Shah. How these tendencies may

evolve is unclear.

The propaganda campaign about “Islamic fundamentalism” has its farcical

elements — even putting aside the fact that US culture compares with

Iran in its religious fundamentalism. The most extreme Islamic

fundamentalist state in the world is the loyal US ally Saudi Arabia, or

to be more precise, the family dictatorship that serves as the “Arab

facade” behind which the US effectively controls the Arabian peninsula,

to borrow the terms of British colonial rule. The West has no problems

with Islamic fundamentalism there. Probably the most fanatic Islamic

fundamentalist group in the world is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the

terrorist extremist who has been the CIA favorite and prime recipient of

the $3.3 billion in (official) US aid given to the Afghan rebels (with

roughly the same amount reported from Saudi Arabia), the man who has

recently been shelling Kabul with thousands killed, driving hundreds of

thousands of people out of the city (including all Western Embassies),

in an effort to shoot his way into power; not quite the same as Pol Pot

emptying Phnom Penh, since the US client has been far more bloody in

that operation.

Similarly, it is not at all concealed in Israel that its invasion of

Lebanon in 1982 was undertaken in part to destroy the secular

nationalism of the PLO, which was becoming a real nuisance with its

persistent call for a peaceful diplomatic settlement, which was

undermining the US-Israeli strategy of gradual integration of the

occupied territories within Israel. One result was the creation of

Hizbollah, an Iranian-backed fundamentalist group that drove Israel out

of most of Lebanon. For similar reasons, Israel supported fundamentalist

elements as a rival to the accommodationist PLO in the occupied

territories. The results are similar to Lebanon, as Hamas attacks

against the Israeli military become increasingly difficult to contain.

The examples illustrate the typical brilliance of intelligence

operations when they have to deal with populations, not simply various

gangsters. The basic reasoning goes back to the early days of Zionism:

Palestinian moderates pose the most dangerous threat to the goal of

avoiding any political settlement until facts are established to which

it will have to conform.

In brief, Islamic fundamentalism is an enemy only when it is “out of

control.” In that case, it falls into the category of “radical

nationalism” or “ultranationalism,” more generally, of independence

whether religious or secular, right or left, military or civilian;

priests who preach the “preferential option for the poor” in Central

America, to mention a recent case.

2. “Terror’s senseless logic”

A lesser potential crisis is the initiation of terrorist activities

within US borders. As recognized at once, the bombing of the World Trade

Center in New York on February 26, which killed 6 people and caused

great damage, may be a portent of things to come. Many questions arise

about that terrorist act. Let us put them aside for the moment, and take

the official accounts at face value. There are, then, two contrasting

interpretations of this event. The first interpretation was expressed in

the huge media coverage, which struck a single chord; the second in a

letter attributed to the perpetrators.

News reports and commentary were so uniform as to make extensive

sampling superfluous. “Americans Feel Terror’s Senseless Logic,” a

typical headline read, introducing a New York Times commentary by

Douglas Jehl that sought to probe the deeper meaning of the atrocity.

Jehl writes that the search for a rational explanation is misguided, a

“particularly American” error. We are “a culture attuned to the

straightforward”; but “terrorism represents a confrontation with the

oblique.” We must learn not “to assume that terrorist attacks will

always reflect Western logic.” They may “appear to the outside world as

senseless,” terrorologist Brian Jenkins explains, “but within the little

community, they will be satisfied.” Americans are “unfamiliar with such

geometry,” Jehl continues, “because of a fortunate insulation. Until the

World Trade Center bombing, such attacks seemed to flare primarily on

far-off horizons. Americans have largely been voyeurs to sustained

terror campaigns,” carried out by strange people out there who don’t

comprehend Western logic and the “civilized values” to which the West

has always been dedicated.[4]

True, Jehl notes, “the most violent acts of international terrorism have

generally reflected some clear logic.” He gives one example: “the 1983

bombing attacks on the American Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut,”

which were “attempts to drive the United States from Lebanon.” It is

also possible that the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner “was revenge

for the 1986 raid on Tripoli” in Libya, and therefore had a certain

twisted rationale. But we have to learn that others are not like us, and

regularly act in ways that have no “clear logic.”

A Boston Globe editorial found “two unnerving portents in the arrest of

a Muslim fundamentalist” suspect. “The first, and most general, is that

Americans can no longer assume they are safe from the terrorist

pathology that has afflicted other countries.” The second is that the US

may “become a target for the kind of political violence practiced

elsewhere by fanatic Muslim fundamentalists,” a fact driven home by the

“unique cruelty” of the World Trade Center bombing.[5] Many others drew

similar conclusions about the foreign plague, unaccountably reaching our

own shores.

A different interpretation of the bombing was given in a letter from

“the LIBERATION ARMY” received by the New York Times four days after it

occurred, allegedly written by the group of Islamic fundamentalists who

had carried it out. “The American people must know, that their civilians

who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by the

American weapons and support,” the letter reads: “The American people

are responsible for the actions of their government and they must

question all of the crimes that their government is committing against

other people.” If they do not, they “will be the targets of our

operations…”[6]

Still adopting the official version without question, we take the letter

to be authentic and to express the views of the terrorists. Comparing

these two diametrically opposed interpretations, a number of questions

arise.

One question is factual. According to the US version — virtually

universal — terrorist atrocities are carried out by fanatics who despise

democracy and freedom (or are inspired by Third World pathologies,

without any “clear logic”). Therefore, the scholarly literature

concludes, they occur “almost exclusively in democratic or relatively

democratic societies,” in an attempt to destabilize or undermine them

(Walter Laqueur, in a much acclaimed study of the plague). The

perpetrators are the kind of people who bombed the “Marine barracks in

Beirut” in one of “the most violent acts of international terrorism,” as

the New York Times and its colleagues see it. The “unique cruelty” of

the World Trade Center bombing shows that we too may be “afflicted” by

the horrors that are conducted by “Palestinians, [Colombian] M-19s, and

other Third World detritus” (Joe Klein, Esquire, 1986), and now “Islamic

fundamentalists.”[7]

According to the radically conflicting version presented in the

Liberation Army letter, the US is a major perpetrator of international

terrorism, its victims being mostly the despised “Third World detritus.”

Which version is correct?

I posed this as a question of fact, and on the surface, that is what it

seems to be. But the appearance is misleading. The factual question

arises only after we decide what counts as terrorism. Here, we face

problems. There are explicit definitions of terrorism, more or less the

same in content (though with interesting differences, to which we

return). But these are not the ones adopted in the literature on

terrorism. Here some care is necessary.

The explicit definitions we find in the US Code, international

conventions, official or quasi-official US documents, and other such

sources. These agree that terrorism is “the calculated use of violence

or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or

ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or

instilling fear” (US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism

Counteraction). Still simpler is the characterization in a

Pentagon-commissioned study by noted terrorologist Robert Kupperman,

which speaks of the threat or use of force “to achieve political

objectives without the full-scale commitment of resources,” that is,

short of outright war.[8]

We might counterpose to these an Orwellian definition, too cynical to

take seriously: “terrorism” is terrorism that is perpetrated by official

enemies; terrorism that we or our clients conduct does not fall under

the concept. Conceivably, a definition of that sort might have been

employed in Stalinist Russia, where, as Times correspondent Steven

Erlanger remarks in one of the many self-righteous commentaries on our

virtue and their awfulness, “The Soviet manipulation of truth devalued

political language so thoroughly, as George Orwell understood, that no

career Russian politican thinks twice about saying whatever words are

most convenient.”[9]

Note that if we were to adopt the Orwellian definition, we would have to

inquire no further into the doctrine of scholarship, media, and the

intellectual community generally: it would be true as a matter of logic

that terrorism is conducted by them against us. But there is a more

interesting fact: to maintain the standard doctrine, it is necessary to

adopt the Orwellian definition, the one we would ridicule if the

commissars in a totalitarian state were to sink to this level. If we

define “terrorism” simply as terrorism, it is child’s play to

demonstrate that the authors of the much-reviled Liberation Army letter

happen to be accurate in their factual assumptions. Merely to

illustrate, note that I cheated in quoting Kupperman; he is defining not

“terrorism,” but “low intensity conflict,” that is, the doctrine to

which the US is officially committed, which as both the doctrinal

framework and practice show, is simply international terrorism writ

large. The US may be the only country that is officially and publicly

committed to wholesale international terrorism as a standard policy

instrument. Since that conclusion plainly won’t do at all, the Orwellian

definition must be adopted, as is done uniformly, and presumably without

awareness for the most part, a most remarkable phenomenon in a society

free from coercion, by comparative standards. Though accurate, the

conclusion is so unacceptable that it simply cannot be perceived and

never will be in respectable circles, no matter how conclusively it is

demonstrated. The intellectual culture would have to undergo a profound

revolution before such truisms could be considered.

The doctrinal system is by no means satisfied with “manipulation of

truth that devalues political language so thoroughly that no

self-respecting commentator thinks twice about saying whatever words are

most convenient,” to paraphrase the derisive (and accurate) Times

description of the official enemy. As already illustrated, standard

practice goes even beyond the Orwellian definition of “terrorism.”

Consider the Times choice for “the most violent acts of international

terrorism”: “the 1983 bombing attacks on the American Embassy and Marine

barracks in Beirut.” Recall that international terrorism is terrorism

crossing national borders. We are to understand, then, that the victims

of the terror (the Marines in Beirut) were in their own country and the

Lebanese who bombed their barracks are outside invaders. The assumption

passes without comment in a culture that takes it for granted that we

own the world, a culture capable of denouncing “the assault from the

inside” against us in South Vietnam — JFK’s description, 10 days before

the assassination, of the aggression by South Vietnamese peasants

against the US forces defending their villages with bombs, napalm, and

massive expulsions of the aggressors to concentration camps.

We may also ask a further question. Why does the bombing of the Marine

barracks count as terrorism at all? The major international convention

on terrorism, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations,

explicitly exempts from the category acts of resistance against foreign

military forces and racist and colonialist regimes. True, it was not

passed unanimously; only 153–2 (US and Israel opposed, Honduras alone

abstaining). Therefore it remained unreported, out of history, and not

germane to the discussion of terrorism, which, for the press and other

commentators, is defined as Washington construes the concept, in its

usual splendid isolation. Furthermore, the entire matter is barred from

discussion, a fact with important policy consequences. When the

Palestinian National Council, in 1988, endorsed the UN convention, the

editors of the New York Times bitterly condemned the move, ridiculing

“the old Arafat hedge,” a position affirmed by its leading dissident,

Anthony Lewis: “the United States says correctly that the PLO must

unambiguously renounce all terrorism before it can take part in

negotiations,” and recognition of international conventions plainly does

not reach those heights. It is not simply that commentators across the

board take Washington’s stand as correct, which would be startling

enough, on any issue. Rather, far more stringent totalitarian standards

must be satisfied: there is no conceivable alternative to Washington’s

stand; the position of the world need not be reported, refuted, nor

enter the discussion in any way.

Those who bombed the barracks in Beirut surely perceived the Marines as

a foreign military force supporting their oppressors, not without

reason. By world standards, the incident does not qualify as terrorism

at all, let alone as the paradigm example of “international terrorism.”

But such questions are far too subtle to raise in an intellectual

culture capable of reflexively adopting the Orwellian definition of

“terrorism.”[10]

This is not the place to review the ample record of international

terrorism by the US and its clients. We might merely recall some

highlights, to illustrate what the despised semi-literate detritus may

have in mind. The day their letter appeared as the lead story in the

Times, AP reported a communique’ of the Lebanese army that “a civilian

was killed and 10 others were wounded when an Israeli force backing

South Lebanon Army militiamen blasted the village of Kfar Milki with

tank and mortar fire” north of Israel’s “security zone” — that is, the

sector of southern Lebanon that Israel occupies in violation of Security

Council Resolution 425 (March 1978), controls with terror and torture,

and uses as a base for attacking the rest of Lebanon at will with many

civilians killed; it is the “security zone” for the US media because

such is the decision of Washington and its client.[11]

Such helpful coincidences are not uncommon. A few weeks earlier, Times

correspondent Judith Miller had a front-page story on an Arab-American

imprisoned in Israel who, under long interrogation by the secret police,

“has provided unusually detailed information suggesting that Hamas…has

drawn critical financial support and political and military guidance

from agents in the United States.” On the same day, an inside page

reported that “The Israelis and the South Lebanon Army pounded Shiite

villages north of the security zone with artillery today after a South

Lebanon Army stronghold came under rocket attacks,” the regular practice

of the occupation army and its mercenaries. Even by the standards of

respectable opinion it should be difficult to describe an attack on a

murderous military force kept in power by a foreign army as “terrorism,”

which justifies the bombing of civilians in retaliation. The doctrinal

system has risen to the challenge admirably, however.

The hard question that Miller and others ponder is whether Americans

should be barred from contributing to Hamas’s social and cultural

activities, in the light of the confessions extracted by the Israeli

secret police in prison interrogations. No question arises to whether

Americans should be forced to contribute to Israel’s vast and

well-documented terrorist practices, as they do directly through US

government grants on a scale without precedent, and indirectly through

tax-free gifts by others (also without precedent). With regard to Hamas,

the question is a legitimate policy concern; with regard to Israel, it

is a conclusive proof of anti-Semitism.

Arab prisoners over the years have been most forthcoming under

interrogation, perhaps because “It’s part of their nature” to confess,

as Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni explained to Amnesty

International when asked about the remarkably high level of confessions

(under torture, as was later conceded, and of course always known to all

but the willfully blind). It was never explained why Jewish prisoners

were also confessing under interrogation to crimes they did not commit;

this was forgotten several years later when the fact that prisoners were

regularly tortured could no longer be concealed, a “revelation” that

elicited much outrage among the High Court Justices — because the secret

police had been lying to them, a practice intolerable in a democratic

society.[12]

Within Israel’s “security zone,” some 300 expelled Palestinians are now

languishing in miserable and worsening conditions, forgotten, because

the Clinton administration announced that Israel’s decision to leave

them to rot there is “consistent” with the Security Council demand that

they be returned to their homes immediately. The original 400 were

expelled on grounds that they were “Hamas activists” responsible for

“terrorist acts”; namely, attacks against the Israeli occupying army.

“We should pay heed to the fact that like all Hamas guerrilla operations

prior to the expulsion [of the 400], yesterday’s operation was targeted

at soldiers,” a lead article in the Israeli press observed a month

later: “We cannot accuse them of practicing random terror which hits

innocent women and children, because they don’t.”[13]

The very knowledgeable Israeli correspondent Danny Rubinstein writes

that about half the alleged “Hamas activists” worked in Islamic

religious institutions, including preachers, teachers, “a large number

of young people who serve as missionaries for increasing religious

practice,” and professionals who “helped establish the Islamic

movement’s network of educational and welfare institutions which

includes clinics, kindergartens, kitchens for the needy, and

organizations providing aid to prisoners’ families, invalids, and

orphans.” “Members of the military wing of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad

organization are not among those deported,” he adds.

Israeli intelligence agrees. An important report last December published

in Israel’s leading journal, Ha’aretz, quoted a “senior government

official” who said that the intelligence services (Shin Bet) provided

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with six names of Hamas activists, adding

one more when they were asked “to increase the number”; intelligence was

“astonished” to learn that more than 400 had been expelled — without any

relevant intelligence information. The facts were reported here only by

Alexander Cockburn, to my knowledge; the press kept to the version

presented in the New York Times by Israeli Arabist Ehud Yaari, an

associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. According to

Yaari, who does not cite the intelligence reports and other Israeli

sources that he knows well, “About 300 of the 413 deportees constituted

Hamas’s command network in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” His account

makes some sense on the assumptions expressed by Cabinet Legal Advisor

Yossef Harish, arguing for the expulsion before Israel’s High Court:

asked how many residents of the occupied territories are members of

terrorist organizations, he responded “I think all of them.”[14]

The expulsions serve to undermine social and cultural work in the

occupied territories, much like the fevered propaganda campaign to cut

off support from US citizens for such activities. There is nothing new

about these plans. It is worthwhile to recall the longstanding policy

guidelines of the Labor doves. These were stated lucidly in internal

discussion in 1972 by Haim Herzog, later President:

“I do not deny the Palestinians any place or stand or opinion on every

matter. But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in

any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our

nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be

any partner.”[15]

Herzog was merely expressing traditional doctrine. “We demand that our

inheritance, Palestine, be returned to us and if there is no room for

Arabs, they have the opportunity of going to Iraq,” David Ben-Gurion

declared in 1937, expressing a consensus that reached to the moral

heroes of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement), who argued that wholesale

“compulsory transfer” by the British was the solution to the

problem.[16]

These doctrines were forcefully reaffirmed after Israel’s 1967

conquests. Israeli rule over the territories is “permanent,” Moshe Dayan

held: “the settlements are forever, and the future borders will include

these settlements as part of Israel.” One of the Israeli leaders most

attuned to the needs and concerns of the Palestinians, Dayan advised the

cabinet that Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the

territories “that we have no solution, that you shall continue to live

like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave — and we will see where this

process leads… In five years we may have 200,000 less people — and that

is a matter of enormous importance.” The regime of daily humiliation and

brutality that ensued is the “benign occupation” lauded by the New York

Times and other starry-eyed observers. From the founder, Chaim Weizmann,

until Yitzhak Rabin today, the guiding assumption has been that with

sufficient force and resolve, the “insignificant Negroes” who were

scattered in the Land of Israel will be “crushed” and “broken”; they

will “die” or “turn into human dust and the waste of society,” Israeli

Arabists predicted, “and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab

countries.” It therefore only makes sense to deny them the means for a

decent existence.

Such facts may also have been in the minds of the writers of the

Liberation Army letter, who, like poor and oppressed people everywhere,

do not need to pore through arcane secret documents to learn about the

reality of the world, which they know from their daily experience.

Ehud Yaari’s current home, the Washington Institute of Near East

Studies, plays an interesting role in American cultural life. Virtually

a segment of the Israeli lobby, it enables reporters to present

US-Israeli propaganda while preserving their fabled objectivity, keeping

their opinions to themselves while citing some “expert” to provide the

line they wish to propagate, the standard device. The Institute was

established by Martin Indyk, an Australian employee of the registered

Israeli lobby (AIPAC), who felt that most Washington think tanks were

too pro-Arab and anti-Israel, some even recommending that the US join

the international consensus on a peaceful diplomatic settlement. Indyk

is now Clinton’s main Middle East adviser, having obtained citizenship a

few days before his appointment. Another leading expert at the

Institute, the much-quoted Robert Satloff, explains that Palestinians

should be heartened by the Clinton Administration’s determination that

Israel is honoring the Security Council resolution on the deportees by

flagrantly violating it: “It’s to the Palestinians’ negotiating

advantage that the US and the Israelis have the relationship they have

now.” That insight should come as a great relief to the men seeking to

survive the harsh climate of Scorpion Hill in southern Lebanon, and

their families.[17]

It would only be fair to add that as Israel expelled 400 “Hamas

activists” from their homes, it demonstrated its unique sensitivity to

the suffering of Muslims by admitting a group of Bosnians (83, according

to a report by Marwan Bishara). In an effort to temper the world

reaction to the deportation, the government of Israel adopted an earlier

proposal to this effect by Israeli Arab mayors, placing its

implementation in the hands of a leader of the parliamentary left, Yossi

Sarid; most of those who had initiated the proposal backed out, Bishara

reports, given the circumstances. The Bosnians were sent to the Arab

village of Tarshiha, the site of a land clearing operation by air and

artillery bombardment, then deportation, in 1948–49, leaving some 700

Christians of the original 4–5,000 population (4/5 Muslims), according

to Israeli historian Benny Morris. The lands were confiscated and used

for Jewish settlement; the former inhabitants and their descendants live

in refugee camps in Lebanon. Bishara recommends that “the newly arrived

Bosnians should visit the Village of Flowers, and in particular, a

certain fascinating villa with ‘mysterious’ beauty that school children

sometimes visit. It was built using the stones of the deserted and

destroyed houses of Tarshiha Moslems. It is a post-modern residence in a

post-cynical country,” known here as “the symbol of human decency,” in

Times lingo.[18]

The official terrorist plague peaked in 1985, when Mid-East terrorism

was selected as the lead story of the year in an AP poll of editors. The

worst single terrorist act of that year in the Middle East was a

car-bombing in Beirut that killed 80 people and wounded 256. The target

was the Shi’ite leader Sheikh Fadlallah, who escaped unharmed. The

attack was organized by the CIA and its Saudi clients with Lebanese and

British assistance, and specifically authorized by CIA director William

Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s book on

Casey. That was not the worst terrorist act of the year, however. The

prize was taken by the blowing up of an Air India flight, killing 329

people — the worst terrorist air attack ever. It was traced to a

paramilitary camp in Alabama where terrorists were trained for actions

in Central America and elsewhere. On a visit to India, Attorney-General

Edwin Meese tacitly conceded that the operation originated in a US

terrorist training camp.[19] Little further is known; such incidents do

not fall within the canon, according to the reigning Orwellian doctrine,

and therefore merit little attention.

By far the major targets of direct US international terrorism have been

Cuba and Nicaragua, as determined by the World Court, in the latter

case, in a decision that elicited much derision here. These terrorist

operations were extraordinary in scale, vastly beyond those attributed

to the officially designated terrorist states. Among them is the

terrorist act that should rank as history’s most ominous, an act that

might have set off a nuclear war. At one of the tensest moments of the

Cuban missile crisis, when Cubans may have had operational control of

the missiles, one of Kennedy’s terrorist teams blew up a Cuban

industrial facility killing 400 workers, guided by “photographs taken by

spying planes,” Fidel Castro alleged. When reported years later by the

highly regarded authority Raymond Garthoff, the revelation drew no

detectable notice, and the incident — of course — does not fall within

the canon.[20]

Throughout all these years, Americans remained “voyeurs,” observing the

mindless evil of others with wonder and dismay.

An honest observer familiar with even a fraction of the shameful record

could hardly fail to be amazed by the discipline of the intellectual

community, which keeps to the official line without detectable

deviation: “Terror’s senseless logic” is foreign to American thought

patterns, the “unique cruelty” of the World Trade Center bombing reveals

that we can no longer be merely observers from afar of the horrors

perpetrated by uncivilized wretches who cannot aspire to enter our moral

universe, and all the rest. The New York Times editors recommend

measures to “Keep Foreign Terrorism Foreign”; understandable, if we

think of it as an extreme version of what a minor player like Qaddafi

might mean had he said the same thing, calling for measures to keep

terrorism away from his shores after the terrorist attack on Tripoli

that murdered dozens of civilians — but does not enter the canon.[21]

While some are laboring to establish an “Iranian connection” in the

World Trade Center bombing, a CIA connection is much more prominent. As

publicly recognized, those charged and suspected are directly involved

with the CIA-run operations in Afghanistan, financed by the US and Saudi

Arabia, where they learned their trade. In particular, Sheikh Omar Abdel

Rahman, widely reported to be the guru of the group, is considered by

specialists to have been close to Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favorite

terrorist and Islamic fundamentalist fanatic. Other veterans of CIA

training have “radically transformed” anti-government activities in

Egypt, a senior Egyptian official said, sharply raising the level of

violence and terror there, while still others appear to be doing the

same in Yemen. Egypt’s President Mubarak claims that the CIA clients

have been “persuaded by the Iranians” to destabilize Arab regimes, so

guilt is properly assigned; but it is not an easy task.[22]

A final comment on the World Trade Center bombing. The accused left a

remarkably transparent trail and chose a curious way to bomb a building.

Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that this was an amateur

job of the most extraordinary ineptness. The second is that it was a

highly professional operation by efficient and practiced hands, using a

group of people that was easily penetrated and manipulated for these

purposes. At the time of writing (March 1993), both possibilities seem

open.

3. “Hatred by the People”

The Liberation Army letter condemns US government crimes, and calls on

the American people to question them. Reporting and commentary that is

designed to enlighten would make it clear that there is nothing new

about such sentiments, and would explore the reasons for them.

In July 1958, President Eisenhower commented on US problems in the Arab

world in a staff discussion: “The trouble is that we have a campaign of

hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people,” who are

“on Nasser’s side.” As for Nasser, he was “an extremely dangerous

fanatic,” John Foster Dulles concluded in August 1956, because of his

stubborn insistence on a neutralist course — though even Nasser wasn’t

as bad as Khrushchev, “more like Hitler than any Russian leader we have

previously seen,” Dulles informed the National Security Council a year

later.[23]

Typically, governments are not a problem; they can be controlled, or

else overthrown. The people are a more difficult nut to crack. The

problem is pervasive, domestically as well. In the Middle East, it arose

once again during the 1990–91 Gulf conflict. It was common then to say

that the world was united against Saddam Hussein; not untrue, if “the

world” consists of its white faces. But in a sector of the world

extending from Morocco to Indonesia, and not only there, it would have

been more accurate to say that the world was united against the US-UK

war, taking “the world” to include its people. It was only the harshest

and most brutal US allies, such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, that could

efficiently suppress popular opposition; where there was even a minimal

“democratic opening” or departure from tyranny, that generally proved

impossible. The hostility to functioning democracy that has long been a

guiding principle of US policy, peaking in the 1980s, is readily

understandable.

That principle has guided US policy towards Iraq throughout. Until his

first transgression, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein was a trusted

friend, whose “iron fist…held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of

the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia,” as Times chief diplomatic

correspondent Thomas Friedman reported Administration thinking in the

months after the war. But Saddam’s disobedience could not stand

unpunished, so the US sought to find a general who might topple Saddam,

“and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted

Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein” — in effect, a return to the status

quo. For similar reasons, the US always dismissed the Iraqi democratic

opposition with disdain, including its most conservative elements, such

as London-based banker Ahmed Chalabi, who observed in March 1992 that

Washington was “waiting for Saddam to butcher the insurgents in the hope

that he can be overthrown later by a suitable officer,” an attitude

rooted in the US policy of “supporting dictatorships to maintain

stability.” As Friedman later reported, he had perceived State

Department reasoning quite accurately.[24]

We might ask why there should have been “a campaign of hatred against us

by the people” already in July 1958, when the US had just

unceremoniously expelled Israel from the Sinai and its allies from the

Canal Zone after the Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt, and well

before the “special relationship” with Israel was in place. It’s easy to

explain the hatred in Iran, where a CIA coup overthrew the conservative

parliamentary regime and restored the Shah in 1953. A decade of CIA

operations in Syria may help explain the matter further. Syria had

traditionally been pro-American, but clandestine US intervention “helped

reverse a century of friendship,” Douglas Little observes in a review of

these operations. In 1948, the CIA approached Chief of Staff Husni Zaim

to discuss the “possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship,” a

result achieved when Zaim overthrew the goverment a few months later.

Zaim called for peace talks with Israel, offering to resettle 250,000

Palestinian refugees, and approved an ARAMCO oil pipeline concession.

Israel chose not to pursue the diplomatic opportunity. Zaim was

overthrown a few months later. In 1951, Col Adib Shishakli overthrew the

government and set up a military dictatorship, with clandestine US

support. Matters drifted out of control again, and in March 1956,

Eisenhower approved Project Omega, which aimed to overthrow the

increasingly pro-Nasser regime in Syria as part of a more general plan

to undermine Nasser by supporting the Gulf dictatorships and scuttling

the Aswan Dam project. Operation Straggle, organized jointly with

British intelligence to overthrow the government of Syria, was timed

(apparently, under British initiative) exactly on the day of the

invasion of Egypt, which France and Britain had kept secret from the US.

Possibly the British goal was to keep the US preoccupied elsewhere. In

any event, Syrian counterintelligence had uncovered the plot, and it

quickly unravelled. The “Eisenhower Doctrine,” approved by Congress in

1957, authorized the President to dispatch US troops to counter “Soviet

subversion,” the usual code word for independent initiatives (which,

naturally, tended to lead to reliance on the USSR, given US hostility

and subversion). While Egypt was the publicly-designated culprit, US

officials believed that Syria was more “nearly under the control of

international communism,” Little concludes. Several clandestine

operations sought to subvert the government of Syria, leading finally to

a bungled CIA effort again penetrated by Syrian intelligence. The end

result was great hostility to the US, close Syrian relations with the

USSR, and much hysteria in Washington about “losing the whole Middle

East to Communism.”[25]

Eisenhower’s rueful comment on the “hatred of the people” was made on

July 15, 1958, as he sent 10,000 Marines to Lebanon to shore up a

right-wing government, in response to the nationalist coup in Iraq that

was taken to be Nasserite in inspiration, the first break in the

Anglo-American rule over the oil-rich states. That caused renewed

hysteria in both Washington and London, leading to secret decisions to

grant nominal independence to Kuwait to prevent the nationalist rot from

spreading, while Britain reserved the right “ruthlessly to intervene,

whoever it is has caused the trouble…if things go wrong.” The US adopted

the same stand with regard to the richer prizes in the Arabian

peninsula. The primary motive was to ensure that profits from Kuwaiti

oil would maintain the health of Britain’s ailing economy, a problem

that was to arise for the senior partner too not long after.[26]

Some months earlier, in January 1958, the National Security Council had

concluded that a “logical corollary” of opposition to radical Arab

nationalism “would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-Western

power left in the Middle East.” Ten years before, Israel’s military

successes had much impressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leading them to

consider Israel to be the major regional military power after Turkey,

offering the U.S. means to “gain strategic advantage in the Middle East

that would offset the effects of the decline of British power in that

area.” Close intelligence links were established at that time. By the

mid-1960s, Israel’s role as a barrier to Nasserite influence in the Gulf

became more salient, and the alliance was firmed up as Israel destroyed

Egypt’s military forces in 1967, also conquering the West Bank, the

Sinai and Gaza Strip, and the Syrian Golan Heights, and expelling

several hundred thousand Palestinians (200,000 more were expelled in

subsequent months, in what was cynically called a “voluntary” migration;

Dayan’s projected 200,000 would be in addition to these).[27]

By then the “hatred of the people” had more tangible reasons than in

1958. It became more firmly established as Israel pursued its policies

of integrating the territories with lavish US support, and attacking

Lebanon from the early 1970s, with a huge civilian toll.

When we add to the balance the US support for the dictatorships that

ensure the flow of oil riches to the West, instead of to the people of

the region, and other US actions (for example, the bombing of Libya, the

support for Israel’s terror bombing of Tunis, and much else), we begin

to perceive that “terror’s logic” may not be entirely “senseless,”

however inexcusable the means employed, and that it is a pea on a

mountain when compared with the regular US practice of international

terrorism. The fear that Americans may no longer be mere “voyeurs to

sustained terror campaigns” are not groundless. The population, as

usual, is ill-served by the intellectual culture, with its remarkably

totalitarian strains, which provides a version of history so radically

at odds with reality that its victims can scarcely understand what is

happening to them.

The historically unique US-Israel alliance has been based on the

perception that Israel is a “strategic asset,” fulfilling US goals in

the region in tacit alliance with the Arab facade in the Gulf and other

regional protectors of the family dictatorships, and performing services

elsewhere. Those who see Israel’s future as an efficient Sparta, at

permanent war with its enemies and surviving at the whim of the US,

naturally want that relationship to continue — including, it seems, most

of the organized American Jewish community, a fact that has long

outraged Israeli doves. The doctrine is explained currently by General

(res.) Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israeli military intelligence and a

senior official of the military administration of the occupied

territories. After the collapse of the USSR, he writes,

“Israel’s main task has not changed at all, and it remains of crucial

importance. Its location at the center of the Arab Muslim Middle East

predestines Irael to be a devoted guardian of stability in all the

countries surrounding it. Its [role] is to protect the existing regimes:

to prevent or halt the processes of radicalization and to block the

explanion of fundamentalist religious zealotry.”[28]

To which we may add: performing dirty work that the US is unable to

undertake itself, because of popular opposition or other costs. The

conception has its grim logic. What is remarkable is that advocacy of it

should be identified as “support for Israel.”

4. A Way Out?

Is there a way out of this morass? As the years pass, the prospects dim,

but it remains possible to imagine a diplomatic settlement which, while

satisfying no one’s sense of justice and guaranteeing nothing,

nevertheless provides at least some hope for peace and moves towards the

closer integration across national boundaries that is a necessity if the

region is to have a healthy future.

One problem — not the only one but a central one nonetheless — is the

conflict over the occupied territories. As well-known to those familiar

with primary sources and the dissident literature, including readers of

this journal, the US has undermined the international consensus on a

diplomatic settlement since 1971, when Henry Kissinger took control of

US policy and introduced his policy of “stalemate.” The US has scarcely

deviated since from this rejectionist stand, in virtual international

isolation, vetoing Security Council resolutions, voting alone (with

Israel) against General Assembly resolutions, barring peace initiatives

from Europe, the Arab states, and the PLO. Most of this record has been

suppressed in the media and journals of opinion, often grossly

falsified, a fact extensively documented elsewhere. Again, the

population has been ill-served by the “manipulation of truth” by the

doctrinal managers, who have, once again, “devalued political language

so thoroughly, as George Orwell understood, that no [American

intellectual or political figure] thinks twice about saying whatever

words are most convenient”; the Erlanger paraphrase is a bit of an

exaggeration, as was his original, but not by much. The comparison to

the perversion of the record on terrorism is striking.

Until Kissinger’s policy coup, the US was well within the international

consensus. The State Department’s Rogers plan of December 1969 called

for a settlement in terms of UN 242 as understood throughout most of the

world, with nothing for the Palestinians, and a full peace agreement on

the (pre-June 1967) international borders, perhaps with minor and mutual

adjustments. Israel rejected the territorial arrangements, Egypt and

other Arab states the conditions on a full peace agreement. In February

1971, Egypt accepted a UN initiative virtually identical to the Rogers

Plan. Israel recognized it as a genuine peace offer, but rejected it,

anticipating further territorial gains. The USSR accepted the same plan

in November 1971.

By then, however, Kissinger had taken over, with his lunatic insistence

on “stalemate until Moscow urged compromise or until, even better, some

moderate Arab regime decided that the route to progress was through

Washington.” The facts were an utter irrelevance, even eight years

later, when Kissinger delivered himself of this astonishing

pronouncement, adding with equal perspecuity that “Until some Arab state

showed a willingess to separate from the Soviets, or the Soviets were

prepared to dissociate from the maximum Arab program, we had no reason

to modify our policy” of stalemate. Of the two major Arab states, Saudi

Arabia and Egypt, it is true that the former had not separated from the

Soviets, nor could it, since it did not even have diplomatic relations

with the hated Russians — who had never associated themselves with the

“maximum Arab program.” And Egypt had not really separated from the

Soviets either, both having adopted the official US policies that

Kissinger rejected. But analyzing Kissinger’s pronouncements by the

standards of “Western logic” is a pointless exercise; his real goal, as

he makes clear, was to undermine his despised enemy Secretary of State

Rogers.[29]

Since then, the US has always insisted on two basic conditions: first,

there can be no international involvement, the Middle East being US

turf; second, the Palestinians, being useless for US strategic purposes,

have no right of self-determination. The latter condition was in flat

contradiction to the international consensus by the mid-1970s, reflected

in the 1976 Security Council resolution vetoed by the US which called

for a two-state settlement. The Camp David agreement under Carter was

tolerable because it satisfied the US conditions, also preparing the

ground for Israel’s accelerated integration of the territories and

attacks against Lebanon, as was obvious at once, and is now conceded in

retrospect. The record of US rejectionism is what is technically called

“the peace process.” That process now continues, satisfying the US

demands: the current negotiations are run unilaterally by the US, with

only a token presence by other powers, and the Palestinians are offered

nothing, as stipulated by the 1989 Baker-Shamir-Peres plan, which has

yet to be discussed in the US mainstream.[30]

The essence of “Western logic” was expressed with admirable clarity by

Nestor Sanchez, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan

years, after the UN Truth Commission report exposed huge atrocities by

US clients in El Salvador — exposed, that is, some of the atrocities

that had long been known to anyone who cared, including the media, which

now profess to be shocked. Sanchez considers the whole exercise

ridiculous:

“We won. Why do we have to beat a dead horse? You go into a prize fight

and the winner knocks out the contender, and then you question the blow?

That’s stupid.”[31]

Any Nazi would nod his head in approval. The logic is impeccable, and a

leading principle of statecraft.

On other matters, the American people have questioned crimes that their

government commits against the people of the traditional colonial

domains, with salutary consequences. On the matters reviewed here, that

has yet to happen. The beginning of wisdom is willingness to face the

facts. From there, the road is not an easy one, but refusal to follow it

only guarantees further torment.

[1] See my Deterring Democracy (Verso, 1991; updated edition, Hill &

Wang, 1992), chap. 1, and sources cited.

[2] See David Hoffman, “Making Iran Public Enemy No. 1,” Washington Post

Weekly, March 22–28, 1993, reporting from Jerusalem on Israel’s efforts

and those of two of its US propaganda agencies, the Anti-Defamation

League and American Jewish Committee. Also Israel Shahak, “How Israel’s

strategy favours Iraq over Iran,” Middle East International, March 19,

1993.

[3] John Murray Brown, FT, March 23, 1993.

[4] NYT, March 7, 1993; Week in Review.

[5] March 6, 1993.

[6] NYT, March 28, 1993.

[7] Klein, Esquire, Nov. 1986. For a small sample of anti-Arab racist

tantrums in respectable US circles, see my Necessary Illusions (South

End, 1989), 294f., 314f.

[8] US Code, US Army document, Kupperman, and other sources; see

Necessary Illusions, 269f.; my article in Alexander George, ed., Western

State Terrorism (Polity, Blackwell, 1991).

[9] NYT, March 28, 1993, Week in Review.

[10] On the bombing and circumstances, see Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation

(Atheneum, 1990). On conventions, PNC, etc., see references of note 8.

[11] AP, BG, March 28, 1993. For regular updates on US-backed Israeli

terror in Lebanon since the 1982 invasion, see my Pirates & Emperors

(Claremont, 1986; Amana, 1988); Necessary Illusions; Letters from

Lexington (Common Courage, 1993).

[12] Miller, Ihsan Hijazi, NYT, Feb. 17, 1993. Etzioni, AI Newsletter,

Sept. 1977. See my Towards a New Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), 454, also

citing law professor Amnon Rubinstein, in Ha’aretz, on false confessions

by Jews; these facts were all “forgotten” when, years later, it became

impossible to suppress the fact that confessions were obtained under

torture, and the Courts professed to be outraged — not so much by the

torture, as by the fact that Shin Bet had lied to them.

[13] Clyde Haberman, NYT, Feb. 2; Aharon Barnea, Hadashot, Jan. 31, 1993

(Israel Shahak, Jerusalem, Report no. 116).

[14] Rubinstein, New Outlook (Tel Aviv), Jan./Feb. 1993; also Julian

Ozanne, FT, Feb. 15, 1993. Akiva Eldar and Eitan Rabin, Ha’aretz, Dec.

31, 1992; Cockburn, LA Times, Feb. 7, 1993. Yaari, NYT op-ed, Jan. 27,

1993; Chaim Cooper, Israel Shelanu (Hebrew language American weekly),

Jan. 22, 1993.

[15] Here and below, see “Afterword,” Deterring Democracy, 1992 edition;

for more details, my article in Cynthia Peters, ed., Collateral Damage

(South End, 1992).

[16] Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine

Studies, 1992), 78, 84–5, passim.

[17] On Indyk, see Greg Sheridan, “Our Man in the White House,” The

Weekend Australian, Jan. 30–1, 1993. Satloff, Peter Grier, Christian

Science Monitor, March 18, 1993.

[18] Issues: Perspectives on Middle East and World Affairs, vol. II, no.

4, Feb./March 1993. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

(Cambridge, 1987).

[19] Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control (Atlantic Monthly press, 1987, 26);

Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 1986; Woodward, Veil (Simon &

Schuster, 1987, 396f.). See Pirates and Emperors, 136.

[20] Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis

(Brookings Institution, 1987.

[21] Editorial, NYT, March 28, 1993.

[22] Chris Hedges, “Muslim Militants Share Afghan Link,” NYT, March 28,

1993. Mubarak, FT, March 30, 1993.

[23] Douglas Little, “Cold War and Covert Action: the US and Syria,

1945–1958,” Middle East Journal, Winter 1990. Steven Freiberger, Dawn

Over Suez (Ivan Dee, 1992), 167, 156f.

[24] See note 15

[25] Little, Op. cit. For further details based on US and British

records, see Freiberger, op. cit.

[26] See Deterring Democracy, chap. 6.

[27] See note 15; Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liason

(HarperCollins, 1991).

[28] Gazit, Yediot Aharonot, April 1992, cited by Israel Shahak, Middle

East International, March 19, 1993.

[29] David Korn, Stalemate (Westview, 1992), epilogue. On Kissinger’s

geopolitical fantasies, see Towards a New Cold War, chap. 6.

[30] For extensive detail, see Necessary Illusions App. V, sec. 4, and

refers of note 15.

[31] Christopher Marquis, Miami Herald, March 21, 1993.