Fighting Terrorism (7 page)

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Authors: Benjamin Netanyahu

BOOK: Fighting Terrorism
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Shultz was as good as his word. He and President Ronald Reagan took the lead in mounting an unprecedented war against international terrorism. Under their
leadership, the United States imposed diplomatic and economic sanctions against terrorist states such as Libya, Syria, and Iran. They fought with determination to apprehend the PLO gunmen who murdered a wheelchairbound American named Leon Klinghoffer aboard the hijacked cruise ship
Achille Lauro
in 1985—to the point of intercepting the terrorists' escape plane in midair over the Mediterranean. Above all, they sent a powerful message to terrorists the world over when, together with Margaret Thatcher's Britain, they bombed Libya, in a raid in which Qaddafi himself nearly lost his life.
Later that year, a TWA airliner was hijacked by Arab gunmen to Beirut, where the passengers were held as hostages. In order to sharpen their demand for the release of terrorists jailed in Kuwait and Lebanese Shiites being held by Israel, the gunmen murdered an American passenger in cold blood and threw his body on the tarmac. Fearing that American troops would storm the plane, the terrorists subsequently scattered the hostages among safehouses in various parts of Beirut, in effect eliminating the option of an Entebbe-style rescue. At the start of the crisis, a special communications channel was established between Shultz and the two key leaders in the government of Israel, Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir (who, although of opposing parties, were jointly ruling in a National Unity Government); I was then serving as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, and sensitive messages concerning the crisis were passed back and forth through my office. Shultz's assistant Charlie Hill called me daily to brief the
Israeli government on developments and consult with us as to how the United States should proceed. Even during the first stage of the crisis, I had insisted that the key to escaping from the trap would be an unequivocal American refusal to give in to the demands of the terrorists under any circumstance. But when the hostages were dispersed throughout Beirut, the terrorists escalated their demands, threatening to begin killing the hostages immediately if these demands were not met. The day this ultimatum was issued, Hill called me to ask what I thought the American response should be.
“Issue a counter-threat,” I told him. “Make it clear to the terrorists that if they so much as touch a hair on any of the hostages' heads, you won't rest until every last one of them has been hunted down and wiped out.”
Hill said he would pass the message to Shultz. Days later, he called back to say that they had acted on this recommendation and that the results had been positive. Over the following days, the Americans were unrelenting in their firm and uncompromising posture. The terrorists eventually tempered their demands, and the tension began to subside. At the height of the crisis, the Israeli government had offered to release the Shiite prisoners in its custody—but according to the original timetable which had been set before the hijacking. Shultz had objected to this offer, because it sounded like a partial acceptance of the terrorists' conditions. A few weeks later, a face-saving compromise was arranged, whereby the hostages were released, followed by the release of Israeli-held Shiite prisoners according to the original timetable.
The central demand—the release of the terrorists' comrades in Kuwait—was not met.
These successes encouraged the Reagan administration to work for an overall change in the Western stance toward terrorism. In 1986, the United States called a summit conference of Western leaders in Tokyo, in which sweeping resolutions were adopted calling for an aggressive Western defense against international terrorism. And in 1987, Congress passed the firmest anti-terrorist legislation yet, ordering the closure of all PLO offices in the United States. The law stated that “the PLO is a terrorist organization, which threatens the interests of the United States and its allies.”
After twenty years in which international terrorism under the leadership of the PLO had enjoyed virtually unrestricted freedom of action, the West had finally begun to grasp the principle that the terrorist organizations and their state sponsors should no longer be able to escape punishment for their deeds. The growing understanding of the nature of terrorist methods, combined with the very real threat of further American operations against terrorist bases and terrorist states around the world, undermined the foundations on which international terror had been built.
Of course, the West's battle against terrorism was not without its setbacks. The worst of these was the revelation in November 1986 that even as the United States had been stepping up its war against terrorism, elements in the Reagan White House had been simultaneously negotiating with Iranian-controlled terrorists in Lebanon
for the release of American hostages in their custody. The agreed-upon price was shipments of American weapons to the regime in Iran. The media reported that three shipments had been sent—one for each hostage released—but that the terrorists, knowing a good deal when they saw one, had during the same period taken three new hostages. As the news of the American capitulation broke, Secretary of State Shultz told his assistant: “After years of work, the keystone of our counterterrorism policy was set: No deals with terrorists. Now we have fallen into the trap. We have voluntarily made ourselves the victims of the terrorist extortion racket. We have spawned a hostage-taking industry. Every principle that the President praised in Netanyahu's book on terrorism has been dealt a terrible blow by what has been done.”
10
(He was referring to
Terrorism: How the West Can Win
, which, according to Shultz, President Reagan had read on the way to the Tokyo summit on terrorism.) Fortunately, Shultz's tenacious campaign to steer the United States away from its dealings with Iran paid off. Within a matter of weeks, he was able to reassert control over Middle East policy, and the American government returned to the original course he had set with President Reagan.
Despite the setbacks, the Reagan–Shultz anti-terror policy of the 1980s was an immense overall success. International terrorism was dealt a stunning defeat. Its dictatorial affiliations were laid bare, its perpetrators unmasked. The sharp political, economic, and military blows delivered by the West against its chief sponsors
caused them to rescind their support and rein in the terrorists. And the destruction of the PLO base in Lebanon deprived the Soviets and the Arab world of their most useful staging ground for terrorist operations against the democracies. The Soviet–Arab terrorist axis was on the verge of extinction. The West's airlines, cities, and citizens seemed to be safe once again. After nearly twenty years of being subjected to continual savagery, the entire scaffolding of international terrorism appeared to have collapsed into the dust.
The 1990s: The Rise of Militant Islam in America and the World
O
r had it?
As with any form of aggression, deterring terrorist violence requires constant vigilance. There is no one-step solution available in which the democracies take forceful action against the sources of terror and then proceed to forget about the problem. For the problem as such will not go away. Terrorism is rooted in the deepest nature of the dictatorial regimes and organizations that practice it. That they are prone to violent coercion, including terror, is not an incidental characteristic of dictatorships; it is their quintessential, defining attribute. And as long as they retain their dictatorial nature, they will retain their proclivity for terror. Unless constantly checked and suppressed, this tendency will manifest itself again and again. Of course, when a regime like Soviet Communism
is replaced by a democratically elected government, this has an immediate effect. Post-Communist Russia is no longer in the business of supporting international terror, and no action is required to ensure that this remains the case. But barring such a dramatic revolution in political philosophy and policy, the basic inclination toward terrorism remains deeply embedded in its chief practitioners and sponsors, and they must be constantly reminded that they will pay dearly for such conduct if they practice it against other societies.
Yet it is precisely this message, potently delivered by the United States and its allies in the second half of the 1980s, that has been obscured and enfeebled in the 1990s. After their impressive victories, some of the Western security services quickly relaxed their anti-terror posture in the pursuit of terrorist cells on their home turf. For example, in Germany the authorities let up the pressure on neo-Nazi groups, with the result that they began to have a renaissance of sorts. Equally, the all-out effort to deter naked aggression in the Gulf War convinced some in the West that they had resolutely defused the potential for aggression from the Middle East. But this was not the case. The results of the Gulf War were hardly decisive in discouraging terror from the Middle East.
First, while the conquest of Kuwait by Iraq was a clear act of aggression for the entire world to see (and punish), terrorism is invariably secretive, relying on its deniability for impunity. The deterrent effect that applies to aggression carried out in broad daylight does not necessarily apply to aggression carried out in the dark.
Second, that very deterrent effect with regard to Iraq was itself eroded by the inconclusive end of the Gulf War. The punishment meted out to Saddam Hussein was not, as it transpires, that severe after all; a monumental American blunder at the end of an otherwise brilliantly executed war left the fifty-one-year-old tyrant in power in Iraq, sparing him to rise and possibly fight another day.
Third, Iraq's enemy to the east, Iran, a terrorist state par excellence, paid no price whatsoever in the Gulf War and was even accorded considerable legitimacy as a tacit ally.
Fourth, Iraq's enemy to the west, Syria, another classic terrorist state, also benefited enormously from the war. For the privilege of seeing its archenemy Iraq crushed by the West, it received badly needed economic assistance, and was offered great respectability in the attainment of its strategic objectives, such as pushing Israel off the Golan Heights and digesting what remained of Lebanon. Since the Madrid Peace Conference convened by the United States and Russia after the war, the Western countries have seldom, if ever, demanded that Syria clearly cease its sponsorship of terror or that it dismantle the headquarters of the dozen terrorist movements based in Damascus, lest such “upsetting” efforts drive the Syrian dictator, Hafez Assad, away from the Western orbit.
Fifth, after the Gulf War, a new base was added to the roster of terrorist havens in the form of PLO-controlled Gaza, which quickly became a safe haven for several Islamic terrorist movements.
The result of all this was that by the mid-1990s international terrorism's major Middle Eastern sponsors were far from defeated and prostrate. Some of them got up, dusted themselves off, and were ready to resume their former practices, admittedly with greater caution and concealment this time. Most important, they were joined by new bullies on the block. Undoubtedly the most important new forces propelling international terrorism in the 1990s have been the Islamic Republic of Iran and the militant Sunni Islamic movements that have assumed an international character. Already active in the 1980s, these forces have escalated their activities in recent years, providing the spiritual and material wellspring of an evergrowing gallery of Islamic terrorist groups. Most prominent is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who rose to prominence in the Khomeinist Shiite revolution in Iran in 1979 and soon afterward sent expeditionary forces to Lebanon. Once in Lebanon, they were instrumental in spawning the Shiite terror organization Hizballah, the Party of God, which with Syrian and Iranian sponsorship masterminded the terrorist attacks that drove the American forces out of the country in the mid-1980s. Hizballah is presently the major terrorist force in south Lebanon, launching incessant attacks against Israel's northern border. It is suspected of involvement in a number of bombing attacks around the world, including the 1988 midair destruction of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which claimed 258 lives, and the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community building in Buenos Aires, which left nearly a hundred dead and hundreds more wounded.
Together, the Iranians and Hizballah have begun nurturing additional affiliate groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which operates against Israel, and similar groups active in other countries.
Iran, Hizballah, and their satellite organizations have rapidly replaced both Communism and Pan-Arab fascism as the driving force behind international terror. For years after the Iranian revolution, the potential of this force was suppressed by the interminable Iran-Iraq war, which began when the militant Iranian regime had barely come to power. But by 1989, this war came to an end, allowing Iran a breathing space in which to flex its international muscles in new directions and try its hand at a new kind of militant Islamic diplomacy. A hint of the potential power of this policy was provided by the convening of a special Islamic conference called by Iran and held in Teheran in October 1991, on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference between Israel and its Arab neighbors; the Teheran conference was attended by radical Islamic movements and terrorist groups from forty countries, and declared itself to be against making any kind of peace with the Jewish state. While Libya and Iraq have chafed under the yoke of Western sanctions (imposed on Libya in 1986 in the wake of its complicity in the bombing of a discotheque in Germany frequented by American servicemen, and on Iraq in 1991 after its invasion of Kuwait), and while the other Pan-Arabist state, Syria, has had to tone down its more overt associations with international terrorism to win U.S. pressure on Israel, Iran has gone virtually unscathed, carefully cultivating
a modern international terrorist network of which the Soviets would have been proud.
But while many people are aware of this Iranian practice, few have yet recognized that the Iranian-sponsored terrorist web is not the only source of militant Islamic terror. After all, the Iranians are mainly Shiites, and they therefore do not command the automatic attention and allegiance of Sunni militants, who stem from the other great branch of Islam. Yet one event served to activate this hitherto dormant Sunni potential for violence. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 resulted in a dramatic inpouring of volunteers into the ranks of the Afghani
Mujahdeen
fighting the Soviet occupation, a
Who's Who
of zealots from throughout the world of Sunni Islam. Funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia—the Americans alone poured in $3 billion—the war in Afghanistan became to Sunni Islam what the Spanish Civil War was to the Communists; it created an international brotherhood of fighting men, well versed in the ways of terrorism. And while the Islamic resistance during the Afghan war was more similar to the Unita insurgents in Angola than it was to the world of Arab terrorism, times have changed. The Soviet Union completed its withdrawal from Kabul in 1989, and the Islamic resistance forces have since dispersed. Unlike the volunteers in the war against Franco, the Islamic resistance won, offering proof of the innate faithful supremacy of Islam over the infidel powers. In many cases these providential warriors have since been in search of the next step on the road to the triumph of Islam. Often
they have had to move from country to country, having been denied the right to return to their home countries for fear that their excessive zeal would find an outlet there. Since the end of the war in Afghanistan, an international Sunni terrorist network has thus sprung into being, composed in the main of Islamic veterans and their religious leaders. It has built a sympathetic relationship with the government of Sudan and has excellent ties with the fundamentalist side in the simmering civil war in Algeria, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Hamas terrorists of Gaza, and the increasingly influential militant Islamicists in Tunisia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It is this group which is associated with bombers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. And if it succeeds in its strategic goal of toppling the present Egyptian government, it will have harnessed the most powerful country in the Arab world in the service of the new Islamic terror. On June 26, 1995, this horrible possibility might have become a reality as gunmen opened fire on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's motorcade as it made its way through the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. According to Egyptian sources, a villa by the roadside had been rented by Sudanese nationals, and accusations were leveled at Hassan Tourabi's militant Islamic group based in the Sudan. Following the abortive attack, tensions flared between the Sudan and Egypt, and both countries amassed troops on their common border. Whatever the true identity of the masterminds, the implications of the attack are clear: The new Sunni militancy is growing bolder, and the old Arab order is running for cover.
It is impossible to understand just how inimical—and how deadly—to the United States and to Europe this rising tide of militant Islam is without taking a look at the roots of Arab-Islamic hatred of the West. Because of the Western media's fascination with Israel, many today are under the impression that the intense hostility prevalent in the Arab and Islamic world toward the United States is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of Western support for the Jewish state, and that such hostility would end if an Arab-Israeli peace was eventually reached. But nothing could be more removed from the truth. The enmity toward the West goes back many centuries, remaining to this day a driving force at the core of militant Arab-Islamic political culture. And this would have been the case even if Israel had never been born.
To fully appreciate the enduring hatred of the West by today's Islamic militants, it is necessary to understand the historic roots of this enmity. Few Westerners are familiar with even the highlights of the strained history of relations between Islam and the West, a history which is the cornerstone of Islamic education throughout the entire Arab world—how in the year 630 the Arab prophet Muhammad united the Arab peoples, forging them into a nation with a fighting religion whose destiny was to bring the word of Allah and the rule of Islam to all mankind. Within a century, Muhammad and his followers had made the Muslim Arabs the rulers of a vast empire, conquering the Middle East, Persia, India and the Asian interior, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Spain, and lunging deep into France. Had it not been for Charles
Martel, who in 732 defeated the Arabs at Poitiers, 180 miles south of Paris, Europe might have been an Islamic continent today—a fact that Arab political culture has never forgotten. Indeed, for 950 years after that defeat, much of Islamic history focused on the struggle to prevent the reconquest of Muslim lands by the Christians, particularly the Holy Land, Spain, and southern Italy, and the longing for a great leader, the caliph, who would set right the historic wrong, resurrecting the glory of Islam by finally achieving the defeat of European power. This was a dream powerful enough to bring the armies of the Ottoman sultan to the gates of Vienna, where the Muslim thrust into Europe was broken in 1683.
The subsequent decline of Ottoman power relative to the Christian powers, particularly Britain and France, was long and painful. By 1798, Napoleon was in command of a modern citizen-army which was able to seize Egypt without difficulty. By the 1830s, Algeria had become a permanent French base and the British had seized control of ports along the Arabian coast. Within fifty years, all of North Africa and much of the Persian Gulf had become British, French, and Italian possessions. And in 1914, with the beginning of World War I, the final dismantling of what was left of the realm of Islam began. In the aftermath of World War I, Turkey was established as a Western-style secular state, and the Arab world was put under European control: Morocco, Algeria, and Syria under France; Egypt, Arabia, and Iraq under Britain. Iran, too, was placed under the control of a pro-Western royal family in the 1930s. After a tortuous
history of fourteen centuries, which had seen triumph and decline, the political independence of the Islamic world appeared to come to a final and complete end.
There can be no exaggerating the confusion and humiliation which descended on the Arab and Muslim world as a result of these developments. The European powers divided up the map of the former Ottoman lands into several arbitrary entities, and ruled by making alliances with local clans who found the relationship profitable, styling themselves “royal families” and adopting the titles of “king” and “prince” after the European fashion. Many grew wealthy off their special status, some immeasurably so after the great oil discoveries in the 1920s and 1930s. The ruling classes sent their children to study at European universities and gladly assisted in maintaining foreign influence over their economies. Not surprisingly, the result was bitterness and consternation in Arab society, as expressed by a leading Egyptian intellectual: “Anyone who reflects on the present state of the Islamic nation finds it in great calamity. Practically, changing circumstances have forced it to adopt new laws taken directly from foreign codes … to arrest its ancient [religious] legislation … The nation is tormented and resentful, plagued by inner contradictions and fragmentation, its reality is contrary to its ideals and its comportment goes against its creed. What a horrible state for a nation to live in.”
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