Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Wednesday, July 31, 2002


A Bluff on Iraq?

The article by Mary Dejevsky in the Independent on the talk about an Iraq campaign being a "bluff" is foolish. There is not any doubt that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz intend to go to war against Baghdad, and the signs I've seen are that they have convinced President George W. Bush to do it. Apparently the top officers in the US armed forces are unanimous in not wanting this war, but then Colin Powell initially opposed the first Gulf War, as well. Who wants to be dragged into an uncertain operation that might make you look bad? Nevertheless, if Bush orders the war, it will happen.

The varying Pentagon war plans being leaked are not a sign of unseriousness. They are a sign that different factions within the Pentagon want to do the war in different ways, and they are jockeying for position by releasing their opponents' plans with a negative spin on them. War departments always have varying scenarios for fighting a war, and often only in the actual event are the hard choices made. Those with good memories may remember that the geniuses over at The New Republic were insisting on putting 100,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan last October, and apparently there were some in the Pentagon who agreed that might be necessary (what a recipe for disaster) before the Taliban collapsed so startlingly.

The Senate and the House don't appear to be opposed to the project. And, the drumbeat of the intellectually dishonest members of the war party, such as former CIA director James Woolsey, intimating that perhaps maybe somewhere there is not impossibly a possibility that it is not unthinkable that there is an Iraq-al-Qaida connection appears to be being bought by the naive. (Of course, there is no such evidence).

The lack of enthusiasm for such a war on the part of the militarily important Powers in continental Europe, in Russia, and in the Arab World, does not mean it cannot be done, I've decided. It simply means that the U.S. will be acting almost unilaterally. Since it will need Saudi or Jordanian air space, which won't be on offer, it is entirely possible that the US will simply use it anyway, on the theory that there is nothing that the Saudis or Jordanians can do about it.

While it seems likely that Bush will go to war, the outcome of such an action is very much in doubt and could haunt him (and us) in the future. The negative possibilities include:

1) Iraq could be destabilized, with ethnic forces becoming mobilized and squabbling over resources, as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion.

2) Iraq could be reconstituted as an unpopular American-backed dictatorship, as happened in Iran in the 1950s. So far, close US allies in the War on Terror in the Middle East include Egypt, which is a military dictatorship that just jailed Saad Eddin Ibrahim for human rights work; Pakistan, a military dictatorship whose leader is attempting to manipulate the fall elections to keep himself in power; Saudi Arabia (nuff said); and other countries with extremely bad human rights records or which are involved in imperial occupations. A Pinochet in Iraq would potentially harm the US diplomatically for decades to come.

2) The loss of civilian life will be significant, further turning much of the world against the United States and losing any sympathy generated by September 11.

3) Recruitment of terrorists to strike the U.S. in the Muslim world may well be easier in the aftermath of a bloodbath in Iraq.

4) The unilateral nature of the action may well provoke Europe, Russia, China and India to begin trying to find ways to unite against the U.S. on such issues in the future, so as to offset its massive military superiority by isolating it on the Security Council and in other international venues. Europe's relative economic clout could grow if war uncertainties keep the US economy weak.

5) The Bush First Strike doctrine may well be emulated by other nations who fear their neighbors, producing copy cat wars that destabilize entire regions.
It should be remembered that the German army in 1914 had a first strike doctrine, which dragged Europe into an unnecessary and highly destructive maelstrom.

6) There may be no dividend to an Iraq war in the form of lower petroleum prices in the long run. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both have significant excess capacity, and OPEC always has an incentive to pump less oil for higher prices, as they have done in the past. Even if Iraq could pump 5 million barrels a day instead of 2, OPEC can just reduce its output by 3 mn. barrels a day and put the price back up. They would have every incentive to do so since they could get about the same amount of income from less oil, benefiting them over time.









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Tuesday, July 30, 2002


A car bomb that the driver intended to use to blow up government ministers in Kabul was intercepted when it had a collision. It is not clear if President Karzai was among the intended victims.

Political parties in Pakistan are continuing to buck President Musharraf. There may well be a substantial confrontation between them and his military government. The Pakistan People's Party has insisted on electing Benazir Bhutto as its head in the first intra-party elections, mandated by Pakistan's new election laws. Musharraf's government has declared her ineligible to run, both because she faces corruption charges and because of term limits it has recently instituted. The Muslim League (N), which is still loyal to deposed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, intends to elect either his son or daughter to lead the party. It is hard to see how Musharraf as president could cohabit with a Sharif as prime minister. In the meantime, the smal religious parties have decided to run under separate tickets rather than as a coalition, which almost guarantees that they will pick up few seats in parliament. Musharraf is under enormous pressure to hold free and fair elections in fall of 2002, but the parties are not cooperating in his call for new leadership. At some point he may jail Benazir or bar one of the Sharif children from the country, which will make him look more and more like the military dictator he is.
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Saturday, July 27, 2002

Ethnic conflict is on the rise in Afghanistan, as evidenced by a number of incidents that do not appear to have been reported in the major U.S. media, though the brave and diligent wire service reporters on the ground have been filing them. These conflicts may well draw the United States military into one side or the other, with the potential for alienating entire regions.

As reported on 7/25 below, Ismail Khan's Tajik forces, based in Herat city and its environs, clashed on Sunday and Monday with ethnic Pushtun forces led by Amanu'llah Khan. The source of the conflict is now said (by AP) to be that both sides were setting up more security posts around an airport at Shindand in the south of Herat province (the south has more Pushtuns). In short, Ismail Khan and his Pushtun opponents appear to be jockeying for position. Will airport taxes and tolls on goods brought in that way stay among local Pushtuns or go north to Herat city, to benefit the Tajiks? The clashes that broke out are now said to have left a dozen persons dead by Monday. A ceasefire was reached late Monday with central government officials acting as mediators.

Karzai on Friday pronounced himself very happy with the tariff income forwarded by Herat and Balkh provinces. For a long time the provinces have not remitted monies to the center.

On Friday, 3000 Pushtuns demonstrated in Jalalabad, protesting the failure of the Kabul government to make any arrests in the assassination of Vice President Abdu'l-Qadir. They also protested Tajik dominance of the government. Abdu'l-Qadir's brother summarily announced himself his successor as governor of Nangarhar Province. Karzai confirmed the appointment on Friday, but this appears more acquiescence than executive action.

Although the wire services reported Friday that the cease-fire was holding between the Tajiks and the Pushtuns in Herat province, the Pakistani newspaper *Dawn* reported on Saturday morning that the Pushtun chiefs have demanded that Karzai dismiss Ismail Khan. They threatened to mount a military insurgency against him if Karzai refused to act.

Karzai is unlikely to dismiss Ismail Khan at this point, since he needs him and since he just sent the central government the first provincial revenue it has had in more than a decade. If the Pushtuns of southern Herat province do turn violent, the US may be tempted to intervene. If the Pushtuns perceive McNeill to be taking the side of the Tajiks, however, this perception could cause political problems for the US military throughout southern Afghanistan.

One elegant solution would be for Karzai to call upon Pushtun chieftains loyal to him to intervene against Amanu'llah Khan if he rebels, thus transforming the fight into an intra-Pushtun affair. By governing only loosely from the center and allowing tribal mechanisms in the provinces to keep what order they can, Karzai's government might be able to survive the years it will need to become powerful enough to intervene directly in such security issues. Still, as a last resort, the need for US intervention cannot be ruled out. Its consequences, however, might be long term and parlous.

Given the potential size of the security problems the US and the US-backed Afghan government face in the next year, it seems to me particularly foolish for the Pentagon to be planning further big wars. There may yet be a battle of Shindand to be fought, with parlous consequences throughout the country.

(For Shindand airport see the interesting Web site: http://www.wapf.com/world/AF75939.html.








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Friday, July 26, 2002


The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister (Igor Ivanov) is in Iraq, and reiterated his government's opposition to a US strike on that country. He implied that the US has been lobbying the other members of the UN Security Council to go along. (France is also opposed, so far). Ivanov did, however, urge Iraq to bring back the UN weapons inspectors, as a step to resolving the problem. Russia has long-term ties to Iraq and is owed $9 bn. by Baghdad.
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Thursday, July 25, 2002

McNeill meets Ismail Khan; and Development Aid

The fighting between ethnic Tajiks (Sunni Persian speakers) around the northwestern city of Herat with ethnic Pushtuns brought a visit from the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill. He met with Herat's governor/ warlord Ismail Khan, offering US good offices in ending the regional fighting. Ismail Khan denied there was much of a problem, and branded the Pushtuns against which the Tajiks were fighting as "Taliban." Pushtuns throughout northern Afghanistan have faced reprisals and collective punishment because they were identified with the largely Pushtun Taliban. It seems a little unlikely that the Pushtuns around Herat are actually Taliban, and this appears to be an ethnic conflict.

Sunday and Monday Tajik fighters had battled Amanullah Khan's Pushtun forces, leaving perhaps 25 or so dead and more wounded. A ceasefire was reached late Monday with central government officials acting as mediators.

The subtext of McNeill's visit is surely not only an offer of help but an implicit threat of US involvement if Ismail Khan does not resolve the situation himself. It also appears to have been a way of pressuring him to greater deference to Kabul. He was careful to proclaim his allegiance to President Karzai, and affirmed that he would send more money to the center if they needed it. This phraseology cannot be very assuring to the Karzai government. It is rather as though Gov. Engler of Michigan should pledge that he would consider remitting to the Federal government Michigan's Federal tax receipts "if W. needed it." On the other hand, AP reports that the Herat region is possibly the best governed in the country, with kept-up paved roads, schools, and even gas stations. In contrast, US troops and Afghan allies discovered a big cache of anti-aircraft weapons near Khost in the southeast, and apprehended 5 persons, though whether these were Taliban or al-Qaida was not specified.

Meanwhile, some Afghan cabinet members met with US officials in Washington, D.C., pleading for more of the $4.5 bn. aid pledged at Tokyo by the industrialized nations to be released (only $1 bn. has come in, and about half of that had to be spent on food and humanitarian activities.) US AID reported that it has rebuilt 70,000 homes and 30 schools, which seems to me a goodwill story that has not been sufficiently reported in the press. In particular, the agricultural sector needs to be revived if Afghanistan is to get back on its feet after 20 years of war and 3 years of drought.

The buzz about Afghanistan's continued instability strikes me as overdrawn. What is amazing is that a country that has undergone such a major revolution in governance in the past year has as much order as it does. Older tribal mechanisms have clearly been resurrected. These work well enough when they do not devolve into major feuds. Afghanistan has not done well under extremely centralized governments, such as those of the Communists or the Taliban.

The the virtual autonomy of an Ismail Khan is probably not a pressing issue at the moment. Eventually the warlords will have to be integrated more effectively into a new Afghan state. That cannot come until the Kabul bureaucracy and army is capable of asserting itself. But Ismail Khan should be made to understand that his forces must give up any vendetta against the Pushtuns, or risk military intervention at Karzai's orders. Ethnic strife among the winners is the one thing that could destabilize the country again in a major way. The nightmare is that Afghanistan will return to the chaos of the mid-1990s. Karzai must not let that happen, but his major military force, the old army of the Northern Alliance, is Tajik and it may not be willing to intervene against other Tajiks. He may have to appeal for US help, and McNeill was surely attempting to gauge whether such a US intervention is warranted.




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Wednesday, July 24, 2002


A Bush Appointee Brings up Concentration Camps for American Muslims

The comments of Peter Kirsanow, a Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights commission, in Detroit over the past weekend are beyond belief. He openly brought up the possibility that if there were another big al-Qaida strike on the US, Muslim Americans could be put in camps. He was quick to say he did not favor such a move, only that the public would certainly demand it. "If there's a future terrorist attack in America "and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights," he said.

In a hearing in which Arab Americans from Dearborn complained about infractions against their civil rights since September 11, Kirsanow was openly dismissive of these concerns.

The Bush administration was quick to distance itself from Kirsanow. It should distance itself even further by firing the man. No one is so naive as to believe he wasn't deliberately raising the camps issue as a way of putting it on the public agenda. The world has changed since World War II and so has the United States. The public values of this country do not allow us at this point in the Republic's history to impose collective punishment on a whole population because of the deeds of a handful of persons. Muslim Americans are extremely diverse, and there are probably 3 million of them. They are from Malaysia and Morocco, India and Egypt. They are Sunnis and Shiites and Ismailis. The vast majority of them would feel no kinship with radical fundamentalists like Bin Laden and Muhammad Atta. US authorities have estimated that there are no more than 100 persons in the United States who have sworn allegiance to al-Qaida, and no more than 5,000 sympathizers. In a population of three million, this is a tiny, tiny fringe. Most of the al-Qaida operatives we know about have come recently from Europe or the Middle East and only a handful have been American citizens.

Kirsanow should not have brought this nightmarish issue up. As a member of the Civil Rights Commission, he should be defending human rights, not dismissing them. Bin Laden has openly said that he desired to steal Americans' freedom from them. He wants them to know what it is like to live in the authoritarian Middle East. Kirsanow appears to have fallen for Bin Laden's trap. The rest of us should not.








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Tuesday, July 23, 2002


Al-Qaida Continues to Recruit

The Sunday Times reported on 7/21 that British intelligence now estimates that some 4,000 Muslims with British citizenship passed through al-Qaida training camps, many of them having fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya or the Balkans before returning to the UK. Previous estimates had been 80 or so. If true, this report indicates that British security forces have a much more difficult task in fighting terrorism than previously thought.

On 7/22 USA Today reported that Peter Gridling, an Austrian who took control this month of Europol's counterterrorism unit. Europol, is convinced that al-Qaida continues to be active in virtually every country in Europe and continues successfully to recruit members and to maintain contact among cells. Roland Jacquard, Roland Jacquard, president of the Paris-based International Observatory on Terrorism, is said by the report to have estimated that over 200 al-Qaida suspects have been rounded up in Western Europe since September 11, but he remains pessimistic about the possibility of cracking the organization altogether.

Asharq al-Awsat reported Tuesday that Salim Zarda, 32, who was deported from the US to Tunisia in May, will be tried there by a military court. Zarda was apprehended last fall in San Antonio on charges of entering the US illegally and suspicion of belonging to al-Qaida. He went to Germany in 1996 and was given political asylum there. He made a number of trips to Afghanistan and Bosnia. He denies any connection to Usama Bin Laden. The military court in Tunisia has already imprisoned 4 persons on similar charges, for terms ranging from 8 to 20 years, and has sentenced another 30 in absentia, including some in the Milan group busted by Italian security.

The same source says that 8 of prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay in Camp X-Ray are Tunisian nationals, one of which also has French citizenship. They include Bilal al-Tunisi, Hamza al-Tunisi, Abu `Abdu'llah (the one with French citizenship) and Abu Shu`ayb al-Tunisi. Most appear to have been caught by the Pakistani security forces, some just after the Tora Bora battle, from which they appear to have been fleeing. It said that fair numbers of Tunisians were killed fighting in Afghanistan for al-Qaida against the U.S.

The Tunisian contingent in al-Qaida is a sign of how effective the virtual police state of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia, has been in cracking down on Islamists and forcing those who insisted on remaining activists to go abroad. (Ben Ali gets 99% of the vote every time he runs.) Although his human rights record is abysmal, it is also true that the radical Islamists in Tunisia were highly intolerant of others and would have established a totalitarian state if given the chance. The interest of these Tunisian radicals in al-Qaida, however, poses a security concern in Europe, where there are large (mostly peace-loving and secular-minded) Tunisian expatriate communities. A poll done in the 1980s showed that 20% of Tunisians, when asked their religion, replied that they were not religious. In the US only 8% of the population gives that reply. Nevertheless, among the other 80% of Tunisians there are obviously some radical fundamentalists. German intelligence is convinced that Tunisian affiliates of al-Qaida carried out the bombing of the Djerba synagogue in April 2002, which killed 19 persons, including 14 German tourists.


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Monday, July 22, 2002


Turkey and Iraq

Although Turkey is rumored to have acquiesced in a US attack on Iraq,
assuming it is paid billions of dollars up front for its economic losses on
the Iraq front, it is clear that substantial questions remain in the minds of
Turkish politicians about this course. Given the instability of the current
government, moreover, there is no guarantee that Prime Minister Bulent
Ecevit's views will be determinative later on.

Even Ecevit himself gave two news interviews reported on
Sunday 7/22 that seem to me extremely significant for the prospects of a
US attack on Iraq. The first warned the US that a major land invasion of
Iraq could produce a quagmire from which it would be difficult for the
Pentagon to extract itself. He also complained that the Kurds of the
north already have virtual autonomy from Baghdad courtesy of the US, and
that things should not be allowed to proceed further in that direction.
(Turkey is worried that Kurdish activism in Iraq will spill over into
Eastern Turkey, where an estimated 8 million Kurds live). The Turks are
said to be particularly insistent that the oild fields in the north not be
gerrymandered into Kurdish territory in a post-war Iraq. I read the
interview as very negative toward the Wolfowitz plan, despite the
apparent grudging acceptance of it, and it is
significant that it was released in the aftermath of Ecevit's
consultations with Wolfowitz on an Iraq campaign.


Ecevit made news with another set of remarks, about the prospects of the
Islamist AK [Justice and Development] Party if elections are held this
fall. Ecevit wants them postponed until much later, even the April 2004
date for the next elections. It seems unlikely he can keep his government
from falling, however. He is pushing hard for setting in motion a Turkish
bid to join the European Union. For that, he needs to abolish the death
penalty and lighten up on the Kurds. However, he is in coalition with a
far-right nationalist party that bitterly opposes both steps.

Polling published last Thursday shows that the Islamist AK Party could
capture 20 percent of seats if elections are held soon, and Ecevit's
center-left party would get almost nothing. This result might set in
motion a repeat of the mid-1990s, with an AK coalition with the
center-right Motherland Party. AK has been reformulated by its leader,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a modernist Muslim party, in favor of human
rights and in favor of joining the European Union (a more traditionalist
successor to the old Refah Party also exists, but it is not nearly as
popular). Ironically, AK and Motherland could probably get the changes
made together, which Ecevit is pushing for but cannot.

In any case, a very strong showing by AK in the polls, if they are held
this fall, could place a further obstacle in the way of Turkey joining the
US in an attack on Iraq, since the Turkish Islamists are deadset against
it. If Motherland goes back into coalition with them, they could just
make the government fall if it capitulates on Iraq.


Ecevit also admitted that the Kurdish party, HADEP, might also meet the
threshold for getting seats in parliament. That he is so worried about
this possibility may help explain why he doesn't want the Iraqi Kurds
stirred up at this juncture. An unspoken assumption may also be that a
US-dominated Iraq will give the Iraqi Kurds so much cultural and political
freedom (and perhaps new economic resources if Iraqi oil receipts are shared more
equitably) that Turkey's own repressive policies will look increasingly bad
by comparison, and will become increasingly unsustainable. In the view of
the Turkish political elite, culturally and politically free Kurds would
inevitably threaten Turkey's territorial integrity in eastern Anatolia.


It continues to be rather puzzling why, if Iraq's close neighbors do not
consider it much of a threat, the Pentagon is so insistent on attacking
it. One would think that since Iraq has no ICBMs but does have Scuds, the
neighbors would be the ones with the greatest concerns. Instead, they are
fairly consistent in speaking out against such a war. Even Kuwait says it
wants the fig leaf of a Security Council Resolution if it is to join the
US in such a war. Does the US have the votes on the Security Council?
Russia, France, and China would all have at the least to decline to
exercise a veto.

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Wednesday, July 17, 2002



The Chronicle of Higher Education


July 24, 2002 [Online Edn. July 16]


Why We Should Not Boycott Israeli Academics

By JUAN COLE

OPINION: THE CALL for an academic boycott of Israel is
misguided, writes Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Many Israeli academics
support the struggling peace movement and should not be
punished for the actions of a government they largely oppose,
he argues.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/free/2002/07/2002071605n.htm


--> FOR MORE from The Chronicle, go to our World Wide Web
site at http://chronicle.com


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Thursday, July 11, 2002



History News Network ( http://chnm.gmu.edu/hnn/ )
7-08-02: News Abroad
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


It's Time for Sharon to Go




Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has reoccupied the West Bank in response to terrorist attacks from Palestinian radicals, putting the entire population under a grueling curfew. In April, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli army of extensive violations of international law during its campaigns in Jenin and Ramallah. Sharon is no stranger to such controversies. He was first accused of being a war criminal after his 1982 invasion of Lebanon twenty years ago this summer, during which the Israeli army allowed its far-right Christian allies to massacre Palestinian civilians. Sharon and his iron fist policies have contributed significantly to the Middle East quagmire.

It is hard to remember now, but in 1982 there was no Shiite terrorism in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War had wound down and the economy was beginning to recover. Despite occasional minor skirmishes, the Palestine Liberation Organization in that country posed no real threat to Israel. It and its leftist and Muslim allies had been badly defeated by Syrian intervention in the 1976 Civil War.

Lebanon was a colonial creation of the French, who designed it with a slight Christian majority. Over time the Muslims had more children, and many Christians emigrated, leading by the 1980s to a Muslim majority and a plurality of dirt-poor Shiites. Lebanese political institutions, however, still gave Christians more power and patronage. Christians and Muslims increasingly disagreed about the Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who had originally fled or been expelled in 1948. They had been organized in the 1970s by the PLO for guerilla strikes at Israel. Rightwing Christians had feared the PLO was becoming a state within a state.

In neighboring Israel, the hawkish Ariel Sharon was appointed minister of defense by Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Sharon developed a plan to march to Beirut, destroy the PLO, which was then based there, and to put the far rightwing Christian Phalangist party firmly into power in Lebanon. Israel could then annex and settle the West Bank and Gaza, occupied since 1967, and could replace a Syrian-dominated, fractured Lebanon with a strong ally.

Sharon launched his invasion on June 6, 1982 without any obvious casus belli, and by the 11th, Israeli forces had reached Beirut. During the succeeding two months, the Israeli army subjected the Lebanese capital to heavy, sometimes indiscriminate bombardment. They deprived the inhabitants of water and electricity. Sharon's aim of destroying the PLO was frustrated when some 15,000 Palestinian fighters and Syrian troops put up a surprising fight. By 21 August, PLO chief Yasser Arafat as well as the Syrian troops had agreed to leave the city. The leader of the Phalangist party-militia, Bashir Gemayel, was elected president on 23 August.

An apparent victory turned bitter for Sharon. The Israeli invasion is conservatively estimated to have killed nearly 18,000 persons, half of them innocent civilians, and to have destroyed a fourth of all the homes in the capital. The Israeli public turned against the war. U.S. President Ronald Reagan, appalled by what he termed a "holocaust" at Beirut, called for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Right-wing strong man Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in September. The Phalangists resented being ordered around by Sharon and Begin, and were alarmed at the apparent Israeli intent to deprive Beirut of sovereignty over southern Lebanon.

The Shiites, who initially had welcomed the Israelis because of their own competition with Palestinian refugees for local resources, were dismayed when the Israelis overstayed their welcome. In response, some formed terrorist organizations. A brief American intervention ended when hundreds of marines were killed by a Shiite suicide bomber. Lebanon fell back into intermittent civil war until 1989. The Israelis were finally pushed out of the south in 2000, in part by the new weapon of suicide bombings pioneered by the Shiite Hizbullah, a party and a tactic that did not exist when Sharon planned his invasion.

Among the mysteries of September 11 is why an engineer from a secular middle class family in Lebanon, Ziad Jarrah, would have hated the United States so much as to hijack United Airlines flight 93. Jarrah was eight years old when he lived through the brutal invasion of his country by America's ally, Ariel Sharon. Despite his promises, Sharon's iron fist and reckless disregard for innocent life have yielded no end to violence. If past experience is any guide he is busily creating further hatred and bitterness that will haunt the future of the Mideast and the United States. Yasser Arafat is not the only old warhorse in the region who should resign from office so that a settlement can be reached.


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Tuesday, July 09, 2002


Afghanistan: Ansari article in Payam-i Mujahid

The most recent Payam-i Mujahid, the organ of the Afghan Jami`at-i Islami
(a major stream in the "Northern Alliance") carries an article by Bashir
Ahmad Ansari on the history of absolutism in Islam. The article begins
with an assertion that consultative (mashvirat) government and voting were
normative in very early Islam. It argues that this early Muslim
republicanism was swept away by the subsequent caliphs, beginning with the
Umayyads and extending to the Ottomans, who preferred to rule by force and
to make claims to absolutism in politics. The article blames the medieval
Muslim clergy for going along with this corruption of Islam, and
attributes it in some part to ancient Iranian and Sasanian notions of
royal absolutism, imbibed by the Muslims. The article attacks virtually
every Muslim government of the past, from the Mamluks to the Mughals.


Ansari, who appears to have lived in the U.S. until recently, is putting
forth a conception of Muslim history that locates sovereignty in the
people or umma (the Muslim community), but it is an umma re-imagined along
Jeffersonian lines. It is anti-monarchical, and thus has the side effect
of rejecting the position of those Pushtuns who wanted to bring back Zahir
Shah either as monarch or president. It is anti-caliphate and thus has
the implication of condemning Mulla Omar, whom al-Qaida had tried to
promote as the neo-Caliph for the Muslim world. Indeed, among many
radical Islamists the revival to the caliphate is a prime goal, whereas
Ansari depicts the history of the caliphs as a sordid one of oppression
and skullduggery. Bin Ladin implied that the end of the Ottoman empire
over 80 years ago and the abolition of the caliphate were disasters for
modern Muslims. Ansari is breathing a sigh of relief that such tyranny
masquerading as Islam was overthrown. He argues that it never mattered
whether the "caliph" was Arab, Persian, Turkish or other, he was always an
unscrupulous despot.


Ansari's point of view as a committed Muslim is analogous to that of the
American Baptists of the 18th century, finding virtuous democratic
republicanism the system of government most compatible with religion.
Unlike Khomeinism, which is also anti-monarchical, Ansari does not seem to
want to give a leading role to the Muslim clergy, and I suspect he would
denounce the Supreme Jurisprudent in Iran as just another absolutist
caliph.


I am aware of the association of the Jami`at-i Islam with former President
Burhanuddin Rabbani, whose record was disastrous to say the least. It is
not clear whether Rabbani's party can overcome its past to achieve a truly
democratic vision. Ansari appears to be trying to move in that direction.
The sort of thinking Ansari and other Muslim democrats are doing in
post-Taliban Afghanistan might be fairly important to the fortunes of
Islam as a whole. It is most unfortunate that his essay will not be read
in most of the Muslim world, because it is in Persian.


Sincerely,


Juan Cole
U of Michigan
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Monday, July 08, 2002

Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 08:12:10 -0400 (EDT)
To: Gulf2000

More on the split among radical Islamists

The Islamic Group leadership in prison recently issued a formal apology
for its past acts of terrorism against the Egyptian people, including the
assassination of Sadat, and condemned the September 11 attacks as contrary
to Islam in a long interview in the government-owned magazine, "The
Illustrated" (al-Musawwar). They denounced Bin Ladin and al-Qaida.


What appears to have happened is that the Islamic Group has undergone a
decisive schism. The six current leaders in Egypt, all in Tura
Penitentiary, direct the organization from behind prison walls. This
leadership has renounced terrorism as un-Islamic. AP reported on June 25
that Karam Zohdi, the group's leader said, "We strongly condemn the Sept
11 attacks because we understand that these attacks damage Islam and
Muslims," and AP added, "Besides apologizing to the Egyptian people
they even suggested paying some kind of compensation to the
families of those killed in their attacks." The six now speak of the
"blind Sheik," Omar Abdel Rahman (in prison in the US for his role in the
1993 events) as "the former leader of the Islamic Group." They appear to
consider Hamdi Abdel Rahman (not in prison) their chief legal guide for
Islamic law. The six released a 4-volume book, *Correction of
Misconceptions*, supporting their new thinking, last winter, but it is not
yet in any U.S. research library. I think that the literature being
produced by the new non-violent Islamic Group ought to be translated into
English and other European languages, in hopes it would have a bigger
impact among expatriate militants, many of whom do not have good Arabic.


It has been suggested by some observers that the six members of the
organization's Consultative Council in Tura may have been subjected to
severe psychological pressure by the Egyptian security apparatus, helping
to account for their about face. This charge may be true, but it is also
the case that discussions of giving up terrorism occurred among members of
the Islamic Groups outside prison in Egypt from the early 1990s, so one
cannot rule out an internal dynamic. It is widely held that the late 1997
shooting of tourists at Luxor not only turned most of the Egyptian public
decisively against the terrorist groups, but also provoked self-doubt and
rethinking within their ranks. Likewise, the embassy bombings in East
Africa the same year are thought to have been met with dismay even in
Islamist circles (most of the wounded and killed were Africans). It has
also been suggested that these statements are aimed at securing their
release from prison, and that of the estimated 12,000 Islamists still
being held in Egypt. A large release of thousands had been expected last
October, but appears to have been postponed or cancelled by the events of
September 11.


Expatriate members of the Islamic Group often still follow Sheikh Omar
Abdel Rahman and remain militant, resembling their sibling organization
al-Jihad al-Islami and, it is charged, maintaining close links to
al-Qaida.


Muhammad al-Shafi`i and `Abdah Zina reported in al-Sharq al-Awsat for July
6 on an interview conducted with Muhammad al-Islambouli, the brother of
Sadat's assassin. He is believed to reside in Iran, and is wanted in
Egypt. Al-Islambouli dismissed the Consultative Council in Tura as
unrepresentative and insisted that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman is still the
leader of the Islamic Group. He rejected their apology and insisted that
his brother had acted righteously.


It is my vague impression that the nonviolent Tura leadership now
represents the majority of Egyptian members of the Islamic Group, who
probably number in the tens of thousands. One wonders whether they might
not ultimately be absorbed by the more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood,
which has long renounced violence and sought change through parliamentary
means. There has recently been a flurry of arrests, trials and retrials
aimed at militant Islamic Group members inside the country. One of the
founders, Islah Hashem, was arrested in Sohag, Upper Egypt (the Islamic
Group is heavily Upper Egyptian in membership).


It is worrisome, however, that Sheikh Abdel Rahman appears to retain a
great deal of prestige among radical Islamists outside Egypt.


Al-Sharq al-Awsat notes that al-Islambouli is one of 14 Islamists on
Egypt's most-wanted list, including Ayman al-Zawahiri.


Since so many Egyptian Islamists are expatriates, it would be very
interesting to know how this schism is playing out among the ones in Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, and Pakistan.


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Saturday, July 06, 2002

Muntasir al-Zayyat: Zawahiri is alive

Al-Sharq al-Awsat for July 5, 2002, has an interview with the prominent Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist lawyer Muntasir al-Zayyat. He was close to al-Jihad al-Islami for many years and knew Ayman al-Zawahiri, its leader and Bin Ladin's right hand man, intimately. The two fell out over al-Zayyat's having gravitated to al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah in the 1990s and his efforts in the mid-1990s to move the leadership of the radical fundamentalists in Tura prison to renounce terrorist violence. (These efforts proved successful with regard to al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah from 1997 and resulted in the gradual release of all but 12,000 of the reported 20,000 - 30,000 imprisoned radical fundamentalists in subsequent years).

Zawahiri was, of course, moving in the opposite direction, melding the by then largely expatriate al-Jihad al-Islami with Bin Ladin's al-Qaida in 1998. Zawahiri is among the masterminds of the 1998 embassy bombings in east Africa and of the 9/11 atrocities. Zawahiri attacked al-Zayyat over this shift, but as late as 1999 al-Zayyat defended Zawahiri from terrorism charges launched in absentia in Egypt.

He denounced him again in his memoirs, published on the Web last winter, to which al-Zayyat wrote a heated refutation.

Al-Zayyat reports that he is still in contact with persons who know Zawahiri well, and that they have intimated to him that Zawahiri is still alive. He was reported injured in early December during a U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Al-Zayyat says that Zawahiri's wife, his son Muhammad, and the husband of one of his daughters died in the campaign, but that the rest of the family is safe.

Al-Zayyat is something of a maverick who has maintained his independence of close organizational ties and is currently on the outs with the leadership of the Gamaa Islamiyyah now that some of them have been released from jail. He was unusual among fundamentalists in acknowledging the authenticity of the tape of Bin Ladin and Sheikh al-Ghamdi/ al-Harbi released last fall. He has also been critical of the practice of radicals who have been released from jail suing the Egyptian government for damages and eliciting false testimony from comrades that they had witnessed the torture.


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Friday, July 05, 2002

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 15:29:02 -0400 (EDT)
To: gulf2000 list
From: Juan Cole

Commentary on Hanson, "Our Enemies, the Saudis" in Commentary
Re: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/hanson.htm


I don't mind so much that Hanson is a specialist in ancient Rome who knows
no Arabic and has never lived in the Middle East, and yet delivers himself
of judgments on Middle East foreign affairs. I suppose I wish more
academics were willing to range beyond their narrow specializations,
assuming they educated themselves on the subject. After all, few
politicians or policy makers of the sort who actually decide on U.S.-Saudi
relations know Arabic or have lived in the Middle East. Of course, there
are State Department Arabists, but most of them are not at a policy making
level.


What I mind is that Hanson is guilty of muddled thinking and illogic, and
that he is advocating an extremely dangerous and irresponsible course of
action. None of *these* attributes of his piece are what I was hoping for
when I said I wished more academics ventured outside the ivory towers.


Hanson's prescription that the U.S. should deliberately attempt to "spark
disequilibrium, if not outright chaos" in the Middle East is the most
frightening thing he says, and one can in this case be glad that academics
are usually without much power or influence in this country. I thought
conservatives were supposed to want *order* and radicals were the ones who
wanted to spark chaos? Or maybe Hanson is one of a new breed of radical
U.S. conservatives? In any case, his logic is the same as Brezhnev's in
1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a decision that
destabilized the region around it and indirectly led to September 11.
May we please have less disequilibrium and chaos? We've had enough of
that in the past year.


Hanson's reference to the Saudi system of princes ruling being like an
Ottoman court only serves to reveal his dire ignorance about the history
of this region. The Ottoman court evolved in a completely different way.
Princes were not prominent as ministers or governors under the Ottoman
sultans, since in the Central Asian system any male of the chiefly family
had political charisma and could potentially succeed. Rival princes
tended therefore to be rudely shunted aside when they weren't (in later
centuries) blinded or killed. Why compare a contemporary royal oligarchy
to an early modern absolute monarchy? And some say that Edward Said's
*Orientalism* is old hat! We are the presence, friends, of the real thing
here.


Hanson neglects to make a basic distinction in this piece between levels
of Saudi society. Some of his attack is directed against the Saudi
government (i.e. the royal family). Other barbs are directed against
fundamentalist activists who oppose the royal family. Yet other attacks
are launched against Saudi cultural customs. Mentions are made of events
occuring on Saudi soil, such as the Khobar Tower bombings, which appear to
have little to do with any mainstream domestic Saudi force and which
implicitly targeted the Saudi Establishment as well as the U.S. All of
these levels are rolled as an undifferentiated mass into an illogical
argument for cutting off relations with Saudi Arabia and declaring it a
terrorist state on the lines of Syria or Libya.


I do not know whether it could be proven that the Saudi government has
recently supported terrorism per se. It has in the past been a partner
with the United States in supporting reactionary guerilla movements, such
as those in Eritrea and Afghanistan. The communists in Ethiopia and
Afghanistan would have seen this as support for terrorism, I suppose, but
where does that leave the U.S.? It is true that the Saudis recognized the
Taliban. But even the United States was essentially urged to do so by
Zalmay Khalilzad (current NSC staffer and envoy to Afghanistan) in 1996,
and the history of Taliban-U.S. covert and other contacts in the late
1990s and very early 2000s will not support an argument for Saudi
exceptionalism if it ever comes to light.


So is it being argued that the U.S. should break off relations with Saudi
Arabia because of its treatment of women? Has *Commentary* magazine been
in the forefront of the fight for women's equality? Gee, I missed that.
Is it being argued that the U.S. should break off relations with Saudi
Arabia because there are radical anti-U.S. fundamentalists in Saudi
Arabia? Since these fundamentalists are at daggers drawn with the Saudi
government, what sense would that make? It would be like cutting off
relations with France because a sixth of the French support the
proto-fascist party of LePen. Should the U.S. cut off relations with the
Saudi state because it has been unhelpful in the Mideast peace process (as
Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Libya have been?) But the Saudi state has put
forward the most far-reaching plan for a peace settlement in the region
ever broached by an Arab power, one which fully recognizes Israel and
normalizes its relationships with all Arab states, including Saudia.
This landmark plan is churlishly tossed aside by Hanson, who presumably
does not want Arab-Israeli peace or thinks it unimportant to U.S. policy
in the region. The ways in which the Saudis have kept petroleum prices
low at key junctures (as after the Gulf War and after September 11),
giving immense help to the U.S. economy, are completely ignored.


As I think I have made clear, I don't like the lack of democracy in Saudi
Arabia, because I think it makes a key country unstable (on the whole,
democracies are stable in the long run and dictatorships are not). I
don't like radical fundamentalism in any religion because it is
reactionary and threatens the liberty of us all. I don't actually object
to Hanson's characterization of the Saudi system of gender segregation and
discrimination as a form of Apartheid. And, I think Saudi foreign policy
and covert operations have often been a disaster for the region (though
the track record of my own country has been mixed, as well). But the
Saudi state is not like the Iraqi Baath Party or a sponsor of
international terrorism as that is currently defined by the Bush
administration--such as would make it appropriate or wise to break off
relations--and suggesting that it is only reveals the ignorance or malice
of the author.


Those who seek disequilibrium and chaos in the contemporary Middle East
are no friends of the American people, or of any people.


Sincerely,



Juan Cole
U of Michigan
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Wednesday, July 03, 2002

Why We Can Blame 20th Century Imperialism for Many of Our 21st Century Problems

History News Network ( http://chnm.gmu.edu/hnn/ )
6-24-02
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


By Juan R. I. Cole

Juan Cole is professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.


The world in 2002 is plunged into war or preparation for it in a number of significant hotspots. During the past decade, we have entered the age of postcolonial wars that are aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has called this the "Age of Muslim Wars." But most of these struggles have not had an Islamic character at all. Christian Serb nationalists, after all, launched the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Gulf wars were started by secular, Arab nationalist Iraq. It so happens that Africa and Eurasia contain large numbers of Muslims, which makes them statistically more likely to be involved in wars in those postcolonial regions. Moreover, the West tends to ignore deadly wars among postcolonial Christians, in places like the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda or not to think of them in these terms, as with Northern Ireland.

The armed conflicts in the world since the 1980s have largely been postcolonial struggles in the Balkans, Asia and Africa. The northern tier of this zone of conflict had been dominated by the Soviet empire, the disintegration of which plunged it into contention. Afghanistan's chaos derived in large part from Soviet imperial overstretch. Bosnia, Kosovo, the Armenian-Azerbaijan war and the civil wars in Yemen and Tajikistan all had this post-Soviet context. The renegotiation of national identities after 1991 helped inspire the revolt in Chechnya, which the Russians have been brutally crushing.

The dead hand of Western European colonialism is responsible for some other major clashes. The British withdrew from the Persian Gulf in 1969 after nearly two centuries of dominance, creating a power vacuum for the tiny oil sheikhdoms they had fostered. The British had managed to draw modern Iraq's borders so as to leave it without a deep water port. From 1980, Iraq sought to redress this omission through violence and to replace the British in the region. The collapsing Soviet Union was in no condition to dissuade its ally. The United States was finally drawn into the Gulf by the Iraq wars as a guarantor of the security of states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Muslim activists with an international consciousness are enraged about the suffering of ex-Soviet Muslim populations such as the Chechens and Bosnians. (Several of the September 11 hijackers initially left their homes in Saudi Arabia to fight for the Chechens against Russia.) They fume about the situation of the Kashmiri and Palestinian Muslims, repressed by ambitious successor states established after a botched British imperial exit. Another sore point for them is conflict in Algeria between a colonially-formed (and formerly Soviet-allied) state elite and lower middle class Arabic-speaking youths in the casbahs who have no prospects. They see these situations as part of an "invasion" of the Muslim realms for the past two centuries by states of Christian or Jewish origin, or their cultural protégés. All of these conflicts have origins in the era of European, including Soviet, imperial rule, which left Muslim populations at a disadvantage when it ended. Their anger at the U.S. projects on us, often unfairly, their discontents with this European and Soviet colonial heritage.

Such adventures as the Soviets in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria, and the British in the Gulf, Palestine and South Asia have unexpectedly given birth to demons for our 21st century world. Imperialism depended on dominating, humiliating and exploiting others, and on drawing artificial boundaries for European strategic purposes. The way out is not, as some are now saying, a new wave of Western imperialism. That is how we got here in the first place. It is the fashioning of a world of equals in which Muslims receive the same rights as others, to self-determination or enough autonomy to foster self-respect. Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end.
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