HOW TO LOSE
THE WAR ON TERROR PART 1: Talking with the
'terrorists' By Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
Seventy-two hours before
the Iraqi people voted on a new parliament, on
December 12, 2005, we were told by a senior US
administration official that "detailed data
received by the White House" pointed to a
"decisive win" for Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National
List. "Allawi's victory turns the tables on the
insurgents," this official said gleefully.
"Sectarianism will be the big loser."
Allawi's prospective triumph was trumpeted
repeatedly over the next two days by US news
networks quoting administration officials. Weeks
later, after the results of the election became
known,
it was clear that the White House had
overestimated Allawi's popularity: his party
received just over 5% of the vote.
On the
eve of the Palestinian parliamentary elections in
late January, US-funded Palestinian polls
suggested that while the mainstream Fatah movement
had lost much of its popular support, Hamas was
expected to win no more than "a third of the
legislature's 132 seats". [1] On January 27, when
the results of the polling were complete, it was
clear not only that Fatah had been defeated, but
that Hamas had swept into office in a landslide. A
prominent front-page article in the Washington
Post stated that US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice was "stunned" by the results, as the Hamas
victory contradicted everything the administration
of President George W Bush believed about
Palestinian society. [2]
Just two weeks
after the Hamas victory, on February 6, Lebanese
Maronite leader Michel Aoun and Sheikh Hassan
Nasrallah appeared together in Beirut to sign a
memorandum of understanding between the Free
Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah. The
Aoun-Nasrallah agreement shook the State
Department, which had worked for years to isolate
Hezbollah.
The US had underscored its
anti-Hezbollah strategy as recently as November
23, when Aoun met with State Department officials
in Washington. The State Department blithely
discounted the importance of the talks that Aoun's
movement had been having with Hezbollah and
reassured the press that Aoun would remain a
staunch supporter of the United States' Lebanon
policy. Certainly, it was believed, the leader of
Lebanon's Maronite Christians would never tie the
future of his own movement to that of a group
allied with Damascus and Tehran.
In the
aftermath of the Aoun-Nasrallah agreement,
however, all of that changed: not only was Aoun's
support for the US-led program against Syria in
question, his agreement with Hezbollah meant that
he was justifying Hezbollah's alleged kidnapping
of Americans in Lebanon during the 1980s. [3]
Overnight, it seemed, Aoun had gone from being a
friend of the US to a man allied with terrorists.
Allawi's failure, Hamas' success, the
Aoun-Nasrallah agreement - and the inability of
the West to predict, shape or even understand
these seminal events - have been variously
interpreted: as a signal that the US intelligence
community needs increased resources, that the West
has not been doing enough to sell its "program" in
the region, that the US and its allies have not
been harsh enough in their condemnation of
"radicalism", that the West has underestimated the
amount of support its secular allies need, and (in
the case of the Palestinian elections) that Hamas
didn't really win at all - "Fatah lost."
We have reached a much more fundamental
and alarming conclusion: Western governments are
frighteningly out of touch with the principal
political currents in the Middle East. The US and
its allies overestimated Ayad Allawi's strength,
were "stunned" by Hamas' win, and were surprised
by the Aoun-Nasrallah agreement because they don't
have a clue about what's really going on in the
region.
But why?
With the
exception of Israel (where a US and European
appreciation of realities is critical to the
formulation of policy), there are, inter alia,
five political movements and governments in the
Middle East of undeniable importance: Iran, Syria,
Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The
governments of the West don't talk to any of them.
They do talk to the leaders of Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf
region; but the net result of most of these
contacts is that Western governments are dependent
for information about the region on a set of
clients who, as often as not, are mere reflections
of what Westerners want the Middle East to be,
rather than what it actually is: Ayad Allawi, who
was wrong when he reassured US officials that
Iraq's voters would reject sectarianism, Fatah,
which was wrong when it told us that their
acceptance of US funding for their campaign would
enhance their legitimacy among Palestinian voters,
and Lebanese leader Saad Hariri, who was wrong
when he told the US government that its program
for isolating Hezbollah would work.
This
clientism is not new; rather, it is a continuation
of the misreading that led US and British
officials to believe their soldiers would ride to
Baghdad along flower-paved highways.
Once
again, we're being "Chalabied". [4]
First encounter In August 2004 -
in an attempt to provide an opening to political
Islam - a delegation including the writers of this
article traveled to Beirut for discussions with
the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. We were
accompanied by Bobby Muller, a well-known American
veterans advocate and a political activist
recognized for his leadership of the
anti-landmines campaign, and Dr Beverley
Milton-Edwards, a professor at Queens College,
Belfast, and an expert on Hamas.
Our
purpose was to begin a process that, we hoped,
would eventually persuade Western governments to
recognize and open up to political movements whose
political legitimacy was derived from a broad base
of popular support in their own communities. We
knew our meetings would be controversial: both
Hamas and Hezbollah were on the US and European
Union lists of proscribed terrorist organizations,
both had either been accused of participating in
or had actually participated in the targeting of
civilians, and both had vowed continued enmity to
Israel - which enjoyed the strong support of the
United States and its European allies.
Even so, the public statements of Hamas
and Hezbollah reflected a desire to reinforce
their political legitimacy by espousing elections
- Hamas was then considering entering candidates
in prospective Palestinian parliamentary
elections, while Hezbollah was engaged in a
national parliamentary campaign in which its
candidates were gaining increasing support. Then
too, and notwithstanding Bush administration
statements linking both groups with al-Qaeda "and
related groups", both had condemned the events of
September 11, 2001, both had publicly stated their
willingness to open contacts with the United
States and Europe, and both had maintained that
their conflict with Israel was legitimate and had
nothing to do with the West.
Ours was one
of the first organizations to seek such an
opening, although various church organizations and
one US think tank had engaged in discussions with
the groups. But nothing had come of these
meetings. In one case, during a conference in the
Gulf region with officials of the Brookings
Institute's Saban Center, the leaders of both
Hezbollah and Hamas left the discussions in anger
"after we were harangued about 'terrorism'.
We thought little could be gained by an
exchange of accusations, so we worked to reassure
our interlocutors that it was not our intention to
engage in lectures, or to present ultimatums in
advance of our discussions. As a further
reassurance, we told the leaders of both movements
that it was our intention to listen - and not just
talk. We proposed that we not call our meetings a
"dialogue" but "an exercise in mutual listening".
After several more private preliminary
meetings, we convened two larger engagements,
bringing a group that included former senior US
and British diplomats and retired officers of
Western intelligence services to Beirut in March
and July last year. By then, our "exercise in
mutual listening" had been expanded to include the
Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan's Jamaat
e-Islami. Even so, our focus remained on Hezbollah
and Hamas.
We asked each group to begin
the sessions by making a presentation on "where
you see the Middle East now, how you view your
role in it, and where you see it going". Our
discussions were blunt, touching on nearly all the
subjects sensitive to the groups and to the West:
suicide bombings, attacks on Israel, the
compatibility of democracy and Islamic law,
philosophies of governance, the compatibility of
Islamic economics and globalization, their views
on al-Qaeda and radical Islam - as well as issues
of particular interest to them.
We knew
there would be difficult moments in our
discussions, and our delegation came prepared:
every delegate had served in the Middle East,
often in conflict situations. All of our team,
without exception, knew the history of the groups
we would be speaking with and all were familiar
with their personalities, leaders and political
goals. Many had served in high-level positions -
as ambassadors, military officers, or as senior
officials in Western intelligence services.
While our meetings with the leaders of
political Islam were not a secret, the meetings
themselves were private. Because of the
sensitivity of the topics we covered, a number of
our delegates preferred that their participation
not be highlighted and that statements made during
the more informal sessions that occurred between
sessions not be used at all. Finally, we confirmed
that - unless explicitly agreed to by individual
delegates - we could characterize what was said
only in general terms.
This said, our
delegations (the members of which varied through
two meetings over a period of five months)
included the original four Conflicts Forum
delegates, plus three former officers of the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a well-known
television producer, a former member of the
Mitchell Commission, [5] a former ambassador, two
Middle East activists, and the head of a US
foundation focused on the Middle East.
A
number of delegates were anxious to confront our
interlocutors - and particularly Hamas and
Hezbollah - over their use of violence, a number
of others were skeptical of any of the groups'
claims for engagement with the US, and nearly all
of our delegates had suffered the loss of close
friends in the region's conflicts. In no sense
could it be said that any member of our delegation
arrived in Beirut sympathetic to the groups to
whom we were speaking. Sympathy was not what was
required, but a hard-headed and unsentimental
appreciation that US and other Western interests
require that we look at facts as they are.
Hezbollah: 'Not a threat to
America' Our Hezbollah interlocutor, Nawaf
Mousawi (the chief of the group's foreign
relations department), was pressed repeatedly to
explain Hezbollah's reputed attacks on Americans
during the 1980s in the midst of the Lebanese
Civil War. He was closely questioned on his
movement's role in the bombing of the US Marine
Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983, on the torture
and death of marine Colonel Rich Higgins, and his
organization's ties to terrorist mastermind Imad
Mugniyah, who is thought to be the head of the
movement's external security apparatus. Mousawi's
response was forceful and blunt: "We have no
American blood on our hands." He repeated this
statement several times to the point of
insistence.
When pressed again to explain
Hezbollah's ties with Imad Mugniyah, Mousawi
refused to mention his name, shook his head, and
confronted his questioners: "If we open every file
on the civil war, then the Americans would not be
able to set foot in the office of any political
party in Lebanon.
"Everyone in the US
administration knows we are not a terrorist
organization or a threat to America," he said.
"This is about politics and Israel's psychological
headache of Hezbollah. We are not raising our
children to hate America. Israel is our enemy; but
not the Jewish people - this is not a religious
war against the Jews. Our war is against
occupation - that is it."
In later,
private, discussions with a number of our
delegates, Mousawi repeated his claim that
Hezbollah was not affiliated with Mugniyah and
that the organization "does not have American
blood on our hands".
The exchange with
Mousawi, and his insistence and unwavering tone,
spurred several of our delegates to return to the
US to reinvestigate the period of the Lebanese
Civil War. Former and current US officials were
closely questioned on the source of their
information on Hezbollah activities in the 1980s
and on the organization's ties to Mugniyah.
The exchanges in Washington cast doubt on
Mugniyah's current ties to the organization and on
the movement's role during the era of
hostage-taking in the early 1980s. In short, these
reports suggested that information on Hezbollah's
participation in past terrorist actions against US
institutions and individuals may well have been
based on informants with an ax to grind. Charges
of Hezbollah's responsibility for anti-American
terrorism may well have been reported to US
intelligence services to undermine Hezbollah's
growing influence in South Lebanon at the expense
of other parties.
But even if these past
incidents ("the baggage they bring to the table",
in the words of one delegate) were somehow to be
cleared up, there is little hope for a direct
US-Hezbollah engagement. "This will take a lot of
time and a lot of work. It won't happen easily and
it won't happen fast - and it might not happen at
all," a former CIA officer said in the wake of our
discussions. "There is just too much distrust."
Hezbollah leaders maintained during the
course of our discussions that their actions were
and are justified and can be defended as
legitimate resistance. "We do not target
civilians," Mousawi said in our March 2005
meetings. "Even when Israel was occupying southern
Lebanon we were absolutely diligent in making
certain that our actions did not endanger Israeli
civilians, and we even stopped operations where
Israeli families of military personnel would have
been endangered by our actions. You cannot say the
same for Israel."
Hezbollah's claims that
its use of arms was simply a matter of
self-defense was met with widespread skepticism,
as was its attempt to play down its support for
Syria and Iran and its dependence on both for
political and (in the case of Iran) financial
support. Despite this, Mousawi emphasized the
Lebanese character of his movement: "We are
Lebanese," he said. "We were born here. We will
die here. We did not come from somewhere else."
Mousawi was adamant in responding to US
demands that the movement disarm and renounce
violence. "I believe that to have a fruitful
policy in the region Israel must be confronted,"
he said.
"Political settlement demands
equity of power. Israel holds all the cards. So
why is there a demand for our surrender? As far as
we are concerned it is not in anyone's interest,
including that of the US, to leave the Arabs weak.
Also in the past four years there has been
stability in Lebanon and even on the border to a
certain extent. Hezbollah's arms have delivered
this."
But perhaps Mousawi's most
interesting, and most detailed, presentation was
on Hezbollah's view of its political role in
Lebanon, then besieged both by demonstrations
marking the assassination of Rafiq Hariri and an
intense campaign for seats in the Lebanese
parliament. "We are prepared to work hard to
maintain Muslim unity and avoid fitna
[division]. We wish to avoid turning the protests
and demonstrations into a sectarian division,
which is why we are prepared to make such
overtures."
In fact, Hezbollah and
Maronite Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement
were then, in March 2005, engaged in a delicate
series of private exchanges on forging a national
consensus - one that both parties vowed would
eventually include Saad Hariri's Sunni following
(the "Future Bloc") and Walid Jumblaat's Druse
party. The results of these first, tentative,
exchanges have now become public, with the leaders
all of Lebanon's major sectarian political groups
meeting in an attempt to forge a common
understanding.
After the end of the
dialogue session that concluded in early March
last year, the leaders of the various movements
and factions agreed to the disarmament of
Palestinian militias operating outside of
Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and agreed
that relations with Syria would be conducted on
"mutual understanding and non-interference". The
February 2006 Maronite-Hezbollah understanding
formed the foundation of these talks, though a
full agreement on all the issues facing Lebanon
has proved elusive. After a third round of talks,
which concluded this March 20, two difficult
political questions remain unresolved: the status
of Hezbollah's arms and the future of Lebanon's
presidency, which is currently in the hands of
Emile Lahoud, who is viewed as pro-Syrian.
At our delegation's second meeting, last
July, Nawaf Mousawi's personal political
capabilities were on full display - as he
presented a seat-by-seat analysis of the
parliamentary election, Hezbollah's success in
winning a large portion of the contested seats,
and the movement's political maneuvers to build
political alliances across sectarian lines.
Mousawi's impressively detailed disquisition, his
obvious openness to any initiative by the United
States to establish a serious relationship, and
his repeated claims that Hezbollah is "first, a
Lebanese party" were stated with such conviction
that a number of our delegation's most skeptical
members were convinced that Hezbollah "is not that
interested in the Syrians remaining in Lebanon.
Rather, their mass demonstrations of solidarity
with Syria seemed more a parting wave of thanks
before they set about the tricky process of
defining their own autonomy, and balancing the
elements in the complex political process."
Others were not so sure: "It is going to
be difficult, if not impossible, for the United
States to talk to a group that is so outwardly
allied to Iran," one of the participants
reflected.
Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, Mousawi's presentation reflected his
personal and his movement's pessimistic views on
the region's future and on the US campaign against
terrorism. Most prominently, while he was "quite
careful and even cagey" (in the words of one
delegate) on his movement's ties with Iran, he was
less so on Hezbollah's vulnerabilities to "the
Khawarij trend". Noting that prominent "Salafist
and takfiri websites" had "actually marked
Hezbollah leaders for assassination", Mousawi said
these "jihadist movements", including al-Qaeda,
"actually represent a greater threat to my people
and to the Palestinian population than they do to
Western interests. [6] This is the real danger,
and the United States needs to recognize it."
The reason for such targeting, Mousawi
explained, is that "the jihadists think we are too
moderate, too willing to participate in democratic
processes - which they view as just another
colonialist plot promoted by the Americans to
dominate our region".
Hamas: A warning
to the West The meetings with Hamas evinced
even greater interest among our delegates than
those with Hezbollah, in large part because - as
the Hamas leaders with whom we met readily
admitted - US and European officials had shunned
any contacts with the movement after the start of
the second intifada. The Hamas leaders with whom
we spoke claimed not to have met an American
"since the late 1990s", while another said that
his last meeting with an American had been in
1996.
Our primary contact viewed our
meetings as "a chance to clear up misconceptions
about who we are and what we want". As in the case
of our meeting with Hezbollah, the exchanges were
blunt and focused on areas of strong disagreement
over the conduct of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The Hamas leadership present for our
first meeting in Beirut, which included Sami
Khater, Musa Abu Marzouk and Usamah Hamdan, began
the exchange with a straightforward statement on
Hamas' political beliefs and goals. "We will
continue the struggle to provide national unity,
to stop Israeli aggression, we will participate in
Palestinian elections, we will establish the
framework for rebuilding the PLO [Palestine
Liberation Organization] to represent all
Palestinians, we will offer a truce with Israel,
and we will continue our work to make certain that
Israel abandons the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.
We do not endorse murder, but we do support
resistance."
Hamas' long period of
targeting Israeli civilians in a series of bloody
bombings of cafes and buses during the second
intifada engendered the most detailed exchange
during our first engagement in March 2005.
Initially, Hamas leaders defended their actions by
citing their right to lawful resistance and the
religious foundation for their decision to target
civilians. But as the discussion progressed, the
Hamas leaders propounded an increasingly assertive
defense of their tactics, noting at one point that
their decision was not made lightly or without
reflection and that it was only undertaken after
it became clear that Israel refused to reciprocate
a Hamas offer to end the targeting of civilians.
"We are against targeting civilians,"
Mousa Abu Marzouk said. "And we did not do so
until 1994 - after the Hebron Mosque massacre [of
settler Baruch Goldstein]. And they built a shrine
to him in Hebron. And at that point, since we were
never attacked in that way before, we determined
that Israelis kill civilians. But no one asks
about Palestinian civilians. In the last five
years, 347 Palestinian civilians have been killed.
The numbers you see are exactly reversed for
Israeli and Palestinian deaths. What about the
targeting of civilians who are Palestinian? And
the homes and the farms of Palestinians that are
destroyed? The Israelis have rejected our offer,
and we have made the offer, that both sides should
stop killing civilians. But they rejected that
offer."
When pressed on their targeting of
civilians, Hamas leaders seemed to contradict
their earlier statements by expressing their
conviction that there is no distinction between
Israeli civilians and soldiers. "Every Israeli is
a solder," one of them said. "Settlers are armed."
When asked whether, in their view,
terrorism "worked", they answered that it served
to unite their people and to gain support for
their political program. This claim was not a
surprise: Hamas began their bombing campaign not
simply as a means of fighting what they viewed as
Israeli aggression, but to seize the political
initiative from Fatah. (In fact, Hamas' radicalism
in the first days and months of the second
intifada forced Fatah leaders to follow the Hamas
example, and adopt suicide bombing as a tactic.)
"Their description of terrorism," one of the
delegates noted, "convinced me that we are not
dealing with genetically encoded monsters, but
hard-headed - albeit brutal - political actors who
carefully choose their tactics and attempt to
manage the effects of their actions."
At
the time of our first exchange with Hamas, there
had been no suicide bombings in Israel since
August 2004. Hamas leaders signaled that this
unofficial calm would be maintained, so long as
the calm was reciprocated by Israel. Even so,
Hamas leaders said that they retained the right to
respond to "Israeli aggression" just as (as they
pointed out) Israel said that it had the right to
continue targeting Palestinians it viewed as
ticking bombs.
"It wasn't so easy losing
our founders, our people, our leaders, and our
friends," one of their leaders said. "When all
channels are closed to us, we use violence. We
don't have jets, we don't have tanks. So we made
the decision. It is one of the ways we resist, it
is not the only way."
In July, with the
unofficial period of calm nearing the one-year
mark, Hamas officials reiterated their commitment
to "maintaining a hudna [truce] with
Israel, even though Israel does not respond and
continues to target out leaders".
In both
meetings, Hamas officials stridently objected to
US proscriptions against any contact between
American and Hamas officials, arguing that "we
didn't wage war on the US, even verbally. We have
never expressed a link with Osama bin Laden and we
don't support him."
Usamah Hamdan was
outspoken in his criticism of the US decision to
add Hamas to the State Department's list of
proscribed organizations: "We knew it was going to
happen and in 1996 we tried to communicate with
[then secretary of state] Madeleine Albright to
find a way to object - to talk with her about the
decision," he remembered. "We were told that she
was unavailable to talk with us and that we should
call back. We were then put on the list and we
made our second call, and we were told, 'We're
sorry, but secretary Albright doesn't talk to
terrorists.'"
Hamas leaders were also
particularly intent on promoting their decision to
participate in the Palestinian Authority's
scheduled parliamentary elections - even after
they were postponed from last July until this
March. At times, their leaders even seemed
prescient, focusing on their organizational
skills, their ability to appeal to a broad base of
Palestinians, and their continuing commitment to
provide constituent services, all of which they
cited as evidence for their belief that they would
likely win a majority in the Palestinian
parliament. [7]
"The Palestinians decide
their leaders and the international community must
accept that," one of them noted in March 2005.
"And when we win those elections it will be a
great problems for the Americans, I am sure. Is
the international community going to ignore the
results of the elections?"
Hamas' leaders
also denied that they would impose strict Islamic
forms on Palestinian social life, using the Koran
as an example of "respecting diversity" among
peoples, a claim they have repeated in the wake of
their recent parliamentary victory.
"Islam
is comprehensive and we understand that, but the
Palestinian people are diverse," one of their
leaders said last March. "The people will decide
who will lead them and what kind of government
they will have and we must respect those
difference and will respect those differences."
Usamah Hamdan gave a more detailed answer
during our July meetings, acknowledging Western
fears about what impact the election of an
Islamist party would have on an otherwise secular
society: "There is a fear that is based on
historical baggage," he said, "that Hamas will be
the next Taliban. We are not. We have always
insisted that our people should be allowed to make
choices - not just on who to vote for, but on how
to live. We do not recruiting forcibly, but by
persuasion. For us, Islam is the answer, but that
is not true for everyone. We believe that there
should be the launch of a democratic process in
the whole region."
Once again (as was the
case with Hezbollah), Hamas leaders were outspoken
in their condemnation of America's "inability to
differentiate" between Islamist movements, of the
United States' and Europe's willingness to list
Hamas as a "terrorist" organization - alongside
al-Qaeda.
One Hamas leader was explicit in
setting out the differences and in explaining how
the West's lack of sophistication and political
nuance could be fatal for America's standing in
the region. "We have been warned by the Salafists
that what we are doing in accepting democracy is
playing into our enemy's hands," this leader said.
"The message was a warning. One of them, I
remember, said to me: 'Listen, my brother, we wish
you well in your elections. But you should know
that whether you win or lose, the Americans will
never, ever accept you are equal partners. And you
will learn this. And when you do, you will come
back to us, and together we will make a beginning.
And together we will finish them here. Together we
will burn it. That is the only solution. Burn it.
And we will begin in Mecca and Medina."
Notes 1. "Palestinians'
risky elections", Washington, Post, Editorial,
January 22.
2. "Hamas sweeps Palestinian
elections, complicating peace efforts in Mideast",
Scott Wilson, Washington Post, January 27.
3. US assistant secretary of state for
Near Eastern affairs David Welch played down the
Aoun-Nasrallah agreement during a press conference
on February 9, saying that the State Department
view was that "this is a discussion between two
political currents and not a governmental
discussion". Welch was then asked: "Now,
obliquely, you referred to somebody justifying
taking American hostages. You're talking about
Aoun? Can you say that on the record?" To which
Welch responded: "Yes."
4. Ahmad Chalabi
was an Iraqi exile who fed the US government
"intelligence" about the Saddam Hussein regime
ahead of the US invasion, much of which turned out
to be wrong or self-serving. See Chalabi: From White House to dog
house, May 22, 2004.
5. The Mitchell
Commission, chaired by former US senator George
Mitchell, was convened by then US president Bill
Clinton to investigate the causes of the "second
intifada", the violence in Israel and Palestine
that followed the visit by Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in
September 2000.
6. The Khawarij - or
Kharijites - were separatists from the army of Ali
ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law and cousin of
Mohammed. Ibn Muljam, a Kharijite, is blamed for
his murder. The Kharijites believe that being a
Muslim is equivalent to salvation, that there is
no salvation for sin, that all non-Kharijites are
sinners, that all sinners are apostates, and that
all apostates should be put to death.
Takfiris are Muslims who view all
Westerners as kafirs (infidels).
7.
Claims from American Hamas experts that the result
of this month's parliamentary vote was as much of
a surprise to Hamas as it was to the US are simply
wrong. In more recent meetings (held in Beirut in
the immediate aftermath of the parliamentary
vote), Hamas leaders confirmed, however, that they
purposely played down their expectations of a
clear parliamentary victory over fears that the US
and Israel would press Palestinian President Abu
Mazen to cancel the elections until Fatah could
gain more strength.
Tomorrow:
Handing victory to the extremists
Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a
London-based group dedicated to providing an
opening to political Islam. Crooke is the former
Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff
member of the Mitchell Commission investigating
the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant, author
of six books on US history, and a former personal
adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Copyright 2006
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