HOW TO
LOSE THE 'WAR ON TERROR' PART 2: Handing
victory to the extremists By
Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke
After the
writers of this article and our colleagues visited
the Middle East for talks with some of the leaders
of political Islam (see Part 1: Talking with the
'terrorists', March 31), our work was greeted
warily - when even acknowledged - in both the
United States and Europe.
We have been
accused of "giving legitimacy to terrorist
organizations", of "suffering from the Stockholm
syndrome", of being "naive and soft", of treading
on ground where only "more
realistic, experienced and
trained diplomats" have a right to go, and of
being "apologists for violence". The US
administration has insisted that we make it clear
that our program does not have its approval or
even tacit endorsement.
We repeatedly
sought a meeting with US officials to brief them
on our work, but were told that such a meeting
"would be seen as a confirmation that you are
acting on our behalf as some kind of back channel
- which you are not". The message to us was
repeated several times by a number of officials:
"The United States is not talking with terrorists,
we will not talk to terrorists and we do not
endorse or in any way support those who do." We
have agreed that we would make it clear: we do not
represent anyone but ourselves. This has been
plain to all our interlocutors from the outset.
But we adamantly reject the view that our
willingness to engage in "an exercise in mutual
listening" with Islamist organizations gives them
legitimacy. They already have legitimacy. The
Muslim Brotherhood (the most recognizable as well
as the oldest pan-Islamic party in the region) is
the most widely respected Islamist organization in
the Middle East and the second-largest party in
the Egyptian legislature, Jamaat e-Islami is the
most powerful and respected elected opposition to
the Pervez Musharraf government in Pakistan,
Hezbollah forms the second-largest bloc in the
Lebanese parliament, and Hamas is now the majority
party in the Palestinian Authority. In southern
Lebanon and in the West Bank and Gaza, the largest
proportion of constituent services - in health
care, child care, education and employment - is
conducted under the auspices of Hezbollah and
Hamas, respectively.
The question of
legitimacy is important because for democracies,
legitimacy is not conferred, but earned at the
ballot box. Hamas and Hezbollah would welcome a
dialogue with the West not because it would confer
"legitimacy" - they already have that - but
because such a dialogue would acknowledge the
differences between Islamist movements that
represent actual constituencies from those (such
as al-Qaeda and its allied movements) that
represent no one.
Are we captives of our
own process? There is no question that our
engagement with political Islamists has led us to
argue strenuously that US and European diplomats
follow our lead. It is true that we have been
impressed by the political sophistication of our
interlocutors, their willingness to discuss
complex political questions, to work to shift
perceptions of their movements and their
movements' goals. We suppose it possible (though
we believe it unlikely), that we have been courted
and misled by master terrorists who have
maliciously entrapped us in their web of lies.
But it seemed to us when we began this
process that the gamble of being lied to was worth
taking, and a far better alternative to not
talking at all. Then too, there is no monopoly on
lying, and it is certainly not the sole province
of Islamists. Diplomacy, at its heart, is a
process of deciphering the real from the imagined.
Of course, foreign governments and movements lie
to the United States and to its allies: lying is
often a significant part of the delicate calculus
of managing a sophisticated foreign policy, and
should not be viewed as an insuperable obstacle to
political engagement. Given the current increasing
instability in the Middle East, conducting a
discourse with movements or governments that we
find distasteful could prove a useful substitute
for implementing policies that have no chance of
working because they are based on what we believe,
and not what we know.
By our calculation,
the West has only three options in dealing with
Islamist organizations: we can bomb them, we can
ignore them, or we can talk to them. By now the
evidence should be clear: the first option has not
and cannot work, while the second is simply a
defense of intellectual laziness - how can we
possibly know whether our political assumptions
are correct unless they are tested?
In the
1980s, US president Ronald Reagan engaged in an
exchange with Soviet leaders - and even concluded
substantive agreements with them - telling critics
that a person who held fast to the rule of "trust
but verify" could not be duped. The US talked to
the leaders of the Soviet Union when its leader
banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations
and vowed to destroy the United States. The US
talked to the Soviet Union through four decades of
confrontation. And Americans talked to the Soviets
even when they had thousands of missiles trained
on the US homeland. The Islamists have none.
Are we - the delegates who conducted the
meetings (detailed in Part 1) - naive?
Our
most recent and more private exchange with the
leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah took place in the
immediate aftermath of the Palestinian elections.
During the week that we spent in Beirut, no fewer
than five workshops and conferences were held in
Washington, DC, on the implications of the Hamas
electoral victory, which included discussions of
the group's political program and its leadership.
A number of those experts were invited to join our
delegation. All refused.
So too, one of
America's most highly regarded experts on Hamas
acknowledged to us personally that he had "never
met one of them", though he has written
innumerable papers and monographs describing their
views and held conferences on who they are and
"what they want".
There is certainly a
price to pay for talking with proscribed
organizations, as any diplomat who had contact
with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the
1970s will attest. But the price for not engaging
with these organizations has recently proved more
costly: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
admitted publicly that she was "stunned" by a
Hamas victory that anyone with any experience on
the ground in the West Bank and Gaza could have
(and in fact did) predict. How could she have
gotten it wrong? One of the reasons may well be
that State Department employees are barred from
entering Gaza, and have been for five years. The
reason? Americans have been attacked in Gaza -
though by Fatah, not by Hamas.
Is
diplomacy best left to diplomats? The West's most
senior diplomats are wedded to the principle that
speaking to "terrorists" is out of the question.
The case was best put by former Spanish prime
minister Jose Maria Aznar, during a visit to the
White House in May 2002. [1] "But [what] I would
like to say once again is that we can establish no
differences among terrorists. They're all the
same. They're all seeking to destroy our
harmonious co-existence, to destroy civilization.
They're seeking to destroy our democracy and
freedoms."
Aznar's view has gained
widespread acceptance in the international
community. On February 6, 2004, Russian President
Vladimir Putin endorsed Aznar's views: "But the
commonly accepted international principle of
fighting terror is an unconditional refusal to
hold any dialogue with terrorists, as any contact
with bandits and terrorists [encourages] them to
commit new, even bloodier crimes. Russia has not
done this, and will not do this in the future."
[2] In spite of this, Putin was the first major
world leader to break ranks with the West in
recognizing Hamas - thereafter inviting its
leaders for consultations in Moscow.
Putin's decision was undoubtedly the
result of his anger with former senior US
diplomats who not only criticized him for failing
to grant Chechnya even "limited sovereignty", but
who established a high-profile Washington-based
non-governmental organization to push for "a
peaceful resolution of the conflict". The American
Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC) - whose
board members include some of Washington's more
high-profile neo-conservatives - was founded, in
part, to pressure Putin to convene "private 'Track
II' talks between representatives of the Russian
government and Chechen resistance ..." [3]
ACPC's public advocacy of a "private"
dialogue is not only a contravention of the nearly
unanimous view among diplomats that you should not
talk to terrorists, but confirmation that (at
least when it comes to Chechnya) not all
terrorists "are the same". Some, it seems, are
thought to have legitimate grievances, a viewpoint
put forward by Richard Pipes, who castigated Putin
in the pages of the New York Times for failing to
understand that Chechen violence is the result of
Russian oppression. Diplomacy, Pipes argued, was
the one way to resolve the conflict, as "there is
always room for compromise". [4]
The
United States and its allies have certainly proved
capable of following Putin's lead. Soon after
America's occupation of Iraq, the US attempted to
open a dialogue with the Shi'ite movement Hezb
al-Da'wa al-Islamiyya. In the heady days following
America's triumphant race across southern Iraq, a
US-Da'wa engagement held out hope for a useful
alliance between those in the US government who
wished to overthrow Saddam Hussein and a movement
that had fought him for more than 25 years.
The problem, of course, was that the US
had once been allied to Saddam's Ba'athist regime
and so was targeted by Da'wa's military wing. A
suicide bombing carried out by the group in 1983
in Kuwait (reputed to be the first suicide bombing
in the Middle East of the modern era) against the
French and US embassies in Kuwait killed three
French nationals and three Americans. Oddly, Da'wa
had never been listed as a proscribed terrorist
organization by the US State Department (though it
was tied directly to Iran, which was and is
considered a state sponsor or terrorism), while
Iraq was removed from the terrorism list in 1982
and added, again, in 1990. (Nelson Mendela was
removed from the list in 2003.) "Today Al-Da'wa
and its sympathizers distance the activist party
and movement from these 'aberrations'," Middle
East analyst Mahan Abaden wrote in the Beirut
Daily Star in 2003. "They contend, with some
justification, that the attacks were the works of
rogue elements hijacked by Iranian intelligence."
[5]
The leaders of political Islam know
this history quite well, and so have concluded
that Americans' talk of values and democracy and
peace is actually a cover for the promotion of US
interests. In 1982 it was in US interest to
support Saddam Hussein. Today, it is in US
interest to speak to the leaders of the Da'wa
party, particularly since its leader, Ibrahim
al-Jaafari, is Iraq's prime minister.
There exist a small but substantial number
of extreme Islamists who not only refuse any and
all engagements with the West, but who also target
those in their own communities who seek a broader
set of contacts and accommodation. These
takfiris take as their touchstone the view
that all Westerners are kafirs - infidels -
whose remorseless political and religious goals
are bent on conquest and domination. "They're all
the same." Those Muslims who talk with these
kafirs are viewed as irtidad
(apostates) and are outside of the protection of
the community. The takfiris are
exclusivists, claiming a special hold on the
truth.
Moderate Islamists have long
condemned this takfiri trend. Writing in
1935, Maulana Maudoodi (the founder of Pakistan's
Jamaat e-Islami, one of the groups with whom we
met in Beirut), warned of the dangers of those who
call others "wrongdoers". It is, he said "not
merely the violation of the rights of an
individual, rather it is also a crime against
society". [6]
So too, it seems, Western
takfiris would deny any and all contacts
and accommodation with political Islam and condemn
those who engage in them.
One of our
principal purposes in engaging with the leaders of
political Islam is to stimulate a new and more
rigorous understanding of armed political action,
its causes and its varied nature, and to
distinguish between it and "terrorism". There is
no question that two of the groups with whom we
spoke - Hamas and Hezbollah - have adopted violent
tactics to forward their political goals. They are
not alone: Fatah (whose candidates for election
the US supported with US$2 million in campaign
funds) continues to use violence (and kidnap
Westerners), so do the Tamil Tigers, so did the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the African
National Congress. So too does the United States.
America's insistence that Hamas and Hezbollah
"renounce violence" and "disarm" is dismissed by
these groups as not only an invitation to
surrender but, in light of the continuing and
increasingly indefensible use of alarmingly
disproportionate US and British firepower in Iraq,
the rankest hypocrisy.
The West's seeming
abhorrence of violence is derived from its deeply
rooted belief that political change is possible
without it. But defending this proposition
requires an extraordinary exercise in historical
amnesia.
While we Americans proudly point
to the civil-rights movement as an example of how
non-violence can successfully enable dispossessed
peoples to grab the levers of change, history
shows that those same levers were made available
as the result of previous, often quite bloody,
conflicts - in the case of the civil rights
movement a brutal civil war that left 638,000
Americans dead. Nor was America's civil-rights
movement as non-violent as it may seem from this
distance: the moderation of Dr Martin Luther King
Jr was opposed by a portion of the black American
community who vowed that they would change the
nation "by any means necessary" and who claimed
that "violence is as American as cherry pie".
Whether we want to admit it or not,
history shows that political change is most often
the result of political pain: the owners of
Montgomery, Alabama's transit system did not agree
to integrate their buses because they suddenly
ceased being racists, but because they were going
out of business. Nor, once the right to vote was
won, was the civil-rights movement ended. The
fight for equality has been long and often
agonizing, and it is not yet finished.
So
too, as America's most recent actions in Iraq
attest, the US policymakers would certainly not
reject the proposition that violence (albeit, as
President George W Bush continues to attest, "only
as a last resort") is often used to defend US
interests or promote US views.
So while we
Americans hold to the belief that the ballot box
offers the best way to effect change, we must
acknowledge that history shows that change is most
often painful and usually bloody.
The
leaders of major Islamist organizations view the
issue of violence in the same way Americans do -
as a legitimate option that is applied to
establish deterrence and stability and to defend
and promote their interests. For Hamas and
Hezbollah, "armed resistance" is a way of
balancing the asymmetry of force available to
Israel. Both groups place their use of violence in
a political context.
"Armed resistance is
not simply a tool that we use to respond to
Israeli aggression," a Hamas leader averred. "It
gives our people confidence that they are being
defended, that they have an identity, that someone
is trying to balance the scales."
Hezbollah puts this idea in the same
political context: "It may be that some day we
will have to sit down across from our enemies and
talk to them about a political settlement. That
could happen," reflected Nawaf Mousawi, the chief
of the Hezbollah's foreign relations department.
"But no political agreement will be possible until
they respect us. I want them to know that when
they're sitting there across from us that if they
decide to get up and walk away, they'll have to
pay a price."
The West's insistence that
opening a political dialogue be preceded by and
conditioned on disarmament is simply unrealistic:
it suggests that we believe that "our" violence is
benevolent while "theirs" is unreasoning and
random - that a 19-year-old rifle-toting American
in Fallujah is somehow less dangerous than a
19-year-old Shi'ite in southern Lebanon.
In fact, political agreements have rarely
been preceded by disarmament. United Nations
demands for the disarmament of the South West
Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) in 1978
unraveled a conflict-ending political agreement (a
situation put right when the rebels were allowed
to keep their weapons), and Northern Ireland's
"Good Friday Agreement" allowed the IRA to keep
its weapons until a political process (leading to
"decommissioning") reflecting their concerns was
put in place.
The West often views Islamic
violence as random and unreasoning, but Hamas and
Hezbollah believe that violence can shift
practical political considerations to create a
psychology in which armed groups can use the tool
of de-escalation as a way of forwarding a
political process. That is to say, absent a
political agreement, Hamas and Hezbollah will not
voluntarily abandon what they view as their only
defense against the overwhelming weight of Israeli
military power.
Disarmament (or
"demilitarization") is possible: it worked in
Northern Ireland and South Africa. When coupled
with substantive political talks, the unification
of armed elements into a single security or
military force - demilitarization - provides the
best hope for increased stability and security in
Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.
As a part
of our program with Hamas and Hezbollah, we
invited John Lord Alderdice to Beirut to brief the
groups on how demilitarization might work in their
societies. Lord Alderdice helped to negotiate the
"Good Friday Agreements" in Northern Ireland that
"decommissioned" the IRA and allowed, among other
things, for Catholic policing of Catholic
neighborhoods and the recomposition of a more
representative Ulster Constabulary. Hezbollah
leaders have acknowledged that they would be
willing to undertake a process of demilitarization
that would allow Shi'ite officers to hold more
senior level officer positions in the Lebanese
army, while Hamas leaders have openly talked of
creating a national army - thereby acknowledging
the importance of the "one commander, one security
service, one gun" solution promoted by the Bush
administration.
Demilitarization is not a
panacea, it does not work always and in every
case, but it holds out greater hope for long-term
stability and security than conditioning peace on
requirements that cannot be met.
The
Israel problem Despite their sometimes deep
and abiding organizational, historical and
religious differences, all of the Islamist groups
with whom we spoke claimed that a resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would do more
than any other single event to calm and stabilize
the region. But while the US, Israel and their
allies insist that "recognition" of Israel be a
starting point for any dialogue between the West
and political Islam, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim
Brotherhood and Jamaat e-Islami insist that
recognition must be the end point of a political
process - not its beginning.
They
forcefully and correctly point out that America's
insistence on Israel's recognition has never been
a condition for any previous dialogue: the US and
its allies maintained relations with president
Abdul Nasser, president Hafez al-Assad, King Fahd
ibn Abdul Aziz, and King Hussein (and even shipped
arms to Tehran), when Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan (and Iran) not only refused to speak with
Israeli leaders, but vowed to destroy their state.
In fact, the United States maintained diplomatic
relations with these nations precisely because it
thought it might end their conflict with Israel.
In two cases - with Egypt and Jordan - it worked.
The argument that "things changed after
September 11, 2001" seems almost perverse. Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat e-Islami
(as well as Syria and Iran) denounced the attack,
expressed their support for the US war against
al-Qaeda and even, in the case of Tehran, offered
US rescue helicopters on missions in Afghanistan
emergency landing rights in Iran.
The
leaders with whom we spoke are offended by claims
that what they call their "resistance to Israeli
aggression" has led to recurring charges of
anti-Semitism. "We are not fighting against Jews,"
Hamas leaders repeatedly argued. "Our argument is
with Israel."
In the case of Hezbollah, a
number of the delegates to our meetings pointed
out that the Hezbollah television station Al-Manar
openly broadcast a "documentary" on the "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion" - a Christian, not Muslim,
invention. References to the "documentary" were
met with an embarrassed acknowledgement by our
Hezbollah interlocutor: "I did not know it was
going to air until I saw it," he said. "I am sorry
it was aired." A number of delegates were
unimpressed by this apology: "It does not make it
okay," one said.
Claims that Al-Manar
regularly broadcasts "anti-Semitic" videotapes
showing Muslim "martyrs" celebrating before a
backdrop of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, however,
brought a swift denial: "The videos we air are not
anti-Jewish, do not call for the destruction of
the Jewish religion, and are not anti-Semitic. We
have a right to extol those who sacrifice
themselves in our defense. You do the same."
The same claims are made of Hamas. In our
first exchange in March last year, Hamas leaders
were accused of supporting anti-Semitism by
including "The Protocols" on their website. Our
interlocutors seemed more puzzled than offended by
the charge, as if unaware of the Protocols'
appearance. But they pledged to look into the
claim.
In March of this year, Hamas leader
Usamah Hamdan responded to the charge by noting
that the Hamas website to which we referred in our
initial charge was actually designed and owned by
a Cairo firm that was not affiliated with the
movement. The Hamas leadership, he said, was
"working to resolve the problem". As of this
writing, the offending website (hamasonline.com)
has been replaced with a nondescript website that
includes links to both an anti-Hamas article and
"Jewish Singles".
Nor, it seems, is Hamas'
view of its charter, which calls for the
destruction of Israel, inviolable: "It is not the
Koran, it can be amended," a Hamas leader has
said.
Still, the charges of Hamas'
anti-Semitism have proliferated. In a recent
article in The New Yorker, David Remnick
castigated Hamas for its open ties to the Muslim
religious tradition that dictates that the
territory of Palestine is a part of the Islamic
waqf - the endowment promised to Muslims by
God - and that "to relinquish any part of the
land" is "forbidden". [7]
But Hamas is not
the only religious-based political movement that
claims that all of Palestine was given by God. For
Jews, as well as for the Zionist movement, there
is a parallel theological belief that the Land of
Israel was given to Jews for all time - from the
Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, from
southern Syria to the Sinai Peninsula. The
creation of a Jewish state in all of Eretz
Yisrael (a phrase included in "The Declaration
of the Establishment of the State of Israel" read
to the public by David Ben Gurion on May 14, 1948)
has always been a fundamental part of Jewish
aspirations, to be realized, as one recent
American visitor with a Hamas leader recently
described it, "in God's time".
Hamas has
little problem with such aspirations, so long as
they are not translated into settlements and land
confiscations, which preempt "God's work" and
negate the eschatological nature of religious
beliefs.
Hamas is as unlikely to disavow
its aspirations for creating a Muslim state in all
of Palestine as Israel is unlikely to cease
calling the West Bank "Judea and Samaria" -
geographic descriptions that Palestinians consider
inflammatory and, they claim, evidence that Israel
is dedicated to realizing its religiously ordained
aspirations.
All of this may seem to be
logic-chopping. The real question remains: Is it
possible for the leaders of political Islam to
recognize Israel, to acknowledge and live in peace
with a Jewish state that has been established in
the midst of the Muslim wafq?
On
this question all Islamic leaders seem united:
"The end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in
the hands of our brothers in Palestine," Nawaf
Mousawi said. "When they say it is over, it will
be over." The leaders of the other groups with
whom we met agree, saying that while their support
for Palestine is constant and unquestioned, it is
no use "being more Palestinian than the
Palestinians".
For the United States and
its allies, on the other hand, "recognition" of
Israel - and not participation in free, open and
fair elections - is a requirement for the
acceptance of a Hamas-led government into the
community of nations. But for Hamas, the
recognition of Israel is not a pro forma
political abstraction, but a vitally crucial
issue. They point out that "recognition" is the
province of states and that, therefore, the
recognition of Israel should come when there is a
Palestinian state that represents the will of the
Palestinian people and has the same international
standing as the State of Israel. Hamas leaders
also believe that simple "recognition" of Israel
will not yield any tangible changes in the status
of Palestinians, let alone Hamas - that the US
response will be (as one Hamas leader said,
mimicking a US leader): "Fine, but that's not
enough. Now, you must ..."
In their most
recent statements Hamas leaders have been quite
insistent: recognition of Israel is dependent on
the recognition of Palestinian rights. That is to
say, Hamas will consider recognizing Israel when
Israel acknowledges UN resolutions calling for a
withdrawal of those territories occupied by Israel
in 1967. Put simply: measures taken by Israel in
the West Bank without Palestinian consent are
illegal and any future negotiation with Israel
must take the pre-1967 situation as their starting
point.
In fact, this is a reflection of
the position enunciated by President Bush last May
26 in an address given during a visit to the White
House by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: "Any
final status agreement must be reached between the
two parties," Bush said, "and changes to the 1949
Armistice lines must be mutually agreed to."
Bush's words are vitally important. If the
Palestinian do not agree with the final borders
proposed by Israel, the conflict will not be
resolved. In effect, the Palestinian have the
right to veto Israel's final status proposal if
they don't like it - and so maintain, by such a
veto, their unwillingness to come to a final
political settlement with Israel. So Bush agrees
with the Islamists: the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict will be over when the Palestinians agree
that it is over. And not before.
Moderation under attack The
seeming intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict has been exacerbated by America's
insistence that its allies in Europe and in the
region withhold funding for the new Palestinian
government until Hamas recognizes Israel (and
renounces terrorism, and disarms, and ...).
To America's failure to foresee Iyad
Allawi's defeat in Iraqi elections, to predict
Hamas' electoral victory, and to isolate Hezbollah
we may now add yet another failure: Condoleezza
Rice's failure to gain support from Egypt and
Saudi Arabia to cease their assistance to the
Palestinian people. Rice's plea to Egypt and Saudi
Arabia to stand with the US in its refusal to fund
a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority was resoundingly
and loudly rejected by Hosni Mubarak and King
Abdullah.
Instead of isolating Hamas, the
United States has isolated itself: not only did
President Putin host a visit by Hamas leaders in
Moscow, a number of European nations (as well as a
growing number of senior Israeli officials) are
now quietly suggesting a reassessment of being
identified with the US program for the region, and
are seeking ways to talk with Islamist leaders
whose legitimacy is the result of a popular
mandate.
The differences in approach are
not simply a reflection of Europe's continued
criticism of the Bush administration's decision to
shape a "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq,
it is rooted in geographic realities: Muslims
constitute Europe's single most important and
powerful minority constituency. Europe's decision
to respond more positively to Islamist concerns is
also, quite obviously, the result of widespread
Muslim rioting in France, the burning of European
embassies in the Arab world, and an admission
among European leaders that they must take steps
to fight Muslim intolerance in their own
societies. While European leaders initially
defended the right of a Danish magazine to publish
cartoons lampooning Mohammed, their most recent
actions betray a discomfort with their defense of
the publication of the caricatures because of the
Western value of "freedom of speech" - a value
that was once cited as a just defense of Julius
Streicher's "right" to publish virulent
anti-Semitic caricatures in Der Sturmer.
A
discussion of Middle East realities also
inevitably touches on George W Bush's call for
greater democracy in the region, a vision fatally
undermined by Secretary of State Rice's
imprecation that the United States will never deal
with a Hamas-led Palestine, whether elected or
not. Rice's lecture tour of Middle Eastern
capitals is not only the most recent evidence for
the Bush administration's inability, or perhaps
unwillingness, to differentiate among Islamist
groups, it threatens to undermine fatally the
central pillar of America's message to Muslims
from Egypt to Pakistan - that democracy provides
the last best hope for the realization of people's
dreams. Inadvertently that democracy message is
being undermined by US policies, which are pushing
Middle Eastern moderates into the arms of the
region's takfiris - those who view any
compromise with the West as apostasy.
More
specifically, America's failure to talk with, or
simply listen closely to, those groups who depend
for their legitimacy on the support of their
constituencies will swing the pendulum of the
Islamist revolution far beyond the views
enunciated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim
Brotherhood or Jamaat e-Islami. It has happened
before.
In 1792, the architects of the
French Revolution found themselves under attack.
For three years the leaders of the Gironde -
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Marguerite-Elie Guadet and
Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud - had served as the
vanguard for national change. The Gironde
represented France's professional classes:
businessmen, academics, lawyers and writers. They
were viewed as defenders of authority and order.
The transformations they authored were
breathtaking: they struck down aristocratic
preferments, convened a national convention, and
made the king answerable to the people. But in the
summer of 1792, these three leaders of the
Gironde, and 18 of their colleagues, were purged
from the convention, tried by a Revolutionary
Tribunal and guillotined before the jeering people
of Paris. Their sin? They not only opposed the
"Enrages" - the revolutionary "madmen" of the
Paris Jacobean Club who would "burn France to
ashes" - they expressed their admiration for
England's government, with its elections and House
of Commons.
The slippage from moderation
to terror that seized France in 1792 is chillingly
familiar to any discerning observer of America's
relations with Islam since September 11, 2001.
Stunned by the attack on its cities and
institutions, the US government justifiably struck
back at al-Qaeda, destroying much of its network,
interdicting its funding, and identifying and
jailing its supporters. The US was supported by
the entire planet. While it would have not have
taken much political sophistication for British
prime minister William Pitt to differentiate
between the Gironde and the Jacobeans, his failure
to do so - evinced by his description of the
Gironde as "regicides" followed by his
mobilization of the British army - sent them to
the block. Like the stiff and unbending Pitt, who
saw little difference between the Gironde and
their enemies on the left, the Bush administration
has lumped Muslim revivalists, who admire
democracy and reform and want it for themselves,
with the Middle East's revolutionaries - who want
to burn the region to ashes.
A more recent
historical example shows how the US and the West
might find a way out of this morass. In 1947, US
president Harry Truman directed the Central
Intelligence Agency to fund European socialist
movements that supported democracy. He did so not
because he was "soft on communism" or a "fellow
traveler" (the accusation made at the time), but
because he was able to differentiate between those
European movements that believed in democracy and
those that didn't. Truman calculated that
marginalizing European socialists would force them
into the communist camp. Truman's strategy,
carried out over a period of decades, worked -
breaking off moderate European Marxists from their
more revolutionary and violent co-religionists.
So too, while talking to or even dealing
with Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and
Jamaat e-Islami might seem an apostasy to some,
including them on the same list of proscribed
organizations as al-Qaeda confuses those groups
open to adopting the values we espouse with those
with whom there can be no accommodation. Being
able to differentiate between political movements
and currents and exploiting them to our benefit in
order to spread democracy is not making a pact
with the devil, it's called diplomacy - and at its
heart is a willingness to talk with groups and
political parties to find a common ground to fight
a common enemy.
The new
Jacobins The United States and its European
allies have declared war on terrorism. Yet the
policies that the West has instituted in this war
are not leading to increased security for its
people or societies. Rather, in failing to
differentiate between "revivalists" and
"revolutionaries", between those who are willing
to submit their program to a vote of their people
and those who won't - ever - the West is
inexorably pushing this great middle ground into
the arms of the takfiris, into the arms of
Islam's Jacobins.
The failure to
differentiate between Hamas leader Khaled Meshal
and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, between
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Jordanian
extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is the failure to
differentiate between those who seek an
accommodation with the West and those who work for
an unremitting and uncompromising clash. The
solution is not simply to begin talking to
political Islam - "we don't want you to talk", a
Hamas leader told us, "we want you to listen" -
but rather to begin the necessary process of
questioning our own assumptions: that "they" are
"all the same". If we fail to begin this vital
work now we will soon see Mecca "burn". And it
won't stop there.
What is perhaps most
surprising about what we have learned in our
"exercise of mutual listening" is not that our
views are radical, but that they reinforce Western
society's best instincts, including those of
George W Bush. In a speech before the
International Republican Institute last May, the
US president laid out his vision for democracy in
the Middle East.
"Today, much of our focus
is on the broader Middle East, because I
understand that 60 years of Western nations
excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in
that region did nothing to make us safe," he said.
"If the Middle East remains a place where freedom
does not flourish, it will remain a place of
stagnation and resentment and violence ready for
export.
"The United States has adopted a
new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the
Middle East; a strategy that recognizes the best
way to defeat the ideology that uses terror as a
weapon is to spread freedom and democracy."
We agree.
Notes 1. "President Bush
meets with European leaders", The White House, May
2, 2002.
2. "Press Statements and Answers
to Questions after the Completion of
Russian-Azerbaijan Talks", Moscow, February 6,
2004.
3. Included on the board of the
American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus are
Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney,
Max Kampelman, William Kristol, Richard Perle,
Norman Podhoretz, and James Woolsey, among many
others.
4. "Give the Chechens a land of
their own", Richard Pipes, New York Times,
September 9, 2004.
5. "Deal with Al-Da'wa
and its controversial legacy", Mahan Abaden, Daily
Star (Beirut), July 3, 2004.
6. "Fitna-I
Takfir" (Mischief of Takfir), Maulauna
Maudoodi, Tarjuman al-Quran, May 1935.
7.
"The Democracy Game", David Remnick, The New
Yorker, February 27, 2006.
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.
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