Memo to Mrs. Merkel - think trusteeship

The illusion of momentum isn't a good enough reason to reinvigorate the Quartet's involvement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her capacity as current head of the European Union, is back in Berlin after a lightning visit to the White House, where she obtained President George W. Bush's agreement to revive Quartet involvement in what is euphemistically known as the Middle East peace process. The Quartet, you will recall, is comprised of the US, the EU, Russia, and the UN.

Bush said it was a "good idea" to convene the Quartet. Merkel added that it would help in achieving a two-state solution if the US and EU "speak with one and the same voice."
Preempting the "why now" question, the chancellor opined: "I simply think that we ought to try time and again to achieve some sort of results in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Merkel has a lot on her plate. In addition to her national and EU responsibilities she's also currently chair of the G-8. But the Middle East is high on her agenda. In February she's scheduled to visit Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

WITH PALESTINIAN factions killing each other in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, the steadfastly rejectionist Hamas controlling the government and President Mahmoud Abbas as politically impotent as ever, Merkel's desire to go down the Quartet's road map path again strikes me as worse than futile.

To get a better handle on what's driving the chancellor to breathe new life into this plan, I asked Emory University political scientist Christian Tuschhoff in Berlin.

Tuschhoff answered that Merkel's government (her Christian Democrats had to enter into a coalition with the rival Social Democratic Party) is unpopular and desperate for a success - and it's unlikely to come on the domestic front. So Merkel, wisely, is turning to foreign policy, exploiting Germany's leadership of both the EU and G-8.

Tuschhoff accepts that her foreign policy agenda won't produce more than "a high profile on television," given the intractability of the problems she's confronting. This is true, incidentally, not only on the Arab-Israel front but also on energy issues, security and the moribund EU constitution.

Which is why, he said, no one really expects results from the revived Quartet.
So why bother? "Germans think it is better to have the process going than no effort at all. If the Quartet can reengage Israel and the Palestinians, they believe this will divert their activities from armed conflict."

GERMANS SEE themselves as uniquely qualified to help reconcile Israelis and Palestinians. Berlin has the respect of both sides and is thought of as having the most balanced stance within the EU. Political culture also plays a role: Tuschhoff argues that "reconciliation is a key trait of German foreign policy generally."

As a further domestic explanation of Germany's efforts to revive the Quartet, another source in Berlin suggested that policy on the Arab-Israel conflict was partially driven by the close cooperation between Social Democrat Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a government-funded foreign policy think tank called Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP).

The director of SWP, Volker Pertes, seems able to influence government decision-making.
Some of Steinmeier's initiatives - reaching out to Syria, for instance - are traceable to Pertes's influence, my source said.

BEYOND DOMESTIC drives, the international arena also offers clues to Merkel's Quartet-revival initiative. From the EU's point of view, the Arab-Israel conflict is key to regional stability, political scientist Tuschhoff explained.

To create a sense of policy consistency and follow-through, Merkel is coordinating her approach with Portugal and Slovenia, respectively scheduled to follow Germany's six-month EU presidency.

Moreover, if Merkel can demonstrate that she has genuine influence with the Bush White House, Berlin's weight within the EU can only increase.


EU members are supposed to pursue their foreign policy goals exclusively within the EU framework, Tuschhoff explained. And the Quartet is the best channel through which the EU can exert a role in our region.

It's not clear whether Germany embraces the latest French call for an international peace conference. But Berlin and Paris closely coordinate their foreign policy initiatives. "It would surprise me if France issued a proposal without prior consultation with Germany and possibly German approval," Tuschhoff said.

As we concluded our exchange, Tuschhoff ventured a speculation: "The key [to solving the conflict] is to educate the Palestinian side to act with much greater responsibility and move them away from jihad and terrorism.

"If some international recognition or venue can achieve that 'civilizing' effect on radical Palestinian factions, it should be tried."

THE QUARTET'S contribution to Arab-Israel conflict resolution is the 2002-2003 road map for peace. As the State Department describes it, "The plan is a performance-based, goal-driven plan, with clear phases, timelines, and benchmarks. It involves reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, and humanitarian fields. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict."

The road map's first phase called for ending terrorism and normalizing Palestinian life. The Palestinians were to end all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. Jerusalem was to commit itself to a sovereign Palestinian state living alongside Israel, which prime minister Ariel Sharon did.

Among other things, Israel also committed to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle outposts not authorized by the government. But Israeli officials have long argued that implementation of the road map is contingent on the Palestinians taking concrete steps to dismantle the terror infrastructure.

Since that never happened, neither did much else.

If anything, since the road map evolved the situation on the ground has gotten only more complicated. In January 2006, Hamas - which rejects the very idea of living in peace alongside a sovereign Jewish state - won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Since then the Palestinian polity has fragmented owing to outside pressure - to shed its rejectionist stance - and internal political cleavages. Today anarchy reigns, with violent clans and splinter groups carrying as much weight as the main terrorist organizations.

It is against this background that Merkel wants to revive the Quartet - as if the Palestinians were capable of agreeing among themselves on a course of action; as if a deal cut with Mahmoud Abbas would hold water with the Islamists; as if the fundamental political culture of Palestinian society, which viscerally rejects accommodation with Israel, could be swept under the rug.

IF MRS. MERKEL wants to do more than engage in the illusion of momentum - and reconvening an international peace conference under the current conditions would be just that - she must have the courage to lead the EU in a radically new direction.

To that end, I direct her attention to Martin S. Indyk's "A Trusteeship for Palestine?" in the May 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs.

We can dispute the details with Indyk (and his scenario anyway needs updating). But the principle that the Palestinian polity desperately needs an invasive "re-socialization" remains key. Merkel should accept that a prerequisite for Palestinian statehood is creating an institutional framework (political, educational and security) that fosters representative government, centrist politics and pluralism.

Can this be done in the Arab context, post-Iraq? What roles should Jordan and Egypt play? What sacrifices would Israel have to make to create the right atmosphere?

These are worthwhile questions that Merkel will need to grapple with assuming she can get first the EU and then the Quartet to make the major philosophical leap of abandoning the road-map illusion that the Palestinians are ready for statehood and investing, instead, in an approach that aims to prepare them to join the family of nations - trusteeship.

Policy trumps presidential personality

I didn't vote for Gerald Ford.
I went for his pro-Israel opponent, Jimmy Carter.

LAST WEDNESDAY night, hours after former US president Gerald R. Ford died at 93, I found myself at the Gielgud Theater in London's West End being captivated by Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon.

It's the story of the televised interviews with the disgraced Richard Nixon conducted in 1977 by British talk-show personality David Frost. Nixon had been largely incommunicado since resigning the presidency on August 8, 1974, after the House Judiciary Committee recommended he be impeached.

Michael Sheen plays the hyperactive Frost adroitly, capturing his mannerisms, while Frank Langella plays Nixon in all his pathos. The original televised interviews were culled from 28 hours of taped cross-examinations conducted over 12 days in San Clemente, California.
The flamboyantly Jewish Hollywood agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar is portrayed negotiating the deal that made the interviews possible (and the ex-president $600,000 richer).

The premise of the play, which mixes fact with fiction, is that by pardoning Nixon on September 8, 1974 rather than forcing him to stand trial, Gerald Ford deprived America of its chance of moral and psychological closure over its long Watergate nightmare.

In the playwright's mind, the Frost/Nixon interviews were necessary so that Nixon would publicly confess.

Paradoxically, to my mind, rather than providing left-liberals with the closure they sought, Nixon's mea culpa - "I let down my friends, I let down our country" - put him on the road to political rehabilitation. He went on to publish his memoirs and a series of books on world politics. By the time he died, in 1994, he was an elder statesman - almost as if Watergate had never happened. President Bill Clinton delivered Nixon's eulogy, with four ex-presidents in attendance.

BUT I LEFT the Gielgud thinking more about the newly-departed Ford than about Nixon or Frost.

Ford's presidency lasted a mere 896 days. He completed Nixon's term, famously met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok, had the dubious distinction of being the White House incumbent when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and signed the Helsinki Accords, which recognized the East-West divide but also obligated the Soviet Union to respect human rights. This in turn boosted the Soviet Jewry movement.

Ford had earlier signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment into law, which made most-favored-nation trading status (something the Soviets desperately wanted under detente) dependent on their willingness to open the iron gates and allow Jewish emigration.

Nevertheless, at the time I was convinced that Ford was bad for the Jews and bad for Israel, and voted against him. When he was defeated by Jimmy Carter on November 2, 1976, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Now with Ford dead, and Carter, at 82, writing books the likes of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, I find myself wondering whether I did wrong by Ford.

BUT YOU'VE got to recall the context. Months after Ford took over from Nixon, the October 1974 Arab summit in Rabat gave the Palestine Liberation Organization an internationally stipulated role as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs. Their cause was on the ascendant. The UN General Assembly invited the PLO to take part in its sessions, culminating in Yasser Arafat's triumphant speech there on November 13, 1974.

The administration made all the right noises about the PLO, but granted it no fewer than 20 entry visas to attend the UN session. It also authorized UN ambassador John Scalli to meet with pro-PLO Arab-American lobbyists.

And, in December, vice-president-designate Nelson Rockefeller expressed affinity for the PLO position, observing that Israel "took the land" of the Palestinian Arabs. Speaking during his confirmation hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Rockefeller said he didn't know whether he would recognize the PLO if he assumed the presidency.

The pro-Israel community was understandably getting nervous, so Republican Jewish macher Max Fisher set up a White House meeting between the Jewish leadership and Ford. The president reassured them that his administration would not court the PLO. That still left plenty of unease - about the administration's plan to sell F5E warplanes to Saudi Arabia, for instance.
By the start of 1975, it had become obvious that Ford would balance support for Israel with criticism of its West Bank policies, coupled with arms sales to pro-US Arab states.

WHEN SECRETARY of state Henry Kissinger's efforts to broker an Egyptian-Israeli deal in the Sinai faltered in March 1975, Ford's administration let it be known that Jerusalem was to blame. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had demanded, and Anwar Sadat had rejected, an arrangement that would have exchanged Israeli control of the Abu Rudeis oil fields plus the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes in return for an Egyptian pledge of non-belligerency.

Privately, Ford complained to Rabin: "I am disappointed to learn that Israel has not moved as far as it might."

All this - cozying up to moderate Arab states with weapons sales, generous visas for the PLO and a soon-to-be-unveiled policy "reassessment" - was largely the work of the Machiavellian Kissinger. To tighten the screws further, Kissinger refused to take calls from Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz.

Then the administration went public. In April 1975, Ford declared his "total reassessment" of US policy in the Middle East. American ambassadors from Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan were all summoned for talks at the State Department.

Kissinger also made a point of meeting with a group of foreign policy "wise men" including George Ball, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Averell Harriman and John McCloy - all of whom supported Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines.Ford then used his connections with leading US Jews, hoping to get them to pressure Israel into being more forthcoming. He told Fisher: "Max, it's the most distressing thing that's happened to me since I became president. Rabin and [foreign minister Yigal] Allon misled us into thinking they would make a deal. I never would've sent [Kissinger] if I didn't think we had an agreement. The Israelis took advantage of us."

Ford spoke about the need for "evenhandedness" in US Middle East policy, insisting he would not meet with Rabin unless he also met with Arab leaders.

Reassessment eventually drew to a close; it had served its manipulative purpose. But relations between Kissinger and the pro-Israel community were at a nadir.

When - with behind-the-scenes encouragement from the America Israel Public Affairs Committee - 76 US senators signed a letter critical of Ford, Kissinger went ballistic, telling Dinitz: "You'll pay for this! What do you think? [That] this is going to help you? This letter will cause people to charge that Jews control Congress."

On September 4, 1975, an Israeli-Egyptian Sinai Agreement was finally signed, the second following the Yom Kippur War. The deal called for a further Israeli pullback in the Sinai and a limited three-year non-belligerency pledge. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, no direct talks between Egypt and Israel had taken place. On the bright side, the US committed itself not to talk to the PLO so long as it didn't recognize Israel's right to exist. Kissinger would later deny that it was binding on future presidents.

WITH THE benefit of hindsight, it's clear that Ford's brief presidency adhered to the fundamental policy followed by every US administration since the 1967 Six Day War: getting Israel to withdraw from (most of) the captured territories in exchange for an accommodation with the Arabs - in other words, land for peace.

An independent Palestinian state was not then on the agenda, but forcing Israel out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza always had been. Ford's Middle East envoy William Scranton, for instance, declared - probably coining the phrase - that Jewish settlements in the territories were "obstacles to peace." Over the years, administrations may have differed over how best to implement this goal, but the essential objective would never change.

Ford's only full year in office, 1976, continued to be characterized by bumpy relations with the organized Jewish community. He repeatedly turned to Max Fisher and other shtadlanim to assuage the sensibilities of the pro-Israel community while simultaneously trying to get it to lobby in Jerusalem on behalf of the administration's policies.

WHICH BRINGS me to Jimmy Carter. As a Democratic presidential candidate, Carter, seeking a primary win in my home state of New York, actually told voters that he supported Israel's settlement activity and would never want to see it relinquish the Golan Heights or east Jerusalem.

He told Jewish audiences what we wanted to hear: Israel hadn't caused the Palestinian problem, so why was the Ford administration caving in to the Arabs' blackmail and selling them arms? Why didn't it support legislation opposed to the Arab boycott of Israel? And he said all this during an upsurge in Arab rioting in the territories.

On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan was challenging Ford for the nomination, and one of Reagan's foreign policy advisers, Jewish Republican lawyer Rita Hauser, was calling on Ford's State Department to stop "creeping toward tacit recognition" of the PLO.

That's particularly ironic because it was Hauser, acting as a private citizen (with the approval of the Carter administration), who was instrumental in facilitating US recognition of the PLO in December 1988.

Carter went on to win the Democratic nomination. Ford overcame Reagan, but was weakened by the intensity of the primary campaign. It would be Ford versus Carter in the 1976 presidential race.Arab Americans announced their support for the "evenhanded" Ford. And I voted, naturally, for the "pro-Israel" Carter.

IT WOULD take me years to fully appreciate this fundamental fact: Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, US policy on the Arab-Israel conflict remains the same. Sure the personality of the president matters, but mostly on the margins.

America's perceived interests in the region dictate a certain course and Washington calibrates its commitment to Israel's survival against its other interests in the region.

US policy-makers adhere to a premise many of us in the pro-Israel community find dangerously naive: that the Arab-Israel conflict has shifted from a winner-take-all, zero-sum game to one that can be solved through compromise. Having embraced the idea that the Arabs no longer seek Israel's destruction, everything else - selling them warplanes, flirting with the PLO, pressuring Israel into vulnerable borders - falls into place.

I had been kidding myself into thinking that supporting Carter over Ford would bring America and Israel closer. From Lyndon B. Johnson to George W. Bush, the American line has not wavered: Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan, the West Bank and Gaza.

It would not have mattered if Nixon had survived Watergate; if Reagan had defeated Ford that year for the Republican nomination and gone on to beat Carter.

When he finally did become president, Reagan sold the Saudis AWACs, visited Bitburg and, in the closing days of his administration, granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO - a necessary precursor to the Oslo Accords five years later.

I don't envy Americans who may want to consider support for Israel as they try to decide between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, between John McCain and John Edwards, between Joseph Biden and Mitt Romney, or between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich.

It's likely to be a pointless exercise - the play's already scripted.

‘Death will find you’

The Looming Tower
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
By Lawrence Wright
Knopf
480 pages
£20/NIS 165


Last month an Islamic seminary in northwest Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, was attacked by Pakistani helicopter gunships. Though 80 “seminarians” were killed, the raid’s primary target, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2 and one of the most wanted men in the world, managed to elude liquidation – again.

Reports mount that al-Qaida is planning a mega-attack, perhaps against a European target, over the Christmas holidays. British security officials are convinced that al-Qaida is actively trying to acquire a nuclear device.

Five years after the assault against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al-Qaida’s top leaders remain at large, and the organization seems to be reinvigorating its operations from havens along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Against this threatening background comes Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Not just another 9/11 tome – there are some 5,000 in print – The Looming Tower may well be the most comprehensive, authoritative and balanced work available.

Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, has produced an engrossing story not only about the events leading up to the assaults, but about the men behind them – Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri – and their main pursuer, anti-hero FBI agent John O’Neill, ironically killed in the WTC attacks that fateful day.

The Looming Tower is a serious work of political history, but it reads like a thriller. The title comes from a passage in the Koran: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.”
Wright answers the great “what if” that so consumes political historians: What if bin Laden had been killed early on – would al-Qaida have become the force it is now?

As with the development of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, the combustible ingredients were all there; but a catalyst was needed. Bin Laden is to the Islamist movement what Hitler was to the Nazis. Al-Qaida could not have developed in the way it did absent the Saudi-born prince of darkness.

So it is all the more heartbreaking that efforts, so vividly presented by Wright, to kill bin Laden before he became a household name failed so miserably.

It didn’t have to be this way. Had America’s political and intelligence echelons done their jobs, Wright asserts, bin Laden would have been caught or killed before al-Qaida’s greatest success: 9/11.

AFTER THE August 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in which 213 people were killed it transpired that the CIA knew about the plot a year earlier, but hadn’t taken the information seriously.

Bin Laden survived thanks to a combination of incompetence and fate. In retaliation for the Kenya attack, and a simultaneous one in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Clinton administration ordered a cruise missile assault against al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as Wright explains, “it takes several hours to prepare a missile for firing, and the flight time from the warships in the Arabian Sea across Pakistan to eastern Afghanistan was more than two hours.”

As luck would have it, both bin Laden and Zawahiri were out of harm’s way by the time the “nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of armaments” rained down on their training camps in Afghanistan and, simultaneously, on what turned out to be a genuine pharmaceutical plant, not an al-Qaida biological or chemical weapons facility, in the Sudan.


TIME AND again Wright shows that a combination of bad luck, bad intelligence and a myopic refusal to share pieces of a complex puzzle within the American intelligence establishment – among the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, even with the White House – allowed the 9/11 plot to proceed.

Even after the 9/11 terrorists infiltrated the US, had the various intelligence agencies shared fragmentary data – in particular, had the CIA told the FBI what it needed to know – the dots just might have been connected.

There is plenty of blame to go around. The CIA feared exposing its intelligence to the FBI, knowing that the FBI viewed terrorism as a police problem. The Bureau would have sought indictments against suspected terrorists, which, to stand up in court, could reasonably have been expected to have jeopardized the CIA’s assets and methods.

How painful to read that on July 5, 2001, intelligence “chatter” had reached such proportions that Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, called a White House meeting of all the relevant intelligence agencies to declare: “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.”

But by then the FBI’s O’Neil, who knew the most about bin Laden, was being eased out of the Bureau and was preparing to take a private job as head of security at the WTC.


BEYOND THE nuts and bolts of how the plot went forward, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in a broad understanding of how the Islamist menace to Western civilization developed.

Wright provides the theological and historical setting to explain al-Qaida’s emergence. He ties the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, the sexually frustrated theoretician of the Islamist idea, to the emergence of today’s Muslim fanaticism. It was Qutb – executed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966 – who theorized against secularism, rationality, pluralism, individualism, mixing of sexes and tolerance, all of which had seeped into Muslim society through its encounter with the West.
Basically, those Arabs who lost faith in their leaders’ ability to harness the energies of their civilization – first through Arab nationalism and then through pan-Arabism, so their shattered world could withstand the “modernity virus” – became Islamists.

The turning point was the 1967 Six Day War, when Arab efforts to destroy even a truncated Jewish state backfired, leading to the loss of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

The Arabs’ shift to pan-Islam was unexpectedly bolstered by the 1979 revolution in Iran, in which Persian nationalism was replaced by Shi’ite fundamentalism. Whether spread by Sunni fundamentalists in Arabia or the Shi’ite mullahs of Iran, the nature of the Muslim struggle against Western influence had now taken on added momentum.

It doesn’t matter that the various Islamist strains despise one another, or try to outdo each other in closed-mindedness. What does matter is the direction in which they are taking Muslim civilization.


ARGUABLY, SAYYID Qutb’s successor was the blind sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. Now sitting in a US jail, Rahman is the key figure connecting the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, to the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing carried out by Ramzi Yousef. And it is Rahman who was Zawahiri’s spiritual mentor.

Had US authorities relentlessly pursued the clues left behind by el-Sayyid Nosair, Kahane’s killer, the menace of the burgeoning Islamist threat might have been revealed much sooner.

As biography too, The Looming Tower is simply captivating. Bin Laden is the scion of the Yemen-born Muhammad bin Laden, who came to Saudi Arabia as an impoverished construction worker and found his way into the hearts of the royal family, eventually building a global dynasty.

As Wright tells it, Osama had a religious epiphany during adolescence that would lead him to a life of asceticism. I was fascinated to read that he fasted on Mondays and Thursdays (as do some pious Jews).

Wright also unveils the personality of the equally devout Ayman Zawahiri – a bookworm and himself scion of an Egyptian medical dynasty. Both men abandoned lives of comfort and security to pursue their vendetta against the West. (Wright suggests that Zawahiri may well be the real brains behind al-Qaida.)

The Looming Tower is also a work of political psychology, providing glimpses into the pathological minds of the Islamist leadership. We meet men from middle-class backgrounds, many of whom “return” to religiosity. They share a sense of displacement; some are expatriates, or the offspring of ex-pats. Many have issues about their sexuality.

One example: Muhammad Atta, the Egyptian leader of the 9/11 hijacking team who piloted American Airlines Flight No. 11 into the WTC, gave these instructions about the handling of his martyred remains: “Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.”

Yet in telling the stories of the main fanatics, Wright also illuminates the life of their chief nemesis, John O’Neill, the agent-in-charge of the FBI’s national security division. A practicing Roman Catholic, O’Neill was also an adulterer, emotionally dependent, a bigamist and a spendthrift. Most significantly, he was an indefatigable lawman obsessed by his pursuit of bin Laden.

There were a handful of others equally dedicated scattered throughout the security establishment. But they were often forced by institutional rivalry to work at cross-purposes, or ignorant of each others’ efforts.


ABSENT THE Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, there would have been no 9/11. An amalgamation of mujahadeen fighters backed by the US, China, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia had indeed overcome the Soviets. But, as Wright reveals, bin Laden played a thoroughly minor role in that effort.

Yet thanks to a combination of hubris, delusion and religious fanaticism, bin Laden convinced himself that his band of Arabs had been ordained by God to wage jihad, that just as they had overcome the Soviets, so too they would beat America.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that the United States was at the root of all that was wrong in Muslim society. Wasn’t it America that was dragging Arabia toward modernity? Wasn’t it America that stood behind Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians? Didn’t it corrupt a pious Saudi regime to the point where Riyadh had actually invited infidel soldiers to defile the holy soil of his homeland?

Washington had corrupted all that was holy.

Today, bin Laden has inspired – it’s not an exaggeration to say – millions of followers with his ideas. His perniciously-enticing Islamist theology has metastasized.

One doesn’t put The Looming Tower down with anything but a sense of foreboding and a despondency over the failure of Europeans and even many Americans to acknowledge that a civilizational war has been declared against modernity and the West.


QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Lawrence Wright is an author (six books), screenwriter (The Siege) and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He received an MA in applied linguistics from the American University in Cairo.


Q) Are reports that Iran is grooming Saif al-Adel to replace bin Laden and Zawahiri true?

Iran has worked with al-Qaida (AQ) in the past, especially during the time when Osama bin Laden was in the Sudan from 1992-96 – when Iran and Hizbullah trained AQ operatives. Ayman Zawahiri supposedly sold information to Iranian intelligence, and he may have maintained those contacts. Moreover, many al-Qaida operatives took refuge in Iran after the invasion of Afghanistan by US and coalition forces in November-December 2001. One Saudi paper said that as many as 500 AQ members were in Iran, which sounds really inflated to me.

The two most prominent members of al-Qaida known to be in Iran are Saif al-Adl, the organization’s security chief, and Saad bin Laden, one of Osama’s most committed sons. The nature of their sanctuary there is unclear.

So there is a long-standing association between Iran and al-Qaida. But that doesn’t mean that the two entities can function together, because AQ is an entirely Sunni organization, and part of its dogma is that Shi’ites are heretics.

The FBI tells me that Saif al-Adl and Saad bin Laden are under a form of house arrest in Teheran. In one of Zawahiri’s letters to the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [leader of al-Qaida in Iraq] before an American bomb found him, Zawahiri chastised him for promulgating a war against the Shi’ites, and reminded him that Iran was holding al-Qaida hostages.

Al-Qaida strategists would like to see Iran pulled into open conflict with the US and the West, and to that extent I think the leaders would be willing to work with Iran. But there’s no possibility that AQ will ever become an organ of a Shi’ite state.

Q) Is Iran providing assistance to al-Qaida units operating in Iraq?

It’s very difficult to know what’s true now in Iraq, but if there was any substance to such reports it would indicate that Iran has decided that chaos serves its immediate goals, though not its long-term ones.

Iran is in a dilemma in that it doesn’t seek a regional war – at least not until it’s secured a nuclear weapon – and that is a lively prospect if Iraq’s civil war begins to spill over the borders; on the other hand, a democratic Iraqi state, even a shaky one, poses a threat to the Iranian example.
The Iranian goal is to keep the Iraqi state weak enough to not ever be a threat again, but not so weak as to utterly fail. That’s a difficult balancing act.

Q) Does the al-Qaida that masterminded the 9/11 attacks still exist?

The old, hierarchical al-Qaida, where a member had to fill out forms in triplicate to buy a new tire, the organization that offered health benefits and paid vacations – that’s gone, but AQ strategists had planned, as early as 1998, for a new model, one composed of smaller groups that may not be networked at all, functioning more like street gangs. We’ve already seen this in Madrid and London.

That’s not to say that bin Laden and Zawahiri are irrelevant. Every day they are free is a propaganda victory for AQ. Moreover, they are still able to give direction to the movement and inspire followers.

Q) Some Israeli analysts here are talking about al-Qaida having set up up operations in Gaza. So al-Qaida still lives?

Yes, of course. It still lives as an organization, although the mother ship is much reduced. But as a movement it has certainly grown, especially in Europe.

Q) What can Israel do to undermine the al-Qaida idea?

Israel doesn’t really matter to bin Laden. He’s never attacked it, except peripherally, although he talks about it all the time. If the Israeli-Palestinian problem were resolved tomorrow, he would be heartbroken. No issue has served AQ propagandists better than the chronic stalemate that has fueled the anger of Muslims all over the world.
[That’s why] I have been urging that the US administration renounce the settlements. Half a million [settlers] should not be allowed to stand in the way of a just resolution to the Palestinian cause.
There are many causes of terrorism, but what they have in common is that they usually spring from the hopelessness and sense of futility that is so common in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Al-Qaida really is an engine that runs on despair. And it’s going to be with us as long as there is not sufficient hope to change that balance.

Say ‘yes’ to the ‘hudna’ – And let the haggling begin!

On those mornings when I take a bus from my southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot to the Post offices on the other side of town, I always scan my fellow passengers – checking for suicide bombers. Several years ago, a colleague found himself sharing a ride with a randy “martyr” on his way to collect 70 virgins.

Perhaps that’s why I found myself receptive to an op-ed in Thursday’s International Herald Tribune calling for a hudna. The piece had been written by one Ahmed Yousef, “a senior adviser to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.”

I have to confess, I had never paid much attention to Yousef. He appears to be a Hamas liaison to the foreign press on such issues as the elusive Palestinian unity government, non-recognition of Israel and the exchange of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. The Christian Science Monitor calls him a “moderate.”

Yousef’s op-ed (which also ran in The New York Times) is part of a larger charm offensive. The Foreign Office in London facilitated visas to allow Yousef and another Hamas member, Said Abu Musameh, to hold private meetings and be interviewed by journalists.

Yousef came pushing the hudna, telling the Guardian: “We hope Europeans will become aware of the concept of hudna, and that it can become a substitute for recognition of Israel. Debate about a political nation’s right to exist seems infantile. Israel is a state now, it is part of the UN, it is de facto there, and we deal with it every day.”

In his op-ed, after explaining what a hudna is and why it is acceptable under Islamic jurisprudence, Yousef pledges that “when Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God, and will therefore keep it.”

Yousef continues: “This offer of hudna is no ruse – as some assert – to strengthen our military machine, to buy time to organize better or to consolidate our hold on the Palestinian Authority.
“We Palestinians are prepared to enter into a hudna to bring about an immediate end to the occupation and to initiate a period of peaceful coexistence during which both sides would refrain from any form of military aggression or provocation.

“During this period of calm and negotiations we can address the important issues like the right of return and the release of prisoners. The next generation of Palestinians and Israelis will have to decide whether or not to renew the hudna and the search for a negotiated peace.”

I’M NO adviser to the prime minister, but my first inclination – mindful of the politics of the bazaar – is to say: you want a hudna, you got a hudna.

Now, let’s talk details.

Our Foreign Ministry is hung up with getting Hamas to unequivocally recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce terrorism and embrace commitments the Palestinian Arabs made under the 1993 Oslo Accords. I’m not much bothered about such things. After all, Yasser Arafat demonstrated that one can “renounce” terrorism while engaging in it; “recognize” Israel’s right to exist while trying to bomb us to smithereens, and sit for photo-ops with visiting peace delegations while brainwashing Palestinian children to hate Jews.

Maybe the problem was that we tried to cut a deal with Palestinian factions that couldn’t deliver their people. We ought to abandon such impotent and disingenuous partners and do business with the people that can deliver.

And considering how little our earlier peace efforts have actually accomplished, we might as well start from scratch.


LET’S RESPOND by offering the Palestinian Arabs a Jewish hudna: 10 years of tranquility for the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria. If they stop all violence from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – no drive-by shootings, no rock-throwing, no firebombs, no bus or cafe bombings (you get the idea) from any Palestinian source – Israel will offer peace and quiet.

If the other side can live without smuggling weapons and without training its young people for the next round of warfare, if it can retool its schools to teach hudna instead of intolerance, we should meet them halfway.

Of course, we can’t withdraw to the suicidal armistice lines of 1949 (which some call the 1967 borders), but we can commit ourselves to genuinely freezing the territorial expansion of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (we can always build higher); we can remove outposts not approved by the government; we can make it as easy to travel from Ramallah to Gaza as it is to journey from Safed to Eilat.

Naturally, we will never agree to the “right of return” of the refugees (and their descendants) who left this land generations ago, but we can – with EU and US help – help those in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the territories demolish their refugee camps and build permanent housing; we can facilitate the building of industries in Palestinian Arab population centers; we can even welcome Palestinian Arabs back into Israel proper for business and pleasure.

And, assuming the Palestinians do deliver, devoting themselves for the next 10 years to rebuilding their morally, politically and economically devastated society, relearning humane values and rediscovering a spiritualism that’s not fixated on blood, I predict they will find most Israelis willing to compromise – even to the point of helping create a Palestinian Arab state.
So, were I advising our premier, I’d urge him to invite Haniyeh to Jerusalem and start the hudna haggling.

Time for the IDF to launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza?

My gut instinct tells me it would be a mistake to launch a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The enemy would like nothing more than to tie down tens of thousands of IDF troops in the alleyways of the refugee camps and in the urban slums of Gaza. They’ve reportedly been training and laying traps for precisely such a step.

An IDF move into Gaza would also halt the internecine warfare among the various Palestinian militias, clans, and terrorist organizations, instantly uniting them against Israel.

No. We need to fight this war by exploiting our strengths not playing into enemy hands which would have us fight in crowded cities and camps.

I think what we’ve been doing until now in response to Palestinian aggression is roughly the right approach. We’ve aimed to kill Kassam launch teams and some of the people who send them. We’ve destroyed ammunition dumps and the factories that make the Kassams.

It’s frustrating that we haven’t been able to stop all rocket and missile launching from Gaza.

But more than 300 enemy combatants (and, regrettably, noncombatants) have been killed since Gilad Shalit was captured. I would not call that sitting on our hands.

We do need to accelerate our efforts along the Philadelphi Corridor – something we’ve begun to do. Still, it will be an immense task to reduce the flow of weapons coming in via the tunnels from Sinai.

That's because the Egyptians are part of the problem by failing to police their side of the Gaza-Sinai border.

We need to be methodical and smart in dealing with Gaza; let’s keep hammering away whenever an opportunity presents itself – by land, sea, and air.

But for now, I say “no” to a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.