Balawi versus Zeid ....which direction will the Muslim world go?

'Turning' Islamists

During the Cold War, Westerners consoled themselves in the belief that most people behind the Iron Curtain did not believe in Communism; they were simply entrapped by a morally bankrupt system driven by a moribund ideology. It was not so much the allure of capitalism that ultimately won over the people of Eastern Europe; it was the failure of Communism.

What will it take to "turn" vast numbers of Muslims now enthralled with extremist Islam, and convince those uncommitted, not to follow the path of the Islamists? Much depends on the outcome of the ongoing battle within Islamic civilization between those promoting jihad against the West and those who say Islam does not need to tear down the West in order to thrive.

Yesterday, this newspaper carried a Washington Post dispatch, "Jordan emerges as key CIA counterterrorism ally." The story by that paper's national security reporter revealed that a Jordanian agent working in tandem with American intelligence had been killed by the Islamist suicide bomber who struck a CIA base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border last week.

It now transpires that the suicide bomber was a 36-year-old Jordanian physician named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. He had been "turned" - or so it was thought - during a stint in a Jordanian prison for jihadi activities.

According to Al Jazeera, the medical-man-turned-suicide-bomber was in Afghanistan to trap another physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of al-Qaida's two top leaders. Balawi had provided so much reliable information that he was trusted to enter the CIA post without being thoroughly searched.

The dead agent, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, was Balawi's handler. King Abdullah II participated in Zeid's funeral, raising the ire of Islamists within his kingdom.

This murky story of spycraft and betrayal serves as a metaphor for how the still-nameless war between freedom, moderation and enlightenment against the benighted forces of coercion, fanaticism and medievalism needs to be waged - by pushing Muslims to choose: the way of Balawi or the way of Zeid.

The most practical way to overcome the Islamists is for them to be defeated from within. After all, non-Islamists have a profound stake in the outcome.

YESTERDAY, President Barack Obama met with his top domestic and foreign national security advisers in the White House situation room. The agenda was two-fold: to unravel what went wrong, both on the systemic and personnel level, that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board Northwest Flight 253; and to take stock of the damage caused by what Balawi did at Forward Operating Base Chapman.

Along with Zeid, seven brave CIA agents, with a combined 100 years' of expertise, were lost. This betrayal, like previous acts of perfidy in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, underscored how dependent the West is on human intelligence provided by those who swim in a sea of anti-Western fanaticism.

Other lessons emerge. The Islamists must not be underestimated. They are getting good at counter-intelligence and disinformation. Israelis have seen this with Hizbullah.

Now Peter Baker of The New York Times has revealed that US intelligence was nearly fooled into thinking that Islamists from Somalia had infiltrated into the US in order to detonate bombs during Obama's inaugural address.

Fortunately, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, deduced that a "poison pen" operation was afoot. One terror group was trying to get the US to take out its rivals. Pretty sophisticated stuff and illustrative of what the West is up against.

Another lesson is not to belittle suicide bombers as "sad guys with no self esteem," or risk being surprised by those like Balawi, who are harder to pigeonhole.

The doctor had once told an Islamist magazine: "I have had a predisposition for... jihad and martyrdom since I was little. If love of jihad enters a man's heart, it will not leave him, even if he wants to do so."

CLEARLY, some Islamists are irredeemable. But others are not. If the West recognizes the scale of the challenge and confronts it effectively, and if there are enough courageous men the caliber of Sharif Ali bin Zeid working to preserve Islam from within, we can be reasonably hopeful that the jihadis will one day find themselves relegated to the dustbin of history.

If...

BUNKER BUSTERS FOR THE UAE? CRUISE MISSILES FOR EGYPT?

Washington's open arms


Human nature being what it is, gratitude has its limits. The more we are on the receiving end of a recurring good, the less grateful we become. Nations are likewise susceptible to "What have you done for me lately?" syndrome.

It is fitting, therefore, to acknowledge the ongoing aid Israel receives from the United States. It may not come out of purely altruistic motives, yet Washington's intentions are largely good, and absent its unwavering military and diplomatic backing, the world would be an even lonelier place for our Jewish state.

Within the past several weeks, the US Congress approved and President Barack Obama signed into law an FY 2010 aid package to Israel that includes $2.22 billion in security assistance. This brings the total amount of aid for the year to $2.775 billion. About 75 percent of these monies will be spent in the US. In addition, the US provides "virtual aid" in the form of loan guarantees.

Especially at a time when Americans are hurting economically, this financial support to Israel is deeply appreciated. In light of our shared values and mutual interests, the American people should know that they can always count on Israel.

ISRAELIS also recognize that America has interests elsewhere in our region. For instance, although the US now gets most of its imported oil from non-Arab sources, Saudi Arabia remains a major supplier of crude. Washington has an interest in bolstering Arab allies who may feel threatened by Persian imperialism.

For decades administrations have been selling advanced weapons to Arab states even when Israel strenuously protested these transactions.

Now, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, the Obama administration is about to sell yet more billions of dollars worth of armaments to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

For instance, it plans to sell the UAE 12 of the latest C-130 Hercules military cargo planes and 16 Chinook helicopters. The UAE is also interested in a supply of 400 GBU-24s bunker-buster bombs.

The Saudis are in the market for the latest in anti-tank missiles. And on a more modest scale, Jordan will buy aircraft engines and anti-tank guided missiles.

But the sale of weapons to Egypt is the hardest to fathom. Cairo wants state-of-the-art Harpoon II anti-ship cruise missiles ($145 million); four high-speed missile craft for its navy ($1.29 billion), and 450 Hellfire air-to-surface anti-armor missiles. Throw in 156 replacement engines, plus 24 new F16 fighters, and you are dealing with a lot of firepower.

The Pentagon insists none of this will "adversely affect the military balance in the region."

WE'RE somewhat less sanguine about these weapons. Egypt, which faces no threat from its neighbors, officially spends roughly $2-3 billion annually on its military and fields a 450,000-man standing army - on top of its mammoth domestic security apparatus. Cairo recently established a strategic military relationship with its old partner, Russia, and has reportedly expressed interest in the S-400 anti-missile missile on the pretext that it is worried about Iran.

In the context of a cold peace, Israel's relations with Egypt are on an even keel. True, President Hosni Mubarak, age 81, refuses to visit Israel and has made our foreign minister persona non-grata. But he does cordially receive Israeli leaders. For years he did precious little to block weapons smuggling from the Sinai into Hamas-controlled Gaza; now that he is making an apparently genuine effort, he is facing strident domestic opposition. Having quashed reformist political parties, his most viable opponents are Muslim extremists.

Egypt is a poor country with relatively weak political institutions and no assured mechanism for presidential succession. Its stability is one of Israel's highest strategic interests. Practically half of Egypt's 83 million people are under age 25. Many live on two dollars a day. Compounding the official unemployment level of 9% is endemic structural unemployment. Corruption is rampant; infrastructure is crumbling. Does this sound like a country that needs cruise missiles?

Since 1975, America has invested $14.83 billion in a wide array of AID projects to make Egypt a better place for its people. Helping ordinary Egyptians is where Washington's emphasis can continue to do the most good. Adding to Egypt's considerable stockpile of weapons hardly benefits its people. And such weapons could, heaven forbid, one day fall into the wrong hands.

WHO IS THE ENEMY? WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT HAPPENS IF WE LOSE?

Name the enemy



The clear, present and continuing danger posed to Western civilization by the worldwide Islamist terror network cannot be overcome while the American, European and other freedom-loving peoples are neither mobilized nor steeled for the sacrifices ahead.

No serious observer minimizes the perils. The attack carried out in November at Fort Hood by Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Muslim, showed the fatal consequences of not intercepting "ticking bombs." And the arrests of Najibullah Zazi, David Headley and five young Pakistani-Americans last year in separate plots against America irrefutably established that homegrown jihadists are a threat - just as they are in the UK, Germany and Spain.

While Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day, this attempted mass murder was only the latest proof that an Islamist terror network, with bases in Africa, Arabia and South Asia, cells just about everywhere else, and a noxious presence on the Internet, sees itself in a relentless state of war with the West.

A RECENT New York Times editorial concluded: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen? Americans have a right to feel weary. But the [Abdulmutallab] plot is a warning of why it's so important to head off full chaos in Yemen. The last thing the world needs is another haven for al-Qaida."

Indeed. But if Americans are "weary" at this stage of the conflict, it is partly because their leaders - and media - have not properly framed the nature of the threat.

Neither former president George W. Bush, who spoke mostly of a "war on terror," nor President Barack Obama, who speaks in terms of "violent extremists" - and no European leader - has had the courage to say that the enemy is global jihad.

The Islamist danger is not primarily rooted geographically - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Lebanon, Iran or Arabia - but theologically and politically within the larger Muslim civilization.

The only way Westerners can connect the dots - between, say, the devastating attack against Forward Operating Base Chapman near the Pakistani border in Afghanistan (which claimed the lives of seven seasoned CIA anti-terror operatives), and the attempted ax-murder of a cartoonist in the Danish city of Aarhus over the weekend - is for their leaders to plainly say who the enemy is, what they want, and what is at stake if they succeed.

That US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's first reaction to the attack aboard Northwest Flight 253 was to think that it was unconnected to a larger plot, testifies to how hard it will be to change mind-sets. Even Obama's first reaction was that Abdulmutallab appeared to be an "isolated extremist."

Yet compared to most other world leaders, Obama is positively Churchillian. He has articulated the right goal: "To disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the extremists who threaten us…anywhere where they are planning attacks…"

He's got the metaphysics right: "Evil does exist in the world." Furthermore, he fully understands the amorphous nature of the enemy, declaring that the "war" is against "a far-reaching network."

The missing link is naming the enemy. Only then will he be able to talk frankly about how hard - and necessary - it is to find trustworthy Muslim allies.

The murdered CIA agents were likely betrayed by Afghans they trusted. Al-Qaida in Yemen was revived partly when terrorists were freed in a prison break, possibly orchestrated by renegade elements of the Yemeni secret police.

EVEN IF Western leaders did mobilize their societies, the struggle against the Islamist menace would remain wearying. This is an enemy that is often embedded among civilians and enforces allegiance by beheading those it suspects of disloyalty. Citizens need to know this, to understand why innocent children are sometimes accidentally killed in military operations conducted by allied forces.

Obama needs to tell Americans and Europeans willing to listen that, though the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists are Muslim, hence the need for profiling.

An overstretched army, supported by a weary home front, against an ill-defined enemy, does not offer a viable strategy for success. Better to tell people that the enemy is radical Islam, which wants to spread its religion using the sword, and that defeat would mean an end to Western values of pluralism, minority rights and democracy.

Can the West maintain its soul in the face of the Islamist war againt our civilization?

The meaning of 443


Eli Cohen, 29, was heading home on Route 443 on the night of December 21, 2000, when his car was sprayed with automatic weapons-fire by Palestinian terrorists.

When the High Court of Justice this week, unhappily marking Cohen's 10th yahrzeit, ordered the IDF to lift its blanket ban against Palestinian traffic on that same road, reactions were predictable.

On the Right, there were accusations that Court President Dorit Beinisch was recklessly disregarding Jewish lives; on the Left, there were assertions that the road should never have been built in the first place.

A FEW days after the Cohen murder, an ambush wounded two other motorists. The IDF attempted to secure the highway while keeping it open to Palestinian traffic filtering in from adjacent villages and Ramallah. But the attacks continued and Israeli motorists petitioned the High Court, complaining that they felt abandoned by the army.

In August 2001, three more Israelis were killed. Sporadic sniping, rock-throwing and firebombings forced many commuters to abandon the road.

In 2002, the IDF began restricting Palestinian traffic, though it did not issue a formal ban until 2006 when an Arab motorist from Jerusalem, mistaken for a Jew, was murdered on the road.

By August 2007, the security situation had dramatically improved and B'Tselem began lobbying to lift access restrictions because of the detrimental impact they were having on ordinary Palestinians.

The advocacy organization also held that securing Israeli motorists beyond the Green Line had a downside - it solidified Jewish claims to Judea and Samaria. Soon foreign campaigners launched protests along Rt. 443 demanding free access for Palestinian traffic.

Then in March 2008, the High Court began hearing testimony in a case brought by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel on behalf of the very villages from which some of the attacks against Rt. 443 drivers had emanated. Plainly, if the court opened Rt. 443 to Palestinian traffic, a precedent might be set against blanket closures on even more dangerous roads deeper in the West Bank.

As the justices were putting the finishing touches on their decision, security forces discovered the remains of a bomb planted by Palestinian terrorists along the 443 road.

TO THE Right, we would point out that Beinisch and Justice Uzi Fogelman (with Justice Edmond Levy dissenting) felt international law gave them no recourse but to order that the ban be lifted. The highway cuts through territory the international community deems "occupied," and land for its expansion was expropriated exclusively on the legal grounds that it would benefit Palestinian Arab motorists.

Intifada violence forced the ban; the absence of Palestinian traffic made the road safe again. Under these paradoxical circumstances, a road that was sanctioned only because Palestinians were supposed to benefit from it could not forever remain the exclusive preserve of Israeli drivers.

The justices told IDF commanders that they could control Palestinian access to Rt. 443 depending on the security situation. That approach, of course, was tried and failed in the early 2000s. The law may be an ass but the justices should not be demonized.

To the Zionist Left, troubled because 14 kilometers of Rt. 443 cuts through the "occupied West Bank," we would point out that, actually, the access arteries to Rt. 443 begin in "occupied east Jerusalem" and together are integral to Israel's control of the capital.

Israel has no internationally recognized borders on the Palestinian front. We have only the 1949 Armistice Lines, which left us with Highway 1 - a narrow, winding, hard-to-defend, uphill corridor to Zion. Even it briefly crosses the Green Line near Latrun.

All this makes a second artery that connects the capital to the coastal plain - Rt. 443 - a strategic necessity. So of course it should have been built. And Israeli negotiators will push hard to make it part of sovereign Israel in any final-status accord with the Palestinians.

A FREE society's first imperative is survival; its second is not to lose its soul.

How to harmonize these essentials will continue to be a key challenge in the decade ahead.

As increasing numbers of Westerners are realizing this holiday season, those who would bring down airliners, blow up trains - and, yes, shoot Israeli commuters dead - are also daily challenging our capacity to uphold civil liberties.

George Mitchell on his way back to the region

[The mediator and the 'moderate']


Terms of reference

After 100 years of conflict, Arabs and Jews have seen peace envoys come and go; peace plans rise and fall. While these efforts have not always been driven by altruism, certainly America's are rooted in good intentions.

Obama administration peace envoy George Mitchell is now trying to coax the comparatively moderate Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiating table by offering customized "terms of reference" memos (TOR) for a way forward to him and Binyamin Netanyahu.

According to Arab press reports, Abbas wants to see the Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative, the Oslo Accords, Road Map and Annapolis all cited in his TOR. And he wants negotiations to pick-up from Ehud Olmert's last offer - the one Abbas never bothered responding to.

Plainly, the TORs presented to the respective sides need to be harmonious, otherwise only an illusion of momentum is achieved, though some peace-processors argue that even mere talking is a desirable interim goal to calm a volatile atmosphere.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton essentially provided Israel with the TOR it needed back on November 25 when she stated: "We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements."

Thus the administration, after a year of driving down the wrong road, is now back to where the Bush II White House had constructively left matters - meaning that there can be no return to the 1949 Armistice Lines, and that agreement hinges on land swaps, on Israel's retention of strategic settlement blocs and on the Palestinians accepting the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

Talks can resume as soon as Abbas drops his prerequisite demand for a total settlement freeze everywhere over the Green Line.

AN ADMINISTRATION that wants a breakthrough peace agreement in 2010 might also want to rethink its own terms of reference. Here are some suggestions:

• The less the US says about construction in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem the better. Palestinians know that Israel is not going to tear down Neveh Ya'akov, Pisgat Ze'ev, East Talpiot or Har Homa. They argue, however, that the bigger these neighborhoods get, the less space the Arabs will have after a peace deal. All the more reason, Mitchell should be telling Abbas, to hasten back to the bargaining table and stop behaving as if he had all the time in the world.

That said, we think it is unhelpful for Israel to create pocket Jewish neighborhoods with negligible security utility in built-up Arab sections of the capital. Not every Jewish right needs to be exercised.

• The administration has modified its initial fixation on settlement construction. Once the two sides agree on permanent boundaries, settlements on the "wrong" side of the border will be dismantled. Meantime, Israel has taken the extraordinary step of ordering a moratorium on new construction encompassing even the strategic settlement blocs.

The administration now needs to take on board that the settlement issue is a red-herring.

• Israelis do not want to see Iranian or al-Qaida camps popping up in the West Bank within walking distance of our major population centers. The sooner the administration incorporates the concept of a demilitarized "Palestine" into its peacemaking, the faster progress can be made.

A workable mechanism for Israeli and international oversight of crossing points between the West Bank and Jordan is equally essential.

• There can be no "right" of Palestinians refugees and their descendants to "return" to Israel proper. Palestinian demands for abandoned property reparations will be countered by the parallel demands by Jewish refugees and their descendants of Arab countries. The administration must tell Abbas to start preparing his people for this reality.

ONE FINAL suggested term of reference: The administration's Iran policy is the peacemaking lynchpin. The quicker the mullahs are defanged, and Hamas and Hizbullah deflated, the sooner moderate Arab elements may be willing to take chances for peace.

We applaud the president for speaking out personally Monday in support of the Iranian people protesting against the Khomeinist regime.

The more he leans on Iran, the closer the region gets to peace.