Dec 13, 2002 Op Eds

It is true that what was trumpeted as the first trophy won in its role as the global cop patrolling the world’s seas and skies has turned out be a diplomatic stinker for Washington. It has been forced to set free the North Korean freighter, So San, with its cargo of 15 Scud-like missiles concealed under a consignment of cement. The US could not afford to ignore the Yemen government’s fury. It is an important ally in its war against Iraq.

The Pentagon has apparently decided it does not want to initiate two conflicts simultaneously. It is having trouble enough finishing its mission in Afghanistan. This indeed may have been why the White House sent the Spanish to intercept the So San, rather than use one of its own warships. In this game of chess however, the North Koreans have no compunction about moving several pieces in the same move. We can surely expect more from them and probably sooner, rather than later.

He has a long history of Islamist militancy, for which he has spent time in jail, and is still banned from public office because of it.

Islam's greatest defenders in the West were Jews. Zionism changed all that. M Shahid Alam traces the transformation

In an earlier era, before the Zionist movement descended on the heads of unsuspecting Palestinians, the least bigoted voices in the field of Oriental studies were often those of European Jews.

At a time when most Orientalists took the Prophet Mohamed for a scheming imposter, equated Islam with fanaticism, denigrated the Qur'an as a crude and incoherent text, and claimed that the Arabs were incapable of abstract thought, Jewish scholars of Islam often took opposite positions. They accepted the sincerity of Mohamed's mission, described Arabs as "Jews on horseback", viewed Islam as an evolving faith that is more democratic than other religions, and debunked Orientalist claims about an unchanging Islam and a dynamic West.

Ironically, these pro-Islamic Jews did not escape the voracious interest of Bernard Lewis, the leader of the new Zionist Orientalists. In a 1993 essay, he writes that they "were among the first who attempted to present Islam to European readers as Muslims themselves see it and to stress, to recognise, and indeed sometimes to romanticise the merits and achievements of Muslim civilisation in its great days". It would appear that these Jews were anti-Orientalists long before Edward Said.

These contrarian positions had their origin in a variety of motives. Even as the Jews began entering the European mainstream, starting in the 19th century, they were still outsiders, only recently emerged from the confinement of ghettos, and it would be scarcely surprising if they were seeking to maintain their distinctiveness by emphasising, and identifying with, the achievements of another Semitic people, the Arabs. In celebrating Arab civilisation, these Jewish scholars were perhaps sending a non-too-subtle message to Christian Europe that their civilisation was not unique, that Islamic achievements often excelled theirs, and that Europeans were building upon the achievements of their adversaries in science and philosophy. In addition, their discussions of religious and racial tolerance in Islamic societies, towards Jews in particular, may have offered hope that this was attainable in Europe too. It may also have been an invitation to Europeans to incorporate religious and racial tolerance into their standards of civilisations.

Yet the vigour of this early anti-Orientalism of Jewish scholars would not last; it would not survive the logic of the Zionist movement as it sought to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Such a state could only emerge as the bastard child of imperialist powers, and it could only come into existence by displacing the greater part of the Palestinian population, by incorporating them into an apartheid state, or through some combination of the two. In addition, once created, Israel could only survive as a militarist, expansionist, and hegemonic state, constantly at war with its neighbours.

In other words, once the Zionist project entered into its implementation phase after 1918, it was inevitable that the European Jews' attraction for Islam was not going to endure. In fact, it would be replaced by a bitter contest, one in which the Jews, as junior partners of the imperialist powers, would seek to deepen the Orientalist project in the service of Western power. Bernard Lewis played a leading part in this reorientation. In the words of Martin Kramer, a Zionist Orientalist himself, Bernard Lewis "came to personify the post-war shift from a sympathetic to a critical posture".

Ironically, this shift occurred when many Orientalists had begun to shed their Christian prejudice against Islam, and several were making amends for the excesses of their forebears. Another factor aiding this shift towards a less polemical Orientalism was the entry of a growing number of Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, into the field of Middle Eastern studies. The most visible upshot of these divergent trends was a polarisation of the field of Middle Eastern studies into two opposing camps.

One camp, consisting mostly of Christians and Muslims, has laboured to bring greater objectivity to their study of Islam and Islamic societies. They seek to locate their subjects in the matrix of history, see Islamic societies as adjusting to the challenges posed by the West, neither innately hostile to the West and Western values, nor trapped in some unchanging obscurantist mindset. The second camp, now led mostly by Jews, has reverted to Orientalism's original mission of subordinating knowledge to Western power, now filtered through the prism of Zionist interests. This Zionist Orientalism has assiduously sought to paint Islam and Islamic societies as innately hostile to the West, and to modernism, democracy, tolerance, scientific advance, and women's rights.

This Zionist camp has been led for more than 50 years by Bernard Lewis, who has enjoyed an intimate relationship with power that would be the envy of the most distinguished Orientalists of an earlier generation. He has been strongly supported by a contingent of able lieutenants, whose ranks have included the likes of Leonard Binder, Elie Kedourie and David Pryce-Jones. There are many foot-soldiers too who have provided distinguished service to this new Orientalism. And no compendium of these foot-soldiers would be complete without the names of Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Thomas Friedman, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Judith Miller.

I try to visualise an encounter between these new Orientalists and some of their eminent predecessors like Hienrich Heine, Abraham Geiger, Gustav Weil, Franz Rosenthal, and the great Ignaz Goldziher. What would these pro-Islamic Jews have to say to their descendants whose Orientalism denigrates and demeans the societies they study and who work to incite a civilisational war between Islam and the West? Would Geiger and Goldziher embrace Lewis and Kedourie, or would they be repelled by their new predatory Orientalism?

* The writer teaches economics at Northeastern University. His recent book, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations, was published by Palgrave (2000).

The US should consider diplomacy as a first and last resort, writes Marwan Bishara. Washington need only look to Europe to see the wisdom of this view

A sweeping fatalism is gripping the Middle East as the spectre of war defies UN diplomacy. Washington's conservatives reckon if force doesn't work, more force will, and if things don't worsen they won't improve.

Pursuing this apocalyptic path can only lead to regional chaos and eventually bring down the curtains on an American era. The proponents of another Gulf War reckon it's time for a regional "shake up" among friends and foe alike. They are betting on the easy part -- a quick victory in the war -- but ignore the impossible task of winning the peace.

Putting out fire with fire could set the whole region aflame and, no doubt, the Arab democrats will be the first to burn. Today, a fragile democratic movement in the Arab world is torn between Washington, whose methods and goals they do not share, and a defiant radical Islam whose values they cannot bare. Adhering to the liberal democratic values that America preaches is increasingly labelled as treasonous. By falling in line with the Islamists, though, democrats would betray their own values.

In most Arab countries the political alternative is the non-democratic Islamists who have evolved into the most potent political force owing to oppression and underdevelopment. Because of political repression, many people have taken refuge in religion and have been manipulated by fanatics. In authoritarian Saudi Arabia, the alternative to the royal family is an Arabian Taliban.

With 70 per cent of the Arab population under 25 years of age, the Middle East needs peace in order to groom an educated open-minded generation of Arabs capable of leading domestically and competing internationally. War and conflict will only deepen hatred of the West among youth and further alienate them from democracy.

Democratic change in the Arab world is possible through social and economic reforms that are strengthened by participatory citizenship in an atmosphere of stability -- not war. Otherwise, a repeat of the 1990 Algerian elections, in which the Islamic Front's victory was met by an army crackdown, could lead to civil strife throughout the region.

War also has the potential to open the floodgates of ethnic/religious conflict. In Iraq, the Shi'ites who make up 60 per cent of the population expect to rule. But the Sunnis are unlikely to relinquish power peacefully after centuries of rule. As for the Kurds, anything short of autonomy bordering on statehood in the oil-rich north would be unacceptable. Federalism as a way out of the impasse could lead to the break-up of Iraq under Kurdish and Iranian pressures, which would mean redrawing the map for territory between Iran and Turkey.

Shaking up the ethnic balance in Iraq has the potential to spill over into neighbouring countries with precarious ethno- demographic balances of power. The aspirations held by a Syrian Sunni majority under Alawite minority rule, the Jordanian Palestinian majority under Hashemite rule, the Bahraini Shi'ite majority under a Sunni monarch could all be awakened by changes in Iraq. A similar fate, too, could befall Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and various North African countries.

In Israel/Palestine the threat of a widening war has been clearly spelled out by Israeli ministers: Some have explicitly threatened to transfer Palestinians outside their homeland as a way of dealing with growing Israeli insecurity. A repeat of the 1948 war could only initiate another century-long cycle of conflict.

For these and other reasons, Washington must reconsider its plans for embarking on a "preemptive" war when all indications are that its aftermath would be a disaster. Such advice is not only in the region's best interest, but also in Washington's interests.

The Bush administration's most obvious alternative at this juncture is to promote United Nations Security Council resolution 1441 as the beginning of a true diplomatic process rather than taking it as a green light for war. Diplomacy is most effective when it's seen as a strategic choice. The disdain among Washington's conservatives for UN diplomacy -- the "D word" -- stems not only from faulty reasoning, but also from a growing loss of identity. Once defined by its geo- strategic confrontation with the Soviet Union, Washington is increasingly defined by its geo-economic disadvantage vis a vis the European Union's rising star -- and that bloc will soon be 25 countries-strong.

According to Charles Kupchan, director of Europe Studies and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the end of Pax Americana is near. What will replace American supremacy, and how American leaders should prepare for this new era are the central questions of Kupchan's new book, The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century. Kupchan reckons that the next challenge to America is fast emerging not from the Islamic world or an ascendant China, but from an integrating Europe, whose economy already rivals America's.

Washington's use of force has become the means by which to maintain its superpower status even though the 20th century has taught us that power is anything but restricted to military means. The 20th century is eyewitness to how the pseudo-academic Clausewitzian notion of embarking on war, as diplomacy by other means, has compromised rather than served the interests of states.

America could learn a thing or two from Israel's failures. In spite of its adherence to a doctrine of taking preemptive action and its experience in combating terrorism, Israeli casualties have been continually mounting in recent decades.

Ten times more Israelis are killed today in Palestinian attacks than were three decades ago. Worse, according to Israel's leading military historian Martin van Creveld, "If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you will become weak yourself."

That's why American conservatives' criticism of European diplomacy is counterproductive. The Americans claim that European diplomacy is driven by weakness, while their own is power-based. If Washington continues to augment its military budget and embark on offensive wars while Europe, meanwhile, grows and prospers, the US has only to look forward to a future in which it is Europe's mercenary.

Turkey and Iraq are two important examples of the limitations of force and the effectiveness of geo-economic power. Motivated by the hollow promise of membership in the European community, Turkey's secular military came to accept the results of the most recent elections; its Islamist- like government, for its part, has vowed to respect and uphold the democratic rules of the game and all of Ankara's commitments to the international community. America's use of force could hardly show a similar achievement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region.

Fortunately, America is not only the biggest military spender, it's also an economic and cultural super-power. Its programme of expanding democracy and free market economics is best served not through preemptive wars, but rather through the prevention of crisis and the promotion of peaceful resolutions to conflict.

* The writer teaches at the American University in Paris and is the author of Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid.

Lamis Andoni, in the first of a series on America's war hawks, looks at the views of the man who coined the phrase "clash of civilisations"

"Bernard Lewis has brilliantly placed the relationships and the issues of the Middle East into their larger context, with truly objective, original -- and always independent -- thought. Bernard has taught [us] how to understand the complex and important history of the Middle East and use it to guide us where we will go next to build a better world for generations" -- Paul Wolfowitz, speaking via video phone at a special ceremony held in Tel Aviv to honour the leading Orientalist in March.

American Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the US war hawks are no doubt indebted to the Princeton historian: At the age of 86, Bernard Lewis has not only provided historical justification for Washington's "war on terror", but has also emerged as chief ideologue for the recolonisation of the Arab world through an American invasion of Iraq.

Lewis's work, especially his book What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, has been a major source in what is practically a manifesto for advocates of US military intervention towards "establishing democracy in the Middle East". By declaring that the peoples of the Middle East, meaning Arabs and Iranians, have failed to catch up with modernity and have fallen into "a downward spiral of hatred and rage", Lewis has at once exonerated American imperial policies and provided a moral imperative for President George W Bush's "preemptive strikes" and "regime change" doctrines.

But the role of the man, who 12 years ago coined the term "clash of civilisations" that was later adopted by Samuel Huntington, has gone beyond that of "an apologist for colonialism", as Edward Said, his foremost critic, describes him. In fact, Lewis, according to published reports and his own statements, has been involved in lobbying, shaping and promoting the Bush Administration's most hawkish policies in support of Israel against the Palestinians, and for the aggressive use of American military force in the region.

His influence is not merely a result of his academic stature and prolific writings on Islam, rather it is primarily a function of his membership in an alliance of neo-conservatives and hard-line Zionists who have come to assume key posts in the Bush administration. Led by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the powerful alliance has been trying to put into practice a vision that they have been advocating throughout the nineties to ensure unrivalled American supremacy through the elimination of all potential threats.

On 19 February 2001, representatives of the alliance, including Lewis, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, signed a letter urging President Bill Clinton to launch a military offensive, which would have included blanket bombings, to destroy the Iraqi regime. Since assuming power, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, have called on influential friends like Lewis, and a host of hard-line pundits, to press for an American war against Iraq.

In that capacity, Lewis has assumed a bigger "insider" role than some officials in the administration who were not included in the decision-making on Iraq. According to a report in USA Today, Lewis participated in a special meeting for the Defence Advisory Board, led by the leader of warmongers, Richard Perle, on 19 September 2001. The meeting that was scheduled before the 11 September attacks had occurred, was also attended by Lewis's friend Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. By various accounts, Lewis's meetings with both President Bush, and especially a dinner with Vice-President Dick Cheney (during his days of seclusion in the immediate aftermath of 9/11), were crucial to promoting Wolfowitz's agenda of refocusing the administration's attentions on a war against Iraq.

In those meetings, and many that followed, Lewis argued that 9/11 demonstrated the danger the West was facing, especially if "Muslim terrorists" were supplied weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, Syria or Iran. His message to the administration was that the US could not afford to show weakness towards Arabs and Muslims. An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force."

Lewis often cites the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, which he criticised as "too early", as an example of such signs of weakness that inspired the Palestinians to emulate Hizbullah's "perceived victory" by launching the Intifada.

But it is his broad definition of the relationship between Islam and the West that makes Lewis invaluable to the war lobby. Arab and Muslim grievances against the West, in Lewis's view, are by in large baseless and no more than desperate attempts by failed societies to blame external powers, especially the US and Israel for their self-inflicted misery. Lewis provides "a scholarly" cover for a lobby that has been openly advocating the reshaping of the regional map to eliminate "the Arab threat to Israel". Furthermore, Lewis considers Israel and Turkey the only real nation states in the region and has been forecasting the demise and the disintegration of Arab states since the Gulf War. "Most of the states of the Middle East... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, [and] no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates -- as happened in Lebanon -- into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," Lewis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1992.

Lewis has repeatedly cited the rise of Islamism, following the decline of Pan Arabism and socialism, as evidence that all Arab and Muslim responses to Western hegemony -- ranging from the Palestinian resistance to intellectual anti-imperialist discourse -- result from irrational religious fanaticism.

Lewis seemed to relish the rise of Osama Bin Laden, who he portrayed in a 1998 article as the eloquent and poetic voice of Muslim rage, taking the Islamist's ascendancy as a vindication of his own inattention to secular and democratic forces in the region who oppose Western domination. In Lewis's world view, which has been adopted by countless media pundits, only tyrants, oppressors and fanatics would stand up to US plans for radical change in the region, while "true democrats", like certain figures in the Iraqi opposition, are awaiting military liberation at Washington's hands.

At the opening of a conference entitled "The Day After: Planning For A Post Saddam Iraq", organised by the right- wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Lewis put forward his views with respect to the current context.

As Lewis sees things, the military campaign is actually a "vision of democratisation" that elicits two types of responses. "The first could be summed up like this: The Arabs are incapable of democratic government. Arabs are different from us, and we must be more, shall we say, reasonable both in what we expect from them and in what they may expect from us. Whatever we do, these countries will be ruled by corrupt tyrants. The aim of foreign policy, therefore, should be to make sure that they are friendly tyrants rather than hostile," Lewis told the opening session of the conference on 3 October.

"The other point of view is somewhat different. It begins more or less from the same position -- that Arab countries are not democracies and that establishing democracies within Arab societies will be difficult. Yet, Arabs are teachable and democratic governance ought to be possible for them, provided we proctor and gradually launch them on our way, or I should say on their way.

"That point of view is known as imperialism. It was the method adopted in the British and French empires, in their mandated territories and in some of their colonies, creating governments in their own image. In Iraq, in Syria, and elsewhere, the British created constitutional monarchies and the French created unstable republics. None of them worked very well. But hope still remains", Lewis said as he argued for the virtue of American military intervention as an opportunity for the West to modernise the Arab world.

Lewis, who worked for British intelligence during World War II, not only has considerable nostalgia for bygone days, but has put himself solidly in the service of the new American empire, hoping it will pick up where the British and the French left off.

Amram Mitzna gets all sorts of bad press -- even the unintentional kind. As if the Labor Party candidate for prime minister in Israel's January elections did not have enough of a challenge in trying to unseat Ariel Sharon, now the Western media is hobbling his efforts to connect with the voters.

This is not to say that the journalists who cover the Middle East for wire services and major newspapers are hostile to Mitzna's candidacy. On the contrary, most of them fancy knee-jerk liberals and secretly long for him to win. The problem is that, while they fawn over him in private and actually try to help him with their reporting in public, they do so for all the wrong reasons and are therefore undermining the very cause they seek to buttress.

The current fashion is to describe Mitzna as a "dovish former general." Virtually everyone who writes about the man has adopted this formula, never bothering to check whether or not it has any basis in fact. Given the track record of Western reportage from this part of the world, a failure to get the story straight should not surprise. What is amazing is that this time, the half-wits are shooting themselves in the collective foot because they refuse to learn anything about the subject matter at hand.

For one thing, if these shapers of public opinion would get off their pedestals long enough to do even a bare minimum of research, they would quickly realize that a) Israeli voters have never been predisposed to backing "doves"; and b) they are even less likely to do so with the current conflict raging. They are, therefore, doing Mitzna no favors by making him out to be the second coming of Gandhi.

In addition -- and this is even more pertinent -- Mitzna is anything but a dove. As commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank during the first intifada, he more than matched his counterpart in the Gaza Strip in terms of taking a tough approach against Palestinian activists and militants, including their families.

To be sure, the experience taught him a thing or two about the futility of using violence and intimidation to solve political problems. It also left an indelible impression on him about the dehumanizing effect that the occupation was having on both Palestinians and Israelis.

Having woken up to a painful reality does not make one a "dove," however, only a sentient being capable of absorbing the powerful lessons imparted by first-hand experience.

Even before then, Mitzna had had a crisis of conscience when he took part in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. That debacle, which included the massacre of hundreds of women and children at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, scarred many Israeli soldiers and Mitzna was no exception. He even went so far as to offer his resignation, declaring that he could no longer serve under Sharon, who was then defense minister.

Again, being disgusted by Sharon's depraved tactics does not make one a dove. Professional military officers are not supposed to like hurting civilians, so when they protest against such crimes, they are really just doing their duty. Like those Israeli Air Force pilots who dropped their bombs into the sea rather than follow instructions to strike residential areas, Mitzna was simply revolting against what he rightly perceived to be illegal orders.

"But," the determinedly misguided will bleat, "Mitzna has to be a dove now because he wants to pull out of Gaza and start talks with the Palestinians before the shootings and bombings stop."

Irrelevant. Gaza does not belong to Israel. Every Israeli there, soldier or settler, is a walking violation of international law as embodied by the Geneva Conventions. Getting them out of there is not "dovish," only sensible. As for the timing of negotiations, history is replete with examples of people continuing to kill one another until the very moment their leaders announced that some sort of truce or treaty had been reached. As Mitzna likes to say, one makes peace with enemies, not friends.

"But," the resolutely confused will yammer, "Sharon wouldn't do any of that. He's a hawk, so Mitzna has to be a dove."

Judging one man solely by comparing him with another is always an exercise in inductive reasoning (i.e. a guess). In this case, the practice is even more flawed because Sharon is anything but a typical hawk. The latter is a hard-liner who frowns on compromise; the former is a mass murderer. Therefore, unless and until the person standing next to Sharon is Darth Vader or some sociopath who dines on human flesh, he or she will always be a "dove" by comparison.

In reality, Mitzna is a no-nonsense type who rejects the dogma that imprisons so many Israeli politicians, including many on what is referred to as "the left." He says that if he is elected, he will use both negotiations and force as he sees fit in order to protect the interests of his people. What he will not do, he insists, is close doors to any possible agreement by seeking to dictate in advance the conditions under which it will be discussed. None of that makes him a "dove," just (outwardly at least) a reasonable man.

"But," the doggedly mistaken will babble, "Israelis will be endangered by a government that fails to negotiate from a position of strength."

That is almost precisely the argument Hitler used when his generals told him to seek peace after it became apparent that the American, British, and Canadian armies flowing out of Normandy in the summer of 1944 could not be stopped. Israelis will not be safe until their leaders stop insisting on fighting battles that can't be lost for the sake of a war that they ultimately must lose. It might take fifty years or a thousand, but a continuing Israeli refusal to make a fair peace can only lead to ruin.

Mitzna's treatment at the hands of the myopic Western media has been anything but helpful, but it is still not too late for him to recover. Only a fool would declare him a savior, but at least he expresses the kind of opinions that make it possible for Israelis and Palestinians alike to envision better days ahead.

Contrast this with Sharon, whose own party's by-laws prevent its members from accepting a Palestinian state and whose coalition partners are avowed supporters of ethnic cleansing.

With no other viable candidates in the race, Mitzna's the man.

[Marc Sirois is a Canadian journalist who lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he serves as managing editor of The Daily Star. The proud and fanatically protective father of three beautiful princesses, his opinionated writing style owes to the fact that he is never wrong along with his holding monopolies on wisdom, logic, morality, and justice. He is also exceedingly modest.]

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