Arabs (101 page)

Though no organization claimed credit for the attacks, the U.S. intelligence services suspected Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida group from the outset. Within days of 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had identified all nineteen hijackers. All were Muslim Arab men—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon—with connections to al-Qaida.

The United States responded to the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 by declaring war on a largely unknown enemy. In a televised address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush declared a “war on terror” beginning with al-Qaida and continuing “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” He prepared Americans for a long and unconventional war and promised them that America would prevail.

The September 11 attacks and the war on terror placed the United States and the Arab world on a collision course. Many—certainly not all, but many—in the Arab world were glad to see America suffer. To Arab observers, the United States seemed indifferent to Arab suffering—of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, or of Iraqis under a decade of stringent sanctions. In his public pronouncements, Osama bin Ladin played on this Arab anger. “What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years,” Bin Ladin claimed in October 2001. “Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.”
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Bin Ladin’s statements from his clandestine Afghan mountain stronghold added greatly to Arab-American tensions. There was widespread admiration for the al-Qaida leader across the Arab and Muslim world. People were impressed by al-Qaida’s ingenuity in striking such a devastating blow against the United States on its own soil. Bin Ladin became an overnight cult symbol, the stencil of his face an icon of Islamic resistance to American domination. Such views were incomprehensible to Americans, who reviled Bin Ladin as a figure of unqualified evil.

The American people were frightened, confused, and extremely angry after the September 11 attacks. They felt threatened at home and unsafe abroad. They demanded their government respond swiftly and decisively against their enemies. The Bush administration responded with covert action against jihadi terror networks, and by taking America into two wars of choice that confirmed the impression in the Arab world that the war on terror was a war against Islam.

America’s war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, supported by a UNSANCTIONED and NATO-supported coalition. Their aims were to topple the rigid Islamist Taliban regime, which had provided support to Bin Ladin and his organization, and to arrest the al-Qaida leadership and destroy their training facilities in Afghanistan. The war was quick and largely successful—the Taliban were driven from the capital, Kabul, by mid-November, and the last Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds fell by mid-December 2001—and involved a minimum of U.S. ground troops.

Despite its operational successes, the Afghanistan War was marred by key failures that exacerbated the war on terror. Most immediately, the Americans failed to capture or kill Osama bin Ladin and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Both men escaped to regroup their forces and resume their fight against the United States from neighboring Pakistan. For Bin Ladin’s supporters, survival against the Americans was victory enough.

Other al-Qaida members were taken prisoner in the course of the Afghanistan War. These men were designated “enemy combatants” and denied both their rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and due process under the U.S. legal system. They were incarcerated in an extraterritorial U.S. military facility on Cuba known as the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Beginning in October 2001,
nearly 800 detainees were sent to Guantanamo, all of them Muslim. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have been released without charge, and they returned home to tell of their experiences. Ranging from humiliation to torture, the mistreatment of Guantanamo detainees provoked international condemnation and outrage in the Arab world.

Within Afghanistan, the Americans worked with local leaders to create a new political structure for the war-torn country that had suffered over twenty years of conflict. However, the Americans needed to invest a great deal in economic development and state-building to ensure the stability of President Hamid Karzai’s new government. Instead, by 2002 the Bush administration had diverted its energies and resources to planning the Iraq War, leaving the fragile Afghan state vulnerable to reconquest by the Taliban. As a result, a war that began in October 2001 with a handful of foreign ground forces expanded into a major conflict involving nearly 100,000 Western troops fighting the Taliban in 2009. And victory is far from assured.

 

Most Arab states were uncomfortable with an expanded U.S. military presence in the region. Their lukewarm support for America’s war on terrorism made the United States doubt a number of its long-time allies in the region—none more so than Saudi Arabia. The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans. Other countries came under new scrutiny as well. Egypt was seen as soft on terror, Iran and Iraq were labelled as part of an “axis of evil,” and Syria rose to the top of the ranks of countries supporting terrorism.

The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America’s war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world’s sole superpower. If they took America’s side, they opened their own territory to the threat of terror attacks by local jihadi cells inspired by Bin Ladin’s example. Between May and November 2003, cities in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey were rocked by multiple bomb attacks that left 125 dead and nearly 1,000 wounded. In November 2005, three hotels were ripped apart by coordinated bombs in Amman, Jordan, that left 57 dead and hundreds wounded—nearly all of them Jordanians. The Arab world faced tremendously difficult choices as it managed its relations with the United States.

The same pressures that drove America and the Arabs apart drew Israel and America closer together. And the more America took Israel’s side, the greater its tensions with the Arab world.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon persuaded President George W. Bush that the United States and Israel faced a common war on terror. The Second Intifada, which broke out in September 2000, had grown increasingly violent by the time of the 9/11
attacks. Palestinian suicide bombers had inflicted heavy civilian casualties on Israeli society. According to Israeli government figures, Palestinian groups carried out thirty-five suicide bomb attacks in 2001, causing 85 deaths. The death toll more than doubled the following year, with fifty-five suicide attacks killing 220 Israelis in 2002.
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The worst incident came in March 2002 when Hamas suicide bombers killed 30 and wounded 140 Israelis celebrating Passover in a hotel in Netanya.

The use of suicide bombings by Islamist groups to target innocent civilians was enough to convince President Bush that Israel and the United States were fighting against the same enemy. The United States then turned a blind eye to Israeli actions against both its Islamist foes—Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon—and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Israel took full advantage of American complacency to unleash disproportionate attacks against Palestinian government and society that heightened tensions in the Arab world enormously.

In June 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the reoccupation of the West Bank. Though he justified the measure in terms of assuring Israel’s security from terror attacks, Sharon’s move was clearly intended to isolate Yasser Arafat and weaken the Palestinian Authority. As Israeli forces seized Palestinian cities that had been under self-rule—Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya—they stepped up attacks against the Palestinian resistance.

Once they were back in control of key Palestinian cities, the Israelis tried to eliminate the leadership of Palestinian parties and militias by targeted assassination. Their attempts to assassinate militant leaders in densely inhabited areas normally led to extensive civilian casualties. In July 2002 the Israelis leveled an entire apartment building with a 2,000-pound bomb in their bid to assassinate Hamas commander Salah Shahada. They killed Shahada, along with eighteen other residents, including a number of children. Such use of heavy weaponry in urban areas inflicted heavy casualties on the Palestinian people. From the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 until the end of 2001, some 750 Palestinians were killed; in 2002, the number of Palestinians killed exceeded 1,000.

On top of the use of lethal force, Israel imposed a number of collective punishments borrowed from British mandate–era Emergency Regulations. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada at the end of 2000, the Israelis have arrested thousands of Palestinians. Some have been tried and sentenced to long prison terms, others have been expelled. Yet others have been held under administrative detention for months on end, without charges or even access to the evidence against them, leaving them no means to challenge their detention or prove their innocence. As a further deterrent, in October 2001 the Israelis began to demolish the homes of Palestinians suspected of involvement in attacks against Israel. The policy of house demolitions was only discontinued in February 2005, when the Israeli chief of staff acknowledged that the policy had no deterrent effect. Over this period, the Israeli military destroyed
664 Palestinian houses, leaving 4,200 people homeless, according to Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.

As the Israeli military struggled to contain the Second Intifada, the Sharon government exacerbated tensions with the Palestinians through measures designed to seize more territory in the West Bank. Israeli settlements expanded in the Occupied Territories. And in June 2002 the Israeli government began construction of a 720-kilometer (450-mile) wall, ostensibly to insulate Israel from Palestinian terror attacks. The Separation Barrier (dubbed the Apartheid Wall by Palestinians) cuts a path deep into the West Bank and represents a de facto annexation of nearly 9 percent of the Palestinian territory in the West Bank, adversely affecting the lives and livelihoods of nearly 500,000 Palestinians.
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Israel’s repression of the Second Intifada proved a clear liability to America’s war on terror. The images of Palestinian suffering, broadcast live via Arab satellite television, provoked fury across the Middle East. Israeli actions, and U.S. inaction, proved valuable recruiting devices for al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. The Bush administration was forced to engage in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking to try to diffuse regional tensions.

President Bush, recognizing the adverse effect Israeli policies had on America’s attempts to win Arab “hearts and minds” in the war on terror, decided to address the Palestine issue directly. In a major White House address delivered on June 24, 2002, Bush held out a vision of a Palestinian state “living side by side in peace and security” with Israel—the first time an acting U.S. president had openly advocated Palestinian statehood. However, the Bush vision required the Palestinians to “elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror”—a clear swipe at the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.

There was much in Bush’s speech to assuage Arab concerns. President Bush called on the Israelis to withdraw their troops from the West Bank and to return to the positions they held prior to the outbreak of the Second Intifada on September 28, 2000. He also called for an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. These were new, substantive steps toward recognizing Palestinian suffering under occupation and towards acknowledging legitimate aspirations to independent statehood.

Even so, Bush’s speech did not receive a favorable reception in the Arab world. His many references to combating terror made clear to Arab viewers that Bush was more concerned with prosecuting his war on terror than achieving a just and durable solution to the Palestinian problem. The Arabs doubted Bush’s sincerity—and for good reason. By the summer of 2002, his administration was already planning for war against Iraq.

The United States presented its case for war against Iraq in terms of the global war on terror. The Bush administration alleged that Saddam Hussein’s government had amassed a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, and precursors for a nuclear weapon. British prime minister Tony Blair echoed Bush’s concerns and aligned the United Kingdom with America’s stance on Iraq. The White House also suggested that Saddam Hussein’s government had connections to Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida organization. The Bush administration invoked the war on terror and threatened a preemptive war to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the most dangerous terrorists.