Informed Comment

*A new, 50-minute Bin Laden tape aired on al-Jazeerah, calling for Muslims to make a united stand against the looming US war in Iraq. Like Bush, Bin Laden insisted that Muslims are either with him or against him, no shades of grey. He called the Gulf leaders cooperating with the US “Karzais,” a reference to the pro-American president of Afghanistan who helped overthrow the Taliban. He also said that the final object of U.S. strategy is to create a greater Israel, covering “large parts of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, the land of the two holy shrines (Saudi Arabia) and the whole of Palestine.” He further asserted that “what is happening to our relatives in Palestine only represents a model” which will be implemented all through the Middle East by the “Zionist-American alliance”.

It has often been said that al-Qaeda is not interested in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, but this assertion has always been silly. Bin Laden fulminated against the Israelis in a sermon given in Jidda in 1990 during the first Intifada, and al-Qaeda has all along had prominent Palestinian members. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, checked out Israeli sites for a terrorist attack, and more recently we had the Mombasa attack on Israeli vacationers.

The spectacle of Ariel Sharon repeatedly invading Palestinian territory, subjecting it to harsh occupation, having rockets fired into civilian apartment buildings, starving Palestinian children, shooting civilians, imposing collective punishment, and so on, is guaranteed to cost American lives because all this will be blamed on the US by the radicals. If Bush had been smart, his first move after Afghanistan would have been to throw his muscle around and settle the Palestine issue by forcing an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Apparently he has fallen for a line from the neocons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon’s ass. So, he has put Sharon on a very long leash. Rightwing Zionists keep claiming you can’t criticize Israel unless you criticize all the other human rights violators in the world at the same time. But what other country is running a colony as a prison camp in the 21st century?

*The divorce rate among Israeli settlers on the West Bank and in Gaza is way up during the past year, and is much higher than the 33% divorce rate in Israel proper. Apparently stealing other people’s land and shooting their children provokes a lot of domestic arguments.

*In an interview with Time magazine, French President Jacques Chirac said: “a war of this kind cannot help but give a big lift to terrorism. It would create a large number of little bin Ladens”. The French have much more experience dealing with Muslim radicals like the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and were much more aware than the FBI and the CIA of the threat they posed in past years, and Chirac may be counted on to know whereof he speaks. In contrast, I very much doubt that President Bush could tell you what the difference is between a Sunni and a Shiite. Moreover, France is near to Muslim North Africa and has 5 million Muslims living in the country, and these issues affect it directly on a scale dwarfing the situation in the US.

*Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya has been at the forefront of urging a US war on the Baathist regime. On Sunday, however, he broke with Washington. The Bush administration put enormous pressure on Makiya, whom President Bush had appointed to a special commission on Iraq, not to go public with his concerns. He published his critique, however, in the Guardian’s Observer. You can read it in full here: http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,896554,00.html.

He writes: “The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities. The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government.”

In other words, the Bush administration is not actually going into Iraq to establish democracy. Rather, the Iraqi people will just be forced at gunpoint to trade a belligerant dictatorship for a pliant one. This is to be Chile 1973, not Japan 1945. I have been very afraid myself all along that the Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes would pull this switch on us at the last minute. In my view, the Left should be concentrating on this issue. There is some point in demonstrating against the looming war, simply to remind the gang in Washington that they rule over real people with real opinions, and can’t count on getting away with perpetual wars. The war will happen anyway, though. The most useful thing we could do is to hold the Bush administration to its promises about democracy in Iraq. If this war is fought merely to replace one dictatorship with another, it will be a black stain on the American soul ever after.

*A hundred deputies in the Iranian parliament called Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on the mat for inviting his Iraqi counterpart, Naji Sabri al-Hadithi, to Tehran. They say they will introduce a motion for his dismissal if al-Hadithi sets foot in Tehran. Many Iranians have not forgiven the Baath regime for the Iran-Iraq war, which killed hundreds of thousands and wounded many more. Anti-imperialism means little to them beside that catastrophe, and they don’t want Kharrazi conferring with the Iraqi even to coordinate efforts at forestalling an American invasion.

* Pakistani sucurity forces believe the US is overestimating how many al-Qaeda members are in Pakistan’s tribal belt. They complain that in 90 percent of cases, information supplied by the CIA and Centcom about targets lead to nothing when the Pakistanis follow up on them. Pakistani officials think there are only 30 to 50 al-Qaeda men at most in that area. This motley crew consists mainly of Chechens and Uzbeks, though a few may be Arabs. *Dawn* Reported that they are stuck. “They have been trapped there and don’t know where to go,” said one Pakistani official. The Pakistan security forces have captured about 500 of the 1,000 al-Qaeda fighters thought to have fled south from Afghanistan last year, and have turned about 450 of those over to the Americans.

*A UN official told me he had never seen someone humiliated as badly at the UN as Colin Powell was today by the comments in the Security Council. The French essentially accused him of not being truthful in his attempts to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. (I am afraid the French are right about this one.) Everyone but the British wanted to give the inspectors more time. This individual thought that the meeting ended the prospects of a war on Iraq any time soon. I told him I disagreed. I very much doubt that Donald Rumseld cares what the Security Council thinks, and if he wants to go to war, he will. Hint: The World Bank, a UN institution, is refusing to send any representatives to Pakistan between now and early March for fear an Iraq war may break out in that period. Do they know something we don’t? A recent poll showed that most Americans want Bush to give the inspectors more time.

*Meanwhile, President Bush called Pakistan’s military “president,” Pervez Musharraf, and got Musharraf to agree that Iraq should voluntarily disarm immediately. (Musharraf still wants a second, explict UNSC resolution authorizing war on Iraq, though). At the same time, US Sec. of State Colin Powell was pledging he would ask Congress to waive possible sanctions on Pakistan for violating rules against dangerous technology transfer (they bought missiles from N. Korea) and democracy (the recent elections were only semi-democratic). The US has already forgiven $1 bn. of the $3 bn. Pakistan owes for loans, and the other $2 bn will probably be forgiven as well, if Pakistan goes along with another Iraq war. The official Pakistani position is that the inspectors should be given more time. Musharraf will probably cave, though many of the elected Members of Parliament in Pakistan, especially the fundamentalist MMA are hopping mad about US imperial interventions. They warn that Pakistan is next on Rumsfeld’s list (probably not true).

*Turkey is seeking at least $14 bn and possibly $25 bn. from the US as an incentive to cooperate in the Iraq war. They asked for $1 bn. in 1990, the US agreed, and then Congress refused to pay it. If I were the Turks, I would get the money in the bank before the war starts. Selling your soul is one thing; selling it and not ever receiving the payment is about the worst thing you could imagine. Egypt is also seeking extra aid to make up for the economic damage of the war to their economy (tourism is worth billions of dollars a year, and the tourists don’t go to Egypt when there is a war in the Middle East). And, the Israelis want an extra $2 bn. and $10 bn. in loan guarantees. Bush senior was ribbed because he was said to have rented out US troops to the Kuwaitis and Saudis, who largely paid for the Gulf War. But he was a better businessman than W., who is having to buy acquiescence to US military action in the Middle East, and not on the cheap, either.

*There is not much good news these days, so the ruling of the Belgian supreme court that Ariel Sharon can be tried there for war crimes is most welcome. An Israeli commission already found Sharon at least partially responsible for the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982. Accusations usually concentrate on this incident, in which he deliberately handed over unarmed Palestinian populations to the far rightwing Phalangist militiamen, who promptly mowed them down with machine gun fire. Photos show women and children lying awkwardly on the ground. But the entire 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a war crime. It killed 18,000 people, 9,000 of them innocent noncombatants; and there was no legitimate reason for the invasion. Sharon just wanted to reshape Lebanese politics, the way his disciples in the Bush administration now want to reshape Iraqi politics. We’ll see if the American Likudniks have more luck than Sharon himself did. His invasion failed to crush the Palestinians and ultimately stirred the Lebanese Shiites to turn fundamentalist and attack the Israelis with a new technique: suicide bombings. Then last year Sharon ordered Israeli pilots to fire rockets at an apartment building in which a Hamas terrorist was thought to be present. Over a dozen innocent civilians were killed, including a little baby. You can’t just fire rockets into people’s apartments! Terrorism wrought on Israelis by Hamas is a horrible thing, but this sort of reprisal tactic is never justified. Sharon should stand trial for this alone (so should the pilot). The Israelis have launched a vicious verbal attack on Belgium and are trying to get the US to pressure the government to back down. But, if Pinochet can be arrested in Europe, why not Sharon? Pinochet killed many more people, but a war crime is a war crime.

*What seems striking to me about Bin Laden’s list of governments ripe for overthrow [in his recent message] is that it excludes both Egypt and Algeria. I am sure the exclusion is only a matter of prioritizing; He hasn’t given up altogether.

Bin Laden began supporting the radical Islamists in Algeria soon after the Algerian army stepped in to cancel the results of the 1991 elections that gave FIS (the Islamic Salvation Front) a majority in parliament.. The radical Islamists broke off from FIS subsequently and formed the Armed Islamic Group under Mourad Sid Ahmed (a returnee from Afghanistan with strong links to Bin Laden). Sid Ahmed and other “Afghan Arabs” had returned to Algeria after 1989, and insisted on wearing Afghan clothing in the streets of Algiers. The Armed Islamic Group has mainly carried out terrorism in Algeria, where it has killed over 100 foreign nationals, and has killed many more locals in the rural areas. Ahmad Ressam, the Millennium Plot bomber who was caught at the US-Canadian border in 2000 with explosives in his truck headed for the LA airport, was an example of the GIA/ al-Qaeda nexis.

The civil war between the army and the Islamists in Algeria has, as everyone here knows, resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, and GIA (Armed Islamic Group) leaders have been killed in large numbers. Antar az-Zouari was killed by security forces just a few months ago.

In Egypt, as well, there was a huge fight between the regime and the radical Islamists in the 1990s, in which the Mubarak regime imprisoned an estimated 20,000 – 30,000 and killed some 1500 in street battles. The once-radical leadership of the al-Jama`a al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad al-Islami in Tura prison renounced violence in 1998, and all but about 12,000 of the detainees have been released.

My guess is that Bin Laden has dropped Egypt and Algeria because the Islamists there have been devastated, and most likely the “Afghan Arabs” who were part of his network are dead or exiled. Indeed, the September 11 attacks were launched against the US partially because of frustration that it had succeeded in shoring up the Egyptian and Algerian governments, and Bin Laden hoped to push America out of the Middle East by making such support seem costly. (This was a miscalculation on his part, since in actuality the US is moving into the Middle East big time instead).

Bin Laden is therefore suggesting that his followers concentrate on overthrowing regimes that are more fragile than those of Egypt and Algeria, where the radical Islamists have not met with such devastating setbacks yet.

This pragmatism is in part driven by Bin Laden’s urgent need for another regime friendly to al-Qaeda, given the fall of the Taliban and the loss of the support of the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence (which is being purged of pro-Taliban officers). I think he is saying that his followers should stop beating their heads against the wall in Egypt and Algeria and concentrate their efforts on regimes that are potentially more vulnerable.

*In addition to Irene Gendzier’s forthcoming article, there is a good summary of the evidence for US supply to Iraq of significant materials and precursors for its weapons of mass destruction by William Blum in a 1998 issue of the Progressive at:

http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html

One Reagan administration official was quoted as saying that the US had been determined to “do whatever was necessary” to save Iraq from Khomeini.

Some key information in this regard was unearthed by a Senate investigation of the early 1990s, which published its report in 1994