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Date Posted: 10:33:47 10/13/01 Sat
Author: Michael Barone
Subject: No time for neutrality
In reply to: Nikolai von Kreitor 's message, "THE THIRD WORLD WAR" on 18:08:26 10/03/01 Wed

No time for neutrality
By Michael Barone

The most important words George W. Bush spoke in his statement announcing the strikes against al Qaeda were not about Afghanistan. “Today we focus on Afghanistan,” he said, “but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.”
These were not the words of a president who has ruled out military action elsewhere; they were the words of a president who seems determined to prepare Americans for military action elsewhere. The deliberate omission of Osama bin Laden’s name in Bush’s statement and those of other administration officials is a sign that he continues to believe that this is a war with more than one theater.
“Every nation has a choice to make.” Some who have spoken of America’s need to hold together a multinational coalition have spoken as if the United States must tailor its goals to the professed sensibility of some of its putative coalition partners, especially in the Middle East. Bush’s endorsement of the goal of a Palestinian state last week suggested that he shared that view, at least up to a point. But the fact is that we do not know what the United States has demanded of nations in the Middle East. And it is entirely possible that we are already moving toward making demands of the sort suggested in the lead editorial in the October 7 Washington Post: “If the campaign against terrorism is truly to rise from the reactive strategies of the past to a mission that will transform international relations, as Mr. Bush has promised, the United States will eventually have to turn to many of this month’s allies, especially in the Middle East, and demand far-reaching changes of policy and behavior.”
For the fact is that even so-called moderate states of the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been in important ways facilitators of terrorism and propagators of the ideas championed by bin Laden. Saudi Arabia has sought to export the extreme fundamentalism of its Wahhabi Islam–bin Laden’s form of Islam–to all corners of the world, including the United States. Many of its citizens have aided bin Laden himself. Many of the September 11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The Saudi government has the capacity to get information about the al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, and is not limited in its methods by the compunctions which must govern the behavior of U.S. agents. Have George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld already demanded this information? Or will they do so in the near future? We cannot know, but we can hope they have or will.
Remember that the government of Pakistan on September 11 had no particular desire to aid the United States in any fight against terrorism. But the United States had leverage: Leaders of the Pakistani government knew that we had the capacity to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and military forces. Now Pakistan has cooperated to an extent almost no one would have predicted pre-September 11, even to the extent of cooperating with India in arresting pro-Pakistan terrorists who set off a bomb in India. We have leverage over Saudi Arabia as well: the support the United States has given its royal family in holding onto power. We do not have to threaten explicitly to withdraw that, just as we almost surely did not have to threaten explicitly to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, to use that leverage. We just have to tell the Saudis that there are certain things they must do which are extremely important to us.
We have leverage on Egypt as well, including $2 billion of aid we give every year. Egyptians were among the perpetrators of the September 11 attack as well, and we should demand that Egypt provide information on terrorists that it has or has the means to get. There is something more we should demand. Jeffrey Goldberg in the October 8 New Yorker paints a chilling picture of the opinions of leading intellectuals and journalists at Egypt’s semiofficial newspapers. One 80-year-old religious figure, who has a program on Egyptian television and regularly writes for the paper Al Ahram, tells Goldberg, “The Branch Davidians attacked the World Trade Center, the McVeigh people. The Mossad gave them help. Did you know the Israelis who work at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day? It is impossible for Osama bin Laden to do this. No Arab could have done this.” The paper Al Akhbar runs praise of Hitler and the paper Al Gomhuriya calls the Holocaust “an exaggeration.” The father of hijacker Mohammed Atta, a prominent lawyer, said, “The Mossad kidnapped my son and stole his papers. Then they spread those papers out at the World Trade Center in order to make it seem like he did it.” One is reminded of the official Egyptian response to the EgyptAir pilot who flew his plane into the sea, muttering Islamic prayers, that it just didn’t happen: This is a country where denial of truth is a national habit.
But not, evidently, a universal one. An upper-class Egyptian whom Goldberg does not name argues that the U.S. puts too little pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his government. “You allow them to manipulate you. Every time anti-American feelings appear here, Mubarak says, ‘Support me or else you see what you’ll get.’ But the suppression and the corruption and the antidemocratic behavior will create much worse fundamentalism over time. Washington never stands up to them.” Instead we have let Mubarak, like the Saudis, argue that they must let their Islamic radicals vent their feelings in the media so that they will not overthrow them at home.
But ideas have consequences. The fact is that most residents of the Middle East never have a chance to hear the case for the kind of society–a free, democratic, tolerant society–that came under attack on September 11. The poisonous ideas propagated by the media of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and the Palestinian Authority have strengthened the forces of evil and weakened the forces of good. In this climate it is not surprising that the leaders of Arab countries don’t want to be seen as backing the United States or aiding our effort against terrorism. They remember the assassination of Anwar Sadat and fear they will lose their power or their lives. But remember that the leaders of Pakistan felt the same way before September 11–and were persuaded to stand with the United States in public.
We do not need Egyptian or other Arab troops in our war against terrorism. We may need bases, but we already have them. We do need help in tracking down the terrorists they have in many cases encouraged and sheltered. But most of all we need the public support of their leaders and their media. They don’t want to give it. But it is essential to the creation of a new climate of opinion in the Arab world.

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  • THE ARROGANCE OF POWER -- NEBOJSA MALIC, 10:35:46 10/13/01 Sat
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