Miniatures

Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics

Daniel Pipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138512245
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351323185
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The volatility of Muslim and Middle Eastern politics has made these interrelated topics an overriding preoccupation of world and especially U.S. politics. Perhaps no region of the world has ever so dominated the American public discourse as the Middle East does today. As Daniel Pipes shows, this results mainly, but not exclusively, from the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing war on terrorism. Other sources of trouble include militant Islam, Muslims in the West, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iraq situation, relations with Saudi Arabia, the price of oil and gas, and U.S. policy toward all these issues. These are the central themes of the roughly one hundred essays in Daniel Pipes' Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics.As Pipes notes, the Islamist war against America preceded the events of 9/11. Nevertheless, response to the earlier attacks had been inconsistent and somewhat nonchalant. Pipes shows how the State Department's annual report on Patterns of Global Terrorism veers into unreliability and even falsehood. He explains the problem in George W. Bush trying to decide what is true Islam and what not, in U.S. academics hiding the true meaning of the word "jihad," and in seventh-grade textbooks proselytizing for Islam. Pipes demonstrates that many seemingly devout Islamists are in fact impious frauds. When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Pipes indicates how the failure of the Oslo process could be discerned as early as 1994 and he shows how Yasir Arafat speaks one way to Arabs and another way to Israelis.This important collection, by one of the foremost experts in the field, presents original insights, accessibly written for Middle East specialists, political scientists, policymakers, journalists, and the interested public.

Part 1
War On Terrorism

1

Before 9/11

“Death To America”

Terrorism’s war on America did not begin in September 2001. It began in November 1979, not long after Ayatollah Khomeini rode the slogan “Death to America” to power—and sure enough, the at-tacks on Americans soon began. Militant Islamic mobs besieged two U.S. embassies that month.

• In Iran, a militant Islamic mob took over the U.S. embassy in the capital Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for the next 444 days. The rescue team sent to free those hostages in April 1980 suffered eight fatalities.
• In Pakistan, false rumors that U.S. troops had helped seize the Great Mosque in Mecca led to an attack on the embassy in Islamabad and the American Cultural Center in Lahore. The Pakistani authorities’ slow response gave the mobs time to bum both buildings, killing four persons in Islamabad, two of them Americans.

These were the first of what are by now nearly four thousand fatalities at the hands of militant Islam’s assault on Americans.

The Islamists’ initial major act of violence against Americans, killing sixty-three, took place in April 1983 when they attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. As the analyst David Makovsky notes, Washington “beat a hasty exit, and Islamic militants saw this as a vindication that suicide bombing was... deadly effective.”

Other attacks included:

October 1983: 241 dead at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

December 1983: five dead at the U.S. embassy in Kuwait.

January 1984: the president of the American University of Beirut killed.

April 1984: eighteen dead near a U.S. airbase in Spain.

September 1984: sixteen dead at the U.S. embassy in Beirut (again).

December 1984: Two dead on a plane hijacked to Tehran.

June 1985: One dead on a plane hijacked to Beirut.

After a let-up, the attacks then restarted: Five and nineteen dead in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, 224 dead at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and seventeen dead on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

Simultaneously, the murderous assault of militant Islam also took place on U.S. soil:

July 1980: an Iranian dissident killed in the Washington, D.C. area.

August 1983: a leader of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam killed in Canton, Mich.

August 1984: three Indians killed in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash.

September 1986: a doctor killed in Augusta, Ga.

January 1990: an Egyptian freethinker killed in Tucson, Ariz.

November 1990: a Jewish leader killed in New York.

February 1991: an Egyptian Islamist killed in New York.

January 1993: two CIA staff killed outside agency headquarters in Langley, Va.

February 1993: six people killed at the World Trade Center.

March 1994: an Orthodox Jewish boy killed on the Brooklyn Bridge.

February 1997: a Danish tourist killed on the Empire State building.

October 1999: 217 passengers killed on an EgyptAir flight near New York City.

In all, 800 persons lost their lives in the course of attacks by militant Islam on Americans before September 2001—more than killed by any other enemy since the Vietnam War. (Further, this listing does not include the dozens more Americans in Israel killed by militant Islamic forces as well as further afield yet, including Americans killed in Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Philippines.)

And yet, these murders hardly registered. Washington threatened retribution (“You can run but you can’t hide”) for attacks against Americans, but hardly ever carried through. “Scandal” is how one Israeli pilot correctly describes the military’s inability to protect the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Only with the events of Sep-tember 11, 2001, did Americans finally realize that “Death to America” truly is the battle cry of this era’s most dangerous foe, militant Islam.

In retrospect, the mistake began when Iranians assaulted the U.S. embassy in Tehran and met with no resistance. Interestingly, a Marine sergeant present at the embassy that fateful day in November 1979 agrees with this assessment. As the militant Islamic mob invaded the embassy, Rodney V. Sickmann followed orders and protected neither himself nor the embassy. As a result, he was taken hostage and lived to tell the tale. (He now works for Anheuser-Busch.)

Looking back, he believes that passivity was a mistake. The Ma-rines should have done their assigned duty, even if it cost their lives: “Had we opened fire on them, maybe we would only have lasted an hour.” But had they done that, they “could have changed history.” Standing their ground would have sent a powerful signal that the United States of America cannot be attacked with impunity. In con-trast, the embassy’s surrender sent the opposite signal—that it’s open season on Americans. “If you look back, it started in 1979; it’s just escalated,” Sickmann correctly concludes.

To which one of the century’s great geostrategist thinkers, Robert Strausz-Hupé, adds his assent. Just before passing away early in 2002 at the age of ninety-eight, Strausz-Hupé wrote his final words, and they were about the war on terrorism: “I have lived long enough to see good repeatedly win over evil, although at a much higher cost than need have been paid. This time we have already paid the price of victory. It remains for us to win it.”

(8 September 2002)

Khomeini, Between The S.U. And U.S.

A year after the revolution of 1979, Iran appears to be drifting into the Soviet orbit. While the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has fulminated often and loudly against a satanic United States, he has rarely condemned the Soviet assault on Afghanistan. His support of the continued holding of the fifty-two American hostages has led Western countries to cut some economic ties with Iran, forcing that country to depend more on trade with the Soviet Union.

Why does Khomeini alienate the United States, the one country that can protect him from the Soviet Union? Westerners, unable to answer this question, throw up their hands in despair and declare Khomeini irrational. But this is glib. Khomeini is not crazy; rather, he represents the Islamic tradition in Iranian culture and his actions make sense in the context of that tradition.

In the Western view, the Soviet Union threatens Iran far more than does the United States: It looms across a long common border and espouses an atheistic doctrine incompatible with Islam and many other institutions of Iranian life, such as private property and the family unit as an ideal.

But for the Ayatollah, it is America that is more threatening. He believes that after 1953, the United States government controlled the Shah and his regime and the Iranian people; further, he believes that Washington is trying to overthrow him and regain its old power. The failed rescue mission confirmed this fear.

It is American, not Soviet culture, that pervades Iran and horrifies Ayatollah Khomeini by, in his view, endangering the Islamic way of life with its loose ways (alcohol, jeans, pop music, nightclubs, movies, dancing, mixed bathing, pornography), with its conspicuous consumption, and with foreign ideologies (such as nationalism and liberalism). He and his followers fervently want an Iran free of foreign domination. So long as they perceive America as the greatest threat to Iran, nothing prevents them from relying on the Soviet Union. Although we share with the Iranians a respect for religion, private property and the family unit, the Ayatollah’s regime also shares much with the Marxists against the West.

For one thing, they both feel considerable antipathy toward the West. The Soviet government, like Khomeini, worries about the al-lure of Western culture and tries desperately to contain it.

In an odd parallel, Islam claims to replace Christianity as the final revelation from God, and communism claims to succeed capitalism as the final stage of economic evolution. The West infuriates both its would-be successors with its continued wealth and power. They respond by presenting the West with its most sustained opposition. Just as earlier in this century they led the attack on European imperialism, today the Soviet Union and Muslim members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are mounting the main challenge to Western political and economic power. Both have revolutionary temperaments; claiming a monopoly on truth, why should either allow imperfect or evil ways to exist for another day? Each propagates its message with rhetorical shrillness, indoctrination, biased law courts, and firing squads. Both tend not to tolerate dissent and regard nonbelievers with suspicion, emphasizing the deep gulf between themselves and outsiders.

Activist Islam and Marxism emphasize international solidarity over nationalism, community needs over those of the individual, egalitarianism over freedom.

Both engage in social engineering—this is the most important consideration. Scorning the modest goals and realistic expectations of liberalism, activist Muslims and Marxists pursue noble-sounding yet unattainable standards for society. For example, Islam forbids interest on money, and communism denounces profits, yet commercial life requires both.

Finally, because activist Islam and Marxism touch on every as-pect of life, their governments incline toward totalitarianism.

While Khomeini shares ideological elements with both the United States and the Soviet Union, as a devout Muslim he believes in the superiority of his own creed and execrates both alternatives.

In the end, however, ideologies cancel out and Khomeini aligns Iranian foreign relations in accordance with his hopes and fears, not on the basis of theoretical affinities.

At present, Khomeini fears the United States more than the Soviet Union: The Russians are near but for him America is already within Iran. Our culture, not the Russians’, has been undermining the Muslim way of life in Iran for decades. So long as these fears remain paramount, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers can be expected to veer Iran toward the Soviet Union, for its ideology appears no worse to him than does our own.

(27 May 1980)

The New Enemy

On their way to power in Iran in 1978 Islamists shouted “Death to America,” and they haven’t stopped in the twenty years since. With this cry they declared war on the United States. Now, in August 1998, in a stunning development, the U.S. finally responded. Let’s hope that the missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan truly mark a turning point, as President Bill Clinton and his aides have promised.

By Islamists I don’t mean traditional, pious Muslims who attend mosque and do their best to live by Islam’s many laws. The Islamists are Muslims who practice a distinctly twentieth-century, politicized version of Islam. They have turned an ancient faith into a modern- style ideology. Rejecting the “isms” that have come out of the West, such as liberalism and communism, they have declared that their version of Islam is an all-encompassing political outlook superior to anything the West can produce.

A state of war exists between them and the West, mainly America, not because of the American response but because Islamists see themselves in a long-term conflict with Western values. When Hasan at- Turabi, the effective leader of Sudan and a leading Islamist thinker, explicitly states that the Muslim world is currently at war, “Against its attackers, led by the imperialist powers—chiefly the U.S. and Israel,” it’s not hard to miss the point.

A closer look reveals that these Islamists, despite their viciously anti-Western views, have in fact imbibed some Western ways whole-sale, and often right at the source. It’s hardly accidental that so many of them, whether leaders or terrorist operatives, are engineers. They pride themselves on having mastered some of the West’s most privileged knowledge.

Why, then, do they see themselves in battle with the United States? To understand, it is best to see them in the framework of other twentieth-century revolutionaries that upheld totalitarian causes. Like fascists or Marxist-Leninists, they are absolutely convinced that they know how to achieve the just society (in this case, through the minute application of Islam’s many laws in all spheres of life, including the political); they rely on the state to remake human beings; and they are prepared to destroy anyone who obstructs their path.

Also, like fascists and communists, they viscerally hate the United States. Americans—individualistic, hedonistic, and democratic— challenge all they represent, and the United States stands as the single greatest obstacle to fulfilling their vision. They hate Americans for who they are, not for what they do; short of giving up the American way of life, the United States cannot please or appease them.

This is why “Death to America” is not empty rhetoric. Time and again, Islamists have assaulted American citizens and institutions; the total death toll from all these and dozens of other attacks num-bers over 600. In other words, more Americans have been killed and injured by Middle Eastern-related terrorism than by any other hostile force since the end of the Vietnam War.

What to do about this threat? Unfortunately, the U.S. government until now has seen this violence not as the ideological war it is, but as a sequence of discrete criminal incidents. This approach turns the U.S. military into a sort of global police force and requires it to have an unrealistically high level of certainty before it can go into action. Basically, it must have proof of the sort that can stand up in a U.S. court of justice. When such evidence is lacking, as is usually the case, the terrorists get away with their savagery. This explains why last Thursday’s retaliations against sites in Afghanistan and Sudan were only the second such action in twenty years, the last one being the April 1986 bombing of Libya. In the vast majority of cases, the criminal paradigm assures that the U.S. government does not respond and killers of Americans pay little or no price.

The paradigm needs to be shifted. Seeing acts of terror as battles, not crimes, changes and improves the whole approach. As in a con-ventional war, America’s military should not need to know the names and specific actions of enemy soldiers before fighting them. When reasonable evidence points to Middle Eastern terrorists having harmed Americans, U.S. military force should be deployed. If the perpetrator is not precisely known, then punish those who are known to harbor terrorists. Go after governments and organizations that support terrorism, not just individuals.

What to target? Missile installations, airfields, navy ships, and ter-rorist camps. In every case, the punishment should be dispropor-tionately greater than the attack, so that it stings. The U.S. has a military force far more powerful than any other in the world; why spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on it and not deploy it to defend Americans, or spend tens of billions for intelligence services if they’re not able to finger suspects?

The missile attacks on Sudanese and Afghan targets will have long-term significance only if they are not a one-time event, but the start of a new era in which the U.S. government establishes a newly fearsome reputation. From now on, anyone who harms Americans should know that retribution will be certain and nasty. This means that Washington must retaliate every single time terrorism harms an American.

To those who say this would start a cycle of violence, the answer is simple: That cycle already exists; Americans are murdered in acts of terrorism every few months. Further, American retaliation is far more likely to stop it than to spur it on. The Islamists and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: War On Terrorism
• Part 2: Islam And Muslims
• Part 3: The Arab-Israeli And Other Conflicts
• Part 4: American Views
• Sources
• Index