Fight for Peace on All Fronts

The U.S. military strikes against the terrorist infrastructure presided over by Osama bin Laden are only one necessary element in protecting innocent lives and American interests. For the threat to the United States comes both from self-created groups of militants carrying the banner of their own brand of Islam and from Saddam Hussein’s secular state of Iraq. They share only one ideology: the perception of Israel as the source of Arab woes.

It is a perception fed by history and reinforced by the current reality of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Consequently, Islamic terrorism, Saddam Hussein’s challenges to the United Nations and Israel’s refusal to move toward peace with the Arabs form three threads within the same fabric of American security. Only by recognizing this fact can the United States begin to shore up its shaken defenses.

The centuries-old distrust of the West that burrows in the Arab psyche is part myth and part reality. It began in the 12th century, when Christian barbarians wearing the cross of the Crusades swept into the Islamic Empire. There the products of Europe’s Dark Ages came face to face with a civilization that for 400 years had tended a lamp of learning fueled with the oils of Greece and Persia. In Arab eyes, their great civilization cracked under the hooves of crusader horses. By the 16th century, the once-great Arabs languished behind a wall erected by the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of the 20th century, Zionists, principally from the West, breached that wall to come to Palestine to build a Jewish state. In 1948, they succeeded at the expense of the Palestinians and Arab pride. Financed, protected and nurtured by the United States, Israel not only endured but became the major military power in the Middle East. As such, it crystallized as the emblem of Arab impotence.

With the blessing of the United States, Israel adopted as its sole formula of survival the power of the strong over the weak. The Arabs saw the big stick of Israel on the backs of the Palestinians in the victory of 1967, which gave the Jewish state the West Bank and Gaza, and in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which left Israel with its “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Tired of fighting the losing war, Arab governments essentially retreated from the struggle. In 1987, it was the stones of the street fighters of the intifada that gave the Palestinians and their Arab brothers a semblance of respect. In the meantime, others had unleashed their own deadly weapon: terrorism aimed at Israel and its American protector.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein suddenly broke the mythology of Arab unity when he invaded Kuwait. The Gulf War that followed tossed the pieces of the Middle East power puzzle into a new pattern. The United States established itself militarily on Arab soil. United Nations sanctions chained Saddam Hussein. And then in 1993, Israelis and Palestinians came to Washington, each to recognize the existence of the other. Most of the Arab states followed in acknowledging the right of Israel to exist. At the end of a road named the Oslo peace process lay the promise of genuine peace in which Israelis and Arabs were to enjoy a semblance of equality. It was not to be.

Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein declared the American military presence in the Arab world “the new Crusade.” Arab terrorism aimed at the fragile peace process led to the election of Netanyahu and his band of religious fanatics and ultranationalists. Bent on destroying the Oslo process in the name of national security and territorial ambition, the Netanyahu government has succeeded in pushing the Arabs once again into a state of humiliating impotence. Yet as a defiant Israel refuses to honor its commitments, the U.S. cajoles and pleads but refuses to act against Netanyahu’s right-wing government. The result is a bitter, deep-seated anger that infuses the Arab world.

This is what Bin Laden, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and others of their ilk feed on. This is also what gives Saddam Hussein his standing among the Arabs.

If the United States is ever going to secure its interests in the Middle East, it cannot continue to do what it did last week: announce on Monday that sanctions on Iraq “may stay on in perpetuity,” then remain quiet on Wednesday when Israel announced that it will build 5,000 housing units for Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights and on Thursday send cruise missiles to destroy suspected terrorist installations in Afghanistan and Sudan.

If last week’s military action is ultimately to succeed, the president must push the Arab-Israeli peace process with the same determination with which he rightly struck the terrorist infrastructure of Bin Laden. And Congress must back him.