Terrorism is served by the policies Bush and his Israeli allies have embraced, writes Ayman El-Amir* "Why do they hate us" was the most perplexing question that gripped Americans in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks seven years ago. The groping for answers did not take long as the Halliburton- Bush administration produced its own hasty response. It launched a carpet-bombing campaign of Afghanistan from end to end, ousted the backward rule of the Taliban, chased Al-Qaeda's leaders and operatives and adopted in September 2002 the Bush doctrine of hot pursuit and pre-emptive strikes against suspected terrorist targets. Billions of US dollars and tens of thousands of brains and hardware were poured into the global war on terror. It forestalled some plots but failed to prevent others in London, Madrid and North Africa. The Halliburton-instigated invasion of Iraq then shifted the focus and relegated the "Why do they hate us" question to the background of the short American memory. One of the versions concocted by the Halliburton-Bush administration to sell the Iraqi war was to fight the terrorist coalition of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. All evidence belied the notion of any possible connection. Instead of serving as the landmark in stamping out terrorism, Iraq itself became a hotbed of terrorism. It turned into a jihadist's dream of crushing "the infidels", a freedom fighter's dream of evicting the conquerors, and a multifarious sectarian dream of settling old scores. The relative drop in attacks and number of casualties the US command structure is now flaunting to justify the reduction of occupation forces is misleading: divided Iraq is not turning into a peaceful country and will not be so for a long time to come. The US-led global war on terror is faring even worse in Afghanistan where NATO troops are fighting desperate battles against a resurgent Taliban. The lessons of past British occupation and Soviet conquest remain unlearned. And NATO generals are experiencing self-doubts that the war against terror in Afghanistan can ever be won. A US analyst once compared trying to crush Al-Qaeda to smashing a ball of mercury with a sledgehammer. All that happens is that it breaks up into a myriad of smaller balls each having the same chemical elements of the original ball. After seven years of Bush's global war, terrorism has mushroomed, the world is not a safer place to live in and the agonising question of "Why do they hate us" still persists. The UN's experience in tackling the problem may be relevant here. As the United Nations started addressing the issue of terrorism more than 20 years ago it called for examining the root causes of the problem. It sought to isolate the phenomenon of acts of revenge by an aggrieved minority group against society from a mass movement of national resistance against military occupation, as in the case of the Palestinian people against Israel. Further, it could not agree on a blanket definition of terrorism. The Halliburton-Bush administration tried and failed to provide a military answer to the question of radical ideology. As a result, US and other Western analysts do not preclude the possibility of future acts of terrorism in Western countries and on US territory itself. When the US mounted its irredeemable war against Iraq that brought to Iraqis untold suffering, it tried to sweeten the pot by proposing the "Greater Middle East" initiative. It argued that the root cause of Middle East- generated terrorism has been the suppression of democracy, denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and political, economic and social marginalisation -- a reasonably good diagnosis. The initiative pledged to help the Arab people restore these rights. It also suggested that a just settlement of the Palestinian problem could help take the wind out of the sails of freedom fighters- cum-terrorists. The initiative was short lived as entrenched Arab autocrats persuaded the Halliburton-Bush administration that upsetting the political applecart in the region would not be in its best interest. Oil and strategic interests were more worthy than a slew of ideals that the Arabs had long lived without. In addition, the now-comatose former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had fostered the idea in the minds of the neoconservatives that all acts of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and expansion were acts of terrorism. It was soon determined that a sitting dictatorship, be it benign or murderous, royal or republican, was preferable to risking unpredictable change. Iran's ascendancy comes in as an aggravating factor for Israeli-driven US policy in the Middle East. Iranian policy presents a multiple challenge to Israel, the US and its allies. To Israel, Iran is a threat to the long- standing Israeli security concept of military supremacy in the region. If US-guaranteed Israeli superiority is neutralised, then Israeli-US hegemony is eroded. And both the US and Israel know of no other way to deal with Middle East Arab countries except from a position of power. For Iran to undermine this supremacist strategy poses a mortal danger in Israeli-American eyes. Iran also supports resistance to Israeli occupation of Arab lands, particularly Jerusalem, like no other Arab country of the region. From another perspective, Arab US allies are alarmed by Iran's rising power, not because of the fictitious Sunni-Shia conflict, but because modern-day Iran is the product of a 30-year-old revolution that overthrew one of the most powerful US allies, the Shah of Iran, and changed the regional paradigm. They fear that much more than they feared Nasser's revolutionary rhetoric of the 1950s. They also fear their own people whom they rule by intimidation, emergency laws and the torture chamber. Intimidation breeds resentment and rebellion. If crushed masses have no democratic way of exercising their will and effecting change, radicalism becomes the only option. The oppressed masses see the US, which endlessly advocates democracy, as the mainstay of their oppressors. In the US, the culture of violence is sometimes perceived as a solution to intractable problems, or for a wrong doer to save himself from severe consequences. When extrapolated on the scale of a major, invincible superpower that is imbued with self-righteousness, it becomes disastrous. It can only be tempered by a sense of humbleness, which was one of the earliest pledges of George W Bush's declared policy when he first took office before he was converted by Vice-President Dick Cheney's Halliburton Oilfield Technologies and Services, and the neocon Israeli loyalists. Counter-terrorist war is winnable only if launched against a small group of amateur anarchists. The problem of trying to wipe out the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or Hizbullah is that they are motivated by a cause rather than by pure hatred. When the cause is injected with religious fervour it turns into an indomitable potion of jihad that keeps regenerating endlessly. In this kind of war, nothing in regular army or advanced intelligence can compete with the radical impetus of a suicide bomber. In a convoluting region like the Middle East, whose drive for transformation is caught between rational modernisation and hardcore fanaticism, it does not help the US or its allies to try to freeze the status quo in time. US invasions, its mighty military armada and the Israeli threat against Iran, even if fulfilled, will not stem the tide of resistance to foreign military presence and Israeli aggression. Mighty powers like the US and Israel often forget that they are equally embarked on state terrorism. The question of hatred will never be resolved by the American movie-style moral lesson of the good guys versus the bad guys. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
