Fighting Terrorism Read online

  If the tactical halt in terrorist attacks agreed upon by Hamas and the PLO holds, it will spell an important development in the relations between the two organizations. As one of the PLO leaders explained, both the PLO and Hamas share the basic strategic goal of doing away with Israel, but they differed on the method of achieving that goal: “[Hamas says] all of Palestine is ours, and we want to liberate it from the river to the sea in one blow. But [Yasir Arafat’s] Fatah, which leads the PLO, feels that the Phased Plan must be pursued. Both sides agree on the final objective. The difference between them is on the way to get there.”21 As we have seen, the PLO has been working to eliminate that difference in tactics as well, arguing with Hamas to adopt the PLO’s phased approach to eliminating Israel. Needless to say, the PLO did not formally annul its Phased Plan, and no such revocation was even requested by Israel at Oslo. And as Arafat made clear several times on PLO television, the peace with Israel was little more than the temporary peace agreement that the prophet Muhammad made with the Koreish tribe (Muhammad proceeded to tear that treaty to shreds when he amassed enough strength to annihilate the entire tribe root and branch).22 What this means is that the negotiations which Israel is now conducting with the PLO over the future of additional territories abutting Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem itself are de facto being conducted over land that will be used one day to attack the Jewish state. And Israel’s negotiating partners are the allies and protectors of the most militant and radical elements in the Middle East—that is, a PLO which enthusiastically supported Saddam during the Gulf War and which today shields the most ardent champions of militant Islam. Gaza has already been transformed into one of the leading centers of pro-Teheran sentiment outside Iran, and Israel’s Labor government is now negotiating over the creation of other such domains, justifying this policy with the contrived suspension of Hamas terrorism. Speaking in January 1995 before Palestinian workers in Gaza, Arafat glorified the suicide bombers: “We are all ready to be Shaheedeen [suicide martyrs] on the road to liberate Jerusalem.” On June 19, 1995, Arafat emphasized that his basic goal remained unchanged after Oslo: “Our commitment stands and our oath remains. We will continue the hard and long jihad, the road of death, the path of sacrifice.” As Freh Abu Medien, the PLO’s “justice minister,” put it on May 8, 1995: “Israel will remain the principal enemy of the Palestinian people, not only today but also in the future.”23

  All this flies in the face of the PLO’s solemn pledge under the Oslo agreement “to advance mutual understanding and tolerance … and to take legal steps against incitement by individuals and organizations under its jurisdiction” (Item XII [1]). Thus the fostering of public education for coexistence and reconciliation, so indispensable for inducing the psychological changes needed to prevent a future renewal of terrorism and war, are starkly and painfully absent in the PLO domains.

  All this has disturbing implications not only for Israel but for the rest of the free world as well. First, a clear linkage was established early on between the Islamic terrorists in Gaza and the cadres of their co-religionists in the United States and Europe, who send money and directives to Gaza on a regular basis. (Such linkages could be reversed, of course, and Hamas could easily send operatives to the West.) A second deadly linkage was unwittingly facilitated by the Israeli government itself, tying the Sunni and Shiite vintages of Islamic radicalism in a tight operational knot. In 1992, before Oslo, the government of Yitzhak Rabin expelled four hundred Hamas Sunni activists from Gaza to south Lebanon. There they were met by their Hizballah Shiite counterparts, who gladly instructed them in the terrorist arts of car bombing, explosives manufacture, and suicide missions. A solid link was thus forged between the two movements, including the detailing of liaison officers. At the time, the Rabin government gave in to the Western outcry against its measures and returned these expelled activists to Gaza after less than a year, in exchange for a farcical written pledge that they would not engage in terrorism. Many of the returnees promptly set up shop in Gaza. Led by Yihya Ayash, otherwise known as “the Engineer,” they dispatched terror squads armed with explosives, some of them suicide missions, to attack Israel’s cities.

  Gaza under Arafat has thus become a unique Islamic base, with solid links in two directions—westward to the United States and Europe, eastward (through Hizballah) to Iran. It can serve in the future as a clearinghouse and stepping-stone for a flexible terrorism launched in multiple directions. Understandably, many Israelis do not want to see that base expanded twenty times to include the West Bank, thereby having an Iranian-influenced Islamic domain hovering over its major cities, and within ten miles of the sea. Such a PLO–Hamas state would sooner or later threaten to topple the pro-Western Hashemite regime in Jordan, the majority of whose population is composed of Palestinian Arabs, many of them susceptible to the fundamentalist message. A Palestinian-Islamic state on the West Bank of the Jordan River might soon expand to include its East Bank as well (i.e., the present state of Jordan), thereby creating a much enlarged base for militant Islam in the heart of the Arab world. Such a base would threaten Syria from the south and Saudi Arabia from the north; through Gaza’s geographic contiguity with Egypt on the east, it will have a physical bridge to North Africa, which is already being assaulted by Islamic fundamentalism from the west. Above all, such a PLO–Hamas state is likely to eventually deteriorate into a new avatar of the PLO terror-state in Lebanon, which was responsible for the exportation of terrorism far beyond the Middle East, serving as a convenient relay station and launching ground for the growing Islamic terrorism against Western targets. This will not necessarily happen overnight. It may take several years for such a state to reveal its true nature. It might first wish to build up its power, adopting a relatively docile outward appearance to continue receiving Western aid and further Israeli concessions. But the underlying irredentist and terrorist impulses that are at the core of its political ideology and raison d’être are unfortunately not likely to disappear.

  Even now, it is possible to correct the mistakes which the Labor government has made in its efforts to appease Palestinian terror. Stability may be achieved and terrorism put on the defensive if Israel reassumes responsibility for its own security and asserts a policy of local autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs instead of the independent terror-free zones now being built. It will take some time for the rest of the world to understand what many in Israel now know: that far from producing the durable peace all Israelis yearn for, the continued expansion of an armed, independent Palestinian domain is merely a stepping-stone to the eventual escalation of conflict and the continued march of Islamic militancy in the Middle East and beyond.

  VI

  The Specter of Nuclear Terrorism

  Yet there is one other potential development that could overshadow all this. The expansion of militant Islam, its growing power to intimidate the West and to cause it grievous damage, would be immeasurably increased if the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Sunni militant movement succeeded in acquiring nonconventional weapons—chemical, biological, or even nuclear. The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and five years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons. After this time, the Iranian Islamic republic will have the ability to construct atomic weapons without the importation of materials or technology from abroad.

  Iran has two nuclear reactor sites. The first, at Busheir, was supplied by West Germany when Iran was still ruled by the Shah. Work at the Busheir plant was stopped in 1979 with the seizure of the government by the Ayatollah Khomeini. At this point, construction of the plant was roughly 85 percent complete, and the special electrical work necessary for such installations was approximately 65 percent complete. The reactor at Busheir was bombed by Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war (which of course did not stop Saddam from condemning the Israeli attack on his nuclear reactor at Osiraq). After the end of the Iran–Iraq war in 1992, Iran signed an agreement with post-Soviet Russia for the revital
ization of the site. The agreement called for the Russians to supply Iran with two 440-megawatt reactors. In early 1995 it was agreed that two other reactors which had been slated for construction in northern Iran were also to be moved to Busheir. The first phase of construction and electrical work will be completed within three to four years. A second project is under way in northern Iran at Darkubin. In the days of the Shah, Iran had signed a contract with France to provide two reactors at this site, and this work, too, was halted by the outbreak of the war with Iraq. In 1993, Iran reached an agreement with China to provide this location with two 300-megawatt reactors, a deal which the United States attempted to block without success. In addition, Iran has its own uranium mine and processing plant at Sighand, which will be operational within three to five years. Finally, Iran has two institutes conducting nuclear research; the principal one at Isfahan is developing techniques for uranium enrichment under the guise of a civilian research project. This means that, within a short time, Iran will have the raw materials, the plants, and the technical know-how to produce its own bombs. It would then be a matter of five to seven years at most before Iran is able to assemble such weapons.

  There is no way of knowing whether Iran can be deterred from using its nuclear arsenal, as the Soviet Union was for more than four decades, or whether it would actually be willing to one day plunge the world into the abyss. But whether or not the Iranian regime is in fact willing to use such a device, it is critical to recognize the effect that an “Islamic bomb” in the hands of Iran would immediately have on the conventional balance of power in the Middle East—for it would be a “new Middle East” indeed. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Islamic republic would dramatically realign the political forces of the Middle East toward heightened radicalism. It would be seen as the greatest of anti-Western weapons, even more powerful than the oil weapon at its height, and a providential sign that Allah had not abandoned his faithful. States such as Algeria, which are in any case tottering on the brink of Islamic revolution, would suddenly find themselves facing a dramatically more powerful domestic threat from their Muslim fanatics. And the peace treaties which Israel has signed may be placed under intolerable pressure under the withering radiation of a nuclear-armed militant Islam. One need only recall how King Hussein—whose commitment to peace with Israel has been demonstrated since 1970—found himself having to make common cause with Saddam Hussein in 1991, when Saddam was at the height of his prestige in the days following Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait. Power has its own logic, and such a quantum leap in the power of Islamic radicalism would attract to it millions of new adherents around the world, and much new political support—both that produced by adulation and that produced by fear—throughout the Middle East and far beyond it.

  How could Iran use such nuclear weapons? It might, of course, threaten the West or any of its neighbors outright, just as Saddam Hussein would undoubtedly have done had his nuclear programs been completed by the time of his invasion of Kuwait. If Saddam had possessed atomic bombs, the Gulf War probably would never have taken place. He could have made it clear that he was prepared to strike at the Allied forces with nuclear weapons; or that he would destroy a neighboring capital like Riyadh; or that he would destroy the oil-loading facilities of the Persian Gulf; or that he would bomb the Straits of Hormuz, wreaking a catastrophe that would have closed down the sea lanes to much of the world’s oil—just as he had no compunction about pouring billions of barrels of oil into the Gulf as a warning to the Allies, in the process inventing a new form of ecological terrorism.

  A nuclear-armed Iran such as we may have to face in the coming years will have all these options open in a future confrontation with the West, and others as well. It could avoid a direct threat against the United States and the West with its attendant consequences of horrible retribution. It could instead resort to indirect intimidation of nuclear holocaust, dissociating itself from the threat by using any one of a number of shadowy Islamic terrorist groups that it controls. Such a group could emerge anywhere in the sea of militant Islamic puddles that now cover the entire West. The group could issue a veiled ultimatum that unless demands emanating from Iran were met, it would exact a horrible price. Further, Iran might be tempted to actually use nuclear weapons against Israel or a neighboring Arab state, and then avoid the consequences of Western reaction by threatening to activate its pre-armed militants in the West. Such groups nullify in large measure the need to have air power or intercontinental missiles as delivery systems for an Islamic nuclear payload. They will be the delivery system. In the worst of such scenarios, the consequences could be not a car bomb but a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.

  This may sound incredible or beyond the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, it is not. Anyone familiar with the warped fanaticism and increasing technical proficiency of Islamic militants cannot rule it out as a growing danger. Today’s terrorist groups can already deploy chemical weapons of the most lethal variety known to man. Equipped by a runaway terrorist regime, they could be given other, even more deadly, nonconventional weapons.

  One does not have to be an expert in international terrorism to sense that this rising tide of Islamic terrorism is qualitatively different from the terrorism which the West has had to face up until now. For it derives from a highly irrational cultural source, militant Islam, which differs profoundly from that other anti-Western doctrinaire militancy, Communism. Some similarities between the two movements are striking. Both have sought world dominion in the service of an all-encompassing ideology. Both have had millions of adherents spread around the globe ready to do their bidding. Both have been centered in a home country, which organized the dissemination of the creed worldwide. Yet the similarities end there. For while the Communists pursued an irrational doctrine, they nonetheless pursued it rationally. Neither Stalin nor Brezhnev ever seriously considered putting ideology above existence. This is why the Communists eventually accepted the necessity of co-existence. When it came to deciding between blowing themselves up in a nuclear exchange and compromising on their ideology, they could be counted on to compromise on their ideology every time.

  The trouble with militant Islam is that it appears to be an irrational goal being pursued irrationally. And this irrationality expresses itself in the ease with which the militant Muslims reverse the order of priorities, putting ideological zeal before life itself. The rapidly increasing use of suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists of the Hizballah and Hamas suggests that at least some of the people involved have no qualms about blowing themselves up in the service of their ideology (a phenomenon Americans will remember from the Japanese kamikazes of World War II). This pathology—I can use no other term—manifests itself in the glee with which mothers offer their sons for the greater glory of the faith, or in the ritualistic drinking from fountains of blood by Iranian soldiers during the Iran–Iraq war. Today one must realistically face the possibility that in the not too distant future militant Middle Eastern states will possess nuclear weapons.

  That the world is standing in front of an abyss is barely understood by most political leaders today. For the irrational strain that runs through Islamic fundamentalism and its obsessive hatred of the West are usually discounted in assessing its potential threat. But the leaders of the West must take into account that this irrationality might prompt the leaders of Iran to toy with the idea of terrorist blackmail on an unimaginable scale. Once Iran has nuclear weapons, there is nothing to say that it will not move to greater adventurism and irrationality rather than greater responsibility. It is not inconceivable that such a regime, in the throes of an international conflict or internal political convulsion, could threaten the United States, or Britain, or France with nonconventional weapons. If this happens, international terrorism could undergo an incredible transformation in which not individual citizens or buildings are threatened or demolished but entire cities are held hostage.

  The only way to understand the failure of understanding i
n this regard is to look back at another hate-filled ideology that began as another local manifestation and within a few years became a global force. Like Islamic fundamentalism, Nazism sixty years ago was directed first against the Jews and other local minorities. But soon it was evident that its creed of hate swept like wildfire throughout all Europe and the world. The Western nations woke up almost too late to its incendiary nature, and to the danger it posed to civilization. But consider what would have happened had Hitler succeeded in his own quest for a nuclear capability. When his scientists invented the V-2 rocket, he had no qualms whatsoever about raining them down in deadly payloads on downtown London. We can only shudder at the consequences for the world if Hitler’s mad antipathies had been wedded to nuclear weapons. Our civilization and our culture would have come to an end. Today, for the second time in modern times, we are faced with the possibility that an irrational movement might come into possession of weapons of mass annihilation. This is the greatest terror imaginable, because the greatest danger of nuclear weapons is in the lack of susceptibility of their deployers to sober calculations of cost and benefit. If Iran, or its militant proxies in the Middle East or Europe or the United States, has atomic bombs, we will be faced with a possibility of terrorism and blackmail that would make Oklahoma City look like a children’s game. This is the great peril, and it has not been addressed. The democracies have wasted much time. They are approaching the twelfth hour. They can wait no longer.

  VII

  What Is to Be Done

  As by now nearly everyone understands, “history” did not end with the collapse of Soviet Communism. The New World Disorder is not merely a hodgepodge of local nuisances that pose no substantial threat to our civilization and our way of life. True, the disintegration of the Soviet Union removed the ideological impetus of Communist domination, but it also lifted the staying hand that the Kremlin had exercised against the ambitions of many local clients and petty dictators. Further, the disappearance of Communist rule in the Kremlin opened up the spigot of nuclear technology that now flows from the impoverished remnants of the Soviet Union to anyone willing and able to pay for it; and the great spiritual and political void created by the evaporation of Communism has at least partly paved the way for the accelerating march of militant Islam in many parts of the Middle East and elsewhere that had previously toyed with Communism as a creed worthy of embracing.