Hundreds of residents from across the Valley gathered Sunday night at Phoenix's Patriots Square Park to join what is believed to be the nation's first Muslim rally against terrorism.
"The killing of innocent people out of revenge, out of hate or out of retribution is against the absolute laws of Islam," said Zuhdi Jasser, a physician who organized the rally. "Suicide is against the absolute laws of Islam.
"People can justify their actions all day long, but we as Muslims are here to say clearly their actions are against everything we believe."
Judi Villa
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 26, 2004 12:00 AM
Hundreds of residents from across the Valley gathered Sunday night at Phoenix's Patriots Square Park to join what is believed to be the nation's first Muslim rally against terrorism.
"The killing of innocent people out of revenge, out of hate or out of retribution is against the absolute laws of Islam," said Zuhdi Jasser, a physician who organized the rally. "Suicide is against the absolute laws of Islam.
"People can justify their actions all day long, but we as Muslims are here to say clearly their actions are against everything we believe."
Jasser said he was motivated to organize the rally by ongoing claims that moderate Muslims in the United States have not voiced a "groundswell of condemnation" against the terrorist activity that destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Jasser said the rally was a way for Muslims to reclaim their faith from those who have exploited it for selfish purposes.
"We do need to stop killing in the name of God," said Shirley Spencer of Phoenix, who attended the rally with her husband, Gene. "It hasn't gotten us anywhere so far."
"We're not working and playing together well," Gene said. "Cockroaches do better than we do."
Soul Khalsa, a Sikh minister, told the crowd that terrorists may still inflict damage in the future but "their day is fading."
"Those people who exploit religion for their own power and greed are a dying breed," Khalsa said. "They are the dinosaurs of this modern era."
Gene Spencer listened to the words and was optimistic such rallies could lead to change.
"It's just a little voice but it's a voice. It's a start," he said. "It's a little electrode but if it bounces against another, who knows what might happen."
The majority of the estimated 250 in attendance Sunday night were not Muslim. They were people like Michael Fischer, 18, of Glendale, who wanted to denounce the stereotyping of Muslims; and Grace Clark of Apache Junction, who wanted to promote peace.
"You just feel like you want to do something," Clark said. "I would like to see the whole world get more together. People who are willing to come together are the only hope we have."
Azra Hussain, a Muslim from Scottsdale, told the crowd that the Islam religion teaches followers to be patient, kind and helpful, and is "very clear on the sanctity of human life."
"I am opposed to killing in any form by anyone," she said. "I know what Islam teaches us and that we should know better."
Ali Homsi, a Muslim from Tempe, said the actions of terrorists "can only be considered crimes" under Islamic law.
"They hide behind the shields of religion while using God's words to justify evil," Homsi said. "This will take all our prayers and good actions to combat. I believe we can make a difference. When someone kills another innocent person, the damage will be to each and every one of us."
LUTON, England, April 24 — The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say.
In this former industrial town north of London, a small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street.
They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the Madrid train bombings as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.
Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam
By PATRICK E. TYLER
and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LUTON, England, April 24 — The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say.
In this former industrial town north of London, a small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street.
They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the Madrid train bombings as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."
On working-class streets of old industrial towns like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open.
In Hamburg, Dr. Mustafa Yoldas, the director of the Council of Islamic Communities, saw a correlation to the discord in Iraq. "This is a very dangerous situation at the moment," Dr. Yoldas said. "My impression is that Muslims have become more and more angry against the United States."
Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with Al Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.
Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.
"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added that some mosques now display photos of American soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed out Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is almost impossible, he said, because it is typically done face to face.
And recruitment is paired with a compelling new strategy to bring the fight to Europe.
Members of Al Qaeda have "proven themselves to be extremely opportunistic, and they have decided to try to split the Western alliance," the official continued. "They are focusing their energies on attacking the big countries" — the United States, Britain and Spain — so as to "scare" the smaller states.
Some Muslim recruits are going to Iraq, counterterrorism officials in Europe say, but more are remaining home, possibly joining cells that could help with terror logistics or begin operations like the one that came to notice when the British police seized 1,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in late March, and arrested nine Pakistani-Britons, five of whom have been charged with trying to build a terrorist bomb.
Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the "culture of martyrdom."
Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Also this week, over Mr. Blunkett's vigorous objection, a 35-year-old Algerian held under emergency laws passed after Sept. 11 was released from Belmarsh Prison. The man, identified only as "G," suffered from severe mental illness, his lawyers told a special immigration appeals panel, which let him out of prison and put him under house arrest.
Mr. Blunkett insisted that that should not be the final judgment on a man already found by one court "to be a threat to life and liberty."
In an interview on the BBC over the weekend, Mr. Blunkett advocated a stronger deportation policy, initially focused on 12 foreign terror suspects held without charge since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990's.
One chapter in Sheik Omar's lectures these days is "The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing."
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.
At a mosque in Geneva, an imam recently exhorted his followers to "impose the will of Islam on the godless society of the West."
"It was quite virulent," said a senior official with knowledge of the sermon. "The imam was encouraging his followers to take over the godless society."
While such a sermon may be incitement, recruitment takes a more shadowy course, and is hard to detect, a senior antiterrorism official said. "Believers are appealed to in the mosques, but the real conversations take place in restaurants or cafes or private apartments," the official said.
While some clerics, like Abu Qatada — said to be the spiritual counselor of Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 hijacking team — remain in prison in Britain without charge, others like Sheik Omar, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun, carry on a robust ideological campaign.
"There is no case against me," Sheik Omar said in an interview. Referring to calls by members of Parliament that he be deported, he added, "but they are Jewish" and "they have been calling for that for years."
Among his ardent followers is Ishtiaq Alamgir, 24, who heads Al Muhajiroun in Luton and calls himself Sayful Islam, the sword of Islam. He says there are about 50 members here but exact numbers are secret.
Most days, he and a handful of his followers run a recruitment stand on Dunstable Road much to the chagrin of the Muslim elders of Luton.
Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger population distrustful of them.
Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque here and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."
Other community leaders look to the government to do something, if only to help prevent the demonization of British Muslims, or "Islamophobia," as some here call it.
"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical clerics," said Akhbar Dad Khan, another elder of the Central Mosque. He wants them prosecuted or deported. "We should be able to control this negativity," he said.
In Slough, Sheik Omar spent much of his time Thursday night regaling his young followers with the erotic delights of paradise — sweet kisses and the pleasures of bathing with scores of women — while he also preached the virtues of death in Islamic struggle as a ticket to paradise.
He spoke of terrorism as the new norm of cultural conflict, "the fashion of the 21st century," practiced as much by Tony Blair as by Al Qaeda.
"We may be caught up in the target as the people of Manhattan were," he told them.
And he warned Western leaders, "You may kill bin Laden, but the phenomenon, you cannot kill it — you cannot destroy it."
"Our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here and then we will live under Islam in dignity," he said.
Patrick E. Tyler reported from Luton, Slough and London and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Germany.
Army counterintelligence agents improperly tried to gather information on civilian participants at a University of Texas conference on Islam, the Army acknowledged on Monday.
Two agents of the Army's Intelligence and Security Command from Fort Hood went to the law school on Feb. 9, seeking information on people who attended a conference titled "Islam and the Law: The Question of Sexism."
Conference organizers and civil rights activists accused the Army of spying on the conference and using tactics meant to stifle free speech.
The Army is prohibited from investigating civilians unless the FBI waives its jurisdiction or requests assistance, and that was not done, said Deborah Parker, a spokeswoman for the Army Intelligence and Security Command, based at Fort Belvoir, Va.
"It was a lapse in judgment," Parker said. "It was not something that was done maliciously."
The conference, which had taken place a week earlier, was open to the public. Conference organizers said they refused to give the agents a list of participants and a video of the event.
Maunica Sthanki, co-chairwoman of the UT Chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, said the conference did not merit military suspicion.
"The message I think that the Army and the government are sending is that anybody who chooses to learn about Islam is going to be investigated," she said. "I don't think the American public should accept that message of fear, and that's why the issue isn't over."
Douglas Laycock, an associate dean for research at the law school, said the Army agents overreacted. "You can't be suspicious of everyone who attends an academic conference," he said.
An Army statement said the agents were acting on a report by two Army lawyers who attended the conference in preparation for an assignment to southwest Asia, where they were assigned to deal with legal issues involving the U.S. military and the Muslim population.
The lawyers reported suspicious behavior by a conference participant who persistently questioned their identity, occupation and status, the statement said. Army personnel are required to report such reactions, Parker said.
However, the agency's Fort Hood detachment did not first check with command headquarters at Fort Belvoir, which would have checked with the FBI, Parker said.
Rene Salinas, a spokesman for the bureau's San Antonio field office, said the FBI is not investigating the conference.
Parker said the Army is reviewing whether disciplinary action will be taken against the counterintelligence agents.
Some Muslim groups seeking to build mosques to accommodate their growing numbers of followers are encountering vehement opposition in communities across the nation.
In some cases, the conflicts are similar to those that for decades have pitted residents against expansion plans by large churches. Neighbors in communities from New Jersey to Arizona have protested Muslim groups' proposals for mosques by raising classic "not-in-my-backyard" arguments that have focused on the sizes of planned buildings, parking, lighting and other factors that can affect property values.
Muslims see new opposition to building mosques since 9/11
By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY
Some Muslim groups seeking to build mosques to accommodate their growing numbers of followers are encountering vehement opposition in communities across the nation.
In some cases, the conflicts are similar to those that for decades have pitted residents against expansion plans by large churches. Neighbors in communities from New Jersey to Arizona have protested Muslim groups' proposals for mosques by raising classic "not-in-my-backyard" arguments that have focused on the sizes of planned buildings, parking, lighting and other factors that can affect property values.
But the debates over mosques in several U.S. cities during the past two years occasionally have led to name-calling and allegations of bigotry — a reflection of some residents' mistrust of Muslims since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by radical Muslims. (Related story: Texas mosque vandalized)
Last year in Voorhees, N.J., a suburb of Philadelphia, a Muslim group's proposal to turn a commercially zoned building into a mosque led anonymous critics to distribute fliers that warned residents that extremists "with connections to terrorists" might worship there. The fliers also claimed that the mosque run by the Muslim American Community Association, a group of about 15 families, would attract hundreds of worshipers for prayers five times a day.
After local churches and synagogues joined the Muslim group in denouncing the allegations, some residents raised objections about the parking, traffic and landscaping plans, says the Rev. Melanie Morel Sullivan of the Unitarian Universalist Church in nearby Cherry Hill, N.J. Sullivan's congregation organized a multifaith coalition to help the Muslim group.
Some of the mosque's critics "got media savvy," Sullivan says, because most residents didn't believe the mosque would pose a threat. The critics "realized they weren't gaining any media points by saying things like, 'The mosque would harbor terrorists.' They maintained there was no prejudice and that some of their best friends are Muslims."
In November, members of the local zoning board unanimously approved the mosque plan after their attorney told them that there was no legal reason to reject it.
Zia Rahman, a Voorhees resident since 1979, led the quest for a mosque and says he has no ill will toward his neighbors who fought the plan. "We are all part of the same community," Rahman says. "There is so much that they did not know about this religion. The mosque will promote deeper understanding."
The Muslim Civil Rights Center in Hickory Hills, Ill., has received several recent reports of opposition to planned Islamic centers, says Ahmad Tansheet, the center's community outreach coordinator. "It's kind of new after Sept. 11," he says of the heightened tension. "We don't have statistics because it's something new. I hope ultimately it will die down."
Even before the attacks, building a mosque in America "wasn't the easiest thing" to do, says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on Islamic-American Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Now, he says, it can be more difficult. "Usually there's a lot of talk of parking and traffic and other things that are sometimes seen as a smoke screen for the real issue," Hooper says. "You'll also get overt bigotry coming to the surface."
Muslims increasing in number
The new conflicts over mosques come as Islam is gaining adherents in the USA.
Islamic groups generally agree that the number of U.S. Muslims who associate with a mosque is about 2 million, up from about 500,000 two decades ago. (Islamic groups estimate that, in all, there are 6 million to 7 million Muslims in the USA.) There are more than 1,200 U.S. mosques; 60% of those opened during the past 20 years.
For years, new Muslim congregations bought old churches or schools and put mosques in them, says Ahmed ElHattab, director general of the Islamic Society of North America Development Foundation in Plainfield, Ind. Now, ElHattab says, mature congregations want their own spaces specifically designed as mosques with traditional architecture such as domes, minarets and large prayer rooms. Usually, ElHattab says, communities welcome mosques.
Like those seeking to open churches and synagogues, Muslims who want to open mosques in residential areas are protected by a law Congress passed in 2000 that bans cities from using zoning laws to fight such plans. But the act doesn't immunize houses of worship from land-use codes as long as the codes don't discriminate against religious groups.
Conflicts across the nation
Since 9/11, there have been several conflicts over mosques besides the one in Voorhees:
•In the Village of Morton Grove, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, a Muslim group, residents opposed to a proposed mosque and local officials are in a legal fight that is being watched by civil rights lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department.
The Muslim Education Center has operated a grade school in Morton Grove since 1989. On the Muslim Sabbath each Friday, students, parents and other community members worship in the school's gym. In November 2002, Muslim leaders proposed building a mosque on school grounds. Although the village denied the permit, neighbors opposed to the mosque plan weren't satisfied. They sued the village in September to try to force officials to ban the services.
The group's Web site accused the city of allowing the school to become a "regional Mega-Mosque." The group wants the city to enforce a zoning law that bans worship services without a special permit. The Muslim group fought back in October with a lawsuit against the city. The lawsuit claims that requiring a permit to worship violates federal law.
"The neighborhood group wants the village to shut them down," says John Mauck, a lawyer who represents the Muslim center. "That's a denial of free exercise of religion."
Village officials say they do not intend to prohibit prayer, but say they denied the mosque a building permit because its plans had insufficient parking. "The vast majority of people in Morton Grove aren't bigoted, and they don't like the way their village is coming across," says Ted Hadley, a lawyer for the village. "The whole issue is whether they have enough parking." The parties in the dispute are in mediation.
•A proposed mosque in Scottsdale, Ariz., is prompting "for sale" signs in a neighborhood near the McDowell Mountains. A Muslim group that owns 3.38 acres applied to build a mosque less than a week before the 9/11 attacks. In January, after several hearings were held and plans were redrawn, the mosque got permission to build. Neighbors say they opposed the mosque and its planned 35-foot minaret for aesthetic reasons only.
Robert Hart, whose home is north of the mosque site, says he and his neighbors would have opposed any building that wasn't a single-family house. He says the view and the pristine desert preserve define the neighborhood. "The (local) newspaper made it out like it was a Muslim thing. Honest to God, it was not," says Hart, who has decided to move.
Tarif Jaber, who is managing the mosque project for the Islamic Center of the Northeast Valley in Scottsdale, says aesthetic objections "don't tell the whole story" of the opposition. "Remember, we did this right after 9/11. A lot of people began to associate this religion with violence. ...We assure them that we are good neighbors."
Local religious groups stepped forward to help. Rabbi Charles Herring of Temple Kol Ami of Phoenix say residents rarely are happy to host a religious institution. "In this case, I sensed something that went beyond simple housing values. It was really an undercurrent of anti-Islamic feeling. I was not pleased."
•A small mosque in Marietta, Ga., has held open houses to get to know its neighbors since its plan for a new mosque was rejected. For seven years, the mosque has operated out of a house, says Amjad Taufique, one of the mosque trustees. In December 2002, the trustees went before the local zoning board to seek a variance for a new mosque with 70-feet minaret. Taufique figured it wouldn't be an issue because local churches have steeples that tall.
The board denied the request by a 5-2 vote. Board member W.O. Wilkerson, who voted to approve the mosque, says that "it was voted against purely because they were Muslims. The neighbors ... said they didn't want Muslims in the neighborhood. ... If we're going to talk about having a country of laws, we better live by that."
Board Chairman James Mills says he voted against the plan because the group had not adequately explained what it planned to do. Neighbors "were reacting because of the lack of communication," Mills says. "It had nothing to do with them being Muslim."
But Taufique says that at the public hearing, "people yelled and screamed and went ... totally out of control. ... People were really concerned about who we are and what we were doing in the neighborhood. They were scared."
Last year, the Muslim group bought property next to its current location. Taufique says the group might try again. "We think this can be worked out."
The New York Times, By Zbigniew Brezinski:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration deserves credit for its long-term commitment to democracy in the Middle East. But even a good idea can be spoiled by clumsy execution. Worse still, the idea can backfire — particularly if people come to suspect that ulterior motives are at work.
This is precisely what is happening with President Bush's "Greater Middle East initiative," which outlines steps the United States and its partners in the Group of 8 industrialized nations can take to promote political freedom, equality for women, access to education and greater openness in the Middle East. Elements of the proposal include the creation of free trade zones in the region, new financing for small businesses and help overseeing elections.
By Mike Wooldridge
BBC World Affairs Correspondent
Are religion and religious differences to blame for war and conflict? Many war leaders have claimed to have God on their side, but should religion get the blame? A "War Audit" commissioned for the BBC programme "What the World Thinks of God" investigates the links between war and religion through the ages. It was carried out by researchers at the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University.
George Bush was in little doubt about how the US-led coalition would bring down Saddam Hussein.
At a prayer meeting, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he said: "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."
Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God
President Bush
But God's help was being invoked in Baghdad, too. Saddam Hussein told Iraqis: "Fight as God ordered you to do."
So does that makes last year's Iraq conflict a religious war?
The authors of the War Audit suggest that it was arguably a war driven by religion.
But, as they point out, the Pope and the US Catholic bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many theologians around the world argued that it fell well short of the rigorous criteria for a "just" war.
President Bush and Saddam Hussein were only the most recent of a long line of political leaders who have drawn on religion to help them in battle or to justify a military campaign.
But the War Audit set out to identify conflicts that were more closely linked to religious belief than to political causes - that could most properly be called religious wars.
And that, it concluded, means going back to the wars of Islamic expansion beginning in the 7th Century, the Crusades starting in the 11th Century and the Reformation wars beginning in the 16th Century.
Here the wars were fought primarily because of religious differences.
Most are much more complex.
To some extent, the nature of a war is in the eye of the beholder.
Political grievances
SELECTED EXTRACTS FROM RELIGIOUS TEXTS
'Then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy' (Torah, Book of Deuteronomy 7:1-2)
'Thou shall not kill' (Torah, Book of Exodus 20:13)
'All who take the sword will perish by the sword' (New Testament, Matthew 5:43-44)
'Fight in the cause of God against those who fight you, but aggress not' (Koran 2:190)
'Whoever fights in the cause of God, then gets killed or attains victory, we will surely grant him a great recompense' (Koran 4:74)
'When all efforts to restore peace prove useless and no words avail, lawful is the flash of steel' (10th Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh)
'May your weapons be strong to drive away the attackers, may your arms be powerful enough to check the foes, let your army be glorious, not the evil-doer' (Hinduism's Rig Veda 1-39:2)
Osama Bin Laden portrays the campaign being waged by his terror network as a religious duty.
But the authors of the War Audit say it is much more about his opposition to the political order in Arab countries and the presence of US forces in Muslim nations.
One of the most extraordinary armed campaigns I have witnessed was that of the Holy Spirit Movement in Uganda in the 1980s, the forerunner of the Lord's Resistance Army that remains locked in battle with the Ugandan army in northern Uganda today.
Alice Lakwena, the leader of the Holy Spirit Movement, claimed that God had commanded her to seize the Ugandan capital and I and other journalists found and interviewed her in a banana grove about 100 kilometres (60 miles) short of Kampala.
Superstition played a large part in the progress her ragtag band of followers had made.
They smeared themselves with a potion they were told would protect them against the army's bullets.
But this bizarre campaign has also fed on northern political grievances in Uganda.
And this is echoed down the ages.
Few truly religious wars
Why is religion a factor in war at all when all the main faiths have little time for violence and advocate peace?
The War Audit says that although armed conflicts may take on religious overtones, their genesis invariably lies in factors such as ethnicity, identity, power struggles, resources, inequality and oppression - and one factor is often exacerbated by another.
It is often suggested that there has been a sharp rise in religiously motivated conflict.
But the authors of the War Audit say there have been very few genuinely religious wars in the past century.
The Israel-Arab wars from 1948 to the present day are often seen as wars over religion.
In fact, they say, they have been about nationalism, self-defence or the liberation of territory.
So why is religion a factor in war at all when all the main faiths have little time for violence and advocate peace?
Because, it is suggested, leaders use differences over faith as a way of sowing hatred and mobilising support for political wars.
As the American civil war leader Abraham Lincoln put it almost 150 years ago: "The will of God prevails.
"In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong.
"God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time."
What The World Thinks of God will be broadcast as follows:
on Thursday 26 February, 2100 GMT
Sunday 29 February 1306 GMT
Read this review of David Frum and Richard Perle's book An End to Evil. Find it on the New York Review of Books
Tomorrow the World
By Thomas Powers
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
by David Frum and Richard Perle
Random House, 284 pp, $25.95
1.
The invasion of Iraq and the planting of an American army in the heart of the Middle East have encouraged one of the war's intellectual architects, Richard Perle, to think that the United States may be pulling up its socks at last. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, following the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the fruit, in Perle's view, of a bracing new clear-eyed toughness in dealing with the enemies of democracy. But the job is far from over and Perle, in the new book he has written with David Frum, worries that "many in the American political and media elite are losing their nerve for the fight." The enemies are many, friends are few, and summertime soldiers on the left, as Perle sees it, want to call a truce in the war on terror in "the hope that...somehow the threat will disappear on its own."
About the source of the threat Perle expresses no doubt. It comes from "a radical strain within Islam" driven by "murderous hatred of the United States" to carry out terrorist attacks against America and its friends. Despite a vigorous worldwide counter-terror campaign, "Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder"; and the willingness of state sponsors to arm them with weapons of mass destruction threatens "even our survival as a nation." But where might the terrorists get these weapons, now that Iraq has been occupied? "North Korea claims already to possess some bombs," Perle argues. "Iran is very close—perhaps three years away, in the optimistic view of US intelligence, maybe twelve to eighteen months, by the less sanguine Israeli estimate."
We have heard such alarms before, most recently about Iraq, but Perle brushes aside the failure to find the weapons which were cited to justify the American invasion. "The critics' emphasis on stockpiles," he writes, "seems to us seriously misplaced." Iraq fortunately was stopped in time, but other outlaws remain: "Why let an enemy grow stronger?" At the top of the enemies list are Iran and North Korea, which not only engage in terror but support terror. "Both regimes present intolerable threats to American security," he insists. "We must move boldly against them both and against all the other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. And we don't have much time."
That's quite a list of target countries —seven nations in all, including the two already defeated and occupied. Does "moving boldly" mean invasion to remove the regimes in all of them? Maybe yes, maybe no. Only a month after the terror attacks of September 11 Perle told an interviewer for Frontline that the resolute action he recommended in Afghanistan and Iraq might be enough to caution others:
Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. "You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Few thought Perle's plan to invade Iraq reasonable or likely when he first began to defend the idea in public. It seemed over-bold even after President Bush, in his second State of the Union speech in January 2002, included Iraq in the "axis of evil"—a phrase partly invented by Perle's coauthor, David Frum, who put the words "axis of hatred" in an early draft of the President's speech. But Perle was not speaking lightly. As a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, he was a figure of significance in Washington, close to officials close to the President, and last year's relentless march to war is ample evidence that Perle's views were taken seriously in the Bush White House.
Of course Perle was not alone in beating the drum, but he is the first of the Washington hard-liners to have written at length about the strategy behind the war on terror, a fact which makes An End to Evil important and timely. The unraveling of the official case for war, based on intelligence claims, now exploded, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and vigorous programs to build more, makes it all the more urgent to understand why President Bush was so determined to go to war, what he hoped to achieve by it, and what we ought to expect if the war policy is confirmed by the President's reelection in November.
Richard Perle and David Frum share the title page and the copyright notice in An End to Evil, but to this reader, at least, it seems that the book belongs in some sense to Perle alone. I do not mean to suggest that Perle did all the work of writing, or that he and Frum did not reach agreement on the text before it went to the printer, or that Frum did not bring experience of his own to the project. But it is Perle who is the one with the public persona, who has held policy-level jobs in two administrations, who is often in the news, and whose pugnacious, bravura intellectual style gives the book its flavor. And above all, it is Perle who has a long history of promoting the hard-line, or "realist," approach to American foreign policy.
Perle has been a fixture on the Washington scene since 1969, when he joined the staff of Senator Henry Jackson, a hard-line Democrat deeply opposed to the whole idea of détente with the Soviet Union. Jackson was a man of the anti-Communist, working-class left, the son of a union man, and he was a combative advocate of keeping ahead in the nuclear arms race, fighting the Communists in Vietnam, and pushing the Soviets hard to open their borders to Russian Jews trying to emigrate—an effort in which he was ultimately successful. Perhaps a quarter of Israel consists now of former Russian Jews and there are those who think Jackson's hard line also deserves a significant share of the credit for the eventual collapse of communism, the freeing of Eastern Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is not quite clear from An End to Evil, or from things Perle has written and said elsewhere, whether he brought a fierce approach to foreign affairs with him to Washington or learned it during the eleven years he spent at Jackson's side. But hard-line is what Perle is.
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"Hard-line" is a word defined by thirty years of examples. At various times hard-liners, Perle often among them, pushed for more and better nuclear weapons, ridiculed the notion of "arms control," argued for victory in Vietnam, were ready to spread the war into Laos, Cambodia, and even North Vietnam itself, supported Israel's invasion of Lebanon, wanted to kick the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua, argued that an all-out arms race would spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, pushed for American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, backed the scrapping of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, supported a clear commitment to defend Tai-wan, and expressed contempt for the United Nations. To be hard-line involves the willingness to use force, realism about using money and power to get one's way, impatience with feel-good idealism, all-out backing for friends, and contempt for efforts to placate enemies. "Hard-liners" share an Old Testament view of the world, promise an eye for an eye, know what they want, and never forget an injury.
But perhaps most important of all, hard-liners are comfortable with the fact of overwhelming American military and economic power, and argue that it ought to be used without apology to chastise enemies, support friends, and get what America wants. In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal Perle and Frum argue that most definitions of hard- and soft-line get things exactly backward. "It is the soft-liners who are driven by ideology, who ignore or deny inconvenient facts and advocate unworkable solutions," they write. "It is the hard-liners who are the realists, the pragmatists." In their view the confusion is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, where East–West friction brings almost daily bloodshed. Hard-liners face facts, Perle and Frum argue: Arafat will never make peace with Israel. Period. But the soft-liners, including many in the US State Department, "cling to this belief" that dialogue, negotiation, compromise will bring a settlement at last.
Perle's devotion to Israel runs deep. Decades of war and near-war with hostile neighbors have made the country tough and self-reliant, in many ways the ideal archetype of hard-line realism as state policy. Perle has been a director of the Jerusalem Post, a consultant for Israeli weapons manufacturers, a member of the board of advisers of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and one of the coauthors of "A New Strategy for Defending the Realm," an influential paper recommending a hard-line policy to Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's predecessor as Israeli prime minister. In an interview with Ben Wattenberg on PBS in November 2002, Perle was asked why "these neoconservative hawks" were mainly Jewish, and how he answered charges that there was a "hidden agenda" in his call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—that, as Perle restated the question in his reply: "We are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel's best interest." Behind the first, Perle replied "there's clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism," and the second claim, in his view, gave off the same aroma. "It's a nasty line of argument," he said, "to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties are."
Perle strikes me as a little nervous and defensive on this point. Why not admit openly that of course the fate of Israel is much on his mind? Anglophiles of yesteryear did not apologize for arguing that it was in America's best interest to come to the aid of Britain in 1940, and Polish Americans did not worry in silence about the fate of Lech Walesa. Complex loyalties are part of the American style. But the decision to attack Iraq was made by President Bush, whose loyalties are not complex. Bush has no history as a hard-liner himself but he seems to have adopted a hard-line position as a governing style, telling enemies abroad what he will not tolerate, pushing for his agenda without compromise at home, taking the support of allies like Britain's Tony Blair as if it were his by right, dismissing the hesitations of other longtime friends as somehow meanly motivated. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill reports in his quasi memoir of two frustrating years in the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty,[1] that Bush was rigid on questions of policy. "I won't negotiate with myself," he often said, meaning, in O'Neill's view, that once the President had taken a position it was set in concrete, and no one should expect to revisit its rationale. The President's frequent use of the word "evil," echoed by Perle and Frum, is a sign that he is not about to negotiate with himself when the question on the table is how to deal with enemies.
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This firmness is about all Bush shares with Perle. Intellectually they are poles apart; Bush sticks to the official line with numbing tenacity while Perle has a lively comment about everything. There is a dazzling, at moments disorienting extravagance to An End to Evil, like the grand climax to an evening of fireworks. No hyperbolist could exaggerate the range or confidence of Perle's opinions. It seems that success in defeating terror is going to require changing pretty much the whole of the rest of the world as well—from the culture of bureaucracy in the CIA to the position of Britain in Europe, from the timidity of the State Department to the irresolution of the United Nations, from the foot-dragging of Pentagon generals to the ingratitude of old allies like France and Germany. Among the obstructionists scolded by Perle are not only Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, but former President Clinton, the State Department's Richard Armitage (for his "incredible statement that he considered Iran to be a 'democracy'"), Brent Scowcroft and Richard Haass (for "almost certainly" instructing US Ambassador April Glaspie to shrug off Saddam Hussein's plans to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990), CIA director George Tenet ("He has failed. He should go"), and even the first President Bush, because he "tried to prevent the Soviet Union from disintegrating"—a failure of nerve so egregious that Perle puts the words in italics.
An End to Evil makes so many charges against enemies abroad, accuses so many people of cant and confusion, issues so many warnings of imminent peril, and proposes so many bold undertakings that it is difficult to find the idea at the core of the book— identification of the danger that America faces, and the strategy Perle believes will bring victory. When the reader gets a grip on the danger at last it turns out to be a kind of mirror-image of the President's claim that terrorists hate America for what it is—Western, tolerant, democratic, pluralist, materialist, and so on. In Perle's view the source of Islamic terror is to be found in who they are—blocked at every turn in societies where hatred and violence are the only means of self-expression:
Take a vast area of the earth's surface, inhabited by people who remember a great history. Enrich them enough that they can afford satellite television and Internet connections, so that they can see what life is like across the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic. Then sentence them to live in choking, miserable, polluted cities ruled by corrupt, incompetent officials. Entangle them in regulations and controls so that nobody can ever make much of a living except by paying off some crook-ed official. Subordinate them to elites who have suddenly become incalculably wealthy from shady dealings involving petroleum resources that supposedly belong to all.... Deny them any forum or institution—not a parliament, not even a city council—where they may freely discuss their grievances. Kill, jail, corrupt, or drive into exile every political figure, artist, or intellectual who could articulate a modern alternative to bureaucratic tyranny.... [Ensure] that the minds of the next generation are formed entirely by clerics whose own minds contain nothing but medieval theology and a smattering of third world nationalist self-pity. Combine all this, and what else would one expect to create but an enraged populace....
Perle's argument for an aggressive assault on "terror," by which he means "all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not," begins with the assumption that no strategy can succeed which does not fundamentally alter the world that breeds terror. The most important change—the one that must precede and open the door to all others—would be to replace closed, authoritarian governments with open ones—in a word, bring democracy to the Islamic world. This bold idea has also been embraced by President Bush, who told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington a year ago that "the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life." The invasion of Iraq did not merely end the possibility that Saddam Hussein would give nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden; it created an opportunity to build a freer, fairer, more open society to serve as a beacon of hope in the Islamic world, "and it is vital," Perle writes, "that we succeed."
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Of this bold scheme, after a day's reflection, one might say what Jake Barnes told a wistful Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises—"Isn't it pretty to think so." Perle's plan to transform the Islamic world beginning with Iraq, an idea shared by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others in Washington, represents what is possibly the single most ambitious program to change the world in American history. Not even the fabled Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II matches it for imagination, generosity, sweep—and difficulty. As I write, success in the democracy-building effort in Iraq seems far from certain. Rather than one free state with a newborn democracy, it seems that Iraq is breaking into three super-nationalist, mutually hostile mini-states comprising the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south. In Afghanistan the military victory of late 2001 seems to be slipping away as the Taliban proves to have life in it yet.
I have no quarrel with Perle's vision of what Iraq might become. "If Iraq's new legislature is freely chosen," he writes,
...if its bureaucracy is generally honest and competent and its courts are fair, if Iraqis can engage in private business without harassment and favoritism, if Iraq's different communities can live without fear—then that is an achievement as impressive as anything the democratizers could hope for.
This is nobly said. Who would fault the dream? Where my credulity fails is with the implicit claim that the scope of this grand intervention is the brainchild of "realists" and "pragmatists." What makes Perle think that the United States can do for the warring factions of Iraq, burning with the grievances of centuries and still raw from thirty years of oppression under the police state of Saddam Hussein, something it has conspicuously failed to do over half a century for the Israelis and the Palestinians?
2.
Richard Perle has been living with the dilemmas at the heart of An End to Evil for many years—at least since the first Persian Gulf War of 1991, when the United States, in his view, made a ghastly mistake in failing to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, an error he credits (gently here) to Colin Powell and the first President Bush. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11 he has argued his position with renewed fervor "to journalists from around the world, almost all of whom eventually work their way up to the one big question: Is the war on terror a Zionist plot?"
Are those really the words used? I doubt it. I'm guessing that the posing of the question sounds more like this: Is one of the goals of the war on terror to make the Middle East safe for Israel? With the question put that way Perle's answer would surely be yes, and a careful search through his blizzard of obiter dicta discovers a theory about how this might come to pass. It is based on two axioms—that Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other military opponents of Israel are dependent on state sponsors like Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia for support; and that these groups, by their resort to attacks on civilians, are on the roster of terrorist organizations and thereby pose a threat to the United States, a threat that cannot be distinguished from that of al-Qaeda. This is presumably what Perle means when he says "Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder" and why he presses for war on "all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not." It's a tricky point. According to Dilip Hiro's The Essential Middle East,[2] Hezbollah and Hamas consider themselves to be at war with Israel, not the United States. Treating them as synonymous with al-Qaeda adds to the number of America's enemies and widens the war on terror without making it easier to fight.
But President Bush seems to have adopted Perle's inclusive definition of terror, possibly without understand-ing quite how clearly it commits the United States to support for Israel's continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. By declaring Israel's enemies as our own, the inclusive definition of terror as a strategy to make the Middle East safe for Israel certainly seems more "pragmatic and realistic" than the more grandiose effort to replace the regimes in Perle's target countries. "Moving boldly" against Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia may not actually bring democracy, but it will certainly impede the flow of money and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, bring a period of relative peace, and thereby allow Israel to put off again the difficult moment when it must give up the West Bank. Delay of the inevitable, cutting off money and arms, making life hard for opponents —those are goals realists and pragmatists can get behind.
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In the world according to Richard Perle everything is clear and all choices are stark—except when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza. There he grows vague. "The Arab–Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism," he writes. "The unwillingness of the Arabs to end the quarrel is a manifestation of the underlying cultural malaise from which Islamic extremism emerges." So the suicide bombers are driven by "the under-lying cultural malaise"? It has nothing to do with thirty-five years of Israeli occupation?
On this subject alone Perle is unable to say what he thinks must be done, offering instead a bleak outline of everything that won't work, starting with the one thing Palestinians have agreed they want—a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Perle concedes that this might be achieved, "if the United States were to denounce Israel as an illegal occupier of Muslim land, attack it, deport the Jewish population, and turn over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians...." Alas, "carving out a twenty-third Arab state in the Judaean Hills" won't solve anything. The mini-state will be weak and small; extremists will demand more; "every great-niece or third cousin whose family once lived on what is now Israeli territory must be allowed to return." America will have to take on the job of defending the mini-state from Hezbollah and Hamas. "In the end, we will be fighting its people on its behalf. We will have created a Palestinian South Vietnam." Yes, yes—"a peaceful, open, and democratic Palestinian state would be a good thing," he concedes, but "the likeliest result...will be another abject failure of the so-called peace process." It will all end badly.
What does this mean? Perle's answers are elliptical. "The greatest... obstacle to peace is the feeling among many people in the Arab and Muslim world that anything that was once theirs can never legitimately be anybody else's." Many peoples have suffered the loss of a homeland in the last hundred years, he writes. They got used to it. Jews had to leave their homes in Arab land. "They...let go of the past. The exiled Palestinians should likewise be accepted as citizens of Arab countries in which they now live." Is Perle saying that the Palestinians ought to give up their hope of a state on the West Bank...and move away?
The hard-liner seems to have run out of ideas. China, Russia, the CIA, the State Department, "the underlying cultural malaise" in the Middle East— all these he can fix. But when it comes to the longest-running open sore in the clash of civilizations, his advice to the Palestinians is what Lucy in her role as psychiatrist used to tell the troubled Charlie Brown—"Get over it!"
That's what decades of bloody struggle over the West Bank get by way of helpful advice in An End to Evil. After it come eighty pages on "Organizing for Victory" and how to deal with "Friends and Foes." Firmly is the basic idea. It's all rousing stuff in its way but hard to take seriously if not for one fact—the American army now planted in the heart of the Middle East. Anybody wondering when that army will return home should follow closely something never mentioned by Perle—the status of forces agreement soon to be negotiated between the United States and the new sovereign government of Iraq, once it is established. A status of forces agreement regulates the presence of military forces in an alien country. It's my guess that the United States will insist on the right to maintain bases in Iraq, to supply, expand, or contract them at will, and to conduct military operations inside Iraq, or against third countries from Iraq, without requiring the permission of the host government. Anything less would be lacking in realism. The hard-liners have insisted all along that Iraq is not the only regime in the Middle East that needs changing, and the United States will need plenty of latitude if a reelected President Bush is to carry on with the hardline strategy for winning the war on terror.
Notes
[1] Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (Simon and Schuster, 2004); see Paul R. Krugman's review in these pages, February 26, 2004.
[2] Carroll and Graf, 2003.
Pat Buchanan's take on the Neo-Cons:
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict
http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our civilization” and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can “end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on terror.” Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can “end” it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and “immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: “We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not” [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, “present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.”
“Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror,” or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a “state sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to “toss dictators aside”? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. “We have no doubt how such a war would end,” say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial.”
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a “cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,” that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.”
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza, “one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam,” as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action” can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about “unipolar” moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and “wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.”
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored “A Clean Break,” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,” he writes, the “con” stands for conservative and the “neo” stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: “This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.”
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to “benevolent global hegemony” to “a Pax Americana” to “world democratic revolution” have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of “passionate attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an “ideological” nation, “like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
(article is too long too paste)
To follow up on our class discussions please read this BBC series on the question of how America projects its power. Try to post your comments.
Amantha Perera COLOMBO, Jul 16 (IPS) - Talk about the Tamil Tigers' suicide cadres and many in both the majority Sinhala community and minority Tamils here in Sri Lanka react with fear.
Since the start of the peace talks in Sri Lanka, the Tigers have allowed, just once, a rare public display of the much-feared Black Tiger suicide cadres. Credit: Buddhika Weerasinghe.
''Their commitment is scary," says Lakshman Wickremasinghe, a Sinhalese. His thoughts are echoed by Nadaraja Sivaganashan, a Tamil. ''They don't care who, when or what, they will kill themselves."
Both of them think suicide bombings by the Tigers have not ended for good, despite the cessation of hostilities that has been in place since February 2002 in the Tigers' campaign for their own homeland.
The use and effect of suicide bombings in Sri Lanka's two-decade-old ethnic conflict was underscored this month, which marks the 16th anniversary of the Tigers' first official use of this weapon on Jul. 5, 1987.
On that day, Captain Miller, a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the Tigers are formally known, drove an explosives-laden truck into an army camp housed at a school in Nelliady in the northern Jaffna peninsula.
Since then, the Black Tigers, as the suicide cadres are known, have been emulated by the likes of Hamas in the Palestinians' campaign against Israeli occupation, and by the al-Qaeda network of terrorists.
Lasantha Dahanaike, a human rights investigator based in the United States, says that poverty, repression -- and the anger and desperation stemming from these -- are responsible for the evolution of the suicide cadre culture.
"I don't condone it, but it is the most effective weapon against an army that has modern weapons at its disposal. They (suicide cadres) are using their best weapon,'' said Dahanaike, a Sri Lankan who has also done research on the suicide attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In other words, the use of suicide bombers depends heavily on the particular situation in a conflict. If the situation on the ground continues to be a breeding ground for such desperate moves, suicide attacks will continue, he adds.
On Jul. 5, Miller and other LTTE cadres who followed him were commemorated by the LTTE all over Tamil-dominated areas in the North and East. At least 243 Tigers have since followed in Miller's footsteps, including 53 women.
Estimates of the number of suicide cadres at present are hard to make, but media quoted one LTTE speaker at the Jul. 5 ceremony as saying there are some 500 of them.
Female suicide cadres were responsible for two of the most spectacular Tiger attacks -- the one that killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the assassination attempt on Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 1999. Kumaratunga survived the attack, but lost an eye.
The background of Black Tiger Kandasmy Lingeswaran is typical. Born to a poor fishing family in Jaffna, he witnessed his family and community harassed by government forces. He joined the LTTE and like most cadres, was willing to give up his life for the Tigers' elusive leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, and what he believes is the Tamil cause.
"If war breaks out, I will fight. And in war you make sacrifices," Lingeswaran said during an interview soon after he was released by the government during a prisoners-of-war swap in September.
''For some, particularly for those who have lost a loved one during an ethnic riot or killed by a soldier, Prabhakaran is a demigod," said author Rohan Gunaratna in his book, 'International and Regional Security, Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency'.
Media reports that emerged during the investigation into the Gandhi assassination revealed that Dhanu's motivation for becoming a suicide bomber stemmed from her rape by Indian soldiers stationed in Sri Lanka during the late 1980s.
From the time a cadre is singled out to be a Black Tiger, he or she courts mythical admiration. The Black Tiger is separated from ordinary cadres and severs all contact with family and friends. Before embarking on a suicide mission, he or she will partake in a special meal with Prabhakaran.
In death, Black Tigers are venerated. In LTTE cemeteries, suicide cadres have pride of place with granite tombstones over graves that hold no bodies.
Shrines built in memory of them dot Sri Lanka's north-east. At the location of the attack in Nelliady, which is now under government control, the Tigers erected a statue of Miller last year. It was here that the main commemoration ceremony in Jaffna took place earlier this month.
The Tiger rebels also look after suicide cadres' families after their demise. For the likes of Lingeswaran, in death he may be able to give his poor family something that he never could in life, a comfortable life and respect. Miller's mother too was among the chief guests at the Jul. 5 ceremony.
The newest addition to the suicide wing is the Sea Tigers. Footage of such attacks has shown them speeding toward Sri Lankan Navy crafts in explosive-ridden crafts, waving and acknowledging the cheers of cadres on other boats.
Some suicide attacks have caused massive casualties, among them the 1996 bombing through an explosives-ridden lorry of the Central Bank building in which 86 were killed and 1,338 injured. In the June 1995 attack on the Joint Operation Command, 21 people were killed and 120 injured.
A suicide cadre is a potent weapon that cannot be detected very easily, says government military spokesman Brig Gen Sanath Karunaratne. "It is a one-way soldier and there is very little stopping. Once you get someone into that mentality, there can be no limit," he told IPS.
For instance, Babu, the LTTE cadre who killed President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993, had infiltrated the President's staff through a household staffer and remained inactive for almost two years before carrying out the suicide attack.
The LTTE realises that the Black Tigers give them an unmatched edge. "The Black Tigers are the strongest force of a much weakened people,'' said Amithaab, an LTTE official at the Nelliady ceremony.
The Tamil daily 'Sudar Oli' recently quoted Prabhakran as paying tribute to suicide cadres. ''No weapon and no technology on earth, can stop the determination of the LTTE's suicide bombers. The suicide squad came into being at a critical juncture in the history of the Tamil liberation movement and has taken it to the next stage."
In many ways, this month's ceremony in Nelliady was a means for the Tigers to tell the Sri Lankan government and other parties in the peace process that it is still a force to reckon with militarily.
For the time being, the Black Tigers are hibernating. They have only been put on public display once, during the Heroes Day celebrations in November, when they marched
An American soldier has been detained on suspicion of trying to pass information about military weapons to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The suspect, identified as Ryan Anderson, a National Guardsman based at Fort Lewis in Washington state, was held after a surveillance operation.
His unit is preparing to be deployed in Iraq as part of a rotation of forces.
It is thought he did not pass on any information, but may have tried to contact al-Qaeda through the internet.
Officials said Mr Anderson, 26, converted to Islam within the past few years.
US guardsman 'in al-Qaeda plot'
An American soldier has been detained on suspicion of trying to pass information about military weapons to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The suspect, identified as Ryan Anderson, a National Guardsman based at Fort Lewis in Washington state, was held after a surveillance operation.
His unit is preparing to be deployed in Iraq as part of a rotation of forces.
It is thought he did not pass on any information, but may have tried to contact al-Qaeda through the internet.
Officials said Mr Anderson, 26, converted to Islam within the past few years.
'Aiding the enemy'
Lt Col Stephen Barger said Mr Anderson was suspected of "aiding the enemy by wrongfully attempting to communicate and give intelligence to the al-Qaeda terrorist network".
He said Mr Anderson was arrested following a joint investigation involving the army, the FBI and the Justice Department.
The BBC's Nick Childs, in Washington, says the soldier is a member of a tank crew but not of a senior rank and is not thought to have had access to highly sensitive information.
Pentagon officials said he had been signing on to extremist internet chatrooms and was trying to contact al-Qaeda operatives to offer services and information.
Mr Anderson, who serves in the 81st Armored Brigade, is being held in custody at Fort Lewis.
Fresh public alarm
Our correspondent says details of this case remain murky and precisely why Mr Anderson might initially have come under suspicion is not immediately clear.
This apparent security scare could raise new alarms in the minds of the American public, at least about the reliability of some Muslim military personnel, he adds.
But US military officials aren't drawing any wider conclusions right now. They are anxious to attract more Muslim recruits to help with operations in Iraq.
Mr Anderson is the second Muslim soldier from Fort Lewis to be suspected of wrongdoing in the US-led war on terror.
Former Fort Lewis chaplain, Capt James Yee, is accused of mishandling classified material at Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects are being held.
Three other men working for the Americans have been charged with security violations at Guantanamo Bay.
Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa — In what may be the first subpoena of its kind since the Communist-hunting days of the 1950s, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
University, Four Anti-War Activists Subpoenaed
Saturday, February 07, 2004
DES MOINES, Iowa — In what may be the first subpoena of its kind since the Communist-hunting days of the 1950s, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas, served by a local sheriff's deputy who works on the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum.
The group, once targeted for alleged ties to communism in the 1950s, announced Friday it will ask a federal court to quash the subpoena on Monday.
"The law is clear that the use of the grand jury to investigate protected political activities or to intimidate protesters exceeds its authority," guild President Michael Ayers said in a statement.
Representatives of the Lawyer's Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union said they had not heard of such a subpoena being served on any U.S. university in decades.
Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq in 2002.
They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent.
"This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on."
The forum, titled "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" came the day before 12 protesters were arrested at an anti-war rally at Iowa National Guard headquarters in Johnston. Organizers say the forum included nonviolence training for people planning to demonstrate.
The targets of the subpoenas believe investigators are trying to link them to an incident that occurred during the rally. A Grinnell College librarian was charged with misdemeanor assault on a peace officer; she has pleaded innocent, saying she simply went limp and resisted arrest.
"The best approach is not to speculate and see what we learn on Tuesday" when the four testify, said Ben Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, which is representing one of the protesters. Supporters plan to demonstrate outside the courthouse.
Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, said he had not heard of any similar case of a U.S. university being subpoenaed for such records.
He said the case brings back fears of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters.
According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."
It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting."
Several officials of Drake, a private university with about 5,000 students, refused to comment. A source with knowledge of the investigation said a judge had issued a gag order forbidding them from discussing the subpoena.
Welcome to the new UC Berkeley J298 class "Arabs, Muslims and the War on Terror". This blog will be written as a collaborative effort amongst the students in our class as well as our professor Lamis Andoni. Feel free to contribute links and relavant information as it becomes available.