LOS ANGELES, 4 May 2003 — Two headlines were tragically, and correctly, juxtaposed on the Reuters newswire Tuesday night. The first was, “Bomber Hits Israel After Palestinian Reform Vote.’’ And the second was, “US Troops Kill 13 Iraqi Protesters.’’
Get used to it, America, because this is the new reality: The United States and Israel are in the same fight in the Middle East. The only debate now is between those who say that both countries are fighting Arab terrorism and those who say that both countries are fighting Arab nationalism, plus Islamic fundamentalism. No matter what a victory-minded President Bush says on nationwide TV, it looks to be a long struggle.
The suicide bomber hit Tel Aviv, killing three and wounding dozens. The explosion came just hours after Abu Mazen, who has called for negotiations with Israel, was named prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, observers suggested that the attack was “a message from the armed Islamic groups to Abu Mazen and his new government that they rejected all attempts to bring about a cease-fire.’’
At the same time, Jewish settlers on the West Bank shot and killed two Palestinian gunmen. In other words, 36 years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the 3 million Arabs there are still violently unreconciled to Israeli rule.
Once upon a time, Israel’s difficulties with Arabs were a sad but abstract topic for Americans. But now it’s a matter of life and death for our own young men and women.
And thus the second headline — 13 Iraqis dead in the town of Fallujah (the number has since been raised to 15). According to a US Army colonel, hundreds of protesters were chanting anti-American slogans when two men with rifles arrived and started shooting. And so the GIs fired back. It’s hard to blame them for defending themselves, but it’s also hard not to see that such a guns-blazing approach to crowd control is not going to win over Iraqi hearts and minds.
American infantrymen are trained to kill and take territory, and yet they are not trained in the subtler art of keeping order. The skill sets of a warrior and a cop are different.
No doubt, eventually, the Pentagon will bring over military police armed with such non-lethal tools as tear gas and water cannon. In the meantime, Reuters reports that two more Iraqis were shot dead in Fallujah in yet another incident.
On a deeper level, the Bush administration has obviously not been paying attention to the Israeli experience. The big story of the past few decades has been the decline of secular Arab power and the rise of Islamism. That is, when the Arabs in uniforms and mustaches are crushed, the Arabs in turbans and beards rush into the vacuum.
As The Washington Post reported last week, when demonstrations by the Shiites first erupted in Iraq, US intelligence officials were surprised that “the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was thought.’’ Indeed, one Pentagon meeting of generals and admirals “evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq’s Shiites and the US strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq.’’
Is it really possible that Shiites, who have been around for 14 centuries, is a mystery to the Pentagon? Short answer, yes. And there’s a reason for that. The careerists in Washington who knew anything about Islam have been excluded from the decision-making loop.
Such folks were derided as “Arabists,’’ lacking the “moral clarity’’ needed for the mission of eliminating Saddam Hussein and his vast stocks of ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, the Defense Department invited an evangelist, the Rev. Franklin Graham — who dismisses Islam as “wicked’’ and “evil’’ — to the Pentagon to deliver a Good Friday sermon. Three days later, with the success of Iraqi “nation-building’’ on the line, the brass needed a crash course in that same religion.
In the wake of the seemingly endless spree of suicide bombings, it’s unlikely that the American “road map’’ — a step-by-step plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace — is going anywhere. At the same time, suicide bombings aren’t likely to go away. Nothing new there. What is new is that America, operating just a few hundred miles from Israel, now needs a road map of its own, as the body count starts to mount.
