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December 8, 2001
by Eugene Narrett, Ph.D.
Some of you will recognize the name of Angelo Codevilla, Professor of International Relations at Boston University and former member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Terrorism & Counter-Intelligence. Codevilla has been one of the most cogent and tenacious critics of the official line on former Israeli agent, Jonathan Pollard, his sandbagging by the U.S. Courts and abandonment by successive Israeli governments. In the Fall 2001 issue of the Claremont Institute's Claremont Review (included within the excellent weekly newspaper, Human Events for 12-03-01) Codevilla presents a scathing and detailed critique of American political and Intelligence leaders to the September 11 bombings. His remarks brim with essential lessons on national self-delusion and bad faith by governing cadres and they bear importantly on the long-festering situation in the Middle East. US Executive Branch policies have contributed greatly to this conflict since forcing the roll back of the IDF from Sinai in 1956 and the "Rogers [land-for-peace] Plan" of 1968. Codevilla's thesis is that the largely mis-directed and otherwise passive, reactive approach that America (like Israel) is pursuing to terrorism against its people is counter-productive. It invites rather than deters attack and its growing mountain of "security measures" serve mainly to raise the expenses and degrade the civil liberties of their own people. It undoes the greatest accomplishments of western civil society, making government more and more a master rather than a servant of the governed. Increasingly invoked, God recedes along with the sense that He and His laws are sovereign, not the "experts" that presume to define and defend us from terror, something they abjectly fail to do. The Bush Administration's interminable suck-up to Islamic nations, Codevilla argues, is the worst signal we could send to a culture and religion most of whose people despise the West, however many of them are active in supporting terrorism. By sharing "intelligence" with and offering membership in a "Coalition against Terror" to notoriously terror-supporting states (Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan being the worst) the Administration signaled Arafat, Bashar al Asad and Saddam Hussein that they "could enjoy, undisturbed the success of the anti-western cause that alone legitimizes their rule. That peace is their victory, and our lack of peace is our defeat," Codevilla notes. I often have explained that in war as in most areas of life, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound, indeed, a ton of cure. More specifically, the best defense is a good offense; preemption solves more current and avoids more future problems than any number of counter-strikes. Codevilla quotes the retiring US. Senator Phil Gramm (R - TX) on this point: "I don't want to change the way I live. I want to change the way they live." But except in Afghanistan, that is precisely what the Bush (and Clinton) Administration have failed to do to the Arab world that envies and hates us with a seething and chronic animosity. Until the past week, the same was true in Israel where the Arab war of attrition against the Jewish people and their homeland (however infinitesimally its boundaries are drawn, see, for example, the Peel Partition Plan of 1937) has grown with the refusal of faithless Israeli governments to wage and win war as America did in WW II. Israel indeed is a model for Americans to see what is right and wrong with constantly heightened security measures that chases after mosquitoes while leaving the swamp undrained. The Israelis invest vast sums in roadside patrols and checkpoints, identity checks, covert operations, bulletproof windows, buses, cars and doors, and fuel for an army that spends most of its time deploying and re-deploying. Caught between the whipsaw of Arab terror and State Department - UN - EU demands for "restraint," Israel bleeds to death financially and in the most literal and terrible of ways, all without diminishing the terrorism. The leitmotif of Codevilla's analysis is that deterrence is the name of the game, the enemy's understanding that for any pain they cause your people or resources, they will suffer ten or a hundred-fold. But a rock-solid commitment to deterrence is not enough, the professor explains. "Intelligence is useful only in service of intelligent policy." And that is precisely what America and Israel still lack in the war that targets them for destruction. Codevilla reminds students of history that "the gullibility of US intelligence is not merely an intellectual fault," but rather what I would call a moral failing reflected in contradictory and patently failed policies. Chief among these moral enormities has been the CIA's virtual invention of Arab radicalism. "Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, when speaking to his brother, CIA Director Allan Dulles referred to Gamal Abdel Nasser as 'your colonel' because Nasser's takeover of Egypt was financed by the CIA. Franz Fanon, darling of the anti-American left" was very close to the CIA, Codevilla notes and "under the Clinton and Bush Administrations, CIA Director George Tenet has openly supported the fiction that Arafat's 'Security Forces' are something other than an army for destroying Israel." Similarly, the CIA under Bush I declared Saddam Hussein "no threat to the region." One basic point in the foregoing critique requires correction. The CIA did not invent but inherited and greatly amplified "the incendiary game of fanning Pan-Islamic nationalism in its most medieval form" from the British Foreign Service in the 1920s and '30s. This fascinating and profoundly disturbing history is told in detail by Shmuel Katz in his crucial biography of the founder of the Jewish Legion, Hagana and Irgun, Ze'ev Jabotinsky (Lone Wolf, 1996). As events of the past decade have shown, collaboration between Foggy Bottom and Downing Street on bizarre alliances has grown more dangerous and routine. Having enormously amplified the problem of pan-Islamic nationalism, they now engage in situational dousing of flames. Yet still, they strain to rescue Yasser Arafat, yet again, for yet one more "understanding" with his Israeli victims who, as always, are expected to exercise "restraint" in response to the mass murder of their civilians. This very week, in the immediate aftermath of the most recent bombings in Jerusalem, the current American envoy, Gen. Anthony Zinni is meeting with Arafat and the [terrorist] directors of his Security Services, Mohammed Dahlan and Gibril Rajoub. And this just after Arfat spit in America's face by welcoming the delegation that had come with the gift of a State and more Israeli concessions for him, with an unprecedented terrorist onslaught. For Mr. Tenet this was old hat. The one-way cease fire supposedly in effect in Israel since the Arabs blew up the Dolphin Disco in Tel Aviv June 01, bears Tenet's name. Charles Krauthammer succinctly described Ariel Sharon's 'policy' toward terror in his December 07 column, "Sharon Flinched." Indeed, this has become the trademark of his administration with always the excuse of pressure from 'the American friend.' This suicidal bad faith and betrayal of America's only true ally between western Europe and Taiwan (and perhaps a truer ally than any in Europe) is rooted in the long term commitment of the Anglo-American diplomatic establishment to a global village and Corporate-Arab partnership. Thus the focus on Afghanistan to the exclusion of the world's worst terror states. Aside from the early bumbling of our Armed Forces response to the Taliban, and fending off of the Northern Alliance, there is the failure to distinguish Afghani Muslims from Arabs. "Unlike Syria, Iraq or the PLO," Codevilla notes, "the Taliban have little concern with affairs beyond their borders." Their regime may be offensive to feminists, but they, until the intervention of Saudi Arabian maniac, bin Laden, had scant interest in the West. "Afghans have not bloodied the world," Codevilla writes. "Arabs have." "How did the PLO and Ba'ath regimes of Syria and Iraq come to power," he asks. "Saudi Arabia and the Emirates gave them money and America gave them respect [diplomatic standing] and money." Codevilla emphasizes that this was in part, especially from the Europeans, because of a habit of giving into terrorist demands, especially but not only on plane hijackings. (America under Johnson actually started this trend in response to hijackings to Cuba). These three regimes "are the effective engines of global terrorism," he explains at length, and indeed have been for more then three decades. "By comparison, Libya, Sudan and Iran have been minor players." Iraq is ripe for replacement of its regime and installation of a democratic regime, just as was done with Germany and Japan after WW II. The case for Syria is the same, along with expulsion from Lebanon and cession of some southern territory to Israel. As for Yasser Arafat and his militias, anyone advocating any further "talks," "understandings," "treaties" or "accords" with him and the PLO is a fool and/or a villain. There will be no peace in the Middle East, and little for the rest of the world, either, until Arafat is finally executed, his dozen or so terrorist groups decimated and driven far from Israel whose blood excites their ferocity. (Regarding the lust for Jewish blood and fantasies about Jewish "power" in the Arab world, Arafat's native State, Egypt, is just completing a thirty-part TV series elaborating the coarse Czarist forgery known as "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion"). Codevilla concludes by noting that "destroying the major anti-Western regimes of the Middle East may come too late to save the moribund government of Saudi Arabia," whose own anti-western and fanatic form of Islam, Wahabism, he indicts, or of Egypt, either. But part of the cogency of Codevilla's argument is that what happens politically in the Arab world is not our main concern or within our capability. What is central is to punish and put the fear of God into any regime that sponsors, protects or supplies terrorists. This is what President Bush pledged on September 20 to do and what his Administration has failed to do since. Indeed, in meeting with Arafat & Co in Ramallah December 06, Gen. Zinni, William Burns, and Israeli intelligence officials, too have mocked themselves by offering terms and concessions to the world's senior terrorist. The sooner the PLO, and the Ba'ath regimes in Syria and Iraq are treated as the Taliban recently have been, the sooner the peoples of the world will take a giant step toward security and, in the west, to regaining the freedoms that once graced our lives. Dr. Eugene Narrett is a writer and teacher in Massachusetts and is the author of Gathered Against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace (Dec. 2000). His new book, Israel Awakened: A Chronicle of the Oslo War, is currently available at www.1stbooks.com/bookview/7421.
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