Four years and six months after al Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S.
and three years and two months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, no
end is in sight to the war on terrorism. 2,400 U.S. soldiers have lost
their lives and 18,000 have been wounded, many of them maimed for life.
More than $300 billion of taxpayers’ money have been spent on
the war effort. Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies warns that “We could end up spending up to $1 trillion
in supplemental budgets for this war.”
The daily killings and the chaos in Iraq’s urban centers remain unchecked,
in spite of the formation of a national government in Baghdad. In Afghanistan,
U.S. and NATO troops are facing resurgent Taliban contingents. Terrorists’ cells,
sometimes unrelated to al Qaeda, continue to strike whenever and wherever they
will, one day in Amman, another day in Kabul.
The Middle East’s core problem, the 39-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian
lands, continues with unabated harshness. Assassinations and shootings committed
by Israeli forces have inflicted far more casualties on Palestinians than Palestinian
attacks on Israelis. Yet, in official U.S. and Israeli terminology, only Palestinian
killers are terrorists.
When you listen to Islamic media and read their press, you learn how much the
1,300 million Muslims around the world are seething with anger over the occupation
of their fellow believers by non-Muslim military powers, not only in Palestine
and Iraq but also in dozens of other places where American
forces are stationed. What international law is it that allows foreigners from
thousands of miles away to impose a new kind of colonialism upon Muslim and Arab
peoples? So they ask.
They are gripped, moreover, by a lingering suspicion that President Bush and
his neoconservative brain trust intend to extend America’s military and
political control over the Middle East permanently. If that were true, the threat
of anti-Western and particularly anti-American terrorism would remain a frightening
reality for as long as Western troops remain there.
It is not clear at all if President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Rice take the Muslim despair over the growing
U.S. domination of the Middle East serious. They still want to shape the nations
of the region in their image. They want governments willing
to accept whatever policies the White House and Congress ordain.
The Bush administration expects the world to agree to its view that neither Israel
nor Pakistan and India need to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and
that all three may keep their nuclear weapons indefinitely. While Israel retains
its arsenal of roughly 200 nuclear arms and its exemption from inspection by
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), all other countries of the Middle
East, including Iran, will not be allowed to enrich uranium, even for peaceful
purposes, and must submit to unrestricted IAEA inspection. Otherwise, they will
be punished economically or militarily. For the sake of our Israeli friends,
neither Congress nor the White House wants to hear calls for a Middle East free
of nuclear weapons.
The President and Secretary Rice have been making it abundantly clear that they
are planning to stay the course. Yet, they have no clue how they could ever achieve
the victory they promise over America’s hidden terrorist foes. In Congress
also, nobody knows how to extract our beloved country from the terrorist menace
and from the ongoing political and religious confrontations in the Middle East
that feed so much bitter hostility and brutal violence.
Instead of threatening and badmouthing America’s alleged foes, Secretary
Rice needs to learn how to respond to their fears and grievances in a civilized
manner and focus on conflict resolution.
The present course of endless confrontation is unsustainable.