If politics makes for strange bedfellows, then the specter of the United States aligned with some of the world’s most notorious terrorist states is an oddity indeed.
What has occasioned this bizarre association is the Bush administration’s desire to build a global coalition against terrorism, one that includes countries with a long and nefarious history of hostility, even violence, toward the United States?
To make this coalition possible, the president has asked Congress to support his proposal for a five-year waiver of all laws that prohibit the chief executive from providing military assistance to countries defined as being either state sponsors of terrorism or those having egregious human rights records. Under the law, these countries currently are ineligible to receive U.S. military aid. The request forms part of the administration’s anti-terrorist offensive, a package of legislative proposals rushed to the Hill with little analysis immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks.
According to the White House proposal, granting the president unrestricted arms sales authority is “important to the U.S. effort to respond to, deter or prevent acts of international terrorism or other actions threatening international peace and security.”
If this waiver request seems peculiar, it is, and it should be resoundingly denied by Congress. Approval would mean that countries such as Syria, Iran, China, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Iraq and Yemen, all now under U.S. sanction, could become eligible for U.S. aid. Yet these are some of the most unsavory regimes on the planet. Many of them have given their support, either directly or indirectly, to Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization.
Countries like Syria and Iran have long terrorist pedigrees and for most of the last 20 years have waged war against the U.S. through surrogates in Lebanon, Europe and the Palestinian territories. The U.S. has no business aligning itself with any of these countries, regardless of the administration’s desire for 100 percent participation in its coalition.
Under the Bush proposal, the administration would no longer be required to notify Congress prior to initiating arms sales to either Pakistan or India. This is quite a change from just two years ago when heavy sanctions were levied on both countries for their detonation of nuclear weapons.
The last time an administration tried to eviscerate U.S. laws against rogue regimes was in September 1993. Then, it was President Bill Clinton who tried unsuccessfully to overturn all statutory prohibitions against dealings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Flush with the afterglow of the White House ceremony at which Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords, Clinton asked Congress to immediately, and unconditionally, repeal all laws that in any way encumbered U.S. relations with the PLO. These included antiterrorist laws, immigration laws, banking laws, and PLO-specific restrictions that prevented the U.S. from conducting full and unfettered diplomatic relations with Arafat and his organization.
Congress had enacted the laws over a 20-year period specifically to protect the American public from a growing terrorist menace in the 1970s and 1980s. As leader of one of the world’s premier terrorist organizations, Arafat engineered some of the most dramatic attacks against America, Israel and the West that had ever been seen up until that time. Airplane hijackings in Beirut and Brussels, the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich and the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador and Charge d’Affairs to Khartoum in 1973 were all attributable directly to the PLO or to its many splinter groups.
But in the heady days of Oslo, history was of little concern to the Clinton administration. A day after the signing, the White House dispatched Ambassador Dennis Ross, the president’s Middle East coordinator, to Capitol Hill with instructions to persuade Congress to end all restrictions on American involvement with the PLO. For the organization, this meant full diplomatic recognition, the movement of PLO representatives beyond a 25-mile radius of New York, and access to U.S. economic assistance. It was a brash and dangerous move.
For without so much as a hearing, a floor debate or an analysis of how these changes in law would affect other pressing interests of the U.S., the president was prepared to nullify 20 years of statute that had protected American citizens from the ravages of the PLO and other terrorist organizations.
When asked by congressional staff why Arafat was not to be held accountable for the deaths of American citizens, Ross could only shake his head and admit that this was the new policy. He acknowledged there was no statute of limitations on the murder of Americans.
Fortunately for the nation, Ross’ efforts met with limited success. Instead of a full-fledged repeal of the antiterrorist laws relating to the PLO, Congress granted the president a temporary, 90-day waiver, on only three laws. Amidst the euphoria of Oslo, prudence triumphed over recklessness.
Eight years later, President Bush finds himself in much the same predicament as his predecessor. While wishing to form a broad alliance of antiterrorist states, he has chosen a path that will, in the end, only undermine U.S. credibility in the fight against terrorism. It will weaken American resolve and compromise the very laws that may be needed to prosecute those responsible for terrorist crimes against the U.S.
It is both brazen and reckless for the president to believe that he can lure Syria and Iran into assisting the U.S. in its fight against terrorism any more than Ronald Reagan was able to garner their assistance during the Iran-Contra debacle. Trusting the likes of radical regimes and their duplicitous leaders is a recipe for humiliation and ultimately, defeat. If the logic driving this new policy approach is “to catch a terrorist you need to employ a terrorist,” then the administration is sorely mistaken – monumentally so. To catch a criminal you need a cop.
The history of the Middle East is littered with the vain attempts by Western powers to court leaders whose very legitimacy stems from a hatred of Occidental civilization. It is a hatred rooted deep in the paranoia of their own Arab-Islamic societies and fierce, intolerant nationalism. For liberal democracies, an alliance with such states is nothing less than a betrayal of their Enlightenment ideals. For America, the leader of the free world, it is a formula for failure.
Just ask former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who made nearly 30 trips to Damascus in an effort to persuade its autocratic leader, Hafez Assad, to join in a peace deal with Israel. No other world leader had such attention lavished upon him by the slavish secretary.
Even after proposing an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, Syria’s central demand since June 1967, Christopher could not get Assad to move one scintilla toward a reconciliation with Israel. All the while, Syria continued to supply its surrogates in Lebanon with weapons used in an unrelenting terrorist war against Israel and the West.
Yet what is the response of the State Department? In the words of one official, “We view Syria as small potatoes in terms of terrorism. Syrian participation in the coalition could tip the balance and finally remove Damascus from the terrorism list.” This is likely to prove small comfort to the families of the 241 Marines who lost their lives when a terrorist bomber, most likely with Syrian assistance, blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut where they were stationed in 1983.
Every patriotic American is committed to the fight against terrorism. The horrors witnessed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania will be forever emblazoned on our national consciousness. But to ask that Americans put aside their sense of outrage, turn their back on core values and embrace one group of terrorists so that we can catch others is both shameful and outrageous. Our people should no more buy into the president’s plan than they should agree to suspend the Constitution so that we can catch a few more bank robbers.
True, the U.S. government used the Mafia to gather intelligence on potential Axis saboteurs and provide security on American docks during World War II. And yes, Washington looked to the Mafia again in the early ’60s to assist in bringing down Castro. But organized crime, for all of its evils, pales against the backdrop of countries like Iran and Syria that have written new chapters in the book of state terror. What could they possibly contribute to the terrorist fight that would warrant giving them guns and training?
A quick perusal of the State Department’s annual terrorism report reveals that Syria and Iran are home to a veritable alphabet soup of terrorist groups – groups that have long histories of murder and mayhem committed against Americans and their allies. Both countries are believed to have been instrumental in the kidnapping and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s. Each is reputed to hold captured Israelis and for years has refused all requests of the international community to allow the Red Cross to verify the condition of the captives.
Adding insult to injury, the Bush administration is even considering removing Syria from its list of terrorist states. Though demanded by Damascus, this major concession comes with no commitment that Syria will refrain from terrorist acts against American or Israeli targets in the future.
So what does the administration hope to gain from its proposed flirtation with evil? The answer is unclear given the disdain with which those regimes hold the U.S. and their close identification with the views and methods of bin Laden and his backers. To obtain their assent, the administration is not only prepared to provide them with the instruments of war, but also to deny Israel a place at the coalition table.
When the devil’s price is so high that it means forsaking your friends, that should be a clear signal that a policy has gone awry. For a president who has staked his reputation on knowing right from wrong, he should not now confuse the victims of terrorism with those who perpetrate it.
For at least the last 10 years, both Syria and Iran have been among the world’s most active drug producers. They have thumbed their noses at Western counter-narcotics efforts and continue to amass hundreds-of-millions of dollars annually through the illicit trade in cocaine and other substances. Syria has gone a step further by establishing a counterfeiting operation that is in large part responsible for the U.S. Treasury being forced to substantially alter the face of American currency.
Neither Syria nor Iran has the desire, or the capacity, to renounce terrorism any more than it would contemplate renouncing its Ba’athist or revolutionary Islamic ideology. To believe otherwise is foolish and signals to the world that the administration lacks any idea as to what it is up against in this new war. The first lesson of any conflict is “Know your enemy.” It would seem that the Bush administration has failed this first test.
Rand H. Fishbein, Ph.D., is president of Fishbein Associates, Inc., a public-policy consulting firm based in Potomac, Md. He is a former professional staff member (majority) of both the U.S. Senate Defense Appropriations and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittees. Dr. Fishbein also served as a foreign policy/intelligence analyst on the Senate Iran-Contra Investigating Committee and as special assistant for national security affairs to Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii.
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