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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Before Bush endorsed Sharon's plan, much of the Arab press and popular opinion had stopped short of such an equation. Many, even those opposed to the U.S. invasion and critical of the occupation, were prepared to acknowledge that not all of those fighting the Americans were noble freedom fighters. Now, the rhetoric and sentiment are swinging the other way.
Sharon's plan for West Bank annexation and withdrawal from Gaza had held one danger. Hamas, strong in Gaza, might take advantage of an Israeli withdrawal to use the territory as a base for even more suicide bombings. Sharon was determined to wipe out the Hamas leadership so as to cripple its organizational capacity and render it unable or fearful to benefit from a unilateral Israeli pull-back. Thus he launched the rocket attack on Sheikh Yassin on March 22, which was a piece of political theater. A half-blind man in a wheelchair could simply have been arrested (in fact, Yassin served time in an Israeli prison in the 1990s). The point was to inspire fear among his successors.
Hamas is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist party, deriving from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Sheikh Yassin's extremist writings are widely read among fundamentalists, including those in Iraq. His murder provoked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. Some of them determined to take revenge on the closest ally of the Israelis, the Americans who were occupying them.
The fuse ran from Gaza to Iraq, and ignited in Fallujah. Sunni Arab fundamentalists and Arab nationalists are particularly strong in al-Anbar Province, the site of the notorious centers of opposition to American rule such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Habbaniyah. Fallujah in particular has many Islamists close in their thinking to Hamas. The group that killed the four American civilian security guards in Sunni Arab Fallujah on March 31 identified itself as "Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin," calling the grisly killings a "gift to the Palestinian people."
American military forces immediately began closing on the city, seeking revenge. Although the link was virtually unreported in the Western press, the ghost of the man in the wheelchair had cast a long shadow over the American occupation of Iraq -- one that would grow longer.
Then, on April 2, the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced in his Friday prayer sermon in the southern Shiite city of Kufa that he should be considered the "striking arm" of Hamas "because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same." On April 3, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued 28 arrest warrants for associates of al-Sadr, and took 13 of them into custody, including Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, his representative in Najaf. The pretext for the arrests was a year-old murder, and the warrants were themselves several months old. It is probable that the decision to act was taken in the light of al-Sadr's April 2 sermon, by Bush administration officials who feared his movement posed a threat to Israel.
The U.S. responded with massive military force to the twin Sunni and Shiite uprisings, assaulting Sadrist positions in East Baghdad and besieging and shelling Fallujah. The situation in Fallujah in particular became dire, and as noted above has exacerbated anti-U.S. sentiment across Iraq and the Arab world.
Neoconservatives, many of them ardent defenders of Israel with strong ties to the Likud, were among the chief intellectual architects of the war on Iraq. The American neoconservative linkage between Iraq and the Likud was first revealed in a position paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and other neoconservatives for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. They advocated an Iraq war, the destruction of the Oslo peace process, the refusal ever to return territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and using a conquered Iraq as a means of pacifying the Lebanese Hezbollah.
At the time, such positions were regarded as wildly radical: Today they have become U.S. policy.
Perle used his position of influence as chair of the Defense Policy Board, which advised the Pentagon, to promote an Iraq war, as did Feith, who became undersecretary of defense for planning in Bush's Department of Defense, and Wurmser, a Middle East advisor on the staff of Vice President Cheney.
The irony is that even though they got what they thought they wanted, the entire enterprise might have just boomeranged on them. Instead of neutralizing Iraq as a player in the Middle East conflict, they almost certainly have provided new allies to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese Shiites, in the form of popular Sunni and Shiite religious and political movements that can now freely mobilize since Baath repression is gone.
The U.S. siege of Fallujah aimed at trapping the guerrillas that had used the town as their base. Some of them were ex-Baath military, others Iraqi or Arab nationalists, and yet others were radical Muslim fundamentalists little different in their views from Hamas. Many were well armed, having raided Baath weapons depots, and well trained, having served in the Iraqi army.
