US, Israel, and the vicious circles in Middle East, Ed Blanche

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

US, Israel, and the vicious circles in Middle East

Ed Blanche

Convicting Iran in argentine court opens doors to military action against Tehran, Hizbullah

Special to The Daily Star, 8/30/03

BEIRUT: The Aug. 20 arrest in northern England of the former Iranian ambassador to Argentina, on an international arrest warrant issued by Buenos Aires for his alleged involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in that city, is certain to harden the Bush administration’s campaign to prove that Hizbullah, funded by Tehran and employed by Syria, has “global reach” and is thus a legitimate target in the “war against terrorism.”
Hizbullah (or operatives using one of the organization’s many flags of convenience) and Iran have long been held responsible for that bombing, and a 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital, by the Americans and the Israelis. But proving it beyond a shadow of doubt was another matter.
This was largely due to Argentine investigations that were either incredibly incompetent or official cover-ups (probably both) and which were plagued by disappearing witnesses, vanishing evidence and unexplained delays, mainly during the corrupt presidency of Carlos Menem. Last month, Argentina’s new president, Nestor Kirchner, released papers of the investigation conducted by Argentina’s secret service, and judicial authorities issued international arrest warrants for eight Iranians.
They included the former envoy, Hadi Soleimanpour, arrested in Durham in northern England where he is studying at the university. He faces extradition to Buenos Aires, and a trial that could finally shed some light on the 1994 bombing and the 1992 attack. Some 120 people perished in the two bombings.
Hizbullah and Iran have repeatedly denied any involvement in those attacks. In 1999, one of Hizbullah’s most notorious operatives, Imad Mughniyeh, an Islamic fanatic who the US holds responsible for suicide bombings in Lebanon that killed hundreds of Americans and the seizure of dozens of Western hostages in the 1980s, was indicted in the 1992 bombing by Argentine authorities four years ago.
Mughniyeh, who blazed an eight-year trail of carnage across the Middle East that Osama bin Laden later followed, has been closely associated with Iran’s intelligence service and the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps since he fled Lebanon to Tehran when the civil war ended in October 1990.
Indeed, his ferocious reputation as a terrorist mastermind has reached almost mythic proportions. Since Sept. 11, 2001, hardly a month goes by without the Israelis or Americans implicating him in one act of subversion or another, or plotting to strike them. It suits their purposes to do so because through Mughniyeh they implicate Iran, Syria and Hizbullah (and therefore Lebanon) in global terrorism and make them justifiable targets for George W. Bush’s war against terror. This, in the final analysis, is Israel’s agenda.
The Americans still believe that they have a score to settle with Hizbullah, Syria and Iran from humiliations that began with the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, less than a year after America’s ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, was toppled in the world’s first Islamic revolution, up to the suicide bombings that eventually drove the Americans out of Lebanon in 1984.
(The US conquest of Iraq has many similarities with the American intervention in Lebanon in 1983 that wound up propping up a Christian-led government in the face of Islamic opposition). But despite the Americans’ desire to get even for those past chastenings, US targeting of these states and organizations like Hizbullah is ultimately to Israel’s benefit.
Even before the Americans invaded Iraq, Ariel Sharon was pressing Bush to go after Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, arguing that they threatened stability in a region into which the Americans have since moved decisively with armed force, a move many in the region see as infinitely more destabilizing. For the Americans to cripple Hizbullah, pressure would have to be applied to Iran and Syria, the first considered a serious threat because of its alleged nuclear and missile programs, the second so weakened and isolated by events as to be a pushover.
For the Syrians, Sept. 11 was disastrous. It pushed the US closer than ever to Israel. The conquest of Iraq, its eastern neighbor and erstwhile rival, left it ringed by the Americans, the Israelis and the Turks, with no leverage any more in negotiating a peace settlement with Israel. Its young and inexperienced president, Bashar Assad, was severely restricted in his room for maneuver.
Assad whose country has been on the US State Department’s blacklist of states supporting terrorism, largely because of its backing for Hizbullah chose to cooperate to the fullest extent with the Americans in the war against terrorism. He gave them unprecedented access to the massive and highly detailed files on Al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants held by Syrian intelligence, which had penetrated cells throughout the Middle East and Europe.
US officials have said that the Syrians thwarted at least two though probably more Al-Qaeda plots against the US. According to Seymour Hersh in a highly detailed account in the New Yorker in July, “the Syrians learned that Al-Qaeda had penetrated the security services of Bahrain and had arranged for a glider loaded with explosives to be flown into a building at the US Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters there. The Syrians also helped avert a suspected plot against an America target in Ottawa.”
Assad believed that this unflinching cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation even allowing CIA operatives to poke around inside Syria itself would earn him rewards from Washington. It didn’t.
The CIA and FBI were all for establishing “back channels” with Damascus, whose penetration of the once-rebellious Muslim Brotherhood, from which hard-core militants gravitated toward Osama bin Laden’s loose-knit network, was considerable. But the State Department, aghast at intelligence men intruding on its turf, and the Pentagon, where Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon hawks were champing at the bit to go after the regimes in Damascus and Tehran, made sure that the fortuitous links with US intelligence were severed and that there was no let-up in the increasingly strident denunciations of Damascus. They found no justification for cooperation with Syria, even though its capability to cause mischief had largely evaporated following the death of Hafez Assad in June 2000.
The detente between the Syrians and the CIA came to a halt when Bush invaded Iraq. Any prospect there may have been of resurrecting it was shattered on June 18, when elite US commandos of Task Force 20, a special unit whose mission is capturing Saddam Hussein and his closest associates, infiltrated as deep as 40 kilometers into Syria and ambushed a convoy suspected of taking senior regime figures across the border.
In fact, the convoy consisted of fuel smugglers. In the wild shoot-out that erupted, as many as 80 people, some of them Syrian civilians, were killed. Five Syrian border guards were wounded. As a military operation it was a disaster.
The Israelis, meantime, were just as upset about the CIA’s entente with Damascus as Rumsfeld and the State Department mandarins, possibly more so since it reduced their influence in Washington regarding Syria. They breathed a hefty sigh of relief when the Bush administration rebuffed Assad.
Sharon’s government showed just how dismissive it is of Assad these days by ignoring two recent offers by the Syrian leader to resume negotiations on the Golan Heights. The Israelis now believe that once they’ve crushed the Palestinians into submission, they’ll hold all the cards in any future peace negotiations and can bide their time. There is little Assad can do any more, even through Hizbullah, to give the Israelis pause.
They had made it known, more than once, that if Hizbullah gets too uppity, retaliation will be directed against the Syrians. They gave Assad a reminder on Aug. 10 when Israeli warplanes flew low over his holiday home above the coastal city of Latakia, believed to be the first time Israeli jets have overflown Syria since Israeli forces abandoned their occupation zone in South Lebanon in May 2000.
Iran, with its weapons of mass destruction programs in accelerated mode, is the Israelis’ biggest security problem. Convicting Iran in an Argentine court for one of the Buenos Aires bombings opens up the possibility of military action by Israel and/or the US against Tehran’s hard-liners and their Lebanese allies. All hell could break loose in Iraq and the long-dreaded alliance between Hizbullah, branded the “A-team of terrorism” by US Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage not so long ago, and Al-Qaeda could well come about despite the religious differences between the two sects that are almost as old as Islam itself.
Western intelligence services, and just about every Arab leader, have dreaded a Shiite-Sunni merger since the 1980s. It is worth noting that Hizbullah has played ball with Sunnis before now during the 1985 “War of the Camps” when it quietly supported the Palestinians besieged in their Lebanese shantytowns by Amal and the Syrians.
A decade ago, Hizbullah passed on its guerrilla skills, and in particular the intricacies of suicide bombings, to Palestinian Islamists dumped by the Israelis in the no-man’s land in south Lebanon for seven months. Indeed, the first Hamas suicide bombing took place in April 1993, a few months after Israel was forced to take back the Islamist deportees. And Hizbullah has busied itself backing the Al-Aqsa intifada, in various ways, since it erupted nearly three years ago.
The US and Israel have come to bitterly regret the succor they gave to Hamas and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s for their own political purposes, and if they’re not careful they could create new Frankensteins for themselves. If the Palestinian cause was not the catalyst in the past, Iraq may provide it now. The tentative Sunni-Shiite alliance emerging there against the Americans, despite all the effort by Arab regimes as well as the Western powers to promote Sunni-Shiite friction over the years, may well be the shape of things to come.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).