Rx for Mideast Terrorism: Solve the Problems, Isolate the Flakes

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The ultimate security is a nation that foreigners do not wish to retaliate against. Maybe that is an absurd dream? We are not helped toward that ideal dream by those who let their enthusiasm for Israel override reason and who make it their business to inflame an American public against an Islamic world." —Henry Mitchell, Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1988.

For Ronald Reagan, Muammar Qaddafi has been a terrorist and a "flake." For Libyans, he has been a tyrant whose education program is to erect a gallows and hang a student on a university campus. For other Arab rulers, he is a public relations disaster whose 20-year ascendancy in Libya demeans them all.

Qaddafi's only rival for the title of worst affliction presently suffered by the Arabs is his own pet terrorist, Sabry Al Banna-Abu Nidal. This sinister figure defected from the PLO years ago and hired out as a hit man for strongman Arab rulers. When his savagery was too much for his first client, Iraq, he moved on to Syria, under whose protection he still trains recruits in Palestinian refugee camps. His current patron is Libya. His victims are frequently his fellow Palestinians, innocent Jews in restaurants or synagogues, American and other Western citizens, and almost never Israelis. Whether Qaddafi or Abu Nidal understand it, the sole beneficiaries of his actions are Israeli intransigents looking for reasons not to make peace with Palestinians.

It is only because of Abu Nidal, and a sinister coterie of Syrian-funded and directed Palestinian splinter groups like the thuggish Ahmad Jibril's PFLP-General Command, that any suspicion at all fell upon Palestinians for the Pan American Flight 103 bomb outrage that snuffed out the lives of 270 innocent persons over and in Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21.

If the United States is serious about ending terrorism, it can start by addressing the Palestine problem. This can be done by supporting moderates on both sides.

Iranian groups so flaky that they have been renounced even by the fanatics in charge of their own government claim responsibility for the tragedy, calling it revenge for the killing of 290 passengers on Iranair Flight 655 on July 3. But instead of taking these Iranians and their Lebanese Shi'ite hirelings at their word, the world ignores them, insisting that terrorists capable of penetrating sophisticated security checks in European airports must enjoy the protection and support of a government such as Syria or Libya.

It was therefore predictable that, with the faces of young Pan Am 103 victims and their grieving survivors on American minds, ambiguous comments by outgoing President Reagan that he was considering "taking out" a factory where the Libyans could make chemical weapons would suddenly electrify the nation. The US government had been aware of the factory since December 1987, and went public with its concerns last September. But serious saber rattling was triggered in December by a series of calculated events including a planted question in a televised press conference by knee-jerk pro-Israel pundit George Will, and a carefully documented leaked report in the New York Times linking the plant to a West German company. Paced by Clint Eastwood rhetoric from the aging actor, and heavy breathing from his stone-faced secretary of state, the media then created a carnival of anti-Qaddafi hysteria that culminated in the shooting down Jan. 4 of two Libyan fighter aircraft by two American jets off the Libyan coast.

The US says the action began when two armed Libyan planes flew aggressively toward two American planes charged with protecting US Sixth Fleet ships between Crete and Libya. From the US point of view, the US ships involved were engaged in routine training exercises 70 miles off the Libyan coast. From the Libyan point of view, it was a case of two of their unarmed observation planes checking on launchings by the aircraft carrier USS Kennedy of heavily-armed jets less than 10 minutes flying time from the Libyan city of Tobruk. And, as the Libyans point out, one of their jets was downed from behind. History will have to decide. Under Qaddafi, the Libyan record for veracity is poor. And so, during the Reagan era, has been the record of the US.

Events Strain US-European Relations

The juxtaposition of the three events, the bombing of the civilian aircraft, loose talk from an aging actor in the last month of his starring role as US president, and the downing of the two military aircraft, had worldwide effects—all welcomed by Mideast extremists and all detrimental to the US.

It united American allies in an effort to stop what all perceived as another destabilizing spasm of anti-Libyan US military action. Margaret Thatcher was the only major world leader who supported Ronald Reagan when he bombed Libya in 1986, causing extensive civilian casualties, including the permanent maiming of Muammar Qaddafi's son, and the death of his adopted daughter. This time even Margaret Thatcher—who was the personal target of a 1984 hotel bombing by the Irish Republican Army, which gets some of its weapons from Qaddafi—counseled restraint.

The events had three grave results. They further frayed bonds between the US and its NATO allies. These ties will, inevitably, snap sometime after 1992 if the then-united Europeans conclude that the protection the US alliance provides them against the Soviets is more than offset by the dangers to which they are exposed by the endless US-Israeli war against the Palestinians and their Arab and Islamic supporters.

The threats to bomb the Libyan chemical factory and the shooting down of two Soviet-supplied MiGS also revived cold-war-type Soviet-US rhetoric. It was exactly the kind of talk that must, ultimately, be silenced if the fear of nuclear annihilation is ever to be lifted from the human race.

Finally, if the resulting new wave of December 1988-January 1989 fury and disgust sets the scene for the deaths of still another planeload of innocents, people on all sides of the ideological lines are going to stop flying, with all that a breakdown in international air travel means for world commerce, prosperity, and understanding.

Time to Re-Examine Terrorism

At the beginning of a new era in which Americans of various political persuasions will truly sleep more soundly, knowing that a real president is in the White House, it is appropriate to re-examine terrorism. The goal should not be to coin new slogans to win another term for incumbents in the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, but to ponder how the world can truly be freed from this scourge.

One school of thought says address the problems against which the terrorists are protesting. The other school says that is not enough because some terrorists are psychopaths who just like to kill people—the flakes. Both schools are right, but solving real problems that turn frustrated idealists into terrorists will, at the least, isolate the madmen.

Those who deny this self-evident truth have a separate agenda. They are more concerned with obstructing a searching examination of their particular cause than with obstructing terrorists. They depend, in fact, upon the torrent of public outrage after each new terrorist excess to obscure the view and obstruct the efforts of the peacemakers who, unimpeded, would drain the political swamps in which terrorists breed.

Who in the Middle East benefited from the chain of events that began over Lockerbie? It occurred right after Yasser Arafat had said the "magic words" that reduced the Palestinian claim to a quarter of the original mandate of Palestine, recognized Israel's right to exist in the rest, and renounced terroristic means to attain even the PLO's newly limited goal. Suddenly the PLO had nothing left to give. Even most American journalists then put aside their normal pro-Israel bias to observe that Israel must make an equally magnanimous peace offer—or be branded as the only remaining obstacle to peace. Israelis pleaded that they needed time to form their government. By the time it was formed, the Pan Am plane had been blown out of the skies and the media was setting up not a confrontation between the US and Israel, but between the US and Libya.

Who Are the Extremists?

"How dey do dat?" Jose Jiminez used to exclaim at startling twists of the script on television's "Laugh-in." The answer, in the Middle East, is that extremists on all sides of the demarcation lines get a lot of help from each other. By resorting to the foulest means to fight each other, they generate the mutual fear they need to perpetuate themselves. And with each startling twist of the Middle East script, they buy more time to stave off compromise solutions. "They" feed on each other.

Who are these extremists? "They" are Libya and its pawns—Abu Nidal for international terrorism, the Muslim fundamentalist Hamaas in Gaza and the West Bank, and many terrorist gangs in Lebanon. Because Libya's leader is a tyrant, he unites his people behind his leadership by striking out in the name of justice for the Palestinians. American counterstrikes impel even Libyans who loathe him to rally behind him.

"They" are Syria and its radical rejectionist Palestinian pawns based in Damascus, but with cells in the Israeli-occupied territories as well. Hafez Al-Assad and his Muslim Alawite co-religionists rule an overwhelmingly Sunni Syria with a heavy hand. The Alawites need an external threat, Israel, as an excuse to buy the tanks and planes with which they maintain their minority rule. A Syrian peace with Israel might be followed by pressure for democracy at home, and that very likely would knock Assad and his clansmen off the privileged perch from which they have ruled Syria for a generation.

Whether Americans like it or not, there are elements in the Mossad who take their cues from right-wing extremists from the older generation like Shamir and Sharon.

"They" are the Khomeini regime in Iran and its pawns. They include Lebanon's Muslim Shi'ite Hezbollah (Party of God), which holds the American hostages. The shah's misrule pales before the political tyranny and economic chaos of the Ayatollah Khomeini's government. The establishment of peace and tranquility throughout the Middle East could lead rapidly to Khomeini's downfall at home.

Finally, whether Americans like it or not, there are elements in the Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies who take their cues from right-wing extremists from the older generation like Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon. There are also younger Likud leaders like Benyamin Nathanyahu and Moshe Arens who seem just as determined that Israel will never relinquish the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and even areas in southern Lebanon which, together, control sufficient water to support a vastly expanded Israeli population. The longer peace negotiations are delayed, the more time they have to implant Israel settlers and to expel Arabs from those lands.

Israel has not only its own Israel-based assassination squads, about which volumes have been written, but also agents under deep cover in Arab states and in Palestinian guerrilla organizations. Israel has boasted for years about these agents in place. It credits them for the interception by Israeli soldiers of so many of the raiding parties mounted against Israel's land and sea borders. It claims they have warded off actions targeted against Americans as well. The role of highly placed informers smuggling information out of Palestinian resistance groups is widely discussed by Israelis and their American supporters. But they refuse to give credence to claims by Yasser Arafat and a great many Americans as well that these same Israeli agents may inspire some of the radical Palestinian and Lebanese Shi'ite groups to the terrorist acts that so obviously redound to Israel's benefit, and whose timing is often so fortuitous for Israel.

Israeli Intelligence Operation

Why this should be so hard for Westerners to accept is puzzling. Antiwestern operations by Israeli intelligence are well-documented. The "Lavon Affair," in which American installations in Cairo and Alexandria were firebombed in 1954, was only the first directed against the US. At home, Americans were not surprised when they learned, years after the fact, that the triggerman in the widely publicized murder by Ku Klux Klansmen of white civil rights volunteer Violet Liuzzo was an FBI informer demonstrating his loyalty to the Klansmen upon whom he was informing. Nor was anyone surprised after World War II to learn that Europe's sworn ideological enemies, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, had both been simultaneously engaged in massacring the entire captured Polish officer corps. Each side blamed the other for the infamous Katyn massacre. In fact, both the Soviets and the Nazis committed similar atrocities against identical targets.

PLO Intelligence Can Help US

The United States, which has relied heavily upon Israeli intelligence in the Middle East for many years, now will have the benefit of PLO intelligence as well in the fight against terrorists. Although it may be no better, it can hardly be worse than the quality of information received from Israel. Israeli intelligence has been extraordinarily self-serving, and therefore remarkably misleading. A case in point was the promised Israeli "opening to Iranian moderates" which was in fact a cover for extensive Israeli arms sales to the ayatollah's Iran. It led directly to the arms-to-the-ayatollah lowpoint of the entire Reagan administration.

If anyone doubts for a moment that terrorists representing causes as ideologically opposed as Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, Arab Marxist radicalism, and Israeli irridentism can actually work together, the evidence is readily available.

Another example was the tip about "Libyan hit squads" headed for Washington to gun down the president. That resulted in a massive and hugely expensive year-long security alert throughout the continental United States. Dump trucks full of gravel blocked White House driveways. Concrete barriers were constructed at the Capitol and Department of State. Americans waxed indignant over the theatrical Libyan "flake." Much later, Iranian-born Mossad agent Manoucher Ghorbanifar admitted the whole "hit squad" was a figment of his active imagination, designed to renew his waning credibility with Robert McFarlane and Oliver North.

On Dec. 29, six days after the bombing of Pan Am 103, the Israeli Embassy press attaché put into every box in the National Press Club a release saying that "terror organizations around the world ... have all learned from one source: the PLO." In fact, two of Israel's prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were carrying out terrorist bombings and assassinations many years before the PLO was created. Most US journalists are well informed enough to realize that the one Middle East group that would have nothing to gain and everything to lose from any connection with the Pan American bombing would be the PLO. But the Washington Post promptly printed an editorial based upon the Israeli Embassy release, never mentioning the source but repeating as much of its disinformation as space would permit.

If anyone doubts for a moment that terrorists representing causes as ideologically opposed as Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, Arab Marxist radicalism, and Israeli irridentism can actually work together, the evidence is readily available. In January, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, Syrian-sponsored rejectionists and adherents of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamaas jointly denounced Yasser Arafat's "capitulation" to a two-state solution and pledged to work together to oppose both the PLO and any settlement with Israel. That statement, and those that follow, play into the hands of Israelis who claim there is nothing to negotiate with Palestinians. Meanwhile the Israelis provide the third side of this "iron triangle" blocking peace by arresting on sight Palestinians suspected of supporting the moderate PLO program, while letting their rejectionist secular and religious rivals run wild in the streets and camps.

Meanwhile the Israelis provide the third side of this "iron triangle" blocking peace by arresting on sight Palestinians suspected of supporting the moderate PLO program, while letting their rejectionist secular and religious rivals run wild in the streets and camps.

If the United States is serious about ending terrorism, it can start by addressing the Palestine problem. This can only be done by supporting the moderates on both sides. Polls in the summer of 1988 showed 60 percent of Israelis willing to trade land for peace. Fifty-four percent of the vote in the November Israeli elections went to parties endorsing land-for-peace programs. A majority of Israelis would negotiate with the PLO.

Why, then, does the US not target its aid to Israel so that it helps the moderates and cuts the ground out from under the extremists who are building illegal West Bank settlements into ever-greater impediments to peace? And why won't the US link a verifiable ban on poisonous gas to a verifiable ban on nuclear weapons? So long as the Israelis secretly stockpile nuclear weapons, the Arabs who fear them will secretly stockpile poison gas. Since both nuclear weapons and poison gas can be delivered by missile, each side sees these horror weapons as its most credible defense against the other side. Only after a peace agreement is reached can the world expect both sides to give up weapons of mass destruction willingly.

Peace is Essential

True, there will always be flakes and idealogues. Perhaps every terrorist operating in Western Europe, Japan, and the US is such a flake. And, in the Middle East, perhaps Khomeini, Qaddafi, and Assad can be described as ideologues, not as personal victims of injustice. But their ideologies derive from, and exploit, the injustice suffered by the Palestinians.

In Europe after World War II, American and British Jews joined Jews of many nationalities in breaking the laws of their own lands to smuggle weapons and fighting men to their co-religionists in the Holy Land. Today Arabs and Muslims all over the world are united in support of the Palestinians. Surely many are equally willing to break the laws of their own lands. This is a global fire that cannot be extinguished by Israeli, or American, military action. It can only be quenched by a just peace. To achieve this, the US must align itself with the moderates on both sides, and recognize that it is the interaction of Israeli as well as Arab intransigents that provides the sea in which terrorists swim. Until then, there will be no beginning of peace in the Middle East, and no end of terrorism in the world.