In the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, terrorist teams commandeered four jetliners departing from airports in Boston; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Within forty minutes, they flew two aircraft into the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center, and a third aircraft into the Pentagon in precisely planned suicide attacks. A fourth jet, which is believed to have been intended for the U.S. Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. In all, besides the nineteen hijackers, some 2,974 people were killed in the four attacks: 2,603 in the World Trade Center, 125 in the Pentagon, and all 246 passengers on the four planes.
The terrorists gave no warning and made no demands. They carried out their attack to inflict maximum damage on the United States and to set change in motion. We can only surmise from subsequent statements by al-Qaida the kinds of changes the suicide hijackers had in mind: to drive America from the Muslim world, to destabilize pro-Western regimes in the Muslim world, to overturn those regimes and replace them with Islamic states.
Though no organization claimed credit for the attacks, the U.S. intelligence services suspected Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida group from the outset. Within days of 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had identified all nineteen hijackers. All were Muslim Arab men—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon—with connections to al-Qaida.
The United States responded to the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 by declaring war on a largely unknown enemy. In a televised address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush declared a “war on terror” beginning with al-Qaida and continuing “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” He prepared Americans for a long and unconventional war and promised them that America would prevail.
The September 11 attacks and the war on terror placed the United States and the Arab world on a collision course. Many—certainly not all, but many—in the Arab world were glad to see America suffer. To Arab observers, the United States seemed indifferent to Arab suffering—of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, or of Iraqis under a decade of stringent sanctions. In his public pronouncements, Osama bin Ladin played on this Arab anger. “What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years,” Bin Ladin claimed in October 2001. “Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.”1
Bin Ladin’s statements from his clandestine Afghan mountain stronghold added greatly to Arab-American tensions. There was widespread admiration for the al-Qaida leader across the Arab and Muslim world. People were impressed by al-Qaida’s ingenuity in striking such a devastating blow against the United States on its own soil. Bin Ladin became an overnight cult symbol, the stencil of his face an icon of Islamic resistance to American domination. Such views were incomprehensible to Americans, who reviled Bin Ladin as a figure of unqualified evil.
The American people were frightened, confused, and extremely angry after the September 11 attacks. They felt threatened at home and unsafe abroad. They demanded their government respond swiftly and decisively against their enemies. The Bush administration responded with covert action against jihadi terror networks, and by taking America into two wars of choice that confirmed the impression in the Arab world that the war on terror was a war against Islam.
America’s war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, supported by a UNSANCTIONED and NATO-supported coalition. Their aims were to topple the rigid Islamist Taliban regime, which had provided support to Bin Ladin and his organization, and to arrest the al-Qaida leadership and destroy their training facilities in Afghanistan. The war was quick and largely successful—the Taliban were driven from the capital, Kabul, by mid-November, and the last Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds fell by mid-December 2001—and involved a minimum of U.S. ground troops.
Despite its operational successes, the Afghanistan War was marred by key failures that exacerbated the war on terror. Most immediately, the Americans failed to capture or kill Osama bin Ladin and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Both men escaped to regroup their forces and resume their fight against the United States from neighboring Pakistan. For Bin Ladin’s supporters, survival against the Americans was victory enough.
Other al-Qaida members were taken prisoner in the course of the Afghanistan War. These men were designated “enemy combatants” and denied both their rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and due process under the U.S. legal system. They were incarcerated in an extraterritorial U.S. military facility on Cuba known as the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Beginning in October 2001, nearly 800 detainees were sent to Guantanamo, all of them Muslim. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have been released without charge, and they returned home to tell of their experiences. Ranging from humiliation to torture, the mistreatment of Guantanamo detainees provoked international condemnation and outrage in the Arab world.
Within Afghanistan, the Americans worked with local leaders to create a new political structure for the war-torn country that had suffered over twenty years of conflict. However, the Americans needed to invest a great deal in economic development and state-building to ensure the stability of President Hamid Karzai’s new government. Instead, by 2002 the Bush administration had diverted its energies and resources to planning the Iraq War, leaving the fragile Afghan state vulnerable to reconquest by the Taliban. As a result, a war that began in October 2001 with a handful of foreign ground forces expanded into a major conflict involving nearly 100,000 Western troops fighting the Taliban in 2009. And victory is far from assured.
Most Arab states were uncomfortable with an expanded U.S. military presence in the region. Their lukewarm support for America’s war on terrorism made the United States doubt a number of its long-time allies in the region—none more so than Saudi Arabia. The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans. Other countries came under new scrutiny as well. Egypt was seen as soft on terror, Iran and Iraq were labelled as part of an “axis of evil,” and Syria rose to the top of the ranks of countries supporting terrorism.
The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America’s war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world’s sole superpower. If they took America’s side, they opened their own territory to the threat of terror attacks by local jihadi cells inspired by Bin Ladin’s example. Between May and November 2003, cities in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey were rocked by multiple bomb attacks that left 125 dead and nearly 1,000 wounded. In November 2005, three hotels were ripped apart by coordinated bombs in Amman, Jordan, that left 57 dead and hundreds wounded—nearly all of them Jordanians. The Arab world faced tremendously difficult choices as it managed its relations with the United States.
The same pressures that drove America and the Arabs apart drew Israel and America closer together. And the more America took Israel’s side, the greater its tensions with the Arab world.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon persuaded President George W. Bush that the United States and Israel faced a common war on terror. The Second Intifada, which broke out in September 2000, had grown increasingly violent by the time of the 9/11 attacks. Palestinian suicide bombers had inflicted heavy civilian casualties on Israeli society. According to Israeli government figures, Palestinian groups carried out thirty-five suicide bomb attacks in 2001, causing 85 deaths. The death toll more than doubled the following year, with fifty-five suicide attacks killing 220 Israelis in 2002.2 The worst incident came in March 2002 when Hamas suicide bombers killed 30 and wounded 140 Israelis celebrating Passover in a hotel in Netanya.
The use of suicide bombings by Islamist groups to target innocent civilians was enough to convince President Bush that Israel and the United States were fighting against the same enemy. The United States then turned a blind eye to Israeli actions against both its Islamist foes—Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon—and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Israel took full advantage of American complacency to unleash disproportionate attacks against Palestinian government and society that heightened tensions in the Arab world enormously.
In June 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the reoccupation of the West Bank. Though he justified the measure in terms of assuring Israel’s security from terror attacks, Sharon’s move was clearly intended to isolate Yasser Arafat and weaken the Palestinian Authority. As Israeli forces seized Palestinian cities that had been under self-rule—Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya—they stepped up attacks against the Palestinian resistance.
Once they were back in control of key Palestinian cities, the Israelis tried to eliminate the leadership of Palestinian parties and militias by targeted assassination. Their attempts to assassinate militant leaders in densely inhabited areas normally led to extensive civilian casualties. In July 2002 the Israelis leveled an entire apartment building with a 2,000-pound bomb in their bid to assassinate Hamas commander Salah Shahada. They killed Shahada, along with eighteen other residents, including a number of children. Such use of heavy weaponry in urban areas inflicted heavy casualties on the Palestinian people. From the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 until the end of 2001, some 750 Palestinians were killed; in 2002, the number of Palestinians killed exceeded 1,000.
On top of the use of lethal force, Israel imposed a number of collective punishments borrowed from British mandate–era Emergency Regulations. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada at the end of 2000, the Israelis have arrested thousands of Palestinians. Some have been tried and sentenced to long prison terms, others have been expelled. Yet others have been held under administrative detention for months on end, without charges or even access to the evidence against them, leaving them no means to challenge their detention or prove their innocence. As a further deterrent, in October 2001 the Israelis began to demolish the homes of Palestinians suspected of involvement in attacks against Israel. The policy of house demolitions was only discontinued in February 2005, when the Israeli chief of staff acknowledged that the policy had no deterrent effect. Over this period, the Israeli military destroyed 664 Palestinian houses, leaving 4,200 people homeless, according to Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.
As the Israeli military struggled to contain the Second Intifada, the Sharon government exacerbated tensions with the Palestinians through measures designed to seize more territory in the West Bank. Israeli settlements expanded in the Occupied Territories. And in June 2002 the Israeli government began construction of a 720-kilometer (450-mile) wall, ostensibly to insulate Israel from Palestinian terror attacks. The Separation Barrier (dubbed the Apartheid Wall by Palestinians) cuts a path deep into the West Bank and represents a de facto annexation of nearly 9 percent of the Palestinian territory in the West Bank, adversely affecting the lives and livelihoods of nearly 500,000 Palestinians.3
Israel’s repression of the Second Intifada proved a clear liability to America’s war on terror. The images of Palestinian suffering, broadcast live via Arab satellite television, provoked fury across the Middle East. Israeli actions, and U.S. inaction, proved valuable recruiting devices for al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. The Bush administration was forced to engage in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking to try to diffuse regional tensions.
President Bush, recognizing the adverse effect Israeli policies had on America’s attempts to win Arab “hearts and minds” in the war on terror, decided to address the Palestine issue directly. In a major White House address delivered on June 24, 2002, Bush held out a vision of a Palestinian state “living side by side in peace and security” with Israel—the first time an acting U.S. president had openly advocated Palestinian statehood. However, the Bush vision required the Palestinians to “elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror”—a clear swipe at the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.
There was much in Bush’s speech to assuage Arab concerns. President Bush called on the Israelis to withdraw their troops from the West Bank and to return to the positions they held prior to the outbreak of the Second Intifada on September 28, 2000. He also called for an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. These were new, substantive steps toward recognizing Palestinian suffering under occupation and towards acknowledging legitimate aspirations to independent statehood.
Even so, Bush’s speech did not receive a favorable reception in the Arab world. His many references to combating terror made clear to Arab viewers that Bush was more concerned with prosecuting his war on terror than achieving a just and durable solution to the Palestinian problem. The Arabs doubted Bush’s sincerity—and for good reason. By the summer of 2002, his administration was already planning for war against Iraq.
The United States presented its case for war against Iraq in terms of the global war on terror. The Bush administration alleged that Saddam Hussein’s government had amassed a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, and precursors for a nuclear weapon. British prime minister Tony Blair echoed Bush’s concerns and aligned the United Kingdom with America’s stance on Iraq. The White House also suggested that Saddam Hussein’s government had connections to Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida organization. The Bush administration invoked the war on terror and threatened a preemptive war to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the most dangerous terrorists.
The Arab world had grave reservations about President Bush’s accusations. Arab governments believed—erroneously—that Saddam Hussein probably did hold an arsenal of chemical and biological agents. After all, he had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Even the UN’s top weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, believed Iraq held such weapons. However, the Arab states knew that Iraq had played no role in the September 11 attacks and strongly doubted any connection between the Islamist al-Qaida movement and the secular nationalist Iraqi Ba’th party. Saddam Hussein headed precisely the type of government that Osama bin Ladin sought to overturn. The Arab world simply did not accept what the Bush administration was saying, and it suspected the United States of ulterior motives—of coveting Iraq’s oil, and of seeking to extend its domination over the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
The invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003, was widely condemned internationally and across the Arab world. The United States, seconded by Great Britain, had invaded an Arab state without provocation or UN sanction. Saddam Hussein remained defiant in the face of superior Western forces, and, as it had during the Gulf War in 1991, his stance generated widespread Arab public support, which Arab governments disregarded at their peril. All twenty-two members of the Arab League except Kuwait supported a resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of the UN Charter and demanding a complete withdrawal of all U.S. and British troops from Iraqi soil on March 23. Yet no one seriously expected the Bush administration to pay heed to the concerns of the Arab world.
Though the Iraqis put up stiff resistance, they were completely overpowered by superior British and American forces who enjoyed unchallenged control of the skies over Iraq. On April 9, the Americans secured Baghdad, signalling the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government within three weeks of the start of hostilities. The Iraqi people had mixed feelings, celebrating the overthrow of a much-hated dictator while resenting the Americans and British for invading their country.
Celebrations gave way to chaos, as crowds of vandals attacked government buildings and presidential palaces to vent their anger and plunder whatever they could lay their hands on. The looters did not confine themselves to hated government offices but attacked cherished institutions of national heritage as well. Iraq’s national museum was stripped of its priceless archaeological treasures, and both the national library and the state’s archives were set on fire while the occupation forces stood by and watched. Arab journalists noticed that the only public building secured by the Americans was the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum, feeding conspiracy theories that the whole invasion had been motivated by American interests in Iraqi oil. Statements by American officials did little to assuage these concerns. When asked by journalists why the American authorities did not do more to stop the looting, the U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissively quipped, “Stuff happens.”
The overthrow of the Iraqi government left the United States in control of the country. The Bush administration established a governing body called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Two early decisions by the CPA transformed the chaos of postwar Iraq into an armed insurgency against American rule. In May 2003, the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer, passed two decrees. The first outlawed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Ba‘th party, barring former Ba’th members from public office. Bremer then passed a second order disbanding the 500,000-member Iraqi military and intelligence services.
The American authorities wanted to purge Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s malign influence, much as the Allied occupation authorities had done to Nazi Germany after the Second World War. They hoped by these measures to enjoy a free hand to build up a new, democratic Iraqi state that would respect human rights. In fact, what Bremer had done was to make a number of well-armed men unemployed, and stripped Iraq’s political elites of any interest in cooperating with America’s new democratic Iraq. What followed was an insurgency against the American occupation and a civil war between Iraqi communities. Iraq quickly became a recruiting ground for anti-American and anti-Western activities.
As the insurgency began to take hold, the casualty figures in Iraq began to mount. New organizations emerged, such as al-Qaida in Iraq, an Iraqi terror group with only nominal ties to Osama bin Ladin’s organization, which deployed suicide bombers against foreign and domestic targets. They drove the United Nations to close their offices in Iraq after targeted bombings in August and September 2003 killed the senior UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and over twenty of his staff. Westerners were taken hostage, and many were brutally murdered. Military patrols became the target of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Insurgents killed an average of 60 U.S. service men per month in the six years following the 2003 invasion. By 2009, more than 4,300 Americans and 170 Britons had been killed and over 31,000 foreign soldiers wounded by the insurgents.
The full horror of the Iraqi insurgency is reflected in the suffering of the Iraqi people themselves. Though the casualty figures for Iraqi civilians since the 2003 invasion are widely disputed, the Iraqi government estimates that between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians have been killed. Suicide bombers have wreaked daily carnage in the markets and mosques of Iraq’s cities. Graphic images of Iraqi death and suffering have been broadcast across the Arab world by satellite TV. The true cost of the war on terror, it seemed, was borne by the Arab people.
And in the end, what was the U.S. invasion of Iraq all about? No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. No connection was ever established between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida or the September 11 attacks. Although the United States had promised to replace Saddam Hussein’s tyranny with a new regime of democracy and human rights, graphic photographs of prisoner abuse demonstrated that the Americans were using torture and humiliation reminiscent of Ba’th practices in Abu Ghurayb Jail. The United States seemed to be operating by double standards that only alienated Arab public opinion further.
The spread of democracy was a recurrent theme in America’s war on terror. President Bush and his neoconservative advisors believed that democratic values and participatory politics were incompatible with terrorism. One of the key advocates of these views was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In a speech to a foreign policy forum in California in May 2002, Wolfowitz asserted, “To win the war against terrorism . . . we must speak to the hundreds of millions of moderate and tolerant people in the Muslim world . . . who aspire to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy and free enterprise.”4 Secretary of State Colin Powell launched his own still-born Middle East Partnership Initiative in December 2002 to bring “democracy and free markets” to the Middle East.5 The Bush administration argued that a democratic Iraq would prove a beacon to the rest of the Arab states and set off a wave of democratization that would sweep the Arab world.
The Bush administration’s expectation that democracy would spread like wildfire across the Arab world had little grounding in the realities of the region. The inconvenient truth about democracy in the Arab world is that, in any free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States are most likely to win. This is not because of any animosity toward Americans per se, but because Arab voters are increasingly convinced that the U.S. government is hostile to their interests. The war on terror has only confirmed Arab voters in this view. American hostilities against Muslim and Arab states, combined with unconditional American support for Israel, led many Arab citizens to conclude that the U.S. was exploiting the war on terror to extend its domination over their region. This has made Islamist parties who advocate resistance to America more attractive to voters than moderates seeking accommodation with America. Elections in Lebanon in 2005, and in the Palestinian territories in 2006, bear this out.
The Palestinians, more than any other Arab people, had grounds to doubt America’s intentions, given U.S. support for Israel. The Palestinian Authority was therefore relieved to see the Bush administration draw Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations—three bodies the Palestinians knew to be sympathetic to their aspirations—into the peace process. Known as the Middle East Quartet, the partnership in April 2003 drafted a “road map to peace in the Middle East” to give direction to the Bush vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict first elaborated in his June 2002 speech.
There were a number of problems with the Road Map that detracted from its credibility. The Quartet’s peace plan set out an unrealistically ambitious timetable for resolving all of the outstanding differences between Palestinians and Israelis. When Bush formally presented the document to the Israelis and Palestinians in June 2003, he was already off schedule: the first phase of the three-phase plan, in which violence and terror were to be ended and Palestinian life “normalized,” was due for completion in May 2003. The second phase, which was to span the last six months of 2003, was to witness the creation of provisional Palestinian state within temporary borders. The third and final phase was to be completed between 2004 and 2005, during which time Palestinians and Israelis would resolve the final status issues: borders between the two states, the status of East Jerusalem, the resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, and the future of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the end of 2005 the states of Israel and Palestine would exchange recognition and declare their conflict at an end. While the Palestinians were in more of a hurry to secure statehood than anyone else, they wanted to see a realistic peace process achieve tangible gains. A plan that raised hopes and then failed to deliver would only leave the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority open to criticism from its Islamist opponents.
Israel’s attitude towards the Road Map further undermined its credibility as a peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority accepted the Quartet’s plan outright, the Israeli cabinet only approved the peace initiative subject to fourteen reservations. The Palestinian Authority was left clutching to the Road Map to demonstrate their commitment to peace and secure some relief from Israel and America’s war on terror. Their failure to secure any tangible gains through working with the Americans—no progress towards an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories or a halt to settlements, let alone Palestinian statehood—played straight into the hands of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.
Palestinian voters soon got the chance to express their views at the polls. In November 2004 Yasser Arafat, the historic leader of the Palestinian national struggle and besieged president of the Palestinian Authority, died of medical complications in a Paris hospital. Though the Palestinians mourned Arafat, the Bush administration insisted that his death opened opportunities for the Palestinians to elect new leaders “not compromised by terror.” On January 9, 2005, the Palestinians voted for a new president. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas won an outright majority of 63 percent to succeed Arafat. The Bush administration applauded the result and declared Abbas a man they could work with.
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, refused to deal with Mahmoud Abbas. In 2005, Sharon announced his intention to withdraw all Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Israel’s position in Gaza was untenable, with thousands of soldiers providing securing for 8,000 settlers in a hostile population of 1.4 million Palestinians. Withdrawal from Gaza was popular with the Israeli army and voters. It also allowed Sharon greater freedom to ignore the Road Map, claiming to be pursuing his own peace with the Palestinians. Yet Sharon refused to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority to ensure a smooth handover in Gaza. In so doing, when the Israelis completed their withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, Sharon left behind a dangerous power vacuum in Gaza and handed Hamas an important victory. The Islamist party naturally took credit for driving Israel from Gaza through their years of resistance.
The true extent of Hamas’s gains only emerged in the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. The two leading parties were Arafat’s Fatah, now under Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership, and Hamas, led by Ismail Haniya. It was widely expected that Hamas would enjoy strong support and reduce Fatah’s majority in the PLC. However, the magnitude of Hamas’s victory was a shock to Palestinians and foreign observers alike. Hamas took 74 of the 132 seats in the PLC. Fatah managed to retain only 45 seats. A party officially boycotted by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization won a sufficient majority in an election deemed by international monitors as free and fair to form the next government of Palestine. It was a shattering reversal for America’s war on terror. And the Palestinian people would pay the price.
The new Hamas government of Prime Minister Haniya openly rejected the Quartet’s Mid East policies. Haniya refused to recognize Israel, to end armed resistance, or to accept the terms of the Road Map. Consequently, the Quartet cut all assistance to the Palestinian Authority. Until Hamas proved willing to renounce terror, neither the EU nor the U.S. would support a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority—even a democratically elected one.
In Lebanon, the Islamist Hizbullah party also proved its appeal to voters for its politics of resistance against Israel and the United States. The strength of Hizbullah came as a surprise to the Bush administration, which upheld Lebanon as an example of citizens who had succeeded in preserving their democratic rights—in this case from Syrian oppression.
Lebanon’s democracy movement, which came to be known in the West as the Cedar Revolution, was provoked by the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005. Hariri’s son Saad led the nation in mourning, and made clear his belief that Syria was responsible for his father’s violent death. The assassination set off waves of mass demonstrations that brought politics in Lebanon to a standstill. On March 14, one million Lebanese descended on downtown Beirut to demand Syria’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon. The movement met with full support from the United States, which accused Syria of sponsoring terrorism. Under intense international pressure, the Syrian government agreed to withdraw its soldiers and intelligence forces from Lebanon. The last Syrian troops crossed out of Lebanon on April 26.
In May and June 2005, the Lebanese public voted to elect a new parliament. The anti-Syrian coalition, headed by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated premier, won 72 of the 128 seats in the parliament. However, the political wing of the Shiite militia Hizbullah won a solid bloc of fourteen parliamentary seats and, combined with a group of pro-Syrian parties, retained sufficient power within the Lebanese political system to resist any attempt by the central government to force the Hizbullah militia to disarm, in lines with the 1990 Taif Agreement. Even in Lebanon, parties explicitly hostile to the United States fared well at the polls.
For Islamist parties, resistance against Israel paid political dividends. Indeed, so long as they persisted in making bold strikes against the Jewish state, Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon could count on broad-based political support. They also believed in what they were doing: that fighting against Israel to liberate Muslim lands was a religious duty. In the summer of 2006, both parties escalated their attacks on Israel—with disastrous consequences for both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
On June 25, 2006, a group of Hamas activists crossed from Gaza to Israel through a tunnel near the Egyptian frontier and attacked an Israeli army post. They killed two soldiers and wounded four others before escaping back to Gaza with a young conscript named Gilad Shalit as their prisoner. On June 28 the Israeli army entered Gaza, and the next day they arrested sixty-four Hamas officials, including eight members of the Palestinian cabinet and twenty members of the Legislative Council. Hamas responded by firing homemade rockets into Israel, and the Israelis in turn deployed their air force to bomb Palestinian targets. Eleven Israelis and more than 400 Palestinians died before a cease-fire was struck in November 2006.
Hizbullah’s war with Israel provoked a massively disproportionate response against Lebanon. On July 12, 2006, a group of Hizbullah fighters crossed into Israel and attacked two jeeps patrolling the border with Lebanon. They killed three soldiers, wounded two, and took two others prisoner. This unprovoked attack set off a thirty-four-day conflict in which Israeli ground forces invaded South Lebanon. The Israeli air force bombed key infrastructure and leveled whole neighborhoods in the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, displacing an estimated one million civilians. Hizbullah fighters fought fierce battles with Israeli troops in the hills of South Lebanon and kept up a constant barrage of missiles firing into Israel, forcing thousands of Israelis to evacuate the conflict zone.
The Lebanese government turned to the United States for assistance. After all, the Bush administration had touted democratic Lebanon as an example to the Middle East and had given its full support to Lebanese demands for Syria to withdraw in 2005. Yet America was unwilling to intervene with the Israelis even to call for a cease-fire in 2006. Because Israel was fighting against Hizbullah, which the United States had branded a terrorist organization, the Bush administration refused to restrain its Israeli ally. In fact, the U.S. government resupplied the Israelis with laser-guided weapons and cluster bombs as the Israeli arsenal was depleted by its intensive bombing campaign against Lebanon. By the end of the conflict, over 1,100 Lebanese and 43 Israeli civilians had died under the aerial bombardment. Among combatants, the UN estimated 500 Hizbullah militiamen killed and the Israeli army reported 117 of their soldiers dead.
Israel’s two-front war against Gaza and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 proved to the Arab world—if further proof were needed—that America would back Israel no matter what it did. The Arabs were more convinced than ever that the war on terror was an American-Israeli partnership to impose their full control over the Middle East. Television viewers alternated between images of violence in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon and concluded that there would be no peace for the Arab world so long as America pursued its war on terror.
The Middle East remained in turmoil at the end of the Bush presidency. There was some good news in Iraq. The Iraqi people had elected a national government in free elections with high voter turnout. A reinforcement of American troops in Iraq in 2007, known as the “surge,” led to a significant reduction in violence and a return to normal life for many Iraqis. By the end of 2008, the Americans began to reduce troop numbers in Iraq. There were still acts of terrible violence that threatened to overturn that country’s fragile gains. But the end of the American occupation was in sight.
The situation for the Palestinians only deteriorated during Bush’s last weeks in office. In March 2007, the Fatah movement and Hamas formed a national unity cabinet with the aim of ending Palestinian isolation and the resumption of much-needed external aid. The unity government proved short lived and broke down in June 2007 when fighting erupted in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas. The dispute between the two parties ended with Hamas in full occupation of the Gaza Strip, and a Fatah-led emergency cabinet ruling the West Bank. The Quartet played upon Palestinian divisions and resumed support of the “moderate” Fatah government in the West Bank, while embargoing assistance to the Gaza Strip, now under Hamas rule. The standard of living in Gaza, cut off from all outside assistance, deteriorated into a humanitarian crisis.
The final conflict of the Bush years took place in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. After Hamas had observed a six-month cease-fire with no relaxation of Israeli controls over Gaza’s frontiers, Palestinian militiamen began to fire missiles into Israel. On December 27, Israel’s government responded with dozens of air raids that left nearly 200 Palestinians dead; Israel claimed it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza. The Bush administration urged the Israelis to avoid civilians—this in one of the most densely populated spots on earth—but endorsed the Israeli attack in time-honored war-on-terror fashion. “Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people,” a White House spokesman claimed.6
After eight days of heavy aerial bombardment, the Israeli army sent tanks into the Gaza Strip. Over the next two weeks, the Israelis targeted UN agencies, hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods, inflicting physical damage estimated at $1.4 billion on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The bombardment continued until the eve of the inauguration of the new U.S. president, Barack Obama. By the time a cease-fire between the Israelis and Hamas was agreed to, on January 18, over 1,300 Palestinians had been killed and 5,100 wounded. By comparison, only thirteen Israelis died; eight more were wounded.
With George W. Bush’s departure from the White House on January 20, 2009, the Arab world hoped for an end to his war on terror. With the inauguration of President Obama, the United States entered a new period of constructive engagement with the Arab and Islamic world.
In his first hundred days, the new president initiated a number of policies intended to reduce the regional tensions generated by seven years of the war on terror. President Obama set in motion the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the reduction of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. He signaled that the Arab-Israeli peace process was a first-term priority, both through the appointment of Senator George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy and by meeting with both Israel’s prime minister and the president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama pursued a policy of rekindling dialogue with states shunned by the Bush administration, like Syria and Iran. Each of these policies was fraught with uncertainty, given the complexity of the history and issues involved. Yet these initiatives provided welcome relief to a region that had suffered years of strain at the center of the war on terror. The clearest expression of this new policy of constructive engagement with the Arab and Islamic world came in Obama’s address to Cairo University in June 2009: “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama told his attentive audience. “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”
Though Obama made important points in his forty-minute speech, it was perhaps his tone of mutual respect that gave Arab audiences most hope for the future. If the dominant power of the day could truly move beyond imposing rules on the Arab world and begin seeking common solutions to the issues that we face, the Arabs would indeed be entering a new and better age.
Yet constructive engagement by the United States, as the dominant power in a unipolar age, is only part of the solution to the ills that face the Arab world in the twenty-first century. The Arabs too must assume responsibility for a better future. If the Arab peoples are to enjoy human rights and accountable government, security and economic growth, they will have to seize the initiative themselves. History has shown the limits of reform through foreign intervention—in both the colonial age and in the post–Cold War era. Democracy cannot be imposed without the messenger killing the message.
There are grounds for hope for positive change in the Arab world today. Between 2002 and 2006, a prominent group of Arab intellectuals and policymakers collaborated on a radical reform agenda. Headed by Jordanian stateswoman Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the drafters of the Arab Human Development Report focused on three crucial deficits: a freedom deficit of good government in the Arab world; a knowledge deficit, in which the education system ill prepared young Arabs to take advantage of the opportunities in the global market place; and a deficit in the empowerment of women, restraining half the population of the Arab world from making its full contribution to human development in the region. Written by Arabs, for Arabs, the authors of the Human Development Report aspire to nothing less than a new Arab renaissance.
Many of the deficits named in the Arab Human Development Report are being addressed in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf today. The wealth provided by oil revenues has given those countries opportunities to connect to the global economy. Their citizens are broadening participation in government through both appointed and elected office—in Kuwait, Bahrain, even Saudi Arabia, with its consultative Shura Council. The Gulf has seen an unprecedented spread of free media, particularly in satellite television, where stations like Qatar’s al-Jazeera or the UAE’s al-Arabiyya broadcast open debates across Arab borders beyond the reach of government censors. And new universities, both national institutions and branch campuses of premier foreign institutions, provide a wider range of educational opportunities and professional training than Arab citizens have ever enjoyed before.
For the Arab world to break the cycle of subordination to other people’s rules will require a balanced engagement from the dominant powers of the age, and a commitment to reform from within the Arab world itself. As the region moves from under the shadow of the war on terror, the very beginnings of such a virtuous cycle may be discerned. Yet much more needs to be done by way of conflict resolution and political reform before the Arabs move beyond a history of conflict and disillusion to achieve their potential and fulfill their aspirations in the modern age.