Illustration by Danny Hellman

Although George W. Bush has performed magnificently on many fronts since September 11, his war on terrorism has a fatal flaw: it gives Israel short shrift.

To date, Bush's diplomatic efforts have focused on building what the State Department Web site calls a "Global Coalition Against Terrorism." Naturally, this coalition must reach beyond America's historic allies; for example, Bush has gone to great lengths to forge a close relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin. But special efforts have been made with Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Seymour Hersh, writing in last week's New Yorker, reported that America was going to accept Saudi Arabia's refusal to trace the ties of Saudi Arabian terror suspects. For the first time, the Pentagon has agreed to sell F-16 jets to the Gulf State of Oman. And some in the administration want to enlist the governments of the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and even Iran in the war on terrorism -- this though both Syria and Iran are still on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism themselves.

But that's not all President Bush has done to appease Arab nations. Less than a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, word leaked out of Washington that the administration planned a major new Middle East initiative: it would call for a Palestinian state. The creation of a Palestinian state is a noble goal, one that Israel and the Palestinians have been working toward for years. But the timing of the leak could not have been worse.

By allowing it to be known that he intended to push for a Palestinian state, Bush made it look as if America would be responding to terrorist attacks -- attacks committed by a radical sect of Islamists who hold among their goals the elimination of Israel -- by acceding to the terrorists' demands that American foreign policy change. In other words, he appeared to be rewarding terror, not fighting it. It's what the United States did in Beirut when it evacuated the region after the bombing of a Marine base in 1983. It's what the United States did when it agreed with Libya's Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi to try two suspects in the Pan Am 103 bombing (men who were believed to be low-level operatives) at the Hague -- and forgo pursuing the true masterminds of the bombing, higher up in the Libyan regime and possibly in other states.

At the same time, Bush seemed to be publicly brushing aside a country that is not just America's closest ally in the Middle East but the one most experienced in dealing with terrorism. (Even Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift and her cronies at Massport turned to an Israeli, Rafi Ron -- who was until recently the head of security for the Israel Airport Authority -- when they wanted to show the Massachusetts public they were serious about fighting terrorism.) By dissing Israel in such a public way, the Bush administration satisfied the wishes of the al-Saud regime of Saudi Arabia, which has long advocated that the United States pressure Israel to make more concessions in the Palestinian conflict. That may keep the Saudi regime happy -- and in the coalition. But it holds disastrous long-term consequences for the American war on terror.

Not surprisingly, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who is not popular in the US and is even less popular around the world, responded with horror to the Bush administration's plan. "Do not appease the Arabs at our expense," Sharon said. "Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism." Sharon's statement was impolitic at best, inflammatory at worst. Even so, the US response was disturbing. "The president believes that these remarks are unacceptable," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer announced, using the same word that British foreign minister Jack Straw had employed to describe a Taliban proposal to hand over bin Laden. The rhetorical flare-up left some observers wondering whether the White House really meant to suggest that Israel was an unfriendly nation that should be treated on the same terms as the Taliban.

Whether the administration meant to imply that or not, we know one thing. A war on terrorism that favors an unwieldy Arab coalition at Israel's expense -- or, worse, a war on terrorism that somehow equates Israel with the enemy -- is doomed. History proves it.

IF THE Persian Gulf War taught us anything, it taught us this: that type of coalition doesn't work. In the case of the Gulf War, all it gave us was the survival of a despotic madman with the capability to produce mass quantities of chemical, biological (anthrax, anyone?), and perhaps even nuclear weapons.

Then, as now, the United States acted mostly to appease the al-Sauds; reaching out to them was President George H.W. Bush's first instinct when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bush, a blueblood who made his money in Texas crude, shared a common denominator with the al-Sauds: oil. And he and his staff, including National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, believed that if Iraq had to be confronted, it would have to be done with a broad coalition that relied heavily on moderate Arab states such as Saudi Arabia. "We needed to demonstrate that this action was not a solo US effort against an Arab state," Scowcroft wrote in his and Bush's joint memoir, A World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

The Saudis, then as now, didn't want too much chaos in the region. And that was why, even as Bush ratcheted up the pressure on Iraq, he permitted Scowcroft to signal a ray of hope for Saddam Hussein: in a September 10, 1990, interview with BusinessWeek, Scowcroft hinted that Hussein would probably survive the aftermath of the invasion. "Even Hussein can learn lessons," said Scowcroft. He also reasoned that if Hussein were convinced that aggressive behavior would not be tolerated, then it might not be necessary to keep massive forces in the region.

As we all know, the coalition forces kicked Iraq out of Kuwait but left Saddam Hussein, who has been stirring up trouble ever since -- flouting the UN resolutions governing the end of the Gulf War, ejecting UN weapons inspectors, repressing the Kurds, and possibly even worse. So much for lessons learned. In the meantime, the United States still has a massive troop presence in the region, and the Iraqi leader is believed to be preparing dangerous weapons to use against the West -- if he isn't already behind the rash of anthrax attacks that have infected two postal workers and killed two others. Richard Spertzel, a former UN weapons inspector, told the New York Post and other media outlets: "Iraq is the prime suspect as supplier."

It was and is the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the guardian of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, that served as the nexus of bin Laden's initial grievance against the United States. And Israel has nothing to do with that. Still, keeping the Saudis happy means keeping Israel out of the coalition -- just as it did a decade ago.

During the Gulf War, Israel was isolated in two ways. The first came during the war, when Israel was attacked by SCUD missiles fired from Iraq and sought to defend its citizens. It was prevented from doing so -- not by Iraq, but by the United States. The American military refused to provide the Israeli Air Force with the coalition codes its fighters needed to identify themselves as friendly to the American jets patrolling overhead. To be sure, Israel could have attacked the Iraqi SCUD launchers without those codes, but when it became clear that the United States would not provide them, the Israeli government committed itself to restraint. Bush's fear at the time was that if Israel and the United States appeared to be on the same side of an alliance that was attacking Iraq, the Arab world would see this as a war on Islam. Whether that's true remains an open question -- one that we're still grappling with today.

The second slight came after the war, when Israel was pushed to the negotiating table with enemies, such as Syria, who used the talks to great propaganda value. Bush, Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker had devised a plan for a major Middle East peace conference in Madrid (an idea that actually made sense given the dominant US position in the region following the Gulf War). But Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, like Sharon today, was a hard-liner who was disinclined to participate in a US-initiated peace process. So Bush strong-armed Israel to the negotiating table by threatening to hold up $10 billion in US-backed loan guarantees that Israel needed to help resettle the wave of Russian Jewish immigrants who had arrived when the Cold War ended. His decision to call for a four-month delay in action on the loan-guarantee legislation coincided with a routine effort by the organized Jewish community to lobby Congress on the same issue.

"I heard today there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question," he thundered to a group of reporters, according to J.J. Goldberg's book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, 1996). "We've got one little guy down here doing it." Bush's depiction of himself as one little guy arrayed against an army of lobbyists was an outrageous play on the anti-Semitic myth that Washington (and Hollywood and Wall Street -- pick your power center) are under Jewish control. Indeed, the White House received a flurry of calls from anti-Semites congratulating the president on his comments, Goldberg reports. Bush subsequently apologized, but the damage was done. Enemies of Israel -- many of them enemies of freedom -- learned that they could get Bush to lean on Israel.

ALL THAT would just be a bit of interesting history, if the current Bush administration weren't in the process of repeating it. Exhibit A? Scowcroft. Scowcroft was a mentor to two key foreign-policy figures in the current administration: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the State Department's director of policy planning, Richard Haass. Through Rice, and through his continuing close relationship with the elder Bush, Scowcroft is playing an influential role in George W. Bush's efforts in the Middle East, the Washington Post reported October 1. He's also trying to sway public opinion: America must "repeat the coalition-building of the Gulf conflict," Scowcroft wrote in an op-ed for last Tuesday's Post. "If anything we are more dependent on friends and allies than we were in the Gulf crisis."

This is the equivalent of saying, "Never mind the mistakes I made a decade ago -- I'll make them even more gloriously this time around." Following the template created by Scowcroft and the first President Bush, the current president and his administration are pressuring Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians. This pressure continues despite the recent assassination of the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In a daily briefing last week, for example, a State Department spokesman still stressed the "imperative of Israel exercising restraint." In other words, after the PFLP assassinates an Israeli leader, and Yasir Arafat refuses to crack down on the terror group, "terror must not be allowed to divert the parties from continuing steps to put an end to the violence," according to the State Department. The hypocrisy of this policy alone -- the whole Bush war on terror is based on exactly the opposite principle -- could cripple the entire struggle.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise given the pro-Saudi bent of Bush's father and Scowcroft -- and of so many within the current Bush administration, including Haass and possibly Rice. (The notable exceptions are said to include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of
defense; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and possibly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.) The Wall Street Journal reported September 27 that the president's father, former secretary of state James Baker III, and former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci have business links not just to the Saudi regime but to a company connected to the bin Laden family. According to the Journal, the elder Bush advises and has made speeches on behalf of the Carlyle Group, a Washington merchant bank in which the bin Laden clan is a major investor. If there were any doubt about the former president's involvement in Middle Eastern matters, it should have been put to rest this summer. In a July 15 story headlined BUSH SENIOR, ON HIS SON'S BEHALF, REASSURES SAUDI LEADER, the New York Times reported that Bush still relies on his father when it comes to the Middle East. Apparently Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was irked that the younger Bush had until then taken a hands-off approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush was in the room, but silent, when the former president telephoned the Saudi. "The president's heart is in the right place," Bush's father reportedly assured the Saudi prince.

Yet after all this deference toward the Saudi regime and its concerns, the Saudis have not exactly rushed to reassure the Arab world that the campaign against Afghanistan does not represent a Western jihad against Islam. First, the Saudis refused America the use of their air bases on the Arabian peninsula. Then, they condemned America's bombing campaign in Afghanistan. "We wish the United States had been able to flush out the terrorists in Afghanistan without resorting to the current action . . . because this is killing innocent people," said Saudi interior minister Prince Naif. "We are not at all happy with the situation."

Given American reliance on oil, it's a lot easier to pressure our ally, Israel, at the behest of Saudi Arabia than it is to ask serious questions about the corrupt Saudi regime. Why did the Saudis pour millions if not billions of dollars into Islamic charities that transfer money to bin Laden? Why do the Saudis remain so uncooperative about the prospect of war in the region? Finally, why do the Saudis continue to fund the Islamic schools in Pakistan that fuel pro-bin Laden and pro-Taliban sentiment? Indoctrination in hate and suicide bombing is a much more fundamental cause of terrorism than any alleged American misdeeds.

Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona accused the Saudis of "playing . . . kind of a double game here." He said: "They're kind of trying to have it both ways." His fellow guest, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, took McCain's words a step further. "We can't tolerate a nation like the Saudis, whose government, in many ways, continues to stand because we support them, to promulgate that hatred."

But Bush's current focus -- away from Saudi Arabia and onto Israel -- plays into exactly the same duplicitous game the Saudi regime has used for years to divert attention from itself. The more effort the Bush administration puts into forging a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians during the war on terrorism, the greater the chance that the US will be distracted from the real goal: bringing terrorists to justice. Just as they did during the Gulf War, the Saudis have created a trap -- one that could lead to less-than-total victory. With 6000 Americans already dead and more deaths surely on the way, that would be tragic.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: October 26 - November 1, 2001