"Blowback" book by Vanden Baviere

[Hakki Alacakaptan]

This is an excerpt from a relatively old but very relevant book by mideast
expert Paul Vanden Baviere that I feel provides a good overall impression of
how the West played repeatedly with fundamentalist fire and got burned to
varying degrees. This text takes us through a wider swathe of history than
other "blowback" books like John Cooley's Unholy Wars. The last paragraph
also illustrates how Western intelligence routinely manipulates Islamic
terrorists (among others, may I add). I translated the text from De
Standaard's Flemish page as I couldn't find it in any other language on the
web.

Hakki Alacakaptan
-----------------------------------

De Standaard, September 18, 1995
"They Are Coming From the East"
The West harbored fundamentalists as allies

This week sees the publication of the book "They are coming from the east by
Paul Vanden Bavière, foreign news editor of De Standaard. The author has
followed developments in the Arab world for 25 years. Below is an excerpt
published by De Standaard. "They Are Coming From the East", Uitgeverij
Scoop, 130 pages, 595 francs, ISBN 90-5312-046-7

Like other religions, Islam was seen as an ally in the fight against the
Soviet Union and communism. Conservatives and fundamentalists made the best
partners of all because they shared the West's aversion to left-wing
nationalism. They also felt threatened, because as a result of
decolonization, socialism and nationalism had become the dominant ideologies
in the fifties. In 1955, the Baghdad Pact was founded on the lines of NATO,
an alliance that counted Islamic states (i.e. countries with a Muslim
majority population) such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan among its
members. This was a period when the United States attempted vainly to build
an Islamic alliance against communism and nationalism from the Atlantic to
the Indian Ocean. Most Arab and Muslim states dragged their feet on this
U.S. project as a result of one man's efforts: Gamal Abdel Nasser
(1918-1970). He was the symbol of nationalism and socialism in the world of
developing Moslem nations. Together with the Yugoslav president Tito and the
Indonesian leader Sukarno, who was overthrown in 1965 by pro-US military, he
was a co-inspirer of the non-aligned movement, a movement of states that did
not want to choose between Washington and Moscow. For the Americans, all
this made him bogeyman number one in the Arab and Islamic world. His coup in
1952 against the Egyptian monarchy was followed in 1958 by an anti-monarchic
military coup in Iraq. This pulled Iraq immediately out of the Baghdad Pact.
At the same time, it ruined Iraq's chance to get Kuwait from the British,
who had been seriously considering this option. Instead, Kuwait became an
independent sheikdom in 1961. The "Nasserite disease" spread to the Arabian
peninsula as republican officers overthrew Imam Mohammed al-Badr of North
Yemen. The last of the Nasserite coups took place in 1979, when Colonel
Moammar al-Gaddafi overthrew Idries Shah in Libya and General Jafaar
al-Noumeyri grabbed power in Sudan.

In its efforts against Arab nationalism the West allied itself with the
natural enemies of the Arabs, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as with
Arabic regimes threatened by this nationalist tide, such as the kingdoms of
Morocco and Libya, the Lebanese Christians, and the Hashemite sovereigns of
Jordan and Iraq. But its biggest allies were undoubtedly the
petrodollar-rich conservative and fundamentalist monarchies of the Arabian
peninsula.

Besides fighting communism and Arab nationalism, Washington had a third
reason for joining forces with the regimes in the Arabian peninsula,
undemocratic though they may be. They were important oil producers. In the
beginning of the next century the United States will depend on imports for
70% of its oil needs. The plans to set up a US Persian Gulf fleet,
officially to contain Iraq and Iran, was undoubtedly informed by this
consideration.

The United States' association with conservative and fundamentalist forces
in the Middle East helped it to prevent several reversals of fortune.
Washington scored an important victory when the CIA managed to reinstate the
exiled Shah of Iran and to have the nationalist prime minister Mossadegh
jailed in 1953. In 1958, American forces intervened in Lebanon's first civil
war and prevented a Nasserite coup. In the same year, British forces landed
in Jordan to save the Hashemite house from the fate that befell Iraq's
monarch. With American help, Saudi Arabia caused Nasser major headaches in
his effort to shore up the republicans in the civil war that ensued after
the 1962 military coup in North Yemen. Egypt was so exhausted by this
adventure that it suffered a massive defeat in the Israeli invasion of 1967.
This was a blow from which Arab nationalism never recovered, paving the road
for an Islamic fundamentalist reaction throughout the Arab world. With the
rise of the rich, fundamentalist oil-producing Arab states, The US won not
only the Cold War, but also the war against Arab nationalism.

The West's fight against everything that smacked of nationalism and
socialism was not waged purely at the governmental level. Contacts were made
in all Islamic countries with conservative and fundamentalist groups in
order to create opposition movements. The Muslim Brotherhood, in particular,
enjoyed the close sympathy of the West as long as it was being pursued by
Nasser or served as the main pillar of support for the 40-plus-year reign of
Jordan's King Hussein.

In the 'fifties the US and British embassies in Baghdad approached the
Shiite cleric in the Bedouin city of Najaf to collaborate against the
influential group of communist sympathizers in the kingdom of Iraq. Barely
30 years earlier, the British had used poison gas against the Iraqi Shiites
when they had rebelled against their new occupier after World War I. The
British Minister of Colonies Winston Churchill, who had expressed deep
outrage at the Germans' use of poison gas against British troops on the
Westhoek front during the war, did not find such use objectionable against
what were manifestly barbaric tribes.

In politics, it is accepted that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but
this policy can also turn out to be disastrously shortsighted, as Israel
discovered to its dismay. It turned a blind eye when the Muslim Brotherhood
was organizing a local chapter in the occupied territories in 1967,
considering it to be a religious, apolitical movement that could
counterbalance the PLO. The Brotherhood, with considerable funding from
oil-rich Arab states, was allowed to take root.

That the Brotherhood's Islamic nature gave it an anti-western character and
that it had sent volunteers to Palestine from Syria and Egypt, among others,
to fight in the 1948 war, were distant memories even for the Brotherhood
itself. It saw Arafat's project for a secular Palestinian state where
Moslems, Christians, and Jews would coexist as equals, as something to be
prevented at all costs, to Israel's great delight.

The outbreak in 1987 of the Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising,
revived the suppressed nationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. It formed its
own Islamic resistance movement, the Hamas. The Izzeddin Kassem brigades,
now infamous for their bloody attacks, became their armed wing. They were
named after the Syrian sheik who was one of the first "martyrs" of the
Palestinian uprising in 1936 against the Zionist colonizers and the British
occupation forces in Palestine (...)

Despite the crystal-clear meaning of its name, Islamic Resistance, and the
reference to an anti-Zionist resistance fighter, Hamas initially
nevertheless received Israel's support. Anything was better than "terrorist"
Arafat with whom Israel would "never" negotiate. Hamas' politics, which
excluded peace with Israel and any territorial compromise, suited
Jerusalem's purpose, as it undermined Arafat's policy of a negotiated peace.
Thus was Hamas able to set up an organization that did in fact undermine
Arafat but also proposed to fill its shoes in resisting the Israeli
occupation when the PLO renounced armed resistance in the framework of the
Middle East peace process in 1991. Israel found that it had been holding a
viper in its breast and paid a bloody price.

Holy War

The American plan to create a fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan also
turned into a real catastrophe. The result is that Moslems, who received
battle and arms training from the CIA in camps in Pakistan, as well as
fundamentalist indoctrination, spread out over the world to use their
acquired skills in attacks and guerilla warfare. When the CIA began its
training program in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in 1979, there was
no Islamic fundamentalist threat to speak of despite the Islamic revolution
in Iran. Even the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by the Turk
Mehmet Ali Agca on May 13, 1981 on St. Peter's Square, did not call the
world's attention to the possibility of such a threat. The attack was
eagerly seized upon for a propaganda victory over Moscow, which was accused
of wanting to liquidate the Polish Pope because he posed a threat for its
Eastern European empire. As no suitable Russians were to be found in Rome
who could be arrested, a "Bulgarian connection" was discovered. This led to
an innocent employee of the Bulgarian national airline spending years in
jail. After the fall of communism no one could find a single trace of the
plot to kill the pope in either the Soviet or the Bulgarian archives (...)

Agca's links to the extreme-right-wing Grey Wolves organization in Turkey
and his earlier activities as a Moslem extremist, which have now become
evident, were all hushed up at the time. It became once more apparent that
Moslem fundamentalists had put the Pope high on their death list when in
January 1995 an assassination attempt was foiled in Manila, The Philippines.
The man behind the attempt was Ahmad Ramzi Yousef who was also considered to
have masterminded the World Trade Center bombing in New York (...)

In the thick of the Cold War, in 1979, Washington could not allow Soviet
expansion in Afghanistan. The holy war against the godless Russians was
successfully launched. The Philippine Interior Minister Rafael Alunan stated
with some exaggeration that a total of four million Moslems were trained as
warriors of Allah in Afghanistan. A more accurate number would be in the
several hundred thousands. Most of these were Afghans and Pakistanis but
volunteers came from the entire Islamic world, from Morocco to China. It is
estimated that the Arab world produced up to 35.000 mujahedeen (fighters),
among which 5.000 from Algeria and an equal number of Egyptians. They
transited through Saudi Arabia, receiving a salary of 50.000 franks and
handing over their passports as insurance, and left for Pakistan.

To recruit these fighters the CIA reactivated its old connections with
fundamentalists of every color, such as the blind sheik Omar Abel-Rahman in
Egypt, spiritual leader of Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Society),
which since 1992 had been carrying out a fundamentalist guerilla war against
the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The sheikh was being sought by the
police for having inspired the assassination of President Sadat in 1981
through a pronouncement that sanctioned the execution of apostates, but he
was cleared of all charges at the murder trial. He procured a US visa
through his CIA connections and escaped to New York. He was arrested there
some months after the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, where
six were killed and more than 1.000 wounded. He was not accused of being a
perpetrator, a charge for which five other Moslems got life sentences, but
as their inspirer and as instigator of other planned crimes such as blowing
up the United Nations building and the Jersey Tunnel and assassinating
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The affair has some shadowy aspects. Emad
Salem, a former Egyptian army officer, was an FBI agent who infiltrated the
sheik's circle of followers and is alleged to have acted as an agent
provocateur. Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian defendant, was a MOSSAD agent,
according to the Israeli weekly Kol Ha'ir. Finally, a disused "rebel
conspiracy" law dating from the Civil War was dug up to bring the
56-year-old blind sheik to the bench. The former friendly agent had now
become a bogeyman, illustrating how Muslim fundamentalism reverts from
friend and ally to enemy.

Paul VANDEN BAVIERE