-- Joseph Green
The Likud doctrine
First Bush, and now Putin, have picked up lessons for their wars on terror from Israel's campaign against the Palestinians
Naomi Klein Friday September 10, 2004 The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is so fed-up with being grilled over his handling of the Beslan catastrophe that he lashed out at foreign journalists on Monday. "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or the White House and engage in talks?" he demanded, adding that: "No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child-killers."
Fortunately for Putin, there is still one place where he is shielded from the critics: Israel. On Monday, Ariel Sharon welcomed the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, for a meeting about strengthening ties in the fight against terror. "Terror has no justification, and it is time for the free, decent, humanistic world to unite and fight this terrible epidemic," Sharon said.
There is little to argue with there. The essence of terrorism is the deliberate targeting of innocents to further political goals. Any claims its perpetrators make to fighting for justice are morally bankrupt, and lead directly to the barbarity of Beslan: a carefully laid plan to slaughter hundreds of children.
Yet sympathy alone does not explain the outpourings of solidarity for Russia coming from Israeli politicians this week. An unnamed Israeli official was quoted as saying that Russians "understand now that what they have is not a local terror problem but part of the global Islamic terror threat". The underlying message is unequivocal: Russia and Israel are engaged in the very same war, one not against Palestinians demanding their right to statehood, or against Chechens demanding their independence, but against "the global Islamic terror threat". Israel, as the elder statesman, is claiming the right to set the rules of war.
Unsurprisingly, the rules are the same ones Sharon uses against the Intifada in the occupied territories. His starting point is that Palestinians, though they may make political demands, are actually only interested in the annihilation of Israel. This goes beyond the state's standard refusal to negotiate with terrorists - it is a conviction rooted in an insistent pathologising, not just of extremists but of the entire "Arab mind".
>From this basic belief several others follow. First, all Israeli
violence against Palestinians is an act of self-defence, necessary to the
country's survival. Second, anyone who questions Israel's absolute right
to erase the enemy is themselves an enemy. This applies to the UN, other
world leaders, journalists and peaceniks.
Putin has clearly been taking notes, but it's not the first time Israel has played this mentoring role. Three years ago, on September 12 2001, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli finance minister, was asked how the previous day's terror attacks would affect relations between Israel and the US. "It's very good," he said. "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." The attack, Netanyahu explained, would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades".
Common wisdom has it that after 9/11, a new era of geo-politics was ushered in, defined by what is usually called the Bush doctrine: pre-emptive wars, attacks on terrorist infrastructure (read: entire countries), an insistence that all the enemy understands is force. In fact, it would be more accurate to call this rigid worldview the Likud doctrine. What happened on September 11 2001 is that the Likud doctrine, previously targeted against Palestinians, was picked up by the most powerful nation on earth and applied on a global scale. Call it the Likudisation of the world: the real legacy of 9/11.
Let me be absolutely clear: by Likudisation I do not mean that key members of the Bush administration are working for the interests of Israel at the expense of US interests. What I mean is that on September 11, George Bush went looking for a political philosophy to guide him in his role as "war president". He found that philosophy in the Likud doctrine, handed to him ready-made by the ardent Likudniks ensconced in the White House. In the three years since, the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the "Muslim mind". It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. It's not simply that Bush sees America's role as protecting Israel from a hostile Arab world. It's that he has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative, the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination.
And now the Likudisation narrative has spread to Russia. In that same meeting with journalists, Putin made it clear he sees the drive for Chechen independence as the spearhead of a strategy by Chechen Islamists, helped by foreign fundamentalists, to undermine Russia by stirring up its Muslim population. "There are Muslims along the Volga, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan ... This is all about Russia's territorial integrity," he said. It used to be just Israel that was worried about being pushed into the sea.
There has indeed been a dramatic rise in religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The problem is that under the Likud doctrine there is no space to ask why this is happening. We are not allowed to point out that fundamentalism breeds in failed states, where warfare has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure, allowing the mosques to start taking responsibility for everything from education to garbage collection. It has happened in Gaza, Grozny and Sadr City.
Sharon says terrorism is an epidemic that "has no borders, no fences", but this is not the case. Terrorism thrives within the illegitimate borders of occupation and dictatorship; it festers behind security walls put up by imperial powers; it crosses those borders and climbs those fences to explode inside the countries responsible for, or complicit in, occupation and domination.
Sharon is not the commander-in-chief of the war on terror; that dubious honour stays with George Bush. But on the anniversary of 9/11, he deserves to be recognised as this disastrous campaign's guru, a trigger-happy Yoda for all wannabe Luke Skywalkers out there, training for their epic battles of good vs evil.
If we want to see where the Likud doctrine leads, we need only follow the guru home, to Israel, a country paralysed by fear, embracing policies of extrajudicial assassination and illegal settlement, and in denial about the brutality it commits daily. It is a nation surrounded by enemies and desperate for friends - a category it narrowly defines as those who ask no questions, while offering the same moral amnesty in return. That glimpse of our collective future is the only lesson the world needs to learn from Sharon.
www.nologo.org <http://www.nologo.org/>
Jim Devine jdevine at lmu.edu & http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine