Читать книгу Middle Eastern Terrorism - Mark Ensalaco - Страница 7

Introduction

In September 1970, a month that came to be known as Black September, terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) simultaneously hijacked three passenger jets bound for the United States in the skies over Europe. Alert air marshals prevented them from hijacking a fourth. Several days later, terrorists from the PFLP hijacked another jet. They flew the jets to a remote airfield in Jordan and held more than three hundred passengers hostage and issued a series of demands for the release of their comrades. The terrorists did not physically harm the hostages, or even threaten anyone. The incident dragged on for weeks. Then, in a spectacle to draw the world's attention to the plight of the Palestinian people, the terrorists blew up the empty jets as news cameras captured the images of exploding planes. That was 12 September 1970.

In September 2001, terrorists belonging to Al Qaeda simultaneously hijacked four American passenger jets in the skies over the United States. During the hijacking the terrorists stabbed and slashed passengers and flight attendants. They did not issue a single demand or statement of grievances. One hundred and eight minutes after the hijackings began, the terrorists crashed the jets into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and the Pentagon as news cameras captured the images of exploding planes and collapsing buildings. The hijacking of the fourth jet was defeated by courageous passengers who sacrificed their own lives to prevent the destruction of the White House or the Capitol. In all, nearly three thousand perished. That was September 11, 2001.

In three decades the terrorism originating in the conflicts and geopolitics of the Arab and Muslim worlds had mutated from spectacle to atrocity.

On the morning of September 11, minutes after American Airlines flight 11 ripped through the World Trade Center's North Tower, the news director from the Dayton affiliate of ABC News summoned me to the newsroom. I had begun teaching courses on political violence and terrorism at the University of Dayton and for Air Force intelligence officers at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in 1989. The local news affiliate had called on me a number of times over the years: after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on military installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

I, like my colleagues who research or teach terrorism, knew enough about Osama bin Laden to be concerned about his organization. Al Qaeda was a clear and present danger to the United States. Bin Laden had issued a “declaration of war against the Americans who occupy the land of the two holy mosques” in 1996. In 1998 he issued a fatwa exhorting Muslims around the world to murder Americans anywhere they could find them. One had the disquieting sense that bin Laden could strike without warning. Al Qaeda terrorists had attacked and severely damaged the USS Cole just before the presidential elections in 2000. But as I watched the atrocity of September 11 unfold that morning, I was struck by its magnitude. I watched the towers collapse with the agonizing realization that thousands of human beings were dying before my eyes.

I returned to campus after the collapse of the towers and stood before a classroom of desperately frightened students. One student asked a question: “Where did this come from?”

As evening fell in the Midwest, my neighbors gathered in the commons behind our homes; an eerie silence hung over us because of the presidential order to halt all air traffic. The silence was broken by the sonic boom of two F-16 Falcons that roared out of Wright Patterson Air Force Base to rendezvous with Air Force One, which passed though Ohio airspace as the president returned to Washington from a Strategic Air Command Base in Nebraska. It was then that my wife persuaded me to write this book in an attempt to answer that student's question: “Where did this come from?”

The question can be taken to mean many things. Who was behind the attacks that Tuesday morning? What is the origin of the hostility? When did terrorists begin attacking Americans?

I remembered as a junior high school student watching the news coverage of terrorists destroying the empty passenger jets in the Jordanian desert in Black September 1970, and the spectacles that followed: the Lod Airport massacre, the Munich Olympic massacre, the destruction of Pan Am 103, and many other acts of terror. I could not think of a single book that covered the entire history of terror directed at Americans and American interests, so I decided to write one. This book narrates the evolution and transmutation of terrorism originating in the complex and conflictive politics and geopolitics of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The contemporary era of terror began after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967, an event that radicalized the Palestinian national liberation movement. It began with a campaign against civil aviation—hijackings, with the first hijacking of an El Al flight in the summer of 1968; automatic weapon and grenade attacks at airport terminals; the sabotage of passenger jets in the air. Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president compelled to confront the threat of Middle East terror. Americans were slaughtered in some of the early terror operations—twenty-nine U.S. Catholic pilgrims to the Holy Land died in the Lod Airport massacre in 1972, and others were held hostage aboard hijacked jets. The terrorists justified such assaults because, in the words of one of those involved in the Skyjack Sunday operation in September 1970, “No one heard our screams or our suffering.”

In 1971, Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO adopted the strategy of terror. This was the origin of the Black September organization. Its terror rampage lasted only three years, until the end of 1973. But in those three short years Black September conducted some of the most memorable operations: the murder of eleven Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972 and of two U.S. diplomats a year later. The man behind Black September resorted to semantics in an attempt to distance himself from terrorism: “I do not confuse revolutionary violence, which is a political act,” he said, “with terrorism, which is not.”

The Israeli response to the atrocities by Black September, as well as the earlier ones by the PFLP, was guided by the biblical maxim of an eye for an eye: Israeli assassins hunted down and killed some of the men who were responsible, or thought to be responsible, for the terror directed against Israelis. The Nixon administration's response was more pragmatic. The CIA established a secret, back channel arrangement with the very men behind Black September. The arrangement was sealed with a warning. “The violence against us has got to stop,” the acting director of the CIA told Fatah representatives, “or much blood will flow, and you may be sure that not all of it will be ours.”

The end of Black September's terror rampage coincided with the end of hostilities between Israel and its most formidable military foe, Egypt. Egypt and Syria stunned Israel with a massive offensive on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, in 1973, only to be defeated after Israel put up a desperate struggle for survival. The outcome of the Yom Kippur War convinced the Egyptian president to turn to the United States to negotiate the return of Egyptian territory lost in the Six Day War six years earlier. It also convinced Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, that U.S. mediation held the only hope for the creation of a Palestinian state. Arafat's tactical turn toward moderation angered those in the Palestinian national movement who clung to the credo that the birth of Palestine demanded the death of Israel. The inexorable result of such logic was the rejection of the peace process and a new wave of terror. So, a month before the American-mediated peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel were to begin, terrorists blew a U.S. airliner out of the sky over the Aegean Sea in the fall of 1974. “We do not want peace,” the slogan went, “peace will be the end of all our hopes.”

Terrorism lost its strategic coherence after the Americans began to broker what would become a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. The era of Palestinian nationalist terror began to fade in this political and geopolitical environment. In 1975 the factions that made up the Palestinian national movement found themselves drawn into a bloody civil war in Lebanon, much of it fratricidal violence between Palestinian factions backed by Iraq. But then there were the final episodes of the campaign the PFLP had begun in 1968. In the mid-1970s, terrorists tried to shoot down Israeli passenger jets, took delegates of OPEC countries hostage, and hijacked French and German jets carrying Israeli citizens. But the hijackings in particular became famous not for the audacity of the operations but for the lethal operations of elite Israeli and West German counterterrorism units. None of the violence impeded U.S. efforts to secure a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. In the fall of 1977, the Egyptian president addressed the Israeli parliament in words that would later cost him his life: “We accept to live with you in permanent peace.”

President Jimmy Carter, who inherited the peace process from Ford and Nixon, managed to achieve a historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1979. An era of terror seemed to have come to an end. But another soon began with a revolution and an invasion. The Islamic Revolution in Iran at the beginning of 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of that year marked the transmutation of terror. Although secular Palestinian organizations continued to commit random acts of terror, militant Islam replaced Palestinian nationalism as the most dangerous inspiration for terror. Jihad overtook national liberation as terrorism's rallying call. The Reagan administration poured money and materiel into jihad against the Soviets. Thousands of Arab men rushed to Afghanistan to fight as mujahideen alongside their Afghan brethren—this was the genesis of Al Qaeda. Then, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO and laid siege to Beirut. American intervention was inevitable but disastrous. The first U.S. encounter with militant Islam—and with mass casualty suicide attacks—came in Lebanon. Hizb'allah, the Party of God, destroyed the U.S. embassy in 1982 and the barracks housing Marine peacekeepers at the Beirut airport in 1983, killing 268 U.S. diplomats, spies, and Marines. The commander of the Marine contingent of the multilateral peacekeeping force had predicted that Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon's sectarian civil war would be catastrophic: “Don't you realize that if you do that, we will get slaughtered down there?”

This was the beginning of America's travails in Lebanon and its confrontation with militant Islam. Hizb'allah began seizing U.S. hostages in 1984 and conducted one of the longest hijackings of a U.S. passenger jet the following year. The hostage crises lasted through to the end of the decade and confounded the Reagan administration, which began selling U.S. arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the dim hope of gaining the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. The clandestine arms-for-hostage deals ended in a fiasco. During this period, remnants of Palestinian terror organizations mounted a series of lethal attacks, including massacres in Rome and Vienna airports. Libya lurked behind most of these attacks, and a military confrontation with the United States became inevitable. Reagan ordered an air strike in 1986; Libya retaliated by destroying a U.S. airliner over Scotland just before Christmas 1988. Ronald Reagan had been compelled to confront a hydra-headed threat of terror. But he could not entirely make good on his pledge that “America will never make concessions to terrorists.”

There were no major acts of terror against Americans or U.S. interests during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. The last embers of Palestinian nationalist terror had burned out. Bill Clinton may have thought he had inherited a new world order that would permit him to focus on domestic issues when he entered office in 1993. But there would be consequences from Operation Desert Storm, the Bush administration's short war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Arab mujahideen formed the “Base” of a global terror network around Osama bin Laden. This base—Al Qaeda—would wage jihad against apostate governments in the Arab world and, eventually, the United States. The presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, the most holy land of Islam, convinced bin Laden, a Saudi, that the United States was Islam's mortal enemy. Others thought like him. Militant Muslims attacked the United States at regular intervals during Clinton's first term in office, in 1993, 1995, and 1996. The first of these attacks came on U.S. soil when a cell of Islamist terrorists attempted but failed to destroy the World Trade Center. Muslims had come to believe, as bin Laden exhorted them, that “the real enemy is America.”

There was a deceptive two-year lull after bin Laden's “Declaration of War Against the Americans who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” in 1996. But then, in February 1998, bin Laden and others issued a ruling of Islamic law that purported to impose a religious obligation on all Muslims to kill Americans. Al Qaeda destroyed two U.S. embassies in East Africa months later. Clinton retaliated with cruise missile strikes on Al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and gave instructions to the CIA to capture or kill bin Laden. America was now engaged in a covert, low-intensity war against militant Islam. Al Qaeda attempted unsuccessfully to conduct mass casualty attacks against Americans on the eve of the new millennium of the Christian era. At the end of 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked and severely damaged the USS Cole. There could be no doubt that militant Muslims had taken it upon themselves as a religious obligation to attack Americans and “kill them on the land, on the sea, and in the air.”

Americans went to the polls to elect a new president twenty-five days after the Cole attack. Al Qaeda had killed Americans on land and sea. By the time George W. Bush took the oath of office, the Al Qaeda terrorists who would kill Americans in the air on 9/11 had already entered the United States. The CIA knew this but never alerted the FBI. Vague warnings about a catastrophic Al Qaeda attack surged in the first months of the Bush administration. By the summer of 2001, counterterrorism officials were warning the national security advisor and the president about an imminent, mass casualty attack that would come without warning. The president was slow to appreciate the urgency of the situation and never took charge of the nation's security crisis. In the first week of August, the CIA briefed the president on bin Laden's determination to strike in the United States. Al Qaeda struck thirty-seven days later. On the night of 11 September, the president addressed the nation: “Today our nation saw evil.”

The face of terrorism changed over the three decades between the spectacle of the PFLP's Skyjack Sunday operation in Black September 1970 and the atrocity of Al Qaeda's attack on 11 September 2001. Militant Islam replaced secular Palestinian nationalists as the ideology of terror. Jihad against apostates and infidels replaced the liberation of Palestine as the cause. Militant Islam was sworn to the destruction of the State of Israel, but now destruction of apostate Arab regimes and expulsion of Americans from Muslim lands became new strategic objectives of terror. Militant Islam proclaimed the murder of Americans, who had rarely been targeted by Palestinian terrorists, to be a religious duty. Terror became far more lethal with the advent of mass casualty suicide attacks. The face of terrorism has changed, but not its nature.

Acts of terror are war crimes. Terrorism is a crime against humanity. Terrorism is a form of irregular warfare that violates the laws and customs of war, as terrorists deliberately target noncombatants for the purpose of instilling fear and ultimately compelling governments to capitulate to their demands. Whatever the validity of the terrorists' political, social, or religious grievances, acts of terror negate the legitimacy of the cause. One of the air pirates who participated in Skyjack Sunday attempted to justify hostage-taking by saying “no one heard our screams or our suffering.” The man behind the Black September terror operations attempted to distinguish “revolutionary violence, which is a political act” from “terrorism, which is not.” But whether the ideological motivation for terror was secular Palestinian nationalism or militant Islam, terrorists justified murder. “The idea,” said a leader of a secular Palestinian terror organization was “to take passengers hostage, kill them in the terminals, blow them out of the skies.” This differs not at all from the Muslim imam's exhortation to all Muslims to kill Americans “on the land, on the sea, and in the air.”

The crimes narrated in this book involve, fundamentally, acts that are “part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”: murder and willful killing, the taking of hostages, torture, and destruction not justified by military necessity.¹ It is immaterial to me that terrorists reject these standards of lawful warfare; the standards have broad international acceptance in principle, albeit not always in practice, and I apply them to the conduct of my own government in the War on Terror.

The attacks on 9/11 clearly constituted a war crime. Al Qaeda intentionally launched an attack that was certain to cause loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects—to paraphrase the language of the statute that established the International Criminal Court. But there is a deeper stratum to this criminality. Bin Laden's 1998 fatwa, discussed in Chapter 9, constituted direct and public incitement to commit acts intended to destroy a national group, to paraphrase the Genocide Convention.² Bin Laden's fatwa was incitement to genocide: “In compliance with God's order, the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

In the three decades from the first PFLP hijacking to the Al Qaeda attack on 11 September, terrorists have sacrificed innocent human lives in the name of abstractions. Then it was a war for the liberation of Palestine, now it is jihad against apostates and infidels. Terrorism in the Middle East, from Black September to 11 September, began as a U.S. president struggled to avert a conventional war between Israel and the Arab states committed to Israel's destruction; it ended with an atrocity, unimaginable thirty years earlier, that led another president to declare a global war on terrorism.