On April 23, a senior Israeli officer, Brig Gen Utai Brun, head of research at army intelligence, made a serious accusation against Syria. In a lecture at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, he declared: “To the best of our professional understanding, the Syrian regime has used lethal chemical weapons against gunmen in a series of incidents in recent months…” General Brun gave no evidence for his accusation and produced no physical proof, but he added that the Israel Defence Forces believed Syria had used the nerve agent sarin on several occasions, including a specific attack on March 19.

As it happened, General Brun made his accusation against Syria during a three-day visit to Israel by America’s new Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel—a man whose appointment Israel’s supporters in the United States had sought to prevent. Some Jewish organisations had come close to calling him anti-Semitic. Only by eating humble pie did Hagel manage to have his appointment confirmed. He now clearly hopes to put an end to his quarrel with America’s pro-Israeli lobby.

On this his first visit to Israel as Defence Secretary, he announced that Israel was to receive a rich haul of advanced U.S. weapons—air refuelling tankers, cutting-edge radar and the V-22 Osprey ‘tiltrotor’ aircraft, an advanced plane so far denied to all other US allies. But Hagel’s generous gesture was to no avail. Although Israel was evidently delighted with the weapons, this did not inhibit it from accusing Syria of using chemical weapons—clearly in the hope of provoking a U.S. attack on that country.

Unpleasantly surprised by General Brun’s claim that Syria had used chemical weapons, Hagel declared the very next day—on April 23 — that he had discussed Syria’s chemical weapons with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon, but that neither of them had said that Syria had actually used such weapons. “They did not give me that assessment,” he said. Clearly, Hagel was angry that Israel was putting pressure on the United States to intervene in Syria. The Israeli authorities may well have thought that Hagel, still recovering from the beating pro-Israelis had given him in Washington, would not dare dispute Israel’s assessment.

What was Israel trying to achieve by inciting the United States to attack Syria? It would undoubtedly like President Bashar al-Assad to be replaced by a more pliant figure. But Israel is also worried that Jabhat al-Nusra, a violent branch of Al-Qaida, might come to power if Bashar were to fall. By accusing Syria of using chemical weapons, Israel’s goal seems to have been to trigger an early American armed intervention with the double objective of ousting Bashar from office, while preventing his replacement by the redoubtable Jabhat al-Nusra.

Israel is well aware that Obama—having pulled American forces out of Iraq and planning to do much the same in Afghanistan by 2014 — is most reluctant to commit US troops to yet another war. Nevertheless, by accusing Assad of using chemical weapons, Israel was clearly hoping to lure Obama into a Syrian campaign. Obama had, in fact, laid himself open to just such pressure by saying that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line.”

Moscow was quick to leap to Syria’s defence. On April 28, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the Russian journal Global Affairs, wrote: “Moscow does not believe that Assad may use chemical weapons: he is not a madman to ask for such trouble.”

In fact, Israel’s objectives may have been even wider than triggering an American attack on Syria. For the moment, it is greatly satisfied that most of its Arab neighbours are in deep trouble.

• Syria is in the grip of a civil war, which has already claimed more than 70,000 lives.
• Iraq seems to be on the verge of major Sunni-Shi‘a clashes, while still struggling to recover from America’s long occupation.
• Iran is under painful sanctions because the United States suspects it—on little evidence—of developing nuclear weapons.
• Egypt is on its knees, wholly preoccupied with its own economic problems, and in no mood to endanger its peace treaty with Israel.
• Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf States seem more worried by Iran than by Israel.
• Israelis are also delighted that, thanks to President Obama’s mediation, the United States-Israel-Turkey coalition has been restored, and is set to be a powerful force in Middle East affairs.

All this is very good news for Israel. Nevertheless, its dominance is not total.

It still faces something of a challenge from the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis. Iran may be facing severe sanctions, but it is far from defeated. Assad’s Syria may be in dire straits, but it is fighting back, and continues to enjoy strong Russian support. Hizballah, Lebanon’s robust Shi‘a movement, may be under intense pressure from militant Sunni groups, but it remains the most powerful force in Lebanon.

Aware that their attempts have—for the moment—failed to push the United States into an armed confrontation with Syria, Israeli spokesmen are already back-tracking. In New York, Yuval Steinitz, minister of strategic and intelligence affairs, was reported as saying on April 29: “We never asked, nor did we encourage, the United States to take military action against Syria.” Iran, he declared, not Syria was the “problem No. 1 of our generation.”

These exchanges demonstrate Israel’s efforts to incite the United States against Israel’s enemies—and also the speed with which it withdraws when its covert efforts fail to produce the hoped for results. Israel is well aware that the United States is at present extremely reluctant to attack either Iran or Syria. Israel may, therefore, have to content itself with continued U.S. pressure on these two countries—short of actual war. The truth is that Israel may well think that its most threatening enemy today is neither Iran nor Syria, but rather Hizballah in Lebanon. It was Hizballah that fought Israel to something like a draw in 2006 and which, to this day, represents its most dangerous neighbour.

It is interesting to note that Israel’s only armed intervention so far in the Syrian civil war occurred on Saturday, April 27, when it attacked a convoy making its way to Hizballah in Lebanon from Syria’s chemical weapons facility, the Scientific Studies and Research Center at Barzeh near Damascus. Israel’s evident fear is that any acquisition by Hizballah of Syrian chemical weapons would give the Lebanese Shi‘a movement considerable immunity from attack.

By insisting that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, General Brun’s aim seems to have been to persuade the United States to destroy both the Syrian regime and its Hizballah ally. Israel wants no limits on the extraordinary freedom it has long enjoyed to attack its neighbours at will and never be hit back. From Israel’s point of view, if America could be persuaded to do the job for it, so much the better. If not this time, another occasion will surely arise.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

A public dispute between two prominent Islamic fighting groups—one in Syria, the other in Iraq—has given Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad a moment of much-needed relief. Although it is too early to say for certain, we may be witnessing a crucial moment in his battered fortunes. Fears about the sort of regime that might come after him seem to have aroused doubts among his Western critics about the wisdom of overthrowing him—at least for the time being.

As the armed struggle in Syria enters its third year, Assad’s most dangerous opponent is undoubtedly Jabhat al-Nusra, a highly-disciplined Islamic force several thousand strong which, since its formation early in 2012, has scored notable victories in the north and east of the country under the leadership of its shadowy commander, Abu Muhammad al-Golani. One of its recent successes has been to capture Raqqa in eastern Syria, the first capital of Syria’s fourteen governorates to fall to Islamic rule.

Jabhat al-Nusra has emerged in recent weeks as the most ruthless, the most disciplined and—because of its devotion to Islam—the most ideological of Assad’s opponents. It has inspired great fear in the population by slaughtering prisoners and carrying out dozens of devastating suicide bombings, including several in central Damascus itself.

This fighting group was long suspected of closely resembling Al-Qaida, the radical and violent Islamic movement which, since the death of its founder Osama bin Laden, has fallen under the control of one of his former colleagues, the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri. In recent months, Al-Qaida managed to establish a clandestine branch in Iraq where—with the evident blessing of Al-Zawahiri himself—it assumed the ambitious name of the ‘Islamic State in Iraq’, under the leadership of a certain Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Needless to say, Iraq’s embattled Shia prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has no tolerance whatsoever for such an overt challenge to his authority and is evidently committed to rooting out all such threats, especially when they come from dangerous Sunni terrorists in his domain.

Such was the situation when, to universal surprise, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced on April 9 that his Iraqi Islamist movement had merged with Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusra to form a new grouping to which he gave the ambitious name of ‘Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Levant.’ He even went so far as to claim that the ties between the two movements were of long standing, since they had been formed by men—many of them Syrian jihadis—whom the Assad regime had encouraged to go to Iraq to fight American troops there from 2003 to 2011. Once the Americans had departed, some of these men had made their way back to Syria, where they formed Jabhat al-Nusra, turning their guns on their former benefactors in Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Indeed, to demonstrate the close bonds between the Syrian and Iraqi Islamic fighters, Al-Baghdadi went on to say that Al-Qaida in Iraq had been making a monthly contribution to Jabhat al-Nusra’s budget in Syria, and had itself chosen Abu Muhammad al-Golani to lead it, after advising him on the plans and strategy needed to defeat Bashar al-Assad.

This announcement from Iraq has clearly come as a most unwelcome shock to Jabhat al-Nusra. While admitting its allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Syrian opposition movement has hurried to make clear that it had no prior knowledge of Al-Baghdadi’s announcement and that it had not been consulted or briefed about it. Evidently deeply embarrassed, it insisted that it totally rejected the notion that Syria and Iraq form a united Islamic state under a single Islamic ruler. In continuing the fight against Bashar al-Assad, it was evidently determined to use its own name and its own flag—and avoid being tarnished by too close an association with Al-Qaida.

Jabhat al-Nusra’s leader, the mysterious Abu Muhammad al-Golani, is clearly well aware that the statement by Iraq’s Al-Qaidi leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has done him no good at all. To be labelled an Al-Qaida affiliate in today’s climate is by no means an asset. On the contrary, it has served to alert the Western world that Al-Qaida is the hidden force behind the Syrian uprising and that it stands to benefit—and perhaps even come to power—if and when Bashar al-Assad were to fall. This realisation seems to have caused the United States and its Western allies to pause in their campaign against Assad’s regime. In other words, Al-Baghdadi seems inadvertently to have done Assad a great service.

The crisis has demonstrated that many of Assad’s opponents in Syria have no intention to be cast as hard-line Islamists. Indeed, Moaz al-Khatib, leader of the Syrian National Coalition and a former Imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, was quick to declare on Facebook that “The bottom line is that Al-Qaida ideology does not suit us.” He seemed to be saying that, while a majority of Syrians wanted freedom, they had no wish to replace Assad’s authoritarian but essentially secular rule by that of an ultra-fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship.

A recent study by Yezid Sayegh, of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, has shown that “significant swathes of Syria’s 1-1.5 million civil servants, 2-2.5 million members of the ruling Baath Party, and the 2.5-3 million strong Alawi community who provide the backbone of the security services and armed forces” are far from ready to abandon the Assad regime. Syria’s minorities—Alawis but also Christians, Druze, Ismailis and other smaller communities—make up some 30 per cent of the population. The prospect of an Al-Qaida victory arouses fears among many of them that their lives would be in danger. But it would also be unwelcome to many Sunnis, especially the more liberal among them—including prominent men such as Moaz al-Khatib himself.

For peace to return to Syria, some reconfiguring of power relationships between its different communities will evidently be necessary. The intelligence services and officer corps, dominated by Alawis over the past several decades, will need to be restructured so as to give moderate Muslims a greater share of power. External powers, Arab and non-Arab, will need to put their ambitions and rivalries aside and join forces in presiding over a Syrian settlement, which will keep fanatics of all communities at bay. Ancient minorities will need to be protected. The more than one million Syrian refugees that have fled the country will need to be brought home and rehoused. Massive financial aid, very probably from oil and gas-rich Gulf States, will need to be provided to rebuild Syria’s shattered towns and villages.

It will evidently require statesmanship in Washington and Moscow, as well as in overheated European and Middle Eastern capitals, to bring the slaughter in Syria to an end and rebuild the country as a peaceful haven for its rich mixture of communities. For the moment, however, this vision remains little more than a dream.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who chaired the P5+1 group of delegates — from Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States plus Germany—admitted that the two sides remained far apart “on the substance” of the negotiations. But she was by no means gloomy or dismissive. “We have talked in much greater detail than ever before,” she said, “and our efforts will continue in that direction…. For the first time that I’ve seen, [there was] a real back and forth between us, where we were able to discuss details, to pose questions, and to get answers directly.” The participants, she said, would now “go back to capitals to evaluate where we stand in the process.” She would be in touch with Dr Jalili — in a matter of “days, not months” — to see if the gap could be narrowed and how to go forward.

For its part, Iran was said to be eager to schedule a new meeting, but, given the considerable differences between the two sides, the P5+1 said they wanted to avoid “talks for talks’ sake.” It therefore seems unlikely that there will be another round of negotiations before Iran’s important June 14 elections, which will bring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial 8-year presidency to a close.

If one were to listen to Catherine Ashton, the outlook for a deal with Iran would seem reasonably hopeful. But is this a true picture? The major uncertainty concerns America’s intentions. It is by no means clear whether Washington truly wants a deal with Iran or whether its covert aim is to bring down the Islamic Republic. Certainly, this is Iran’s profound suspicion, which is not altogether surprising considering its long quarrel with the United States, which extends back to the birth of the Islamic republic in 1979. Just as many people in the United States suspect that Iran is spinning out the talks to gain time for its covert nuclear programme, so a great many Iranians believe the U.S. is not negotiating in good faith. They suspect the United States is using the pretext of Iran’s nuclear programme to impose ever more crippling sanctions on it with the aim of bringing down the Islamic regime. There is certainly no indication yet that the United States recognises that a deal with Iran must inevitably require a degree of compromise — very probably one allowing the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium for industrial purposes under strict international supervision.

Catherine Ashton is patently well-intentioned. She seems to have managed to dispel some of Iran’s darkest suspicions. Whereas much American comment about Iran is hostile, she has given every indication of wanting the talks to succeed. Breaking with the U.S. tendency to portray Iran as a sinister adversary, she has made a real effort to befriend Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, to understand his concerns and break with the language of condemnation and threat too often adopted by U.S. officials and commentators. It is by no means clear, however, whether the United States government shares her positive approach. There are powerful forces in the United States which do not want a deal with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

For one thing, Israel, which exerts considerable influence over America’s Middle East policy, wants to close down Iran’s nuclear industry altogether and makes no secret of its readiness to use force to achieve this aim. It is totally opposed to any compromise which would allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium. Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, has been quick to dismiss the talks at Almaty as a waste of time — indeed as a failure.

“This failure was predictable,” he declared. “Israel has already warned that the Iranians are exploiting the talks in order to play for time while making additional progress in enriching uranium for an atomic bomb. The time has come for the world to take a more assertive stand and make it unequivocally clear to the Iranians that the negotiations games have run their course.” Steinitz — and, behind him, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu — have pressed the United States to set a red line for Iran, insisting that it totally abandon its civilian nuclear programme. The excitable Steinitz has even said the closure must take place “in a few weeks, a month” at the most. He has warned that Iran would face immediate attack if it failed to do so!

U.S. President Barack Obama has adopted a cooler tone, arguing that it would take at least as year, if not longer, for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. But it is by no means clear how far he can depart from Israel’s more pressing agenda. In the circumstances, the negotiations behind the scenes between the United States and Israel may well be as important as those between Iran and the P5+1 — if not more so.

Iran has always insisted on international recognition of its ‘right’ to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes on its home soil. From the start, this has been its position of principle. “What we are insisting on is our right to enrich,” Saeed Jalili told the press. “This is equally true for 5 percent or 20 percent. You know well that 20 percent enriched uranium is used for medical purposes. One million Iranian patients are using those isotopes… Today the fuel is exclusively used for humanitarian matters, medical purposes, exclusively peaceful purposes.” Jalili explained that Iran’s proposals required recognising “our right to enrich and ending behaviours which have every indication of enmity toward the Iranian people… In consideration of our new proposals, it is now up to the P5+1 to demonstrate its willingness and sincerity to take appropriate confidence-building steps in the future.”

Nevertheless, at Almaty, the Iranian delegation showed some flexibility in suggesting that, as a “confidence-building” measure, Iran might be prepared to freeze production of some of its enriched uranium if, in return, the West were to lift its economic sanctions. Iran, however, seems unlikely to agree to close its enrichment plant at Fordo, buried deep in a mountain, unless its legal right to nuclear power under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is acknowledged.

Does this indicate that Iran and the P5+1 are at a dangerous stalemate? It is to be hoped that the departure from office next June of Iran’s pugnacious President Ahmadinejad will ease the way to an international agreement, which will spare the region the horrors of war.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 April 2013
Word Count: 1,157
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Rarely if ever has an American President shown such intense concern for Israel’s welfare and such casual indifference for the Arabs.

The visit to Israel and its Arab neighbours marks an important moment in Obama’s presidency. It sends a clear message that he is not prepared to engage in a fight with powerful pro-Israeli forces deeply entrenched in American government and society. To the Arabs, it signals that resolving the Palestine problem is no longer his priority. He seems prepared to leave it to the next incumbent of the White House, whoever that might be.

No doubt John Kerry, America’s new Secretary of State, will go through the motions of addressing the Palestine problem for a while, but it would be naïve to expect any real progress without vigorous and sustained presidential attention, and that now seems highly unlikely.

Many Arabs had thought that Obama, on this his first presidential visit to the region, would give fresh impetus to the search for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement — even at this eleventh hour. Their disappointment has been bitter. They had failed to grasp how the evolving power relationships — in the region itself and also in Washington — had undermined their interests and hardened the resolve of Israel’s land-hungry leaders not to give an inch.

The truth is that the Arabs’ attention over the past two years has been fully engrossed by the political upheavals in their own societies. Revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, as well as the bitter civil war in Syria, have absorbed Arab attention, virtually blotting out everything else. The Arabs have failed to grasp that their revolutions — whatever promise they may hold of a better future — have for the moment at least gravely weakened them, reducing their influence on the international stage.

It is, therefore, not surprising that, on this visit to the Middle East, Obama felt no obligation to calm Arab fears or help the Palestinians towards their longed-for independence. Instead, he devoted himself entirely to celebrating Israel’s achievements as the region’s most powerful and dynamic actor — as well as hailing its ever closer ties with the United States. No doubt he felt free to flatter Israel and offend the Arabs because of the lamentable state in which much of the Arab world now finds itself.

As a handsome parting gift to Netanyahu, Obama brokered a peace deal between Turkey and Israel, putting an end to the three-year feud between them. It will be recalled that their quarrel dates back to May 2010 when Israel attacked and boarded a Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, which was seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Nine Turks on board the ship were killed. During his visit to Israel this month, Obama persuaded Netanyahu to issue a public apology to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, together with a promise of compensation, thus putting an end to the quarrel.

The sudden and dramatic Israeli-Turkish reconciliation has come as a bitter blow to the Arabs. They had thought that their alliance with Turkey would help them stand up to Israel. Instead, Obama has brokered an alliance between the United States, Israel and Turkey which is intended to dominate the region and dictate terms to the Arabs.

Indeed, the Arab heartland has rarely seemed so weak and vulnerable:

• Egypt is today close to bankruptcy, a condition which severely limits its regional influence. Once the most powerful Arab country, it is today a victim of long years of authoritarian rule and of a population explosion. When Nasser’s Free Officers took power in 1952, there were about 18m Egyptians; today there are 85m. Egypt desperately needs international credits and is dependent on American support to get them. It cannot afford to show sympathy for Hamas in Gaza since the United States — pandering to Israel — considers it a terrorist organisation.

• Iraq has far from recovered from the American invasion of 2003, engineered and driven by pro-Israeli neo-cons, and from the nine-year occupation which followed. Now under Shia leadership, and allied to Iran, it is a long way from recovering its once influential place in Arab affairs. It has virtually lost control of its Kurdish territories and is being torn apart by Sunni-Shia strife.

• Syria is in the grip of a brutal civil war, which threatens to overthrow its secular Ba‘thist regime, in power since 1963. If the regime is toppled, Syria could then be ruled by hard-line Islamists who are leading the revolt against President Bashar al-Asad. More probably, however, the country could be partitioned into small confessional units, each looking desperately to its own defence. So great is the human and material damage Syria has suffered in these past two years that it seems unlikely that it will recover its long-standing role as a barrier to Israeli power in the Levant.

• Under Israeli pressure, the United States is subjecting Iran to a cruel siege. This has greatly enfeebled the Iran-Syria-Hizballah alliance which, over the past three decades, had attempted to keep Israeli power in check. Today the alliance is in grave danger of collapse: Iran is battling against crippling sanctions, Syria faces dismemberment, while a nervous Hizballah contemplates the potential loss of its two external patrons. In Jerusalem on March 21, Obama blatantly embraced Israel’s point of view by calling on foreign governments to brand Hizballah as a ‘terrorist organisation’. Blinded by their fear of Iran and puffed up by their vast income from oil and gas, a number of Arab Gulf states have also joined in the effort to dismantle the Iran-Syria-Hizballah alliance and rob it of its regional influence. They may live to regret it.

What sense, therefore, can one make of the overall picture? How to explain Israel’s arrogant self-confidence and its cold-hearted refusal to allow the Palestinians a mini-state of their own? Part at least of the answer must surely lie in Egypt’s insolvency; in the deep divisions in Iraqi society, scarred by a decade of conflict; in Syria’s cruel civil war; and in Iran’s struggle to survive harsh American sanctions.

By all accounts, Arab public opinion has been shocked by Obama’s extravagant love affair with Israel. It was not what the Arabs had expected. In their innocence, they had thought the American President would put on a show of neutrality and do his best to promote a settlement of the Palestine problem. They had not realised — or had forgotten — how little influence the Arab voice has in Washington and how their own long-running and still unfinished revolutions have sapped their energies and undermined their international influence. The awakening has been rude.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 March 2013
Word Count: 1,148
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Hell bent on revenge, U.S. President George W Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror. The 21st Century thus began with a great outburst of violence and counter-violence, which a dozen years later shows little sign of abating.

The American war on Afghanistan shattered much of that country, killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens and is still unfinished a dozen years later. The United States and Britain then attacked Iraq in 2003. The reasons for doing so were fraudulent because Iraq had had nothing to do with Al-Qaida’s terrorism. But pro-Israeli neo-cons in the U.S. administration seized the chance to destroy a leading Arab country, which might have challenged Israel’s regional hegemony. By the time the United States finally withdrew in 2011, Iraqi civilian casualties were estimated at well over one million and material destruction immense. As the country wrestles with the painful task of political and physical reconstruction, it has fallen victim to Sunni-Shia quarrels, which threaten to tear it apart once again.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States has continued to kill Muslims it considers hostile — in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places across the globe, usually resorting to strikes against distant targets by pilotless armed drones. Large numbers of innocent civilians have been among the casualties, inevitably stoking violent anti-American feeling among relatives and friends of the victims.

These violent events across the Middle East — which are now spreading to the Sahel in North Africa — have dominated the first years of this century. One way or another, they have all been triggered, and been publicly justified, by Al-Qaida’s 9/11 assault on the United States. Yet an inescapable fact is that a great many victims of these retaliatory wars were innocent Muslims, who had nothing to do with Al-Qaida but were swept up in the security frenzy of the time.

Over the past dozen years, many Muslims in Britain and America have faced discrimination, harassment and years of incarceration without trial just because they are Muslims. The secret war against them has passed largely unnoticed and unreported, largely because opinion is still outraged by Al-Qaida’s violence. But their plight — and the devastating impact it has had on their wives and families – caught the attention and aroused the conscience of the British writer Victoria Brittain. Her book, Shadow Lives, which examines the painful lives of these victims of counter-terror, is a heart-wrenching work to which she brings the passion and the careful investigative skills which made her reputation on the British daily newspaper, The Guardian.

With barely suppressed anger, she describes how, after 9/11, George W. Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair launched “what was effectively an anti-Muslim crusade” — including the right to arrest, indefinitely detain or deport anyone, even if they had committed no crime, as well as massive surveillance of mosques and Muslims. Britain, America’s close ally, was swept up in the hysteria which was to condemn many an innocent Muslim to long years of incarceration and their families to untold misery.

Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was, Victoria Brittain writes, “the centrepiece of the reaction to 9/11, and remains the symbol of how half a century of international conventions on torture, prisoners’ rights, rendition and other aspects of international law were simply over-ridden by the US government and its allies.” In the name of national security, anti-terrorist laws were passed which meted out gross injustice. Thousands of men were captured, many of them entirely innocent, in what she describes as “a vast fishing expedition across the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and from Bosnia to Gambia.” They were sent to Guantánamo where they were held beyond the reach of U.S. law, without habeas corpus, in conditions that were flagrant violations of international law. The Geneva Conventions were set aside. Torture was widely and systematically practiced. She describes how, in Guantánamo, men were “stripped naked in front of females, held in freezing containers, kept awake for as long as 20 hours a day” and were subjected to repetitive interrogation. Her book is, in fact, a passionate indictment of the cruelty and stupidity of the war on terror.

Most of the men at Guantánamo were held there on very slight evidence. They were victims of a “steamroller of propaganda” by the U.S. and UK governments and their media allies. Stoking fear of Muslims had become a profession. Even before 9/11, Arabs and Muslims in the United States were victims of what the author calls “a general manufactured climate of fear… often linked to efficient and well-funded pro-Israeli lobbyists.”

Of Victoria Brittain’s many painful case studies, I have space to mention only two. Ghassan Elashi was chairman of America’s largest Muslim charity, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. In July 2007, he and four colleagues from his Foundation were charged with “material support” for Hamas, described as a foreign terrorist organisation. They had sent some $12 million to Gaza, earmarked for orphanages and community welfare groups. Although the groups they were helping were not on any government terrorist list, the prosecution claimed they were fronts for Hamas. Elashi was sentenced to 65 years in jail. The impact on his family was devastating.

Sami Al Arian, a professor of engineering at the University of South Florida and outspoken campaigner for Palestinian rights, was indicted in 2003 on multiple counts of “material support for terrorism.” In a 2006 trial, after nearly three years in solitary confinement, the jury acquitted him of half the charges, while they were deadlocked on the others, with ten jurors to two wanting to acquit. He took a plea bargain on one count, agreed to deportation and should have been freed the following year. But he was then charged with criminal contempt when he would not testify in another trial. In 2009 he was released to house arrest, where in three years he was allowed to leave his apartment twice — for his daughters’ weddings.

In Britain, too, many men were arrested after 9/11 as part of a worldwide intelligence swoop on Muslims. They were assessed as “risks to national security” and held for years in high security prisons on secret evidence that was not disclosed to their lawyers and about which they were never interrogated or charged. As Victoria Brittain comments, “indefinite detention felt like torture to them and as life suspended for their frightened wives.”

Shadow Lives is an important book which will awaken righteous rage in many readers — or reduce them to tears.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 March 2013
Word Count: 1,116
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In reacting to these events, the European Union has tended to leave the initiative to the United States. There were, of course, some exceptions. France, for example, played a leading role in spearheading the international intervention in Libya and more recently in Mali. But, on the whole, in dealing with major problems like the Arab-Israeli conflict, the dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme, or the highly destabilising civil war in Syria, the European Union has preferred to leave the initiative to the United States.

Problems have arisen, however, because of America’s close relationship with Israel. For several years now, the Israeli tail has wagged the American dog in the Middle East — and Europe has meekly followed along. This has not been good for the reputation of several European countries, Britain in particular. In the explosive climate created by the Arab revolutions of the last two years, it is surely time for Britain and the European Union to recover their freedom of thought and action in dealing with the Middle East

The Arab-Israeli conflict, which has festered for the past 65 years, remains a factor of immense instability. Today, the two-state solution is moribund, if not actually dead. A last minute attempt must surely be made to bring it back to life, or the consequences could be extremely dangerous for the Middle East and for European interests in this important region. Britain has a historic responsibility for the tragic state of affairs. Instead of keeping silent, Britain should be making a big and noisy fuss about the cruel oppression the Palestinians are suffering — under occupation on the West Bank and under siege in Gaza. It is surely time for the UK, and its European partners, to press for Palestinian statehood at this eleventh hour, even if it means threatening Israel with sanctions. As Israel’s major trading partner, the EU could apply considerable pressure, if it were able to summon up the courage and the political will to do so.

Israel’s present course is ultimately suicidal. It is a small country which depends on generous American aid and protection. But its long-term survival must surely depend on its ability to reach an accommodation with its Arab, Iranian and Turkish neighbours. This can be achieved only by halting and reversing its theft of Palestinian land and allowing the emergence of a small Palestinian state living alongside it in peace, security and prosperity. Israel’s reward would be normal relations with all 22 Arab states.

Britain made a blatant mistake ten years ago when the then Prime Minister Tony Blair joined the United States in the invasion of Iraq. The war was planned by a group of pro-Israeli neo-cons embedded in George W Bush’s administration — notably Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon and David Wormser in the Vice-President’s office, among many others. The French and the Turks were wise enough to stay out of the war. Israel wanted Iraq destroyed because, after the Iran-Iraq war, it thought it might one day pose a threat to Israel’s eastern front. So Iraq, a major Arab state, was shattered and hundreds of thousands of its citizens killed. Millions more were displaced or driven into exile. It is still a long way from recovery.

An unforeseen consequence of the war was to unseat the Sunnis from power in Baghdad and replace them with the majority Shia community. This meant that Iraq could no longer play its traditional role as a Sunni counterweight to Shia Iran in the Gulf region. This development has caused some of the smaller Gulf States to take fright at the prospect of falling under Iranian hegemony. The shift in the regional power balance has also worried the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the major Arab state in the region.

Having managed to persuade the United States to destroy Iraq, Israel then shifted its attention to Iran, another potential challenger to its regional supremacy. Israel has campaigned tirelessly to get the United States to join with it in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — or, better still, for the United States to do the job alone. Israel has not hesitated to depict Iran as a terrorist state and its nuclear programme as a threat to all mankind.

In his first term as President, Obama was able to resist Israel’s intense pressure for war against Iran. But he only managed to do so by imposing crippling sanctions on Iran, and forcing the Europeans to follow suit. Sanctions have more than halved Iran’s oil exports, shattered its currency, cut it off from international banking, and inflicted great hardship on its population.

There are now, at long last, some timid signs of a more rational approach to the Islamic Republic. The recent talks in Kazakhstan between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany appear to have had some limited success and are due to be followed up soon by further negotiations. The obvious solution is for Iran to be allowed to enrich uranium to a low level for peaceful purposes under strict IAEA safeguards, in exchange for a lifting of sanctions.

But Israel is seeking to torpedo any such compromise. It wants to close down Iran’s nuclear industry altogether. It doesn’t want any of its neighbours, near or far, to acquire even the possibility of a modest deterrent capability. As we all know, Israel is a major nuclear power with an elaborate arsenal of well over a hundred nuclear weapons, numerous long-range delivery systems and a second strike capability in the form of nuclear-armed submarines. It wants the freedom to hit its neighbours at will and never to be hit back.

In Syria, the United States and some of its allies seem to be edging towards supplying weapons and equipment to opposition fighters. Of these, by far the most effective are radical Islamic groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, linked to Al-Qaeda. The United States and its allies are thus in the paradoxical position of fighting Al-Qaeda across the world but supporting it in Syria. They will undoubtedly live to regret it. The Syrian conflict should be brought to an end as soon as possible. The way to do this is not to arm one side against the other, but to deny weapons to both sides. A ceasefire must be imposed by the United States and Russia, backed by all the other external parties who have been feeding the flames of war. This is what the great majority of the martyred Syrian population is longing for.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2013 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 March 2013
Word Count: 1,180
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