Host: After a string of Palestinian suicide bombings killed dozens of civilians in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Natanya and Jerusalem, Israel sent tanks rolling into the West Bank. The operation is expected to last at least several weeks. Can there be any peace in the face of terror? Next, On the Line. [Music] Host: The goal of Israel’s military incursion is to uproot the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. Israel claims that Yasser Arafat is directly responsible for the relentless suicide attacks. The United States has hesitated to label Arafat a terrorist. But among documents found by Israeli forces when they raided Arafat’s headquarters was an invoice for four-thousand dollars to be paid to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The money, according to the document, is for the chemicals needed to make a month’s worth of suicide bombs. “It’s an invoice of terrorism,” said Israeli spokesman Dore Gold. Joining me today to talk about fighting terrorism in the Middle East are Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Franklin Foer of the New Republic magazine. Welcome. Thanks for joining me today.
Edward Luttwak, is this invoice a smoking gun for Arafat’s involvement in the terror attacks.
Luttwak: Well, listen, it’s a document. Usually Israelis issue authentic documents, but we don’t need it. We don’t need it because a few months ago, out of nowhere, there appears a whole organization called the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which appeared from one day to the next. And as it rises out of the ground, and after a very short time it became evident that this is just another brand-name for the Fatah, which is the armed militia, which is directly controlled and salaried by Arafat. As you know, Arafat is the head of Fatah and then he’s also the chairman of the P-L-O [Palestine Liberation Organization], which is the other movement. But Fatah is his very own. So, we don’t need this particular document. It’s now evident and this explains the hardness of President [George W.] Bush. All this time when the United States was asking Arafat to stop the terrorism of Hamas, he instead had decided to compete with it. He decided that he wanted --evidently Hamas was drawing popular support -- so he orders the Fatah to set up the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, both to do some attacks and to do suicide bombing. So they actually acquired the whole software and technology of suicide bombing. So the document, I believe personally, is effective. But one doesn’t have to have any opinion at all about it because the evidence is already evident. Organizations don’t appear from, you know, midnight Monday there is no al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and by Tuesday they’re all over the territory.
Host: Franklin Foer?
Foer: It was an obvious fiction that the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy was an entirely separate entity from al-Aqsa. They, for domestic political purposes, needed to connect themselves to the suicide bombing. So, you always when you heard Palestinian officials quoted on the suicide bombings they deployed exactly the same rhetoric as Hamas, praising the Martyrs, etc. So it’s not a terribly surprising revelation in light of the recent history.
Luttwak: Yes, it’s always interesting to have a document, particularly Americans find it important. America’s very legalistic. It’s nice to have a document. But this is really not the real issue. The more interesting thing is how the Fatah -- which is of course a professional, salaried, multi-purposed kind of terrorist organization -- how did they acquire so quickly the rather, you know, fairly elaborate software that you need to make it happen?
Host: By software you mean?
Luttwak: Well, you know methods and so on, because this idea that people have been offering them, this is contagious. People are angry, very angry and so they go and do a suicide bombing. This is a fantasy. First you have to identify likely candidates. You have to recruit them into the organization. You have to work them in, indoctrinate them so they’ll keep it secret. We know this because their families never know. And then you slowly persuade them that they’ll get to this heaven. Most of them are boys; [it’s] a heaven in which there are girls. There are no girls in Gaza, the West Bank. There are no prostitutes. They were eliminated a long time ago. There’s no sex. And you offer them sex. Now they accept, then you have to film them. Photograph them so they cannot change their mind. The families -- they forbid them to talk to their families because family members would talk them out of it or might talk them out of it. And then, they have to be dressed up. There is a vestician [costume specialist]. You have to be dressed up to look right. Whether it is as Orthodox Jews or soldiers or whatever. Then they have to be trained. They have to walk through the drill so that they don’t have any mannerisms, ticks or give-away signs in how they behave. And only then they’re sent in. So this takes some skill in dressing people up, theatrical skills. Make-up may be necessary to make it look right. Wigs are used. You need the right kind of clothing that can carry, you know, seven, eight kilos of high explosives -- which is a devastating amount, you know one of the big artillery shells only contains about three or four kilos. This is fairly elaborate. And it’s impressive that once when Arafat decided that he wanted to compete with Hamas, which has been in this business for years, they were able to acquire the skills so quickly. That suggests that they always knew each other. They were always friends, actually.
Host: Do you agree, Franklin Foer?
Foer: I do and I think it’s important to note that it’s not a spontaneous display of emotion. That there is an infrastructure that’s in place that can be destroyed. We have the feeling sometimes that this campaign is utterly hopeless, the military campaign. And you know, to an extent it is. It is a very monumental task that they’re set with. But, I think that it’s possible. It is possible at a certain level to destroy some of the infrastructure that is responsible for these bombings. And that’s I guess the more hopeful interpretation. The less hopeful interpretation is that the ethos of death and the lack of value for life is so deeply ingrained within the culture that even if you’re able to somehow disrupt this infrastructure. . . .
Luttwak: I’m in real disagreement.
Foer: Okay, yes.
Luttwak: First of all, I’m not comfortable with the word infrastructure, because infrastructure means highly physical things. There is this elaborate activity, okay, but infrastructure implies buildings and structures. Most forces, regular military forces can occupy buildings and so on. In this case, they’re talking about the teams, the people, the ones who know how to do the make-up, the ones who know how to teach them the manners, and what to do to rig it up, the ones who are good at indoctrinating. Above all, persuading a young guy not to talk to his family and to talk only to you and slowly talk him into committing suicide. This is an elaborate system but it’s not an infrastructure. The other disagreement I have is a very strong disagreement about this notion that this culture is a culture of death. I totally don’t agree with it. In the Second World War, people who joined the Royal Fleet Air Arm, which is those little biplanes that took off from those storm-tossed ships in the British Navy, they knew that they really didn’t have -- they had no way to survive two tours. People who joined the German U-boat service after May 1943 and went to sea had very low probability of coming home, and the Japanese Kamikaze. And to go away from these dramatic examples, in normal war there is a process of indoctrination, of acceptance. People are willing to do things that are very dangerous. In this case, the difference is suicide, but that difference is bridged because of the very tangible promises. The preachers in Gaza, in rather lubricious detail, go beyond the text of the Koran. They go beyond the actual literal sayings of the Koran and they embellish and they say, “all these girls, and you’ll be able to have intercourse with them and they’ll stay virgins and they’ll have your name imprinted on their foreheads,” and they go on and on. So this is what [it is]. But I don’t think it’s a culture of death. I think it’s simply an embattled society, an embattled society. Britain was embattled and people were willing to join the Fleet Air Arm.
Foer: I hope that’s true, but when you hear the stories about the games that children play.
Luttwak: I accept that. I’m just saying that analytically, it’s not necessary.
Host: I’d like to move to talk about how the war against terror in the Middle East affects the U-S broader war on terror. And before we do this, let me reintroduce my guests to our audience. This is On the Line and I’m Eric Felten and we’re talking about fighting terrorism in the Middle East. I’m joined by Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and also Franklin Foer of The New Republic Magazine. Let me read an article that was in the New York Times recently by Thomas Friedman. He was the columnist, of course, who helped to spur the Saudi peace plan in an interview that he had with the crowned prince [Abdullah] of Saudi Arabia. And he wrote, this week, “Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization, because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then like hijacking and airplane bombing it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.
Host: Franklin Foer, is Thomas Friedman right about this? Is the success of the suicide bombing strategy that great a threat to the overall war on terrorism?
Foer: I actually think it is and this is where I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are many historical antecedents to what the Palestinians are doing. But there is certainly some connection between the way in which al-Qaida deployed suicide bombings and the way in which the Palestinians have deployed suicide bombings and the inability of Islamic states to condemn the practice of using suicide bombings as a means of destroying civilians and scoring strategic points. In this recent meeting of Muslim states, only Malaysia and Bosnia were willing to support a resolution condemning the use of suicide bombings against civilian populations. So I do think that it’s all of a piece and if we’re serious about fighting a war against terrorism, we’re going to have to somehow deal with the problem.
Luttwak: Well, listen. First of all, Thomas Friedman’s prose was alluding to the death of civilization, the nuclear bombs strapped to the waist. If you have a nuclear bomb, you don’t need to strap it to the waist. It’s clearly, I was very nervous, unhappy in particular with that, but there is a real problem with the issue and a conclave of ministers meeting in Malaysia, as you correctly said, they were unable to condemn suicide bombings. Only [Prime Minister] Mahathir [Mohamad] of Malaysia and the deputy foreign minister of Bosnia [-Herzegovina Ivica Misic], they condemned it. Well, you know this is a testimony to their secular nature, because there is a problem. And the problem is that it is right in the text of the Koran. Islam has never undergone a reformation. There has never been -- they’re all textual fundamentalists. Every word in the Koran is true and so forth. In the Koran it says that if you die for the cause you will go to heaven and you will be rewarded not by the favor of God or the divine breath, but you will be rewarded by a palace, by gardens, by nice water to the gardens and girls, okay? In a sexually deprived society, this is a powerful statement. And it’s very important here because they have to make a great jump between the normal willingness of Americans, and anybody else in certain situations, to really risk your life, to actually know, you know, to make it certain and habitual as opposed to high-risk. I mean, we’ve had American soldiers in recent episodes, Somalia and so on. When somebody tells a parachute pilot to lower him down in the middle of Mogadishu, in the middle of fighting, two men, two men to go and help a stranded helicopter crew and there are, thousands of people with rifles between them, I mean, hey. So it is a matter of degree, and probably with Mahathir, Mahathir wants to bring them all to Malaysia to condemn suicide bombing, because he wants to make Islam respectable, so to speak. The problem is that it’s textual. It’s textual and it’s based right there, and a bunch of politicians can’t go and refute it. We are trying to live with the pretense that Islam is the same as Christianity, Buddhism, whatever. It’s not, it’s different.
Host: Do you agree with that, Franklin Foer?
Foer: I do. [But], I don’t agree that Islam also doesn’t have an ingrained separation between church and state, so I think it’s possible for politicians to actively lead a reinterpretation of Islam on certain points like this.
Luttwak: But you see it wasn’t an Islamic government in Malaysia. It wasn’t a group of politicians who happen to be Muslims.
Foer: No, right.
Luttwak: It was an Islamic gathering. So if you’re an Islamic gathering, you cannot turn your back on the fundamental principle. You just mentioned it, that there’s no separation of church and state. Hamas and all the Islamic fundamentalists, their anger is first of all against their own governments not against us because the very existence of a secular non-Islamic government is a violation. And we’re talking suicide bombing, okay. Suicide bombing, committing to throw your life away on this earth to get to rewards of paradise is textual and organic and is well-established in the religion.
Foer: But there also have been periods, long periods of Islamic history when suicide bombing wasn’t a predominant tactic, right? So, it’s not … .
Luttwak: Look, first of all we know that in the Koran there are many other statements. There are statements like, for example, it’s evil to initiate aggression. You can fight but you cannot start an aggression. So in fact all these people always have to claim that they didn’t start something. So, that’s the first thing. Secondly, every religion has moments when it’s very active and moments when it’s quiet. Now it’s obviously active and so we have to deal with this problem. We can deal with it with fences, with protections. The Israeli operation may well have prevented a number of suicide bombings, perhaps many. If we’ve had two weeks pass with no suicide bombings, it’s clearly been effective. Even though the “infrastructure” isn’t that solid, you can’t damage and destroy it. It does take a whole team of people. If you capture half of them they cannot do it.
Host: Let me ask Franklin Foer. I’m going to read a quote from Brigadier Sultan Abu-Alynen, who is the chief of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction in Lebanon. And this last week he threatened to launch world-wide terror attacks against the United States, “If one hair on the head of Arafat is harmed, the U-S had better protect its interests around the world. I mean what I am saying. The U-S should protect itself if anything happens to Arafat. We are not like Osama bin Laden, but we have our own style of response. Our reach is long. The world forced us once before to create an organization called Black September. We hope that the world won’t force us to use the tactics of Black September once again.”
There’s been a lot of debate over whether the fighting and terrorism in the Middle East . . . .
Foer: It’s hard to believe the Palestinians are doing so well in the court of public opinion when they put out stuff like that. But I’m sorry, go ahead.
Host: Well, what I was going to ask you is, this notion of, the question of whether the U-S can fight terrorism without addressing terrorism by Palestinians and Palestinian authority-supported terrorism. This would appear to be, you know, taking the threat of terrorism directly to the United States, now.
Foer: I think it’s been clear all along that at some point, even if we don’t believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the cause of September 11th or of terrorism, that if we’re serious about trying to stanch the problem of terrorism, we’re going to have to somehow deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict. And Bush started out dealing with this and he’s a man who is, I think, very methodical and in his mind at a certain point after September 11th could have had a broad, very simple outline for how he viewed the war on terrorism proceeding. And I’m not sure that he intended to deal with the Palestinian issue this soon or that he even viewed it as part of his agenda. But it’s clear, obviously it’s clear now, it’s the first thing he’s got to address.
Host: Edward Luttwak, are there people supporting terrorism by Palestinians in an effort to thwart the U-S war on terrorism?
Luttwak: I think so. I think that since Saddam Hussein knows that he was due to be attacked and that the Arab-Israeli fray delays it, he had the motive. He also had means and the means are the ability to communicate and influence perhaps. But on the quote you make. I remember how Arafat used to storm out of meetings without bothering to reply when somebody accused him of having anything to do with Black September. Now we have a statement from his lieutenant in Lebanon saying, “Well, in the past we were forced to create Black September.” I mean, as I said, he used to routinely refuse to talk. I mean you accused him of having anything to do with Black September terrorism -- oh my God, he never heard of it.
Host: We only have a minute left and I’d like to hit on . . . okay you had another point to make?
Luttwak: Yes, just to answer your question. One of the great virtues of being a great power is that you can be inconsistent. And the United States could be inconsistent in pursuing terrorism everywhere and pretending to treat Arafat, or treating Arafat as if he were not a terrorist. What’s happened is the recent events have forced a choice on the United States. And the United States government knows that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is Arafat’s own organization. It has put it on the list. So I believe that these events are forcing the United States to make a choice it did not want to make.
Host: I’d like to thank my guests for joining me today. Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Franklin Foer of The New Republic Magazine. For On the Line, I’m Eric Felten.
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