Arabs (100 page)

 

The expansion of settlements contributed significantly to public anger at a process Palestinians believed failed to deliver statehood, security of property, or prosperity. That anger boiled over in a series of violent demonstrations that broke out in September 2000 and developed into a new popular uprising. Whereas the First Intifada (1987–1993) had been marked by civil disobedience and nonviolence, the second uprising was very violent indeed.

The outbreak of the Second Intifada followed a visit by Ariel Sharon, who had risen to lead the right-wing Likud Party, to East Jerusalem on September 28, 2000. At the Camp David summit, Prime Minister Ehud Barak had raised the possibility of relinquishing East Jerusalem to Palestinian control and for Jerusalem to serve as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. The proposal was enormously controversial in Israel, prompting some of the members of Barak’s coalition to withdraw from the government in protest, which in turn required a new election.

For Sharon, Jerusalem was a vote winner. He chose to visit the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem to reinforce his party’s claim to preserve Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and to launch his campaign to unseat Barak as prime minister. The Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), was the site of Judaism’s Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and, since the seventh century, home to the Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site after Mecca and Medina. Because of its significance to both Judaism and Islam, the Temple Mount is politically charged territory.

Sharon arrived in Arab East Jerusalem on September 28, 2000, with an escort of 1,500 armed police and toured the Haram al-Sharif. In his comments to the press pack that followed the Likud leader, Sharon asserted his commitment to preserve Israeli rule over all of Jerusalem. A group of Palestinian dignitaries, on hand to protest Sharon’s presence, were dispersed by Sharon’s security detachment. Television cameras captured Israeli police rough-handling the Aqsa Mosque’s highest-ranking Muslim cleric. “As chance would have it, his turban, a symbol of his exalted spiritual
status, got knocked off his head and tumbled into the dust,” Sari Nusseibeh recalled. “Viewers saw the highest Muslim cleric of this highly charged Muslim site standing bareheaded.” This insult to a respected Muslim official in Islam’s third holiest site was enough to provoke a massive turnout the next day for Friday prayers in the Haram. “Armed and nervous [Israeli] border police marched into the Old City by the hundreds, while hundreds of thousands of Muslims poured through the gates from neighborhoods and villages.”

Prayers were conducted without an incident, but as the angry crowd withdrew from the mosque a violent demonstration erupted. Teenagers threw stones from the Haram complex onto Israeli soldiers posted to the Western Wall below. The Israeli border police stormed the Haram complex while soldiers opened fire on the protesters. Within minutes, eight rioters were shot dead and dozens fell wounded. “The ‘Al-Aqsa intifada’ had begun,” Sari Nusseibeh recorded.
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The deterioration in public order played to Sharon’s advantage, given his reputation for being tough on security, and he swept to power in February 2001. Israel’s bellicose new prime minister was more interested in land than peace, and his election only exacerbated volatility between Israelis and Palestinians. At the start of a new millennium, the Middle East was further from peace than ever.

As the twentieth century came to a close, the Arab world witnessed a number of important transitions. Three leaders who had been pillars of Arab politics for decades died and were succeeded by their sons. The Middle East had been static under a group of long-term rulers. The successions brought a new generation to power, raising hopes for reforms and change. Yet the fact that both monarchies and republics tended to single-family rule weighed against substantial changes.

On February 7, 1999, King Hussein of Jordan died after a prolonged battle with cancer. With nearly forty-seven years on the throne, he was the longest-serving Arab ruler of his generation. Celebrated at home and abroad as a peacemaker, Hussein caused turmoil in his family and country with a last-minute change in his choice of successor. Hussein’s brother Hassan had served as crown prince since 1965. With no warning, Hussein relieved Hassan of his duties and named his eldest son, Abdullah, as his heir and successor less than two weeks before his death. Not only was Abdullah relatively young—he had just turned thirty-seven—but he had spent his entire career in the military, with little preparation to rule. Worse yet was King Hussein’s handling of the change in succession. The dying monarch published a long and angry letter to Prince Hassan in the Jordanian press that was nothing less than a character assassination of his younger brother. Many close to the king explained
the letter as a cruel but necessary measure to ensure that Hassan could never mount a challenge to the change in succession. The Jordanians experienced two seismic shocks of the change in succession and the death of their long-ruling monarch within two weeks. Many feared for the future of their precarious country, left in young and inexperienced hands.

Five months later, on July 23, 1999, King Hassan II of Morocco died, ending thirty-eight years on the throne. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI, who was only thirty-six and, like King Abdullah II of Jordan, represented a new generation of Arab leaders. He had trained in politics and law and had spent time in Brussels to familiarize himself with the institutions of the European Union, and his father had been expanding his official duties in the years before his succession. Even so, he remained an unknown quantity to most people at home and abroad, and all were left to wonder how the new king would strike the balance between continuation of his father’s policies and making his own mark on the kingdom.

Dynastic succession was not confined to the Arab monarchies. On June 10, 2000, Syria’s President Hafiz al-Asad died after nearly thirty years in power. The elder Asad had been grooming his son Basil to succeed him until Basil’s untimely death in a car accident in 1994. The grieving president summoned his younger son, Bashar, interrupting Bashar’s medical studies in ophthalmology in London, to prepare him for the succession. Bashar al-Asad entered the military academy in Syria and saw his official duties expanded in the last six years of his father’s life. Bashar assumed office at age thirty-four on the promise of reform. Though many in Syria expected the new president to face serious challenges from within the political establishment, and from the many enemies his father had created in three decades of authoritarian rule, the succession from the strong man of Damascus to his novice son passed without incident.

Other aging leaders around the Arab world were grooming their sons for succession. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had originally promoted his son Uday as heir apparent. Uday headed a television station and a newspaper in Iraq. Notorious for his homicidal cruelty, Uday Hussein was critically wounded in an assassination attempt in 1996 that left a bullet lodged in his spine. As the limits of Uday’s recovery became apparent, Saddam Hussein began to promote his second son, Qusay, for the leadership role. The leader of Libya, Muammar al-Qadhafi, was rumored to be preparing his sons to inherit power. And in Egypt, Husni Mubarak was promoting his son Gamal and refusing to name a vice president, leading many to assume Gamal would in time assume the presidency.

The most significant succession of 2000, however, took place in the United States. Pundits in the Arab world made jokes at America’s expense as the U.S. Supreme Court awarded an Electoral College victory to George W. Bush, son of former president George H. W. Bush. The fact that the popular vote had slightly favored Bush’s
Democratic opponent Al Gore—and that the outcome hinged on faulty ballots and contested recounts in the state of Florida, where Bush’s brother was governor—suggested the Americans were no less dynastic than the Arabs.

In fact, most Arab observers celebrated the victory of George W. Bush in 2000. They saw the Bush family as Texas oil men with good ties to the Arab world. The fact that Al Gore had chosen Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his vice presidential running mate, the first Jewish candidate on a major U.S. political party presidential ticket, led many in the Arab world to assume that the Democrats would be yet more pro-Israel than the Republicans. And they placed their trust in Bush.

The new President Bush took little interest in the Middle East. He was not a foreign affairs president, and his priorities lay elsewhere. One week before his inauguration, Bush had a meeting with the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet. As part of his intelligence briefing, Tenet presented the president-elect with the three top threats facing the United States: weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Osama bin Ladin, and the emergence of China as a military and economic power.
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Though a number of Arab states were believed to have dangerous weapons programs, including Libya and Syria, the international community was most concerned with Iraq’s WMD. The government of Iraq had been under sustained pressure by the United Nations and the international community to surrender its weapons of mass destruction since the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 687 in April 1991. The resolution called for the destruction of all chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, as well as all ballistic missiles capable of reaching beyond 150 kilometers (93 miles). Saddam Hussein, suspecting the Americans of using the weapons inspection regime as a means to subvert his government, obstructed the work of UN weapons inspectors, who withdrew from Iraq in 1998.

The Clinton administration was determined to topple the government of Saddam Hussein. They upheld stringent trade sanctions on Iraq that had been in place since the invasion of Kuwait, and had caused a humanitarian crisis without weakening Hussein’s grip on government. They maintained strict control over Iraqi airspace by regular British and American air patrols over northern and southern Iraq. In 1998, the Clinton administration introduced legislation—the Iraq Liberation Act—that committed U.S. government funds to support regime change in Iraq. And in December, 1998, after UN weapons inspectors had left Iraq, President Clinton authorized a four-day bombing campaign to “degrade” Iraq’s capacity to produce and use weapons of mass destruction.

George W. Bush preserved Clinton’s policies to contain Iraq and the WMD threat it was believed to pose to the United States.

The American intelligence community was far more concerned about the deepening conflict with Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida network than any threat from Iraq.
Bin Ladin had invested a great deal of time and energy in al-Qaida’s stated goals of driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world more broadly. In August 1998 the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were targeted by simultaneous suicide bombings that left over 220 dead and hundreds more wounded—nearly all of them local citizens (only twelve of the fatalities were American citizens). For his role in the embassy bombings, Bin Ladin was placed on the FBI list of ten most wanted criminals. In October 2000, a suicide bomb attack on the USS
Cole
in the Yemeni port of Aden left seventeen American sailors dead and thirty-nine wounded.

Al-Qaida’s ability to strike at vulnerable points in America’s armor had raised real concerns in White House circles. CIA Director Tenet warned Bush in January 2001 that Bin Ladin and his network posed a “tremendous threat” to the U.S. that was “immediate.” However, unlike Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bin Ladin was a mobile and elusive threat. It was not clear what policy measures the president might authorize to address the Bin Ladin threat.

Bush entered the Oval Office convinced that the threat of Iraqi WMD had been contained, and seems not to have been particularly concerned by the terror threat posed by Bin Ladin and his network. In his first nine months in office Bush made China his top priority.

Extraordinary events on September 11, 2001, would change Bush’s priorities, opening a period of the greatest American engagement with the Middle East in its modern history. It would also prove the moment of greatest tension in modern Arab history.

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, terrorist teams commandeered four jetliners departing from airports in Boston; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Within forty minutes, they flew two aircraft into the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center, and a third aircraft into the Pentagon in precisely planned suicide attacks. A fourth jet, which is believed to have been intended for the U.S. Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. In all, besides the nineteen hijackers, some 2,974 people were killed in the four attacks: 2,603 in the World Trade Center, 125 in the Pentagon, and all 246 passengers on the four planes.

The terrorists gave no warning and made no demands. They carried out their attack to inflict maximum damage on the United States and to set change in motion. We can only surmise from subsequent statements by al-Qaida the kinds of changes the suicide hijackers had in mind: to drive America from the Muslim world, to destabilize pro-Western regimes in the Muslim world, to overturn those regimes and replace them with Islamic states.