Pierre's Middle East Issues Blog

Gabriel, like me, is a Lebanese Christian who, like me, moved to the United States and, unlike me, made a career out vilifying Muslims. She runs the so-called American Congress for Truth, an attempt to capitalize on hate through hate.

Because she hates.

Gabriel makes no distinction: In her view, “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” That statement not only discredits her as an alleged journalist or analyst. It puts her in league with garden-variety bigots and backwoods survivalists. A New York Times Magazine interview shrewdly headlined her the “Crusader.”

She makes ridiculous statements, claiming that Muslims are running “jihad camps” in the United States, that “the moderate Muslims at this point are truly irrelevant,” and that, even though she receives death threats, she plasters a glamour shot of herself on her book cover because “in Lebanon, we were raised to be glamorous, feminine and sensual.” Fine answer, idiotic follow-up: “It’s the only good thing we inherited from the French.” My Jesuit education, for one, begs to differ. But Gabriel is not about education. She’s about glamorous demagoguery, for whixch there’s quite a market in the United States. Anyway, Gabriel is about to publish a second book, the Muslim-peril-titled They Must Be Stopped.

They?

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A strange way to enjoy a laugh, but why not? Immediately before they set off to attend Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's funeral, ex-presidents Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford gathered in the White House Blue Room with then-President Ronald Reagan for a toast, captured in this White House photograph that I unearthed at the National Archives. A smaller version of the photograph appears on the White House Web cite, though it only mentions the four "as they share a laugh in the Blue Room October 8, 1981." No mention of poor Sadat.

Sadat had been assassinated two days earlier. Reagan did not go to the funeral, citing security concerns. Neither did George Bush, his vice president (Herbert Walker, not W, who was still inebriated on oil and booze at the time), leaving it to then Secretary of State Alexander Haig to be the titular head of the American delegation, which included Henry Kissinger -- sans Sarah Palin -- and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

No doubt Haig at one point spoke, to any ears that would listen, his famous five words: "I'm in charge here."

You wouldn't know it from reading the press or watching the news, but seven years ago today, at 1 p.m. Eastern time to be precise, President Bush, who was somewhat more relevant then than he's been lately, spoke to the nation from the White House Treaty Room ("a place where American Presidents have worked for peace") to announce the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The military operation was initially termed "Operation Infinite Justice," though like other administration blunders that set an unhelpful tone of West versus East (such as Bush's reference, six days after the attacks, to coming retaliations as "this crusade") the image crafters had to change the name to "Operation Enduring Freedom" once Muslim groups in the United States reminded the administration that only God provides "infinite justice."

"Given the nature and reach of our enemies," Bush said in one of his more eloquent moments, "we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose."

Seven years on, the failures seem to outnumber the successes by a margin of Taliban to one. Let's review:

• Osama bin Laden is still at large. He's probably in Pakistan's Waziristan.
• Al-Qaeda has reconstituted, is stronger than before 9/11 and pulled off more attacks in 2007, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, than in any year before.
• The Taliban are back in Afghanistan. While they're not stronger than they were before, they're setting the Afghan's war agenda enough that Afghan President hamid Karzai is looking to negotiate with them.
• The Taliban are stronger than ever in Pakistan, where they control the Tribal Areas.
• NATO and American forces have been unable to maintain their control of Afghanistan militarily while losing the hearts and mind of the population by recklessly bombing civilians.
• Pakistan, a nuclear power, is weaker and more unstable than it was before 2001, when it was close to a failing state. Its president is the eminently corrupt and ineffectual Asif Ali Zardari. Its military is increasingly divided between Islamist sympathizers and government supporters. Its outlying provinces are beyond its control.
• John McCain and Barack Obama are largely ignoring the deterioration on virtually every front in Afghanistan in Pakistan.
• Then there's Iraq, which continues to disproportionately devour American resources, manpower, attention and misplaced hopes.

Iraq is daily proof of how much we wavered.

The inattention the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are daily reminders of how much we've tired of both.

Afghanistan is daily proof of how much we've faltered.

And Osama, who's likely more worried about when he can get his next dialysis treatment than whether he's going to face American capture, is daily, painful and embarrassing proof of how much we have failed.

Then again, I hesitate to say we. This hasn't been our failure, though we're paying its price, and will continue to do so long after Jan. 20, when he has--not a moment, not a failure too soon--left the scene he did so well to ravage.

Twenty-seven years ago today, Egypt's Anwar Sadat was celebrating Egypt's Armed Forces Day, a commemoration of the Egyptian Third Army's surprise attack on Israel in what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Military parade, pageantry, Mirage jet fighters above. He never made it through the day. A posse of soldiers jumped out of a truck in the military parade, one soldier threw a grenade at Sadat's stand, others started firing. The bloodbath left Sadat and 10 others dead, 38 wounded.

He was the first Arab leader truly to pay more than lip service to peace with Israel, the first Arab leader to sign an outright peace treaty with Israel (unlike Israel's arm-length friends in Morocco, Mauritania or Pakistan), the only one to be inspiring beyond his borders for more than self-destructive nationalistic myths (like his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser).

I say this without illusions. Sadat was beloved in the West for being so at odds with the Middle East's tendency to produce leaders more inclined to self-pity, thuggery or theocratic barbarism, but Sadat was still a dictator and a bit of a megalomaniac. Whatever: his lesser qualities, which pale compared to those of his peers, don;t diminish his accomplishments. The great Egyoptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz summed him up, I think, perfectly. Sadat, he said,

was a man who did great things, but who also made big mistakes…. Nasser considered himself a god, but Sadat thought he was a Pharaoh…. He moved us back toward democracy but far from real democracy. It was controlled and disciplined, and it retained authoritarian traces. But it was a change of direction which, with some setbacks, has continued. Sadat’s great contribution was to turn the country to constructive goals and values. The most important was to bring Egypt peace.

Read More About Sadat and Egypt:

• Profile: Anwar Sadat
• The Assassination of Anwar Sadat
• Ronald Reagan on Sadat's Assassination
• What Was the Yom Kippur War?
• Egypt: Country Profile
• When Sadat Negotiated the First Disengagement Treaty With Israel
• State of Stand-Up: Egyptian Jokes and Humor
• This Day in Middle Eastern History

In 1919 Louis Brandeis, the great Supreme Court justice, took a trip to Egypt and Palestine with his daughter. He was moved, in jerusalem, to write his wife Alice: "It's a wonderful country, a wonderful city. [...] It is a miniature California, but a California endowed with all the interest which the history of man can contribute and the deepest emotions which can stir a people. The ages-long longing, the love is all explicable now. [...] The problems are serious and numerous. The way is long, the path difficult and uncertain; but the struggle is worthwhile. It is indeed a Holy Land."

If only he knew.

Jerusalem is Yerushalayim in Hebrew, which means "City of Peace," Al Quds in Arabic, which means "The Holy." It has been anything but for a place so sacred to the world's three largest religions.

Islam's Dome of the Rock, also known as the Mosque of Omar (Omar was the second caliph to succeed the Prophet Muhammad, though he didn't build the mosque), is there. So is Al Aksa Mosque, from where Muhammad is supposed to have taken his Black Elk-like mystical night flight, though the mosque was built almost two centuries after Mohammed's death. Christianity's Church of the Holy Sepulcher (to some Christians the site of Christ's tomb, to other Christians not) is there. And of course the Western Wall of Judaism's temple, which was never part of the temple, is there. In other words, even the holiest (or near-holiest) sites of the great religions seem to be arguing with themselves about the authenticity of their connection to willed beliefs, themselves tentacled exclusively by faith to religion's trellises beyond it all.

And to think that anyone at this late date (I'm speaking millenniums here, not years), Palestinian or Israeli, would want to layer Jerusalem's congenital heartbreaks in yet another prisonhouse, this one least justifiable of all because it's a rational choice, therefore an avoidable one--the prisonhouse of political demarcation, which by definition defines inclusion as much as it defines exclusion.

For all its strategic religious value Jerusalem was never the capital of any state. In the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 Jordan took control of East Jerusalem, threw out all Jews and demolished most of the synagogues there. Israel retaliated, first by occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, then by annexing it and declaring the whole city Israel's capital in 1980, an act the United Nations condemned and the United States didn't recognize.

But Jerusalem is never too far from, American politics. In 1995, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a law that required the U.S. government to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by 1999, pending completion of the "final-status" agreement between Israel and Palestinians that was supposed to have been achieved in line with the Oslo accords of 1993. Oslo collapsed, "final status" is as un-final as ever, the embassy is still in Tel Aviv, as are the embassies of all nations with diplomatic ties with Israel.

Now John McCain has vowed to move the embassy to Jerusalem regardless-should he be elected president, that is. He needs that South Florida vote (where Florida's liberal and independent Jewish vote is concentrated), and we now know he'll say anything, and occasionally do anything, to get his way. But does he realize what an inflammatory act that would be? Ariel Sharon triggered the second Palestinian Intifadah on Sept. 28, 2000 by merely (well, let's say provocatively) visiting, with a phalanx of armed men, Jerusalem's Temple Mount complex, where the Dome and the al-Aqsa Mosque are located, to declare that Israel would control the place from here to (apologies to James Jones) eternity. Then as now the state of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations was in intensive care. Sharon's gambit flat-lined it and the lives of many Israelis and many, many more Palestinians.

Imagine what McCain would inflame by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. Why the provocation?

I'm reminded of a New York Times editorial on Aug. 3, 1980, following Israel's passage of its "basic law" declaring Jerusalem the capital: "Thus did Israeli moderates, like so many Arab moderates, mortgage themselves to the frantic fringes that prefer war, terror and repression to conciliation, compromise and peace. And for what? A new law that in no way alters the already proclaimed annexation of East Jerusalem or Israel's development of the city in patterns that make a future division almost inconceivable. A final peace may one day provide for a symbolic sharing of sovereignties in Jerusalem, and define rights of access to the holy shrines of three religions. But that is for the end of the peace process, when passions have been cooled by the vision of a new future. To play upon those passions now is reckless, as most Israelis surely know."

Read More About Jerusalem:

• Jerusalem As the Capital of Israel: Legal Status or Illegal Occupation?
• Should the American Embassy Be in Jerusalem?
• United Nations Resolution 478 (1980) on the Status of Jerusalem
• United Nations Resolution 476 (1980) on Israel's Occupation of East Jerusalem
• Israel: Country Profile
• What Is the Knesset?

These days, foreign policy doesn’t mean much other than Middle East policy. (I’d have loved to hear what Sarah Palin had to say about relations with China, or the Gulf Cooperation Council, or what she things about the new Union for the Mediterranean, but as they say: they ran out of time.)

And I’m curious to know what you think: would a McCain-Palin presidency be that different from an Obama-Biden policy when it comes to the Middle East? Sure, the two camps say they see Iraq’s future differently,. But would Obama really pull out all troops within 16 months? Both camps see Afghanistan the same way: more troops, more war. Both camps see Israel the same way: Whatever Israel wants (while barely acknowledging the existence of Palestinians). Both camps are keeping the option of bombing Iran on the table, even if the Obama camp is willing to preface its bombing with a little diplomacy (isn’t that what Bush did with Iraq?) while McCain remains a bomb-first, talk never sort of guy.

So a few details aside, what, exactly, would differentiate one administration from the other? Bring your insights and opinions to the forum and let me know.

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin weren't as oblivious in their vice-presidential bout Thursday. Both the heavyweight and the bantamweight willingly took on the standard-issue Middle East concerns (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan), but when it came to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the way they went about discussing it was even more disturbing than McCain and Obama ignoring the issue altogether.

Moderator Gwen Ifill framed the question pointedly: "What has this administration done right or wrong -- this is the great, lingering, unresolved issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- what have they done? And is a two-state solution the solution?" The question is multi-layered. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is "the great, lingering, unresolved issue." The Bush administration has been the least engaged of any administration since Lyndon Johnson. Ifill even soft-balled her delivery by giving that opening to a "two-state solution," which was really unnecessary. She should have left the two candidates to formulate an answer without one being formulated for them.

Still, while both Biden and Palin embraced the two-state solution bit, they also did something else that the entire Middle East picked up on, even if Middle America couldn't care less: neither mentioned the word "Palestinian," let alone "Palestine." Not once. They could have been talking about a two-state solution between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Robert Fisk put it bluntly:

Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. "Palestine" and "Palestinians" – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase "Israeli occupation" was mercifully left unused. Neither the words "Jewish colony" nor "Jewish settlement" – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, "Jewish neighbourhood" – got a look-in. Nope. Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to "defence", hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people.

It’s a little presumptuous to suggest that all eyes tonight will be on the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Numerically speaking most eyes won’t be. Politically speaking few eyes that still need their electoral vision adjusted will be. The show for most will be mostly entertainment, a sort of vigil to see who among these two eminently foot-in-mouth specialists will crash first, or most.

I’m still thinking about the debate that matters. The one between Barack Obama and John McCain.

If you’re a Palestinian or any other kind of Arab, if you’re an Israeli, an Afghan, a Pakistani, a north or east African, even a Turk or an Iranian — or, for that matter, if you’re American concerned about what happens to those people and to America’s interests in those regions — you’d have been either astounded or embarrassed by the Sept. 26 debate between the two candidates.

Ostensibly about foreign policy, the two men and their questioner, the usually savvier Jim Lehrer, spent more than 90 minutes blind-spotting over the hardest questions and terrains of the Middle East. If the perspective on the world is as narrow and, one has to assume from their omissions, as ignorant as the two men projected, neither the Middle East nor the United States stand to make much progress toward peace or understanding over the next four years.

Read my full analysis, "How John McCain and Barack Obama Ignored the Middle East."

The United States, by double-proxy, is looking to negotiate with the Taliban. The former Afghan regime that hosted al-Qaeda, that regressed Afghanistan to a permanent state of terror and repression, that treated animals better than women and demolished art in the name of spiritual purity, is now being sought after by the United States for negotiations.

To be sure, the Bush administration isn't out there, openly advocating this. It's having its man and puppet in Kabul, the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, seek the intercession of Saudi Arabia, which could then seek to persuade the Taliban to go to the negotiating table. But have no illusions. Karzai since 2001 has been an instrument of American policy. He's smart, a Pashtun (like the Taliban) and a tribal elder long connected to southern Afghanistan (unlike the Taliban). He's also terribly weak--a lousy politician who confuses compromise with eternal accommodation, whether those being accommodated are war lords, drug lords or overlords (the United States and NATO).

"But," reports The Times, "But Mr. Karzai said his appeals had failed to yield any talks, and his tone suggested a degree of frustration with the Saudi government for not having acted more decisively. Nor was there any indication that senior Taliban leaders were ready for talks on any grounds that the Karzai government and its Western backers would be likely to accept."

Amazingly, the story made less than a ripple in the America media. Here we are, seeking negotiations with the regime Mr. Bush considers a synonym of al-Qaeda, and The Times puts the story somewhere on an inside page while the rest of the press ignores it in favor of, say, Sarah Palin's admittedly absorbing foreign policy train wrecks. I wonder what she thinks about negotiating with the Taliban. Or do they have a right to privacy?

Mahound sits on the edge of the well and grins. “I’ve been offered a deal.” By Abu Simbel?Khalid shouts. Unthinkable. Refuse. Faithful Bilal admonishes him: Do not lecture the Messenger. Of course, he has refused. Salman the Persian asks: What sort of deal. Mahound smiles again. “Al least one of you wants to know.” […]

“If our great God could find it in his heart to concede—he used that word, concede—that three, only three of the three hundred and sixty idols in the house are worthy of worship…”

"There is no god but God!” Bilal shouts. And his fellows join in: “Ya Allah!” Mahound looks angry. “Will the faithful hear the Messenger?” They fall silent, scuffing their feet in the dust.

“He asks for Allah’s approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return, he gives his guarantee that we will be tolerated, even officially recognized; as a mark of which I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That’s the offer.”

See Also:

• The Satanic Verses at 20: An Appraisal
• The Rushdie Affair: A Timeline
• What's a Fatwa?
• Controversial Excerpts from The Satanic Verses
• The Muhammad Cartoons Controversy
• Muhammad Cartoons, al-Qaeda and Al-Jazeera
• Teddy Muhammad