Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 42 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The Oslo framework had been flawed, but it brought Israel and the Arab world closer to peace than at any point since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. The gains of Oslo were very significant. Israel and the PLO had overcome decades of mutual hostility to exchange recognition and enter into meaningful negotiations toward a two-state solution. The Palestinian leadership left exile in Tunisia to begin building its own state in the Palestinian territories. Israel broke its isolation within the Middle East, establishing formal ties with a number of Arab countries for the first time, and overcoming an Arab League economic boycott that had been in place since 1948. These were important foundations upon which to build an enduring peace. Unfortunately, the process was inextricably linked to building confidence between the two sides and to generating sufficient economic prosperity that Palestinians and Israelis would be willing to make the difficult compromises necessary for a permanent settlement. Whereas the Oslo years were a period of economic growth for Israel, the Palestinian economy suffered recession and stagnation. The World Bank recorded a significant decline in living standards over the Oslo years and estimated that one in four residents of the West Bank and Gaza had been reduced to poverty by 2000. Unemployment rates reached 22 percent.⁴⁷ The decline in living standards between 1993 and 2000 produced widespread disillusion with the Oslo process. Israel’s decision to expand the settlements was also a key factor in dooming the Oslo accords. As far as the Palestinians were concerned, settlements were illegal in international law and their continued expansion contravened the terms of the Oslo II Accords.⁴⁸ Yet the Oslo years witnessed the greatest expansion of Israeli settlements since 1967. The number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem rose from 247,000 in 1993 to 375,000 in 2000—a 52 percent increase.⁴⁹ Settlements were built in areas Israel wanted to retain either because of their proximity to urban centers within Israel or to crucial aquifers, providing control over scarce water resources in the West Bank. Palestinians accused the Israelis of forsaking land-for-peace for a land grab, while the guarantor of the process, the United States, turned a blind eye. The Palestinians expected nothing less of the Oslo process than an independent state on all of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians knew their position was supported by international law and believed it was reinforced by the demographic reality that the territories were almost exclusively inhabited by Palestinians. The PLO had come to recognize the state of Israel in the 78 percent of Palestine conquered in 1948, and the Palestinians held to their rights over the remaining 22 percent of the land. With so little space on which to build a viable Palestinian state, there was no room for further concessions.

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. ⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹ 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.

Epilogue

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. Though no organization claimed credit for the attacks, the U.S. intelligence services suspected Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida group from the outset. Within days of 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had identified all nineteen hijackers. All were Muslim Arab men—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon—with connections to al-Qaida. The United States responded to the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 by declaring war on a largely unknown enemy. In a televised address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush declared a “war on terror” beginning with al-Qaida and continuing “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” He prepared Americans for a long and unconventional war and promised them that America would prevail. The September 11 attacks and the war on terror placed the United States and the Arab world on a collision course. Many—certainly not all, but many—in the Arab world were glad to see America suffer. To Arab observers, the United States seemed indifferent to Arab suffering—of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, or of Iraqis under a decade of stringent sanctions. In his public pronouncements, Osama bin Ladin played on this Arab anger. “What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years,” Bin Ladin claimed in October 2001. “Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.”¹ Bin Ladin’s statements from his clandestine Afghan mountain stronghold added greatly to Arab-American tensions. There was widespread admiration for the al-Qaida leader across the Arab and Muslim world. People were impressed by al-Qaida’s ingenuity in striking such a devastating blow against the United States on its own soil. Bin Ladin became an overnight cult symbol, the stencil of his face an icon of Islamic resistance to American domination. Such views were incomprehensible to Americans, who reviled Bin Ladin as a figure of unqualified evil. The American people were frightened, confused, and extremely angry after the September 11 attacks. They felt threatened at home and unsafe abroad. They demanded their government respond swiftly and decisively against their enemies. The Bush administration responded with covert action against jihadi terror networks, and by taking America into two wars of choice that confirmed the impression in the Arab world that the war on terror was a war against Islam. America’s war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, supported by a UNSANCTIONED and NATO-supported coalition. Their aims were to topple the rigid Islamist Taliban regime, which had provided support to Bin Ladin and his organization, and to arrest the al-Qaida leadership and destroy their training facilities in Afghanistan. The war was quick and largely successful—the Taliban were driven from the capital, Kabul, by mid-November, and the last Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds fell by mid-December 2001—and involved a minimum of U.S. ground troops. Despite its operational successes, the Afghanistan War was marred by key failures that exacerbated the war on terror. Most immediately, the Americans failed to capture or kill Osama bin Ladin and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Both men escaped to regroup their forces and resume their fight against the United States from neighboring Pakistan. For Bin Ladin’s supporters, survival against the Americans was victory enough. Other al-Qaida members were taken prisoner in the course of the Afghanistan War. These men were designated “enemy combatants” and denied both their rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and due process under the U.S. legal system. They were incarcerated in an extraterritorial U.S. military facility on Cuba known as the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Beginning in October 2001, nearly 800 detainees were sent to Guantanamo, all of them Muslim. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have been released without charge, and they returned home to tell of their experiences. Ranging from humiliation to torture, the mistreatment of Guantanamo detainees provoked international condemnation and outrage in the Arab world. Within Afghanistan, the Americans worked with local leaders to create a new political structure for the war-torn country that had suffered over twenty years of conflict. However, the Americans needed to invest a great deal in economic development and state-building to ensure the stability of President Hamid Karzai’s new government. Instead, by 2002 the Bush administration had diverted its energies and resources to planning the Iraq War, leaving the fragile Afghan state vulnerable to reconquest by the Taliban. As a result, a war that began in October 2001 with a handful of foreign ground forces expanded into a major conflict involving nearly 100,000 Western troops fighting the Taliban in 2009. And victory is far from assured.

Most Arab states were uncomfortable with an expanded U.S. military presence in the region. Their lukewarm support for America’s war on terrorism made the United States doubt a number of its long-time allies in the region—none more so than Saudi Arabia. The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans. Other countries came under new scrutiny as well. Egypt was seen as soft on terror, Iran and Iraq were labelled as part of an “axis of evil,” and Syria rose to the top of the ranks of countries supporting terrorism. The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America’s war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world’s sole superpower. If they took America’s side, they opened their own territory to the threat of terror attacks by local jihadi cells inspired by Bin Ladin’s example. Between May and November 2003, cities in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey were rocked by multiple bomb attacks that left 125 dead and nearly 1,000 wounded. In November 2005, three hotels were ripped apart by coordinated bombs in Amman, Jordan, that left 57 dead and hundreds wounded—nearly all of them Jordanians. The Arab world faced tremendously difficult choices as it managed its relations with the United States. The same pressures that drove America and the Arabs apart drew Israel and America closer together. And the more America took Israel’s side, the greater its tensions with the Arab world. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon persuaded President George W. Bush that the United States and Israel faced a common war on terror. The Second Intifada, which broke out in September 2000, had grown increasingly violent by the time of the 9/11 attacks. Palestinian suicide bombers had inflicted heavy civilian casualties on Israeli society. According to Israeli government figures, Palestinian groups carried out thirty-five suicide bomb attacks in 2001, causing 85 deaths. The death toll more than doubled the following year, with fifty-five suicide attacks killing 220 Israelis in 2002.² The worst incident came in March 2002 when Hamas suicide bombers killed 30 and wounded 140 Israelis celebrating Passover in a hotel in Netanya. The use of suicide bombings by Islamist groups to target innocent civilians was enough to convince President Bush that Israel and the United States were fighting against the same enemy. The United States then turned a blind eye to Israeli actions against both its Islamist foes—Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon—and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Israel took full advantage of American complacency to unleash disproportionate attacks against Palestinian government and society that heightened tensions in the Arab world enormously. In June 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the reoccupation of the West Bank. Though he justified the measure in terms of assuring Israel’s security from terror attacks, Sharon’s move was clearly intended to isolate Yasser Arafat and weaken the Palestinian Authority. As Israeli forces seized Palestinian cities that had been under self-rule—Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya—they stepped up attacks against the Palestinian resistance. Once they were back in control of key Palestinian cities, the Israelis tried to eliminate the leadership of Palestinian parties and militias by targeted assassination. Their attempts to assassinate militant leaders in densely inhabited areas normally led to extensive civilian casualties. In July 2002 the Israelis leveled an entire apartment building with a 2,000-pound bomb in their bid to assassinate Hamas commander Salah Shahada. They killed Shahada, along with eighteen other residents, including a number of children. Such use of heavy weaponry in urban areas inflicted heavy casualties on the Palestinian people. From the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 until the end of 2001, some 750 Palestinians were killed; in 2002, the number of Palestinians killed exceeded 1,000. On top of the use of lethal force, Israel imposed a number of collective punishments borrowed from British mandate–era Emergency Regulations. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada at the end of 2000, the Israelis have arrested thousands of Palestinians. Some have been tried and sentenced to long prison terms, others have been expelled. Yet others have been held under administrative detention for months on end, without charges or even access to the evidence against them, leaving them no means to challenge their detention or prove their innocence. As a further deterrent, in October 2001 the Israelis began to demolish the homes of Palestinians suspected of involvement in attacks against Israel. The policy of house demolitions was only discontinued in February 2005, when the Israeli chief of staff acknowledged that the policy had no deterrent effect. Over this period, the Israeli military destroyed 664 Palestinian houses, leaving 4,200 people homeless, according to Israeli human rights group, B?Tselem. As the Israeli military struggled to contain the Second Intifada, the Sharon government exacerbated tensions with the Palestinians through measures designed to seize more territory in the West Bank. Israeli settlements expanded in the Occupied Territories. And in June 2002 the Israeli government began construction of a 720-kilometer (450-mile) wall, ostensibly to insulate Israel from Palestinian terror attacks. The Separation Barrier (dubbed the Apartheid Wall by Palestinians) cuts a path deep into the West Bank and represents a de facto annexation of nearly 9 percent of the Palestinian territory in the West Bank, adversely affecting the lives and livelihoods of nearly 500,000 Palestinians.³ Israel’s repression of the Second Intifada proved a clear liability to America’s war on terror. The images of Palestinian suffering, broadcast live via Arab satellite television, provoked fury across the Middle East. Israeli actions, and U.S. inaction, proved valuable recruiting devices for al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. The Bush administration was forced to engage in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking to try to diffuse regional tensions. President Bush, recognizing the adverse effect Israeli policies had on America’s attempts to win Arab “hearts and minds” in the war on terror, decided to address the Palestine issue directly. In a major White House address delivered on June 24, 2002, Bush held out a vision of a Palestinian state “living side by side in peace and security” with Israel—the first time an acting U.S. president had openly advocated Palestinian statehood. However, the Bush vision required the Palestinians to “elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror”—a clear swipe at the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat. There was much in Bush’s speech to assuage Arab concerns. President Bush called on the Israelis to withdraw their troops from the West Bank and to return to the positions they held prior to the outbreak of the Second Intifada on September 28, 2000. He also called for an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. These were new, substantive steps toward recognizing Palestinian suffering under occupation and towards acknowledging legitimate aspirations to independent statehood. Even so, Bush’s speech did not receive a favorable reception in the Arab world. His many references to combating terror made clear to Arab viewers that Bush was more concerned with prosecuting his war on terror than achieving a just and durable solution to the Palestinian problem. The Arabs doubted Bush’s sincerity—and for good reason. By the summer of 2002, his administration was already planning for war against Iraq.

The United States presented its case for war against Iraq in terms of the global war on terror. The Bush administration alleged that Saddam Hussein’s government had amassed a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, and precursors for a nuclear weapon. British prime minister Tony Blair echoed Bush’s concerns and aligned the United Kingdom with America’s stance on Iraq. The White House also suggested that Saddam Hussein’s government had connections to Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida organization. The Bush administration invoked the war on terror and threatened a preemptive war to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the most dangerous terrorists. The Arab world had grave reservations about President Bush’s accusations. Arab governments believed—erroneously—that Saddam Hussein probably did hold an arsenal of chemical and biological agents. After all, he had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Even the UN’s top weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, believed Iraq held such weapons. However, the Arab states knew that Iraq had played no role in the September 11 attacks and strongly doubted any connection between the Islamist al-Qaida movement and the secular nationalist Iraqi Ba’th party. Saddam Hussein headed precisely the type of government that Osama bin Ladin sought to overturn. The Arab world simply did not accept what the Bush administration was saying, and it suspected the United States of ulterior motives—of coveting Iraq’s oil, and of seeking to extend its domination over the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003, was widely condemned internationally and across the Arab world. The United States, seconded by Great Britain, had invaded an Arab state without provocation or UN sanction. Saddam Hussein remained defiant in the face of superior Western forces, and, as it had during the Gulf War in 1991, his stance generated widespread Arab public support, which Arab governments disregarded at their peril. All twenty-two members of the Arab League except Kuwait supported a resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of the UN Charter and demanding a complete withdrawal of all U.S. and British troops from Iraqi soil on March 23. Yet no one seriously expected the Bush administration to pay heed to the concerns of the Arab world. Though the Iraqis put up stiff resistance, they were completely overpowered by superior British and American forces who enjoyed unchallenged control of the skies over Iraq. On April 9, the Americans secured Baghdad, signalling the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government within three weeks of the start of hostilities. The Iraqi people had mixed feelings, celebrating the overthrow of a much-hated dictator while resenting the Americans and British for invading their country. Celebrations gave way to chaos, as crowds of vandals attacked government buildings and presidential palaces to vent their anger and plunder whatever they could lay their hands on. The looters did not confine themselves to hated government offices but attacked cherished institutions of national heritage as well. Iraq?s national museum was stripped of its priceless archaeological treasures, and both the national library and the state?s archives were set on fire while the occupation forces stood by and watched. Arab journalists noticed that the only public building secured by the Americans was the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum, feeding conspiracy theories that the whole invasion had been motivated by American interests in Iraqi oil. Statements by American officials did little to assuage these concerns. When asked by journalists why the American authorities did not do more to stop the looting, the U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissively quipped, ?Stuff happens.? The overthrow of the Iraqi government left the United States in control of the country. The Bush administration established a governing body called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Two early decisions by the CPA transformed the chaos of postwar Iraq into an armed insurgency against American rule. In May 2003, the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer, passed two decrees. The first outlawed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Ba‘th party, barring former Ba’th members from public office. Bremer then passed a second order disbanding the 500,000-member Iraqi military and intelligence services. The American authorities wanted to purge Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s malign influence, much as the Allied occupation authorities had done to Nazi Germany after the Second World War. They hoped by these measures to enjoy a free hand to build up a new, democratic Iraqi state that would respect human rights. In fact, what Bremer had done was to make a number of well-armed men unemployed, and stripped Iraq’s political elites of any interest in cooperating with America’s new democratic Iraq. What followed was an insurgency against the American occupation and a civil war between Iraqi communities. Iraq quickly became a recruiting ground for anti-American and anti-Western activities. As the insurgency began to take hold, the casualty figures in Iraq began to mount. New organizations emerged, such as al-Qaida in Iraq, an Iraqi terror group with only nominal ties to Osama bin Ladin’s organization, which deployed suicide bombers against foreign and domestic targets. They drove the United Nations to close their offices in Iraq after targeted bombings in August and September 2003 killed the senior UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and over twenty of his staff. Westerners were taken hostage, and many were brutally murdered. Military patrols became the target of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Insurgents killed an average of 60 U.S. service men per month in the six years following the 2003 invasion. By 2009, more than 4,300 Americans and 170 Britons had been killed and over 31,000 foreign soldiers wounded by the insurgents. The full horror of the Iraqi insurgency is reflected in the suffering of the Iraqi people themselves. Though the casualty figures for Iraqi civilians since the 2003 invasion are widely disputed, the Iraqi government estimates that between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians have been killed. Suicide bombers have wreaked daily carnage in the markets and mosques of Iraq?s cities. Graphic images of Iraqi death and suffering have been broadcast across the Arab world by satellite TV. The true cost of the war on terror, it seemed, was borne by the Arab people. And in the end, what was the U.S. invasion of Iraq all about? No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. No connection was ever established between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida or the September 11 attacks. Although the United States had promised to replace Saddam Hussein’s tyranny with a new regime of democracy and human rights, graphic photographs of prisoner abuse demonstrated that the Americans were using torture and humiliation reminiscent of Ba’th practices in Abu Ghurayb Jail. The United States seemed to be operating by double standards that only alienated Arab public opinion further.