The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 0 Barack Obama responded with rhetorical “change we” —or at least five Norwegians — “can believe in.” In his speech in Cairo last June, he clearly signaled that he recognizes the imperative of solving the Israel- Palestine conflict and repairing American relations with Arabs and Muslims if the U.S. is to enjoy peace abroad and tranquility at home. Still, in theMiddle East and else- where the Obama administration has made only minimal changes to longstanding American policies that are conspicuous fail- ures. The short-term stakes in getting these policies right are large. The long-term stakes are vastly larger. A Large National Blind Spot When U.S. interrogators asked Khalid Sheikh Mo- hammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 atrocities, why al-Qaida had done the terrible things it did that day, he gave a straightforward answer. He said that the purpose was to focus “the American people ... on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further ex- ploitation of the Arab Muslim people.” In Osama bin Laden’s annual “address to the American people” on Sept. 11, 2009, he reiterated: “We have demonstrated and stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of our disagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine.” There is nothing at all ambiguous or unclear about these explanations of 9/11 by its planners and perpetrators. Few abroad dispute their essential validity. Yet here in America, they remain completely unreported outside the Internet. Any public reference to U.S. backing for Israel as a griev- ance that motivated the atrocities in New York and Wash- ington eight years ago is vigorously disputed and suppressed as politically incorrect. This has created a large national blind spot to the seriousness of Arab Muslim re- action to a core American policy. It has also left our country unable to analyze the very real threat to our domestic tranquility that intermit- tent terrorist attacks represent. By leaving such incidents unexplained, and disconnecting them from the trends and events in the Middle East that helped inspire them, we have imposed a mental block on ourselves that has distorted our threat perceptions and greatly ham- pered the development of a realistic national security strategy. So it is necessary to begin by recapitulating the obvious. The 9/11 assault on the United States was carried out by Muslim extremists, motivated in large measure by their re- sentment of U.S. support for Israel and its actions. The need to avenge 9/11 and deter a repetition of it led directly to the American invasion of Afghanistan. The so-called “global war on terrorism” that this invasion inaugurated provided a spurious but politically sufficient justification for the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Our labeling of Hamas as a “terrorist organization” in- spired the joint U.S.-Israeli effort to reject and overturn the results of the 2006 elections in the occupied territories, even though these elections were universally judged to be free and fair. A similar view of Hezbollah caused the U.S. to encourage Israel in its savage mauling of Lebanon and to protect it from the huge international backlash against its more recent assault on Arab civilians in Gaza. Determination to avoid another 9/11 remains the strate- gic rationale for the ongoing war in Afghanistan and adja- cent areas of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the insolent cruelties of the West Bank occupation and the siege of Gaza continue to inflame Arab and Muslim opinion. Taken together, these developments have caused a growing number of Arabs andMuslims to perceive a broad American crusade to humiliate them and their religion. Their estrangement from the U.S. and other non-Islamic societies has deepened. Al-Qaida has discredited itself through its excesses, but Islamic extremism has continued to metastasize. In Gaza, for example, political forces far more fanatical than Hamas are beginning to emerge from massive suffering. What began as a conflict between Jew- ish colonists and indigenous Arabs has become a worldwide struggle between Jews, Muslims and their respective allies. F O C U S Chas W. Freeman Jr. is a retired FSO and former ambas- sador to Saudi Arabia. He is currently president of the Middle East Policy Council. This article is based on Amb. Freeman’s remarks to the National Council on U.S.–Arab Relations in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 16, 2009. What began as a conflict between Jewish colonists and indigenous Arabs has become a worldwide struggle between Jews, Muslims and their respective allies.