“Our target was terror. Our mission was clear.”
– President Clinton, Aug. 20, 1998
To the litany of terrorist acts that President Clinton laid at the feet of renegade Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden in justification of his cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan last week, the administration has now alleged a murky plot to assassinate the president as well.
The alleged plot against Clinton was to have taken place when he was to have visited Pakistan. The anonymous intelligence sources that have made such an industry in bin Laden revelations this week acknowledge that the plot never went beyond the coffee-shop talking stage.
But the charge helped to reinforce the president’s claims that bin Laden is “perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today,” and that there was “compelling” — if unrevealable — evidence that a network of terrorist groups he controlled was planning “further attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving groups.”
At a time when presidential veracity is at an all-time low, one might have wished that the president and his national security advisors had laid out in detail just what was the “compelling evidence” that led the United States to launch some 75 missiles at two sovereign nations.
As it is, the public, both here in the United States and in the more critical world at large, is being asked to take a giant Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the president’s claims. Given Clinton’s recent track record in the “trust me” department, this is a lot to demand.
For while there is little doubt that bin Laden is a sworn enemy of the United States with the financial means to put some teeth in that enmity, his exact role in anti-American terrorism is unclear. The administration’s claims are based more on conjecture — mostly bin Laden’s own braggadocio and the bad company he apparently keeps — than hard and convincing evidence.
Clinton and his security staff have now blamed bin Laden for being behind almost every terrorist act in the past decade — from plotting the assassinations of the pope and the president of Egypt to the planned bombing of six U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific, with massacres of German tourists at Luxor and the killings of U.S. troops in Somalia, fatal car bombings of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and this month’s truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam thrown in. Not since the ’70s heyday of the terrorist Carlos has there been such a Prince of Darkness, if the allegations are to be believed.
But so far, for all of the accusations, no government, not even that of the United States, has established enough credible evidence against bin Laden to conclusively prove his direct participation in, much less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he stands accused of. To date no formal request for his extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese government that once housed him or to his current hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.
Though it was suddenly leaked this week that a federal grand jury’s continuing investigation into the World Trade Center bombing in New York City in 1993 had belatedly handed up a sealed indictment against bin Laden in June, the indictment is understood to be only for “sedition,” that is, incitement to violence, not the violence itself. That is the same charge under which the Unites States previously convicted Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Trade Center bomber’s spiritual leader.
The only link between bin Laden and the World Trade Center bombing seems to be the fact that the mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was eventually detained by U.S. agents while living in a guest house in Pakistan reportedly rented by bin Laden. The Saudi was also implicated in a failed 1994 plan to blow up American jumbo jets over the Pacific because the plot mastermind, Wali Khan Amin Shah, reportedly was a “close friend” of bin Laden’s.
If bin Laden’s fingerprints were to be found on any terrorist acts of the last decade, they should have been on the two attacks against U.S. military personnel carried out in the years when he was still living in his Saudi Arabian homeland. Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi engineering graduate who became a radical Muslim after joining the war against Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, became virulently anti-American after U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War.
To him the American presence in Saudi Arabia, home of the holy Islamic sites Mecca and Medina, is a sacrilege he has vowed to reverse, along with toppling the “corrupt” Saudi royal family that has allowed it. Thus, when a car bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard office in Riyadh in 1995, killing five Americans, and another blew up at the Khobar Towers Barracks in Dhahran a year later, killing another 19, bin Laden seemed the most likely suspect.
But neither the FBI, the CIA nor the Saudi intelligence services has ever been able to establish bin Laden’s links to those crimes after years of trying. What evidence that has emerged from those ongoing investigations points the finger at dissident Saudi Shiites, perhaps with the logistic support of the Lebanese Hezbollah organization, or even Iran.
Though much has been made of the fact that from his safe-houses in Afghanistan bin Laden has forged a loose alliance with perhaps a dozen different Islamic groups in the Muslim world from Algeria to Bangladesh, he seems to be more of a spiritual leader and financier than the sort of terrorist mastermind being alleged.
“Bin Laden is a true believer and a funder of Islamic causes, rather than a planner and active participant,” says Professor Shibley Telhani, a Middle East scholar from the University of Maryland who has followed his career. “His real influence is not as a mastermind of terrorism but as a person who is using a personal fortune to encourage others to wage war against the American interests in the Middle East he finds so objectionable.”
Indeed the sealed federal indictment just handed up, it would appear, is not based on any evidence directly linking him to either of those plots or others. Instead, it seems to have been motivated by a public call to arms against Americans that bin Laden published in the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi last February. Issued as an Islamic Fatwa, or holy order, even though bin Laden has no religious authority whatsoever, the broadside by bin Laden and other signers from various Islamic groups called for Muslims to “kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military” wherever they find them.
These are strong words indeed. But they are words, not deeds. And though it is all too likely that those words have inspired others to such actions as the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last month, bin Laden himself is unlikely to have personally ordered those bombings or carried them out.
Unless the Clinton administration can come up with some hard evidence that bin Laden is in fact calling the shots of a vast new anti-American terrorist network, all the present allegations and faceless intelligence-source leaks claiming facts too secret and explosive to be revealed should be taken with a grain of salt.
Bin Laden may be a dangerous anti-American zealot with a mouth as big as his bankroll. But the evidence so far does not support him being a cerebral Islamic Dr. No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world chessboard to checkmate the United States.
President Clinton and his entourage of a thousand best friends, court officials and attendant journalists descended on China this week, determined to celebrate its emancipation from communism and to encourage its emergence as a superpower of the 21st century the United States can do business with.
Despite bitter sniping about China from Republican critics in Congress, Clinton received a welcome suitable for an emperor as he touched down in Xi’an, once the Rome of the East. It was there, in the second century B.C., that Qin Dynasty Emperor Shi first united the region’s then warring states into the vast sprawling nation-empire that is today’s China.
Certainly both sides are making every effort to make nice. Clinton, the first U.S. president to visit the Middle Kingdom since the Tiananmen Square horror of 1989, and President Jiang Zemin were eager to proclaim a new era of cooperation and amity that would look to the future, rather than the past.
The future, everyone is told, is all about budding free-enterprise capitalism. Tiananmen Square is but “a fading scar,” as a headline in Newsweek put it this week. The images that have captured the imagination of late are miniskirted Chinese women, young lovers embracing in public, chic boutiques and the return of nightclubs and privately owned homes. “Today, this is a country of cell phones and pagers, McDonald’s and bowling alleys,” is how Newsweek describes China in its cover story this week.
But before getting carried away about the New China of relaxed social and economic mores, it’s important to remember that in China’s 4,000-year history, change is cyclical and better measured in centuries than in decades. China’s future can never be divorced from its past.
That was perhaps the most important lesson I came away with when I first visited China in the early 1970s, at a time when the country was still grappling with the demons Chairman Mao Tse-tung had let loose in 1966 with his Cultural Revolution. I remember visiting Guangdong University, in southern China, at a time when that most venerable and moral of Chinese sages, Confucius, was being branded a “Capitalist Running Dog” by Mao’s Red Guard thugs and all Confucian scholars in China were being persecuted; many were killed.
It was, I discovered, an old story. Back in Xi’an 22 centuries earlier, Emperor Shi had also sought to solidify his rule by attacking the traditions and order that preceded him, banishing and executing Confucian scholars and burning their books. A classic Chinese example of how creating a new future gets bogged down in warring with the past.
Confucius is back, of course, in Jiang’s New China. But as President Clinton began his nine-day China odyssey in Xi’an, he needed look no further than bustling Shanghai to be reminded of the tenacity of historic traditions of repression and intolerance. For there, in spite of all the new openness and freedom being proclaimed by Jiang and company in Beijing, China’s dogmatic, xenophobic reflexes are on display again.
As is so often the case with China’s arcane internal politics, the issue was cultural — an obscure, rarely performed, 400-year-old Ming Dynasty opera called “The Peony Pavilion.” The work, an elaborate love story written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu, had been selected by New York’s Lincoln Center to anchor a summer cultural festival next month.
Lincoln Center had contracted with Chinese-born American director Chen Shi Zheng to direct this monster work of 55 acts that takes 20 hours to perform. Chen, who grew up in China before moving to the United States in 1987, spent eight months working with the Shanghai Kunqu Opera company to prepare it for its New York debut. But this week, after a dress rehearsal in China that drew praise from the official People’s Daily but was attacked in the Shanghai press, the local cultural czars turned thumbs down on the opera’s performance abroad.
Ma Bomin, the director of Shanghai’s Bureau of Culture, charged that in Chen’s creative interpretation of “The Peony Pavilion,” the original sense of the opera’s central love story was perverted by “feudal superstition, stupidity and pornography.” As a result, the containers holding six and a half tons of the opera company’s sets and costumes were stopped at Shanghai airport by order of Ma.
That China’s minister of culture, Sun Jiazheng, had hailed the Lincoln Center performance of “The Peony Pavilion” as just the sort of cultural exchange that President Clinton’s trip to China sought to promote, has cut little ice with Ma or her superiors in China’s most dynamic city. And to date, no amount of negotiation by U.S. consular officials, Lincoln Center executives and Chen himself has convinced Ma to let the show go on.
Add that incident to the withdrawal of visas for three U.S. journalists working for Radio Free Asia the day before Clinton’s departure for China and the scattered arrest of local dissidents along Clinton’s path through the Middle Kingdom, and you have plenty of evidence that eternal China is alive and well. Though China may be flirting with capitalism and democratization, the instinctive despotism of China’s historic culture is still a powerful force.
An old Chinese proverb states: “He who carries a boat can also overturn it.” That wisdom has been proven time after time by Chinese history; there is no reason to believe the boat floats differently this time around.
With evidence mounting by the hour that another tragic chapter in the Balkans’ long history of violence is under way in Kosovo, world concern over the Serbian repression of its southernmost province has reached a fever pitch.
As with Bosnia, fever pitch means a maximum of oratory combined with a minimum of concrete action. And, as with the Bosnian Muslims, the response out of Washington and other Western capitals does not bode well for the plight of Kosovo’s Albanian ethnic majority.
First, the oratory. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has termed the crackdown by Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic an act of “barbarism.” President Clinton, more politely, called what is happening “unacceptable.” Pope John Paul II has weighed in between prayers to speak sorrowfully of “repression and the flights of people” in Kosovo in urging world powers not to remain “inert.”
Papal urging and secular saber-rattling notwithstanding, inertia on Kosovo remains the order of the day. Ever since Milosevic’s crackdown in Kosovo began three months ago, the West has responded with hand-wringing meetings by NATO foreign ministers, the six-nation Balkan “Contact Group” (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States), the European Union in Luxembourg, the White House and the National Security Council. The upshot of those meetings has been a mantra-like recitation of demands for Milosevic to desist and get down to talking to Kosovo’s civilian leaders, or face possible military wrath.
The latest round of meetings this week in London and Brussels were no different. The Contact Group discussed a plan to give Milosevic yet another ultimatum to resume talks with Kosovo’s moderate civilian leader, Ibrahim Rugova. Thursday, NATO defense ministers warned of possible military options, though they were only able to agree on the dispatch of NATO planes to conduct air maneuvers over Albania and Macedonia, beyond Kosovo’s borders.
Milosevic has heard it all before. As far back as 1992, when Yugoslavia first started to fragment, President George Bush warned the Serbian leader to keep his hands off Kosovo militarily or face American intervention, even bombing. Milosevic dodged that threat by refocusing his holy crusade for Serbian dominion on the breakaway republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It took four years of vicious civil war and genocidal “ethnic cleansing” campaigns before Western fulminations were translated into military intervention and the flawed peace accords negotiated by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke.
By then, Milosevic had accomplished his goal. He expanded Serbian power into Bosnia while solidifying his own political dominance over the fragmenting Yugoslavia. He is now gambling he can do the same in Kosovo, the small, impoverished province worshipped as the historic cradle of Serbian nationalism, despite the fact that 90 percent of its current population of 2 million is ethnically Albanian.
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Guilt about their inaction in Bosnia while hundreds of thousands died haunts Western policymakers. Almost every statement put forth by President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger or Britain’s increasingly shrill Tony Blair is prefaced by the promise that Kosovo will not be allowed to degenerate into another Bosnia.
Unfortunately, Kosovo already is another Bosnia. Since March, Milosevic’s police and special forces have been waging war against the ethnic Albanians who have had the temerity to call for a return to the provincial autonomy that Milosevic stripped from them in 1989, when he launched his messianic campaign
to reassert Serbian hegemony over all of Yugoslavia’s multiethnic lands.
Milosevic’s refusal to consider the Kosovars’ demands has undermined the influence of Rugova, a Gandhian moderate who favors negotiations. Rugova’s impotence has strengthened the more militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which advocates independence, not autonomy.
In the past weeks, Milosevic’s campaign against the small, disorganized armed groups of the KLA in the rugged mountains bordering Albania has blossomed into full-scale warfare, using artillery, helicopter gunships and scorched-earth shock troops to raze all Kosovo villages along the mountainous Albanian border through which the KLA is supplied.
Lest there be any doubts that history was repeating itself, Wolfgang Ischinger, the political director of the German Foreign Ministry who visited the Kosovo capital of Pristina, said the Serbian operations that have left hundreds dead and sent tens
of thousands of refugees into neighboring Albania were
nothing short of a new campaign “of ethnic cleansing.”
As with Bosnia, Milosevic seems unmoved by Western consternation about Kosovo. He knows from past experience how hard it is for the West to come to a consensus on action in the Balkans. He also knows that Russia, long an ally of the Serbs, will not agree to any military action in Kosovo, even if there were a Western
agreement to launch it. Since the United Nations Security Council would ultimately have to approve such action, a Russian veto will stop it. To make sure, Milosevic goes to Moscow next week to meet with Boris Yeltsin.
If military action was hard enough for the West to decide on in Bosnia — an internationally recognized independent nation — it will prove 10 times more difficult in Kosovo, which is recognized as an integral region of the
Yugoslav state. So long as Milosevic’s actions there don’t spill over to incite war with neighboring Albania and Macedonia,
what the Serbian leader does in Kosovo remains a domestic affair.
The much-discussed plans for NATO to send troops to Albania and Macedonia (where a U.S.-NATO observer force is already in place) as a means of containing the problem to Kosovo is something Milosevic would, in fact, welcome, as it might help isolate the KLA’s cross-border operations and arms smuggling. Nor can sanctions, which the European Union and
the United States so belatedly imposed this week, be expected to have a dramatic effect on Milosevic’s behavior. He has weathered such economic punishment before and no doubt feels he can again.
In addition to the typical divisions among Western councils about what to do, there is also division of opinion in Clinton’s cabinet. Secretary of State Albright, as is her wont, has
taken a hawkish position in favor of intervention while Secretary of Defense William Cohen and National Security Advisor Berger have been counseling against military commitments that Congress or the American people might not support.
Milosevic may be a brute and a thug, but he is not dumb. He has proven time and again that he understand the dynamics and limits of Western power, perhaps better than people in the West itself. The Serbian leader knows that ultimately, unless the U.S. can agree to a concrete plan of action, no one else will. And with a scandal-weakened presidency, with its
own internal divisions and bureaucratic rivalries, Milosevic is clearly betting on continued inaction from the world’s only superpower.
The prognosis for Kosovo, therefore, is grim. The U.S. and its allies will continue to protest — loudly — Milosevic’s latest bout of savagery, and they will bluster about military retaliation to come. Meanwhile, more villages will be razed, more civilians will die, more refugees will flee. In the
near term, before the Albanian majority in the province can organize its own effective resistance, Milosevic, once again, will likely get away with the ethnic cleansing of yet another Balkan land.
They’re back. The American weapons inspector whose presence helped ignite the last crisis between Iraq and the United States returned to Baghdad just before the weekend, picking up where he left off, trying to check out Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
But while all eyes remain fixed on the American, Scott Ridder, his team of United Nations weapons inspectors and the U.S. armada that remains poised to strike Baghdad from the Persian Gulf, few noticed that the real battle to topple Saddam Hussein quietly began late last month.
It was waged by five burly U.S. wrestlers competing in a little-heralded international meet in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
For two days, the U.S. wrestlers grappled with their Iranian counterparts and those of 18 other nations in a sporting event dear to the Iranian heart. The Americans won some matches, lost others, but it wasn’t the tournament scorecard that mattered. It was the fact that for the first time since radical Islamic students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, burned American flags and humiliated the “Great Satan” for 444 days, an American delegation was back in Tehran, performing under the Stars and Stripes to the cheers of an Iranian crowd.
Both American and Iranian officials have been quick to play down any political significance of the sporting contest, but for anyone who recalls how a simple ping-pong match in Beijing in 1971 opened the door to U.S. recognition of communist China, there is little doubt the event represented an important, if still tenuous, step toward rapprochement between the United States and Iran. If realized, it will have enormous strategic implications for Saddam Hussein’s future.
U.S. policy makers still insist that their increasingly unsuccessful policy of “dual containment” of both Iran and Iraq remains in place. But behind closed doors at the White House and the State Department, a debate is raging on whether to continue such an unrewarding policy.
The main reason, of course, is Saddam. A full-scale war in 1991, occasional air strikes, at least five failed CIA operations and seven harsh years of economic sanctions have failed to topple the Iraqi tyrant. Despite all efforts to oust him, he remains ensconced in power, playing a masterful cat-and-mouse game with U.N. arms inspectors trying — still — to find what’s left of Iraq’s deadly armory of biological and chemical weapons.
If this latest showdown with Baghdad showed nothing else, it was that our allies — in Europe as well as in the region — no longer have the stomach to use military force. More to the point, even the most sanguine bomb-’em-back-to-the-Stone-Age strategists seem to have concluded that without the land bases denied by our Arab allies — and without the land forces the American public has no intention of sending to the gulf again — any U.S. bombing campaign would be more punitive than transformative.
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The Clinton administration’s failures in Iraq — as those of the Bush
administration before it — have left it casting about for a policy that
will keep Saddam down. With few other options, it is only natural that
American strategists should find themselves turning once again to Iraq’s
historical enemy, Iran.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons to remain wary of Iran. There is
Tehran’s support for terrorism, its opposition to the U.S.-sponsored Middle
East peace process and a residual hatred for America among the hard-line
mullahs.
But there is also an inescapable logic to a rapprochement with Tehran.
Iran, for decades a pawn of Western powers, views itself as the strategic
counterweight against the volatility and unpredictability of the Arab
nations and tribes with which it shares the oil-rich Persian Gulf basin.
While it opposes the U.S. military presence in the gulf, its strategic goal
of balancing Iraq’s power dovetails with American concerns.
The Iranians have plenty of reasons to fear Saddam and to keep him
contained. Not only has the Iraqi dictator ruthlessly repressed Iran’s
co-religionist Shiite majority in southern Iraq, but their memories remain
seared by Iraq’s 1980 invasion and the eight murderous years of trench
warfare that followed. More than a million are believed to have died in
that dismal war — some, it should be recalled, by Iraq’s use of chemical
weapons.
Last May’s national elections in Iran opened the door to the realignment
of forces that is quietly taking place. While the Islamic establishment
supported the conservative speaker of parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori for
the presidency, the Iranian populace opted for a more liberal direction. By
an overwhelming majority, voters turned against the tired fundamentalist
leadership and chose as their president the Western-educated, relatively
moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami.
Though ultimate power still resides in the hands of Iran’s “Supreme
Leader,” the dour Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the new president — ousted from
his previous post of cultural minister for being too soft on Islamic purity
and censorship — has wasted little time trying to open up Iranian society
to its own citizens, and to the long-shunned Western world.
President Khatami’s opening salvo was a live interview with CNN’s
Christiane Amanpour in January, in which he praised “American civilization”
and called for a renewed dialogue and exchange between the peoples of Iran
and the United States in order to “crack the wall of mistrust” that has
prevailed since 1979.
Diplomatic breakthroughs among bitter enemies rely on veiled symbolic
gestures such as this. An American response came quickly. In his Jan.
28 message to honor the end of the month-long religious fast of Ramadan,
President Clinton telegraphed Washington’s own flexibility.
“To the people of Iran, I would like to say the United States regrets the
estrangement of our two nations,” Clinton declared. “We have real
differences with some Iranian policies, but I believe these are not
insurmountable. I hope that we have more exchanges between our people and
that the day will soon come when we can enjoy once again good relations
with Iran.”
Within a month of that statement U.S. wrestlers were in Tehran fighting to
great applause, with no less a spectator than Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori looking
on. No sooner had the American wrestlers left Tehran than Middle East
specialist Geoffrey Kemp arrived to hobnob with Iranian Foreign Ministry
officials.
The significance of Kemp’s visit should not be underestimated. A former
member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration,
he is one of a handful of former U.S. officials and diplomats who have been
quietly asked by the Clinton administration to come up with a viable
alternative to its dual containment policy.
So beneath the official insistence that nothing is happening, the signs are
that the United States and Iran are beginning to dance with each other once
again. And the tune they’re dancing to is probably the oldest song in the
Middle East: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
