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The Wrong Coalition
David Horovitz

In these first dazed weeks after September 11, something deeply disquieting appears to be happening to President Bush�s war against �global terror,� a struggle in which, as he put it, �every nation in every region� had a decision to make: �Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.�

That unambiguous presidential distinction, the accurate depiction of a battle between good and evil for our very survival, is taking on subtler tones, shades of gray. And they threaten to make a mockery of the war, and condemn it to failure.

When the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw went to Teheran in late September, Israeli Transport Minister Ephraim Sneh condemned the visit as a stab in Israel�s back. That comment may have sounded premature. After all, if the purpose of reaching out to rogue states like Iran � where terrorist groups are encouraged to recruit, train and raise funds, where acquiring nuclear weaponry is an obsession and where the determination to eliminate Israel is undisguised government policy � was to produce an improbable, drastic change in official attitudes, then Straw�s trip was to be applauded rather than condemned. But the early indications suggest a very different and troubling agenda.

Less for the sake of revenge or even justice than for the practical imperative of protection from yet more devastating attacks, the international community needs to eliminate the murderous fundamentalist outgrowths of Islam, and all other forms of terrorism, wherever they flourish, however inconvenient. Yet the initial impression is that, in its desperation to avoid the unfounded perception that it is waging war against all of Islam, the allied coalition is gearing up to whitewash the ongoing sponsorship of terrorism by Middle East states.

And astoundingly, in this craven, misguided courting of the very perpetrators of the crime they are seeking to eliminate, some of the architects of the alliance are even implying that blame attaches to one of terrorism�s prime victims: Israel. It is outrageous to hear Straw, within days of so devastating and inhumane an assault on America, intimating, as he did in comments that coincided with his Teheran visit, that terrorist acts against Israel could somehow be legitimized by what he called �the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.�

This was no slip, either; there was no apology from the British Foreign Office.

Wherever you stand in the argument over where justice lies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is no context, no wider dispute, no grievance that can ever, anywhere, justify the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians. It is precisely this message that the assault on terrorism ought to be dedicated to conveying. Straw of Great Britain, which purports to be at the forefront of this effort, is fatally undermining it from the start � and thus virtually inviting terrorists to carry out more crimes, in our country, his and others, by providing them with a false justification for murder. It is no surprise that Iran has now rejected Straw�s advances; it is hugely depressing that Teheran is now happily capitalizing on Straw�s false distinction, and attempting to turn reality on its head by portraying the Palestinians as �the main victims of terrorism.�

I have heard it suggested that, in pursuing a �softly, softly� approach to regimes like Teheran and Damascus, some of the coalition�s European allies are attempting to obtain some kind of implicit or explicit guarantee against further attacks on their own territory. But they surely cannot be that na�ve after the horror of September 11. Not when Argentina, having turned a blind eye to evidence leading toward Syria and Iran in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, was �rewarded� by a second, more devastating Middle East-orchestrated bombing, at the Jewish community offices, two years later. Not when Germany and France and Britain have gathered incontrovertible evidence of Syrian and Iranian state involvement in various terrorist acts in their countries through the 1990s.

As with Iran and Syria, so with the Palestinian Authority. If Secretary of State Colin Powell�s purpose, in welcoming Yasser Arafat�s purported offers of assistance, is to respond by requiring the PA to demonstrate anti-terror credentials by arresting the orchestrators of suicide bombings, seizing explosives, and closing down the institutions where the fundamentalist doctrine of violence is preached, then speed the day. But here, too, the early signs are worrying. There has been no PA crackdown on violent extremists. Terror kingpins have no fear of the PA, only of Israel. And yet when Israel, its pleas for the arrests of militants ignored, exercises its sole remaining alternative and strikes directly at those who plot the murder of its civilians � doing, in short, precisely what the U.S. is preparing to do to Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices � Powell issues statements of condemnation.

One can only hope that, despite the lost momentum and missed opportunities of these first weeks, what looks like a loss of nerve will ultimately prove misleading, and that when Bush talks of a �lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen,� he is thinking of a stage when the full might of civilized consensus will be brought to bear against terrorist regimes. Otherwise, the �enlightened� world will have failed the thousands of families devastated by the atrocities of September 11, and failed to protect itself from further assaults on everything it holds dear.