Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (30 page)

The result was nothing less than remarkable. The inspector general flatly denied any direct CIA involvement. In introducing his report to Congress in March 1998, he said he found “absolutely no evidence to indicate that the CIA as an organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring drugs into the United States.” But he closed the same introduction with an important admission: “Let me be frank. There are instances where CIA did not, in any expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking or take action to resolve the allegations.” The inspector general admitted that none was investigated for drug dealing “as expeditiously as they should have been.” The CIA finally posted a heavily censored version of volume two of the Hitz report on its Web site. The report revealed that the CIA had worked with fifty-eight contras implicated in cocaine trafficking but had concealed their criminal activities from Congress. Alfred McCoy, whose example I have followed in reading the fine print of the report, comments:

Starting at paragraph 913, Hitz explores, with unprecedented frankness, the Agency’s alliance with the notorious Alan Hyde, providing a revealing case study of the operational pressures that led the CIA into a compromised relationship with a criminal who was, quite possibly, the leading smuggler of cocaine across the Caribbean into the United States. Over the space of 48 dense, detailed paragraphs, the inspector general quotes classified correspondence up to the level of Deputy Director to provide extraordinary documentation about the dynamics of a CIA alliance with drug lords—a story that the national press somehow overlooked even though the controversy over the “dark alliance” case still raged.

The fourth cost of the Afghan jihad was an increasing incoherence in state agencies meant to enforce U.S. policy, a fact that came to light dramatically on 9/11, the day the terror produced by the Afghan jihad crossed U.S. national borders and took on truly global dimensions. This incoherence was dramatically illustrated in relations between the CIA and two other agencies of the federal government: the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Cooley cites the case of Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director, who “had mentioned the CIA training of several of the World Trade Center bombers on a 1993 television broadcast—and was transferred, ‘by coincidence,’ several weeks later.”

From the time the CIA got involved in drug trafficking as a way of financing covert operations, there was a similar incoherence in the coordination between the CIA and the DEA. It reached truly blatant proportions in the Reagan administration. In 1982, the attorney general announced that the FBI, not the DEA, would henceforth control antidrug campaigns inside the United States. The 1998 report of the CIA inspector general revealed that only two months after Reagan had authorized covert CIA support for the contras, CIA Director William Casey was able to conclude a secret “Memorandum of Understanding” with Attorney General William French Smith. Dated February 11, 1982, this memorandum exempted the CIA from reporting drug trafficking by its assets who were not formally CIA employees, such as “pilots who ferried supplies to the contras, as well as contra officials and others.” The agreement was modified four years later to require more reporting, but the CIA continued to work with these assets. Even more remarkable, the waiver remained in effect until scrapped by the Clinton administration in 1995.

The Way Out

Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting. Anyone who lived through the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era would recognize the significance of this fact. A key lesson of the Vietnam War is that the antiwar and anti-imperialist movement inside the United States restrained American military power from being fully unleashed on the people of Vietnam.

Successive U.S. administrations have held the American press responsible for defeat in Vietnam. Their argument has been simple if self-serving: by concentrating on “our” atrocities and remaining silent about “their” atrocities, the press aided a popular movement against the war. After the killing fields of Cambodia, the accusation had a ring of credibility. From then on, right through to Iraq, the press has tended to turn to official America for accounts of “their” atrocities. In doing so, it has contributed to removing foreign policy from processes of democratic accountability—a process that seems to have reached its “patriotic” conclusion with the arrival of “embedded” reporters in the recent Iraq war.

The self-censorship of the press has been reinforced by developments in the marketplace. With the changing ownership of media giants, several have been taken over by corporations based in the defense or entertainment industry, reinforcing the tendency to treat news as marketable entertainment. Yet another reason for the continuing erosion of press freedom arises from the common sense that the press shares with those in power. When it comes to the Middle East, Israel is the Achilles’ heel of American liberalism, the blind spot that is part of its “common sense.” The domestic importance of Israel became dramatically clear during the second Reagan administration. As the Iran-contra scandal unraveled, it became clear that the executive branch had been guilty of such gross disregard of legislative restraint that the consequences were likely to be no less severe than those after the Watergate scandal. But this did not happen, for one reason: liberals in Congress and in the press hesitated. An important part of the reason was that Israel was involved.

America and Israel: The Heart of the Matter

If critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East see it as oil driven, its proponents see defense of Israel at the heart of the policy. The more central the Middle East has come to be in U.S. foreign policy, as it indeed has after 9/11, the larger Israel has loomed in the imagination of advocates and critics alike. The higher the cost of America’s Israel policy, the more its motivation seems obscure and difficult to fathom. Could this be no more than a replay of official America’s constructive engagement with apartheid South Africa? Or does the absence of even the hint of a critique in America’s Israel policy indicate a more special relationship, the grounding of which must be located in more than just state interest?

In the search for credible answers, many have turned to the influence of civil society-based groups, first to the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby in Washington and more recently to the growing weight of the Christian right in the Republican party. The Israeli lobby is “a loose network of individuals and organizations,” of which the most important are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Rather than “a traditional ethnic voter machine” that would organize the Jewish vote behind particular candidates, the Israeli lobby functions more as “an ethnic donor machine,” which has emulated the ways of issue-based interest groups such as the National Rifle Association or the pro- and antiabortion groups. Its power is exercised through campaign contributions and government appointments. The most notable appointments in the current Bush administration are those of Richard Perle, a member (and until his recent resignation the chair) of the quasi-official but highly influential Defense Advisory Board, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense. Both straddle the U.S. and Israeli defense and foreign-policy establishments. In 1996, they coauthored a paper advising Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu to make “a clean break from the peace process.” In 1997, Feith wrote a paper called “A Strategy for Israel,” calling on Israel to reoccupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control,” even though “the price in blood would be high.”

Neither state reasons such as geopolitics nor the weight of special interests in the state or civil society quite explain why there is not even the trace of a public debate in America when it comes to Israel. Internationally, there is one state that stands in defiance of practically every UN resolution that affects it: Israel. In the international community, Israel stands for the exercise of power with impunity. Israel defies the international community consistently—not because it is the world’s sole superpower but because it is backed up by the world’s sole superpower. At the same time, within America, it is easier to criticize the government than it is to criticize Israel. The same American liberal who will uphold your democratic right to criticize any government in the world, including that of the United States, will consider criticism of the state of Israel as potentially anti-Semitic, in the words of the current president of Harvard, in effect if not in intent. Why do American liberals not use the same standard for the state of Israel that they would not hesitate using for every other state in the world, including the United States? What explains the enduring nature of the special relationship between the United States and Israel? To understand that enduring motivation, I think it necessary to focus away from special interests to the American mainstream, so as to understand the ways in which the political project called Israel has come to resonate with American historical sensibilities.

To be sure, U.S.-Israeli relations have gone through different phases since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Relations were the most stretched during the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel, along with Britain and France, was forced to acknowledge America’s rise as the hegemonic Western power. It is only after 1967, and more so 1973, that we can speak of the building of a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel. The makers of the strategic alliance have been able to tap into an American sensibility, a reservoir of support, to enshrine this alliance with a halo.

To make sense of that historical sensibility, one can look at the relationship between the United States and Israel through the historical experience of postapartheid Africa. If you look at America from the southern tip of the African continent, gazing from Cape Town across the Atlantic, “Africa” and “America” do not appear as just two names of two different continents but also as names that signify two radically different historical trajectories. With the end of apartheid, the African experience stands for the end of settler colonialism—unlike the American experience, which signifies the triumph of settler colonialism.

This triumph is written in the history of citizenship in the United States. That history comes to light if one asks, Who is an American? The answer has been shaped by two major struggles, the Civil War and the civil rights struggle. The Civil War began a few years after the 1857
Dred Scott
decision. This is how Chief Justice Roger Taney put the question as he placed the locus of American citizenship in the individual states rather than the union:

The question is simply this: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?

As Paul Finkelman sums up, Justice Taney’s response left no doubt: “Free blacks could never be citizens of the United States and have standing to sue in federal courts.” The Civil War both shifted the locus of American citizenship from individual states to the union, thereby reversing the legacy of
Dred Scott
, and changed the basis of state citizenship from ancestry to residence; but it did not create an equal citizenship for black and white Americans. The American nation after the Civil War was still a nation of white settlers. The redefinition of the nation, from a white to a settler nation,
regardless of color
, was the fruit of the civil rights movement that followed the Second World War.

The postwar period represented a double shift, on grounds of both race and religion. Before the war, it was presumed that whites were Christians; more often than not, the heritage of Christianity was defined in opposition to that of Judaism. The idea of a single Judeo-Christian tradition is mainly a post-Holocaust idea with weak historical depth. It is post-Holocaust America’s antidote to anti-Semitism. Contemporary America is a multicultural and multireligious political community that has yet to come to grips with its settler origins.

I came face-to-face with the common sense born of this history during antiwar teach-ins after 9/11, and more specifically in September 2002 when Columbia University organized a conference called “A South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine.” Even among many of the antiwar American youth, the suggestion that Israel is a settler colony aroused strong opposition: Israelis were not settlers, but returning natives. The passion and the conviction reminded me of when I was a lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in the 1970s, and we listened to representatives of a group that championed the rights of native Liberians. When they claimed that Liberia was a settler-colonial state, no different from apartheid South Africa, the Tanzanian and East African audience was noticeably uncomfortable. We all knew that Liberia, like Sierra Leone, had been founded as a colony for freed slaves in the nineteenth century: Liberia was to be a settlement of freed American slaves, and Sierra Leone for freed British slaves—meaning those American slaves who had cast their lot with Britain in the American War of Independence and subsequently moved to the British Isles. Our reluctance to accept the analogy with apartheid South Africa was grounded in this historical fact: we saw Americo-Liberians as returning natives, even if returning after centuries, and not as settlers. It was then, in the heat of debate in the post-9/11 American academy, that I understood why it was important to acknowledge the American historical sensibility if one was interested in changing the American point of view, which itself recognizes the subjectivity of the Jew who “returns” to Israel. From this point of view, Israeli Jews see themselves not as settlers but as returning natives, even if returning after millennia. Such an analogy might yield more fruitful insights into the relationship between America and Israel.