Commentary: A tale of 4 nations

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- The United States is trying to hunt down suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan does not breed terrorists -- it only hides them.

To use a metaphor comparing terrorists to mosquitoes, killing them where they are is less important than clearing the swamps in which they breed.

Where are those swamps? One should begin by taking seriously what bin Laden said in his statement to the media released several weeks ago -- he mentioned three nations as being the source for his grievances against the United States: Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The intellectual debate in the United States about what to do, whenever it has wandered beyond the question of the Afghan war, has moved to each of these nations in turn.

The debate started with Israel, naturally. If Menachim Begin were alive today, he might repeat his statement of 19 years ago: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews?"

The complaints about Israel ran in opposite directions: Some argued that American policy was too deeply involved in the Middle East, others that the United States ought to get involved in the peace process once again. Both sets of critics agreed that the Palestinian situation was what made America hated in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the pro-Israeli side argued that the attacks weren't really about Israel -- a statement half true and half false. Whatever the truths of the issue, most Arabs hold the United States responsible for the existence of Israel.

Of course, the entire debate rested on a misconception: Americans and Arabs alike believe that the United States is all that stands between Israel and destruction -- it isn't.

The Israeli supremacy over the Arabs that developed between 1947 and 1967 was little dependent upon American help. If the American government started "supporting" Israel after 1967 it was because Israel was a fact. The only important American contribution to Israel's survival was to keep the USSR away between 1967 and 1981 -- and that was not done for Israel's sake.

If the United States stood back now, the result would be a huge war which Israel would win again --and which the Arabs would still blame on the United States. The United States has used its support as a way of making Israel do things it might not have done on its own, and will continue to do so. But the idea that it can force Israel into peace with the Palestinians (which has been U.S. policy for at least a decade) is not being stopped by the Israelis, but by the Palestinians. That's why Powell issued such a sharp warning to Arafat the day after his people slapped down the Israelis.

Palestinians are suicide bombing in Israel, not in America. The Palestinian leadership knows that their only hope lies here, no matter what lies they may tell their own people.

The existence of Israel is certainly an inconvenience for an American policy, which is otherwise based on supporting autocratic regimes in the Middle East. But the weaknesses of that policy run far beyond the existence of Israel.

The American debate then turned to Iraq. On this one, the pro-Israeli lobby made the early running. It seemed a chance to "finish the business" of 1991. Of course, most of the present administration was complicit in the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power then, and the same logic that applied then still applies now -- no matter how much the American government professes to "hate" Saddam Hussein, it has continued to see his overthrow as a worse alternative.

This reality still remains, and it makes it pretty hard for the U.S. government to get on a moral high horse, especially when the policy actually followed for the last decade, sanctions punctuated by random bombing raids, has probably led to far more deaths than would have resulted from going to Baghdad 10 years ago would have.

It is also true the connections of Iraq with the WTC event are pretty far-fetched. The fact that al Qaida, who probably met with representatives of just about every Arab nation, met with Iraqi officials, is hardly enough weight to hang a war on. In fact, the U.S. government had longer and more intimate relations with both al Qaida and Iraq than either has had with each other.

In recent weeks, however, the focus of intellectual attention has turned to Saudi Arabia. It is hard not to notice that 15 of the 19 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, hard not to notice that "Islamic fundamentalism" is really just another way to describe the Wahabi regime in Saudi Arabia, hard not to notice that the Saudi regime is barely cooperating with the United States.

In fact, a number of commentators, including Stephen Schwartz and David Wurmser, have begun to focus on the Saudi roots of recent events. Robert Scheer, in what he thought was a reductio ad absurdum, suggested that the grounds of invading Saudi Arabia were greater than those for invading Afghanistan.

This is a case where the argument might actually be correct. One could make the case that the West, keeping the corrupt Saudi regime in power, has been nursing a viper in its bosom. Perhaps one could suggest that Wilsonian crackpots want to invade Iraq, while the Wilsonian realists should suggest that we invade Saudi Arabia.

This is a case in which the long and continued relationship between the present American administration and the Saudi Arabia regime is standing in the way of a sensible policy.

Anti-Zionist critics say that the interests of Israel guide American policy too closely, but the sad reality of the last six decades is that the interests of Saudi Arabia's rulers have guided American policy far more closely. And even in this present crisis, in which the U.S. government is willing to bluntly tell Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon what to do, our government approaches the Saudi regime with quiet murmurs, and never protests no matter how unhelpful that regime has been.

Where are the swamps, which breed the terrorists? Some are in Egypt, and most are in Saudi Arabia. Since nothing the United States is doing will discommode either of those regimes in the slightest, it is pretty easy to see that no amount of wars with our "enemies" will end Islamic terrorism. It is our "friends," not our enemies, who are the problem.