Israel Kicks Hostile Arab Armies’ Butts 50 Yrs. Ago

John R. Houk

© June 6, 2017

In the 1967 – 50-years ago – June 5 -10; Israel fought a war with at least four Arab nations amassing troops on Israel’s border. Begin counting from day one through the last day, you have the Six-Day War.

Israel AGAIN defeated armies much-much larger than the Israel Defense Force (IDF). The Arab nations prepared for invasion for what they believed would be the utter destruction of Israel. Wisely, Israel utterly surprised the Egyptian military front by launching a preemptive attack which destroyed most of Egypt’s air force. Using the shock to Israel’s advantage, the IDF then launched their vastly outnumbered tanks and pushed Egypt out of the Sinai.  Then Jordan and Syria launched their invasions unaware that Egypt had gotten their butts kicked in the Sinai. Although there was a less of a surprise, the IDF ultimately prevailed against Syria and Jordan. The Golan Heights was taken from Syria and the land conquered by Jordan in 1948 was taken back which included Israel’s heritage of uniting Jerusalem. Making Jerusalem whole allowed Jewish access to their most holy site left to them – the Western Wall still standing after the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple circa 70 AD.

The Six Day War Project has a great video setting up the scene leading to 1967:

VIDEO: Why Did Israel Go To War? | Six Day War Project #1

Posted by Jerusalem U

Published on May 17, 2017

1/12 | In the first video of the mini-series, find out about the early steps that led to the 1967 Six Day War - a war that changed the future of Israel. Surrounded by enemy neighbors and only nine miles wide at its narrowest point, Israel was vulnerable.

See all the videos as they are released: http://www.sixdaywarproject.org/.

In May of 1967, the state of Israel was only 19 years old. At its inception in 1948, five Arab armies had coordinated a military invasion to prevent the creation of the small Jewish country. But Israel’s War of Independence succeeded in repelling the forces bent on Israel’s destruction. Israel reclaimed sovereignty over the ancient Jewish homeland, making way for the establishment of a Jewish country after 2,000 years of statelessness and periods of persecution.

Yet despite Israel’s success in creating a new country, it did not enjoy peace with its neighbors. Terrorism and frequent attacks on three borders kept Israel in a perpetual state of alert.

To the north, from the Golan Heights, Syria shelled Jewish communities below on a regular basis. In the South and East, Arab terrorists from Egyptian-controlled Gaza and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank infiltrated and perpetrated attacks on Israeli civilians, killing 400 in the 19 years since Israeli independence.

The attacks reached the point that they were condemned as “deplorable” by then-Secretary General of the United Nations U Thant.

Although the Jewish state had been welcomed into the United Nations and hailed by the international community, its Arab neighbors rejected its very right to exist, preparing to resume a war for Israel’s destruction which they had halted 19 years earlier. The Arab buildup for all-out war was very near.

In this video - the first in a 12-part mini-series - you will learn about the regional atmosphere leading up to the 1967 Six Day War, and find out about the early steps that led to the war that changed the future of Israel.

Like the Six Day War Project on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sixdaywarproject

This video was produced by Jerusalem U in partnership with The Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Jewish National Fund, the Israel Action Network, the European Jewish Congress and the Center for Israel Education. For more on the dramatic events and impact of the Six Day War, visit sixdaywarproject.org.

Thumbnail Photo Credit: Israel GPO/Moshe Milner
-----------

Subscribe and check out more awesome JerusalemU videos!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU63EiU7Y-8xcRntPIRVrzA?sub_confirmation=1

GET SOCIAL @ JERUSALEM U:
https://www.jerusalemu.org/
https://www.facebook.com/JerusalemU
http://instagram.com/Jerusalem_U
http://twitter.com/Jerusalem_U

-----------

Are you Jewish and aged 16-28? You could be eligible for … READ THE REST

If you are a bit impatient to educate yourself at the Six Day War Project, here is a 6:45 abbreviated 6-Day War documentary that will provide the highlights:

VIDEO: 50 Years Later: Remembering the Six-Day War

Posted by AIPAC

Published on May 24, 2017

While the military victory was resounding, the Six-Day War created unresolved challenges that Israel grapples with to this day. The war also bolstered America’s pro-Israel community and helped to further reinforce the foundation of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and America’s pro-Israel community. Learn more: http://fal.cn/SixDayWarReflections

Adam Garfinkle wrote an essay for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) reflecting on his historical view of the results of the Israeli victory in the 6-Day War.

JRH 6/6/17
Please Support SlantRight 2.0

****************

The Six Day and Fifty Years War

By Adam Garfinkle

June 5, 2017

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Chief-of-Staff Yitzhak Rabin, Gen. Rehavam Zeevi R and Gen. Narkis in the old city of Jerusalem - Source: Government Press Office/Flickr

The most important lesson of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war is that there is no such thing as a clean war. That war was very short and stunningly decisive militarily; it has been anything but politically. From the Israeli point of view, military victory solved some serious near-term challenges, but at the cost of generating or exacerbating a host of longer-term ones—some of which may have come along anyway, some not, some of which may have been averted (or worsened) had Israeli postwar policy been different—and we cannot know for certain which are which. To ask whether what has transpired after the war “had to be that way” constitutes an aspiration to levitate the philosopher’s stone.

At any rate, of the war’s many consequences, three stand out as pre-eminent. First, major wars change the societies that fight and endure their consequences. The Six Day War changed the political, social-psychological, and, in at least one key case, demographic balances within all the participating states and a few others besides, with multiple and varying secondary and tertiary effects over the years. Second, despite the war’s after-optic of a smashing Arab loss, it was the best thing that ever happened to the Palestinian national movement. And third, the war catalyzed a redirection of U.S. Cold War policy in the Middle East (and arguably beyond) from one teetering on the edge of generic failure to one of significant success.

At this fiftieth “jubilee” anniversary of the war, buckets of ink will inevitably be spilled mooting and booting about such questions and many others; a lot already has been, and I am not reluctant to add to the bucket count.[1] But before doing so, we all need to take a deep breath to inhale as much humility as we can—to remind ourselves what exactly we are doing and what we cannot do when we exhume moldering chunks of anniversarial history for reexamination.

Shiny Anniversaries

We are so very attracted to anniversaries in the long parade of political history. We love to draw clear lessons from them, if we can—and if we can’t some others will claim to do so anyway. We are also attracted to thinking in terms of parsimonious eras with sharp lines of delineation between them; anniversaries of turning or tipping points help us mightily to draw such lines—which is precisely why we call them epochal. Wars, mostly hot but occasionally cold, figure centrally in the pantheon of such points.

The June 1967 Arab-Israeli War is all but universally considered to be epochal in this sense, so the recent ink flow is no wonder as journalists, scholars, memoirists, and others look for lessons and insight as to how those supposed sharp lines that divide eras were drawn. The subtitle of a new book furnishes a case in point: “The Breaking of the Middle East.”[2]

There is a problem here—at least one, arguably more than one. Without yet having read this book, I cannot say for sure that this subtitle is not magnificently meaningful. But I can say for sure that it puzzles me. What does it mean to say that a region of the world is “broken”? Does it imply that before the 1967 Middle East War the region was somehow whole, a description that implies adjectives such as peaceful, stable, and nestled in the warm logic of a benign cosmos; and suggests that regional wholeness also meant that its state or regime units were seen as legitimate by their own populations and by other states and regimes? So on June 4, 1967, the Middle East was whole, and by June 11, it was well on its way to being broken?

All of which is to say that the penchant for reposing great significance in anniversaries is often distortive, because for many it reinforces the right-angled sureties and sharp distinctions—and presumed causal chains leading into our own time bearing those precious, sought-after lessons—that historical reality rarely abides. Only by rounding off the ragged edges, usually with a rasp composed of our contemporary concerns and convictions unselfconsciously pointed backwards, can such artificial categories be devised. Ambiguity annoys most people, and so they go to some lengths to duck it, in the case of getting arms around history by generating categories, boxes, and labels into which to shove obdurate facts. History, meanwhile, remains the sprawling entropic mess it has always been and will always remain.

To employ the anti-ambiguity rasp presupposes, too, that the craftsman commands cause and effect. We can, after all, only simplify a reality we presume to understand in its detail. When it comes to the Six Day War, that means presuming to know how it started and why, how it ended and why, and what the war led to thereafter in an array of categories: how the postwar geopolitical trajectory of the core Middle Eastern region and its periphery spilled forth; how the region’s relationship to the key Cold War superpower protagonists shifted; the war’s impact on the domestic political cultures of participants and near-onlookers; and more besides.

The problem here is that we know with confidence only some of these causal skeins, and, what is more (or actually less), some of what we know has not stayed constant over the past half century. At one point, say thirty years ago, we thought we understood the Soviet government’s role in fomenting the crisis by sending false reports of events in Syria to the Egyptian leadership; after the Soviet archive opened in the early 1990s, consensus on that point has weakened as revisionist interpretations have come forth.[3] Nasser’s moving-target motives at various points in the crisis leading to war seemed clear for a time, until they no longer quite did. Several more examples of elusive once-truths could be cited.

Alas, every seminal event has a pre-context and a post-context: the convolutions of historical reality that give rise to an event and its causal afterflow. The further we get from the event, the greater the still-expanding post-context overshadows the pre-context, because we can see, for example, how various things turned out in 2017 in a way we could not have in, say, 1987. But so much else has happened that must, of necessity, dilute any construction of direct or preponderant causality.

Thus, did the war push Israeli society into becoming more religious, as many have claimed? Did it help shift Israeli politics to the Right by transforming the relationship of Orthodox Judaism to Zionism, leading Orthodox Israelis to engage on many political issues to which they had been formerly aloof? Or was that a deeper social-demographic trend that would have happened anyway, if differently, war or no war? So we face a paradox: the richer the post-context becomes for any epochal event, the poorer becomes our ability to isolate its downstream impact. As already suggested, we often enough make up for that poverty by exiling natural ambiguity before the demands of our current questions or biases. That is how we predict the past.

Scholars do try to isolate causal threads, of course, but differently because intellectual business models, so to speak, differ. Historians tend to seek out particularities; political scientists tend to search for general rules. Historians like their rocks fresh and jagged; political scientists like theirs rounded by patterns that flow through time. Each to their own intellectual aesthetic.

And the rest of us? How do we chase truth in history? Consider that if you pick up a history book and a memoir old enough to serve as an adjunct to it, you will have in your hands two different perspectives on the political world. An international political history of the 1930s written in the 2010s will take a passage of reality—say about the British, French, and American reaction to the 1935 Italian aggression against Ethiopia—and might spend two sentences or perhaps a paragraph on it. A memoir written in the 1950s by someone actually involved in debating and shaping that reaction will read very differently, recalling details, sideways connections to other issues, and nuances of policies and personalities bound to be lost in a general text if it aspires to be less than 10,000 pages long. In a history book such a mid-level event is likely to be framed as a consequence of larger forces that were leading to more portentous happenings (say, World War II); in a memoir it is more likely to be framed as both illustration of a synthetic historical moment, akin to a zeitgeist that is fully felt but is recalcitrant to reductionist analysis, and partial cause of what came after. Which do we read; which do we trust?

The answer is both, and wholly neither. How will the Six Day War figure in history books fifty years from now? There’s no way to know, because it will depend at least as much on what happens between now and then as it will on what happened in May and June 1967. But one thing we do know: As the post-context of the war doubles, the thinness and sameness of the description will grow, and be of little help in understanding how the main actors involved saw their circumstances. It will lose a sense of human verisimilitude. Details invariably give way to theme, and narratives grow shorter even as their truth claims grow larger. The thickness of memoirs will retain that sense of human verisimilitude. But what they provide in terms of broader context may suffer from too narrow an authorial aperture, and perhaps a bad memory in service to ego protection, if not other incidental causes of inaccuracy. As with many aspects of life, intellectual and otherwise, tradeoffs spite us in our search for clarity.

The point of all this?  Anniversaries are shiny. They attract a lot of attention, much of it self-interested and sentimental enough to lure some people into excessive simplifications if not outright simplemindedness. If someone will bait the hook, someone else will swallow it. We witnessed exactly such a spectacle not long ago at the 100^th anniversary of Sykes-Picot, and we’ll see it again a few months hence with the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.[4] But as Max Frankel once said, “simplemindedness is not a handicap in the competition of social ideas”—or, he might have added, historical interpretations. If it gets you on TV talk shows to sell your book, no form of simplification is liable to remain out of bounds these days. After all, what is fake history if not a collection of aged fake news?

Shining On

Never mind all that: I want people to read this essay, so rest assured that I know what happened and why, and what it all means even down to today. And now that I have donned sequins and glitter, I can be almost as brief and punchy as I am shiny, as is the current custom.

What did the war mean for the region? Plenty. It proved to remaining doubters that the Arabs could not destroy Israel by conventional force of arms. It helped establish Israel’s permanence in the eyes of its adversaries, the world at large, and, to an extent, in the eyes of its own people. That changed Israel’s domestic political culture. It no longer felt to the same extent like a pressure-cooking society under constant siege, and that, along with demographic and other subterranean social trends, ironically loosened the political grip of Israel’s founding generation of leaders, and the Labor Party. Less than a decade after the war Revisionist Zionists came to power for the first time, and now, fifty years later, Israel has the most rightwing government in its history. Did the Six Day War directly cause that? Of course not; but it was one of many factors that steered Israeli politics toward its current circumstances.

The war also began the occupation, first of Golan, the West Bank, and Gaza—in time a bit less of Golan and not of Gaza at all. If you had told typical Israelis in the summer of 1967 that fifty years later the West Bank would still be essentially occupied, neither traded for peace nor annexed, they would have thought you mad or joking. Israel as an independent state was 19 years and a few weeks old on June 5, 1967. The twentieth anniversary of the war in 1987 was about the midpoint of Israel’s modern history, half within-the-Green-Line and half beyond it. Now vastly more of Israel’s history has passed with the occupation as a part of it. Many more Israelis today cannot remember Israel in its pre-June 1967 borders than can—and that includes the Arabs citizens of the state as well as their ethno-linguistic kin living in the West Bank and Gaza.

In Israel there is a huge open debate, and a constant more private discussion beneath it, as to how the occupation has changed the nature of Israeli society. It is a difficult debate to set premises for, because in fifty years a lot is going to change in any modern society, occupation or no occupation. My view, like that of most Israelis I know, is that the occupation has been significantly corrosive of many Israeli institutions. They would like the occupation to end if it could be ended safely; but increasingly most agree that it can’t be, at least anytime soon. The remarkable fact is that, considering the circumstances, the damage to morale and heart, beyond institutions, has not been even worse. Israel’s moral realism has proved resilient. But the damage has not been slight, and of course it is ongoing.

As for the Arabs, the war crushed the pretentions of Arab Socialism and of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Within what the late Malcolm Kerr called “the Arab Cold War” it played in favor of the Arab monarchies against the military-ruled republics and hence generally in favor of the West; but it did not guarantee the safety of monarchical rule everywhere: Just 27 months later the Sanusi kingdom in Libya fell to a young army colonel named Muamar Qadaffi. None of the defeated Arab states lost its leader right away: not Nasser in Egypt, or King Hussein in Jordan, or Nurredin al-Atassi in Syria. But by the late autumn of 1970 Nasser was dead and al-Atassi had been displaced by Hafez al-Assad. Rulers also rolled in Iraq, and the very next year, with the British withdrawal from East of Suez, the United Arab Emirates came into being against its own will.

The war, therefore, was one element—more important in some places than others—in a general roiling of Arab politics (and I haven’t even mentioned stability-challenged zones like Yemen and Sudan), those politics being pre-embedded, so to speak, in generically weak states (again, some more than others).[5] Not that Arab politics was an oasis of serenity before June 1967 either, as a glance at post-independence Syrian history will show. Indeed, the contention that the Six Day War, by hollowing out the pretensions of secular Arab nationalism for all to see, presaged the “return of Islam” with which we and many others struggle today is both true and overstated—in other words, too shiny. The frailties of secular nationalism among the Arab states preceded the war and would have multiplied on account of any number and kind of failures to come, war or no war.

In any event, the political impact of the Arab loss was mitigated by the “Palestine” contradiction that then lay at the heart of Arab politics. “Palestine” was, and remains to some extent, a badge of shame, for it epitomizes the failure of the Arab states to achieve its goals. Yet it is only a badge; the persistence of the conflict, sharply inflected by the 1967 loss, has served as a raison d’être for most ruling Arab elites, their unflagging opposition to Israel as a symbol of legitimacy. In the parlous context of inter-Arab politics, too, the conflict has served as the only thing on which all the Arab regimes could symbolically unite. Non-democratic Arab elites have used the conflict both as a form of street control internally, and as a jousting lance in their relations with other Arab states.

Yet by far the most important consequence of the Arab defeat in 1967 was to free the Palestinian national movement from the clutches of the Arab states. The theory before June 1967 was that the Arab states would destroy Israel in a convulsive, epic war, and then hand Palestine over to the Palestinians. The hysteria that overtook the Arab street leading to war shows how widespread this theory was, and the war itself showed how hollow a promise it was. So the Palestinians took matters into their own hands for the first time, seizing control of the Palestine Liberation Organization from its Egyptian sponsors and reversing the theoretical dynamic of liberation:  Palestinians would liberate Palestine, and that victory would supercharge and unify the Arabs to face the hydra-headed monster of Western imperialism. The key bookends of this transformation as it manifested itself in Arab politics writ large were the Rabat Arab Summit of 1974, which passed responsibility for “occupied Palestine” from Jordan to the PLO, and the 1988 decision by King Hussein to formally relinquish Jordan’s association with the West Bank, which it had annexed and ruled for 18 years after the 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreements.

But how would the Palestinians themselves, led by the new and authentic PLO, liberate Palestine? They had in mind a revolutionary people’s war, an insurrection focused on the territories Israel newly occupied. It took its inspiration from lukewarm Maoism and its example from the Vietcong. The attempted insurrection in the West Bank failed miserably and rapidly; terrorist attacks mounted from east of the Jordan and across the border with Egypt became the next tactical phase as Palestinian nationalism’s organizational expression fractured. In time, Palestinian use of contiguous lands in Jordan and later in Lebanon to launch repeated terror attacks against Israeli civilians sparked civil wars in both countries. It did not bring about the “liberation” of even one square centimeter of “Palestine.”

Terrorism, however, did put the Palestinian issue “on the map” for much of the world, and now, fifty years later, Palestinians can have a state if their leaders really want one and are prepared to do what it takes to get it—the evidence so far suggesting that they don’t, and won’t. Nevertheless, looking back from fifty years’ hindsight, the Six Day War was about the best thing that could have happened for the Palestinians; that fact that they have not consolidated that windfall politically is their own doing, but everyone’s tragedy.

As to terrorism, it is true that the pusillanimous behavior of many governments in the 1970s, including some allied in NATO to the United States, helped the PLO shoot, bomb, and murder its way to political respectability. So one might venture that by helping to show that terrorism post-Six Day War can work at least to some extent, these governments bear some responsibility for the metathesis of nationalist, instrumentalist terrorism into the mass-murder apocalyptical kind we have witnessed more recently with al-Qaeda and ISIS. To me it’s another in a series of shiny arguments, more superficially attractive than fully persuasive. It is not entirely baseless, however.

But far more important than what the war did for the thinking of the Palestinians was what it did to the thinking of the Arab state leaders whose lands were now under Israeli occupation: Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.  Before the war, Arab support for “Palestine” was highly theoretical, highly ineffectual, and in truth amounted merely to a symbolic football the Arab regimes used to compete with one another in the ethereal arena of pan-Arab fantasies. Now, suddenly, the core national interests of three Arab states—including the largest and most important one, Egypt—became directly and ineluctably entwined with the reality as opposed to the symbol of Israel.

The Egyptians, particularly after Nasser’s death brought Anwar el-Sadat to power, got downright pragmatic. Israel had something these three states wanted—chunks of their land. And the Egyptian and Jordanian leaderships, at least, knew that a price would have to be paid to redeem that pragmatism. Complications aplenty there were, as anyone who lived through the dozen years after the 1967 War knows well. Nevertheless, this critical divide among the Arabs—between state leaders who could afford to remain only symbolically engaged and those who could not—shaped inter-Arab politics then and still does to some degree today. First Egypt in March 1979 and then Jordan in October 1994 paid the price and made peace with Israel. It seemed like forever passed between June 1967 and March 1979, but it was less than a dozen years—quick by historical standards.

While Egypt recovered the entire Sinai through its peace arrangement with Israel, Jordan did not recover the West Bank. The war had shifted the political demography of the Hashemite Kingdom, sending more Palestinians to live among East Bankers—some now refugees twice over and some for the first time. The consequence was to intensify Jordan’s internalization of its problem with Palestinian nationalism: It had lost land but gained souls whose fealty to the monarchy was presumably weak. The benefit of peace to Jordan in 1984, and hence its main purpose from King Hussein’s point of view, was therefore not to regain territory but to strengthen the stake that both Israel and the United States had in Jordan’s stability in the face of future challenge from any quarter, internal and external alike.

Syria, do note, did not follow the Egyptian and Jordanian path to peace, and so the Golan Heights remain for all practical purposes part of Israel. The reasons have to do with the complex sectarian demography of the country, and specifically with the fact that since 1970 Syria has been ruled by a minoritarian sect in loose confederation with the country’s other non-Sunni minorities. The Alawi regime has needed the symbolic pan-Arab mantle of the Palestinian cause more than any other Arab state, particularly as one with a border with Israel. Regime leaders anyway did not consider the Golan to be their sectarian patrimony, but more important, peace and normalization seemed to the Syrian leadership more of a threat to its longevity (and to its ability to meddle in Lebanese affairs) than a benefit. Now that Syria as a territorial unit has dissolved in a brutal civil war, the legacy of 1967 has been rendered all but moot.

Does that mean that Egypt and Jordan essentially sold out the Palestinians, making a separate peace? Well, much political theater aside, yes. But they really had no choice, and not selling out the Palestinians would not have gained the Palestinians what they wanted anyway. That, in turn, left the Palestinians with little choice. Eventually, the PLO leadership also decided to “engage” Israel directly, but without giving up what it still called the “armed struggle.”

Its partial pragmatism, tactical in character, gained the PLO a partial advance for the Palestinians through the truncated Oslo process: a kind of government with a presence in Palestine; some “police” under arms; a transitional capital in Ramallah; wide international recognition; and more. Withal, the “territories” remain under Israeli security control, and the Palestinian economy (jobs, electricity grid, water, and more) remains essentially a hostage to Israel’s.

This has given rise to perhaps the most underappreciated irony in a conflict replete with them: First Israel internalized the Palestinian nationalist problem in June 1967 by occupying at length the West Bank and Gaza, and then the PLO internalized its Israel problem by drifting via Oslo into essential dependence on Israel for basic sustenance and even security support (against Hamas, for example). Note that it was hard for Israel to bomb PLO headquarters in Tunis in October 1985, but very easy to send a tank column into downtown Ramallah ten years later. It’s all so very odd, you may think, but there you have it.

The Bigger Picture

Now to the larger, international scene. What the Six Day War showed was that Soviet patronage of the Arabs and arms sales to them could deliver neither victory to the Arabs nor reflected advantage for the Soviet Union. This devalued the allure of Soviet regional overtures reassured the Western-oriented Arab regimes and hence played directly into the portfolio of U.S. and Western interests: keep the Soviets out, the oil flowing, and Israel in existence (the latter construed at the time as a moral-historical obligation, not a strategic desideratum).

The Johnson administration figured the essence out, which is why in the aftermath of the war it did not do what the Eisenhower administration did after the Suez War of 1956: pressure Israel to leave the territories it had conquered in return for promises that, in the event, turned out to be worthless. It rather brokered a new document—UNSCR 242—calling for withdrawal from territories (not “the” territories) in return for peace.

But it was not until the War of Attrition broke out in 1969 around and above the Suez Canal—a direct follow-on to the Six Day War—that the new Nixon administration codified in policy this basic strategic understanding. To prevent and if possible roll back Soviet inroads in the Middle East, the U.S. government would guarantee continued Israeli military superiority—that was the start of the major U.S. military supply relationship to Israel that endures today (the younger set may not know it, but Israel won the Six Day War with a French-supplied air force). In short, nothing the Soviets could supply or do would help the Arabs regain their lands or make good their threats. The events of the Jordanian Civil War in September 1970, and the way Nixon administration principles insisted on interpreting and speaking about that civil war, only deepened the conviction and the anchors of the policy.

On balance, the policy worked well, despite one painful interruption. By July 1972, President Sadat had sent a huge Soviet military mission packing out of Egypt, and was all but begging the United States to open a new relationship. Egypt had been by far the most critical of Soviet clients in the Middle East, and Sadat’s volte face represented a huge victory for U.S. diplomacy. Alas, neither the victory-besotted Israelis nor the increasingly distracted Americans paid Sadat the attention he craved—so he taunted the Soviets to give him just enough stuff to draw Jerusalem and Washington’s eyes his way: He started a war in October 1973. This also worked, leading as already noted to the March 1979 peace treaty—a geopolitical and psychological game-changer in the region and, ultimately, beyond.

For most practical purposes, Israel’s role as an effective proxy for U.S. power in the Middle East endured through the end of the Cold War, although its benefits paid out quietly, more often than not in what trouble it deterred as opposed to actively fought.[6] And the Israeli-Egyptian relationship—imperfect as it may be—still endures as a guarantee that there can be no more Arab-Israeli conventional wars on the scale of 1967 or even 1973. These are both, at least partially, strategic achievements born of the conjoining of Israeli power and American diplomacy, and—it bears mentioning—these are achievements that were constructed and made to endure pretty much regardless of the state of play in Israel’s relations with the Palestinians.

Obviously, the end of the Cold War put paid to the structure of this regional American strategy, its logic dissipated through victory. In that sense, the larger global strategic impact of the Six Day War ended when the Berlin Wall fell. While Israel remains a strategic partner of the United States in the post-Cold War environment, largely through intelligence sharing and other activities, its value as strategic proxy diminished as the focus of U.S. concerns moved east, toward Iraq and the Gulf. In the 1991 Gulf War, for example, Israel through no fault of its own became a complication for American policy—a target set for Iraqi scuds—not an asset, such that the U.S. government pleaded with its Israel counterpart not to use its military power against a common foe.

Amid the sectarian and proxy wars of the present moment in the region, Israeli arms lack any point of political entrée that can aid U.S. policy. Even when it comes to counterterrorism efforts, Israeli intelligence is indeed valuable but we will not see Israeli special forces attacking salafi terrorist organizations far from home. The last thing Israel needs is to persuade still more murderous enemies to gaze its way.

Only if the two parties come to focus on a common enemy—never the case during the Cold War, by the way, when for Israel the Arabs were the threat and for the United States the Soviets were the threat—could a truly robust U.S.-Israeli strategic partnership be born anew. And that common enemy, which could bring in also many Sunni Arab states and possibly Turkey as well, is of course Iran. But we are now very deep into the post-context of the Six Day War, more than six degrees of separation from any plausible causal skein leading back to June 1967.

A Smaller Picture

The war affected the political and social-psychological condition not only of state actors but of some others as well. As the Middle East crisis deepened in May 1967, I was a (nearly) 16-year old Jewish high school student in the Washington, D.C. area. Just like every American who was of age in November 1963 can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, I suspect that just about every Jew of age anywhere in the world in May and June of 1967 can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard that the war had started, and how they felt when it had ended.

We had been frightened, and afterwards we were relieved and even elated. It turned out that a lot of what we thought was true about the state of affairs at the time was incorrect. That was hardly a unique experience, but more important, over time the effects of the Six Day War on American Jewry and other Jewish communities outside Israel were dramatic—and the triangular relationship between Israel, American Jewry, and the United States has never since been the same.[7]

Figuring it all out has borne its own challenges, surprises, and disappointments. Those on all three sides who thought they knew what was going on—who was dependent on whom, who could count on whom, who had political leverage over whom, and so on—learned better, often the hard way. But none of this has involved armies with modern weapons and high-level state diplomacies interacting; no, it is truly complicated and tends to generate narratives that are very, very shiny—so let’s just leave it at that.

If You Pick Up the Gun, You Roll the Dice 

Let us conclude by returning to where we began, using another’s much earlier conclusion as our prooftext. On Saturday, June 3, 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol concluded a meeting of his inner cabinet with these words: “Nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here.”

Eshkol (as well as the out-of-office but still prominent David Ben-Gurion) had counseled patience and restraint to Israel’s confident military leadership as the spring 1967 crisis grew, and only reluctantly came to the decision for war. Keenly sensing the ironies of history—Jewish history not least—he knew that the war would not be politically conclusive. He realized that whatever immediate threats needed to be extinguished, war would not deliver peace and security before, if ever, it delivered mixed and unanticipated consequences. He was right.

Not even the shrewdest statesmen are wise enough to foresee the consequences of a major war: When you pick up the gun, you roll the dice. That, I think, is no shiny lesson, but one more likely for the historically literate to recall the past’s many dull pains. May it help future leaders to control their own and others’ expectations if use force they must.

---

[1] I have written on the anniversary of the Six Day War before:  See “Arab Loss Had Profound Effect on Politics in the Middle East,” Jewish Exponent, June 5, 1987; “1967: One War Won, a Few Others Started,” Newsday, April 30, 1998; and “Six Days, and Forty Years,” The American Spectator, June 5, 2007.

[2] Guy Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press).

[3] See, for example, Isabella Ginor & Gideon Remez, Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2007).

[4]  On the former, note my “The Bullshistory of “Sykes-Picot”, The American Interest Online, May 16, 2016.

[5] For detail on what is meant by “pre-embedded” in “generically weak states,” see my “The Fall of Empires and the Formation of the Modern Middle East,” Orbis (Spring 2016).

[6] A point emphasized in Michael Mandelbaum, “1967’s Gift to America,” The American Interest Online, June 2, 2017.

[7] I have written of this triangular relationship elsewhere: “The Triangle Connecting the U.S., Israel and American Jewry May Be Coming Apart,” Tablet, November 5, 2013.

________________

Israel Kicks Hostile Arab Armies’ Butts 50 Yrs. Ago

John R. Houk

© June 6, 2017

____________

The Six Day and Fifty Years War

The Foreign Policy Research Institute, founded in 1955, is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests. In the tradition of our founder, Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, Philadelphia-based FPRI embraces history and geography to illuminate foreign policy challenges facing the United States. More about FPRI »

Foreign Policy Research Institute · 1528 Walnut St., Ste. 610 · Philadelphia, PA 19102 Tel: 1.215.732.3774 Fax: 1.215.732.4401 www.fpri.org

Copyright © 2000–2017. All Rights Reserved.

I Found Clarity in my Thoughts of Islam

John R. Houk

© March 3, 2014

I don’t wish to sound too sophomoric (a favorite term used by one of my History Professors when a student or pundit said something he considered beneath his intellect), but I have to make that sound – SHAZZAM!

I just read an essay by Dr. Mary Habeck a PhD in history from Yale; a MA in International Relations from Yale and a BA in International Relations, Russian, and Spanish from Ohio State. Those are a lot of letters.

Dr. Habeck’s essay has brought the best clarity for me to understand Islam in that so-called fine line between Moderate and Radical. I use the term “so-called” because I have had quite a bit of difficulty in seeing the difference in beliefs between Moderate and Radical Islam even if there is a difference in practice.

Here is my difficulty with the concepts of “Moderate” and “Radical” within Islam. ALL practicing Muslims believe the Quran is the direct manifested word from their deity Allah as delivered from whom Muslims consider the perfect man their prophet Mohammed (or Muhammad or Mohamet or whatever depending in the time frame someone writes about this guy). That means the Quran is an absolutist holy document. Then the other commentaries on the Quran such as the Hadith and Sira (or whatever combination the Sunna is as part of the Sira – I am unsure of the difference between Sira and Sunna) are of value depending on which Muslim scholar majority opinion says which commentary are authentic or bogus. When there is wide agreement on authenticity on Muslim commentaries those commentaries are nearly as holy as the Quran in its force but still NOT the very word of Allah.

I reassert the word “ALL” because it doesn’t matter whether one is Moderate or Radical, all Muslims believe what I just wrote about the Quran, Hadith and Sira. What Dr. Habeck has accomplished for me is how the Moderate and Radical Muslim interpret the meanings of the Quran, Hadith and Sira.

A Muslim who contends that he/she is Moderate will undoubtedly respond, “Well DUHHHH!” However, in Dr. Habeck’s clarity I also comprehend why there is little public condemnation from a Moderate or as the good scholar Doctor writes, a “typical Muslim” about the terrorist actions of a Radical Muslim. The Moderate Muslim will consider the violence and harshness employed by Radical Muslims as un-Islamic. Even so the Radical Muslim STILL IS interpreting the Quran, Hadith and Sira from their original intent. Ergo even if the interpretation varies in implementation in the now, the Radical Islamic goals of global Islam, a global Caliphate and an absolute Islamic society governed by Islamic Sharia Law; the ends of Radical Islam do not differ from the ends of Moderate Islam. That which differs is the MEANS.

The Moderate (or “typical”) Muslim have updated their “MEANS” with modernity which is indeed is more peaceful than the “MEANS” of Radical Islam. Nonetheless, wherever Islam is already supreme a Moderate Muslim will view Islam as a superior way of life for society and law. This is the case even if Moderate Islam by activity is of a more peaceful manner. In an Islamic society Islamic Superiority is more than an ideological concept it is a norm that is sacrosanct. Hence when a non-Muslim is viewed as being insulting to that which holy even Moderate Muslims can be stirred to go nuts against that non-Muslim.

In Western society differences of opinion in ideology or religion are viewed as an individual right. Especially in the USA where we have enshrined Liberty in the First Amendment of our Constitution. Thus everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as it does not elicit harm to individuals or the community. In America the radical side of Leftism which is an offshoot of Marxism which leads to absolute State control of individuals especially by force is frowned upon even by center-Left Americans. Also the radical side of the Right Wing such as unrestrained Capitalism-Free Market that harms individuals in the name of the bottom line of profit is frowned upon even by center-Right Americans. Also there are the violent Right Wingers that will utilize violence to bring racial superiority ideologies that leads to the harm of individuals is heavily frowned upon by center-Left and center-Right Americans. The key for Americans at the least unconsciously is the harm to individual Liberty.

The Right of individual Liberty is absolutely foreign in Islamic society. The actions, beliefs and Freedoms are viewed through the filter of submission to Allah. If an action, belief or perceived freedom deviates from submission to Allah as understood from the Quran, Hadith and Sira is unacceptable in Islamic society.

This is the real essence of the clash of societies when it comes to Western thought and Islamic thought!

Individual Rights are the very identity of Americans and to a filtered extent due to history to all Western influenced nations. Submission to Allah is the very identity of Muslims. As long as there is a U.S. Constitution Americans as a whole will not accept Islam. As long as the Quran is considered absolute closely followed by authentic Hadith and Sira; Muslims as a whole will not accept or conceive Liberty as a good thing.

Just to be clear – even though Dr. Habeck brought some clarity to my mind, I cannot speak that this is the same clarity that Dr. Habeck has a conclusion of an irreparable clash between Western Liberty and Islamic submission. In fact the essay I read “Attacking America: Al Qaeda’s Grand Strategy in Its War with the World” is less about an inevitable clash between the West and Islam and more about American leaders underestimating the global agenda of Radical Islam especially as embodied in the Islamic terrorist organization al Qaeda. Even so – I have clarity about America and Islam. And thus I feel actually feel better about distrusting all of Islam in general. This is the case even if I am labeled an Islamophobic bigot. If the love of America makes me a bigot, then a bigot I will be when it comes to Islam.

JRH 3/3/14 (Hat Tip: Foreign Policy Research Institute)

Please Support SlantRight 2.0

********************************************************

Attacking America: Al Qaeda’s Grand Strategy in Its War with the World

By Mary Habeck

February 2014

Notified by FPRI email - 3/1/2014 6:59 PM

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Defining what precisely is meant by grand strategy and how al Qaeda, in particular, views grand strategy is vital for our national security. In fact, grand strategy is intertwined with every policy debate over al Qaeda that is currently ongoing in Washington, D.C.

The questions of what is al Qaeda, and who is al Qaeda have been debated since 2001. More recently, questions have arisen about affiliates and what is their relationship with al Qaeda. Is there any command and control between al Qaeda and its affiliates? What is the proper way to deal with these groups? And can we actually win against them? This talk will seek to add to this debate by offering answers to the questions of what al Qaeda is and what the group hopes to achieve.

WHAT IS GRAND STRATEGY?

We must begin by defining “grand strategy” and by defending the existence of this concept.  Grand strategy is the highest level strategy that an organization or country possesses for dealing with a specific problem. Given this definition, grand strategy is related to policy, but policy often is simply a set of objectives. For instance, under the George W. Bush Administration, a policy objective was to spread democracy or democratization around the Middle East. Yet, stating this objective does not detail how the country would go about achieving it. A grand strategy has much more to it than just an objective. Rather, it sets a variety of ways and means—the plans that one might use to achieve those policy objectives. Specific strategies are then subordinate to, and seek to support and fulfill, this top-level plan. These strategies would encompass military, political, economic, and diplomatic aspects, among others that are necessary to achieve the over-all grand strategy. Under the specific strategies would be operational art and tactics as well—working out the plans, ways, and means in far greater detail, theoretically all the way down to specific groups, units, or even individuals, perhaps on a particular battlefield or in one embassy and what each is supposed to do on a daily or weekly basis in order to achieve the grand strategy.

Given this level of detail, some observers are skeptical about whether grand strategy can even exist. Can an entire nation really have bold ideas about what they are going to achieve, work out a finely detailed plan and then implement it in any serious way? Yet, if one looks at the United States, it is possible to tease out the existence of several grand strategies. There was Manifest Destiny, which was the grand strategy for expansion of the country. During the Cold War there was a grand strategy that included deterrence and containment.  But other experts and scholars contend that these were simply pieces of a real grand strategy; they did not include a fully worked out concept about economics, scientific knowledge, industry, and other important concerns, nor did they include the finely worked-out details for operational art or tactics that were actually followed by the United States as a whole.  Others would argue that the United States has at times developed a grand strategy but it has been implemented very poorly.

As we can see, grand strategies, in general, are contested. Thus, there is a significant disagreement amongst experts about whether al Qaeda, as a non-state actor, with no real territory under its control, can have a grand strategy. Based on my research, I contend that al Qaeda not only has a theoretical grand strategy that they have discussed in statements, speeches, and written documents, but that since the 1990s, al Qaeda has been seeking to achieve parts of their grand strategy. And they plan to achieve the rest of it over the next 200 years, their grand strategic time frame.

Most experts believe that in grand strategic planning, one must begin with an objective—the ends that one wants to achieve known today, in general, as policy objectives. At the very highest level, what do we want to accomplish as an organization or a nation? But in order to achieve the objectives, an organization actually needs to start somewhere more basic and understand certain key starting points:  Where are we starting from? What are we? What are our strengths, our weaknesses? Who are our friends, our allies? And who are our opponents or enemies? There is, as well, an important set of assumptions that must be made explicit rather than implicit so that they can be questioned and critiqued. Then to get from the starting point to the objective one must elaborate a pathway called the plan. This plan will include the means that will be used in order to progress from the starting point to the objective.

It is important to note that assumptions are always adjusted along the way. The organization (or nation) should have a mechanism that convenes on a regular basis to consider what was done right and wrong; what can be learned from experiences; and what should be changed about the organization or its way of doing business so that it will be better at achieving its objectives. Al Qaeda is, above all else, a learning organization. It has gone through a tremendous evolution since its formation in 1988 to its current incarnation. This shows an impressive ability to adjust, to learn, and to evolve over time in reaction to what the United States and others have been doing to stop it.

HOW WILL WE KNOW IF AL QAEDA HAS A GRAND STRATEGY?

Having laid out this elaborate vision for a grand strategy, perhaps we need to ask an even more basic question:  how will we know if our enemy has a grand strategy? At times the U.S. has been very lucky and had an enemy who is eager to share its grand strategy with the world. For instance, Adolf Hitler had a grand strategy that he was perfectly happy to share. In fact, he wrote an entire book about it, which was widely distributed and available for any government to buy and read. Unfortunately, few people read this book outside Germany or thought that anybody would be crazy enough to seek to achieve these insane objectives using such violent ways and means. Basically, the book was ignored until far too late.

In the same way, al Qaeda has been perfectly happy to publish books and issue written statements about their grand strategy. In fact, there are multiple such “Mein Kampfs” in which they go into great detail about what they hope to achieve and how they are going to achieve it. But not many people are paying attention to what the enemy itself is writing about what they want to achieve and how they are going to go about doing it.

Another way that one can know if an enemy has a grand strategy is through speeches, lectures, and so on, as Hitler gave during the 1920s and 1930s. As with its writing, al Qaeda has been very willing to give hundreds of public audio and video statements since the 1990s about their grand strategy. The reason that they have been so verbose is because they are hoping to convince people to join them, and these lectures and speeches are an attempt to persuade them that their objectives are sound and can be achieved, and that their ways and means can be supported.  They also believe that they are starting from a very strong position with a firm idea about who they are and who the enemy is that shows that they can achieve their objectives. This is why they have been happy to share their grand strategy with the world.

Beyond this, it is also possible to compare what people are saying with what they actually do. After all, it is entirely possible that the organization could just be insane or braggarts spouting nonsense, and they either do not really mean to achieve all these goals, or they simply do not have the capabilities to do so.  To understand if a nation or organization has a grand strategy, one must always compare what their public documents and statements say with what they are actually doing in the real world.

Finally, if a company, for example, is going to spread globally, open affiliates or branches all over the world and they seek a uniform strategy that every one of these affiliates will follow, then one could look at these affiliates around the world and analyze whether these branches are following uniform ways and means to achieve the same ends. On a global scale, one would seek to understand if it is just here in the United States that they are following this playbook or if it is guiding their actions in every country that has a branch of the company. If one can see a broadly unified strategy—including specifics that no other company has adopted or tactics that seem actually counterproductive but are followed in any case regardless of local circumstances—then we can conclude that this company might actually have a unified strategy on a global scale. On the other hand, if only one of the branches is actually doing what the company says is their strategy and others are explicitly contradicting the strategy in their words and actions, then we can be skeptical about whether this is actually occurring on a global scale as they claim.

AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGIC VISION

Having provided this background, it is now possible to turn to Al Qaeda’s grand strategy and see how fully articulated it is through its own statements and documents. Then, we will see how they have been following up on this with their own actions on a global scale. We begin with the starting points, that is the opponent’s ideology as well as their assumptions about themselves and the people they consider to be their enemies. Having laid out the starting conditions for Al Qaeda’s grand strategy, we will consider their objectives and then the means that they are using to achieve these objectives. Finally, we will look at the plans they are using to put everything together to achieve their objectives.

Al Qaeda’s basic ideological vision is something that they have been more than willing to share with the world from the time the group was founded. One of the first statements issued by Osama bin Laden, in 1996, provides a detailed explication of al Qaeda’s ideological vision and, in fact, its grand strategy as a whole. The statement is a very thick document called “Declaration of Jihad on the United States.” Most Americans know about the 1998 Declaration of Jihad, but the 1996 one was ignored. I believe that, at 22 pages and no bullet points, it was too long for most Americans. It was also confusingly written. Bin Laden began by talking about Saudi Arabia and half way through his statement suddenly addressed the United States. Most importantly, the document was issued in Arabic. The result was that most Americans did not pay any attention to this statement of al Qaeda’s objectives and grand strategic vision. One has to wonder who, in fact, this was written for if not the United States.

In this document, supplemented by multiple statements, including a terrific book by a man named Abu Bakr Naji, al Qaeda begins its ideological vision by stating that the main objective of the organization is to create the “caliphate” or an Islamic state in order to practice its version of Islam correctly. Second, they want to force the entire world – beginning with ordinary Muslims – to follow their extremist version of Islam and Sharia. Third, they argue that they are the only true believers in the entire world—this tiny group of a few hundred and then later a few thousand people. All other people who call themselves Muslims are just “nominal Muslims.” They are not real Muslims. And, in fact, al Qaeda call themselves the “saved sect,” or the “victorious party” to set themselves apart as a group that is guaranteed paradise, unlike the rest of the Muslim community, who may be going to paradise but may also be going to hell. They believe too that hostile unbelievers control the world. The international system was set up and is being run by these hostile unbelievers whose main purpose is to prevent the creation of an Islamic state, divide the Muslim-majority world into tiny statelets, and destroy Islam. According to al Qaeda, this has been the main goal of U.S. foreign policy from the beginning. And they actually have written histories of the United States to prove that this is true. That is why war against the United States and its allies is justified in their grand strategy.

THE IDEOLOGICAL ELEMENTS OF AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGY

Al Qaeda’s starting points and specifically their ideology are extremely important for understanding this basic vision. They have six different concepts that are foundational for explaining why they are the saved sect, why their version of Sharia is the only right and true one, and why other Muslims are not really real Muslims.  Four of these six foundational concepts have a place within Islam as a whole. It is best in explaining them to contrast al Qaeda’s views with those of the vast majority of the Muslim world so that we can see how ordinary Muslims think about these principles and the great differences between these views and those of Al Qaeda’s. The result will be a clear distinction between al Qaeda and the broader world of Islam. These foundational concepts include:

1. Tawhid. Ordinary Muslims understand Tawhid as the center of their entire religion. It means quite simply that there is only one God and only he should be worshipped. The term is usually translated as monotheism. Tawhid is as central to Islam, as the notion of the Trinity is for Christianity.

Al Qaeda has taken this core principle of Islam and given it a twist. They say that it is true, there is only one God and only he should be worshipped, but worship includes obedience to all of his laws because God is the only lawgiver and the only one with sovereignty.

This has two implications with which other Muslims do not agree. First, al Qaeda’s version of Tawhid implies that if a Muslim does not obey all of God’s laws, then he is not actually a Muslim. The second implication that al Qaeda draws is if God is the only lawgiver, the only one with sovereignty, anyone who attempts to make laws other than those that God has given humanity is not just making a political statement. Rather, they are actually making a statement about religion, i.e. that they believe in divinities other than God himself.  Al Qaeda in fact argues that democracy, which begins with the proposition that sovereignty lies with the people of a nation, and which grants legislative power to the people, puts man in the place of God who should be the only lawgiver.

Other Muslims think this is insane: how can the notion that there is just one God lead a Muslim to the conclusion that democracy is a foreign religion? Yet, there is an entire book, written by a member of the ulama who supports al Qaeda, which states that democracy is a foreign religion. This simply does not make sense to other Muslims. A good analogy would be if a sect of Christians argued that the Trinity implies that a nation must have three branches of government: God the Father is the president, God the Son would be the legislature, and God the Holy Spirit inspiring all would be the Supreme Court. That is how crazy that sounds to other Muslims, and yet this notion lies behind a great deal of what al Qaeda is doing in the world today.  It has forced them to conclude that they cannot work through democratic means, including elections or a political process, to achieve their ends. To do so would be to leave the religion of Islam and to join a foreign religion.

2. Jihad.  Instead, al Qaeda is committed to changing society through a violence that they call “Jihad.”  Again, this term is understood very differently by ordinary Muslims, who believe that Jihad means first and foremost a spiritual struggle to overcome evil either within oneself or within one’s society.  Ordinary Muslims also believe that defense of the nation is a God-given right, and this lawful physical struggle, when declared by the state, is also called “Jihad.”  The internal Jihad is, however, given priority by ordinary Muslims, who quote a well-known saying (hadith) of Muhammad in which he said that the internal struggle is the “greater Jihad,” while the physical struggle is the “lesser Jihad.”

In al Qaeda’s ideology, Jihad is interpreted as fighting and fighting alone, and the internal struggle is not the greater Jihad.  Instead, fighting and dying on the battlefield, whether in an offensive or defensive war, are considered the greatest sacrifice and the only way to transform society.  Al Qaeda also argues that this violence is commanded by God and, if an ordinary Muslim refuses to join their “Jihad,” he is sinning and perhaps not a “real” Muslim at all.

3. Dawa. This third concept is also extremely important for understanding al Qaeda’s actions in the world today, as well as their grand strategy. Dawa, for ordinary Muslims, is an integral part of their faith and a good deed to support with time or money.  Dawa for them is about preaching to those who are outside the faith to bring them in, to explain what the religion is like, why one should become a Muslim, and how to become a Muslim.  Some ordinary Muslims also understand Dawa as social action—feeding the poor, educating the disadvantaged, or fighting for justice for the oppressed.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has again taken this foundational concept and transformed it.  The group believes that Dawa is about converting “nominal” Muslims, to bring them into the al Qaeda fold and especially to convince ordinary Muslims to join in their “Jihad.”  The advent of Zawahiri as head of the organization seems to have also led al Qaeda to change its views of Dawa as social action, and to support working with the oppressed and disadvantaged in order to convince them to support al Qaeda and eventually to join in the organization’s violence.

4. Sharia. The term “Sharia” is much in the news these days, although there seems to be some misunderstanding about what constitutes Sharia.  There is no set of books marked “Sharia” that one can take off a shelf. Rather, Sharia is a legal system that has developed and changed over 1,400 years. It is not 30 or even 100 volumes in a legal corpus that is tightly bound, so that one might take down volume 32 to understand, for instance, what inheritance means within Islam. In fact, it includes thousands of volumes and four diverse schools of law that disagree with each other over a variety of issues within the Sunni tradition. Shia Muslims have their own schools of law. Sharia also includes a great deal of commentary, interpretation, and legal rulings that would take a lifetime to understand. But for most ordinary Muslims Sharia is Islam, and following God’s law is the religion, although for many Muslims, this is less about specific details and more about justice or morality. If another Muslim does not follow this moral code, ordinary Muslims do not see it as their duty to correct him; this is the responsibility of the state.

Related, when I see very poorly worded polls in the Muslim-majority world asking: “Would you like to have Sharia implemented in your country?” and people answer “yes,” I think that this is a very misleading way to ask the question. One might as well ask: “Do you believe in morality?” And the answer is obviously going to be yes.

Al Qaeda has a very different view. They begin by saying that Sharia is the entire religion, but beyond this point of agreement they say that there is just one correct version of Sharia, a very specific and extreme version, which they have been empowered to interpret and impose on other Muslims. If ordinary Muslims do not agree with al Qaeda, the organization believes that they have the God-given right to use violence to “correct” other Muslims and force them to follow this extremist vision of the law.  The actions taken by al Qaeda affiliates in northern Mali, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere, where resistant Muslims have been forced to follow this version of Sharia, show just how little other Muslims support this interpretation of Sharia.

5. Finally, there is a concept known as al-Wala’ wa-l-Bara’. This is based on two terms that can be translated as allegiance and disavowal or friendship and enmity. Within the broad world of Islam, this concept is not recognized, and is associated most nearly with a particular version of Salafism. The concept basically argues that everyone who is with al Qaeda, who agrees with the group completely, follows their extremist version of Sharia, believes in their ideas about Tawhid and Dawa:  these are their people, and al Qaeda will support and have friendship with them. But anyone who disagrees with al Qaeda, both ordinary Muslims as well as the unbelievers, must be shunned, separated from, and hated by al Qaeda members.

6. This leads to something called “Takfir,” that is declaring other Muslims to not really be Muslims. This has implications within their version of Sharia that are quite severe. One’s blood becomes “halal,” that is, one can be killed. All property can be taken away. You are divorced. You are disinherited. An ordinary Muslim becomes, in fact, a non-person. That is what al Qaeda has been doing to most of the Muslim-majority world. And by the way, this concept is of course completely unacceptable to ordinary Muslims.

This discussion leads to the inescapable conclusion that the vast majority of al Qaeda’s ideology is aimed at other Muslims and has nothing to do with the U.S.  In fact, justifying the attack on the United States was a departure for them, and one that was predicated solely on removing the U.S. from world affairs so that they would be able to proceed with the rest of their strategy. Al Qaeda’s entire vision is actually focused on taking over the religion of Islam and twisting it for their own purposes and ends. This explains, for instance, what has been happening to Muslims in northern Mali, Syria, Yemen and Somali, or any place where al Qaeda has attempted to implement its world view.

AL QAEDA’S VISION OF ITSELF AND THE WAR

Since al Qaeda’s vision is fundamentally about transforming other Muslims and Islam, much of the group’s identity is based on seeing themselves as people who are renewing the religion.   How precisely they would act to transform the religion led to two separate views of their role:  before 9/11, the leadership of the group talked about themselves as a vanguard, as a group that was going to charge ahead and others would follow. They would show other Muslims what Islam should be and the community would imitate them. But since 9/11, the leadership of al Qaeda has changed the way they talk about themselves. They are no longer depending on others to follow them. Rather, they are going to command others, to order people to do what they want and to have forces on the ground that they call branches who will do their bidding and act as their hands and feet out in the world.

This self-image of al Qaeda as divided into two pieces – a command structure and branches – is also reflected in current thinking in Washington about the group.  Many experts and the U.S. government itself use the terms al Qaeda “core” and al Qaeda “affiliates,” reflecting the language that is used by al Qaeda in talking about what it is and what it is attempting to accomplish. But the terms “core” and “affiliate” do not get at the functionality of the terms “command” and “branches.” Just as branches are organically part of the tree, so al Qaeda’s branches are viewed as integral parts of the overall organization and working in harmony with each other to achieve the leadership’s grand strategy.  In addition, the leadership of al Qaeda believes that they are in charge: they command and the branches obey. It is this latter contention that is most debated in Washington today:  just how much control does the leadership of al Qaeda have over the affiliates?  At stake in this debate is whether al Qaeda is “on the run” and nearing defeat or expanding its areas of influence throughout the Muslim-majority world as the U.S. withdraws.

Al Qaeda’s assumptions about the current war are also quite telling. The organization believes that this is an existential fight, not a limited conflict or a war of choice. They believe the war is about the very existence of Islam and they have made strenuous efforts to convince ordinary Muslims that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam. In this total war there can be no bystanders—“you are either with us or against us”—and any means are justified. This view of the war can be contrasted with the opinion of our government that this is indeed a limited conflict:  one where we have the choice to engage or to disengage; to stay in Afghanistan or to withdraw and end that war; to arm rebels in Syria or to refrain from doing so; and choosing to withdraw will not harm our national security.

CATEGORIES OF ENEMIES

Al Qaeda’s grand strategy is built as well on a series of assumptions about their enemies that flow from their ideology. Most importantly, they believe that all their enemies have one main purpose:  to prevent the establishment of an Islamic state and thus to destroy Islam.  The books that al Qaeda has written explain the history of the United States through this lens, beginning with the fight against the Barbary pirates, right through the foundation of Israel, and the “unprovoked attack” on the Taliban (founders of the first “real” Islamic state) after 9/11.

Al Qaeda divides its enemies into four categories, each of which has weak spots that they can exploit with different strategies.

First, al Qaeda names its primary enemy as “the Jews and Crusaders.” The Jews—that is Israel, the Crusaders—any Christians who fight them (and especially the United States and Britain), as well as their allies (i.e., France, Germany, and so on), are the biggest threat and the one that has to be dealt with first, in their view. This is because the Jews and Crusaders have the means to stop them from creating an Islamic state and have been trying to for hundreds of years.  The center of gravity for this enemy, in their current view, is public support and the American economic system. This is also a development since 9/11 and shows some interesting learning on their part. Before 9/11, Bin Ladin believed that the United States was a paper tiger and a media mirage. All that his group had to do was carry out a few attacks and the United States would run for it. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has adjusted their thinking. They now are prepared for a longer-term battle to push the United States from “their” land, and are using attrition, especially, to carry out this vision.

The second enemy is the so-called “apostate rulers.” These are the heads of state of every Muslim-majority country. In al Qaeda’s view, these leaders are puppets, agents that have no real agency of their own and are propped up solely by the United States.  If this is true, then convincing the United States to leave the battlefield will allow them to defeat the “apostate rulers” through prolonged guerrilla warfare.

The Shia are the third enemy, to be dealt with after the “apostate rulers.” In a very interesting letter that Ayman al- Zawahiri wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he says that eventually al Qaeda will have to come to blows with the Shia state. He adds in the same vein that they will also “eventually” have to destroy the Jewish state that is Israel. But, he continues, for now al Qaeda should be dealing with the Shia as two groups. There are the sheep, the ordinary Shia, who have to be re-educated and their leaders, who must be killed off.

And finally, they have a very large group of people who must either convert to al Qaeda’s extremist version of Islam or face death. This group—called “polytheists” and “apostates,” includes all Hindus, Alawites, Druze, and other Muslims who follow a version of Islam that they despise.  One al Qaeda leader put out a statement about six months ago in which he told fighters in Syria not to even ask for another Fatwa to kill the Alawites, since they all need to die. The Druze also will be given the choice of conversion or death. The results of this view of the enemy are seen in Syria, where al Qaeda affiliated groups are implementing these genocidal ideas through massacres of civilian populations.

One might be tempted, in thinking about al Qaeda, to compare them to the Bolsheviks, or our current struggle with them to the Cold War. After all, they are a small conspiratorial group hoping to take over a state and then carry out an ideologically inspired vision of world conquest.  Because their vision is so driven by a distinction between real human beings and sub-human, however, a far better analogy would be the Nazis. In al Qaeda’s formulation, real humans follow only their version of Islam:  all others deserve death or second-class citizenship in their “utopia.”  It is a genocidal view of the world that compares not with the cold and rational Bolsheviks, but rather the emotional and insane Nazis.

AL QAEDA’S OBJECTIVES

Al Qaeda’s ideological vision, views of the war and the enemy, as well as their own self-image, set the foundation for the rest of their grand strategy.  The objectives that they seek to achieve are quite clear and have been stated repeatedly over the past twenty years by Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and many other leaders of the group.  The first objective is to rid the Muslim-majority world of all non-Muslim occupiers, including all “apostate rulers,” that is all the current leadership of these countries.  Their definition of “occupation” makes this first objective quite different from what one might assume.  Rather than speaking just of military forces, they define occupiers as all non-Muslims, and specifically list diplomats, tourists, businessmen, and scholars as the “occupiers” who must be removed from “their” countries.

The second objective is about their extremist version of Sharia and has two parts.  They have repeatedly stated that they will impose their version of Sharia and that they will force—through violence if necessary—ordinary Muslims to follow it. It is interesting that dissent and resistance to their version of Sharia will not stop them:  implementing God’s law is so important for al Qaeda that they would rather anger the vast majority of the Muslim world than fail to follow through on this objective.

Al Qaeda’s determination to fight Jihad—and to ignore every peaceful method for change—should also be considered an objective as well as a means for achieving other objectives.  From its foundation in 1988, al Qaeda has defined itself as a jihadist organization, and has stated on many occasions that it is impossible to transform Islam or other Muslims through peaceful methods alone:  only fighting, dying, and killing will lead to the “utopia” that they desire.

Al Qaeda plans to build on Jihad and the implementation of Sharia to set up Islamic governance.  They believe that fighting Jihad and imposing Sharia—and the institutions that will be created in the process of doing so—leads naturally to their minimalist vision of a state.  Their state has only two purposes: to make certain that citizens are following al Qaeda’s version of Sharia and that Jihad is being fought to spread their ideology and state.  They are in the process of creating these institutions and the state right now in places like Syria.  Out of the creation of states in multiple locations will somehow come the Caliphate, a mega-state that will cover the entire Muslim-majority world and every piece of land that al Qaeda believes was stolen from Muslims.  This would include Spain, Portugal, and most of Eastern Europe.

Al Qaeda’s final objective is to “make God’s word the highest.” This expression means many things to other Muslims, such as to uphold the glory of Islam, but for al Qaeda what it means is: “We will force the entire world to follow our version of Sharia.”

MATCHING MEANS AND ENDS

In every grand strategy, naming objectives is just a first step.  Achieving these goals will require appropriate means that must be carefully matched with each of these ends, and al Qaeda’s grand strategy is no different.  Thus, “attacking America” is the means that Al Qaeda is using to force the U.S. out of the greater Middle East so that the group can have a free hand to implement its vision.  To fight its Jihad, the group is “inciting the entire Muslim community to join them in their war.”  Al Qaeda has also devised a separate complex strategy to bring diverse Jihadist fighting groups into their orbit. This explains how they were able to take over the fighting in Iraq when they began in that country as a tiny minority of all the groups fighting there. It answers the question of how they were able to take over the fighting in Syria when they began as a small minority there as well. Mali, Yemen and Somali are also great examples of al Qaeda beginning as a tiny group and gradually co-opting all the other jihadist organizations into its orbit. This particular means is called “unifying the ranks.” “Commanding right and forbidding wrong” is the means that they employ to force people to follow their version of Sharia.  To create their perfect Islamic states and ultimately the Caliphate, al Qaeda is “setting up shadow governance”—creating institutions, taxing ordinary Muslims, setting up governors and other political leaders, and drafting young men into their armies. And finally the ultimate means is “eternal Jihad” with believers. While they foresee a mere 200-year war with the United States and all the “occupation forces,” the fight will go on far longer.  In fact, al Qaeda believes that they will be engaged in a war until they conquer the entire world for their version of Islam and time comes to an end.

AL QAEDA’S PLANS

Al Qaeda’s plans take these means and seek to apply them to achieve their ends.  The plans that al Qaeda has adopted have evolved over time, but seem to consistently include stages, following a vision taken from both their reading of the life of Muhammad and from Mao. By looking at what al Qaeda is doing in the world, and by carefully reading their published documents (such as a lengthy book by Abu Bakr al-Naji) as well as listening to their public statements and speeches, it is possible to distinguish some of the stages of their current plan.

Al Qaeda’s plan seems to begin with preparation and training for Jihad, a concept similar to the Maoist first phase of guerrilla warfare. During this stage, Mao recommended that guerrillas prepare for war, but secretly, and not engage in actual warfare. This stage would also consist of seeking to win over the population through ideological education.  For al Qaeda, this would be known as “dawa.”

Once the guerrilla forces are beginning to take shape, al Qaeda moves on to attacking American and allied targets in each country, whether one that they view as occupied by the U.S. and its allies (such as Iraq or Afghanistan) or one that is occupied by an “apostate ruler.”  If this leads to open warfare they also encourage what they call hijra, that is a migration, by foreign fighters to travel to the occupied country.

The next stage, whether open warfare has begun or not, seems to consist of imposing Sharia with the Hisba—a term that they use for the institution that will command right and forbid wrong—and with Sharia courts.

Abu Bakr al-Naji’s book argues that the central governments—if they have refused to engage in open warfare up to this point – will now be forced to begin fighting the mujahidin. This will lead to a stage of protracted guerrilla war in these countries.  Good examples of this occurring just as he proposed are Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and the Sinai in Egypt.

Al-Naji calls the next phase “the management of savagery.” By this he means setting up institutions that will take the place of the government so that the government will eventually be displaced across huge tracks of land. Various leaders of al Qaeda have also talked about unifying all the groups that are fighting in order to declare the kernel for the state.  At this point, the al Qaeda affiliate would have all the institutions created to take over and begin running its own state. At some point during this stage, al Qaeda linked groups have also usually begun to fight and work across borders. Al Qaeda’s leaders have repeatedly stated that borders are meaningless, since they were set up by their enemies to confine the spread of “real Islam.”

The next stage would apparently be the creation of the Caliphate, but since al Qaeda has not yet  gotten to this stage, even they may not know what this means yet. I have seen no discussion of how precisely they are going to go about creating this nearly global state.

And finally, there will be all out war with the unbelievers until the end of time. This confrontation, they believe, will end with the return of the Mahdi and Jesus, who will convert everyone to Islam.

HOW WELL IS AL QAEDA DOING?

How well are they doing?  From al Qaeda’s perspective, they believe that they are doing quite well.  The U.S. understands events over the past few years very differently.  The homeland has not suffered a major attack since 9/11 and we have ended the war in Iraq and are ending the war in Afghanistan. But in al Qaeda’s view, attacking the homeland was always about getting the U.S. out of “their” territory.  And haven’t we withdrawn from Iraq? Aren’t we about to leave Afghanistan? So for them, it is time to turn to the rest of their plans, which are not about us at all.

My view of al Qaeda has shifted considerably since 2003 and 2004, when I wrote my first book on this topic. I still thought it was about us. But now I understand.  Al Qaeda’s grand strategy is primarily about other Muslims; it is primarily about the rest of the world and not about us at all. Yet, my fear is that we will understand this seminal fact and decide to keep ourselves safe, but at the cost of losing the rest of the world.

__________________________

I Found Clarity in my Thoughts of Islam

John R. Houk

© March 3, 2014

___________________________

Attacking America: Al Qaeda’s Grand Strategy in Its War with the World

Copyright © 2000–2014. All Rights Reserved.

Mary Habeck is a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She has been an Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins-SAIS and taught for 11 years in the Yale University History Department. She served on the National Security Council 2008-2009. A member of the Editorial Board of FPRI’s quarterly journal Orbis, she is also now a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

This essay is a revised version of the 17^th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs that she delivered in Philadelphia on October 3, 2013. For previous lectures in this series, visit: http://www.fpri.org/event-lecture-series/templeton

About FPRI

Mission

Founded in 1955, FPRI is a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests. We add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.

Who We Are

The 82 affiliated scholars of FPRI include a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a former president of Swarthmore College, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, and a former Ambassador and senior staff member of the National Security Council. We count among our trustees a former Undersecretary of Defense, a former Secretary of the Navy, a former Assistant Secretary of State, a foundation president, and numerous active or retired corporate CEOs, lawyers, and civic leaders. Our Inter-University Study Groups and our larger network of scholars include representatives of diverse disciplines, including political science, history, economics, law, management, religion, sociology, and psychology.

What We Do

We conduct research on pressing issues— the war on terrorism, developments in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, relations with China, Russia, and Japan— and … READ THE REST