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March 7, 2004
Review: ...so shall you reap
WHEN a suicide bomber destroyed the barracks of the US Marines stationed in Beirut in 1983, one of the survivors of the attack said that the bomber had been smiling seconds before he rammed the explosives-laden truck he was driving into the building. “Of course he was smiling,” observed Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk in his outstanding work Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, “He was going to paradise.”
Like Fisk, Lawrence Pintak, an American journalist based in Beirut during the height of the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, too comments on this determination to kill the enemy and die in the process. Speaking specifically of the Hezbollah, the militant Islamic organization that can be credited with driving the Israelis out of south Lebanon after a prolonged occupation, he describes in Seeds of Hate, how its “members ached for martyrdom...”
Pintak argues that the roots of what is largely seen as Islam’s current war against the United States can be traced to the conflict in Lebanon. It was here that the phenomenon of suicide attacks against US and Israeli interests was first witnessed. The Palestinians were to later use the same killing tactics against the Israelis on home soil.
More than a treatise on the spread of militant Islam, the book sets out to answer the plaintive question lingering in the minds of many Americans: “Why do they hate us?” It shows how the Americans, arriving as neutral peacekeepers in Lebanon, found themselves inadvertently, or so he claims, siding with the Christian militias and the Israeli troops against the Muslims. As resentment grew inside Lebanon, the Americans were time and again told to leave. Non-compliance and growing interference by the Reagan administration in the domestic politics of the country resulted in a series of suicidal attacks, the worst resulting in the deaths of 241 US Marines.
Apart from the American military, US diplomatic staff, journalists and academicians were also targeted. It took Washington a while to understand the intricate web of hostilities that had trapped the Americans inside Lebanon. By the time it decided to withdraw its troops, a Pandora’s box, whose contents were to sweep across the globe, had been opened. The roots of Islamic militancy were soon to fan out to countries as distant as Argentina and Indonesia.
Thanks to the large number of players involved, Lebanon and its internal conflicts have never been easy to understand. The civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 was fought on several fronts ranging from the economic and ethnic to the religious and ideological. Its basis lay in poverty, a huge Palestinian refugee population, skewed population dynamics, a faulty power-sharing system in parliament and the birth pangs of an “artificial” nation created by the French.
The Maronites and the Druze, the Palestinians, the Shias, the Syrians, the Israelis and the Iranians all took part, while the Italians, French, American and British peacekeepers found themselves sucked into a conflict not of their making. Even the 6,000 members of the United Nations Force in Lebanon were not safe from the wrath of the local militias.
Strangely enough, as Pintak points out, the US does not seem to have learned the lessons of the Reagan administration’s disastrous Middle East foreign policy as seen in Lebanon. There was no attempt at damage control to prevent the situation from spilling over to other countries after Washington’s short-lived but traumatic experience in Beirut. Instead, the US continues to antagonize Muslims all over the world by its blind support to Israel and, of late, its occupation of Iraq.
While Seeds of Hate is gripping and an essential read for those who want to understand why America appears to be at war with Islam and its adherents, one can trace the roots of this conflict to well before the Lebanese civil war. The seeds of hate were sown in the 1940s and the 1950s. They sprouted with the creation of Israel in 1948 and with the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. (Interestingly, Mosaddeq’s predecessor General Ali Razmara, was killed by a member of the extremist Fedayeen-i-Islam organization, an event that perhaps outlined the shape of things to come).
While the Palestinians became a rootless people, taking shelter in the surrounding Arab countries where very often they were treated as second class citizens, the Iranians burned with rage as the United States became the dominant foreign power in their country. Both the US and Israel had a hand in propping up the despotic Shah of Iran through their support for his ruthless intelligence agency the SAVAK.
When the US found that it had been turned into “the Great Satan” by the revolution of 1979, it lived up to this label by arming the Iraqis in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Small wonder then that Tehran saw its chance in the desperate, poverty-stricken Shia population of Lebanon living in uncertain political times. Lebanon, as Pintak notes, was “fertile soil for the first Islamic revolution inspired by the ayatollah’s success against the American-backed Shah.” And there were plenty of volunteers around to take the shortest route to martyrdom.
Since 9/11 the clash between America and militant Islamic organizations has intensified with the United States determined to root out extremist elements and the latter equally bent upon halting the superpower’s growing interference in the affairs of Muslim governments in the Middle East and elsewhere. In this, and in Washington’s continuing disregard for the Palestinians and its support for Israel, lies the answer to the Americans’ “Why do they hate us?”
Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East policy Ignited the Jihad
By Lawrence Pintak
Pluto Press. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar Karachi Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0-7453-2043-0
360pp. Rs895
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