Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (15 page)

The Iran-contra scandal broke on November 25, 1986, when Reagan appeared at a nationally televised press conference to confess that he “was not fully informed on the nature of the activities undertaken in connection with this [Iran] initiative” and to announce the dismissal of Poindexter and North. Then Attorney General Edwin Meese followed with the real bombshell: funds from the Iran arms sales had been diverted, possibly illegally, to the contras in Nicaragua. The attorney general had revealed nothing less than a conspiracy at the highest levels of government to break the law and contravene public policy on Iran, terrorism, and military aid to the contras. No longer a question of faulty judgment, this was about breaking the law.

The Sunday Telegraph
of London cited one former official in early 1989 as saying that the White House “suppressed” hundreds of documents on “Israeli mercenaries who, with the knowledge of the Israeli and the U.S. governments, flew weapons and ammunition to Tegucigalpa [Honduras] … at a time when Congress had banned military aid. The arms were then distributed to contra bases on the Nicaraguan border.” Claiming that these documents were “crucial to understanding the whole scandal,” a congressional source concluded: “The American public never knew. It is a cover-up.”

The resulting Iran-contra scandal could have taken on the proportions of Watergate, which ended Nixon’s presidency, but it did not. Part of the reason must lie in the alliances built by the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, which had over the years turned into
an antidétente lobby. Fearful that American détente with Russia was weakening American backing of Israel, supporters of the Jewish state were willing to ally with one and all, liberals or conservatives, to weaken the rapprochement with the Soviet Union. On the one hand, they joined hands with conservatives who considered the Kissinger line soft on the Soviet Union; on the other, they lined up with liberals who regarded his silence on human-rights violations within the Soviet Union as amoral and inconsistent with American values. Faced with Israel’s involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, could it be that congressional liberals hesitated to press matters further precisely because Israel was involved?

Even before the Boland Amendment expired in October 1986, President Reagan was calling for a renewed contra offensive against the Sandinistas. Few outside of official Washington would have thought of Nicaragua—this small, impoverished nation just emerged from under the boot of an American-blessed dictatorship in 1979—in the terms that Reagan used in his February 4, 1986, State of the Union address: “This is a great moral challenge for the entire free world. Surely no issue is more important for peace in our own hemisphere, for the security of our frontiers, for the protection of our vital interests than … Nicaragua.” The point of the escalating rhetoric was to convince the American public that this bloody war of attrition against this tiny country was, somehow, in the national interest. The scandal was that as soon as the Boland Amendment expired on October 17, 1986, the portion of the CIA budget allocated for the contras rose to $100 million.

The contra war combined elements of the old and the new. As in Laos, the covert war was financed through illicit trade. The
proxy war came to include a range of domestic constituencies, most significantly the religious right. Finally, it was in Nicaragua that the Reagan administration learned how to combine covert and overt methods of work into a single coherent strategy, thereby joining terrorism to electoral politics, so as to translate the pursuit of terror into a political victory.

The CIA’s embrace of terror tightened during the two years the Boland Amendment was in effect. How far CIA thinking had come from the days of Vietnam and counterinsurgency is clear from the training manual it published in 1985 for the contras, titled
Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare.
The manual called for combining a range of tactics, from the “neutralization” of civilian officials to “armed propaganda.” It advised “the selective use of violence,” including involving the population in acts of violence: “It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, magistrates, police and state security officials, etc. For psychological purposes, it is necessary to gather together the population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor.” While calling for selective terror as a way of eroding popular confidence in government, the manual advised against “explicit terror,” lest the population be alienated: “If the government police cannot put an end to the guerrilla activities, the population will lose confidence in the government which has the inherent mission of guaranteeing the safety of citizens. However, the guerrillas should be careful not to become an explicit terror, because this would result in a loss of popular support.” When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.

The parallel between Renamo in Mozambique—particularly after South Africa became Renamo’s principal patron in 1980—and the contras in Nicaragua is indeed striking. Both began as counterrevolutionary movements created by a foreign power looking for proxies in a war in which it could not intervene directly. Both embraced terror as a strategy. Their practice made little sense from the point of view of winning or taking power. No one—including the CIA—really expected the contras to win the war against the Sandinistas. The point of this war, this terror, was not to win but to bleed the government, to show it as incapable of protecting the population from terror and simultaneously to invite its repression—two different but effective ways of discrediting the government. Testifying before the World Court on September 8, 1985, David MacMichael, a CIA national intelligence analyst on Central America from 1981 to 1983 who later became critical of the contra War, explained that the CIA expected that contra raids would provoke the Sandinistas into three kinds of aggressions: (1) “clamp down on civil liberties within Nicaragua itself, arresting its opposition, demonstrating its allegedly inherent totalitarian nature and thus increase domestic dissent within the country”; (2) provoke “cross border attacks by Nicaraguan forces and thus serve to demonstrate Nicaragua’s aggressive nature and possibly call into play the Organization of American States”; and (3) provoke “reaction against United States citizens, particularly against United States personnel within Nicaragua and thus serve to demonstrate the hostility of Nicaragua towards the United States.”

The point of harnessing terror as part of an electoral campaign was to turn it into a form of blackmail that could be switched off and on at will. This is how the Nicaraguan election was turned into a referendum on terror. The idea was that if the right dose of terror could be delivered with effectiveness and combined with
impunity, it would be only a matter of time before the population was convinced that the only way to end terror was to grant terrorists their political objective: power. Meanwhile, so long as the terror continued, those responsible for giving it a political cover continued to disclaim political responsibility. Just as the South African and American press routinely described mounting deaths in southern Africa as evidence of “black-on-black violence”—consistently downplaying its overall context—so the United States, too, looked for “deniability” by describing terror as a matter of “Nicaraguans fighting against Nicaraguans,” an internal Nicaraguan affair for which Washington had no responsibility.

The United States’ embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late Cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a distinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally—apartheid South Africa—the United States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counterrevolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illicit trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in U.S. support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international religious crusade: a jihad.

Chapter Three
A
FGHANISTAN:
T
HE
H
IGH
P
OINT IN THE
C
OLD
W
AR

I
n an article he wrote in
Dawn
, the Pakistani political thinker and activist Eqbal Ahmad draws our attention to an American television image from 1985. On the White House lawn, President Ronald Reagan is introducing, with great fanfare, a group of Afghan men, all leaders of the mujahideen, to the media: “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” This was the moment when America tried to harness extreme versions of political Islam in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The half decade that followed defeat in Vietnam witnessed other setbacks in U.S. foreign policy. This trend was illustrated dramatically in 1979 when popular revolutions swept away two U.S.-backed dictatorships, one in Nicaragua, the other in Iran. At the end of the same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Who
would have guessed that the Soviet Union would collapse only a decade later, leaving the United States as the sole, triumphant superpower? If 9/11 cut short the celebration of that victory, it also posed the question: At what price was the Cold War won? To answer this question requires focusing on the Reagan presidency, for it was Ronald Reagan who claimed that the defeat of U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Third World was evidence that the Soviet Union was “on a roll,” and it was Reagan who demanded that all possible resources be marshaled to “roll back” the Soviet Union, “by all means necessary.” Afghanistan, more than any other location, was the high point of the Cold War.

The Afghan War made the counterrevolutionary operation in Nicaragua pale by comparison, both in the extent of resources mustered and in the gravity of its aftereffects. There were 100,000 Soviet ground troops in Afghanistan at the height of the war. Afghanistan presented the United States with an opportunity to hand the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. Reagan formulated this into a strategic objective, thereby approaching the Afghan War from a perspective more global than regional. As it stretched through the near decade of the Reagan presidency, the Afghan War turned into the bloodiest regional conflict in the world. This largest CIA paramilitary operation since Vietnam also turned out to be the longest war in Soviet history.

The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian Revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States
supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt. The expectation that political Islam would provide a local buffer against secular nationalism was also broadly shared by U.S. allies within the region, from Israel to conservative Arab regimes. Until events proved the foolhardiness of the project, Israel hoped to encourage an Islamist political movement in the Occupied Territories and play it off against the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas to operate unhindered during the first intifada—letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly helping it with funding—only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat appeared as a liberator of political Islam after the death of Nasser. Between 1971 and 1975, Sadat released Islamists who had been languishing in jail and gave them, first, the freedom to publicize their views and, later, the freedom to organize. I cite these instances not to tarnish and discredit the movements concerned because they were supported by American or Israeli intelligence, but to show how the unintended consequences of misinformed, cynical, and opportunistic actions can boomerang on their perpetrators.

The impact of the Iranian Revolution was dramatized by the humiliating saga of the American embassy hostages. The first student occupation of the embassy occurred shortly after Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 14, 1979, but Khomeini and Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan moved quickly to expel the occupiers. Eight months later, circumstances changed radically: when the U.S. government welcomed the deposed shah to New York for medical treatment, Khomeini responded with criticism of the United States as “the Great Satan.” Within a month, some three thousand Iranian
students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took ninety hostages. This time, Khomeini and the government responded differently. After the release of women and black Marine guards, the remaining fifty-two American diplomats were held for 444 days.

The Iranian Revolution introduced a new political development on the world scene: here was an Islamist regime that was not only Islamist and anti-Communist but at the same time fervently nationalist, determined to act independently of all foreign influences, particularly the United States. The more this became clear, the more official America expanded its search for friends in the neighborhood. Soon, secular but brutal regimes like that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq were recruited as American allies. While the second embassy occupation was in progress, the forces of Saddam Hussein invaded southwest Iran on September 20, 1980—with open encouragement from the United States. The Iraqi war against Iran saw the first post-Vietnam use of chemical weapons in war, and America was the source of both the weapons and the training needed to use them.