[Islam-Online- Politics]

Western interests often blur the facts when Islamism is scrutinized. One of the ironies of the current discussion about the threat of Islamism in the post-Cold War era is that in significant ways it miscasts the entire debate. For example, the Globe and Mail printed a map entitled, "The Islamic Cauldron," representing the entire Muslim world.29 The map erroneously covered only North Africa and the Middle East while excluding the most populous Muslim regions of south and southeast Asia. Why were these areas not included in the Globe and Mail map? The answer lies in what Zbigniew Brezinski calls the "arc of crisis," an area of the globe that "stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries."30 It is in this region that two things intersect: oil and the state of Israel, both of which political Islam affects.
The U.S. State Department has described the Middle East as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history," "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment," or, in President Eisenhower's words, the most "strategically important area in the world."31
Richard Nixon wrote that the Middle East's "oil is the lifeblood of modern industry, the Persian Gulf region is the heart that pumps it, and the sea routes around the Gulf are the jugular vein through which that lifeblood passes." In a subsequent book, Nixon argued that, because the Middle East is likely to remain "the only source of significant exportable oil in the world for the next twenty-five years, we have no choice but to remain engaged in the area."32 Oil was a central reason behind Operation Desert Storm. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, explained the American rationale for a military presence in the Gulf:
[G]iven the enormous resources that exist in that part of the world, and given the fact that those resources are in decline elsewhere, the value of those resources is only going to rise in the years ahead, and the United States and our major partners cannot afford to have those resources controlled by somebody who is fundamentally hostile to our interests.33
The New York Times leaked excerpts from the Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidelines for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999" in 1992. The report stated that the overall U.S. concern was to "remain the predominant outside power in the region and [to] preserve the U.S. and Western access to the region's oil." The report also recommended that the United States "prevent a hegemony or alignment of powers from dominating the region. This pertains especially to the Arabian peninsula."34
The main regional threats to Western hegemony in the area are the popular Islamist movements which form the main opposition to the unelected and autocratic governments. William Quandt, author of Peace Process, acknowledges that "most regimes have little mass support," that "opposition movements that reject the present order are widespread," and that, for the most part, "economic development is stalled."35 Stated simply, the political and ideological goals of Islamism clash with Western interests in the Middle East.
Khalid Bin Sayeed notes in Western Dominance and Political Islam that Islamists define their goals as establishing an alternative social and political system challenging Western control over Muslim land and resources in the Middle East. Therefore, socio-political Islam in this sense cannot play an accommodative or subordinate role to Western hegemony as current regimes in the area do.36
The other American concern is Israel. From Israel's perspective, Islamist groups are the main challengers to its regional hegemony. They ardently oppose the 1993 Israel-Arafat Accords. In 1991, Israel's leading West Bank correspondent, Danny Rubenstein, predicted that the self-rule proposed by Israel and the U.S. is analogous to the "autonomy of a POW camp, where the prisoners are 'autonomous' to cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events."37 In other words, self rule gives control over basic services, with Yasser Arafat playing the role, according to Benjamin Netanyahu, of a "subcontractor," to crush Palestinian resistance.38 American partiality threatens to derail the process. Former secretary of State James Baker III publicly acknowledged that the peace process was "basically constructed on Israel's terms."39
The ongoing settlement activity in the occupied territories, backed and financed by the United States, is yet another destabilizing factor.40 A recently announced Israeli housing initiative "represents a marked increase in the pace of construction initiated by the Rabin government in the Occupied Territories during its first two years."41 According to a former high ranking member of Israel's intelligence services, "In the [five year] interim period [of the peace accords] the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria will double."42 Such iniquitous conditions engender a reaction; and in this case Islamist forces lead the opposition.
The issues of oil, Israel, Islamism and the West, intersect at a regional level as a result of the U.S. view of Israel as a strategic asset and reliable ally in protecting Western interests in the Middle East. In 1958, the U.S. National Security Council proposed that a "logical corollary" against those who opposed American interests in the region, "would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-Western power left in the Middle East."43 At the time, Arab nationalism threatened Western allies in the region. The British cabinet's Eastern Committee, established after World War I, referred to these regimes as an "Arab Facade," whom Lord Curzon described as being "ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan, and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff."44 These states made up of impotent monarchies and family dictatorships remained in power "veiled by constitutional fictions, as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer State, and so on."45 America's strategic view of the Middle East envisions Israel and the "Arab Façade" as regional gendarmes, whose main preoccupation is battling Islamist forces. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Israel's strategic function remains the same. The former head of Israeli military intelligence, General (reserve) Shlomo Gazit, explicitly stated:
Israel's main task has not changed at all, and it remains of crucial importance. Its location at the centre of the Arab-Muslim Middle East predestines Israel to be a devoted guardian of stability in all the countries surrounding it. Its [role] is to protect the existing regimes: to prevent or halt the processes of radicalisation, and to block the expansion of fundamentalist religious zealotry.46

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