ÿþ<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <title>Middle East Timeline</title> <style type="text/css"> body,td,th { font-family: Courier New, Courier, mono; color: #000000; } a { color: #566281; border-bottom: dotted 1px; text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: #566281; text-decoration: none; } a:hover { color: #990099; text-decoration: underline; } a:active { color: #990099; text-decoration: none; } body { background-color: #ECE9D8; } .style3 { color: #C3CEB6; font-weight: bold; } .style4 { color: #666666; font-weight: bold; font-size: x-large; font-family: "Courier New", Courier, mono; } .style5 {color: #FFFFFF} .style7 {color: #FFFFFF; font-weight: bold; } table {border-style:dotted; border-width:thin; background-color:#FFFFFF; width:90%; border-color:#333333;} .style8 { color: #333333; font-weight: bold; } .style9 {color: #666666} .style10 {color: #666666; font-weight: bold; } --> </style> </head> <body> <p align="center" class="style4">Middle Eastern Timeline<br /> (with reference to Wikipedia)</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/mid_east.jpg" width="653" height="348"/></p> <table width="90%" border="dotted" align="center" cellpadding="10" id="Mid.East.Table"> <tr> <td width="46%" valign=top class="Normal"> <p align="center" class="style8 style9"><u>Western World</u></p></td> <td width="7%" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style7">Date</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p align="center" class="style10"><u>Persian and Arab World</u></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="5" valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"></td> <td rowspan="4" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7"><p>going<br /> way<br /> back</p> </td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iraq#Modern_History">Iraq</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="../IMAGES/Iraq_map.png"></a> <img src="images/iraq_map.jpg" width="330" height="355"></p> <p>This is a region that goes way back to biblical times (the Garden of Eden is there).&nbsp; It never looked like this until after 1916, when the national boundaries were carved out of the post-WWI <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreement">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a>, which divvied up the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence.&nbsp; From 200 BC to 600 AD it was part of the Persian Empire (Iran).&nbsp; In 634 AD it was overrun by Arab Muslims, who retained control of the region until the Ottoman Empire took over in the 16<sup>th</sup> century.&nbsp; That lasted until 1922, when British forces took over the region as a province after WWI and established a monarchy</span>.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_empire">Persian Empire</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/persian_empire.jpg" width="249" height="190"></p> <p><span class=grame>There are</span> all kinds of history here, going way back to pre-biblical times, so we ll focus on a specific era.&nbsp; After the Mongols went through, the Persian empire re-set itself under Azerbaijani rule.&nbsp; This empire stretched from Afghanistan through present day Iran and over to Azerbaijan.&nbsp; In 1722, Peter the Great of Russia, along with the Ottomans, invaded the northern region, and the empire collapsed.&nbsp; From this time until 1914 (WWI), mainly under the Qajar dynasty, it watched Russia extend its sphere of influence to the north in Central Asia, and Britain extend its sphere of influence through India in the south.&nbsp; This lead the Persian empire to interact with Russia and Britain, and other major European powers, in order to retain stability.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire">The Ottoman Empire 1299-1922</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/ottoman_empire.jpg" width="280" height="200"></p> <p>A 600-some year empire that stretched from present-day Algeria/Morocco over to Egypt, around the Arabian Peninsula, up through the Middle East and Turkey, up through the Balkans and southern <span class=GramE><span class=grame>Ukraine</span></span><span class=GramE><span class=grame>,</span></span> and at one point nearly ended up in Austria.&nbsp; During this period, what is now known as was just, regions, like Mosul</span></span> and Basra.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qajar_dynasty">Qajar Dynasty 1795-1925 </a></p> <p>A ruling family (think something like the Saudi family) who allowed Persia to fall under the sway of various European colonial <span class=GramE><span class=grame>powers,</span></span> like Great Britain, Russia, Portugal and France. Under this family's rule they ceded the Caucasus and Azerbaijan regions to Russian, and gave the oil-rich southern region to Great Britain.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style3 style5">1905 </p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Revolution_of_Iran">Persian Constitutional Revolution 1905-1911</a></p> <p>A revolution to overthrow Qajar family rule and establish a constitutional parliament.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Oil found in southern Iran, 1908, by British entrepreneur <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Knox_D%27Arcy">William Knox D Arcy</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/darcy.jpg" width="142" height="141"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center"> <span class="style6">1908</span></p></td> <td rowspan="4" valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>D Arcy s business venture turned into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company">Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909</a> (name changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1935). APOC buys 50% of the Turkish Petroleum Company, organized by Armenian Calouste</span></span> Gulbenkian</span></span>; they strike oil in Kirkuk</span></span>, in 1927 and become the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Petroleum_Company">Iraq Petroleum Company</a>.&nbsp; The Iraq Petroleum Company was own by three major companies: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Shell Oil, Royal Dutch Shell Oil (i.e. Shell Oil), and the French Compagnie</span></span> Française</span></span> des Pétroles</span></span>.&nbsp; In essence, at this point Iraq and southern Iran s major oil wells are controlled by European companies.</p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1909</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWI">WWI</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/ww1_map.jpg" width="413" height="393"></p> <p>Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and heir to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary">Austro-Hungarian Empire</a> is assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian-Serb Gavrilo</span></span> Princip</span></span>.&nbsp; All hell breaks loose (the domino effect, where nations with treaties with other nations mobilized troops in response to the assassination).&nbsp; Participants were <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Entente">Entente Powers</a></i>: the United Kingdom, France and Russia, supplemented by the United States, Japan and Spain; <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Powers">Central Powers</a></i>: Germany, Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, and later Italy.&nbsp; The key here is that it meant the end of the Ottoman Empire.</p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1914</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreement">Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916</a> was a secret agreement between Britain and France to divide up the Middle East according to their spheres of influence after WWI.  This agreement defined many of the boundaries we see today, including Syria and Iraq.  The agreement was broadened to include Italy and Russia, but after the Russian Revolution of 1917 Russia s claims were rejected and Vladimir Lenin, in retaliation, publicized the secret agreement.  Lenin s publicizing of the agreement let the Middle East know how Europe intended to extend power over the former Ottoman Empire.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/sykes_picot.jpg" width="321" height="295"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1916</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Britain has control over the regions of Jordan and Iraq, and establishes two kings under British protection; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_I_of_Jordan">King Abdullah I</a> would reign over Jordan, while his brother <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_I_of_Iraq">King Faisal I</a> would be reign over Syria and Iraq.  King Faisal was a major figure for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence">T.E. Lawrence s</a> operations in WWI.  During WWI Britain appealed to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_nationalism">Arab nationalism</a> to help string out the Ottoman Empire and wear down their capacity to reinforce the Austro-Hungarian forces in Europe; T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, was instrumental in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt">Arab Revolt</a>.&nbsp; Lawrence had worked extensively in the Middle East as an archeologist and knew the cultures and Arabic language well when he was brought into the British military to help map the Sinai Peninsula (between Egypt and Saudi Arabia).&nbsp; In 1916 Lawrence was sent to report on Arab nationalist movements, and he fought alongside Arab irregular forces (i.e. not official or standard military forces).&nbsp; Lawrence convinced various tribal leaders to organize their efforts in the interests of the British military and not force the Ottomans out of Medina (in Saudi Arabia); rather, they staged guerilla attacks and repeatedly attacked the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejaz_railway">Hejaz</span> railway</a>, which the Ottomans used to move troops through the Arab region.&nbsp; This forced the Ottoman troops to rebuild and re-allocate forces that would otherwise be heading toward Europe.&nbsp; (The saying goes something like amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics; forcing the Ottomans to re-allocate their power was a logistical win for Britain.)&nbsp; Lawrence then aided in the Arab takeovers of Aqaba</span>, Jordan and Damascus, Syria.&nbsp; Later, after WWI, Lawrence appealed to the British government for Arab independence, but to mixed success.&nbsp; T.E. Lawrence s experiences with the Arab world led to his masterpiece <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom">The Seven Pillars of Wisdom</a></i>.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/lawrence.jpg" width="156" height="210"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1920-23</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>King Faisal I abdicates the throne in Syria to French forces, who occupy the land according to a League of Nations mandate.  The French would control Syria until 1946, when they turned it over to a republican government.  Arab nationalist fervor rose in Syria during the French occupation.  Military coups ensued, along with a brief union with Egypt and their Arab nationalist leader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamal_Abdel_Nasser">President Nasser</a>; but instability continued, and by 1963 the leftist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'ath_Party">Ba ath Party</a> came to power.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/faisal_lawrence_said.jpg" width="440" height="459"></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="3" valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><p align="center" class="style5">1925</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_dynasty">Pahlavi</span></span> Dynasty 1925-1979</a></p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Pahlavi">Reza Khan</a> (later changed his name to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Pahlavi">Reza Shah Pahlavi</span></span></a>), an officer in Iran s military, stages a successful coup and overthrows the despotic Qajar Dynasty.&nbsp; Imagine an officer in the Saudi military overthrowing the ruling family.&nbsp; (Pakistan s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervez_Musharaf">Pervez Musharaf</a> pulled off a similar move in 1999).&nbsp; Tried to modernize the country with infrastructural, educational, judicial and transportational developments.&nbsp; He also wanted to step away from British and Russian (USS.R. by 1922) influence; unfortunately, to gain the expertise needed to modernize the country, Europe was necessary.&nbsp; Iranians went to Europe to study and European consultation would be required (Germany, France, Italy, etc.).&nbsp; Even though AIOC owned all of Iran s oil resources, Reza Shah avoided giving any new contracts to either Britain or the USS.R.&nbsp; By the 1930 s a middle class had emerged, but there was also a growing dissatisfaction with Reza Shah s dictatorial style, particularly by Islamic clergy.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/reza_shah.jpg" width="180" height="288"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><p align="center" class="style5">1933</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazi_of_Iraq">King Ghazi</a> succeeds his father King Faisal I to the Iraqi throne.  Ghazi was a staunch Arab nationalist who opposed the British presence in Iraq, but not a particularly strong leader, and the military gained much strength over government at this point.  Ghazi opposed Britain in WWI and supported the military coup of the civilian leadership of Iraq by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakr_Sidqi">General Bakr</span> Sidqi</span></a>.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/ghazi.jpg" width="250" height="361"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><p align="center" class="style5">1939</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>King Faisal II succeeds Ghazi to the throne of Iraq.  Faisal grew up very close to his cousin in Jordan, Hussein bin Talal</span>; they both were educated in Britain and retained diplomatic relations with the UK, and discussed joining the Iraqi and Jordanian kingdoms.  </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/faisal2.jpg" width="193" height="242"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>In 1939, just before WWII, Britain accused German and Italian technicians in Iran of being spies sabotaging British oil facilities.&nbsp; Fearing Reza Shah would sell oil to Nazi Germany, British and Soviet forces occupy regions of Iran and in 1941 force Reza Khan to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, who helped establish the Persian Corridor; this corridor was a way for US and British forces ship aid and supplies to the USSR through Iran during WWII.  For this, Iran was promised complete independence 6 months after the war s end.</p> <p>But 1941 also saw the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Iraqi_War">Anglo-Iraqi War</a>; Ghazi had died, Faisal II was too young (he was 6) and was represented by Emirs, and the nationalism first sparked with the aid of T.E. Lawrence would backfire a bit. Prime minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuri_as-Said">Nuri as-Said's</a> government supported Britain (Said fought with Lawrence), but many Arab nationalists did not support Britain during WWII out of anti-colonial sentiment.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> <p> Said was overthrown by anti-British coup led by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Ali">Rashid Ali al-Kaylani</a>, who refused to acknowledge the 1930 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Iraqi_Treaty_%281930%29">Anglo-Iraqi Treaty</a> signed by Said and tried to bring Iraq into the sphere of Axis influence. The British had to send in forces from Palestine, and Said took back the parliament. Iraq would remain within the British sphere of influence for the next 25 years under King Faisal II.</p> <p align="center"> <img src="images/nuri_as_said.jpg" width="165" height="272"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5"> 1941</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Reza Shah declares Iran neutral in the lead-up to WWII.&nbsp; Iran becomes a supply line to the Allies through the US <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-lease">lend-lease</a> program (before the US got involved in the war). This lead to the presence of British and Indian forces in and Soviet forces in northern Iran.&nbsp; When forced to abdicate, his Reza Shah s son <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi">Mohammad Reza Shah</a>.  Mohammad Reza Shah was more amenable to Western influence, and continued with modernization reforms, but began rule in a hands-off style that left parliament in disarray.  Despite other reforms, democratic reforms were slow in coming, and this lead to the rise of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq to prime minister, who attempted to establish a republic, remove the Shah, and nationalize the British oil companies in Iran.  After the Shah s reinstatement (see Operation Ajax below), he continued reforms like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution">White Revolution of 1963</a>, but his unpopular autocratic style squeezed the middle class and infuriated the clergy.  Riots forced him to flee to Egypt in 1979, and the power vacuum led to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution">Iranian Revolution</a>.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/mohammad_reza_shah.jpg" width="180" height="248"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Conference_of_1943">The Tehran Conference in 1943</a> attempted to re-establish some national boundaries.&nbsp; The conference was attended by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, and was followed by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Conference">Cairo Conference</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference">Yalta Conference</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Conference">Potsdam Conference</a>.&nbsp; These conferences dealt with where the Allied Powers would wage the war against the Axis, which also had the effect of changing national boundaries. </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5"> 1943</p></td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>After the end of WWII, the Soviet Union refused to leave the area leased to it through the Tehran Conference, and backed revolts in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan (both areas were to be Soviet puppet regimes).&nbsp; Soviet troops did not withdraw from northern Iran until 1946 with the promise of oil (a concession which was shortly revoked).</p></td> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">&nbsp; 1946-49</p></td> <td rowspan="2" valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab-Israeli_war">1948 Arab-Israeli War</a></p> <p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_1917">Balfour Declaration of 1917</a> went off from the Sykes-Picot Agreement demarcated the region along the Sinai Peninsula known as Palestine (at the time Mandate Palestine).&nbsp; This region was comprised of Palestinian Arabs, Jews and Christians, but was in part set up as a Zionist homeland by the British.&nbsp; By 1922 increasing Jewish persecution in Europe drove up Jewish immigration to Palestine; the response by Arab nationalists became severe, and attacks, riots and strikes became regular.&nbsp; It s important to note that more Palestinian Arabs who wished to live in peace were killed by nationalists than either Jews or Christians through the 1930 s.&nbsp; Such attacks led to the formation of underground Jewish militias, and by 1939 the British <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939">restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine</a>.&nbsp; But WWII changed all of this; even with the restricted immigration policy, quotas were not being met, and the Jewish population ceased to cooperate with the British government in the wake of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust">Holocaust</a>.&nbsp; Throughout the 1940 s a number of other Arab nations fell out from under British colonial rule: In 1946 Jordan gained independence from Britain, but Britain placed the Jordanian ruler s half-brother on the throne <span class=GramE>in .&nbsp;</span> In 1945 Egypt renegotiated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, but Britain retained control of the Suez Canal.&nbsp; Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, as did Syria from France.&nbsp; This was a period where many post-colonial nations in the region were first feeling their nationalist muscle, and began to show it.&nbsp; </p> <p>Remember, these were only recently nation-states.&nbsp; Not 25 years before these regions were emerging out of the wreckage of a 600-year empire and were falling under the control of other European empires.&nbsp; Changes this fast were sure to be turbulent at best.&nbsp; In 1945 Britain helped established the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League">Arab League</a>, comprised of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Yemen.&nbsp; The goal was for these countries to coordinate policy among the Arab states.&nbsp; Iraq and Jordan quickly formed a strong alliance (after all, Britain made the Jordanian king s brother the king of Iraq), and they were wary of Arab nationalism; this led Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria to fear an Iraqi-Jordanian annexation of Palestine, which could be used as a base of operations to expand their sphere of influence around the region.&nbsp; A look at a map might show you why this is an important region; Palestine provides access to both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; you control that, and you control a trade route that reaches the rest of the Middle East, the eastern coast of Africa, and sea access to South Asia: </p> <p align=center style='text-align:center'><img src="images/israel_map.jpg" width="332" height="434"></p> <p>Furthermore, negotiations between Israeli minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda_Meir">Golda Meir</a> (from Milwaukee!) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_I_of_Jordan">King Abdullah of Jordan</a> were moving in a direction where Jordan would assume Palestinian Arabs when Israel declared nationhood; Israel was not interested in seeing a Palestinian state emerge, and Abdullah hoped to extend his rule over the Palestinian regions.</p> <p align="center"> &nbsp;<img src="images/meir_abdullah.jpg" width="425" height="226"></p> <p>In November, 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved a partition of British Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, keeping Jerusalem under international control.&nbsp; The plan was criticized by the Jewish far right and the Arab League, and almost immediately fighting broke out.&nbsp; Arab attacks were met with surprising strength by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah">Haganah</a>, an underground Jewish paramilitary organization that had been getting weapons from Czechoslovakia. The more extreme right-wing elements of Haganah broke off to form <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun">Irgun </a>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Gang">Lehi, or the Stern Gang</a>.&nbsp; The British called Irgun a terrorist organization, as they attacked occupying British forces, while the Stern Gang called <span class=GramE>themselves</span> a terrorist organization and did the same; there is even evidence that Lehi was in contact with German authorities to have Jews shipped out of German-occupied Europe into Palestine during WWII.  Considering the loose ways terrorism is used in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, one should note that this kind of terrorism is in the service of political ends (a Jewish homeland), not unlike the early <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Republican_Army">IRA</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Volunteer_Force">UVF</a> in Ireland, or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front_(Algeria)">FLN</a> in Algeria.&nbsp; Their agitation was for governmental and territorial recognition, not ultimate deistic power, even if their ethnic identification has a religious element.&nbsp; </p> <p>On May 14, 1948, the British mandate over Palestine expired, and Israel declared itself a nation (which was recognized internationally).&nbsp; Prior to this, the Arab League had already determined to send troops into the Palestinian region, as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_UN_Partition_Plan">1947 UN Partition Plan</a> gave 55% of the land to the Jews, who comprised 33% of the population and owned only 6.5% of the non-state-owned land (70% of the land was state-owned, meaning 25.5% was Palestinian Arab-owned).  The Arab League complaint was that the plan ignored the Arab majority, and that the withdrawal of Britain left a vacuum of authority that threatened Arab land and property.</p> <p>By 1949 each side of the war had increased its troops and firepower, but Israel had increased its power at a greater rate and Jordan had taken control of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank">West Bank</a> (of the River Jordan), incorporating some 400,000 Palestinian Arabs and more Palestinian refugees.  This would prove destabilizing, as many Palestinians did not wish to live under the Jordanian monarchy and wanted their homeland back.  </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="4" valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1951</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>King Abdullah I is assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist at the Al Aqsa</span> Mosque. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/king_abdullah_bin_hussein.jpg" width="200" height="259"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1952</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Prince Hussein bin Talal</span> becomes King of Jordan.  He was with his grandfather King Abdullah when the king was assasinated, and struggled with him until the gunman shot himself. A medal pinned on Hussein at the insistance of his grandfather had deflected the bullet.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/king_hussein.jpg" width="219" height="298"></p> <p>King Hussein introduced liberal western reforms, but was also noted for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan">Black September</a>, when he violently shut down Palestinian nationalism in his country by expelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization.  Hussein drew criticism for siding with Iraq during the Gulf War, but also worked to normalize relations with Israel and helped <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel-Jordan_Treaty_of_Peace">orchestrate a peace treaty in 1994</a>. </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> <p align="center">(King Hussein apparently also boxed)</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/hussein_on_heavybag.jpg" width="235" height="330"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">&nbsp; 1953</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Iran was just unstable after WWII, and in 1953 the secular nationalist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mossadegh">Dr. Mohammed Mossadeq</a> was democratically elected. Mossadeq was a member of the Qajar family (of the Qajar Dynasty), and was concerned about the presence of foreign forces seizing Iran s natural resources after WWII.&nbsp; In 1951 under his leadership the Iranian National Parliament voted to nationalize the oil, and seized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.&nbsp; Britain responded with a naval blockade in the Persian Gulf, known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abadan_Crisis">Abadan Crisis</a>.&nbsp; The problem was the major buyer of Iranian oil was Great Britain; the choice was to either allow Britain to retain total control of Iranian oil, or seize it and risk not being able to sell it. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/mossadeq.jpg" width="210" height="312"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html">See James Risen s</span></span> New York Times special The Secret History of the C.I.A. in Iran.</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/nyt_cia.jpg" width="383" height="276"></p> <p>(NOTE: After a period of time, all of these documents become public, which is why we know this.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011101-12.html">However, in November 2001, President George W. Bush invoked Executive Order 13233</a>. This order overrides the Presidential Records Act that made all presidential records public by the national archivist 12 years after a president s term.&nbsp; Any request for information can now be vetoed by that president, or any other past president, locking up presidential documents (which in fact belong to the people).&nbsp; This effectively means that any documentation of orders passed since the Sept. 11 attacks will not be public until long after Bush is dead, and only if the president at the time agrees to release the documents.&nbsp; This was also made retroactive, effectively sealing documents going back to the Reagan administration and sealing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra">Iran-Contra documents</a>.)</p> <p>The success of Operation Ajax led the CIA to attempt a similar governmental overthrow of a democratically-elected leader in Guatemala the following year, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBSUCCESS">Operation PBSUCCESS</a>.&nbsp; President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was sympathetic to what the CIA saw as communist threats; this was in part fueled by the irrational fear of communism stoked by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism">McCarthyism </a>of the time.&nbsp; The CIA in turn trained a  Liberation Army in Honduras run by Castillo Armas, a weak army only 400 strong.&nbsp; They also began a propaganda campaign, in which they publicly declared prominent members of government  communists (a McCarthyite tactic) and lead student groups into protest and revolt  a move which required Arbenz to respond with police action, making his regime seem like the repressive one the propaganda made it out to be.&nbsp; When Armas forces attacked they were easily shut down and driven into the countryside, but the propaganda had worked, and fears that a US marine force was getting ready to invade through Honduras to support Armas forced Arbenz to step down.&nbsp; Armas eventually took power and proved woefully inept, and his repressive tactics lead to intense civil conflict.&nbsp; In CIA follow-up info gathering missions, they found that Arbenz had no ties to the Soviet Union.</p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1953 cont. </td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax">Operation Ajax</a></p> <p>The Western powers feared Mossadeq s socialist rhetoric  would he side with the Soviets? The Soviet Union bordered Iran and Turkey; NATO had already made an ally of Turkey, and a re-installed Shah would make Iran another Western ally.&nbsp; So in 1953 President Eisenhower, siding with Winston Churchill and Britain, aided in a joint  British Intelligence-CIA coup to overthrow Mossadeq and re-install the Shah, who was seen by the US and Britain as indecisive and someone they could control.&nbsp; In April 1953 CIA director Allen Dulles (of the Dulles Airport in Washington, DC) authorized $1 million to be used by the intelligence community in the overthrow of Mossadeq.&nbsp; (Try to imagine, say, Canada infiltrating our government and overthrowing it.)&nbsp; The operation was directed from Tehran by President Theodore Roosevelt s grandson Kermit Roosevelt Jr.&nbsp; The CIA worked something out with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a safe area to launch guerilla activities. Such activities consisted of CIA operatives posing as socialists who threatened Muslim leaders if they opposed Mossadeq.&nbsp; This stirred unrest among the Islamic community in Iran, and the hint of threat lead to plots of conspiracies.&nbsp; This drove Mossadeq to suspend parliament (in a rigged election), a move that allowed to US and British press to fan flames of  Mossadeq exercising dictatorial power, further creating unrest.&nbsp; The only person who outranked Mossadeq was the young (33) <span class=GramE><span class=grame>Shah,</span></span> and Mossadeq asked the Shah to leave.&nbsp; The Shah refused, instead dismissing the prime minister; but Mossadeq refused to leave, vowed to fight the Shah, and the Shah left for Italy.&nbsp; Protests broke out in the streets, and the pro-Shah side was funded by CIA  British MI6 cash, leading to some violent occurrences (some 300 dead).&nbsp; The military eventually drove a tank regiment to the capital, shelled it, and took Mossadeq prisoner on August 19, 1953, effectively re-installing the Shah as monarch.&nbsp; The Shah would in turn release Iranian oil reserves back to the British oil interests.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/mosaddeq_trial.jpg" width="242" height="242"></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/operation_ajax.jpg" width="250" height="316"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="4" valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1956</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Suez_War">The Suez Crisis</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/suez.jpg" width="200" height="384"></p> <p>After WWI Britain retained control of the Suez Canal in Egypt.  In 1956 Egyptian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamal_Abdel_Nasser">President Gamal</span> Abdel</span> Nasser</a>, the foremost proponent for Arab nationalism, moved to nationalize the canal, not unlike Mossadeq s move to nationalize Iranian oil.  Britain and France, along with Israel, moved forces to Suez to retain control of the canal; the plan was for Israel to attack and for Britain and France to convince both sides to withdraw, and for Britain and France to retain control of the canal.  </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/nasser.jpg" width="300" height="395"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1958</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>In 1958 King Faisal of Iraq joined Syria and Egypt in the short-lived <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic">United Arab Republic</a>, which further prompted the creation of the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan.  But in the next few months, military movements opened a window for an officer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Karim_Qassim">Abdul Karim</span> Qassim</span></a>, to stage a military coup; he took Baghdad, deposed the monarchy and established a republic.  </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/abdul_karim_qassim.jpg" width="208" height="328"></p> <p>Qassim</span> lasted until the Ba athist coup in 1963, when he was assassinated and Abdul Salam</span> Arif</span> took power.  Arif</span> later died in a helicopter crash and his brother Abdul Rahman</span> Arif</span> became president.  He would then be overthrown by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Hassan_al-Bakr">Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr</span></a>, who greased the wheels in the Iraqi Ba athist party for Saddam Hussein s rise to power.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/al_bakr.jpg" width="187" height="292"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1963</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>The leftist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'ath_Party">Ba ath Party</a> comes to power in both Syria and Iraq.  The Ba ath party was secular, socialist and nationalist in intent, and was at odds with growing religious fundamentalism.  It started through a small group of intellectuals and students in the 1940 s, espoused Arabic nationalism and socialist ideology, but did not address the Marxist idea of class struggle.  In 1966 the Ba ath parties in Iraq and Syria went separate ways; they would end up opposing each other in many instances, and both abandoned many of Ba athisms original principals. In Syria, economic reforms took focus and there was a shift from socialist ideals and toward reconciliation with the more conservative elements in the Arab world.  In Iraq, the Ba athists purged dissident groups, and in 1979 Saddam Hussein succeeded Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr</span>, who had ruled since 1968.  Hussein s lasting mark on Ba athism in Iraq was its militarization.  Hussein, as an official, originally negotiated and signed a pact with the Soviet Union in 1972, but the 1978 execution of Iraqi communists and the call of Western trade would end these relations.  By the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was doing most of its trade with France, the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union, and other Arab nations who had an interest in seeing the Iranian Revolution end.  With Western aid, Iraq would develop chemical weapons and a nuclear power program during this period. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><p align="center" class="style5">1967</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War">The Six-Day War</a></p> <p>The short version for a short war: After the Suez Crisis in 1956, the US and the USSR convinced Israel to withdraw troops from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The UN moved in to keep the peace for a while. However, the USSR was supporting Syria and the Ba'ath Party there, and in the early 1960's Syria began shelling northern Israel (the Galilee) from the Golan Heights region of Syria. In 1964 Israel started a project to link the Sea of Galilee to its water system, and Syria responded by trying divert the Dan/Baniyas stream away from Israel and through Syria to Jordan. Border skirmishes between Israel and Syria increased until Israel threatened to invade Syria and overthrow the Ba'athist regime, which was backed by the USSR. (So you can guess where the US stood in all this --directly behind Israel.) Egypt under Nasser had been attempting to re-establish its place at the center of the Arab world, and when it received what turned out to be false Soviet intelligence that Israel was ammassing troops along the Sinai, it began to mobilize its own troops to the region. Nasser convinced the UN to remove its troops from the buffer zone, and Israel refused to allow the UN troops to fall back to their country, so there goes your peace-keeping. Then in May, 1967, Egypt imposed a blockaid on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Tiran">Straits of Tiran</a>, at the mouth of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Aqaba">Gulf of Aqaba</a>. (Recall the note above about Israel's strategic location.) </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/straits_of_tiran.jpg" width="343" height="516"></p> <p>This effectively blocked all southern trade to and from Israel; but this is messy, because Israel had earlier refused to sign the Territorial Sea Convention that would recognize Israel's right to trade through the Straits of Tiran, even though 17 other maritime states had earlier agreed to Israel's right to use the route. King Hussein of Jordan was pushed into signing a defense treaty with Syria and Egypt to pacify Jordanian nationalists whom he felt threatened his administration; it was either deal with the Israeli army or a civil war. Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait and Algeria also began to mobilize. This left Israel surrounded by amassing forces. At this point the UN and the US were tearing their hair out; the US was bogged down in Vietnam and there was little it could do. Attempts at diplomacy didn't work, and on June 5, under defense minister Moshe Dayan (with the badass eye-patch) Israel pre-emptively attacked the Egyptian Air Force. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/moshe_dayan.jpeg" width="164" height="226"></p> <p>The surprise attack took out 300 Egyptian planes and gave Israel a decided advantage. In the next five days Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the Sinai Peninsula. Most importantly, they demonstrated both a military superiority, and a willingness to use it first. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p>A word on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_terrorism">political terrorism</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism">state terrorism</a></p> <p>The 1970's were the boom time for terrorist activities and insurgencies. The term <em>terrorism</em> was first used after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution">French Revolution</a> and the subsequent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror">Reign of Terror</a>. </p> <p>Much of the political terrorist activity throughout the 20th C. was in response to autocracy within a country (the French Revolution, and the peasant uprisings in 19th C. Russia), against foreign rule (the Irish Republican Army, the Mau Mau of Kenya), and against totalitarian states (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer">theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's</a> attempts to assasinate Hiter). The 20th C. saw the last of the European colonial empires; insurgency (often Marxist) was used as a tool to help end these colonial occupations, and then flourished in the subsequent vacuums of power.</p> <blockquote> <p>Examples of 1970's political insurgencies:<br /> Ireland: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_IRA">IRA</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_IRA">Provos</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Volunteer_Force">UVF</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Defence_Association">UDA</a> <br /> Germany: The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction">Red Army Faction</a><br /> Italy: The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Brigades">Red Brigades</a><br /> Spain: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA">ETA</a><br /> USA: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathermen">Weather Underground</a> <br /> Uruguay: The Tupamarus<br /> Columbia: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARC">FARC Rebels</a> <br /> Middle East: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLO">PLO</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah">Fatah</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah-Revolutionary_Council">ANO</a><br /> </p> </blockquote> <p>State terrorism is when a state, often through paramilitary and/or state force, uses terrorist tactics to control its own people or people in a region it occupies. In brief: the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party">Nazis</a>, China and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989">Tianamen Square incident</a>, human rights abuses in Cuba, Iraq, and by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK">SAVAK</a> with CIA support in Iran from the 1957-1979, in Northern Ireland the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Ulster_Constabulary">Royal Ulster Constabulary</a> colluded with loyalist factions to assasinate suspected IRA, The FBI assasination of Black Panther leader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton">Fred Hampton</a> in Chicago, 1969, and some would argue that the US <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation">School of the Americas</a> and internment camps at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_X-Ray">Camp X-Ray</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Delta">Camp Delta</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitmo">Gitmo</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse">Abu Ghraib</a>, and operations like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax">Operation Ajax</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods">Operation Northwoods</a> constitute state terrorism. </p></td> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">1970</p></td> <td rowspan="2" valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan">Black September</a></span></p> <p>After the Six-Day War, a majority of Jordananians were Palestinian, and Arab nationalism continued to foment sporadic attacks on Israel, especially by the Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen">Fedayeen</a> (Arabic for one who sacrifices for the cause). The Fedayeen had come from Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, were supported by Egyptian President Nasser's army, and continued sporadic attacks on Israel. In 1968 the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Defense_Forces">Israeli Defense Forces</a> invaded <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karameh">Karameh</a>, Jordan.</p> <p>Karameh had been a stronghold of the Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah">Fatah</a> movement, which was founded by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat">Yasser Arafat</a>.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/arafat.jpg" width="238" height="285"></p> <p>Fatah was for some time supplied by the USSR and carried out attacks on the Middle East and Western Europe on Israeli or Israeli-linked targets. It also provided training to insurgencies from other regions, from Europe to Africa to Asia. </p> <p>('Fatah' is a reverse acronym in Arabic for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, or 'Palestinian National Liberation Movement.' 'Hataf' in Arabic means 'death.') </p> <p>In 1968 Fatah joined the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLO">PLO</a> (Palestinian Liberation Organization), and in Jordan they began arming themselves, collecting taxes, and setting up checkpoints, turning where they lived in Jordan into a separate state. This didn't hold well with Jordanian authorities or King Hussein, as it destabilized their own country and raised the threat of invasion from Israel, which could mean counter-invasions from other nationalist Arab countries. Hussein visited with US President Nixon and Egyptian President Nasser, and returned with a ten-point plan to restrict the actions of the PLO within Jordanian territory. Clashes between the PLO and Jordanian security on Feb. 11 left 300 dead. Tensions continued to heighten. A Sept. 1 attempt to assasinate King Hussein failed, and on Sept. 6 the PLO subgroup <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFLP">PFLP</a> (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) hijacked three planes, and a fourth on Sept 9. On Sept. 16 King Hussein declared martial law; two days later Syrian forces invaded and joined the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Army">Palestinian Liberation Army</a> (the PLO's military wing). In response, Israel sent air strikes against Syrian tanks. Hussein met with Arafat on Sept. 27 and conditions were agreed upon for recognition of Palestinian organizations in Jordan. </p> <p>The next day Nasser died of a heart attack. He was succeeded by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Sadat">President Anwar Sadat</a>.</p> <p>Estimates range between 5,000-10,000 dead from the events of Black September. The Syrian defense minister, Ba'athist Hafez al-Assad, soon overthrew the civilian government in Syria, and a new order was established to the north of Israel, Palestine and Jordan. In the instability Arafat was in a weakened positioned, and later that year was forced to return control over to King Hussein and dismantle military bases. Many Palestinian organizations started calling for Hussein's overthrow over Radio Baghdad in order to prevent a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. Soon the militant Palestinian groups were driven out, many to Lebanon.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jrw3k">Joley</span> R. Wood</a> is born on Sept. 8 near Omaha, Nebraska, USA.  Grows up in La Crosse, Wisconsin along the Upper Mississippi reading comic books, watching people watch the news, and mortally terrified of snapping turtles.  Remembers seeing people like Nixon and Ford and Khomeini on TV, and even remembers lame SNL jokes about these same people back then (if you ain t</span> a tank-bomber, you ain t</span> Shi ite?  Come on& ).  Yadda yadda yadda, he eventually ends up working on his Ph.D</span> at the University of Virginia, where he teaches ENWR and makes web pages for his students like this one.  When he grows up he wants to be finished with his dissertation.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/greencard_mugshot.jpg" width="266" height="340"></p> <p align="left">(If you pay attention throughout this timeline, you'll notice that a lot of badness seems to go down right around his birthday.)</p> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1972</td> <td rowspan="2" valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre">The Munich Massacre </a></p> <p>On Sept. 5, at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, a eight members of a Palestinian terrorist group calling themselves Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage. The kidnappers were identified as fedayeen from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Black September demanded the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israel to Egypt. Israel refused to negotiate and wanted to send special forces into the Olympic Village, but German Chancellor Willy Brandt declared German forces would handle it. Offers of cash and of replacing the Israeli hostages with German ones were refused. The Palestinians demanded transport to Cairo. The Germans sent in an police force untrained in such matters, disguised as athletes, and attempted to kill the kidnappers with snipers. The rest was a mess. Two helicopters took the kidnappers and hostages to an airbase, where the German force was to overpower the Palestinians. In short, the Palestinians caught on to the ruse, one sprayed fire on the hostages in one of the helicopters, and in the chaos all of the hostages were killed. Three kidnappers were taken prisoner, the rest were killed. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/munich_hostage_crisis.jpg" width="350" height="251"></p> <p align="left">The Israeli team left on Sept. 5, and the Egyptian team left on Sept. 7. On Sept. 9 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sent air strikes against PLO bases in Lebanon and Syria. She then set up Operation Wrath of God (Hebrew <em>Mivtzah Elohim</em>), authorizing the Israeli secret service <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad">Mossad</a> to assasinate any Black September or PFLP operatives wherever they could be found. For the next 20-some years, Mossad would assasinate suspected members throughout Europe and the Middle East, often by planting bombs. That October a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked; the hijackers demanded the release of the three Black September prisoners in Germany; the demands were met, in part out of German embarassment abot the affair, and the prisoners fled.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p>The Yom Kippur War cease-fire called for an end of fighting between Egypt and Israel, but not Syria and Israel. It was arranged through the US and the Soviet Union. Nixon was immersed in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal">Watergate Scandal</a>, and most of the diplomacy was handled by Kissinger and and other White House top staff (Defense Secretary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Schlesinger">James Schlesinger</a>, Chief of Staff <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Haig">Alexander Haig</a>, and CIA Director <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby">William Colby</a>). In the negotiations, Brezhnev noted that if the US did not agree to cooperate, the Soviet Union would act unilaterally; the US response was that if the Soviets did not cease its Egyptian support, they would intervene. Such actions could have sparked a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III">third world war</a>, and in the end the Soviets conceded an Arab defeat. </p> <p>The fall-out in Israel wasn't good for Golda Meir's government. Per capita, Israel suffered as many casualties during the war as the US had in a decade of fighting in Vietnam. Following an investigation, Meir and her cabinet resigned, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin">Yitzhak Rabin</a> became Prime Minister; he would be defeated by the right-wing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likud">Likud</a> party in 1977, led by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Begin">Menachim Begin</a>, a first for Israel. </p> <p>Sadat became frustrated with the slow pace of the negotiations, and in 1977 went to Israel, which implied he recognized Israel as a state. US President Jimmy Carter then invited both Sadat and Begin to Camp David to work on their negotiations. Between September 5-17 of 1978 Israel and Egypt hammered out a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel-Egypt_Peace_Treaty">peace treaty</a>, Egypt recognized Israel as a sovereign state, Israel withdrew its troops from the Sinai, and the Arab League expelled Egypt for negotiating with Israel. Sadat was later assasinated in 1981. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/camp_david.jpg" width="448" height="356"></p></td> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1973</td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War">Yom Kippur War</a></p> <p>In 1972 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Sadat">Anwar Sadat</a> publicly proclaimed his determination to retake the region of the Sinai Peninsula lost to Israel in the Six-Day War. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/sadat.jpg" width="200" height="225"></p> <p>Egypt had received Soviet military aid in the build-up (only defense weaponry). When it could not receive more offensive aid, Egypt expelled some 20,000 Soviet military advisors. In June of 1973 US President Nixon met with Soviet Premier Brezhnev, who both agreed they had no interest in any more Middle East destabilizaiton. </p> <p>Israel had toyed with the idea of a pre-emptive strike, but faced a major problem; European nations had stopped supplying Israel with weapons under the threat of an Arab oil embargo, so Israel was soley dependent upon the US for military aid. A pre-emptive strike was voted down because Israel could not be seen as having started this war, as in the Six-Day War. By holding back, they did receive US reinforcements. Then US Secretary of State <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger">Henry Kissinger</a> said had Israel struck first, they would not have received &quot;so much as a nail.&quot; </p> <p>On October 6 Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack to retake the regions of the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights that were lost during the Six-Day War. The war lasted just over two weeks before a UN cease-fire was imposed; the Egyptian-Syrian coalition won a string of victories before Israel could regain its footing. Prior to the fighting, reinforcements from Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, the PLO, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia and Sudan had been given to the Egypt and Syria, as well as Saudi and Kuwaiti financial aid. But in the end, Israel ended up taking even more of the Golan Heights. </p> <p>(If you've seen the Scorsese film <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_of_new_york">Gangs of New York</a></em>, this must have been like a massive version of the opening gang fight, where all the different factions announce themselves and then just start killing.) </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Nidal">Abu Nidal</a> </p> <p>A Palestinian nationalist and insurgent, also noted as a paranoid (and possible psychotic), who broke from Arafat's PLO after the expulsion from Jordan. Abu Nidal had joined the Ba'ath Party when he was 18 and living in Jordan, but in 1957 King Hussein closed the party, and Nidal eventually ended up Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he studied engineering. He began a secret Palestinian organization in Saudi Arabia, and after the Six-Day War, was apprehended and tortured by Saudi authorities. He was expelled to Jordan, where he set up legitimate companies that served as a front for Fatah. (At one point in the 80's he was the largest importer of chickens to Poland.) In 1970 PLO Deputy Chief Abu Iyad recognized Nidal as an organization administrator, and appointed Nidal as representative to Baghdad --thus an Iraqi connection is established. After King Hussein's expulsion of Palestinian militants, Nidal emerged as a leftist challenger to Arafat's authority over Fatah, and over <em>Voice of Palestine</em> radio declared Arafat an enemy of the Palestinian people. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/abu_nidal.jpg" width="180" height="239"></p> <p>On Sept. 5, 1973 five members of Nidal's own organization the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah_-_the_Revolutionary_Council">Revolutionary Council</a> (also known as the ANO, Abu Nidal Organization) took 13 hostages in the Saudi embassy in Paris, demanding the release of Nidal associate and Black September member Abu Dawud from jail in Jordan (Dawud had attempted to assasinate King Hussein). After three days the PLO intervened and the gunmen surrendered, but not before the Kuwaiti government agreed to pay Hussein $12 million for Dawud. Abu Iyad and PLO representative Mahmoud Abbas (now the president of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_National_Authority">Palestinian National Authority</a>) went to Iraq to dissuade Nidal from such actions, claiming they hurt the PLO's cause, but Nidal wsa protected by Iraq, who claimed Nidal was following their orders. At that point the PLO refused to recognize Nidal, and declared him a mercenary. In 1981 Nidal moved his organization to Syria, and had established operations in Lebanon. In 1985 he moved again to Tripoli, Libya, where he orchestrated the bombing of Pan Am Fligh 103 out of Lockerbie, Scotland. In 1999 he was expelled by Libya and moved back to Iraq, where he died in 2002 by gunshot wounds; some claim it was suicide, others claim he was executed on orders of Saddam Hussein.</p> <p>His paranoid handling of the organization meant once you were in, you could never leave; members had to write out their life stories in longhand, and dissenters were executed and their names published in the ANO's paper <em>Filastin al-Thawra. </em> His organization is responsible for some 100 operations in 20 countries, leading to some 900 deaths. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1975</td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War">The Lebanese Civil War </a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/lebanon.jpg" width="302" height="273"></p> <p>The Lebanese Civil War is another one of those post-colonial power-vacuum deals. After the French left in 1943, the majority were comprised of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maronite">Maronite Christians</a>, who were constitutionally guaranteed governmental control, with Sunni and Shi'a Muslims comprising the rest of Lebanon's ethnic make-up. After the 1948 diaspora of Palestinians, many feld to Lebanon, and many of these turned militant with the general rise of the PLO. In 1969 Muslim leftists called for a census that would put the Christians in the minority and restructure the government; this lead to the formation of factional militias, the Maronite militias getting support from West Germany, Belgium and other Western nations, Sunni factions getting support from Libya and Iraq and later Syrian Ba'athists, and Shi'a factions getting eventually getting support from the Revolutionary Guard out of the Iranian Revolution, and forming Hezbollah. In the meantime, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_for_the_Liberation_of_Palestine">PFLP</a> faction of the PLO was getting Soviet aid. None of these factions were unified against each other, and struggled against each other for power. </p> <p>The PLO was active in Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and were attacking Israel from its positions in Lebanon. In 1978 Israel in turn invaded Lebanon under the auspices of aiding the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lebanon_Army">SLA</a> (Southern Lebanese Army) in its civil war, and by 1981 was attacking PLO positions in Lebanon. In July, Israel bombed PLO -Fatah headquarters West Beirut, sparking retaliation rocket fire into Israel, which led to the US sending in diplomat <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Habib">Philip Habib</a> to negotiate a cease-fire. A cease-fire happened, but was only recognized in Lebanon proper and along the Israeli borders, so Israeli-Palestinian attacks continued in other arenas. In June, 1982, Abu Nidal's organization attempted to assasinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London; he had assasinated a PLO ambassador, and had ended up on their hit list. British and Israeli intelligence claimed the hit on Argov was sponsored by Iraq, but Israel still sent retaliatory air attacks at PLO and PFLP targets in West Beirut. So much for the cease-fire. Israel went back into Lebanon, the UN Security Coucil passed Resolution 509, which demanded Israel withdraw its troops to the recognized Lebanese borders. For the first time the US used its veto power and overrode the resolution, allowing Israel to occupy Lebanon. </p> <p>Israeli forces were under the command of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon">Ariel Sharon</a>, who planned to destroy the PLO before any negotiations could proceed. (Sharon would later be held responsible for the massacre of 1000-2000 Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during this period.) In comes Habib again, and he negotiated treaty where both Israel and the PLO would withdraw, and a joint US-Italian-French UN contingent would oversee the withdrawl to protect the civilians (around 80% of the deaths in this conflict were civilian). </p> <p>In the meantime, Iranian support for Hezbollah grew, and their mission became driving the Israeli and Western presence out of Lebanon. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="2" valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Afghanistan">The Soviet-Afghanistan War</a></p> <p>In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and this would be their Vietnam, a war they couldn't pull out of that drained their resources. The war lasted over a decade, and began when a communist coup orchestrated by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafizullah_Amin">Hafizullah Amin</a> (while under house arrest), took over the country in 1978. With President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_Mohammed_Taraki">Nur Muhammad Taraki</a> as president, they brought the marxist Khalq Party to power. In 1965 the Marxist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Democratic_Party_of_Afghanistan">People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan</a> was founded, but split into two factions, the Khalq and Parcham factions, two years later. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/afghanistan.jpg" width="376" height="314"></p> <p>However, the Khalq reforms were met with widespread resistance; Parcham elements were being purged, Amin and Taraki struggled for power over each other, and by 1979 both Amin and Taraki were assasinated. This destabilization lead to the Soviet Union's invasion, who found the Khalq to be too radical and unstable to control; a 1978 friendship treaty between the countries was the pretext for the invasion, and before his death Taraki had convinced the Soviets to send in ground troops and helicopter gunships. They realized that Amin's marxist reforms would be too difficult in a conservatively religious country like Afghanistan, and much opposition went to Iran and Pakistan to establish the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahideen">mujahideen</a> (literally &quot;those who struggle&quot;). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev">Brezhnev</a> finally made the decision that to move in because of the increasing instability along the Soviet border regions in Central Asia. After Amin's assasination, the Soviets installed Parcham leader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babrak_Karmal">Babrak Karmal</a> as president. </p> <p><a name="AfghanAlQaedaTaliban" id="AfghanAlQaedaTaliban"></a>This being the Cold War, and with the Soviets supporting the Afghan leadership, the mujahideen gained backing by the US and China, and by religious supporters in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (this is where Osama bin Laden and his access to the family fortune would come into play). The US also reversed policy on Pakistan and began sending military aid there. Thus began a war of attrition where the Soviets had to respond to repeated guerilla attacks from the well-funded rebels. The mujahideen was made up of a number of factions, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden">Osama bin Laden</a>, with Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Azzam">Dr. Abdullah Azzam</a>, had established the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maktab_al-Khadamat">Maktab al-Khadamat</a> (or Afghan Services Bureau) to recruit and train mujahideen fighters. MAK's main function was to channel funds from the variety of backers into its recruitment and training; this included CIA funds that were sent to Pakistan's secret service, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Services_Intelligence">ISI</a>. Maktab al-Khadamat would later become <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda">Al Qaeda</a> (the base). </p> <p>The Soviets underestimated the force necessary to pacify the country, and the mujahideen grew. By 1986 the USSR decided to withdraw from the country. The resultant power vacuum, like anywhere else, meant some organized group would take power, and that was the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban">Taliban</a>, a fundamentalist Islamic political faction that fought within the mujahideen, but consolidated total power after the USSR left. Other factions of the mujahideen formed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Northern_Alliance">Northern Alliance</a>, a loose organization of warlords but effectively led by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shah_Massoud">Ahmed Shah Massoud</a>. Massoud had been an engineering student who proved to be an influential and effective guerilla leader during the Soviet occupation and during the reign of the Taliban --he was nicknamed the Lion of Panjshir. He was assasinated on July 9, 2001, by Al Qaeda members posing as photojournalists; the camera was a bomb that killed them all. It is believed Massoud was assasinated so there would be less resistance to the Taliban harboring Osama bin Laden after Sept. 11. Writer Sebastian Junger profiled Massoud for National Geographic shortly before he was assasinated; here is <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0103/story.html#story_1">an excerpt of his article The Lion in Winter</a>, a <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0110/junger.html">follow-up remembrance</a>, and a <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0103/life.html">photo gallery</a>. </p> <p>Afghanistan has long been the center of the world's poppy production; the poppy seed is what's needed to produce opiates like morphine , codeine and heroin, and the heroin trade had kept Afghanistan financially alive (or at least the factional leaders). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Opium_trade">In 2001, the US gave the Taliban $43 million for efforts to reduce the opium trade</a>, efforts which amounted to checking shipments. Little evidence exists that the trade was actually slowing, and when the Taliban would announce a crack-down on the trade, it just sent prices higher. </p></td> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">&nbsp; 1979</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_revolution">The Iranian Revolution, 1979</a></p> <p>Mohammad Reza Shah was only in his early 30 s when he became Iran s ruling monarch and Western oil connection.&nbsp; The Shah s autocratic leadership hurt the middle classes; only the well-connected benefited under his regime, and protesters and opponents were imprisoned.&nbsp; In such a regime, little support for a constitutional democracy could be garnered.&nbsp; In 1964 constant critic and fundamentalist religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was exiled by the Shah first to Turkey and soon after Iraq, and then in 1978 to France.&nbsp; (Remember, France was a country who benefited from Iranian oil, like Britain and the US.)&nbsp; Apparently, the French secret service offered to arrange an accident for Khomeini, but the Shah declined, claiming that would make him a martyr.&nbsp; While in exile Khomeini wrote <i>Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists</i>, which laid out his ideas for an Islamic jurist state that rejected monarchy in favor of republicanism, or representation by elected officials; however, the leader would be appointed by a council of Islamic clerics.&nbsp; By January 16, 1979, the combination of conservative Muslim and middle class unrest with the Shah forced him and his family to flee to Egypt.&nbsp; There were a number of competing state models, but the short version is Khomeini returned, the Revolutionary Guard of clerics was formed, they organized the quickest, and the Iranian Revolution ensued.&nbsp; One might say the revolution began when a student group who were followers of Khomeini stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took American hostages on November 4, 1979.&nbsp; They held the hostages for 444 days, creating a crisis that effectively ended President Jimmy Carter s chances for a second term and ushered in Ronald Reagan (who may have cut a deal with the Iranians before the election, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise">October Surprise</a>; they d hold on to the hostages until after the election, guaranteeing Reagan s election, and then free them for Reagan s future support).</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/iranian_revolution.jpg" width="180" height="312"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein#Rise_in_the_Ba.27ath_party">Saddam Hussein</a> </p> <p>Hussein rose through the Iraqi Ba'athist regime through his cousin, President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. An admirer of Nasser, he worked to modernize the country, focusing on using its oil reserves to generate revenue and to initiate institutions not seen in the Arab world (free education, the recognition of women's rights and their entry into government, free health care, a program to eradicate illiteracy, electrification, infrastructure development.) In 1979 al-Bakr was working with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad to join the two Ba'athist nations; Assad would become deputy leader of the union, eclipsing Hussein. But Hussein took power before these negotiations were completed, and declared there were spies in the Ba'ath Party; in a videotaped assemby, he read out the names of the disloyal, who were removed to face a firing squad. A new regime had emerged that would work towards a kind of secular Western modernization while it developed a cult of personality around its leader and demanded devotion to the Ba'ath Party. Iraq under Hussein was the only country in the Persian Gulf to abandon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia">Sharia</a> religious law in favor of a Western style legal system; after the Iranian Revolution, however, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi%27a_Islam">Shi'a</a> majority became a problem (Hussein was part of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunni">Sunni</a> bourgeois minority in Iraq), and the Kurdish region in the north, despite being Sunni, were not Arab and had long wanted their independence. This internal stratification lead Hussein to either attempt to incorporate the opposition into his party, or eliminate it. As a result, he ended up putting family members into high stations of power, including his sons <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uday_Hussein">Uday</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qusay_Hussein">Qusay</a>; Uday was particularly brutal, and considered by Egypt's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosni_Mubarak">President Hosni Mubarak</a> to be a psychopath. Both sons were killed in the 2003 Iraq War. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/saddam_hussein.jpg" width="240" height="291"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>US involvement in the Iran-Iraq War </p> <p>The US was already wary of Iran due to the hostage crisis, and began shifting support to Iraq, offering materials, intelligence and weapons by 1982.&nbsp; By 1984 both Iraq and Iran were attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf in the hopes of harming the opposition s trade.&nbsp; Each side struck deals with the planet s Cold Warriors; in 1987, the Soviet Union began chartering tankers, and in response if a tanker flew the American flag, it got US protection.&nbsp; This guaranteed Iraq s access to trade through the Gulf.&nbsp; On May 17, 1987, an Iraqi plane accidentally attacked a US ship, but the US was more interested in isolating Iran, which it did by getting Resolution 598 passed through the UN Security Council, criticizing Iran for mining international waters and leading to naval skirmishes.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/shakinghands_high.wmv"></a><img src="images/rumsfeld_hussein.jpg" width="200" height="153"></p> <p>The Special Envoy to the Middle East at that time, Donald Rumsfeld, met with Saddam Hussein in 1983:  He s a son of a bitch, but he s our son of a bitch. (<a href="images/rumsfeld_hussein_shake.wmv">See video here</a>.)</p> <p>At the same time, the US was in the midst of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair">Iran-Contra affair</a> (see below, 1986 for details).&nbsp; Americans had been taken hostage in Lebanon, and the US hoped Iran would have some influence over hostage-takers.&nbsp; The Reagan Administration had also been funding Contra rebels in Nicaragua with weapons, despite the US congress banning this.&nbsp; To get around the ban, the Reagan administration continued to fund the Contras through the National Security Council run by John Poindexter and Col. Oliver North.&nbsp; In the meantime, Iran needed weapons to fight its war <span class=GramE>against;</span> in short, the money gained through sales of arms to Iran <span class=grame>were</span> used to fund the Contras through the NSC.&nbsp; North and his secretary were subsequently caught shredding evidence of these illegal sales.&nbsp; All in all, a bad time for US policy; President Reagan was subsequently implicated in the investigation, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Commission_(United_States)">Tower Commission</a>, but some wonder if his encroaching Parkinson s disease didn t honestly leave him in the dark, not knowing what he was told and what he wasn t told.</p> <p>Yet US support of Iraq never flagged.&nbsp; A global network of US-based companies provided Iraq with dual-use items, goods that could be used in military or other applications (trucks, chemicals, computers, etc.).&nbsp; The British paper <em>The Financial Times</em> began reporting in September, 1989 that the Italian bank Banca</span></span> Nazionale</span></span> del Lavoro</span></span> funneled $5 billion in US taxpayer-guaranteed loans to Iraq from 1985-1989, money used to fund chemical and nuclear weapons programs.&nbsp; For the next two years, the Financial Times ran over 300 stories on the subject, documenting the US companies who provided material goods.&nbsp; In December, 2002, Iraq s <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/23/news-crogan.php">Weapons Declaration report</a> documents a number of US companies that sold them precursors to chemical weapons like mustard gas and sarin.</p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><p align="center" class="style5">1980</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War">The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988</a></p> <p>Iraq and Iran had tense relations over territory for some time before the war; Iraq had skirmishes with the Shah s regime over the resource-rich <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuzestan">Khuzestan </a>region of Iran and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvand/Shatt_al-Arab">Shatt Al-Arab waterway</a> into the Persian Gulf. (Imagine a time when the British and French tussled over the Mississippi Delta and access to the Gulf of Mexico  similar kind of access was desired.)&nbsp; The Ba ath party, an Arab National Socialist political party that began in Syria in the 1940 s, gained a stronghold in Iraq, and in 1963 overthrew the Prime Minister and quashed a communist uprising. The Ba athist headed in a Marxist direction, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr</span></span> ran the party in Iraq until 1979, when his cousin Saddam Hussein took power.&nbsp; Marxist, secularist, and wanting to take the mantle of the <i>leader of the Arab world</i>, Ba athist Iraq irked fundamentalist Iran; Shi ite Muslims were being repressed by Iraqi Ba athists, as well as in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Khomeini hoped they d follow the Iranian Revolution example.&nbsp; At the same time, Hussein recognized the instability occurring in Iran after the revolution, and believed their Sunni population would want to join Iraq.&nbsp; The rest was trouble.&nbsp; In both cases, nationalistic fervor and state-controlled media lead the ambivalent populations <i>against</i> their possible saviors  Sunni Iranians fought Iraqis, and Shi ite Iraqis fought Iranians.&nbsp; Hussein declared the Shatt al-Arab waterway Iraq s on September 17, 1980, and the full-scale war began five days later based on a supposed assassination attempt of Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.&nbsp; </p> <p>The war eventually became a stalemate, but Iraq had by that point built up an arsenal of scud missiles chemical weapons.&nbsp; A cease-fire was agreed upon in August, 1988.&nbsp; Both countries were left financially ruined; Iran had lost millions of people in casualties and $350 billion, while Iraq owed debt to Arab backers throughout the region.&nbsp; The Iran-Iraq war proved to be the fifth costliest since WWII.&nbsp; In the end, the borders remained the same, and the important Shatt Al-Arab waterway to the Persian Gulf remained partly in Iran, partly in Iraq.&nbsp; Iraq s $14 billion debt to Kuwait, the port country at the mouth of the waterway, was a major reason for Iraq s 1990 invasion of the country.&nbsp; After the war Iraq tried to increase its oil prices to cover its war costs, but Kuwait in turn increased its own oil production, thereby driving down costs and gaining it some leverage in the region.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/iran_iraq_war.jpg" width="426" height="302"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_barracks_bombing">Bombing of US Marine Barracks in Beiruit </a></p> <p>Things get messier after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped create and support the Shi'a insurgent group <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Hezbollah_and_the_cedar_revolution">Hezbollah</a> in Lebanon. US diplomat Philip Habib had brokered a cease-fire in the Lebanese Civil War that called for a joint US-French-Italian UN contingent to monitor Israeli and PLO withdrawals and create a buffer between the armed forces and civilians. The Marines were headquartered near the Beirut International Airport, and on October 23, a delivery truck loaded with about 12,000 pounds of TNT crashed through the gates and into the headquarters, killing 241 Marines; it was the single worst day for Marine casualties since <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima">Iwo Jima</a> in WWII. The US blamed Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, but they denied involvement, while any number of other groups assumed responsibility for the act. President Reagan planned retaliatory attacks on barracks believed to house Hezbollah trainees, but this plan was aborted to maintain US-Arab relations. The next year the Marines were removed from Lebanon.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/beirut_barracks.jpg" width="480" height="320"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1983</td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_Doctrine">The Reagan Doctrine</a></p> <p>Announced in his February, 1985 State of the Union Address, the Reagan Doctrine was a response to the 1968 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brezhnev_Doctrine">Brezhnev Doctrine</a>. Brezhnev claimed that whenever a socialist country was hostiley threatened by capitalism, it became a common problem for the socialist world. (The doctrine implicitly made the Soviet Union the arbiter of what was to be called capitalism and what would be called socialism.) Reagan's response was that the US would offer support to whoever is fighting Soviet aggression, &quot;<em>on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.&quot; </em>In other words, if there were people fighting Soviets, the US would offer support. This can present risks, however, and leads to an &quot;enemy of my enemy is my friend&quot; situation. This ended up being the the case in Afghanistan, where US support of the mujahideen resulted in the rise of the Taliban and indirectly the group that would become Al Qaeda. </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1985</td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p>A word on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_nationalism">Arab nationalism</a></p> <p>Iraq argued that Kuwait was always a part of Iraq until British Imperialism separated it off for the empire's own benefit.&nbsp; Annexing Kuwait wasn't seen by them so much as aggression as a restoration.&nbsp; Arab Nationalism began before WWI, when there was a push for Arab solidarity within the Ottoman Empire.&nbsp; The Ottoman Empire was based in Turkey, and was made up of a different ethnic majority; Turkic peoples are one of the most widespread ethnic groups in Eurasia, breaking down into numerous linguistic subgroups that stretch from Turkey to Siberia.&nbsp; </p> <p>Arab Nationalism was a movement within the Ottoman Empire to re-establish Arabic language and education, some political autonomy, and the use of imperial conscripts for local service during peacetime.&nbsp; This was not a widespread movement, and many Arabs first found identity in tribal and religious affiliations before they found it in Arab Nationalism, but some proponents of Arab Nationalism met violent ends at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.&nbsp; </p> <p>Where Arab nationalism did take root, however, was in the secular, leftist, Ba'ath Party (Ba'ath means <i>resurrection</i>).&nbsp; The Ba'ath Party began in 1945 and was strongest in Iraq and Syria, but also found adherents in Lebanon and Jordan.&nbsp; One might think of this pan-Arab nationalism as similar to what led to European nationalism in the early-to-mid 20<sup>th</sup> century; after the fall of empires, the peoples who remain are forced to re-organize themselves and re-discover their social identities, and such vacuums are often filled by opportunistic nationalist movements.&nbsp; In 1957, King Hussein of Jordan outlawed the Ba'athists in his country.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair" >The Iran-Contra Affair</a> </p> <p>The shortest version of this: Since 1981, the Reagan administration began secretly funding the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua in their fight against the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front" >Frente Sandinista de Liberaci&oacute;n Nacional</a>, or Sandinistas. Why in secret? Because when Congress found out that the CIA had run sabotage missions in Nicaragua without requesting congressional permission, they passed the 1982 Boland Ammendment, which cut off all Contra funding. But the administration found a loophole in the ammendment, and began funding the Contras through the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Security_Council" >National Security Council</a> under <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter" >John Poindexter</a>. (The NSC was not explicitly banned in the ammendment.) Under John Poindexter and his aide <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North" >Col. Oliver North</a>, the NSC sold arms to Iran and channeled the proceeds to the Contras. At the time Iran was in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, and the US was overtly supporting Iraq in that war. </p> <p>Accounts of how the Iran arms trade began vary; some claim the idea came from national security advisor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McFarlane" >Robert &quot;Bud&quot; McFarlane</a> and his assistant <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen" >Michael Ledeen</a>, others that the idea originated with Israel. Prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Israel maintained good relations with the Persian country, and after the revolution some 80,000 Iranian-born Jews remained in Iran. Israel's arms trade with Iran began in 1980 when arms dealers approached the Israeli Defense Ministry asking for permission to sell to the country who had just entered a war with Iraq. Avraham Bar-David, former director of the Israeli arms manufacturer <a href="http://www.soltam.com/" >Soltam</a>, told the Jerusalem Post <a href="../Articles/Jerusalem.Post-Israeli.Firm.Sold.Arms.to.Iran.till.93-Steve.Rodan-Sept.12,1997.pdf" >&quot;Until 1988 Israel was liberal in arms sales to Iran,&quot; and &quot;There was the Iran-Iraq War and our interest was that war would last forever.&quot;</a> Iraq was more of a mortal threat to Israel than Iran (Iraq being an Arab country, Iran Persian, and thus not part of the nationalist Arab states that had attacked Israel), and the Israeli government worked to maintain open back-channels with the Iranian government after the revolution. Since Jews still lived in Iran, this was also seen as a way to help protect them or aid in their transfer to Israel. It may be out of this where the idea of trading arms for hostages was first broached to the US; . These deals were mainly done through arms dealers, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/meast/9807/16/israel.treason/" >Nahum Manbar</a> in Israel, and Michael Ledeen found Iranian dealer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manucher_Ghorbanifar" >Manucher Ghorbanifar</a> through the aid of Saudi oil and arms trader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi" >Adnan Khashoggi</a>. </p> <p>(Khashoggi's very interesting, and Slate Magazine has been doing its own <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2080044/" >Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi game</a>; Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Khashoggi was <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact" >brokering a defense contract deal</a> between a Saudi industrialist and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle" >Richard Perle</a>, who represented the venture capital firm <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme_Partners_LLP" >Trireme Partners L.P.</a> and also advised Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the chair of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Policy_Board_Advisory_Committee" >Defense Policy Board</a>. Khashoggi, et.al, knew that the contracts would not go through unless an Iraqi invasion was immanent, and Perle was instrumental in convincing Rumsfeld and the public of the necessity of the invasion. When journalist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh" >Seymour Hersh</a> uncovered Perle's conflict of interest, Perlse had to step down from his chair at the Defense Policy Board, and threatened a suit against Hersh. The suit never was never filed.) </p> <p>In any case, the original plan was to trade arms for hostages held by Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. The first shipment of arms went in 1985, some 508 TOW missiles. The second shipment of 500 HAWK missiles was nearly stopped when then-Major General <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell" >Colin Powell</a> realized any requests over $14 million would require Congressional approval, but he was assured by McFarlane that President Reagan signed off on the project. But the Iranians rejected the shipment when the first 18 arrived --wrong kinds of missiles. </p> <p>Then the Lebanese magazine <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash-Shiraa" >Ash-Shiraa</a> exposed the operation in 1986, when a shipment of weapons to be delivered to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua. The scandal became a huge political embarassment; Col. North was fired after he was caught shredding files of the operation, McFarlane tried to commit suicide, in 1990 Poindexter was convicted of multiple felony counts and Nahum Manbar was convicted of illegal arms trading in Israel. President Clinton returned to the policy of enforced containment of both Iraq and Iran in the 1990's, and the arms shipments ended. </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1986</td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"><p>&nbsp; </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="3" valign=top class="Normal"><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td rowspan="4" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><span class="style5">1988</span></td> <td valign=top class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p>The PLO recognizes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Security_Council_Resolution_242">UN Security Council Resolution 242</a>, which delineated the pre-Six-Day War political boundaries of Israel and its neigbors; by doing so, the PLO also recognized Israel as a sovereign state. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden">Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/bin_ladin.jpg" width="150" height="200"></p> <p>Bin Laden's radicalization began when he helped fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. He and Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden">Dr. Abdullah Azzam</a> had set up the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK), an administrative service that worked to fund and supply the Aghanistan mujahideen from the Arab world. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/azzam.jpg" width="180" height="173"></p> <p>They were also greatly influenced by the teachings of fundamentalist Islamic scholar <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyed_Qutb">Sayyid Qutb</a> (1906-1966). </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/sayyid_qutb.jpg" width="172" height="296"></p> <p>Qutb, from Egypt, was educated in religious studies, and went to the US from 1948-1950 to study education. He was offended at the open racism he encountered and the openness between the sexes, and this began his rejection of Western values and his radicalization. In 1949 he wrote <em>Social Justice in Islam</em> and on his return became active in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood">Muslim Brotherhood</a>. The Brotherhood was dedicated to nonviolence, and had originally supported the military coup of the monarchy in Egypt, but gradually turned against the continued martial law. A member of the Brotherhood was accused of an attempt on President Nasser's life in 1954, Nasser subsequently banned the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned many of its members, like Qutb. In prison Qutb wrote his two most important texts, <em>In the Shade of the Quran</em> and the manifesto <em>Milestones</em>. He also came to the view that violent revolution would be necessary to overthrown an anti-Islamic government, and the Brotherhood eventually distanced itself from Qutb. His writing deeply affected Azzam and two other others, Egyptian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Abdel-Rahman">Omar Abdel-Rahman</a> (the Blind Shaikh, who was implicated in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_bombing">1993 World Trade Center Bombing</a>) and Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri">Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri</a>. These figures would be key in turning MAK into Al Qaeda.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/blind_shaikh.jpg" width="171" height="251"></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/zawahiri.jpg" width="212" height="185"></p> <p>Bin Laden came to follow Wahabbism, a strain of fundamentalist Islam that attempts to remain as true to the text as possible (kind of like constitutional strict constructionists, or indeed some Christian fundamentalist sects; it's been said that Wahabbis without oil revenues would be the Amish of the Muslim world). Wahabbism became the official state religion under the Saud family, who are Wahabbist. Many Wahabbists claim bin Laden is not a Wahabbi but rather a Qutbee (a follower of Sayyid Qutb), as Wahabbism denounces such innovations in Islamic interpretation and practice as Qutb's. </p> <p>Maktab al-Khadamat received aid in cash, arms and fighters from all over, including the CIA. Hang tight, because this gets a bit complicated: Under the Reagan Doctrine, the mujahideen would get US aid. How that aid arrived was a maze of paper trails. <a href="http://msnbc.com/news/190144.asp?cp1=1">The CIA had backed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, their secret service, and funneled money their way</a>. In return, the ISI bought the weapons and trained the fighters for the mujahideen. The US State Department claims that <a href="http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html">none of the money used to fund the mujehideen was given to Afghan Arabs</a>, but the CIA documents remain classified, and its hard to imagine that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun">Pashtun</a> mujahideen fighting alongside Arab mujahideen wouldn't have access to the same cache of weaponry and information. </p> <p>Osama bin Laden was just another source for cash in all this, and was generally seen as a &quot;dilettante&quot; from a rich Saudi family who provided cash through his family's construction business. Saudi Arabia also saw the mujahideen as an opportunity to spread Wahabbism and send its own radicals elsewhere. From the US point of view, this all created an image of the entire Muslim world against the Soviet Union, so this radical Muslim militancy was supported. (Just see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo#Rambo_III">Rambo III</a> for an example of this dynamic; Rambo goes to Afghanistan to save his colonel from the Soviets, and does so with the help of the mujahideen.)</p> <p>In 1988 bin Laden broke with MAK to form a new group made up of the most militant MAK members he could get; the US gave this new group the name <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda">Al Qaeda</a>, or &quot;The Base.&quot; </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="2" valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bombing">How about suicide bombings?</a></p> <p>Historically, suicide attacks are only seen in cases of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare">assymetric warfare</a>, and are found throuhgout history from the bible to some guy from 14th C. Switzerland named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_von_Winkelried">Arnold Winkelried</a> (who threw himself on enemy lances to create a breach in their formation) to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze">Japanese kamikaze pilots of WWII</a>. If one is in battle and death is imminent, and one has the chance to take out some of the enemy with one's death, you can expect that person will try to take as many into death as possible. A person has to either truly feel, or be convinced, that their living situation is as bad as death in order to become a suicide attacker. One could consider the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae">Battle of Thermopylae</a> in 480 BCE, where a Greek force outnumbered by something like 170-200 to 1 fought the Persian army at the mountain pass of Thermopylae. Every fighter was killed, and it was a lost cause from the beginning. The Persians broke through and sacked Athens, but were delayed long enough for the Greeks to prepare for and win the naval <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamis">battle of Salamis</a>, driving the Persians out of Greece.</p> <p>In some cases, like Hamas, ideological promises of paradise in the afterlife help convince converts to such tactics; at other times, they're forced. But whenever a group is forced into desperate situations, desperate measures will be taken, and such desperation can take on a kind of romantic quality that overrides reason. Just take Ulster, Northern Ireland, for example: This is the Northern Ireland flag --note the red hand:</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/northern_ireland_flag.jpg" width="238" height="143"></p> <p>The Red Hand of Ulster comes from a myth about the founding of Ulster; there was a race to the land of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and the first person to touch its shores would gain that land as a kingdom. In some versions its Eremon, and later it's picked up by the O'Neill clan, but the story's alway's the same; the heroic figure cuts off his own hand and throws it to the shore, thereby touching it first and winning the land. The sense of this is the <em>willingness to sacrifice the body for the land</em> <em>out of desperation</em>, and the red hand became a motif for all kinds of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist#Loyalists_in_Northern_Ireland">loyalist</a> movements; this ideological symbol is today found on flags, doors, seals, and all kinds of places where people are willing to sacrifice the physical self for an ideological cause. In other words, pure physical sacrifice for an ideologically-driven political goal is not something new, it's just done now with modern technology.</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas">Hamas</a></p> <p>In 1987 Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood had become Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, or Hamas (meaning &quot;Islamic Resistance Movement,&quot; &quot;zeal,&quot; and &quot;courage&quot;). In its early manifestation in the late 1960's, it was officially recognized by Israel as a charitable organization that received state support (it undermined Yasser Arafat's secular Fatah movement and the PLO's authority, so it was seen as something positive). Throughout the 1980's Muslim Brotherhood strengthened its presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and it supported education, medical, social and religious programs. But during this time the tone of its rhetoric began to shift toward the extreme. </p> <p>In 1987 the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine became Hamas under the leadership of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Ahmed_Yassin">Sheikh Ahmed Yassin</a> (a quadruplegic stuck in a wheelchair) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdel_Aziz_al-Rantissi">Abdel Azziz al-Rantissi</a>. In 1988 they produced the <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hamas_Covenant">Hamas Covenant</a>, which called for the elimination of Israel. The rhetoric turned decidedly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, to the point of denying the existence of the Holocaust. Since all Israelis are conscripted into some military service, Hamas does not discriminate between a civilian and military target --they're all military targets. From this logic emerges <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bombing">suicide bombings</a>, a tactic of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare">assymetrical warfare</a> (meaning one side has a decided and extreme advantage, so extreme measures are taken). </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/hamas_logo.jpg" width="179" height="200"></p> <p>Hamas greatly increased the rate and number of terrorist activities in Israel in the 1980's under its militant leadership, and as a result Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered an assasination strikes in 2004. </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><span class="style5">1990</span></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>Iraq invasion of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwait">Kuwait</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/kuwait_map.jpg" width="392" height="445"></p> <p>Kuwait, a monarchy run by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sabah">al-Sabah family</a> since the mid-18<sup>th</sup> century, is located at the bottom of Iraq and was at one point a province of Iraq.&nbsp; After WWI the region fell under British control, who carved it off from Iraq.&nbsp; Through oil exports it became the richest Arab nation by 1953 and in 1961 had amassed enough wealth to declare independence.&nbsp; Iraq s challenge to this was deterred by Egypt, and British troops were deployed to deter Iraqi annexation.&nbsp; Kuwait sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, in part due to fears of an Iranian Shi ite takeover.&nbsp; The $14 billion dollar bill Iraq ran up with Kuwait during the war, and Kuwaiti <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slant_drilling">slant-drilling</a> into oil fields in disputed territories, fueled the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.&nbsp; (Slant drilling: drilling at an angle, starting in your property and ending in someone else s.&nbsp; The opposite of dumping your trash over the fence in the neighbor s yard.)&nbsp; At the time, the first Palestinian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada">Intifada</a> was raging, and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait were dependent on US support. Iraq deposed the Kuwaiti monarchy, appealed to Arab nationalism as the only state in the region that would stand up to the West, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein">Saddam Hussein</a> installed a governor.&nbsp; </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="2" valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_War">The Gulf War</a></p> <p>Background: The whole kerfuffle</span></span> began when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.&nbsp; Iraq was in debt to other Arab nations after the Iran-Iraq war, including $14 billion to Kuwait.&nbsp; Iraq tried to raise its oil prices to generate revenue, but Kuwait countered by increasing production; since Kuwait exists at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, oil shipping went there before it went to Iraq via the Shatt Al-Arab waterway. This is supply-demand economics; when Iraq increased the price of oil, Kuwait s increase in production drove the costs back down.&nbsp; Most of Iraq s oil facilities at the mouth of the gulf had been destroyed in the war, so Kuwait proved even more interesting; their facilities were in tact and were protected by Iraq during the war.&nbsp; Then there was the alleged slant drilling by Kuwait into Iraq.&nbsp; Iraq also argued that since it protected Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, that these countries owed it debt relief.&nbsp; </p> <p>After the Iran-Iraq War, the US had made moves to distance itself from Iraq for its human rights abuses and its anti-Israeli stance. Iraq had also been on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._list_of_state_sponsors_of_international_terrorism">State Department list of states who sponsor terrorism</a> since 1979 when Abu Nidal operated from there (note that this is specifically political terrorism dealing with the state of Palestine). After Iraq expelled Nidal to Syria in 1983, the US sent Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld to help re-establish diplomatic ties. From 1983-1990 the US approved $200 million in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_sales_to_Iraq_1973-1990">arms sales to Iraq</a>, which wasn't much in the way of Iraq's military build-up; the US actually supplied much more in the sale of dual-use items, as categorized by Iraq's <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/23/news-crogan.php">Weapons Declaration report</a>. </p> <p>In 1989 President George H.W. Bush signed <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsd/nsd26.pdf">National Security Directive 26</a>, which claimed "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security" and "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East." When Iraq amassed troops on the Kuwaiti border, the US stance appeared to be officially neutral; Ambassador <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie">April Glaspie</a> met with Saddam Hussein, and transcripts of that meeting include the following:</p> <blockquote> <p><br /> "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker">Secretary Baker </a> has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America." </p> </blockquote> <p>In November, 1989, CIA director <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Webster">William Webster</a> had met with the Kuwaiti head of security. Iraq claimed to have a memorandum of the meeting, which was produced at an Arab summit; the Washington Post reported that the Kuwaiti foreign minister fainted when confronted with the document, which describes a joint CIA-Kuwait effort to take advantage of Iraq's weakened post-war state to destabilize it economically and politically. Both the CIA and Kuwait have claimed the document is a forgery (but the foreign minister's fainting was real enough). Part of the document reads:</p> <blockquote> <p> &quot;We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition that such activities be coordinated at a high level.&quot;</p> </blockquote> <p>On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, quite easily, too. Within the next day both the UN Security Council and the Arab League had passed resoultions denouncing the invasion. Soon after the UN imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. The real danger seen by the West was Iraq's proximity to Saudi Arabia and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama">Hama</a> oil fields. Saudi Arabia is a large country with its dispersed population, which would have made it difficult to mobilize any effective defense in time. The Hama oil fields are Saudi Arabia's most important, and if Iraq grabbed those, along with Kuwait, they would have the second largest oil supply in the world. Iraq also owed Saudi Arabia $26 billion in war debts from the Iran-Iraq War, and as with Kuwait, felt these debts should have been waved because Iraq protected the border. On August 7 President Bush declared it would engage in a defensive mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Shield was begun. A coalition of 34 countries was amassed to aid in the effort, but US troops comprised 74% of the 660,000 forces. On November 29 another resolution was passed giving Iraq a January 15, 1991 deadline, and then came the justifications. </p> <p>First it was declared that oil was too important to the US economy, but this angered the US public who felt we were too tied to Saudi oil to begin with. Then the human rights violations were cited, notably the gassing of Kurds in Halabja, but that went unsanctioned at the time, and was accomplished with those dual-use items sold to Iraq by Western companies. The human rights violations case wasn't helped by Kuwait's contracting the US public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for $11 million to create a campaign recounting violations --fair enough, but they made up their facts. One girl who testified before Congress to seeing Iraqi soldiers dump Kuwaiti babies in incubators at a hospital out on the floor later admitted to lying. Then it was the threat of a possible nuclear plan, weapons of mass destruction, and just the audacity of a nation invading another. </p> <p>Iraq would only agree to a withdrawl from Kuwait if their withdrawl was linked to a Syrian withdrawl from Lebanon and an Israeli withdrawl from the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon. Neither Syria nor Israel saw any linkage there. Syria even joined the coalition against Iraq, while Israel was convinced to stay neutral with the promise of US aid. The PLO, meanwhile, fully backed Iraq under Yasser Arafat (which later led to Kuwait expelling Palestinians).</p> <p>On January 12, 1991, the US Congress authorized military force, and on January 17 began the Operation Desert Storm. First the Iraqi air force was destroyed, and by February 26 Iraqi troops were withdrawing from Kuwait, setting fire to oil fields along the way. On February 27 Kuwait was declared liberated. At the peace conference Iraq won use of its helicopters, which it used to suppress Shi'ite uprisings in the South, while in the North the Kurds prepared an uprising with the promise of US aid; the aid never came, the revolt was crushed, and Kurds fled to Iran and Turkey. These incidents resulted in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fly_zone">no-fly Zones</a> of the North and South. Iraqi forces generally fell back and put up little fight, and by March 10, 540,000 US troops were pulling out of the country. </p></td> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">&nbsp; 1991</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds">Kurds</a></p> <p align="center"><img src="images/kurdistan.jpg" width="413" height="371"></p> <p>The Kurds are an ethnic group from the region bordering northern Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and southern Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan.&nbsp; During the Ottoman Empire, their region was known as Kurdistan on maps, but after WWI things took a turn.&nbsp; Kurds make up 20% of the Turkish population, but when Mustafa Kemal</span> (Atatürk</span>) came to power and modernized Turkey in 1923, he set up a westernized secular state that would not recognize the separateness of cultural subdivisions  if your were in Turkey, you were a Turk.&nbsp; Even the Kurdish language was banned.&nbsp; Kurds have always been part of the Persian empire, and are recognized in Iran, but not allowed formal governmental representation.&nbsp; In Iraq, Kurds were initially granted a measure of autonomy under the Ba athists, and after a revolt in 1961 even gained some representation in parliament.&nbsp; But Kurdish support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war led to civil war between the Ba athists and Kurds.&nbsp; In 1988, an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack">Iraqi chemical weapon attack killed as many as 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja</span></a>.&nbsp; Iraq was never seriously sanctioned for this by the <a href="http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/">United Nations Security Council</a> at the time.&nbsp; The permanent members of the council, who set the UN Security Council agenda, include the US, Great Britain, China, France, and Russia (which are also the only countries allowed by the council to have nuclear weapons).&nbsp; For any number of complicated reasons no doubt related to Britain, France, the US, and Russia s historical involvements in the region, the civil war with the Kurds just was not seriously addressed.&nbsp; The delicate position of the Kurds would be used as a political pawn in future negotiations.</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p>When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#Formation_of_al-Qaeda">offered to provide 12,000 troops to defend the Saudi border, but his offer was rebuffed in favor of US support</a>. This shocked bin Laden and the more fundamentalist members of Al Qaeda. The Saud family claimed legitimacy to rule in part by being guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and after the war they allowed the US to maintain permanent bases in the region. Allowing US troops to occupy the land was tantamount to giving up that holy guardianship. </p> <p>Osama bin Laden's subsequent criticism of the Saud family got him expelled to Sudan in 1991. He then started to recruit and train new militants, investing in businesses along the way to fund his efforts. With the aid of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_al_Turabi">Hassan al-Turabi</a>, a religious and political figure in Sudan, the Sudanese government protected bin Laden. </p> <p>(Reports suggest Hassan al-Turabi is associated with an Islamist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_and_Equality_Movement">Justice and Equality Movement</a> that is fighting the government-supported genocidal <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janjaweed">Janjaweed</a> militia in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict">Darfur conflict</a>.) </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1992</td> <td valign=top class="Normal">December 29: Osama bin Laden's first attack as Al Qaeda on the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden, Yemen. Some 100 US soldiers had been in the hotel for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Restore_Hope">Operation Restore Hope</a>, but had left shortly before the bombing. </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions">Sanctions of Iraq</a></p> <p>In August of 1990 the UN Security Council passed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Resolution_661">Resolution 661</a>, which banned all trade with Iraq except for medical, food and humanitarian supplies. After the end of the war, <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/UN_Security_Council_Resolution_687">Resolution 667</a> was passed, requiring Iraq to dismantle all of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. The sanctions, which were meant to force Iraq to work with the UN, left Iraq unable to maintain its infrastructure, which in turn hurt the people more then Hussein's government. Items like chlorine, which would be used to disinfect water, were banned because they could also be used for chemical weapons. The UN estimates that a million childred died during the sanctions, and in 1998 UNICEF calculated that children were dying at a rate of 90,000 a year. </p> <p>The UN appointed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Halliday">Denis Halliday</a> as the Humanitarian Coordinator in 1997; Halliday had a 34-year-long career with the UN, but resigned in 1998 claiming "I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide">genocide</a>". The next coordinator also resigned in protest. </p> <p>In 1996 the UN passed Resolution 986 to introduce the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme">Oil-for-Food Programme</a>, where Iraq was allowed to export $5.2 billion dollars worth of oil every six months to purchase humanitarian items for its population; 30% of these monies were earmarked for war reparations. The program went into effect in 1998, and all-told over $65 billion dollars worth of oil was sold on the world market; $46 billion went to humanitarian aid, 2.2% went to UN administrative costs, and 0.8% went to weapons inspections. Critics of the program claimed that the ban on dual-use equipment kept any real aid from occuring and only strengthened Hussein's position as an anti-Western hero. </p> <p>But the program fell under some heavy abuse. In short, Iraq sold oil at below-market costs (or inflated the prices) to some sympathetic countries or individuals and had the difference returned to them in cash. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme#Operation_of_the_Scheme">The specifics are here</a>.) Many in the UN were implicated, and the evidence suggests that the US and UK knew about the scandal, but ignored it because beneficiaries included allies like Turkey and Jordan. The Senate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Subcommittee_on_Investigations">Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations</a> declared:</p> <blockquote> <p> "The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales." </p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, the investigation found that 52% of the beneficiaries of the kickbacks scandal <a href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11569">were US-based companies, like the Texas-based BayOil, Exxon Mobil, ChevronTexaco Corp, and El Paso Corp</a>. Later, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duelfer_Report">Duelfer Report</a> (an investigation of WMD in Iraq after the 2003 invasion) cited only the anti-war countries France, Canada and Russia as beneficiaries of the kickbacks; <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16201-2004Oct7.html">US companies were censored out of the official report on CIA orders</a>. However, some congressional subcommittees received the uncensored report before the official one was presented, and they made the full report public. </p> </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><span class="style5">1991<br /> -<br /> 2003</span></td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords">The Oslo Accords</a></p> <p>Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat sign an agreement in Oslo, Norway, and was a continuation of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Conference_of_1991">1991 Madrid Conference</a>, overseen by the US and USSR. The agreement recognizes Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Palestine's right to govern those regions through a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority">Palestinian Authority</a>. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/rabin_arafat.jpg" width="320" height="210"></p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1993</td> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal"><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1995</td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin#Death_and_aftermath">Rabin is assasinated</a> by a Jewish right-wing orthodox law student, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Amir" >Yigal Amir</a>. amir opposed Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords. </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/rabin.jpg" width="167" height="225"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top bgcolor="#ECE9D8" class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><span class="style5">1996</span></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>The Sudanese government, under pressure of international sanctions from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the US, tried to send bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia had stripped bin Laden of his citizenship and would not take him back. He ended up going to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabul">Kabul</a>, Afghanistan, and then settled in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalalabad,_Afghanistan">Jalalabad</a>. He there established relations with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban">Taliban</a> leadership of Afghanistan, namely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omar">Mullah Mohammed Omar</a>.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/mullah_omar.jpg" width="180" height="240"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad">What's this <em>Jihad</em> word mean, anyway?</a></p> <p>Jihad literally translates to &quot;struggle&quot; or &quot;strive&quot;, and is nothing new in relgious terms. One's jihad can be a struggle to attain perfect faith. Perhaps a person is addicted to cigarettes; that person's jihad would be to quit the butts in order to better his religious practice by treating the body as a holy thing. A mujahid is one who struggles (hence mujahideen); a mujahid's jihad may be to memorize the Quran. Jihad al-akbar is considered to be the greater, or spiritual, struggle, while jihad al-asgar is the lesser jihad, or a physical struggle. Traditional scholars note five kinds of jihad, jihad of the heart/soul, jihad of the tongue, jihad of knowledge, and jihad of the sword. Jihad, as it's widely used in the West, simply means an armed struggle from a Muslim position, which is an over-simplification of a complex concept (see the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_war_in_Islam">rules of war in Islam</a>). </p> <p>One might wish to compare our contemporary concept of jihad with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade#Usage_of_the_term_.22crusade.22">crusade</a>, which in popular usage has come to mean a kind of holy war. Not just Muslims are uncomfortable with the use of the word <em>crusade</em>, as the original crusades were intended to take Jerusalem from Muslim control; Eastern Orthodox Christians also see the crusades as an invasion by barbarians, and many artifacts from Constantinople still reside in Rome. </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">1998</td> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p>Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-sign a fatwa in the name of the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda">World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders</a></em>. In part, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwa">fatwa</a> reads:</p> <blockquote> <p> "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies  civilians and military  is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Mosque">al-Aqsa Mosque </a> (in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem">Jerusalem</a>) and the holy mosque (in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makka">Mecca</a>) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah">Allah</a>,'and 'fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.'" </p> </blockquote> <p>Bin Laden then made it on the US most wanted list for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya; 225 people were killed, and over 4000 were injured. Al Qaeda is later implicated in many unsuccessful bombings; the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_millennium_attack_plots">Millenium plot to bomb the Los Angeles Airport</a>, tourist sites in Jordan, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_The_Sullivans_%28DDG-68%29">USS The Sullivans</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_embassy_terrorist_attack_plot">US embassy in Paris</a>.</p> <p>President Clinton passed an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order">executive order</a> calling for the assasination of bin Laden and the US offers $25 million for information leading to his arrest or death. Clinton further ordered a freeze on all assets linked with bin Laden. </p></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing">The Bombing of the USS Cole</a></p> <p>On October 12, 2000, the destroyer USS Cole was entering the harbor at Aden, Yemen to refuel when a small boat pulled up portside and exploded, killing 17 sailors. The attack was carried out by Al Qaeda. President Bill Clinton called this an act of terrorism that would be dealt with as such, but critics pointed out that attacks on military targets were not considered terrorism. In November, 2002 the CIA fired a hellfire missile at a vehicle transporting one of the suspected plotters of the attack, killing him and a US citizen who was with him. In 2004 the Yemeni government sentenced to death two others who were implicated in the attack. </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style7">2000</td> <td valign=top class="Normal">&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11" >9.11</a></p> <p>On September 11, 2001, four airliners in the United States were hijacked. Two airliners, United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11, were flown into the World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan, New York City. The third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon building. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. </p> <p>These attacks were said to have been orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, who was protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan (<a href="#AfghanAlQaedaTaliban">see the rise of Al Qaeda, the mujahideen, and the Taliban in the entry for the Soviet-Afghanistan War above</a>). Bin Laden initially <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_laden#September_11.2C_2001_attacks" target="_blank">denied having anything to do with the attacks</a> and claimed this was an operation carried out under the hijackers' own volition. In 2004, he <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Osama_bin_Laden_video" target="_blank">then took credit for orchestrating the attacks</a>, saying they were a retaliation for the oppression of the Palestinian people and the U.S. -backed Israeli <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Invasion_of_Lebanon" target="_blank">attacks on Lebanon in 1982</a> (<a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=7403" target="_blank">see transcript here</a>). The U.S. Justice Department has not brought forth any formal charges against bin Laden. Of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizers_of_the_September_11%2C_2001_attacks#List_of_the_hijackers" target="_parent">19 hijackers</a>, 15 were Saudi Arabian, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. A &quot;20th hijacker,&quot; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui" target="_blank">Zacarias Moussaoui</a>, was arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 16, 2001, 26 days before the attacks. The Minnesota FBI found evidence that convinced them to investigatge Moussaoui, including flight manuals, information about crop dusting, knives, and evidence linking Moussaoui to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969" target="_blank">a 1994 Air France hijacking</a>, in which the hijackers planned to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. The Minnesota FBI, especially <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleen_Rowley" target="_blank">agent Coleen Rowley</a>, tried to get federal authorization to search Moussaoui's laptop; they were denied. After the 9/11 attacks, Rowley became a whistleblower, and went public with the information she had linking Moussaoui to the hijackers, and how the federal FBI kept the Minneapolis office from further investigation. Many speculate if the 9/11 attacks my have been stopped had the investigations gone forth.</p> <p>Such a lack of information, as well as accounts of odd, conflicting, and bizarre information, have led to a number of open questions and conspiracy theories about the attacks. The attacks led directly the the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq, but the mysteries surrounding that date have taken firm hold in public consciousness. </p> <p>For instance, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_World_Trade_Center" target="_blank">7 World Trade Center</a> was a building across from the Twin Towers; some debris from the attack landed on the tower, and it shortly thereafter collapsed straight into the ground in what many say looked like a controlled demolition. It was the first and only scryscraper in history to collapse due to fire. Tenants who had offices in the building included a number of large financial institutions, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, and the CIA. Very little from the collapsed survived. The collapse of this building has not been addressed by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_commission" target="_blank">9/11 Commission</a>. All surveilance films of the Pentagon attack were seized shortly after the attack; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Watch" target="_blank">Judicial Watch</a> petitioned for their release under the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_%28United_States%29" target="_blank">Freedom of Information Act</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Security_camera_video" target="_blank">the only films released does not show the plane itself, just a quick blur and then the impact</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD#Post-September_11_attacks" target="_blank">NORAD</a> (the North American Aerospace Defence Command) is under standing orders to scramble fighter planes if the U.S. comes under attack, but were ordered to stand down on 9/11. The destruction from the Twin Towers was so severe that even the planes' black boxes couldn't be recovered, yet <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html" target="_blank">one of the hijacker's passports fell from the burning wreckage and was recovered</a>. </p> <p>These are just a few of the inconsistencies that have yet to be explained. More than anything, the lack of adequate responses to such questions have led to rampant conpsiracy theories, especially the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_truth_movement" target="_blank">9/11 Truth Movement</a>. The movement has been championed by some who argue that the government has not been forthcoming in its investigation of 9/11; criticized by others as a bunch of crackpots; and criticized further still by others who argue that the way the 9/11 Truth Movement operates hurts the chances of ever getting good information about the event. Some even argue that elements in the 9/11 Truth Movement are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO" target="_blank">COINTELPRO</a>-like plants to present the most outlandish information they can, thereby discrediting the movement as a whole. </p> </td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">2001</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._invasion_of_Afghanistan" >The Afghanistan Invasion</a> (still in progress)</p> <p>Soon after the attacks of 9.11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban was dismantled, but neither Osama bin Laden nor his lieutenant Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri were found. At one point Bin Laden was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora" target="_blank">cornered in the mountain caves of Tora Bora</a>, along with other Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, but the number of forces requested by the CIA and Special Forces to pursue the Al Qaeda leader were never given, and Bin Laden escaped. </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">2001</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal">&nbsp; </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq" >The Iraq War</a> (forthcoming; still in progress) </p></td> <td align="center" valign=middle bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"> <p align="center" class="style5">2003</p></td> <td valign=top class="Normal"> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="Normal"></td> <td align="center" valign="middle" bgcolor="#C3CEB6" class="style3"><span class="style5">2004</span></td> <td colspan="2" class="Normal"><p>In March, 2004 Yassin was attacked with hellfire missiles from a helicopter as he left a prayer service. The attack killed six others and injured many more. The severity of the attack was criticized internationally; leaders like Britain's Foreign Secretary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Straw_%28politician%29">Jack Straw</a> proclaimed that Israel has a right to defend itself, but &quot;it is not entitled to go in for this kind of unlawful killing and we condemn it. It is unacceptable, it is unjustified and it is very unlikely to achieve its objectives." </p> <p align="center"><img src="images/sheikh_yassin.jpg" width="200" height="262"></p> <p align="left">The leadership of Hamas fell to Rantissi. A trained pediatrician, he never got a practice going before he became militant. Israel assasinated Rantissi with a missile three weeks after assasinating Yassin.</p> <p align="center"><img src="images/rantissi.jpg" width="150" height="180"></p> <p align="left">Jack Straw responded as he did with the assasination of Yassin, calling such attacks &quot;unlawful, unjustified and counter-productive.&quot; The US in both cases noted their concern with such attacks, but not in as severely as Britain. </p></td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>