An
Emerging Axis Of Evil
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
28 May, 2003
WASHINGTON - Immediately
after the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the editorial
page of the Wall Street Journal featured an article arguing that Israel,
India and Turkey were Washington's only "allies for the long haul"
in the coming war against terrorism.
While an increasingly democratic
Turkey turned out to be a major disappointment (from the Washington
point of view), three-way ties between Israel, India and the United
States are growing fast, spurred by precisely the same forces in Washington
who championed the invasion of Iraq.
That trend reached new heights
when US officials confirmed last week that Washington has given the
go-ahead for Israel to sell its advanced Phalcon airborne reconnaissance
system to India in a deal worth some US$1 billion.
The same officials said that
the administration of President George W Bush is also on the verge of
approving the more-expensive sale of Israel's Arrow anti-missile system,
which was developed jointly with the US. Such a system could go far
in neutralizing threats posed by Pakistani missiles capable of carrying
nuclear warheads.
Both moves highlight the
burgeoning alliance between the two most potent non-Islamic militaries
in the Middle East and South Asia, a trend that has the enthusiastic
support of Bush administration hawks, particularly in the Pentagon and
Vice President Dick Cheney's office. That alliance will again be spotlighted
with next month's scheduled visit to India by Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
While Israel sees India as
a comrade in the fight against Islamic militants, the US has a somewhat
broader agenda to pursue with New Delhi, particularly its possible role
as a counter-balance to China, which US hawks see as Washington's strategic
competitor in Asia. "India is the most overlooked of our potential
allies in a strategy to contain China," according to Lloyd Richardson
of the Hudson Institute, a think tank very close to the administration.
With India determined to
build a naval force capable of projecting power into the South China
Sea, says Conn Hallinan, an analyst at the University of California
at Santa Cruz, Washington has especially courted India's navy, most
recently with the Malabar IV joint exercises involving thousands of
sailors and pilots from both countries.
Not coincidentally, some
of the biggest boosters of US-Indian military ties both in and outside
the Bush administration are also prominent neo-conservatives with close
ties to Israel's ruling Likud Party.
With the support of hardline
officials like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith -
whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement on the
West Bank - a group of leading neo-conservatives have formed a new think
tank, the US-India Institute for Strategic Policy, precisely to promote
military ties, according to Hallinan.
Members of note are the head
of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, and
a founder of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Michael
Ledeen. Both have promoted Indian-Israeli military ties as well. Gaffney
and Ledeen, in particular, have long argued that the Pakistani military
was unreliable as a US ally in the "war against terrorism"
given the alleged sympathies felt by middle- and some senior-ranking
officers.
Washington put on hold the
Phalcon deal last year when Pakistan and India were mobilizing their
forces along their common border. Tensions between the two countries
have since eased considerably, and there is hope that a new peace initiative
by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee may yield progress.
But the fact that the deal
was approved before any indication of serious forward movement in bilateral
talks suggests that the more hawkish forces within the administration
are winning the argument over the value of "tilting" ever
more sharply in India's direction.
It is no secret that the
Pentagon, in particular, has become increasingly angry about the alleged
role of Pakistan's intelligence services in protecting Taliban and al-Qaeda
forces along the border with Afghanistan, from which ever more frequent
and lethal attacks against Afghan security forces and US soldiers have
been launched.
Final approval of the Phalcon
sale and likely approval of the Arrow sales are designed in part to
demonstrate that Washington's patience is running out, according to
one administration official.
India is already the biggest
customer for Israel's sophisticated military industry, which last year
ranked fifth in the world among all arms exporters, after the US, the
European Union, Russia and Japan. The Phalcon and Arrow deals are likely
to propel Israel even higher in the rankings over the next two years,
arms experts say. Almost one half of Israel's total military sales last
year of $4.2 billion went to India.
But the deal also moves the
relationship between Israel and India closer to the vision set out by
the Journal back in September, 2001, of an alliance of three non-Muslim
states (now, perhaps, minus Turkey) and the US in an existential battle
against "Islamic terrorism" and the governments (including,
presumably, Pakistan's) that support it.
"Outside the Western
world, as geographically defined," wrote the author, editorial
board member Tunku Varadarajan, "these three states are perhaps
the only ones on which the US can count, virtually unconditionally,
to show an immutable opposition to Islamic terrorism. Crucially, they
are all situated at terrorist nodes, in a vast, seething region in which
Islamic states are preponderant."
Indeed, that vision was also
echoed earlier this month with the unprecedented appearance by Vajpayee's
National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra, at the gala dinner of the
annual convention of the American Jewish Committee. The US, India and
Israel, he said "have to jointly face the same ugly face of modern-day
terrorism", adding that "such an alliance would have the political
will and moral authority to take bold decisions in extreme cases of
terrorist provocation".
Given their democratic governments,
"vision of pluralism, tolerance and equal opportunity ...",
Mishra said, "stronger India-US relations and India-Israel relations
have a natural logic".
The AJC announced it would
soon be opening an office in New Delhi.