Earlier this month, the United Kingdom announced that it is reopening dialogue with the political wing of Hezbollah. Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has only banned Hezbollah’s terrorist (External Security Organization) and military wings. The ban on the terrorist wing came in 2000, while the ban on the military wing only came in June 2008 in response to Hezbollah’s “providing active support to militants in Iraq who are responsible for attacks both on coalition forces and on Iraqi civilians, including providing training in the use of deadly roadside bombs,” for plots to kidnap British security workers in Iraq, and for its support for terrorist activity in the Palestinian Territories.

Meanwhile, the European Union has not yet designated any part of Hezbollah—military, political or otherwise—although it did label Imad Mughniyeh, the late Hezbollah chief of external operations, and several other Hezbollah members involved in specific acts of terrorism.

But despite the differences between U.S. and European perceptions of and policies toward Hezbollah, there is one critical area where all parties’ mutual interests converge, namely law enforcement. Regardless of divergent political considerations or definitions of terrorism, combating crime and enforcing sovereign laws are straightforward issues. More than any other Islamist group, Hezbollah has a long record of engaging in criminal activity to support its activities. The United States and its European counterparts have a particularly strong shared interest in combating the group’s increasing role in illicit drug trafficking.

Just this past week Admiral James G. Stavridis, the Commander of U.S. Southern Command who has now been nominated to head NATO troops as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, testified before the House Armed Services Committee about the threat to the United States from the nexus between illicit drug trafficking—”including routes, profits, and corruptive influence”—and “Islamic radical terrorism.” While Hezbollah is involved in a wide variety of criminal activity, ranging from cigarette smuggling to selling counterfeit products, the connection between drugs and terror is particularly strong. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 19 of the 43 U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations are definitely linked to the global drug trade, and up to 60 percent of terror organizations are suspected of having some ties with the illegal narcotics trade.

Hezbollah is no exception to this statistic, and in recent years has augmented its role in the production and trafficking of narcotics. Hezbollah has utilized the vast Lebanese Shi’a expatriate population, mainly located in South America and Africa, to its advantage. According to Michael Braun, former assistant administrator and chief of operations at the DEA, “Both Hamas and Hezbollah are active in this [Tri-Border] region [see map at right], where it is possible to make a profit of $1 million from the sale of fourteen or fifteen kilos of drugs, an amount that could be transported in a single suitcase.”

For example, Admiral Stavridis’s testified that in August 2008, the U.S. Southern Command and the DEA, in coordination with host nations, targeted a Hezbollah drug trafficking ring in the Tri-Border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. In August 2008, the United States, in cooperation with Colombian investigators, identified and dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money laundering ring based out of Colombia. This operation, which was made up of a Colombian drug cartel and Lebanese members of Hezbollah, used portions of its profits—allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars per year—to finance Hezbollah.

Such revelations should not surprise. Back in December 2006 the U.S. Treasury listed Sobhi Fayad as a Specially Designated Terrorist. Why? Because, Treasury informed, “Fayad has been a senior TBA [Tri-Border Area] Hezbollah official who served as a liaison between the Iranian embassy and the Hezbollah community in the TBA. He has also been a professional Hezbollah operative who has traveled to Lebanon and Iran to meet with Hezbollah leaders. Fayad received military training in Lebanon and Iran and was involved in illicit activities involving drugs and counterfeit U.S. dollars.”

Africa is additionally becoming an area of concern regarding terrorist groups engaged in drug trafficking. According to Admiral Stavridis, drug traffickers have expanded their presence in West Africa as a “springboard to Europe.” Hezbollah has long maintained a strong presence in Africa, and has utilized Africa as a strategic point to from which to raise and transfer funds and to engage in criminal enterprises, such as diamond smuggling.

The nexus between drug trafficking and terrorist activities—specifically those of Hezbollah—represent an immediate law enforcement challenge for the United States and its European allies. While the Europeans may not view Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, they are certainly eager to prevent Hezbollah from running criminal enterprises within their borders. Countries are particularly determined to prevent the importation of illegal narcotics across their borders, whether by organized criminal networks, terrorists groups, or the hybrid narco-terrorist networks that DEA officials describe as “meaner and uglier than anything law enforcement or militaries have ever faced.”

So while there is no common understanding between the United States and the United Kingdom on whether or how to engage Hezbollah or even how to classify Hezbollah and its various component parts, there is no “gray area” as to whether drug trafficking is illegal. The United Kingdom and other European nations are no less eager than the United States to combat the flow of drugs into their countries and to prevent Hezbollah from operating criminal enterprises within their territory.

The British decision to openly engage Hezbollah politically is misinformed, to be sure. But do not be surprised if the Brits talk to Hezbollah “political” leaders on the one hand while arresting some of their cohorts involved in illicit narcotics on the other. Officials may openly describe these actions as targeting criminals, not Hezbollah, but the effect will be much the same.

From W. Taylor Fain

During the United States’ first war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, I was a Department of State historian in Washington. The Office of the Historian was charged with providing historical background information on the Gulf crisis to Department policy makers, and one of the tasks I was given was to write a classified analysis and chronology of Iraq’s historical claims to Kuwait and the United States’ response to them. I had been a student of European security issues and arms control, and this was my introduction to Persian Gulf affairs. Baghdad’s periodically asserted claims to its neighbor were new to me, and I was fascinated to learn how deeply Great Britain had been involved in Kuwait and in the Persian Gulf since the era of the Napoleonic Wars. I was convinced that Britain’s imperial legacy in the Gulf played a role in shaping American policy in the area in ways that contemporary U.S. policy makers did not fully appreciate. This proved to be the germ of American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region.

Essentially, my research examines the origins of the United States’ current embroilment in the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula… and Iraq. What I have underscored is that it is impossible to understand America’s current predicament in the region without understanding the process of Britain’s imperial retreat from the area and the ways the United States attempted to come to grips with it. It was the inability of U.S. foreign policy makers to deal successfully with Britain’s retreat from the region, their inability to establish viable surrogates for British power in the area, or, alternatively, to recast or re-imagine American interests in the Gulf after 1971 that led the United States, by the end of the 1970s, to assume the large-scale, direct political and military obligations it has in the Gulf.

Some historians have argued, unpersuasively in my opinion, that Britain’s imperial moment in the Middle East ended with the 1956 Suez debacle. In fact, Britain continued to be a key actor in the region for another decade and a half. It clung like grim death to what the Foreign Office called the “hard kernel” of its Middle Eastern interests in the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia, until a combination of economic crisis and political turmoil at home forced Harold Wilson’s Labour government to relinquish its position in the Gulf region.

The Anglo-American relationship was particularly fraught in the Persian Gulf, and my research underscores the very different interests, priorities and perceptions of threat the United States and Britain defined for themselves in the Middle East. While the United States worked to integrate the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into the larger architecture of its Cold War containment policy, Britain struggled to secure its more parochial economic and imperial interests in the region. The United States attempted to ensure the flow of reasonably priced Persian Gulf oil to the West in order to support the economies and governments of its European and Japanese allies during the Cold War. At the same time, officials in London attempted to safeguard the supply of Gulf oil produced by British companies and defend its military assets in the Gulf region and its colony in Aden. It worked to secure the lines of communication through the Gulf region to its allies and Commonwealth partners in Southeast Asia and Australia, and to defend the interests of its Gulf region client states.

It’s clear that both U.S. and British officials appreciated the close relationship between their interests in the Persian Gulf and throughout the Arabian Peninsula but comprehended that they were not identical. The British government had only mixed success in winning American approval for its policies in the Gulf region. Successive American administrations believed that a British presence in the Gulf could help secure Western interests, but they were uneasy about the efficacy of Britain’s military guarantee of Gulf security. They feared that heavy-handed British military action during a crisis could provoke a violent nationalist reaction against Western interests. This unease prevented American policy makers from giving Britain the unequivocal support it sought in the Gulf region. Frequently, British officials expressed their frustration and even anger over American reluctance to back their Gulf policies wholeheartedly.

So, the Anglo-American “special relationship” in the Persian Gulf region had very real limits. Sentiment alone wasn’t enough to keep U.S. and British policies aligned in the Middle East or elsewhere during the Cold War. The alliance functioned fully only where the interests of both members coincided fully. In Europe, both Washington and London certainly agreed on the need to contain Soviet power and to oppose communism. But elsewhere, for example in the Gulf region, U.S. and British policies moved out of step.

When I began my research, I expected to tell a rather straightforward story of the “changing of the guard” or “passing of the torch” from Britain to the United States in the Persian Gulf. What I found was something altogether more complicated and more interesting. I found a story of successive British governments’ determination not to cede Britain’s position in the Gulf until the last possible moment, and of the United States’ equal determination not to assume expensive new commitments.

What historians have left largely unaddressed is that while the United States and Britain pursued their interests in the Persian Gulf region, the peoples of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula worked just as hard to determine their own destinies. Deeply entrenched conflicts and ambitions shaped the environment in which U.S. and British statesmen attempted to work. Iraqi designs on Kuwait, Yemeni claims to Aden, and political competition between Baghdad and Cairo—unrelated to the Cold War era concerns of Washington and London—complicated the efforts of the U.S. and British governments to fashion workable foreign policies in the region. Frequently the smaller nations of the Persian Gulf and Arabia attempted to co-opt the power and influence of the United States and Britain for their own ends.

I hope that my study leaves the reader with an appreciation that the record of U.S.-British diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region is a complex and often troubled one. It’s marked by tension and littered with important failures as frequently as it is characterized by lasting successes. But it rewards close examination. It underscores the formidable difficulties even the closest allies confront in establishing cooperative policies, and I hope it illuminates an important chapter in the history of Western diplomacy on the Cold War’s periphery during the era of European imperial retreat.

Order from Publisher | Amazon

From Priya Satia

There was something fittingly fateful about how I came to write Spies in Arabia. Exactly a year before the 9/11 attacks, when the war in Iraq was but a twinkle in George W.’s eye, I stumbled into the Mesopotamian quagmire from the east. While exploring British Indian efforts to “develop” that region during World War One, I came across frequent complaints by local British officials about their difficulty gathering information in the country.

I assumed their problems arose partly out of a cultural mindset that had long seen the Middle East, and the “Orient” more generally, as essentially unknowable, mysterious, inscrutable. Here, I thought, was a question worth pursuing further: How did long-circulating cultural representations about the Middle East influence the practical unfolding of empire on the ground? How did they shape military and intelligence operations? The question promised to inject new life into the somewhat tired subject of European perceptions of the Orient. And so, I embarked for the UK to research the history of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East, without an inkling that the topic was about to seize center stage in American political debate.

My clever academic question soon acquired a more sinister and politically urgent aspect when the records of the Air Ministry revealed the true significance of the subject of British surveillance in the Middle East: After World War One, Iraq became the first colony policed from the air, bombardment forming a routine part of administration. The Royal Air Force’s obsessive emphasis on “ubiquity” of surveillance seemed in some way to be connected to those earlier complaints of blindness, a hypothesis I set about proving by tracing the culture of intelligence-gathering in the region before, during, and after the war. As I read official records alongside agents’ personal papers, contemporary fiction, scholarly journals, and the press, the extent to which secret histories—the history of espionage—can produce immense effects in politics and culture became increasingly and eerily apparent.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the book that I had launched for its apparent intellectual merits inexorably acquired a new purpose and an increasingly polemical subtext. The more I thought and wrote, the more I grew convinced that the contemporary echo of my historical topic was neither a coincidence, nor evidence of my political prescience, nor even the tragically farcical repetition of history; it was in fact the unfolding of a new chapter in that unfinished history. What came to be known as the “group think” of our intelligence community was, I found, partly a legacy of the British intelligence establishment’s earlier incursion in the region, as was the mentality guiding American counterinsurgency.

Intelligence, it turns out, is not simply the matter of collecting objectively true, but hidden facts. It depends on prior epistemological choices, as we are now painfully aware—and those are liable to be shaped by cultural understandings. If a certain Edwardian-era hankering after romance and fascination with Bedouin inspired the eccentric community of British Arabist agents (T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St. John Philby, and John Glubb being among the most well-known) to volunteer to spy in the Middle East, that very “genius”—and their claim to such a genius—ensured that all that the British state did in the region was similarly inventive—and often with horrific consequences, as in the case of the aerial surveillance regime. The book’s purpose is partly to make sense of how those who claimed the greatest empathy with Arabs—those most committed to “Arab freedom”—became the most enthusiastic supporters of a regime they knew to be unprecedentedly lethal and highly error-prone: How it came to be, in George Orwell’s words, that “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: [and] this is called pacification.”

Conversely, today’s events helped me understand the historical significance of the new imperial style ushered in with air control, what I call “covert empire.” At the very moment that Britain’s democracy became truly inclusive after the war, and began, somewhat self-consciously, to assert its right to check the power of the British state, particularly the extravagant expenditure and brutality in Iraq, those activities became increasingly hidden from public view; administrative and military power fell into the hands of unaccountable intelligence bodies. There was a lesson in here for us—about the perils of democracy, its fostering of a paranoid official secrecy simply by virtue of its insistent demand for openness. Somewhat counter-intuitively, when a democracy attempts imperial occupation, there is a lot of lying and a lot of unrecorded death. Indeed, today’s conversation about official secrecy about violence and corruption in Iraq seems almost to parody the parliamentary debates of 1920s Britain. Then, too, “spin,” euphemism, and spurious declarations of success accompanied the creation of an ethnically-ordered, militaristic, and corruptly developmentalist security state in Iraq.

The secrecy of British intervention was not lost on Iraqis. They too grew suspicious, indeed paranoid, about the extent of their independence once it was nominally granted in 1932, and even after the RAF finally departed in 1958—with good reason, since a mere two years later, the CIA made its first attempt to assassinate the Iraqi head of state. My hope is that Spies in Arabia will not only help us think about the follies of Britain’s imperial past (and dispel the myth of Britain’s success in Iraq) but will also remind us of the all-too-recent historical memory shaping reception to Western occupation in formerly colonized countries, however benevolent its stated objective; people simply can no longer swallow that much unfairness—or that much paternalism (except perhaps under UN auspices).

At a practical level, the lesson from the past is that the local spawn of covert empire is inevitably doomed: today’s blinkered conversation about why the Iraqi government is failing to step up so that we can stand down is founded on the fallacy that an only nominally independent government can ever have any legitimacy. Collaborationist regimes are, by their very nature, prone to paralysis and/or oppression. And making the U.S. presence more discreet—for instance, by replacing troops with airpower, as has been suggested—will only further compromise local authority. Iraq needs to belong fully and without reservation to the Iraqis; my own hunch is that if we depart, we will be pleasantly surprised by their possession of the heroic yet ordinary human capacity to avert the chaos that we claim to fear—and that we have in any case delivered to them.

Spies in Arabia has morphed into a rather different book from what I had foreseen. As much as it attempts to explain the past, it provides an unwitting but insistent comment on our present discontents. Flying in the face of our usual assumptions about the relatively benign and retiring nature of the inter-war British empire, it tacitly questions any modern government’s presumption of the oxymoronic role of peaceful empire.

Order from Publisher | Amazon