Alastair Crooke's conversation with the Hamas official Osama Hamdan in last month's Prospect, brought to mind Robert Maxwell's "interview" with Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania—"Tell me, Mr President: why are you so popular with your people?" Hamas, at least as refracted through Crooke, is little more than an Islamist form of Lib Dem pavement politics. If only the west would stop making unreasonable demands such as halting terrorism and recognising Israel, Hamas might transform the middle east for the better.
Should we take Crooke's depiction of the democratic potential of Islamism seriously? The stated purpose of the organisation he runs, Conflicts Forum, is to end the isolation and demonisation of Islamist movements. Certainly, the hallmark of Crooke's approach is an extraordinary willingness to take Islamists such as Hamdan at their own estimation. And it is an attitude that Crooke has demonstrated ever since his days as a senior MI6 officer both in the middle east and Latin America.
So we learn from Crooke that the Hamas leaders are uncorrupt devotees of good governance who want to reduce the bloated state sector in the Palestinian Authority; that they are scrupulously observing a unilateral de-escalation (or tadiya); and that they don't want a top-down imposition of Shari'a on Muslims or anyone else.
One would have little sense from this description that these devotees of good governance have been busy eliminating their rivals in Fatah—or that Hamas's own foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, claimed recently to have "lost" $450,000 from his suitcase in Kuwait. Even the tadiya was explained last year at an Al Ahram conference by the head of Hamas's political bureau, Khaled Meshal, as a "trick"—presumably to buy time to re-equip for the next round of struggle.
Hamdan makes much of the point that since 2003 Hamas has focused on attacks within the territories as opposed to direct assaults within pre-1967 Israel. In the past few weeks, Hamas has increased the tempo of its claimed attacks. But even without taking that into the reckoning, Hamdan's account conveniently omitted to mention the two bus bombings in Beersheba in 2004, also claimed by Hamas, and the murder of the confectioner Sasson Nuriel in 2005. Moreover, Crooke's account avoids serious analysis of the Popular Resistance Committees group—whose violence, according to one of its leaders, the late Yussuf al-Qoqa, is "fully co-ordinated" with Hamas.
What of Shari'a? Hamas, Crooke asserts, "prefers the goal of a state peopled by believing Muslims whose freely chosen priorities colour society from below." What does this mean? In practice it means Islamic religious and municipality leaders in the West Bank town of Kalkilya demanding that the local YMCA be closed. Or it can mean "honour killings"—such as the shooting dead in 2005 of a 20-year-old woman for alleged "immoral behaviour."
Hamas apologised for this killing after an outcry. But it points to the greatest weakness of Crooke's analysis. He holds that Islamist hostility to the west is the consequence of our policies—thus severely underrating the autonomous role of their religious-political ideology. If Hamas is as "modern" as he implies, why does its charter—which sees a world full of plots by Jews and Freemasons—remain? Article 17 even states that the cinema is a tool of the enemies of Islam for seducing Muslim women from piety.
One of Crooke's board members, Azzam al-Tamimi (a close friend of Khaled Meshal) says that some Christians and Jews could live in a future Islamist state as protected but obviously subordinate religions. Since Tamimi has stated in the past that Iran and Sudan can claim to have some of the greatest civil liberties in the Muslim world, the precedents for non-Muslims are not auspicious. This is the problem for "sophisticated" Europeans such as Crooke: when you feast with theocratic panthers, you discover that those theocratic panthers have the awkward habit of speaking the truth about their intentions.
Is Crooke a maverick? Or does he reflect a strand of thinking in the western intelligence services—the PC spook? One high-ranking ex-colleague of Crooke from MI6 emphasises that his views are not representative, and he has been out on a limb since he went on secondment to the EU in 1997. And yet he does not exist in a complete vacuum. For the post-imperial intelligence services are light years removed in values from their officer-class predecessors, so effectively lampooned in Christopher Andrew's Secret Service. Unlike the old guard, few serving officers axiomatically believe in the superiority of the British or even western way of life. Indeed, Paddy Ashdown noted in one of his diaries after addressing new MI6 entrants that he doubted there was a single Tory among them. And according to John Chilcot—who recently retired as staff counsellor for the security services—there was a certain amount of (resolvable) conscientious and legal objection about both the war on terror and the Iraq war within those organisations. But he notes that all of the pressure came from the "ethical" side of the divide. No one resigned for "right-wing" reasons—because the government was doing too little.
Nor is Crooke the first of his breed to suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome—starting to see the world through the eyes of his captors. The best known ex-spook to have spoken out on how to deal with insurgents is Michael Oatley, who was the key MI6 contact for the IRA and who sought to induce them to adopt a more political path. Both Oatley and Crooke are vexed by the notion of demanding swift decommissioning of arms by terrorists. And both adopt the terminology of the enemy: Oatley does not refer to Northern Ireland, but to "the north." Both indulge insurgent narratives: Crooke speaks of Hamas and Hizbullah "completing the process of decolonisation."
Crooke thus marginalises moderates and democrats—exemplified by his dismissive sideswipes at the concerns of the Egyptians and Jordanians over the rise of Hamas and by his lack of real interest in that brave band of genuine Arab liberals squeezed between the dictators and the Islamists. Only the extremes, in the shape of secretive militaristic elites like Hamas or the IRA, can truly "deliver." Crooke is also inclined to downplay the role of force in compelling such elites to refine their methods. Like so many Europeans, he believed that the Israeli policy of targeted assassinations, like the killing in 2004 of Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, would result in an "explosion of violence." It did not.
Both men dislike the moralising rhetoric of the masses and their elected representatives: Oatley when dealing with IRA decommissioning, Crooke with America after 9/11. According to the Palestinian record of a meeting between Crooke and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2002, the Briton opined "as for terrorism, I hate that word. I have spent some time in my life with freedom fighters in Colombia… People cannot tolerate the sight of babies being killed and that triggers an emotional response. When America reacted to the 11 September events, the Afghan people should not have paid the price for that."
But the belief that "our" side bears equal responsibility for de-escalating conflict is not new. Sean O'Callaghan, the ex-IRA man, remembers being debriefed by senior MI5 officers in Holland in 1986 and was told that the Provisionals were treading water until Thatcher went: "If Gerry and Martin can deal with some of their problems… and once we can get rid of Margaret, then we could have a settlement."
One of the greatest problems with semi-official interventions of the kind associated with Crooke and Oatley is that they are often taken by insurgents to represent the "true" view of western states (as opposed to the passing interjections of mere elected politicians). Such "exes" can do great damage, giving insurgents confidence to hold out for more. No wonder the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds al Arabi gave Crooke's interview such prominence.
Crooke and Oatley are the products of late-imperial British defeatism: an era when the main issue was the terms on which to exit the colonies. That is why the self-confident liberal interventionism of the American neoconservatives poses such a stark challenge. But America, whose decline is far from assured, should tread carefully before embracing the mindset of a country at a different phase in its existence.
