Total Jihad

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Title: Total Jihad

Author: Eric L. Rozenman

ISBN: 1928928099

Description:

The year is 2007. Israel, first weakened by an imposed peace, now lies defeated and occupied, a demoralized section of the Islamic Republic of Greater Palestine. In Europe a new anti-Semitism is in the saddle. In America, the fractured Jewish community struggles to find its bearings in an increasingly isolationist nation. Onto this scene stride five unforgettable characters – Aharon Tabor, kubbutznik, patriot, warrior; Admiral Chester Wingate Fogerty, Commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, Christian believer, and rebel; Congressman Jonathan Marcus, Washington insider and long shot gambler; Ya’acoub al-Masri, part Ghadafi, part Khomeini, brilliant and erratic; and Rabbi Jeri Levi, destines despite herself to lead… Total Jihad! Current as tomorrow’s headlines, revealing as a classified briefing, Total Jihad, captures the turmoil of today’s Middle East, describes the coming upheaval – and forecasts its startling outcome. What Leon Uris’s Exodus was for its generation, Total Jihad will be to this one… a page turning thriller, a provocative fable for our times.

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Excerpt from Chapter One:

Part 1

"Thus says the Lord: 'I will return unto Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. There shall yet old men and old women sit in the broad places of Jerusalem and the broad places of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing.'" -- Zechariah 8:4-5.

Washington, D.C. (April 20, 2007) -- A killing in the White House - specifically in the Old Executive Office Building next door - was impossible to conceal, even for the president and Secret Service. But in a city whose news media functioned as its central nervous system, and an ever-excitable one at that, details of the White House shoot-out were scarce. The lid was on; neither Col. Abner Samuels' name, nor his rank or position with the National Security Council had surfaced. The fact that he died carrying a fistful of contingency plans for U.S. involvement in a Middle East war likewise remained suppressed. But the Capitol Hill grapevine - rabbit-like, prone to exaggeration, driven by e-mail - did better. It fleshed out the skeleton of official details into an entertaining, inciting melange of truth, half-truths, and falsehoods, stepbrother to television news. Still, not good enough to suit Congressman Jonathan Marcus. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Col Samuels, in a private briefing that violated Pentagon regulations, had delivered ominous information to him and two colleagues. A few hours later the officer, half mad and completely drunk, had set off for the White House. As far as Marcus could see, members of Congress needed to know exactly why - even if President Johnston and his artificially enhanced first lady refused to tell them…

***

Washington, D.C. (April 19, 2007) -- A congressman in Bullfeathers at mid-afternoon was not unusual. But a congressman with an officer in uniform, decorations on his chest and well into his third drink, was. At Bullfeathers, on the House side of Capitol Hill at First and D Streets Southeast, congressional staffers and their bosses, lobbyists, reporters and consultants of every stripe preyed on each other and, thanks to deductible business luncheons, on the taxpayers.
    "Another Manhattan for the colonel, another decafe for you?" the waitress asked Marcus.
    A provocation in designer slacks and low heels, she could have been a starlet-in-waiting in Los Angeles, Representative Jonathan Marcus thought. Here, she went to graduate school at night, studying international relations and law, and ached for a congressional committee staff job. Washington brimmed with young men and women like her, drawn by the aphrodisiac of power and the potential for money that followed. Especially young women, including some like Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy, for example, feminist offspring too clever to know better. It was, he thought again, the opposite of New York, which drew people by the possibilities of money, which then would bring power -- and at a tangent from L.A., where notoriety, often built on little more than bad behavior, commanded attention, which became power and perhaps ultimately, money. In New York a profile too public sometimes impeded gain; in Washington, adulation often preceded destruction.
    "Ah, I'm getting too old for this," Marcus muttered, nodding at the waitress as she strode back toward the bar, her flanks high and firm against her beige slacks. The waitress, meanwhile, wondered who the suit was with the colonel. He looked like a congressman, in the standard-issue navy blue suit, well-made, well-tailored -- with the obligatory off-red tie -- subtle, sharp but not flashy enough to put voters off. The officer, not a general, might be of marginal utility to her; a congressman, particularly if he turned out to be a committee chairman or ranking minority member, now that was something else. She continued attentive.
    "No, you're not," Samuels slurred. "Just too cautious. Too hesitant." The man's mind was still working, even if his tongue wasn't, Marcus thought. "And you'd better pay attention to what I'm telling you!" Samuels snapped.
    Marcus glared at him, but listened, just as he had the day before, when the colonel asked to speak with him and two other pro-Israel members after a hearing at which the assistant secretary of defense for international assistance had testified. A be-ribboned colonel, in the slate blue full dress uniform of the Air Force, had been sitting near the assistant secretary at the witness table. Except for whispering some advice before the latter answered a military question, he had said nothing. Now the man -- tall, lithe, with fiery eyes -- approached Marcus.
    "Congressman? I'm Colonel Abner Samuels, Middle East specialist on the National Security Council. Can we talk? Somewhere private?"
    "Sure," Marcus replied.
    He had met Samuels before, at the Israeli Embassy's annual gala Independence Day reception, when the Israelis insisted on behaving as if theirs were a country like any other, established, equal, sovereign. The sliding scale of diplomatic representation each year -- a full complement of European and Asian ambassadors when the Palestinians were happy, a handful of deputy chiefs of missions and the odd Balkan or central Asian military attaché when Israel cracked down on Arab terrorism -- argued otherwise. Marcus suspected that the officer was Ambassador Tarbitsky's source at the N.S.C. The colonel's reputation as something of a maverick preceded him.
    "The chairman has a small, private office right around the corner. Staff can open it for us."
    "We'll join you," said Larry Levinson, with Mel Bernstein at his side. The pair, Democrats like Marcus, fell in without an invitation. Marcus, eyebrows arched, looked at Samuels. The colonel shrugged. The four of them marched out of the hearing room, Rayburn 2270, past the portraits of the present and former chairmen, portraits which grew larger and more florid the closer their subjects' tenures were to the present, out under the two-story high ceiling with its strong indirect lighting -- meant to give this arena of policy a glow from on high, as if sanctified -- and off the rich bottle green rug, decorated with leaves of gold laurel. At one of the two heavy wooden double doors Marcus hesitated, glancing at a glass-encased display box mounted on the wall.
    Inside was a medal, a shard of pavement, and a small plaque. The pavement was a piece of runway from the airstrip at Jonestown, Guyana, gathered after the murder of committee member Leo Ryan in 1978. The medal was Congress' posthumous award to Ryan, and the plaque tersely recounted his selfless, relentless quest to do his job and protect his constituents. Marcus often stared at the little shrine, measuring himself and his colleagues against the example it commemorated, measuring himself and doubting. In the chairman's small, well-appointed sitting room, a hide-out really, behind a door that carried no identification other than a number, no legend informing passers-by which committee or member worked beyond the threshold, Col. Samuels unzipped his black leather portfolio. He withdrew several photographs, eleven-by-fourteen black-and-white enlargements. Propping them on an elegantly upholstered love-seat, he pulled his Pentagon standard pen-like laser pointer from his shirt pocket and gestured authoritatively.
    "Gentlemen," he said, "these satellite photographs clearly indicate the deployment of Jordanian, Iraqi and Saudi armor just east of the Jordan River, on the eastern lip of the rift valley. They highlight a similar concentration of Syrian armor on the Golan Heights and, with Lebanese markings, in the Bekaa Valley. These are large deployments. That they were there during the Thirty-Six Hour War is not news. That they remain -- and have been reinforced -- would be, if it were not highly classified. To keep it out of the news and off the Internet we've taken the unusual step of disabling the commercial surveillance satellites. NASA has put out a story about electro-magnetic storms in the upper atmosphere.
    "And although I could not bring the photos to back up this next assertion -- taking too much that would not be displayed in open session might have raised eyebrows at N.S.C. -- the concentration of Iraqi and Saudi warplanes at Jordanian airfields also continues. I believe the Arabs will attempt to finish off Israel in the near future. The very near future. And that's regardless of how many more concessions the Jews make."
    "So this briefing is unauthorized?" Marcus asked. The colonel shot him a withering look, one that declared Samuels could not abide simpletons, especially not now. Marcus, unfazed, was nearly as concerned about the wild gleam in the officer's eyes as about the information the latter was leaking.
    "Look, colonel," Bernstein said. "We all know these intelligence photos are subject to interpretation, let alone computer manipulation. And even when the data are clear, pictures alone can't determine intent. Otherwise, we and the Kuwaitis would not have been surprised by Iraq in 1990, the Israelis would not have been surprised by the Syrians and the Egyptians in 1973 ...."
    Samuels cut him off. "Congressman, there's nothing ambiguous about these particular photographs. I told you what they show -- thousands of enemy tanks positioned to go over to offensive operations immediately, only miles from Israeli forces, forces depleted and not resupplied after the latest fighting.         As for interpretation, today's technology is a generation better than that used for the Persian Gulf in '90, half a generation ahead of that used in Afghanistan a few years back. And failure in interpreting intelligence data -- like the Israelis in '73, or the Pentagon regarding China during the Clinton years -- usually is a matter of political denial or wishful thinking, not technical inadequacies.
    "As for intent, in the Middle East military planners rarely err by preparing for worst-case scenarios. That was the secret of Israeli success -- in 1956, '67, at Entebbe in '76, Osirak in '81, even Lebanon in '82, at least early on. It was all about preemption to prevent the worst case and even winning. But beginning with the first Palestinian intifada in late '87, and Oslo in '93, war-weary and demoralized, they began betting on best-case scenarios and lost their freedom of maneuver."
    "Lost it to whom?" Levinson asked. "To themselves, to their own yearning for peace. And, in a logistical sense, to us, Congressman, to us. That was the lesson of the forced cancellation of the Lavi fighter-bomber project, of the suppressed Phalcon command-and-control plane deal with China -- after which we immediately began selling the Chinese supercomputers, as if that weren't a bigger security risk." Samuels spoke as a teacher might to a sluggish class.
    "When we forced Sharon to withdraw from Beit Jala after just two days in 2001, leaving the residents of Gilo in Jerusalem no safer from snipers and mortars than before, when we insisted Israel let Yasir Arafat walk out his shattered offices in Ramallah five years ago, when we oversaw the stationing of international monitors in the West Bank and on the Golan Heights, we not only 'protected' Israel from international condemnation, from Syrian surprise attack, we also protected the Palestinians and then Syria against Israeli preemption.
    "The closer the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship grew," the colonel explained, "the more the smaller partner was roped to the larger. U.S. global interests predominated over Israeli regional goals. Of course, for a time it was symbiotic, politically. The Clinton administration used the Rabin and Barak governments for moves that otherwise would have sparked widespread pro-Israel opposition in this town, and the Israelis used Clinton as a talisman with their own public to make palatable otherwise unacceptable appeasements of the Arabs. Call it a suffocating embrace, for the little guy."
    Levinson, a gruff, heavyset man who owned several independent service stations in Fort Lauderdale, was a savvy if rough-hewn politician. He was not afraid to ask questions, naive or otherwise, and his boisterous self-promotion notwithstanding, almost always understood the answers. "So it's like major refiners and independent stations," Levinson said. "The guys with the product call the shots."
    "Exactly."
    "Why tell us?" Marcus asked. "If the White House obviously knows all this, the Israelis must know it."
    "Because," Samuels nearly shouted, "the administration lies to the Israelis. It pretends the information is ambiguous, 'subject to further analysis.' Given its hesitancy and isolationism, it has to be able to give the Arabs the benefit of the doubt, and to withhold some of it from the Israelis. Go easy on your enemies, hard on your friends -- that's why all those slogans about peace and multilateralism, about a new, less-violent world order remained just slogans.
    "I argued about this with the White House chief of staff, and finally he said, 'Colonel, aren't you making too much of this? After all, we're talking about small, faraway countries for which we would care little -- if not that a few of them have a lot of oil.'
    "'Munich,' I said to him, and this guy -- whose father was in diapers during World War II, said, 'What's Germany got to do with it?'
    "And," Samuels continued, "We aren't sharing the most damning information with the Israelis. Haven't been for months."
    "But the Israelis have a spy satellite of their own, and a pretty decent intelligence system, don't they?" Bernstein inquired, almost plaintively. "They did launch a replacement surveillance device of their own, yes, Ofek-6. A nice, compact piece of work. But we think they've had some trouble with it. Maybe Arab sabotage. Maybe someone else ..." he said. "As for Israeli intelligence, perhaps it's been compromised from within."
    The colonel, Marcus decided, was a conspiracy theorist. Well-informed, but a conspiracy theorist nevertheless, seeing hidden hands where there were no arms. But when Samuels called a few hours later to beg for a one-on-one conversation as soon as possible, Marcus had agreed.