[lit-ideas] Re: Possible reason why
- From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:38:05 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
-----Original Message-----
From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
Sent: Sep 14, 2004 9:00 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Possible reason why
In a message dated 9/14/2004 7:22:13 AM Central Daylight Time,
aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Nic Robertson (reporter) of CNN said on News Hour that it's in al Qaeda's
interests to have this guy reelected. I wonder why.
A.A. Good article. Just for the record, though, I was being facetious when I
said I wonder why. I think the last line of this analysis says it all:
"al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its." The U.S.
has not achieved its goals because it didn't set any goals, except for its
obsession with Iraq. U.S. politics is basically a popularity contest. Gore
was by far the superior leader and lost because, literally, people didn't like
him. Bush is ahead now despite his horrendous mismanagement of the country
because people do like him. In light of Bush's support of only the haves and
have mores in this country, this truly says something about people.
Andy
Hi,
I would suspect that this rather frightening analysis of what has happened
these past couple of years might explain why it would be so...
Comments, anyone?
My thoughts are that no matter how I felt in regards to the
US entering Iraq in the first place, there is still an incredible tension in
regards to how we have handled the war over there and what we are going to
do to make it better(even I could have gauged the reaction of people in
regards to the abuse in the prison--and how no one in the leadership end of
the
current administration has taken any real responsibility. Or how...well, no
matter.)
I just believe it all points to the High Need for some major creative
thought as the only hope towards finding an 'out of the box' solution...or the
USA
is really going to find itself in an even greater and more major problemic
situation in a few years...and as I want Ben and other children to grow up
dancing and singing in this world (as much as possible) and the grown-ups have
an
obligation to assist in creating such a platform--well, with all the
creativity that I see around me in so many arenas of life--where is it in this
arena?
Americans are, typically, creative, find-the-trap-door, caring for the Other
type of people--what is happening and where are those sorts now?
And, yes, it is also hard for me to comprehend the lengths people will go
for an ideology and completely close their eyes to what *is* and not what they
want it to be.
Best regards,
Marlena
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan
Saturday, September 11, 2004
September 11 and Its Aftermath
<http://juancole.com/>
In order to evaluate the aftermath of September 11, we first must understand
that event. What did al-Qaeda intend to achieve? Only if we understand that
can we gauge their success or failure.
From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be
united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political
unity,
under the early caliphs. Even as late as the outbreak of World War I, the
Ottoman state ruled much of the Middle East, and the Ottoman sultans had begun
making claims to be caliphs (Muslim popes) from about 1880. In the below map,
blue indicates heavy Muslim populations, green means medium, and yellow means
the Muslims are a significant minority.
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was
deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers
invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim
states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little
more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British,
French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took
Egypt
in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other
Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward.
Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often
small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests
have lasted. (Look at the British Empire and its imposition on much of the
Muslim world, e.g.:)
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an unprecedented event from the
point of view of Bin Laden and his followers. Far from it. It was only the
latest in a long series of Western predations in Muslim lands. The British had
conquered Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had unilaterally opened Palestine to
Jewish immigration, with the colonized Palestinians unable to object. The
Russians had taken the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early nineteenth century,
and had so brutally repressed the Muslims under their rule that they probably
killed hundreds of thousands and expelled even more to the Ottoman Empire
(now Turkey).
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the Soviet attempt to absorb Afghanistan was
the beginning of the end of the colonial venture. They demonstrated that even
a superpower can be forced to withdraw from a Muslim land if sufficient
guerrilla pressure is put on it.
Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened
by outside forces. Among these is the Americans in Saudi Arabia and the
Israelis in geographical Palestine. He repeatedly complained about the
occupation
of the three holy cities, i.e., Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in
the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a
single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad
al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always
checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt.
They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and
backs Saudi Arabia's royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the "far enemy" first. That
is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as
to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United
States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep
into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going
to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could
not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of
the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which
then ruled what later became Indonesia).
Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the
Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more
vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack
was
conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting
Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Bin Laden wanted to move
the timing of the operation up to spring of 2001 so as to "punish" the
Israelis for their actions against the Palestinians in the second Intifadah.
Khalid
Shaikh Muhammad was mainly driven in planning the attack by his rage at
Israel over the Palestinian issue. Another goal is to destroy the US economy,
so
weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.
Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the
Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated
and
they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle
Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism. Jordan's population, e.g.
is 5.6 million. Tunisia, a former French colony, is 10 million, less than
Michigan. Most Muslims have been convinced of the naturalness of the
nation-state model and are proud of their new nations, however small and weak.
Bin Laden
had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is
possible.
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he
appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely
possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into
a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what
they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that
he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local
Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many
American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for
no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they
had avoided in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to
convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands,
humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge
hard to
accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib
prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's
wisdom and foresightedness.
After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a
significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre
finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude.
It
grew up in reaction against US policies.
It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it
was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a
huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis
want
an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory
the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist
Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting
the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden
dreams.
If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated
intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the
Persian
Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Bin Laden's dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may
well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be
one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred
for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims,
that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has
emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group
of
Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.
Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant
numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new
generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved
from
being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a
model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia
and
elsewhere.
The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won.
But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of
its goals than the US has of its.
posted by Juan @ 9/11/2004 06:01:49 AM
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