The post-September 11 era has unleashed
fundamentalists of all stripes who are not only
blossoming, but are colliding with each other
frequently, sometimes even ferociously, in the process
keeping us on the edge. Fundamentalism is defined here
as a feeling of self-righteousness, and of the
correctness of one's cause and one's objective, which
also convinces, with an equal fervor, the believer that
others and their causes are wrong, and they should be
defeated, and, in some instance, eradicated.
A fundamentalist belief system has little use for
a contrary point of view. Perhaps the strong feeling
of righteousness - or even righteous indignation
- overpowers the inherent human curiosity and the need
for inquiry. Eric Hoffer labels these fundamentalists
"true believers", in his seminal work of the same title.
His description of this personality type states, "It is
the true believer's ability to shut his eyes to facts
which in his own mind deserve never to be seen or heard
which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and
consistency."
In this clash of fundamentals
there are a whole slew of players; some of them are well
known, while others are not. The level of transnational
violence is on the rise, while the level of tolerance
for different beliefs, different perspectives and
different outlooks is going down. As a seemingly
interminable outcome of this clash, the international
community is living out that well-known Chinese curse:
"May you live in interesting times."
The most brutal
and bloody phase of this clash of fundamentals started
with terrorist attacks on the United States on September
11, 2001, by Islamists affiliated with al-Qaeda. They
were self-appointed warriors of God, doing his bidding
by inflicting damage on their "super-infidel" arch
rival, the US. In the process they killed thousands of
human beings of various nationalities and practitioners
of various faiths, including Islam. The sole fault of
those victims was that they were at the wrong place at
the wrong time.
In response,
President George W Bush declared a global "war
on terrorism". The perpetrators of violence on the US were
described as "evil-doers", a phrase that was rightly
imbued with moral outrage. Ironically, however, al-Qaeda's
attack on the US was also driven by a similar intense
emotional expression of outrage. For Osama bin Laden, the US
was the chief tormentor of Muslims all over the world
and supporter of Israel, which was occupying the
Palestinian homeland and butchering Palestinians. Bin Laden
has another special reason to fight with the US: it was
then "defiling" the birthplace of Islam by keeping its
forces of "occupation" there. That was his reference to
the fact that the US troops had been stationed in Saudi
Arabia since the Gulf War of 1991. (Those troops were
finally withdrawn in April 2003.)
The rationale
underlying Bush's use of the phrases "evil one" or
"evil-doers" was to unite everyone to condemn bin Laden
and his methods in much the same way bin Laden was using
similar phraseology to unite Muslims. In 1998, bin Laden
issued a fatwa (religious edict), in
which he stated, "The ruling to kill the Americans
and their allies - civilians and military - is an
individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country
in which it is possible to do it, in order to
liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their
grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all
the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten
any Muslim." Bush's explanation of the reason al-Qaeda chose
to strike at the US was that they "hate us for our
freedom". Al-Qaeda's explanation was that the United States was the
force of evil, an anti-Islamic force, which should be
confronted and harmed everywhere in the world.
Bin Laden's use of the word "infidel" should be
clearly understood in the context of a clash of
fundamentalism. Even though the original meaning and
intent of that word was only to describe a non-Muslim,
the Wahhabi sect - of which bin Laden is a member - uses
it to describe anyone, including Muslims, who do not
subscribe to the cause and the world vision of al-Qaeda
and its violent modus operandi.
In choosing the
language of morality to characterize bin Laden, Bush was
emulating his idol, former president Ronald Reagan,
himself an ardent and effective practitioner of
right-wing fundamentalism. Reagan's characterization of
the former Soviet Union as the "focus of evil" and "the
evil empire" has a special place in the voluminous
chronicles of highly value-laden collection of normative
and pejorative phrases of the Cold War years.
Incidentally, those phrases were part of a speech that
Reagan delivered in 1983 at the National Association of
Evangelicals (a Baptist fundamentalist group). An
interesting aspect of Reagan's phraseology was that it
came at a time when the Soviet Union was already feeling
the pressure of heightened US military spending
initiated by none other than Reagan. In retrospect, a
number of conservative American ideologues still recall
that period of the Cold War competition with much
nostalgia, since the Soviet Union collapsed soon
thereafter.
Not to be outdone by his idol, Bush
found another expression for his right-wing
fundamentalism in his "axis of evil" speech, in which he
denounced Iran, Iraq and North Korea and proclaimed
that they would not be allowed to acquire weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). Even though that depiction was not
well received in "old Europe", Bush's seriousness of
purpose was fully established when the US invaded Iraq
for the explicit purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein and
ridding that country of WMD.
Since then, the US
is exercising something that can be described as
"secular fundamentalism". This particular brand of
fundamentalism is just as dedicated for the
establishment of secular democracy in the Middle East,
as are Islamists about creating Islamic governments. The
only difference is that the secular fundamentalists had
not waged war for the creation of a democratic
government, until the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Not to be outdone by the US in this exercise of
secular fundamentalism, France has exercised its own
brand by banning the wearing of the hijab (scarf)
by Muslim women, and other symbols by the
followers of other faiths, in public schools. The notion
of conformity has taken precedence over the fundamental
right of an individual to wear his or her religious
preferences. The overwhelming support of that collective
exercise in idiocy among the French populace has
established the fact that, despite having a highfalutin
commitment to civility, even France is just as capable
of indulging in an exercise in triviality as any other
country, and in the name of secular fundamentalism (or
even secular fanaticism).
The leftist critics of US
global policies are creatures of old habits whereby they
see everything big and powerful as an "empire", hence
their current depiction of US as a practitioner of
"imperial fundamentalism". The presidency of Bush added
new wrinkles to that phrase, however. In the pre-September
11 phase of the Bush presidency, the US was
accused, with much justification, of practicing "unilateral"
foreign policy in refusing to abide by the Kyoto
environmental treaty, and by its decision to pull out
of the membership of the International Criminal Court,
and in its abandonment of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty. In the post-September 11 phase, that unilateralism
was to become more pronounced and militant.
In the United States' military campaign against
Afghanistan, Washington had much of the world's sympathy
and support. However, divisions began to emerge with
Bush's warning to the community of nations, which stated
in the global "war on terrorism", "either you are with
us or with the terrorists".
In
the post-September 11 era, the Bush administration took
the practice of unilateralism to new heights (or new
nadirs, depending on one's perspective) when it decided
to invade Iraq without final United Nations sanction.
The imperial fundamentalism has created a new
paradigm whereby the US was not only determined to create
a sycophant government in Iraq in the name of
inserting democracy, but the rest of the countries of that
region were to be democratized by using the same US
template. That template, to be sure, was about the
creation of a Western-style secular democracy. One can
only imagine the consequences of imposing democracy - an
oxymoron - from without. But that is what the US appears
resolute to do in the Middle East.
The right -
to be precise, the neo-conservatives - applauded what
the left generally condemned as imperial fundamentalism.
Perhaps an apt phrase that the right would use to
describe America's behavior is "hegemonic
fundamentalism", whereby the hegemony of the US should
be maintained at all cost. Since its military primacy
and dominance are at an all-time high at the present
moment, the neo-cons argued that the cost for the
exercise of hegemonic fundamentalism to the US would be
minimal. Iraq has proved that the neo-con calculation
about the minimal cost to the US was dead wrong.
Stabilizing Iraq has already cost billions of
dollars and more than 1,000 American lives. But there is no
indication that the US will pull out of Iraq. Now the
neo-con rhetoric, which Bush is reiterating during his
stump speeches, states that the cost of getting out of
Iraq at the present time would be too horrible to
envisage. By being engaged in Iraq, according to this
argument, the US is keeping the terrorists away from
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Walla Walla, Washington. Needless
to say, this type of rhetoric maintains the high fear
level among the US populace.
Aside from America's global "war
on terrorism", another major development of global
implications of the post-September 11 era is the al-Aqsa
Intifada (uprising) that erupted after the highly charged September
2001 visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon,
then an opposition leader and an aspirant to the prime
ministership. Even though Sharon's action is described
as the event triggering the outbreak of violence, the
failure of the Camp David summit between Yasser Arafat
and the then Israeli prime minister Yehud Barak was the
main underlying reason for the escalating frustrations
of the Palestinians. Interestingly enough, the strongest
support for Israel in the US came from a coalition of
Jewish-Americans and Christian fundamentalists. The
rationale for the latter group's support for Israel is
cogently described as follows:
A growing number of Christians embrace the
idea that in all history, Israel is on center stage.
They say God has planned epochs of time
("dispensations") such as an "in-gathering" of Jews in
the ancient land of Canaan. One epoch, they say,
includes the present time when Jews are obligated to
build a Jewish temple and re-institute animal
sacrifice. Such epochs or "dispensations" are
necessary, they say, before Christ can return.
Ironically, while Christian dispensationalists place
Israel as the most important nation in all the world,
they do not respect or even like Jews - as Jews. Yet,
because they believe Christ can only land in a "safe"
area near Jerusalem, they make a cult of the land.
They thus give total, unquestioned support to
Israel.
Not to be outdone by that coalition,
the Democratic supporters of Israel in the US - the
secular fundamentalists - have their own rationale for
supporting the Jewish state. The liberal Democrats were
not only heirs to the strong feelings of guilt of their
predecessors - the Roosevelt Democrats - for not doing
anything to avoid the Holocaust of World War II, but
they also view the Jewish state as a symbol of Western
liberal democratic tradition that might be emulated
elsewhere in the Middle East. The Palestinian cause, on
the other hand, remains an orphan in the domestic arena
of the US, looking for a powerful political group to
adopt it.
In 2004,
the Palestinian-Israeli peace process is
dead. Prime Minister Sharon is convinced that he does not
need to negotiate with the Palestinians, unless they
change their leader to his liking. Bush very much
supports Sharon on this point. Arafat has remained a
prisoner in his residence for over two years,
epitomizing the humiliation of the Palestinian nation,
to which the US is also a party. The Palestinians are
expressing their rage through suicide attacks, and
Israelis through waging war on the Palestinian nation.
Moderates in the Jewish and Palestinian nations are
nowhere to be seen. The search for common ground has
ended. In fact, in the churlish environment of clashing
fundamentalists, even the common ground is soaked with
the blood of innocent Palestinians and Israelis.
In the meantime, the Republican
fear-mongering related to September 11 is numbing the US
electorate. The most recent evidence of that was Vice
President Dick Cheney's recent unfortunate observation
that the US would come under terrorist attack if the
American voters were to make a wrong choice in November,
implying that the wrong choice would be a vote for John
Kerry. The conscience of the world seems to have gone
numb. The continuing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine and Chechnya seems to have created a
collective (or even universal) frame of mind that cannot
express outrage loud and clear enough for all the
holy-rollers - religious as well as secular - to stop
berating, humiliating or even killing each in the name
of God or democracy.
Ehsan Ahrari,
PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent
strategic analyst.
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