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Another Gulf War, another
al-Qaeda
By Ahmad Faruqui
Arguing that there is a link between al-Qaeda
and Iraq, the administration of US President George W
Bush convinced Congress last October about the need to
invade Iraq as an act of self-defense. A slender
majority of Americans now believe that Iraq was behind
the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and support
such a war with or without United Nations approval.
Unfortunately, this link is a mirage. The real link
between al-Qaeda and Iraq is very different.
It
is a fact of history that the US decision to prosecute
the Gulf War in 1991 spawned al-Qaeda. From the very
beginning, Osama bin Laden's refrain has been that
Western forces on Arab soil have compromised Arab
sovereignty and polluted Islam's holy lands. Al-Qaeda
played on these grievances to recruit radical young
Arabs to its cause. By pointing out the pro-Israel bias
in US foreign policy, bin Laden gave his message a
grassroots appeal on the Arab street. Through the clever
use of historical symbols, he has sought to position
himself as a modern-day Saladin who would wrest control
of Jerusalem for the Muslims.
Right after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush referred to the
war against terrorism as a "crusade". His critics were
quick to exploit what was probably an inadvertent misuse
of the term. The term played right into the theme that
bin Laden had been laying out for years. The Arab world
remembers well the words that British General Allenby, a
descendent of the English Crusaders, uttered when he
entered Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, "The Crusades
have ended now!" Similarly, it has not forgotten either
the content or the tone of the statements made by French
General Henri Gouraud when he entered Damascus in July
1920. Striding to Saladin's tomb next to the Grand
Mosque, Gouraud kicked it and exclaimed, "Awake Saladin,
we have returned. My presence here consecrates the
victory of the Cross over the Crescent."
During
an interview with CNN in 1997, Osama bin Laden said the
ongoing US military presence in Saudi Arabia was an
"occupation of the land of the holy places". In February
1998, notwithstanding the fact that his only formal
education is in economics, bin Laden issued a
fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans and
their allies. Only highly learned clerics can issue such
a fatwa, which is a binding religious ruling on
their followers. However, three other militant groups,
including Islamic Jihad in Egypt, moved quickly to
endorse the ruling. The World Islamic Front (a grouping
of dozens of Islamic militia) issued a statement: "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." It was
published three months later in the London newspaper
al-Quds al-Arabi.
It is a comment on the depth
of anti-American sentiment in the region that bin Laden
has been able to call his violent campaign of terror
against civilian Americans a jihad, even though Muslim
clerics have said such a terrorist campaign cannot be
interpreted as a jihad under Islamic law.
It is
useful to recall that the Gulf War in 1991 was waged by
the United States to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It
had United Nations support, and the forces that went in
to fight the armies of Saddam Hussein comprised a large
coalition of troops drawn from several Muslim and Arab
nations, in addition to the US, Britain and Australia.
Even then, al-Qaeda was able to portray that war as a
crusade, giving credence to Samuel Huntington's theory
about an inevitable clash of civilizations.
This
new war has proved profoundly unpopular around the
globe. It has been opposed by the 116 nations who belong
to the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the
Islamic Conference and the Arab League, in addition to
several key European nations.
The war will be
fought largely with US troops, with assistance from
Australian and British troops. Neither Arab armies nor
any Third World armies are likely be in the "coalition
of the willing", belying the allegation that Iraq poses
a threat to its neighbors. It is likely to lead to a
significant rise in anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
A just-released survey by Professor Shibley
Telhami of the University of Maryland provides a
disturbing commentary on Arab public opinion. Telhami,
who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and
Development, interviewed 2,620 men and women in five
Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and
Saudi Arabia. The respondents were asked to state their
opinions on major foreign-policy hypotheses that have
been advanced by the Bush administration.
The
overwhelming majority of respondents felt that war with
Iraq would worsen the chances for peace in the Middle
East. Most pessimistic were the respondents in Saudi
Arabia, where 91 percent concurred with the statement,
and least pessimistic were those in Jordan, where the
percentage was 60 percent. When asked whether the war
would lead to less terrorism, more than three-quarters
of the respondents disagreed. The Saudis were in
greatest disagreement, with 96 percent saying that the
war would lead to more terrorism. The Egyptians had the
most positive position on this topic, but even then 75
percent felt it would lead to more terrorism. When asked
if the war would improve the chances for democracy in
the region, respondents disagreed strongly, with 95
percent of Saudis leading the way but even in Jordan, 58
percent disagreed. The survey uncovered significant
negative attitudes toward US foreign policy. Only 4
percent of the people in Saudi Arabia had a favorable
opinion of US foreign policy, followed by 6 percent in
Morocco and Jordan, 13 percent in Egypt and 32 percent
in Lebanon.
Bush has expressed a hope that this
war would lead to a resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian problem. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former
foreign minister of Israel, finds much that is troubling
in this assertion. "The president's bellicose rhetoric
and his intention to invade an Arab country and
dismantle its regime by force, however despicable that
regime may be, while pretending to ignore the
Palestinian tragedy provides a platform for unrest
throughout the region."
Once hostilities
commence, it is likely that Iraqi civilian casualties
will occur on a large scale. According to published
accounts, the US will fire more than 3,000 cruise
missiles on Iraq within the first 48 hours, an amount
that exceeds the entire number fired in the Gulf War.
More casualties will occur as US forces fight their way
into Baghdad, fueling resentment on the Arab street.
While the US has sought to portray this campaign
as a war of liberation, so have others in the past. When
British forces marched into Baghdad 86 years ago, their
commanding general assured the people of Iraq, "Our
armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."
Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude proclaimed, "O
people of Baghdad, remember that for 26 generations you
have suffered under strange tyrants who have endeavored
to set one Arab house against another in order that they
might profit by your dissensions." Three years later,
Iraqis were in open revolt against British rule. This
led an exasperated Winston Churchill - the architect of
Britain's Iraq policy - to say that the crown was
spending millions for the privilege of sitting atop a
volcano. Similarly, the new Gulf War will be seen as a
colonial war of the 19th-century genre. Historians may
well call it "a war to end all peace", an appellation
they have used to capture the strategic myopia of World
War I.
The incoming prime minister of Malaysia,
Abdullah Badawi, worries that "a war against Iraq would
be seen in the Islamic world as unfair, and if it causes
Muslims to join the extremists, then moderate Muslim
governments would be threatened everywhere". Georgetown
University's John Esposito, an expert on Islam, has
voiced his concerns about the wisdom of pursuing
knee-jerk military action against Muslim states.
Esposito says an example was the US strikes against
Sudan and Afghanistan in the wake of the 1998 bombings
of US embassies in Africa. The target in Sudan, a
factory that the Sudanese government contended was
manufacturing only pharmaceuticals, is widely thought to
have been a mistake, though the US government has only
indirectly acknowledged that was the case. "The risk is
that in the rush to respond and retaliate, which is
understandable, we may end up hitting the wrong targets
and the wrong people," Esposito said. "It's the opposite
response that we need."
There is a strong chance
that the second Gulf War will succeed in accomplishing
the very opposite of what Bush has sought to achieve.
The US president has made a virtue of regime change, and
has compared the reconstruction of Germany and Japan
after World War II to what he is about to undertake in
Iraq. However, 21 contemporary historians from Europe
and North America have termed this concept "a
pick-and-mix history of regime change". In a letter to
the Financial Times, they say that Iraq cannot be
compared to either postwar Germany or Japan since it
differs from them in its endowment of natural resources,
borders, institutions, religion, political culture and
ethnicity. In other words, it is likely that post-Saddam
Iraq will be even more chaotic and dangerous than Iraq
under Saddam.
The United States is making rapid
strides against al-Qaeda. As a result of Pakistani
cooperation, it has apprehended or killed many of its
key leaders and appears to be rapidly closing in on the
top two. With the capture of the third man, Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, the organization may have lost its
operational capability to mount "spectacular" acts of
terrorism. However, all of this will come to naught once
the US invades Iraq.
It is likely that this war
will add new credibility to grievances about loss of
Arab sovereignty. It will complicate the resolution of
the Palestinian problem, leading to a rise in
anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world. In a
fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences, it
may spawn a second generation of terrorists even more
determined than al-Qaeda to evict US forces from the
Middle East, thus defeating the very purposes for which
it is about to be fought.
Speaking at Tufts
University, former US president George Bush Sr said that
any military action against Iraq should be backed by
international unity. He said the case against Iraq this
time was weaker than in 1991, and urged his son to build
bridges with France and Germany, rather than to bear
grudges. Instead of listening to the neo-conservatives
in the administration, Bush Jr should have taken a few
moments to reflect on his father's advice. Not only
would this have been a patriotic thing to do, it would
also have been very Christian. And it may have led to a
safer America.
Ahmad Faruqui, PhD, an
economist and defense analyst based in San Francisco,
writes frequently on the Middle East and South Asia. He
is the author of Rethinking the National Security of
Pakistan.
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