HOW TO
LOSE THE WAR ON TERROR PART 5: The politics
of indignation By Mark Perry
and Alastair Crooke
(For earlier articles
in the series, please click here.)
The
foundational belief of the "war on terrorism" is
that militant Islam is hollow. We are not fighting
a credible movement with a set of core beliefs,
but "evildoers" - people who have nothing to say,
who are without values, who hate our freedoms and
who want to return their societies to the 7th
century. Militant Islam is much like worldwide
communism, an empty shell that, if confronted with
overwhelming power, will crumple like burned
paper. Not coincidentally, neo-conservatives aver,
the evildoers of militant Islam, a new class of
post-Soviet religious Bolsheviks, have taken root
in a region that suffers from the same maladies
that fueled the "evil empire": state-engineered
poverty, endemic
corruption, political
oppression, access to weapons of mass destruction,
and a failed ideology.
For America's
neo-conservatives, the past victory over the
Stalinist state and its Warsaw Pact allies points
the way to the future. All that needs be done to
triumph over this evil is to replicate the late US
president Ronald Reagan's strategy of
confrontation with the USSR: increase defense
spending, deploy Western armies to troubled
regions, undermine collaborationist societies,
spread democracy, and counter the evildoers'
propaganda with political toughness. Those who
counsel caution (Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft,
George H W Bush - those who called a halt to the
first Gulf War after 100 hours and so saved Saddam
Hussein) do not understand that "managing" Middle
Eastern extremists, particularly in an era of
benevolent US military hegemony, is to signal a
surrender against the forces of evil. Ronald
Reagan had it right: a little nudge and Islam's
Nicolae Ceausescus will be hunted in the streets.
This "implosion of tyrannies" belief is
now a central tenet of neo-conservative doctrine.
Yet as a result of the Iraq debacle and the
seeming incoherence at the center of US and
European policies, even some of neo-conservatism's
core believers are beginning to have doubts. In a
series of recent articles and a best-selling book,
Francis Fukuyama - one of neo-conservatism's
charter members and a scholar most responsible for
establishing its post-Reagan bona fides
(particularly in The End of History and the
Last Man) - exiled himself from the movement
and critiqued its mistakes. Writing in the British
newspaper The Guardian, Fukuyama accused the
neo-conservatives of "overreaching" in Iraq "to
such an extent that they risk undermining their
goals".
Saying that "neo-conservatism is
something I can no longer support", Fukuyama
directly attributes its failing to its
interpretation of the end of the Cold War. "The
way it ended shaped the thinking of supporters of
the Iraq war in two ways," Fukuyama wrote. "First,
it seems to have created an expectation that all
totalitarian regimes were hollow and would crumble
with a small push from outside. This helps explain
the Bush administration's failure to plan
adequately for the insurgency that emerged. The
war's supporters seemed to think that democracy
was a default condition to which societies
reverted once coercive regime change occurred,
rather than a long-term process of
institution-building and reform."
Fukuyama
expands his claim by adding that neo-conservatives
have not only misread the history of the end of
the Cold War, they have failed to understand the
true nature of democratic political institutions
and how they are established. In fact, the
neo-conservatives (and Fukuyama) also misread the
Cold War's beginnings.
The West's response
to the Soviet threat was shaped by the military
lessons of World War II. The two American military
giants of that conflict, Generals George C
Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, emerged from the
war convinced that the United States and its
allies needed to follow a policy in which
communism was contained, but never directly
confronted.
Their view was adopted not
simply because they believed it provided the best
chance for ultimate victory, but because (contrary
to the "greatest generation" historical
narrators), US soldiers had not acquitted
themselves particularly well in the fight against
the Axis. At the height of the conflict (at the
time of Germany's counteroffensive in late 1944),
the rate of desertion in US units reached an
astounding 45.2 per thousand - the highest rate of
any Allied army - and the beginnings of domestic
impatience with the length of the war was becoming
obvious. As a result of this, Marshall and
Eisenhower shaped and implemented a foreign policy
that contradicted General George Patton's
strutting dictum that "Americans love a good
fight". In fact, they don't, and Marshall and
Eisenhower knew it.
The resulting Cold War
strategy followed Marshall's and Eisenhower's
unofficial dicta: fight only when you have to,
never fight alone, and never fight for long. These
beliefs were reinforced by British military
thinkers, including Field Marshal Bernard Law
Montgomery and Winston Churchill, whose experience
at "scraping the bottom of the barrel" for combat
soldiers in the Second War stripped Great Britain
of yet another generation of young men. So it was
that over the course of a generation, the United
States and its allies played a "zero-sum game",
fighting a series of "partition wars" (in Korea
and Vietnam) and "proxy conflicts" (in
Afghanistan) that bled the Soviets of their moral
authority, economic growth and political will.
Winston Churchill predicted this. Meeting
Eisenhower in Lisbon in 1947 for the founding
conference of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), Churchill summarized his
views of how communism might be defeated: "We
wait," he said. Eisenhower responded with a
question: "For how long?" Churchill did not
hesitate - for about 50 years, he said. He was
wrong: in 1999, the Soviet Union and communism had
been dead for 10 years.
While there is
little doubt that Ronald Reagan's confrontational
style and defense buildup accelerated the Western
vision, it is also clear that he did not singly or
solely cause the fall of the Soviet Union.
The strategy that was followed by the West
was cumulative, coherent and implemented through
the dependence on the creation of a painstaking
alliance of democracies who believed in the
efficacy of international law and an appeal to
international opinion. To claim otherwise is not
only to misread history, but to misread the
willingness of the American and European peoples
to engage in ill-defined, unilateralist and
seemingly endless foreign conflicts. This
misreading is the direct result of a fusion of the
belief that militant Islam replicates the Reagan
era with a (Bernard) Lewisian perception that
Islam is a form of medieval tyranny. This is
intellectual casuistry. It has resulted in the
needless deaths of thousands of young soldiers and
innocent civilians in a war that is so morally
bankrupt that it may lead to our, not their,
implosion.
Defining
terrorism Paradoxically, the Arab world's
takfiris (those militantly intolerant of
"infidels") mirror the West's conclusions about
the collapse of the Soviet Union, reading history
through the optic of the Russian withdrawal from
Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar,
Ayman Zawahiri and their revolutionary supporters
believe that international communism's collapse is
directly attributable to the mujahideen's
political and military pressure. It hardly matters
whether this reading is correct (though, as we
have noted, it seems unlikely that the Soviet
collapse is single-sourced). The reason for the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Soviet
Union's subsequent collapse is clear: a major
Western power imploded as the result of a defeat
at the hands of militant Islam. For al-Qaeda, the
differences between the USSR and its American and
European antagonists are marginal - Marxism is a
uniquely Western world view, rooted in the views
of a German philosopher writing in a London
library. The lessons derived from the Soviet
collapse are, therefore, applicable to the United
States.
Speaking three years before
September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden laid out
al-Qaeda's strategy, saying that just as the
Soviets were defeated as a result of their failed
war in Afghanistan, so now the United States would
be defeated in the same way. But bin Laden implied
that his would not be a military victory; rather,
he said that the United States would turn in on
itself from within, just as the Soviets had: "What
is true is that God granted the chance of jihad in
Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia, and we are
assured that we can wage jihad against the enemies
of Islam, in particular against the greater
external enemy - the Crusader-Jewish alliance."
Bin Laden expanded on this message in the
wake of September 11 in several televised
videotapes, each of them reflecting a relatively
sophisticated understanding of the weaknesses of
Western societies. "We have no difficulty in
dealing with [US President George W] Bush and his
administration because they resemble the regimes
in our countries, half of which are ruled by the
military and the other half by the sons of kings,"
bin Laden told one interviewer. "They have a lot
of pride, arrogance and thievery. [Bush] adopted
despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab
rulers - calling it the Patriot Act under the
guise of combating terrorism."
Author and
scholar Faisal Devji, an assistant professor of
history at New York's New School University, has
provided Western readers with a small but powerful
essay that focuses on militant Islam's message.
Devji's "Landscapes of the Jihad" may well be the
most thoroughgoing and insightful treatment of
al-Qaeda in the West - shorn of the language of
America's rising class of terrorologists, Devji
refuses to slum with the pundits or accept that
what Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants say is
"rigmarole".
Reflecting on bin Laden's
post-September 11 messages, he provides this
exegesis of bin Laden's words: "The hollowness of
the World Trade Center, whose imposing towers
crumbled so easily in the face of al-Qaeda's
attack, represented the void at the heart of
Western civilization itself, not least because the
attacks of September 11 were followed by a
significant if partial breakdown of America's
much-vaunted culture of democratic rights and
civil liberties, including even a suspension of
certain provisions of the Geneva Convention."
Devji then adds: "This fact was not lost
upon any participant in the jihad, to whom it
demonstrated that the West's moral superiority was
not only hypocritical, because its boasted freedom
was based upon the un-freedom of others, but
hollow as well, because it could not preserve this
freedom even for its own citizens."
Osama
bin Laden's thinking mirrors the views of
America's takfiris - if you simply poke at
the West's structure it will crumble like burned
paper. In fact, according to bin Laden, the
attacks of September 11 were of little account in
terms of actual damage, particularly when compared
with the damage the US would inflict on itself in
its reaction: the United States and its allies
would turn in on themselves; they would seal their
borders, spy on their own people, expand domestic
police powers, detain people without a warrant,
hold people without evidence, torture suspects,
violate international norms and subvert foreign
governments - becoming, in his words, "a suicide
state".
So too, it would seem odd that
Western governments would deny liberties to their
own citizens but grant them to others; more likely
we (we in the West, that is) would, and have,
demanded that "our" (and the sense of property
here is not accidental - for "our" allies are
"our" friends in more than a passing sense) allied
Kemalists suppress all resistance to the Western
anti-terrorism program, accept Western
counter-terrorism funding, agree to US military
training, open their societies to "our" (Western)
monitoring and, finally, suppress Islamic parties
participating in free, fair and open elections -
because while Islamists might adopt different
tactics, there are "no major differences in
goals".
This, in fact, is the doctrine of
Islamic revolutionaries: that in refusing to
differentiate between al-Qaeda and more moderate
groups, in refusing to empower them in their own
societies, and in denying the peoples of the
region the tools of democracy and self-government
that the West extols, the United States and its
allies would actually help to spread the jihad,
just as the Soviet Union had done by its actions
in Afghanistan. Our claim in our first article in
this series (Talking with the
'terrorists', March 31) - that
America's takfiris actually mirror the
beliefs of Islam's revolutionaries - now seems
particularly pertinent, and eerily Straussian.
Islam's revolutionaries see the materialism and
self-centeredness of secular liberal society as a
destructive mechanism at the heart of Western
society.
They view the purposelessness of
lives based on a consumerism leading to
corruption, fragmentation and, inevitably,
nihilism. They see Western commercial interests as
dehumanizing and exploitative and its financial
structure skewed toward large corporations at the
expense of the individual and community
enterprise. Finally, they believe that the United
States and its allies are incapable of
differentiating between moderate "revivalist"
Islam and militant "revolutionary" Islam - are
incapable of differentiating between the Muslim
Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jamaat e-Islami
(all of whom endorse democratic practices, have
fielded candidates in elections and, in the case
of Hamas, have actually taken their place in
government) and, say, al-Qaeda in Iraq. These
revolutionaries not only believe that Western
leaders will fail to differentiate the
"revolutionaries" from the "revivalists", they are
counting on it.
The invasion of Iraq has
provided Osama bin Laden with the circumstances in
which to build a genuine Salafist revolutionary
movement by capitalizing on the West's missteps
and miscalculations. His aim is to create a
revolutionary climate that will radicalize the
Islamic world and lead to the fall of the Arab
"colonial" regimes. The Salafist methodology is
neither medieval nor regressive, but global,
modern and without borders. Its methods are
sophisticated, psychological, nuanced and
carefully planned. These are not barbarians, they
do not babble; while the United States has focused
on September 11, Osama bin Laden's jihadist
movement has diligently worked to broaden its
appeal by purposely talking to its co-religionists
with words that reflect the language of the
oppressed.
It has responded to our
military strategy by speaking not of victory, but
of respect and dignity and self-determination.
"Violence, though definitive of the jihad today,
is probably the least important of these
responses, and likely the most short-lived
compared to the other transformations that
al-Qaeda has wrought," Faisal Devji writes.
"Indeed such violence might well represent the
final agony of an old-fashioned politics centered
on a specific geography and based on a history of
common needs, interest or ideas. Rather than
marking the emergence of a new kind of Muslim
politics, in other words, al-Qaeda's jihad may
signal the end of such politics."
It is
this, then, that causes our "angst" - our feeling
that somehow we have gotten the "war on terrorism"
wrong; that we are not winning this conflict and
that, in continuing our current policies, we
cannot win it. We have a growing sense that the
enemy we are fighting cannot be contained, limited
or quarantined, that its foot soldiers are not
easily identified, that its ideology is
ever-changing, that its methods have less to do
with violence than with the use of language. That
what we face is not simply an insurgency in Iraq,
or car bombs in Beirut, or bombings on our
subways, but a coalescing transnational intifada
that does not so much oppose our beliefs as demand
that we live up to them - and that somehow gains
strength with every aircraft carrier that we
deploy.
Our colleague Jeff Aronson - who
joined us in Beirut for our exchanges with the
leaders of political Islam, puts this another way:
"We have to come to terms with a disturbing and
blunt truth and finally face it - that after
September 11 a segment of [the] planet celebrated.
We cannot simply pass it off, we cannot ignore it.
We have to face it."
After September 11,
the West is evincing a growing unease that we can
now begin to characterize, that identifies the
"long-known vulnerability of our complex
civilization" that makes us question our most
"deep-seated conceptual presuppositions". That
"angst" - simply stated - grows from our having
not listened to or understood the enemy we are
fighting. Instead, we have drowned out the diverse
voices of Islam with our own univocal ascriptions,
while our enemy continues to evade our attempts to
frame his existence. The "angst" comes from the
slow realization that our policies have begun to
reflect a hypocrisy in spreading our most
cherished ideal. We say we support democracy, but
our most recent initiatives seem purposely
designed to undermine it.
A leading
foreign-policy figure in the United States, though
not a US official, recently accompanied us to
Beirut for discussions with a Hamas official. His
purpose was to explore Hamas' views toward Israel
and the conditions under which Hamas might be
willing to accede to Israel's recognition. The
discussion was detailed and fruitful, as it
identified Hamas' views that recognition should
include a reciprocal exchange in which Israel
recognized the legitimacy of Palestinian
aspirations and rights and that recognition be
discussed at the conclusion of a deeper
comprehensive settlement.
The
foreign-policy figure came away from our meetings
impressed by Hamas' grasp of the current political
environment and its dedication to good governance.
Disappointment followed the meeting, however, when
the United States adopted a "soft coup" policy
aimed at "punishing the Palestinian people for
making the wrong electoral decision". Our
colleague's response to this policy unveiled the
"vulnerability" at the heart of "presuppositions"
and the "angst" that we now feel: "Perhaps I am
mistaken in this," he reflected wryly, "but I was
under the impression that punishing the innocent
for political gain is the definition of
terrorism."
That the West does not live up
to its beliefs - and that contradictions plague
the Western program for the Islamic world - is the
subject of many of bin Laden's video commentaries.
"The killing of innocent civilians, as Americans
and some intellectuals claim, is really very
strange talk," he said in an October 2001
interview. "Who said that our children and
civilians are not innocent and that shedding their
blood is justified? That it is lesser in degree?
"When we kill their innocents, the entire
world from east to west screams at us, and America
rallies its allies, agents, and the sons of
agents. Who said that our blood is not blood, but
theirs is? Who made this pronouncement? Who has
been getting killed in our countries for decades?
More than 1 million children died in Iraq and
others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone
screaming or condemning, or even someone's words
of consolation of condolence?"
For bin
Laden, says Devji, killing "has become the
instrument of achieving equality with the enemy",
and he goes on to quote bin Laden's October 2001
analysis of the September 11 attacks: "Just as
they're killing us, we have to kill them so that
there will be a balance of terror."
For
bin Laden, the guilt of Western leaders for
implementing policies that killed innocent Muslims
is shared by all. The American people put Bush in
office, returned Prime Minister Tony Blair to 10
Downing Street, and hence institutionalized the
war with Islam. We - we in the West - are all
guilty, bin Laden claims. "Your security is in
your own hands," he says, "and each state which
does not harm our security will remain safe."
The war of the
takfiris As we have criticized
"America's takfiris" for promoting false
political categories that rob language of its
meaning and cultures of their diversity, so now we
are confirmed that Islam's revolutionaries stand
in the same dock as their antagonists. As we
believe that the neo-conservatives have done
violence to the central pillar of "our" Western
"values" - tolerance - so too it seems eminently
clear that in holding all guilty, bin Laden and
his takfiri allies believe that their
actions are not subject to Islamic legal
restraints, especially those prohibiting the
killing of non-combatants.
His explanation
is that Islam is fighting an existential battle
against an intransigent enemy and that
differentiating between innocent and guilty is a
useless enterprise, since "they're all the same"
(that is, the West's culture is "ethnocentric").
He would undoubtedly argue that any exercise that
fails to recognize the fact of Western oppression
is guilty of moral relativism. His failure is
ours: a refusal to differentiate, a desire to hold
all responsible, to sharpen our intellectual
incisors on a foundation of collective guilt, not
only to divide the world into "us" and "them", but
then having dipped into this bit of vacuous
legerdemain to suppose that when we talk about
building a just world we're lying - but he's
telling the truth.
Our response has been
consistent:
We understand that one does
not become a revolutionary through science, as
Marxists believe, but out of indignation. We
understand that there are grievances and that it
is possible they are just. But all humans are
caught by involuntary responsibility and guilt by
circumstance, and not just those who have suffered
through colonialism or exploitation. Oedipus did
not want to marry his mother and murder his
father, but he did it - and it's a crime. Nor is
it necessary for us to dissociate ourselves from
our own history simply because it is sometimes
shameful.
That we engaged in an
inquisition does not make our condemnation of any
future inquisition moot; our support for Saddam
Hussein does not justify his gassing of the people
of Halabja, September 11 does not justify Haditha.
We are not naive. We know, in philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's formulation, that "there is no
line between good people and the rest and that, in
war, the most honorable causes prove themselves by
means that are not honorable". Still, "that the
bully does not know what he is doing does not
excuse the bully". We do not love peace out of
weakness, but because of the strength of our
belief that peace is the only course that will
assure us a future.
We have talked with
those political Islamists whom we define as
"revivalists" because they derive their beliefs
from a set of principles that human actions must
be moral and just. They believe that there is an
indisputable system of values, articulated in the
foundations of their religion, that provide a
guide for all actions: not simply that policies
must be grounded in principles, but that the ends
can never justify the means. These "revivalists"
are committed to the proposition that as God has
given humans the right to choose their beliefs, so
too God has given individuals the right to choose
their leaders.
The takfiris on both
sides reject these principles, holding that some
lives are inherently more valued than others, that
"there must be a balance of terror", that "pity is
treason", that the innocent may be made to pay for
the crimes of the guilty, that "power is virtue",
that all compromise is perfidy, that the ends
justify the means.
The "revivalists"
believe that there is justice in the universe,
that it must be pursued and that it can be
implemented, no matter how imperfectly. Not all
people pay for their crimes and some are even
rewarded. But our celebration of justice is not
dependent on its perfection. The people who fell
to their deaths through the air of lower Manhattan
did not bear the guilt of a generation of leaders,
any more than all Sunnis are responsible for the
tragedy of Karbala, or all Jews for Israel's
occupation, or all Christians for Auschwitz, or
all Shi'ites for Iraq's death squads. People are
responsible for their actions.
Saying
what we mean In preparation for this
article, we returned to the Middle East region for
the specific purpose of discussing the "war of
values" between Islam and the West and the
deepening despair that seems to grip our
societies. We reviewed with our interlocutors our
briefings in Washington, London and Brussels and
bluntly reviewed the increasingly remote
possibility that the West would recognize and
differentiate among the several forms of Islamism.
Our Hamas interlocutors found our review
of our meetings in Washington particularly
compelling, but were angered by the West's
rejection of what they viewed as Hamas' good-faith
commitment to provide good governance for their
people. "How are we to view what you are doing to
our people?" a Hamas leader asked. "And we are
forced to conclude - when we say we're for
democracy you say we're lying, but when you say
you're for democracy we know you don't mean it."
Another Islamist leader listened closely
to our report, but then issued an emotional
response dripping with sarcasm: "So that's why you
killed all those people in Fallujah," he said.
"It's because they didn't agree with your values."
But by far our most interesting exchange
came in Amman, with a respected and dignified
Iraqi leader who spent years in the West but has
seen his country "ripped apart by your policies,
and infiltrated by the jihadists you created". He
listened politely to our presentation and thought
for a moment. "For years and years we have talked
and pleaded with you," he said. "We told you we
did not want kings and princes over us, but you
did not listen. We told you we wanted a future for
the Palestinian people, but you did not listen. We
said we wanted a fair price for our resources, but
you did not listen. And we said that we wanted you
out of our lives and our societies, but still you
did not listen.
"And then the great
tragedy of September 11 happened and we were sad,
but in our hearts we all asked you the only
question that matters: 'Are you listening now?'"
And here he paused again, dissatisfied
with his metaphor and suddenly discomfited by the
meaning behind his words. It was not what he had
meant to say and so he shifted uncomfortably,
feeling the need to amend what he had said. And so
he spoke of his religion, emphasizing the
importance of the Koran in the life of a Muslim.
"Its central message is so important that it is
almost never stated in our societies," he told us,
"and it is simply this: God 'speaks' in the Koran
and human beings learn by listening."
Alastair Crooke and Mark
Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum,
a London-based group dedicated to providing an
opening to political Islam. Crooke is the former
Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff
member of the Mitchell Commission investigating
the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant and the
author of six books on US history.
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