July 2005


Entangled in terror's net
Under Western pressure, Pakistan has cast the net far and wide to round up suspected jihadis and other suspects in the "war on terror". The system is not perfect, though, and instead of eliminating the problem of extremism, it is actually making it worse. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Jul 29, '05)

THE ROVING EYE
The Algerian connection
It is one thing to mouth opposition to the US-led occupation of Iraq, it is another to allow the US military to use your country as a playground in the "war on terror". Two Algerian diplomats have paid with their lives at the hands of an al-Qaeda-linked group for their government adopting such a position. - Pepe Escobar (Jul 28, '05)

Why the Saudi envoy really went home
It's all relative when it comes to the Saudi royal pecking order. The resignation of the Saudi ambassador to Washington indicates ailing King Fahd is near his end, and now the family feud that is the country's bureaucracy is taking up positions. Watching with interest are the followers of Osama bin Laden. - John R Bradley (Jul 28, '05)

Getting bombed on the cocktail circuit
The life of a diplomat is no longer a piece of cake. Terrorism has turned what was once "an extension of aristocratic life" into a potentially dangerous career choice, one in which traditional mission work is shelved in favor of counter-terror and security strategies. Diplomats no longer live in castles, but in fortresses. - Jeffrey Robertson (Jul 28, '05)

Rumsfeld makes it to first base
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has secured the US's continued use of a key military base in Kyrgyzstan, heading off a challenge from a Central Asian grouping that includes Russia and China. The game is far from over, though. - Sudha Ramachandran (Jul 27, '05)

Open season for jihadis
Jihadis everywhere, but nowhere to be found, at least in Pakistan. The government has managed not to find major militant training camps which journalists have been able to discover, while in mountainous terrain between Afghanistan and Pakistan, an insurgency flourishes. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Jul 26, '05)

Iraq exit on the agenda
Calls are mounting within the US for a withdrawal timetable amid fears that civil war may be unavoidable in Iraq and that the US presence could be fueling insurgency and more widespread Islamic extremism. - Jim Lobe (Jul 26, '05)

SPENGLER
Dien Bien Phooey
"Iraqification" is turning out to be a dog's breakfast. Washington is embarrassed, and has no choice but to adapt by removing American troops from the line of fire. The nation-building program can now hit the wall with an arbitrarily high degree of splatter, without perceptible consequences - a far cry from Vietnam War days when potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union had to be considered. (Jul 25, '05)

SPEAKING FREELY
Just who's emboldening terrorism?
The US believes that an early withdrawal from Iraq would embolden terrorists. But it is American foreign policy as a whole, especially the carnage in Iraq, that has emboldened terrorists. - Ramzy Baroud (Jul 25, '05)

Pakistan: United militants, divided leaders
More than ever, the heat's on Pakistan from the US and Britain to stamp on militants. President General Pervez Musharraf is doing his best to comply, but in the process he's putting himself on a collision course with militant organizations and sections of his government. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Jul 23, '05)

JIHAD WITHOUT BORDERS (Jul 21, '05) Exporting the resistance The resistances in Iraq and Afghanistan have united to take their fight against foreign occupation forces to the home countries of the occupiers. The London bombings were the first salvo in this wider struggle. Meanwhile, a steady supply of recruits from around the world is arriving at Pakistani and Iraqi training camps. - Syed Saleem Shahzad THE ROVING EYE Fighting the uncivil fight European Union officials, not to mention Europe-wide public opinion, are starting to confront a very serious question: how to fight jihad inside the EU without infringing on civil liberties, thereby playing into the jihadis' hands. - Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Self-service jihad
More and more so-called "white Moors" - white Muslims carrying European Union passports - are taking jihad training in Chechnya, while "individual jihadis", without contact with al-Qaeda, are learning the trade of terror on their own before joining or starting sleeper cells in Europe. - Pepe Escobar (Jul 19, '05)

'Plamegate' is no summer squall
The storm around Karl Rove has implications far beyond the fate of President George W Bush's key political advisor, Karl Rove. The case may also prove crucial in confirming that the Bush administration was "fixing the facts" about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the rails to war. - Jim Lobe (Jul 19, '05)

SPEAKING FREELY
Tempting the Iraqi oil curse
Beyond crushing the resistance, the Iraqi government has also to break the "oil curse". Like so much in Iraq, management of the country's oil wealth to date gives cause for both hope and alarm - oil may yet lead to riches, or ruin. - Stanley A Weiss (Jul 19, '05)

Musharraf and his Taliban 'pals' Although Pakistan has formally abandoned the Taliban, the ground realities tell a different story. With the Taliban-led resistance in Afghanistan escalating, the US must be seriously concerned over which side of the fence Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf is sitting. - Kaushik Kapisthalam (Jul 18, '05) Charlie's war, act two Party-loving Texas congressman Charles Wilson helped the CIA funnel billions of dollars to the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, leading to the withdrawal of the Soviets. "We did it," Wilson said, celebrating the withdrawal. Little did he know what "we" really did. (Jul 18, '05)

Attack! Attack! Attack!
"World War IV" has already broken out if one believes far-right and neo-conservative personalities in the US who, jolted by the furor over President George W Bush's key advisor, Karl Rove, are dispensing a stream of geostrategic advice that takes aim at usual suspects Iran, Syria and China, and even faint-hearted allies like Japan. - Jim Lobe (Jul 18, '05)

Iraq goes courting in Iran
Iran and Iraq are moving apace to mend ties shattered by years of war and animosity, even as Tehran emerges as an important player in helping stabilize the situation in war-torn Iraq. - Safa Haeri (Jul 18, '05)

How London brought terror on itself
The radicalization of Britain's Muslim youth of Pakistani origin began in the mid-90s with the full knowledge and complicity of British and US intelligence agencies. At the behest of a US administration keen to aid the Bosnian mujahideen in their war against the Serbs, about 200 UK Pakistanis went to Pakistan for training by a jihadi organization, and then to Bosnia. With the London bombings of July 7, it appears that the chickens have come home to roost. -B Raman (Jul 15, '05)

SPEAKING FREELY
The dehumanizing factor
The master illusionists are at work. They have us believing that our very civilization is under attack.  Nonsense: terror is terror, regardless of the means chosen to deliver it, and where it is perpetrated, be it London or Chechal village in Afghanistan. - Mohammed Hussain (Jul 15, '05)

BOOK REVIEW
God's madmen
Suicide Bombers. Allah's New Martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar
Why would any normal person want to blow himself and others up? Iranian intellectual Farhad Khosrokhavar's book argues that Muslim human bombs, far removed from traditional atavism, are in fact products of modernity and Westernization. - Sreeram Chaulia (Jul 15, '05)

THE ROVING EYE
War comes to the heart of Europe
A new, deadly generation of internationalist jihadis is making Europe its battleground. It's not only a war against the Western occupiers of Muslim lands; it's a war for the future of global Islam as the al-Qaeda "nebula" strives to impose Wahhabi values on the faith. - Pepe Escobar (Jul 14, '05)

WEB WARS (Jul 14, '05) How the Pentagon targets teens As one US general puts it, "We're reaching the bottom of the barrel." In the course of fighting two small, ugly, and especially in the case of Iraq, unpopular wars, the US military is battling to find recruits. To solve the problem, the Pentagon is increasingly turning to the Internet, which is becoming packed with slick, non-military looking websites lying in wait to lure teenage websurfers into the ranks, with promises of a wonderful future. - Nick Turse Downloadable jihad With training in terrorism accessible at the click of a mouse, an increasing number of jihadis with martyrdom on their minds are logging on to the Internet. Experts say that there has been a sharp surge in dissemination of online jihadi training. - Sudha Ramachandran

Foul play in the Great Game Exactly eight years ago, the scholar-diplomat Strobe Talbott spelt out the Clinton administration's goals in Central Asia as the US practiced "the geopolitics of oil", and US prestige and influence were at a peak when the Bush administration brought its "war on terror" to the region. In less than four years, Washington has squandered that enormous goodwill with appalling ease. - M K Bhadrakumar Cutting out the US With attention focused on the G8 summit and London bombs, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was quietly going about cementing itself as a vehicle for Beijing's and Moscow's geopolitical aims, at the expense of the US. (Jul 12, '05)

Afghanistan, Iraq-style
The Taliban and their allies have markedly increased attacks in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. (Jul 12, '05)

COMMENTARY
Boy president in a failed world
There's something dream-like, fantastic, absurd about all this, especially set against the background of the murder of random people in one of the globe's great cities. As reality grows ever darker, President George W Bush never departs from his scripted version of a fictional world that is nowhere to be seen. - Tom Engelhardt (Jul 11, '05)

THE ROVING EYE
Blowback
For the new generation of jihadis, the Anglo-American coalition - as well as civilians - must live in fear, just as people live in fear in Iraq and Palestine. Only the US leaving Iraq and an internationally-accepted agreement between Israelis and Palestinians will end the cycle. - Pepe Escobar (Jul 11, '05)

SPEAKING FREELY
So you want to stop the suicide bombers? 
Overwhelmingly, suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel countries to withdraw military forces from the territories that the terrorists view as their homelands. Suicide terrorism emanating from Afghanistan and Iraq will stop as soon as the occupiers leave. - Toni Momiroski (Jul 11, '05)

Fighting the wrong war
The fact that al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates has struck in the heart of another Western capital - and Washington's closest ally - could add to the growing sense in the US that the Iraq war was and remains a diversion from the fight against al-Qaeda. President George W Bush can expect more pressure over Iraq. -Jim Lobe (Jul 8, '05)

A twist in the 'war on terror'
The word "civilization" holds the key to unraveling the complicated web of possible reaction to the London bombings by the West, with the British and American leaders vowing to protect the values for which they stand. Inevitably, this will lead to a hardening of positions on both sides in the "war on terror". - Aruni Mukherjee (Jul 8, '05)

Londoners take it in their stride
Millions of London commuters trudged for hours to get home on Thursday after the transportation system shut down. J Sean Curtin was among them. But, he reports, by early Friday the city was, eerily, almost back to normal. (Jul 8, '05)

The smash of civilizations
At a time when people were warning of a "clash of civilizations", US occupation forces in Iraq were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies, an invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, be looted and smashed. - Chalmers Johnson (Jul 8, '05)

BOOK REVIEW
The specter of two 'isms'
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Anatol Lieven, and The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, by Andrew Bacevich
These books intelligently outline the danger of two "isms" gaining ground in the US. The first "ism" sees US polity turning its back on civic patriotism and political egalitarianism in favor of an "American antithesis", a radical and vengeful nationalism. The second is "creeping militarism", for which the neo-conservatives bear heavy responsibility. - Jim Lobe (Jul 8, '05)

LONDON UNDER ATTACK
Authorities knew it was coming
Since August last year there have been indications that pro-al-Qaeda terrorist elements were planning a major terrorist strike in London. The fact that despite the British authorities being aware of the presence of suspected al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the UK, the perpetrators of Thursday's bombings were able to carry them out, speaks volumes about their motivation and ability to plan and execute strikes in total secrecy. -B Raman (Jul 7, '05)

 Stiff upper lip - Ronan Thomas (Jul 7, '05)

Zarqawi: Everywhere and nowhere
His reputed feats of terrorism have been raised to epic, even mythic, proportions by the Bush administration and US media. No car bomb, no beheading occurs in Iraq that isn't attributed to this omnipresent butcher, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Dahr Jamail, bearing in mind other Iraqi myths like weapons of mass destruction, goes looking for him. (Jul 6, '05)

A HOUSE DIVIDED (Jul 6, '05) Where terror and the bomb could meet Saudi Arabia is under pressure to open its nuclear facilities for inspection: the UN's watchdog suspects that its nuclear program has reached a level, with Pakistani cooperation, where it should attract international attention. The concerns don't end there, given the links that many in Saudi Arabia have to Osama bin Laden. - Amir Mir Jihad knocks on the door Saudi Arabia, apart from having Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as an enemy, is in crisis, its elite bitterly divided. Its initial response is to slowly close ranks and reassert authoritarian rule. That won't deter jihadis, and a US invasion force could enter the picture if oil supplies are threatened. - Rabbi Moshe Reiss

Perils of colonial justice in Iraq
Iraqis learned under Saddam's 30-year rule all about absolute power and control, and now they're getting a second lesson from Washington. Impunity or token punishment is the norm for US servicemen accused of the "unlawful killing" of Iraqi civilians: the soldiers are thus perceived by Iraqis as being above the law, and the US as being the final arbiter of Iraqi sovereignty. This colonial relationship will leave a long-term legacy. - Ashraf Fahim (Jul 5, '05)

COMMENTARY                         by Spengler Do Muslims worship idols? Pope Benedict XVI does not say that Muslims worship idols, but he says quite plainly that the "martyr ideology" of Islamist terrorists amounts to an odious form of idol worship, in which "morality and law become instruments of partisan policy". He adds that the West is not blameless in this respect. (Jul 5, '05)

The American hand in Iran
Backed with millions of dollars, US intelligence and its non-governmental organization regime-change industry is hard at work on Iran, in an  effort personified by Jerome Corsi and his Iran Freedom Foundation. Tehran is not taking the interference lightly. - Trish Schuh (Jul 5, '05)

BOOK REVIEW
Changing perceptions
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit.
The general climate of society has changed since September 11, and to blame everything on the West has become less fashionable. In that regard this book is important, as it indicates the new intellectual trend in American culture. - Dmitry Shlapentokh (Jul 1, '05)

June 2005