It's Not World War III

by **nomo** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:36 pm

They might just get their Clash of Civilizations … By Joshua Holland Posted on July 18, 2006, Printed on July 18, 2006 <a href="http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/39163/">www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/39163/</a> It's more import than ever to recognize that there's never been a global war on terror -- that it's a sham, a ruse and a red herring. Reasonable people have to articulate that now, more than ever. If we don't, a real war between the "liberal" West and Islamic East -- that over which Neocons and Islamic extremists alike have been drooling for years -- might come to fruition. I've argued in the past that the problem with calling the campaign against Islamic terror a "war" is numerical, not ideological: there are a few tens of thousands of potentially violent extremists disbursed around the world. They're not gathered in groups, and you can't distinguish them from ordinary civilians by looking. That makes it fundamentally a law enforcement problem (which at times requires Special Forces and other limited military support). But it goes further than that. There's no global war between East and West because there are no discrete sides. There's no "West"; the Western democracies certainly agree that terrorism is a problem, but are perfectly divided about the means with which to address it. The United States and Israel stand alone in their "wars," the Russians have their "war" with the Chechens and the rest of the world does what simple logic dictates: they investigate terror cells, arrest the participants and jail them. They've had quite a bit of success. What's more, as a practical matter of U.S. foreign policy, we don't care about Islamic extremism per se. We are no more allied with the Russians in their war with Chechnya than we have been with the Chinese as they've cracked down on Islamic groups in Xinjiang. Where U.S. "interests" aren't involved, we're indifferent. Let's stop pretending otherwise. Much more importantly -- and this is incredibly hard for average Americans to understand -- there's no "them." The image of a well-organized global Islamic insurgency is a fantasy. Al Qaeda was one of a dozen Islamic militant groups in the mid to late 1990s. Bin Laden was one of a few dozen influential and charismatic leaders of those groups. These disparate groups were fighting separate, national battles; Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya opposed the Egyptian government, Hezbollah was formed to beat back the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, the Group Islamique Armé rose up to topple Algeria's government and on and on. Al Qaeda was unique in one important way: Bin Laden, like his Neocon partners, saw in the world an existential struggle between East and West. He was jockeying for position with dozens of other movements, none of which were focused on a broad, global effort against the U.S. and its Western allies. Bin Laden saw our support for the Saudi Government, for Israel, for Egypt's repressive regime -- a government that imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of political Islamists -- and preached that the U.S. was the head of the snake. First defeat us, and then all those individual, national and very particular battles could be won. This was not an easy sell. Messing with the U.S., it was widely acknowledged, was not a terribly smart course of action, and many militants had a narrowly focused hatred of their own domestic ideological opponents. It also didn't sit well with Bin Laden's hosts. As Jason Burke writes in his excellent book, Al Qaeda, "it is important to recognize that [Islamic groups] in the Yemen, and Afghanistan and the regime in the Sudan, have roots in local contingencies that pre-date Bin Laden." They used the Sheik and allowed themselves to be used by him, but their conflicts, too, were domestic in nature. In early 1996, the Sudanese government approached the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and offered to turn Bin Laden over to their security services. They refused. In May of that year, he returned to Afghanistan, where he had developed a reputation fighting the Soviets. Here we come to a crucial part of the story of the rise of international Islamism -- a narrative the American media has been criminally complicit in ignoring. In August of 1998, independent groups loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda attacked U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Rather than treating the attacks as an intelligence and law enforcement problem, Bill Clinton reacted by using the tools of war, launching over a hundred cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan in Operation Shortsighted Violence ("Infinite Reach"). The missiles were primarily for domestic consumption -- to deflect attention from Monica's cum-stained dress and to assuage the bloodthirsty right -- and had little effect on violent extremists. But they did knock out Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant, precipitating a disease epidemic that killed tens of thousands of people -- a story ignored by the Western press. Meanwhile, the Taliban had grown weary of Bin Laden's shtick. They were sick of his public attacks against the "crusaders and Zionists" and, while the Taliban's leaders were terribly provincial, they understood the heat Bin Laden was bringing down on them wasn't helping their cause. Remember, this was a group that was negotiating with Texas oilmen from Unocal to install a major pipeline in Afghanistan; they wanted foreign investment and recognition. In mid-1998, the Taliban, like the Sudanese before them, cut a deal to turn Bin laden over to Saudi Arabia, where he would be tried for treason and in all likelihood executed. All that the Taliban asked in return was for a group of religious authorities loyal to the Saudis to issue a statement justifying the move under Islamic law -- a mere technicality. In July of that year, the deal was confirmed and in early September, two planes landed in Kandahar carrying Saudi Prince Turki and a group of Saudi commandos to collect Bin Laden. But the deal had run into a snag three weeks earlier, when the U.S. had launched its cruise missiles. The Saudis arrived only to be told the deal was off and be dressed down by Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The strikes had changed everything. The missile attack was a disaster with far-reaching consequences. Those Tomahawks validated all of Bin Laden's claims; the U.S., it seemed, really was unconcerned with the deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims. Hundreds of extremists, who had come to Afghanistan to train for their little fights in Kashmir or the Philippines or wherever suddenly flocked to Al Qaeda, convinced that Bin Laden's epic struggle against the West was their own. It was the beginning of a trend that continues today: the United States, a country that is unable, because of deeply held aspects of its political culture, to differentiate between a war and a law enforcement issue, stumbles blindly into a full-blown attack on a sovereign country -- pressed ever forward by its psychotic and racist right-wing -- with disastrous and unintended consequences. Iraq wasn't the first and Bush didn't start it -- Clinton did. 9/11 was a bomb going off. Its long fuse had been laid by Reagan -- who joined the Saudi regime in promoting an extremist form of Islamic fundamentalism in a short-sighted move to counter both the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Pan-Arabism of lefties like Nasser in Egypt -- and it was lit by Clinton's fireworks display. After 9/11, we had an opportunity to fracture the coalition that Bin Laden had managed to cobble together after the East Africa bombings. The 9/11 attacks were widely viewed as a misguided case of over-reach. We could have isolated the international AAl Qaeda from the other Islamic movements, but we had to launch a "war" on terror, and in doing so we again proved to a receptive audience that we're the ultimate enemy. Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Gitmo -- these are recruiting posters for global Jihad. We may yet end up with a unified opponent against which we can fight a global war, but if we do, it will have been one of our own making. Now we see the same thing happening in Israel's response to Hezbollah's kidnapping of two soldiers -- an all out attack on cities and infrastructure that's completely disproportionate to the provocation. And the simplistic, self-serving explanations of what's going on over there are just as dangerous. After George Bush told Tony Blair that his administration blamed neither Israel nor the Lebanese government for this fresh outbreak of war because, after all, the situation would resolve itself if only the Syrian government would tell Hezbollah to behave, Juan Cole wrote: "It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet…" Cole called the exchange -- caught by a microphone that wasn't supposed to be on -- "a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth." He added: "I come away from it shaken and trembling." He should. The lack of any meaningful analysis of what's going on in the world is as terrifying as it is universal.The Washington Post tells us today that the problem is generic "extremists" who -- get this -- essentially hate the idea that the Palestinians might get a state. Our crazies are debating whether this is World War III or World War IV, while the region descends into chaos. Bush and Blair don't want a ceasefire just yet, preferring that Israel pummel Hamas and Hezbollah for a while. All of this is completely removed from context; it's as if Hezbollah decided to launch some cross-border attacks on a whim. Missing from the analysis almost entirely is the fact that Israel and the U.S., backed reluctantly by the EU, decided to answer the Palestinians' disobedient election of Hamas by starving the government of all revenues. The humanitarian crisis that followed in Gaza has been breath taking, if rarely reported here. Disease outbreaks, hunger, lack of refrigeration and AC and a deep economic crisis were the predictable results of a policy decision. This conflict didn't spring up in a vacuum. And it won't be bombed away. Olmert, like Clinton in 1998, is forced by his own extremists to wage this war in order to protect his right flank from attack by the Likudniks. The long-term consequences are likely to be just as disastrous. If there isn't some serious leadership forthcoming from some quarter soon, the Victor Davis Hansons and Michael Ledeens may just get the existential Clash of Civilizations for which they've lusted so long. We've got to do our part to stop them, and that begins by challenging the war narrative itself. Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer. © 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: <a href="http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/39163/">www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/39163/</a>

It's Not World War III

It's Not World War III

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