So what do we do now?

[kmc]

I am pretty sure the Democratic minority in Congress is to blame for all of this.

[frag]

I blame bunnies.

[phil]

This is as good a place as any to post this ...

Poisonous Misinterpretations

by Scott Horton

"This is not an isolated criminal act we are dealing with, it is an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam."
– Tony Blair


Why do they hate us? Does Islam, or a "poisonous misinterpretation" of it, create terrorism? Often we're told by politicians that a corrupt version of Islam is the cause of the al-Qaeda movement and its most deadly tactic, suicide terrorism. In his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, University of Chicago associate professor of political science Robert A. Pape wrestles with these questions and more. His conclusions surprised even him. On my July 16 radio show [stream] [download mp3], he said that after 9/11 he assumed the Koran might contain clues toward understanding what motivates a person to commit a suicide bombing. For his book, however, Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is "a nationalistic response."

Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it. In most cases, this foreign military presence is not hostile in a traditional sense, since the local governments have agreed to their stay. But according to a Saudi poll after 9/11, 95 percent of educated Saudi males between the ages of 25 and 41 agreed with bin Laden's goal of driving Americans off their holy land.

No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.

The root cause of suicide terrorism is occupation, not Islam, and not the other way around, as the War Party and its ill-informed adherents so righteously claim.

"Don't you remember Sept. 11? We were attacked!"

As Harry Browne has pointed out, history does not begin on 9/11. In fact, American intervention in the Middle East dates back to 1919, when U.S. participation in World War I helped turn the entire region over to the British and the French, who then drew borders to their own liking for the states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, what was Palestine, etc.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. government has dominated each of the Middle Eastern states at one time or another, and consistently a majority of them. It has supported bloody coups; backed fascist monsters like Shah Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak; armed and financed both sides of wars; propped up puppet kings, sultans, and emirs; and helped the Israeli government kill, steal, and destroy with our money. To top it off, it has now waged a bloody war and a terrible blockade of Iraq – all from bases in the "land of two Holy Places," the Arabian Peninsula.

Surprised that revenge was taken? We're lucky it took so long.

Michael Scheuer, the formerly anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror and ex-head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alec Station, seems to concur. In his book, he lists six policies that have fueled al-Qaeda's fire:

First and foremost are the U.S. forces that spent 13 years in Saudi Arabia and have now been moved to other bases on the Arabian Peninsula. This is a distinction, Pape says, without a difference to bin Laden or his followers, for whom the entire Peninsula is Holy Land. Think of it as a Middle Eastern Monroe Doctrine. It was not American tourists and businessmen that pissed him off either. It was the soldiers.

Second is America's unconditional support for Israel, which occupies Jerusalem.

Third are the long-term blockade of Iraq and the bombing of the "no-fly" zone, which, on average, happened once every three days for over a decade. These have now been replaced by the wars against, and ongoing occupations of, Afghanistan and Iraq – even more valuable recruiting tools.

Fourth on Scheuer's list of bin Laden's motivations is American support for Russia, China, and India in their suppression of Muslims. Seems he spoke too soon on Russia, as the American neoconservatives curiously favor the Chechens in that fight, despite the U.S. government's rhetorical and financial support of "the fight against Islamist extremism everywhere."

Fifth and sixth are U.S. government support for corrupt governments in the Middle East, none of which are democratic (among these are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, and now Iraq), and pressure (that is, threats of violence) to keep oil prices set where American mercantilists want them. Is it a surprise that all of the 9/11 hijackers – at least the one's whose identities aren't in dispute – were from countries (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) with governments friendly to our own, and that none of them were from Iran, Iraq, or Syria?

Pape has researched the strategic, social, and individual logic of suicide terrorism. He explains that when occupying forces are culturally and/or religiously alien, they are more vulnerable to demonization. It's the same with the American soldier who wrote to tell me that Iraqis are "animals" who "all look alike" and are all "guilty of something" as his excuse for taking life.

A major problem with the "fringe religion" theory is that it ignores the fact that supermajorities in Islamic nations agree with bin Laden's view of American foreign policy, though not necessarily with his tactics. It denies the slightest possibility of a single legitimate grievance that might deserve to be addressed. It also enables our government to maintain its state of war indefinitely.

The profile of the individual suicide bomber is going to need some major revision as well. Pape explains the difference between egoistic and altruistic suicide – the former being the desperate killing of oneself during a period of hopelessness for their own situation, the latter a selfless and noble sacrifice for others, like a soldier jumping on a grenade for his buddies, or a Kamikaze Pilot trying to delay a land invasion of his country. Egoistic suicide has been the model used by westerners to explain suicide bombings. The bombers are losers, they say; young, poor, uneducated, hopeless and full of rage. Having nothing to live for, they murder innocent people because evil Wahhabists brainwash them and promise them virgins in heaven.

According to Pape, this model must be scrapped. Suicide bombers are typically upper-middle class, well-educated, successful, socially connected people who know exactly what they are doing. For their perception of a greater good, they give their lives to kill people as part of a strategic campaign aimed at the people of the West, to turn us against our governments, and to force them to end the occupations and protections.

The action is in the reaction. As we saw in the recent London attacks, suicide terrorism works, particularly against democracies. It is dependent on the ability of the targeted civilians to pressure their governments to end the occupations.

The Royal Institute for International Affairs, the center of the British foreign policy establishment, has concluded [.pdf]:

"There is no doubt that the situation over Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK, and for the wider coalition against terrorism. It gave a boost to the al-Qaeda network's propaganda, recruitment and fundraising, caused a major split in the coalition, provided an ideal targeting and training area for al-Qaeda-linked terrorists. … Riding pillion with a powerful ally has proved costly in terms of British and U.S. military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure, and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign."

But Jack Straw remains as stubborn as… well, as a Stalinist. According to DeHavilland:

"[F]oreign secretary Jack Straw said he was 'astonished' by the report.

"Mr. Straw said the war on terror had been sparked by September 11th, the 'premeditated unprovoked attack' on New York and Washington, and not vice versa.

"'The time for excuses for terrorism is over. The terrorists have struck across the world, in countries allied with the U.S., backing the war in Iraq and in countries which had nothing whatever to do with the war in Iraq,' he said.

"'They struck in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Indonesia, in the Yemen. They struck this weekend in Turkey, which was not supporting our action in Iraq. It is the terrorists who will seek any excuse whatsoever for their action.'

"John Reid, defense secretary, dismissed the report, saying it had failed to proffer any alternatives.

"'The terrorists want to kill anyone who stands in the way of their perverse ideology,' Mr. Reid said."


The terrorists struck Americans in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Yemen. Locals who were also killed were collateral damage, so to speak. As for the attack in Turkey, it was committed by our allies the Kurds. Why didn't Straw go ahead and mention the Mujahedin e-Khalq terrorist cult of Islamo-Marxists that the coalition of the willing sent into Iran to bomb civilians only a few weeks back?

As for 9/11 being unprovoked, I will again quote James Bamford's description of bin Laden and Zawahiri's plan to provoke the U.S. into invading the greater Middle East:

"Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to 'the distant enemy' in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and 'personally wage the battle against Muslims.' It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war 'against Jews and Crusaders.' They believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh."

The leaders of al-Qaeda believed that the U.S. was already at war against them through our proxies, so they decided to lure us into their desert swamp to "bleed us dry" economically, and to eventually force us out altogether, all the while expanding their own constituency on our dime. It's working.


The people of England disagree with Jack Straw. Check out this article in the Guardian:

"Two-thirds of Britons believe there is a link between Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq and the London bombings despite government claims to the contrary, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. The poll makes it clear that voters believe further attacks in Britain by suicide bombers are also inevitable, with 75% of those responding saying there will be more attacks. The research suggests the government is losing the battle to persuade people that terrorist attacks on the UK have not been made more likely by the invasion of Iraq. According to the poll, 33% of Britons think the prime minister bears 'a lot' of responsibility for the London bombings and a further 31% 'a little.' Only 28% of voters agree with the government that Iraq and the London bombings are not connected."

America's policy is self-destructive. A "global democratic revolution" – in other words, the maintenance of Western-friendly governments in countries all over the world – can only make matters worse. The war in Iraq sure has.

According to the Boston Globe,

"New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank – both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States – have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself."

One could do worse than to read Pape's book, or for that matter, to simply Google "Osama bin Laden" for a few hours. All of bin Laden's threats are predicated on removing American troops from his backyard. He may want to rule all the world, but all available historical evidence shows that occupation is what galvanizes his followers. They'll keep signing up until our governments bring the soldiers home from the Middle East and South Asia.

Defeat, in this case, means ending the empire. What right do we have to win?

[kmc]

This is tremendous, Phil. Thanks for posting it.

[kmc]

But to answer the question, now we bomb the shit out of them.

[phil]

US interventions have boosted Iran, says report

Staff and agencies
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


The US-led "war on terror" has bolstered Iran's power and influence in the Middle East, especially over its neighbour and former enemy Iraq, a thinktank said today.
A report published by Chatham House said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had removed Iran's main rival regimes in the region.

Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and its invasion of Lebanon had also put Iran "in a position of considerable strength" in the Middle East, said the thinktank.

Unless stability could be restored to the region, Iran's power will continue to grow, according to the report published by Chatham House
The study said Iran had been swift to fill the political vacuum created by the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Islamic republic now has a level of influence in the region that could not be ignored.

In particular, Iran has now superseded the US as the most influential power in Iraq, regarding its former adversary as its "own backyard". It is also a "prominent presence" in its other war-torn neighbour, Afghanistan, according to Chatham House's analysts.

The report said: "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East.

"The United States, with coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures."

The thinktank said the west needed to understand better Iran's links with its neighbours to see why the country felt able "to resist Western pressure".

"The US-driven agenda for confronting Iran is severely compromised by the confident ease with which Iran sits in its region," said the report.

Western countries, led by the US, are locked in a bitter dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, says it will not give up what it says is its right to peaceful nuclear technology. The west suspects Tehran is developing nuclear weapons.

The thinktank said: "While the US and Europeans slowly grind the nuclear issue through the mills of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations security council, Iran continues to prevaricate, feeling confident of victory as conditions turn ever more in its favour."

The report added the country was "simply too important - for political, economic, cultural, religions and military reasons - to be treated lightly".

One of the report's authors, Dr Ali Ansari, reader in modern history at the University of St Andrews, told Radio 4: "The United States needs to take a step back and reassess its entire policy towards Iran and work out, first of all, what does it want and how is it going to achieve it, because at the moment everything is rather like putting a sticking plaster on a fairly raw wound, and it is not really actually doing much at all."

[rockysigman]

no shit

[kmc]

It was kind of tough watching the President unable to define the steps that are currently being taken to ensure "victory" in Iraq. At this point, I am quite sure no one knows what victory in that place even means.

[kmc]

What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference!

It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or …
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET

Among the many flabbergasting answers that President Bush gave at his press conference on Monday, this one—about Democrats who propose pulling out of Iraq—triggered the steepest jaw drop: "I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."

George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world is like … well, it's like George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world. It's sui generis: No parallel quite captures the absurdity so succinctly.

This, after all, is the president who invaded Iraq without the slightest understanding of the country's ethnic composition or of the volcanic tensions that toppling its dictator might unleash. Complexity has no place in his schemes. Choices are never cloudy. The world is divided into the forces of terror and the forces of freedom: The one's defeat means the other's victory.

Defeating terror by promoting freedom—it's "the fundamental challenge of the 21st century," he has said several times, especially when it comes to the Middle East. But here, from the transcript of the press conference, is how he sees the region's recent events:

What's very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this: These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy.

What is he talking about? Hamas, which has been responsible for much of the violence in Gaza, won the Palestinian territory's parliamentary elections. Hezbollah, which started its recent war with Israel, holds a substantial minority of seats in Lebanon's parliament and would probably win many more seats if a new election were held tomorrow. Many of the militants waging sectarian battle in Iraq have representation in Baghdad's popularly elected parliament.

The key reality that Bush fails to grasp is that terrorism and democracy are not opposites. They can, and sometimes do, coexist. One is not a cure for the other.

Here, as a further example of this failing, is his summation of Iraq:

I hear a lot about "civil war"… [But] the Iraqis want a unified country. … Twelve million Iraqis voted. … It's an indication about the desire for people to live in a free society.

What he misses is that those 12 million Iraqis had sharply divided views of what a free society meant. Shiites voted for a unified country led by Shiites, Sunnis voted for a unified country led by Sunnis, and Kurds voted for their own separate country. Almost nobody voted for a free society in any Western sense of the term. (The secular parties did very poorly.)

The total number of voters, in such a context, means nothing. Look at American history. In the 1860 election, held right before our own Civil War, 81.2 percent of eligible citizens voted—the second-largest turnout ever.

Another comment from the president: "It's in our interests that we help reformers across the Middle East achieve their objectives." But who are these reformers? What are their objectives? And how can we most effectively help them?

This is where Bush's performance proved most discouraging. He said, as he's said before, "Resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists." This may or may not be true. (Many terrorist leaders are well-off, and, according to some studies, their resentment is often aimed at foreign occupiers.) In any case, what is Bush doing to reduce their resentment?

He said he wants to help Lebanon's democratic government survive, but what is he doing about that? Bush called the press conference to announce a $230 million aid package. That's a step above the pathetic $50 million that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had offered the week before, but it's still way below the $1 billion or more than Iran is shoveling to Hezbollah, which is using the money to rebuild Lebanon's bombed-out neighborhoods—and to take credit for the assistance.

As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news—and, really, a bit of a shocker—is that he doesn't seem to know what "strategy" means.

Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. … Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy—"

Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."

First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective, but it's not a strategy—any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.

Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives—or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly—what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?

[rockysigman]

He's just stretching things out so he can leave the dirty work for whoever gets elected in '08. He knows things are fucked up beyond belief, but he can't pull out for political reasons, so he's just going to bide his time until someone else has to worry about it.

[kmc]

It's such a terrible clusterfuck over there. Really, this level of incompetence ought to give everyone pause.

[phil]

"So what do we do now?"

I'm buying a wood stove, chickens, a couple of goats
more vegetable seeds than needed and pray all those idiots
doesn't bring our planet to the brink of destruction ...

[phil]

If I didn't have kids, I would be building my self-sufficient
retreat on the mountain overlooking the sea right now ...

Seriously !!

[Mary]

Thanks for posting that kmc; it makes the point that I think is perhaps the single biggest blind spot in the rhetoric of this administration (and most talking heads in the media as well) - that democracy in the middle east does NOT in any obvious way equate to freedom, secularism, moderation, western-friendly regimes, or a bulwark against terrorism. In many cases quite the opposite. Until we seriously confront this issue and think about what it means for our expeditions in the Middle East, we are on a complete fool's errand. Every single time Bush or anyone in his administration talks about "freedom and democracy" as if the two naturally go together, he should immediately be called to task for it. Indeed the reason so many Western countries have constitutional democracies is precisely because on some level we recognize that democracy can be a weapon AGAINST freedom, and so we aim to protect these freedoms via constitutional guarantees.

Here's the issue at its starkest:

We are supposedly fighting for democracy in the Middle East, and, at the same time, against the most radical strains of Islamism. (not to be confused with Islam - another thing that no one seems to understand - islam is a religion, islamism is a political movement, they are not one and the same) When these two goals conflict, we canNOT continue to insist we are serving both goals at the same time. Something MUST give. It has to. Otherwise we are simply blind delusional fools.

M

[Dr. Drum]

Am I a total cynic if I suggest that in 880 days (or less) all the high falutin' democracy-talk goes out the window?