Oh, there he goes again ...

[saavedra77]

This morning, President Bush declaimed: "In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world."

Yeah, there he goes again ...

For the record, I'd argue to the contrary that we're facing a radical fringe of jihadis who feed on existing Muslim grievances over conflicts in Kashmir, the Palestinian Territories, and Chechnya, and over the similarly longstanding U.S. support for Arab tyrannies like the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies and Mubarak's Egypt. The jihadis have long used these conflicts to persuade other Muslims that the West is their mortal enemy, to recruit new militants, and to fuel their ambitions for new Taliban-style theocracies.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq did not of course create Al Qaeda (arguably, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided the crucial impetus, there), but President Bush is--perhaps unintentionally--quite right to suggest that jihadis have "now ... set their sights on Iraq"--that is, since the U.S. invasion. Iraq has provided the jihadis with a golden opportunity to tell potential recruits "See? We told you the West was out to destroy Islam!" Hence the now-all-too-routine reports of foreign fighters carrying out suicide bombings and sectarian killings in Iraq. (By all acounts, the foreign fighters are not the most numerous, although they may be the most destructive strand in the insurgency currently tearing that country apart.)

President Bush also alludes darkly to bin Laden's ambition to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia." I suppose that this is meant to elevate jihadi terrorism to the level of geopolitical threat posed by Hitler and Stalin--a comparison Bush explicitly makes.

But isn't there something a bit, well, ridiculous about this dream, coming from a Sunni extremist whose followers invest as much energy in blowing up Shi'ites (in Pakistan as well as in Iraq) as they do in attacking Western targets? If I remember my history correctly, it was precisely this kind sectarianism and geographic overreaching that brought down the medieval Islamic caliphate in the first place. Sorry, but I don't see the makings of the jihadi equivalent of Nazi Germany or the U.S.S.R., here.

Comments

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

wow, I should finish sentences more often.

I think that the radical arms of the Ba'ath party have been linked to quasi-terrorist activities since shortly after WWII. Various Islamic states had insurrections and homegrown mobs of folks angry at Western occupying forces by the forties. Afghanistan certainly coalesced a lot of the Arab world's anti-Western factions into a united front which led to bin Laden and today's Taleban, however.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the Ba'ath Party had longstanding ties to Palestinian terror groups--on pan-Arab rather than Islamist grounds.

And, yes, there is a long history of Islamic populations resisting foreign occupation. I think that this might be a separate issue, though: you could say the same thing about many groups that have been subject to foreign occupation.

What is relatively new is the form of Islamism that began to appear on the scene after WWII, which was specifically a reaction to modern Western culture. The ideas of the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb are often cited as Islamism's ideological starting-point. (Of course, Qutb's puritanical, theocratic, and militant themes have roots going back to the early days of Islam.) The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is particularly important to the development of this movement because the resistance it engendered brought together men from all over the Muslim world around a common Islamist ideology, and because the mujahedeen ("holy warriors") were later able to boast of defeating a superpower, there. The Taliban are an offshoot of the jihadi fervor of the time, although they're only one of the Islamist factions that emerged from the war.

Sources

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

You may or may not already be familiar with these, but the following are some books that have been really helpful to me in understanding the history and development of militant Islam:

Gilles Kepel. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. This is one of the best general books on the subject I've come across, tracing the development of modern militant Islam from the writings of Mawdudi and Qutb during the early-to-mid-20th century to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khomeini's Iranian Revolution, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Algerian GIA, and Al Qaeda.

Rohan Gunaratna. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. This is the fullest treatment I've seen so far of the origins, ideology, and structure of Al Qaeda--it's roots in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, its internationalization after that war's end, the role of bin Laden and other leaders in shaping Al Qaeda ideology and propaganda, the relationships that bin Laden and his circle formed with other militant groups around the globe.

Ahmed Rashid. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. This book talks about how the Taliban emerged from the chaos that followed the anti-Soviet jihad, as a forceful alternative the rival mujahedeen "warlords," the group's tribal basis among the Pashtuns, its extremely puritanical and misogynist ideology, its entanglement with Al Qaeda, etc.

Great books, if you don't mind delving into some decidedly uncheerful subject matter ...

Re: Sources

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Sigh. Once upon a time, I'd have been reading those books for my career. These days I rarely have enough brain (thanks to fatigue) for "real" reading. But I've toyed with the idea of doing more research in that direction for (yet another) potential book, so I'll keep these in memories. Thanks.