Oh, there he goes again ...
Oct. 6th, 2005 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77This 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-07 06:10 pm (UTC)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.