Understanding Al Qaeda

Changing War and Global Politics

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783714384
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book controversially argues that Al Qaeda has clear aims, and that the only way to defeat it is to engage with its arguments in a serious way. Since the publication of the first edition in 2006, Mohamedou has brought the text right up-to-date. Starting with Al Qaeda's creation almost twenty years ago, and sketching its global mutation, Mohamedou explains that there is a cogent strategy to Al Qaeda's actions. He shows that the 'war on terror' is failing, only serving to recruit more terrorists to Al Qaeda's cause. He also puts forward a case for how the international community can best respond. Arguing that it is dangerous to dismiss Al Qaeda as illogical and irrational, this incisive and original book is important for policy-makers and ideal for undergraduates in international relations, Middle East studies and peace/conflict studies.

1

Casus Belli

All hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, it seems as though the one argument that the Arabs are incapable of understanding is force.

Hannah Arendt¹

In spite of all that has been written and said about the 11 September 2001 epoch-changing events and their aftermath, there remains, in the West, a profound reluctance to confront openly the reasons behind the attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States. To many Americans and Europeans, the one question that continues to matter urgently, ‘Why did this happen?’, remains unanswered satisfactorily. Why indeed did this happen? What was driving the perpetrators of the attacks? What made modern, urban-savvy, college-educated young men plan professionally and carefully an operation of this sort? From where did they muster their motivation and dedication? Why were they willing to give their lives in their prime? What reasons stood at the heart of their animus?

Since the attacks were the work of 19 Arab Muslims (15 Saudis, two Emirati, an Egyptian and a Lebanese), the required analysis also concerns the larger relationship between the United States (and, beyond, the West) and the Arabo-Islamic world. These questions cannot, however, be addressed without establishing the historical context in which the events took place.

Catching a nonchalant America engaged more than ever in the business of entertaining itself, the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington marked the end of American insouciance and closed abruptly the confused decade of transition known as the post-Cold War era. It is in the nature of uncertain times to be defined in relation to what preceded or replaced them, and it is how we may end up remembering the 1990s. In hindsight, those years constituted a decade of chimeras, a make-believe world whose demise was epitomised by the fate of the Oslo Process and the dot. com era. Short-sighted analyses, such as Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992), reigned supported by neo-Orwellian agendas posing as pragmatic accounts of global progress. Fukuyama’s approach was thus summarised in his statement that ‘for our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso’.² As events in the second half of the 1990s started pointing to the persistence of ‘real world’ problems, and indeed to a ‘coming anarchy’ in many places around the globe, it became evident that history had not culminated in modern Western liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism.

The myopic pursuit of that ideal notwithstanding, for most of the twentieth century the United States had been an inspiring land – a nation whose ideals could be worthy of admiration worldwide. It was a country that had taken significant steps towards ridding itself of discrimination and class disparities – with uneven success to be certain, but at times with a forceful, nationally shared drive. Though surely imperfect, its model of democracy was becoming ‘the least worst’ system that modernity could provide for the West. Gradually, however, American society fell under a spell of cynicism. The ascendancy of greed and of irreverence overtook the land, and – once rationalised – became the measure of all endeavours, leading the country onto a culturally and politically relativist path.

In time, fin-de-siècle America had become a voraciously consumerist system with an eager appetite for closure and little patience for complexity. It had evolved into a community characterised by cultural phenomena such as the trivialisation and commodification of everything, the dictate of immediacy and its corollary the end of patience, the individualisation of power, the institutionalisation of cynicism and the infantilisation of people. The cumulative effect of these phenomena was an American oblivious indifference towards the rest of the world. A doctrinaire but somewhat debonair, almost aloof America became engaged in something best described as démission civilisatrice, and its self-centredness was tantamount to exclusionary living.

Thereon, such civic cacophony led to an emotional flattening of democracy shoehorned by ignorance of the world and an ‘innocent domination’³ of it, whereas, paradoxically, American culture was reaching the apex of its international influence in the context of globalisation. The anarchy prevailing in the rest of the world – however turbulent, morally arresting and, in cases, resulting partly from US foreign policy – could not be allowed to disturb the national appraisal of prosperity.

A manufactured perception of peace was forced on international events. Such denial produced a numbing of the political senses. In the United States, this endured until the bourgeois and commercial passions for material well-being were shaken to their foundations on 11 September 2001, and the urgent need for a cultural market correction was provided by Al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland. A nation bloated by good living realised suddenly that it had serious enemies, which it had dismissed dangerously in a blind fit of ethnocentrism.

When not unreflective about the world around it, America had indeed oftentimes been antagonistic towards large parts of it. The enmity of the United States was nowhere more manifested than in its relationship with Islam (as a faith) and Arabs (as a people). The unprecedented economic prosperity and the global political power that the United States had enjoyed in the 1990s were linked to the end of the Cold War, but also, and possibly more directly, to the outcome of the 1990–91 Gulf War. The selling of that unfinished conflict as a political and military success combined with the euphoria of having drawn back safely from the brink of World War III to set the stage for a period where Americans (and later Europeans and Third World elites) would indeed want to focus exclusively on ‘the economy, stupid’. In addition, the CNN-delivered portrayal of a ‘heroic’ American army helped cure the psychological trauma of the Vietnam war, and endow (temporarily) America with self-confidence. The decade that followed was in significant measure about the blowback of that conflict, which would only be settled decisively on 9 April 2003 with the fall of the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad.

Contrary to what many believe, the September 2001 attacks did not mark the opening salvo of the contest between the United States and Al Qaeda. To adduce this claim is to ignore that the long-coddled conflict had been going on for a while, and that 11 September was merely the escalation of a pattern that had begun following the 1990–91 Gulf War. On 21 January 1996, the New York Times featured a self-explanatory lead story entitled ‘Seeing Green: The Red Menace Is Gone. But Here’s Islam’, which constituted a sign of things to come after 2001.

Between 1991 and 2001, America sustained, as it were, six major assaults by Al Qaeda: the 26 February 1993 first World Trade Center operation; the 13 November 1995 bombing of a Saudi-American base in Riyadh; the 25 June 1996 attack on the Al Khobar towers near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (housing site for the crews enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq); the simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August 1998; the attack against the USS Cole warship in Yemen on 12 October 2000; and the operation against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. In addition, there had been at least two thwarted attacks: a plot to explode eleven American airliners over the Pacific Ocean in January 1995, and in December 2000 a bombing (possibly of the Space Needle) during the millennial festivities in Seattle, Washington.

For its part, the US government had been consistently and increasingly in conflict with Muslims and Arabs. According to the US Defense Department, between 1980 and 1995 the United States engaged in 17 military operations in the Middle East, every one of them directed against Muslims. The United States also took direct action against Muslims in Iraq throughout the 1990s, and in the Sudan and Afghanistan on 20 August 1998. No such pattern – which multiplied dramatically in the years that followed culminating in the 2000s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – occurred against the people of any other civilisation. In that respect, Stephen Walt estimates that over the past 30 years, the United States has killed approximately 288,888 Muslims.⁴ US hegemonic attitudes towards the Islamic world and America’s failure to recognise the violent resentment that its policies were nourishing set the stage for 11 September.

THE SERIOUSNESS OF INJUSTICE

With the veil of ignorance lifted abruptly, post-September 2001 Americans began asking themselves all kinds of questions with despondency. Looking contentedly on the order of things – 1990s style – was no longer an option as interrogations abounded. Could the United States remain a superpower? Should it embrace empire-making? Should it resort to torture? How was it to handle a new type of war for which it was not prepared? Who are the Arabs? What is Islam?

Cut adrift by the shattering of their reality, Americans could not cushion the emotional experience. The sense of disconnectedness was too powerful. Yet though there could have been no bigger wakeup call than the events that transpired on 11 September, it was as if nothing was learned. The central reasons behind the sociogenesis of the attacks remained unnamed. The Gulf War matrix was dusted off. ‘Osama’ joined and dethroned ‘Saddam’ in the pantheon of all-star villains (though Hussein continued to run a close second) and, ten years later, Arabs were again an obscure enemy.

The replacement answers provided by officials and commentators alike – ‘they hate our way of life’,⁵ ‘they detest democracy’, ‘this is a war of freedom-loving people against evil barbarians’ – were equally misleading. For far too long, Americans had been listening complacently to analysts who contributed actively to their cecity towards the political grievances of more than a billion individuals. No stranger blindness indeed than the one of a democratic country fuelled by a devotion to a hegemonic Israel that knows no satiety and that cancels all reasoned thinking.⁶ The result of such stigmatising discourse and dichotomising history was that, as Don DeLillo remarked, the sense of disarticulation heard in the formula ‘Us versus Them’ had never been so striking, at either end.⁷

Amid this flotsam and jetsam, questions were asked about who had done this and how come it could have happened, but there were no proper introspections into why the 2001 attacks took place. While the answer to it is quite clear to Arabs and Muslims around the world, as noted, the question that remains unanswered to many an American is ‘Why did this happen?’ In fact, proper inquiry into the reasons behind the events has come to be regarded as almost insidious. The late Edward Said pointed out that

the least likely argument to be listened to in the United States in the public domain is one that suggests that there are historical reasons why America, as a major world actor, has drawn such animosity to itself by virtue of what it has done … The assumption seems to be that … any minimizing or explanation of that is an intolerable idea even to contemplate, much less to investigate rationally.⁸

Why then did Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda attack the United States in September 2001? Mainly, the answer is a deep and heavy sense of injustice harboured by a transnational armed group self-championing the feelings of millions around the Arab and Islamic world. The issue is not Islamic fundamentalism, religious fanaticism, poverty or the lack of democracy in the Arab world. It is justice and the yearning for it. Specifically, the perception of American injustice displayed as the unceasing and unflinching support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the continued assistance to authoritarian Arab regimes and the expanded US military presence in the Middle East. It bears reminding that it is not America’s paramountcy that is resented, but its hegemonic policies. The predominance is an accepted fact to most Muslims.

Many in the United States and some in Europe have argued that those who committed the attacks ‘hate our way of life’. These protests are hypocritical. Few Arabs hate the West’s way of life to the point of committing kamikaze attacks, but a far larger number of Muslim youth – who need not be dim-witted lunatics – resent America’s policies and its pax Americana in the Middle East. With the American and British colonisation of Iraq, this feeling multiplied. As evidenced by America’s own reply to the September 2001 attacks, revenge is a powerful motivation and victimhood is no myth – it is a painful reality to large numbers of dispossessed Arabs and Muslims, including the families of the thousands killed in Iraq. Yet for many an American it is difficult to countenance the fact that there might be more to the 11 September operation or the Iraqi resistance than religious fanaticism or terrorism, namely a political dimension.

Post-11 September 2001 civil liberties clamp downs have been rationalised similarly by several American commentators. Michelle Malkin writes, for instance, that ‘racial profiling – or more precisely, threat profiling – is justified’.⁹ Statements such as those of nationally syndicated columnist Ann Coulter who opined that ‘we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity’, or Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s claim, on 28 September 2001, that Western civilisation is ‘superior’ to the Islamic one, or Reverend Jerry Falwell’s 6 October 2002 remark that the Prophet Mohammad is ‘a terrorist’, or indeed President George W. Bush’s 15 September 2001 declaration that ‘this crusade … is going to take a while’ attest to the fact that reactions to the 11 September attacks were often along civilisational lines. Such hatred – awakened at once and embodied in Italian journalist Orianna Fallaci’s diatribe-filled bestseller The Rage and the Pride (2002) – is also what made it easy for many a Westerner to, overnight, start seeing Osama Bin Laden (previously a supporting character in the background noise of world politics) as the new face of evil, rather than considering soberly the reasons he and those he leads elected war.

MISREPRESENTATIONS AND DISTORTIONS

Not asking the right societal questions – Have we been committing injustice? Should we reassess our foreign policy? Are these choices worth the price paid? – the United States could hardly come up with the proper political answers. This has led the ‘land of the free’ on a path where, within months, institutionalised racism became tolerated nationwide, torture was rationalised,¹⁰ and the very same indoctrination methods that characterise dictatorial regimes, including secret trials, ghost detainees, secret prisons, self-censorship and witch-hunts, were implemented nationwide. By 2002, sweeping legislation introduced secretly had departed radically from the constitutional guarantees at the core of American democracy: the rights to an independent judiciary, trial by jury, public proceedings, due process, habeas corpus and appeals to higher courts. In time, the country embarked on an illegal, immoral and ill-advised colonial war on a sovereign state.

If the United States of the late 1990s was a country yearning for meaning, post-11 September America ached for direction. It knew only too well and, for most, merely intuitively, that something about its behaviour was amiss, but – ‘militarist, agitated, uncertain, anxious, projecting its internal disorder on the planet’¹¹ – it refused to admit this bifurcation. The self-congratulating masquerade that was displayed in full effect after September 2001 was no recipe for responsible leadership in the face of national tragedy. Almost in all matters, America’s reply – including that of the majority of its intellectuals¹² – took the form of a martialist reasserting of American imperialism, disguised as legitimate, defensive patriotism, rather than a re-examining and reassessing of its problematic policies. This was clearly the adobe of the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy, which redefined the country’s approach to international politics along lines that rested on the use of imperial phraseology: ‘We will disrupt and destroy’, ‘We will … wage a war’.

More dangerously for Americans, the United States government did not hesitate to change its laws to undemocratic ones to dispose ...