In short, bin Laden’s campaign, however contemptible, and opposition to the U.S. ambitions in the Greater Middle East more generally, emerged at least in part as a response to prior U.S. policies and actions, in which lofty ideals and high moral purpose seldom figured. The United States cannot be held culpable for the maladies that today find expression in violent Islamic radicalism. But neither can the United States absolve itself of any and all responsibility for the conditions that have exacerbated those maladies. After several decades of acting as the preeminent power in the Persian Gulf, America did not arrive at the end of the twentieth century with clean hands. Andrew Bacevich: TNAM, p. 198.
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I just heard Tucker Carlson casually say that he told his "lesbian leftist friend" (probably Rachel Maddow), "when al Qaeda takes over you’ll be the first one hung up by your thumbs." Digby
This idea of al Qaeda taking over the world is a meme I’ve been reading in right wing and even moderate conservative blogs over the last week or so. The idea is that if the Democrats are in power–or if Al Gore had been president during 9/11– it’s only a matter of time before American women are forced to wear burkas. It fits in with the rhetoric coming from the Bushies that we’re in World War III struggling to defeat an enemy as aggressive and bent on world domination as the Nazis.
Call me naive, but I guess I’m not that concerned about the prospect of Islamic hordes parachuting into New York and
D.C. and landing craft all up and down the eastern seaboard discharging
millions of invading Islamic warriors. Nobody is explicitly promoting this vision of the future, but isn’t it really the subtext of the most recent adminstration propaganda? Why else would Carlson say what he’s saying, even if he’s not completely serious. It wouldn’t even be possible to say such a thing if the fear of it wasn’t there in the collective unconscious.
I continue to be amazed at the paranoia that animates the right wing in
this country and the way that paranoia creates the template by which
certain information is selected and other information filtered out. It
has this way of taking serious threats like Islamic terrorism and distorting them into something that bears little resemblance to what
they really are. If you can’t see a problem clearly, you can’t develop the most effective solution for it. If you have a kitchen fire, you better make sure you understand its cause. What we’re doing in the Middle East is the equivalent of tryng to put out a grease fire with water.
Sure there might be some loony-tunes, fringe Islamists sects which have fantasies of subjugating the world in the name of the prophet. But that’s not al Qaeda’s current mission, and even if it were, it’s not something they are even remotely capable of achieving. Al Qaeda has been clear that its primary objectives are to repel the western invader from the Islamic soil. This is primarily a nationalistic impulse that has more in common with the anti-colonial insurgencies of the the mid-twentieth century. Did the IRA in Ireland want to take over the government in London and make everyone a Catholic? Neither does al Qaeda have a similar interest regarding the U.S.
Their goal, consistent with the strategy of all such anti-colonial insurgencies, is to make the U.S. occupation cost more than it is worth for us, and if that means detonating a nuke on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill, they’ll do it. I have no doubt that they will try. And it’s clear that this is the kind of threat that we must bend all of our energies to prevent, and that this administration has been negligent in giving it the attention it deserves. Why? Because all of its energy and resources are bent on occupying the Islamic heartland. Which only increases the insurgents’ motivation to hurt us in ways that will surpass what we suffered in 9/11.
And so the question that never seems to be asked is why are we really there in the Middle East? Why is it worth the cost to us? What’s really at stake for us there that we are willing to sustain its enormous costs in blood and treasure and to risk inciting even worse terrorist attacks on our own soil? Why is this worth it to us? How did this whole thing get started?
Most Americans haven’t a clue about the real logic of our invasion or of Islamic hatred of the U.S. Americans just think of it in simplistic terms: Those hadjis hit us on 9/11, and now we’re hitting back. Or they have WMD, and even if they don’t, they want them, so we have to occupy them so they won’t get them because, because–well just because it’s not a good thing for them to have them. But the Muslim extremists most likely to use them against us are living in Pakistan, which already does have nukes. But Pakistan is our ally, right? So we don’t have to worry, right? Iran, which has no nukes to give to terrorists, that’s who we have to worry about, right?
The reasons promoted by the administration for the invasion of the Islamic heartland make hardly any sense on the face of it, and it doesn’t have to because most Americans are oblivious of the long history that led to 9/11. They accept the administration’s blather about how the terrorists hate us because they hate freedom. But they hate us for the same reason they hated the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan. They hate us because of our bases and troop presence on Islamic soil. And they hate us for the long Anglo-American history as colonialist bullies. From the Muslim point of view, we’re the barbarians at their gates.
Now you could argue that they have it all wrong and that they’re really the barbarians and we have only the most benevolent intentions and that our occupation will benefit these backward Islamic societies in the long run. That’s always been the colonizer’s rationalization. But we’re not there as neo-Wilsonian missionaries to convert Muslims into a liberal society suffused with Western values.
That’s a justification promoted by the neocons, and it’s a smokescreen to hide the real purposes, which is that we are indeed involved in the next world war, a war in which we are the aggressors and the Muslim insurgents are the defenders. It’s a war over who’s to control the vast energy reserves of the middle east, and the sooner we face up to the fact, the sooner we can have a real debate in the U.S about how to develop a sane energy policy and a sane relationship with these Islamic societies that will support their struggle to find their way into the modern world.
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