Record's view is pretty consistent with my understanding of the general situation, which mostly comes from Judith Miller's book, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East , see amazon.com for example. The local true believers never tire of clumping the bad middle eastern governments, bin Laden and followers, and Muslims in general into one big bad amorphous mass, but I don't think that's either useful or particularly honest. For the most part, the bad governments in the middle east are secular dictators and not particularly Islamic except for lip service. The Islamists, particularly the forebear of them all, the Muslim Brotherhood, are in general the closest thing to a popular oppostion to the bad dictators there is. For that reason, the Muslim Brotherhood has been ruthlessly repressed in most places. For a further irony, the Arab middle eastern goverment that usually gets the most respect in the US, Jordan, is the government that is most tolerant of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then there's the additional irony that the the two nation states that provided the most "training, logistical support, and political/religious inspiration" for the direct forebears of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan were Saudi Arabia and the United States. The moral equivalents of the founding fathers, some conservative icon called the Afghan Jihadists. I suppose people could argue that Saudi Arabia had the leadership role there, people argue a lot of truly bizarre notions around here.
Then there's the other irony of Judith Miller and her most recent role of channeling Chalabi fantasy leakage into the dreaded "liberal" NYT as her little part of the war marketeering effort, but that's another story.
It may be convenient for war propaganda purposes to smear Al Qaeda, all of Islam, and all Arab governments together into one big "swamp" that the neocon true believers are going to magically clean up if we just sit back and let them, but the lumping together seems somewhat inconsistent with conventional reality. |
