This is from S2...
Blowback from Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued
war on terror has hit London. When will the U.S.
figure out how to fight smart?
salon.com
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By Juan Cole
July 8, 2005 | Credit for the horrific bombings of the
London
Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday
morning was
immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a
"secret group"
of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By Thursday afternoon, as
the casualty
toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded, British
Foreign Minister
Jack Straw was saying, "It has the hallmarks of an
al-Qaida-related
attack." Although U.S. President George W. Bush
maintains that al-
Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies
because of
hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing
of the sort.
The attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of
sacred revenge
for British "massacres" in "Afghanistan and Iraq," and
a punishment
of the United Kingdom for its "Zionism" (i.e., support
of Israel).
If they really are responsible, who is this group and
what do they
want?
The phrase "Qaida al-Jihad" refers to the 2001
decision made by
Ayman al-Zawahiri, a leader of the Egyptian terrorist
group al-
Jihad al-Islami, to merge his organization into bin
Laden's al-
Qaida ("the Base"). The joint organization was thus
renamed Qaida
al-Jihad, the "Base for Holy War." (Zawahiri and bin
Laden had
allied in 1998.) The group claiming responsibility for
the London
bombings represents itself as a secret, organized
grouping or cell
of "Qaida al-Jihad in Europe." It is significant that
they identify
themselves as "in Europe," suggesting that they are
based on the
continent and have struck from there into London. This
conclusion
is bolstered by their description of the attack as a
"blessed
raid." One raids a neighboring territory, not one's
own. Whether
this group carried out the attack or not, the
sentiments they
express do exist among the radical fringe and form a
continued
danger. Jihadi internet bulletin boards expressed
skepticism about
the group, and pointed to an inaccuracy in the
quotation from the
Quran. But al-Qaida wannabes are often engineers
without good
Arabic or Islamics training.
Most probably, then, this group consists of a small
(and previously
obscure) expatriate Muslim network somewhere in
continental Europe,
which has decided to announce its allegiance to Qaida
al-Jihad. It
is highly unlikely that al-Qaida itself retains enough
command and
control to plan or order such operations. They could
have found
many cues in al-Qaida literature, however, that London
should be
attacked.
The United Kingdom had not been a target for al-Qaida
in the late
1990s. But in October 2001, bin Laden threatened the
United Kingdom
with suicide aircraft attacks if it joined in the U.S.
campaign in
Afghanistan. In November of 2002, bin Laden said in an
audiotape,
"What do your governments want from their alliance
with America in
attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular
Britain,
France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia." In
February of 2003,
as Bush and Blair marched to war in Iraq, bin Laden
warned that the
U.K. as well as the U.S. would be made to pay. In
October of 2003,
bin Laden said of the Iraq war, "Let it be known to
you that this
war is a new campaign against the Muslim world," and
named Britain
as a target for reprisals. A month later, an
al-Qaida-linked group
detonated bombs in Istanbul, targeting British sites
and killing
the British vice-consul. Although bin Laden offered
several
European countries, including Britain, a truce in
April of 2004 if
they would withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the
deadline for the
end of the truce ended in mid-July of that year.
Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a videotape,
excerpts of which
appeared on al-Jazeera on June 17, which stressed the
need for
violent action as opposed to participation in
political reform.
True reform, he said, must be based on three premises:
The rule of
Islamic law, liberating the lands of Islam from the
Occupier, and
the freedom of the Islamic community in managing its
own affairs.
He thundered that "expelling the marauder Crusader and
Jewish
forces cannot be done through demonstrations and
hoarse voices." Al-
Zawahiri's videotapes have often been issued just
before major
terrorist actions, and some analysts believe that they
are intended
as cues for when they should be undertaken. Abdel Bari
Atwan, the
London editor of the Arab newspaper al-Quds, warned
that the
appearance of the tape signaled an imminent attack.
The communiqué on the London bombing is unusual in
appealing both
to the Muslim community and to the "community of
Arabism."
"Urubah," or Arabism, is a secular nationalist ideal.
The diction
suggests that the bombers are from a younger
generation of
activists who have not lived in non-Arab Muslim
countries such as
Pakistan and Afghanistan, and think of Arabism and
Islam as
overlapping rather than alternatives to one another.
The text makes
relatively few references to religion, reading more as
a statement
of Muslim nationalism than of piety.
In accordance with al-Zawahiri's focus on violence as
the answer to
the "marauding" of occupying non-Muslim armies in
Muslim lands, the
statement condemns what it calls "massacres" by
"Zionist" British
troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of them Muslim
lands under
Western military occupation (and, it is implied,
similar in this
regard to Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli
control). These
bombings, it says, are a form of revenge for these
alleged
predations. The language of revenge recalls tribal
feuds rather
than Islamic values.
The terrorists refer to the bombings, which they say
they carefully
planned over a long period, as a "blessed raid." They
are recalling
the struggle between the wealthy, pagan trading
entrepot, Mecca,
and the beleaguered, persecuted Muslim community in
Medina in early
seventh century west Arabia. The Muslims around the
Prophet
Mohammed responded to the Meccan determination to wipe
them out by
raiding the caravans of their wealthy rivals,
depriving them of
their profits and gradually strangling them. The
victorious
Muslims, having cut the idol-worshipping Meccan
merchants off,
marched into the city in 630. Al-Qaida teaches its
acolytes that
great Western metropolises such as New York and London
are the
Meccas of this age, centers of paganism, immorality
and massive
wealth, from which plundering expeditions are launched
against
hapless, pious Muslims. This symbology helps explain
why the City
of London subway stops were especially targeted, since
it is the
economic center of London. A "raid" such as the Muslim
bombings is
considered not just a military action but also a
religious ritual.
If the communiqué of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe proves
authentic, the
London bombings are the second major instance of
terrorism in
Europe directly related to the Iraq war. In March of
2004, the
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (French acronym:
GICM) launched a
massive attack on trains in Madrid in order to punish
Spain for its
participation in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq,
following on their
bombing of Casablanca the previous year.
From the point of view of a serious counterinsurgency
campaign
against al-Qaida, Bush has made exactly the wrong
decisions all
along the line. He decided to "unleash" Israeli Prime
Minister
Ariel Sharon rather than pressing for
Israeli-Palestinian peace and
an end to Israeli occupation of the territories it
captured in
1967. Rather than extinguishing this most incendiary
issue for
Arabs and Muslims, he poured gasoline on it. His
strategy in
response to Sept. 11 was to fight the Afghanistan War
on the cheap.
By failing to commit American ground troops in Tora
Bora, he
allowed bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape. He
reneged on promises
to rebuild Afghanistan and prevent the reemergence of
the Taliban
and al-Qaida there, thus prolonging the U.S. and NATO
military
presence indefinitely. He then diverted most American
military and
reconstruction resources into an illegal war on Iraq.
That war may
have been doomed from the beginning, but Bush's
refusal to line up
international support, and his administration's
criminal lack of
planning for the postwar period, made failure
inevitable.
Conservative commentators argue that Iraq is a "fly
trap" for
Muslim terrorists. It makes much more sense to think
of it as bin
Laden's fly trap for Western troops. There, jihadis
can kill them
(making the point that they are not invulnerable), and
can provoke
reprisals against Iraqi civilians that defame the West
in the
Muslim world. After Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, many
Muslims felt that
Bin Laden's dire warnings to them that the United
States wanted to
occupy their countries, rape their women, humiliate
their men, and
steal their assets had been vindicated.
These claims were not credited by most of the world's
Muslims
before the Iraq war. Opinion polls show that most of
the world's
Muslims have great admiration for democracy and many
other Western
values. They object to the U.S. and the U.K. because
of their
policies, not their values. Before Bush, for instance,
the vast
majority of Indonesians felt favorably toward the
United States.
Even after a recent bounce from U.S. help with tsunami
relief, only
about a third now do.
The global anti-insurgency battle against al-Qaida
must be fought
smarter if the West is to win. To criminal
investigations and
surveillance must be added a wiser set of foreign
policies. Long-
term Western military occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq is simply
not going to be acceptable to many in the Muslim
world. U.S.
actions at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah created powerful
new symbols of
Muslim humiliation that the jihadis who sympathize
with al-Qaida
can use to recruit a new generation of terrorists. The
U.S. must
act as an honest broker in resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. And Bush and Blair must urgently find a
credible exit
strategy from Iraq that can extricate the West from
bin Laden's fly
trap.
Chicago political scientist Robert Pape argues in his
new book,
"Dying to Win," that the vast majority of suicide
bombers are
protesting foreign military occupation undertaken by
democratic
societies where public opinion matters. He points out
that there is
no recorded instance of a suicide attack in Iraq in
all of history
until the Anglo-American conquest of that country in
2003. He might
have added that neither had any bombings been
undertaken elsewhere
in the name of Iraq.
George Bush is sure to try to use the London bombings
to rally the
American people to support his policies. If Americans
look closer,
however, they will realize that Bush's incompetent
crusade has made
the world more dangerous, not less.
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About the writer:
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and
South Asian
history at the University of Michigan and the author
of "Sacred
Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).
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