Russia as the jihadists’ “far enemy”

When Al Qaeda jihadist terrorists attacked the U.S. World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it was part Osama bin Laden regarded the USA as the “far enemy” who propped up all the “near enemies” in the Arab world.

But for many of the jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, the “far enemy” is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not the USA.   A large number are Chechens, a Muslim nationality living mostly within the Russian Federalion, or Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs or others living under regimes in Central Asia that are propped up by Russia.

One of Putin’s first actions when he came to power was to ruthlessly crush the independence movement in Chechnia.   The justification was a series of terrorist attacks that were very likely a false flag attack by the Russian FSB.

Since then many Chechen fighters have been driven out of Russia, and are now fighting the Russian-backed Assad government of Syria, along with Uzbeks and other nationalities from the former Soviet republics.

Some analysts think that the export of jihadists is a conscious Russian strategy.  The best outcome, from the Russian point of view, is that they die fighting in Syria.   But even if they survive, they have made themselves known to Russian intelligence services.

Saudi Arabia does the same thing with its jihadist rebels—suppresses them at home and encourages them to go wage war in other countries.

9/11: the path not taken

Photo by National Park Service

After the 9/11 attacks, the whole world, including the Muslim world, sympathized with the United States.

The whole world, including the Muslim world, condemned the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 innocent civilians.

The U.S. government had an opportunity to unite the world in bringing the Al Qaeda terrorists to justice.   This could have been a step to unite the international community behind a rule of law.

Instead the Bush administration chose to implement pre-existing plans to invade Iraq, whose leaders had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.  The Obama administration has done likewise with Libya, Syria and other countries.

The result has been militarization of American life, eclipse of civil liberties and the deaths of many more innocent civilians in majority-Muslim countries than ever were killed in jihadist attacks on Americans and Europeans.

Even worse, a generation of Americans has grown up in which all these things are normal.

And jihadist terrorism, partly and maybe mainly as a result of U.S. policies, is stronger than ever before.

The threat of a global holy war

One of the worst thing that could happen is an escalation of the U.S. “war on terror” into a global war between Christendom and Islam.  That is the goal of al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS).

If it happened, the United States and much of Europe would become as beleaguered as Israel is today.  The devastation that has been visited on Gaza, Palestine, Iraq, Libya and Syria would be spread to the whole world.

That is why Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were careful to distinguish jihadist terrorists from Muslims in general.

Unfortunately, there are Americans, such as Lt. General (ret) William “Jerry” Boykin, who don’t.

President Bush fired him in 2007 from his post as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence for saying that the United States is in a holy war of Christian crusaders against Muslim jihadists.  Even though Boykin was a brave and patriotic soldier, Bush acted in the best interests of the United States.

Boykin has endorsed Ted Cruz for President, and Cruz has appointed him as one of his top advisers.  I think Cruz also wants to make the “war on terror” a religious war.

How the USA helps ISIS, AQ and the Taliban

The U.S. government provides arms to ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban.  It sometimes does this directly, as in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s and Bosnia during the 1990s.  Other times it arms ineffective and corrupt governments, warlords or insurgents who then give the arms of ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The U.S. government is an enemy of the nations fighting ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taiban.   These include Syria, Iran and Russia and, in the past, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  I’m not praising these nations’ governments.  I’m just pointing out they are the enemies of the terrorists the U.S. government supposedly is making war on.

The U.S. government declines to confront nations from which ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban draw support.   I’m thinking of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Turkey.   Oil flows out and money and arms flow in.

U.S. military intervention creates the kind of environment in which ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban flourish.   When the structure of civil government and civil society are smashed, as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, only criminal, religious or military groups can flourish, or criminal religious warlords such as ISIS, al Qaeda or the Taliban.

One motive for joining ISIS is to take revenge for killing of bystanders in U.S. military operations.
Drone operations, bombing campaigns and support for oppressive governments create more terrorists than they eliminate.

Many Americans support the claims of ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban to be true representatives of Islam.   Presidents Obama and George W. Bush distinguished between terrorists and mainstream Islam, but many American politicians and journalists seem to be intent on turning a struggle against a tiny group of terrorists into a crusade against the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims.

Ironically, many Iranians and Iraqis believe that Americans intentionally created ISIS.   I’m sure there was no such intention.  I just think that certain people in the U.S. government sought to use the war on terror as a screen to achieve other geopolitical objectives which they gave higher priority.

One of these objectives was to be the dominant military power in the Greater Middle East.  Another was to control oil, gas and pipeline routes.  A third was to back Israel, Saudi Arabia and other allies against their enemies and rivals.

They neither achieved these objectives (unless waging war is a goal in itself) nor effectively fought terrorism.

§§§

If we Americans are serious about waging a war on terror, we should stop doing things that make the terrorists stronger.

The origins of ISIS in U.S. policy

The supposed legal authority for American military interventions is a resolution by Congress authorizing the President to use military force to root out terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

But after 14 years, radical terrorists such as Al Qaeda and its successors, including the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL and Da’esh), are stronger than ever.  Why?

It is because the American military is invincible in destroying the governmental and economic structures of nations, but is incapable of establishing order.

This is partly by design.  The so-called revolution in military thinking inaugurated under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called for use of small, highly-mobile, highly-trained special forces with high firepower, instead of the mass armies of the World War Two area.   Such forces are effective at killing people and breaking things but not at long-term occupations.

The other is that the U.S. government, being averse to committing sending large numbers of Americans into battle, supports extremist Islamic terrorists when they are fighting other designated enemies.  This is what happened in Libya, and is the real reason for the Benghazi tragedy.  It is what is going on in Syria now.

The US is the enemy of the enemies of ISIS

One reason that Al Qaeda and ISIS are strong is that US attacks on Muslim countries create the conditions of chaos in which they flourish.  Another is that the US government has been more interested in undermining nations that happen to be enemies of Al Qaeda and ISIS that in fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Women of Kurdistan

The latest example of this is President Obama’s support of the Turkish government in its attack on the Kurdish people.  The Kurds are dedicated and effective enemies of ISIS and support democracy, religious toleration and women’s rights, which are supposedly the ideals the US government represents.

But Kurdish nationalism threatens the unity of Turkey, and the support of Turkey is essential to the covert war being waged by the United States against Syria, whose government also is an enemy of ISIS.

The “war on terror” which the United States began on Sept. 12, 2001, is on the one hand so urgent that we Americans are being asked to give up basic Constitutional liberties, but on the other hand not important enough to distract from overthrowing regimes that Washington has targeted—first Saddam, then Qadaffi and now Assad.

LINKS

The Politics of Betrayal: Obama Backstabs Kurds to Appease Turkey by Mike Whitney for Counterpunch.

Turkey’s conflict with Kurdish guerillas in Iraq can benefit Isis in Syria by Patrick Cockburn for The Independent.

Has Iran cut off Hamas?  Is Hamas Turning to Saudi Arabia? by Juan Cole for Informed Comment.

USA should join with Iran against ISIS

Israel and Saudi Arabia are not friends and do not even have diplomatic relations, but they work in parallel when it is in their national interest to do so.

Why should not the governments of the United States and Iran work together against our common enemies, the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) and Al Qaeda?

This would make more sense than trying to fight ISIS and Al Qaeda while making common cause with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates against the main enemies of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Tom Jansson cartoon for The Cagle Post

Maybe this is what President Obama had in mind.  Maybe this is already U.S. policy.  If so, good!

Americans criticize the Iranian government for giving weapons and other help to armed factions in other countries, but that is no different from what the Saudis, the Gulf emirates, Israel and the United States itself does.  Iran’s current intervention in Iraq and Syria is at the invitation of the governments of those countries.

I think the violent conflicts in the Middle East, including the Sunni-Shiite conflict, would die down if Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, the USA and other countries agreed among themselves to stop giving weapons, supplies and money to the various battling groups.

Unfortunately that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.  But I have to say the such an agreement is more likely than other nations agreeing to be neutral while the US government continues conducting bombing campaigns and arming its own proxies.

Iran and the United States are neither friends nor enemies.  They are countries with their own interests, which sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict.

LINKS

Rethinking Iran by Kevin Schwartz and Arjun Singh Sethi for Counterpunch.

U.S. actually backs al Qaeda rebels in Syria

It’s surprising how little of the “war on terror” has been directed against the actual killers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” included Iraq and Iran, two nations whose rulers were enemies of al Qaeda, and North Korea, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The U.S. attacks on Iraq and Libya, and the attempted overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, created chaos and lawlessness in which al Qaeda could flourish.  The rulers of Libya and Syria had proven their willingness to co-operate with the United States, so what U.S. policy showed is that there is nothing to be gained in being a friend of the USA.

Now the U.S. government is supporting the Nusra front, an al Qaeda unit, in Syria, as an alternative to the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) insurgents there.  Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire wrote an illuminating post about this.

If the U.S. government’s top priorities were to eliminate al Qaeda and ISIS, we would co-operate with their enemies, namely Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.  They are more effective fighting forces than the U.S.-trained Iraqi army.

Why don’t we?  Is it because Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, and not al Qaeda and ISIS, are the main enemies of Israel and Saudi Arabia?  Do the Pentagon and State Department think it is possible to get control of Middle East oil by military force?  Or does continuous war have a self-perpetuating momentum that nobody is willing to stop?

Decades of war haven’t made the USA safer

American intervention in the Middle East is not a reaction to anti-American Muslim terrorism.  Anti-American terrorism is a response to American intervention in the Middle East, which goes back long before Al Qaeda or ISIS.

The Reagan administration’s naval bombardment of Lebanon and aerial bombing of Libya were acts of war, and created a precedent for further acts of war.

Such acts have become so common that we Americans have come to think of them as normal, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the opinion the relatives and loved ones of the civilians killed in those bombings.

Al Qaeda’s original complaint against the United States, remember, was that American troops didn’t belong on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia.   U.S. troops came to Saudi Arabia as part of the war to drive Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait, and remained there as part of the low-level war against Iraq through the 1990s.

I’m not trying to justify Al Qaeda, or ISIS, either.  To the contrary!  I’m just recalling known historical facts.

Andrew Bacevich, writing in the Washington Post, counts 13 majority-Muslim countries that the United states has invaded, occupied or bombed since 1980, without either bringing stability to the region or making Americans more secure.

The Saudi roots of ISIS and the 9/11 attacks

It is impossible for the United States armed forces to put an end to Islamic jihadist terrorism.

That is because Al Qaeda, ISIS and their ilk have their roots in a country that is off limits to American military action.

In the same of fighting terrorism, the United States has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, helped overthrow the government of Libya, is working to overthrow the government of Syria and has imposed sanctions on Iran.

President Obama visits Saudi Arabia in March

Yet the U.S. government does not touch Saudi Arabia.   Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and so were most of the 9/11 hijackers.  Sections of a Senate report that allegedly implicate elements of the Saudi government in the 9/11 attacks have been blacked out and declared as classified information.

The Saudi government, along with Qatar and other Gulf sheikdoms, provided the funding for ISIS and the other radical jihadist groups now fighting  in Syria and Iraq.  All these groups are adherents of Wahhabism, the most radical and intolerant Islamic sect, which is based in Saudi Arabia and supported by the Saudi government.

Why would the U.S. government, through Republican and Democratic administrations, tolerate such a situation?

The U.S. “deep state”—the permanent part of the government that is untouched by elections—is committed to protecting Saudi Arabia in return for Saudi help in regulating oil prices and oil supply.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s richest countries, and one of its weakest.  The sparse Saudi population is incapable of defending the country against stronger nations such as Iraq or Iran.  But none of those nations dare attack Saudi Arabia so long as the nation is under the protection of the U.S. military.

The problem is that the source of the Saudi monarchy’s power, the force that enabled the House of Saud to conquer the Arabia peninsula in the first place, is the support of the Wahhabi movement, a highly strict Muslim sect which regards all other Muslims as untrue to the faith.

Wahhabi teachings are incompatible with the self-indulgent lives of many rich Arabs, including some of the members of the Saudi royal family, so the Saudis buy them off by subsidizing Wahhabi schools throughout the Muslim world, and supporting Wahhabi jihads, which, conveniently, are usually against nations such as Iran, Syria or the Shiite government of Iraq that are rivals to Saudi power.

The CIA on occasion found them useful tools as, for example, the overthrow of Qaddafi’s regime in Libya and the ongoing fight against the Assad regime in Syria.

President Bush receives a Saudi delegation

The Saudis meanwhile have close ties with American politicians and business executives.  Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, was a leading light on the Washington social scene.  He was so close to the Bush family that his nickname was Bandar Bush.

Matt Stoller wrote an excellent article about this for the Medium news site.  He pointed out that the Saudi monarchy is not a unified government, but consists of different factions with different aims.  The Saudi leaders have to be concerned with keeping a balance of power between the different factions and are not in a position to act decisively against any one of them.

The same is true of the government of Pakistan, which he didn’t mention.  Evidently there are factions in Pakistan’s government that are pro-Taliban, factions that are anti-Taliban and factions that think the Taliban is useful in fighting proxy wars against India.

Such a balance of power cannot be maintained forever.  Sooner or later there will have to be a showdown the Saudi monarchy and radical jihadist fanatics. which the monarchy may not win.

Last week the top Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa condemning ISIS and calling for public executions of its members.  Saudi Arabia has staged public executions of ISIS members.  That’s a welcome change.  I wish I knew enough to judge whether the change is permanent and whether the crackdown applies to top people in the Saudi power structure.

I must confess I don’t know what to do to prevent a jihadist takeover of Saudi Arabia, or what to do when and if it happens.  But if we Americans can bring our covert foreign policy out into the open, and discuss what to do, we at least will not be taken by surprise.

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees free speech to all Americans.   Article One, Section 6, says Senators and Representatives cannot be called to account outside of Congress for anything they say on the floor of Congress.   It is high time they exercise these rights and powers.

Why the U.S. lost the war on terror

The war on terror is over …  Terror won. [1]

Following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States began what was called the “war on terror.”  This war [2] has been lost.  Anti-American terrorists are many times stronger now than they were back then, and the U.S. government lacks a feasible strategy for fighting them.

It didn’t have to be this way.  Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the whole world, including most of the Islamic world, was outraged at the killing of 3,000 innocent civilians, and rallied to the side of the USA.  There were pro-American demonstrations even in Tehran!

This would have been a great opportunity to shut down Al Qaeda for good.  Al Qaeda was a criminal conspiracy and a would-be mass movement.  The way to fight a mass movement is to cut it off from its popular support.  The way to fight a criminal conspiracy is to cut if off from its sources of money.  Both of these, in my opinion, were feasible at the time.

But this was not the path that was taken.

Instead of targeting Al Qaeda, the U.S. government decided to target hostile governments—perhaps on the theory that the Pentagon does not know how to fight mass movements, but does know how to invade small foreign countries.

Instead of targeting countries in which Al Qaeda had its roots, such as Saudi Arabia, the U.S. invaded Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, was an enemy of Al Qaeda, while continuing its cold war with Iran, also an enemy of Al Qaeda.  Later the U.S. helped overthrow the government of Libya and plotted to overthrow the government of Syria, whose leaders, Qaddafi and Assad, were not anti-American, but eager to stay in the good graces of the U.S. government.

U.S. invasions reduced Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to bloody chaos, which are precisely the conditions in which radical and terrorist mass movements flourish.  Since the U.S. military has yet to figure out how to deal with insurgencies, the U.S. government has relied on assassination teams, flying killer robots and use of local forces as proxies.

Assassination teams are effective in taking out leaders.  I can’t count the number of times the death of Al Qaeda’s “second in command” has been announced.   Flying killer robots are less so.  But mass movements throw up new leaders.  Osama bin Laden is dead, and his original organization probably is need, but new Al Qaedas have sprung up in Yemen and Iraq, and the so-called Islamic State is even more radical than Al Qaeda.

Use of proxies has backfired time and time again.  The weapons the U.S. government gives to its supposed friends wind up in the hands of its enemies, either because the supposed friends are not willing to fight or because the supposed friends have their own objectives which are different from what we Americans think.

The USA has had too many enemies in the Middle East, so that the enemies of our enemies are also our enemies.   We were enemies of the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran, but supported their Shiite allies in Iraq against Saddam’s loyalists and radical Sunni Muslim jihadists.   We were enemies of the radical jihadist Muslims, but we supported them against Libya’s Qaddafi and Syria’s Assad.  Now Washington journalists and politicians talk about supporting Iran and its Syrian and Iraqi allies against the jihadist Islamic State.

It is no wonder there is no faction in the Middle East the U.S. government can trust.  Nor is it any wonder there is no faction that trusts the U.S. government.

Having no clear aims of its own, the U.S. government follows the lead of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchs such as Qatar, all of whom naturally follow their own perceived interests,

I am as horrified by the actions of the so-called Islamic State movement as anybody else.  But I can’t think of anything the Obama administration could do that won’t make matters worse.   Bomb the Islamic State forces?  Bombing from the air terrorizes and alienates the mass of the people below.  Arm the Iraqi government?  The U.S. arms they were given previously wound up in the hands of the Islamic State.   Arm the Kurds?  Maybe.

We Americans have lost all moral standing in the Middle East to denounce the crimes of the Islamic State.  That is because hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners have died as the result of U.S. military action, and hundreds of thousands more have been turned into refugees.  [3]   Nobody in that part of the world has any reason to take seriously anything an American says.  [4]   The Islamic State is an evil for the Arabs to deal with (or not), not us.

The best thing for us Americans to do is to admit defeat, wind down our presence in the Middle East and concentrate on rebuilding our own nation.

Proxy war and the arming of Al Qaeda

The American people have no desire to send U.S. troops into more foreign wars, so the U.S. government is arming Syrian rebels to serve as our proxies for overthrowing the rule of Bashir al-Assad.   By channeling arms to the “moderate” rebel forces, the Obama administration hopes to prevent Assad from being replaced by radical Al Qaeda jihadists.

Forces in Syria as of March

As Pepe Escobar wrote in his latest column for Asia Times, the problem with that is the troops aligned with Al Qaeda are the fiercest fighters, and they’re getting all the weapons and support they want from the Saudi Arabian government.   They also are working to overthrow the Shiite government of Anwar al-Maliki in Iraq.  A possible result of the Syrian rebellion is two new governments aligned with Al Qaeda—Syria and Iraq.

Such governments, unlike the Saddam, Qaddafi and Assad regimes, really might be a threat to Americans—not to the existence of the United States, but to us Americans as individuals.  This is another good reason for the U.S. government to make peace with Iran and form an alliance against Al Qaeda.

Another example of bad consequences of a proxy war is given by Ian Welsh (whose web log is the newest addition to my Blogs I Like links page).   He wrote about how the attack by Muslim terrorists on the Nairobi Mall in Kenya was blowback from a U.S.-inspired Kenyan invasion of Somalia.

I am reminded of Adam Smith’s comment about how masterminds who think they can manipulate other people like pieces of a chessboard forget that the chessmen are playing their own games, which may be different from what the mastermind intended.

I think there are two good rules for the United States for intervening in foreign wars.

1. Don’t arm our avowed enemies.
2. Don’t attack people who are not our enemies.

Leakers of secrets who won’t be punished

[Update 9/24/13.  The “leak” may have been disinformation.  No such conference call seems to have taken place.  Either the information came from other sources or it was bogus.]

Somebody leaked to The Daily Beast, an on-line newspaper, that the reason the U.S. State Department is closing embassies throughout the Middle East is information revealed in a conference call between Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top leader of al Qaeda, and more than 20 al Qaeda affiliates.

Al Zawahiri thought his communications were secure, but, because of the information leak, he now knows they aren’t.  If that information hadn’t been leaked, maybe it would have been possible use to continue eavesdropping and figure out the locations of al Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders.

Why then was the information leaked?  My guess is that the leakers’ purpose was to silence critics of the Obama administration who claim that the closing of the embassies was intended as a distraction from the controversy over Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program.

Unlike Snowden and others who leak information embarrassing to the government, these leakers will not be tracked down and punished, any more than earlier leakers who have revealed information about successful intelligence operations against al Qaeda.

The U.S. government has always been concerned about the leaking of information to the public that makes the government look bad, even when the information happens to be well-known to America’s enemies.  Since 2001, it has seldom if ever been concerned about leaking of information that may be helpful to America’s enemies but makes the government took good.

These leaks make me skeptical of the claim that the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping has thwarted plots that the agency can’t reveal because of national security considerations.  If there were successes, the information would be made known.  The pattern I see is that public relations trumps national security.

U.S. aligns with al Qaeda rebels in Syria

The United States government proclaims it is committed to all-out war against the radical terrorists of al Qaeda, who supposedly are as great a threat as the followers of Hitler and Stalin in earlier eras.  Because of this threat, our government claims unprecedented powers to eavesdrop on citizens and create “kill lists.”  Yet to achieve certain objectives, such as the overthrow of the governments of Libya and Syria, the U.S. government aligns itself with the very forces it considers an existential threat.

There have been three troublesome factions in Middle East politics—Sunni Muslim theocrats, such as al Qaeda and the Taliban, Shiite Muslim theocrats, such as the ayatollahs in Iran, and secular dictators, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  The problem is that a U.S. attack on any one of these factions strengthens the other two.  I wouldn’t want to live under any of the above, and, all other things being equal, I would be glad to see them out of power.   But I imagine a lot of people living in the Middle East think it is better to live under a tyrant than to suffer foreign invasion, civil war and a society reduced to chaos.

The invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam empowered the Shiites, who are the majority of the people of Iraq.   Shiites also were an important part of the Northern Allliance, which helped overthrow the Taliban.  So the U.S. invasions of these two countries actually strengthened the position of the Iranian ayatollahs, who were part of George W. Bush’s so-called “Axis of Evil.”

In the same way, the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi and the arming of the rebels in Syria has strengthened al Qaeda, a long-time enemy of Qaddafi and Assad.

While the U.S. government supports the overthrow of governments that have nothing to do with al Qaeda, it maintains its alliance with Saudi Arabia, where al Qaeda is said to still have financial backers and whose government sponsors the fanatic, intolerant Wahhabist or Salafist sect of Islam, to which al Qaeda gives its allegiance..  The U.S. government may fire drone missiles into villages in Yemen, but for various reasons, including oil, it won’t touch Saudi Arabia.

Likewise, the U.S. government is allied to the government of Pakistan, whose Inter-Service Intelligence agency (its version of the CIA) was the original backer of the Taliban.  The U.S. may fire drone missiles into tribal areas of Pakistan, but it won’t and can’t go after Taliban backers in the ISI.

What to do?  As a first step, maybe we Americans should just stop intervening in the affairs of countries we don’t understand.

The 9-11 Decade: Crusaders and Jihadists

This is the last of three interesting documentaries by the Al Jazeera network on the consequences of the 9-11 attacks.

It shows that the goal of Al Qaeda was to instigate a war between the United States and the whole civilization of Islam.  Al Qaeda discredited itself through indiscriminate killing of innocent people, but it remains to be seen whether it has failed to achieve its goal.

The 9-11 Decade: Spin, lies and video

In war, it is said, truth is the first casualty.  In a propaganda war, truth is the first enemy.

That’s why, in the war on terror, the United States military and intelligence agencies once regarded Al Jazeera as an enemy, and now regards Wikileaks as an enemy.   It doesn’t matter that Al Jazeera broadcast quoted President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell hundreds of times for every time they quoted Osama bin Laden.  From the point of view of Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it was a hostile act to let the world hear bin Laden’s words at all.

I don’t think Al Jazeera was ever especially the enemy of the United States.  Al Jazeera’s maintained a remarkable level of objectivity, considering how U.S. forces abused and killed some of their employees.

I know from my own experience that journalists who report on their own news organizations walk a tightrope.  In this documentary, Al Jazeera walks the tightrope well.  It shows that what really swayed the hearts and minds of the world’s people were the actions and not the propaganda of the U.S. armed forces and the Al Qaeda operatives.  In the end, Al Qaeda was discredited not by U.S. propaganda, but by its own actions, the indiscriminate killing of fellow Muslims in Iraq.

The 9-11 Decade: Hunting down Al-Qaeda

The Al Jazeera network is uniquely able to report on the war on terror because it draws on information all sides.  We Americans mostly get our government’s propaganda version, as transmitted by CNN and the other U.S. networks, while Al Jazeera shows the world as people outside the United States see it.  In this particular documentary,  Al Jazeera relied mainly on U.S. sources, including certain retired CIA employees, and.

Overall the documentary enhances the reputation of U.S. intelligence agencies.  The Central Intelligence Agency figured out long before the 9-11 attacks that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network were a particularly dangerous threat to the United States.  The National Security Agency by surveillance of telephone calls traced Osama bin Laden to his hideout in Afghanistan.

President Bush said the purpose of invading Afghanistan was to apprehend bin Laden “dead or alive.”  But the Pentagon decided – against the CIA’s advice, the retired CIA officials said – to outsource the mission of apprehending bin Laden to Afghan warlords, partly because they knew the territory but also because American troops were needed for the impending invasion of Iraq.  As a result, bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.   Al Jazeera journalists retraced bin Laden’s escape route.

One of the CIA’s great successes was the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who, according to the documentary, was in charge of the logistics of moving Al Qaeda members and supplies from Afghanistan to Pakistan and the rest of the world.  They knew that he was in one of 14 safe houses in a city in Pakistan, and they successfully raided all 14 simultaneously.  This gave them a trove of information on Al Qaeda members, plans, codes and sources of supply.  However, the Bush administration had other priorities besides tracking down Al Qaeda.

The United States, from the Civil War to the Korean Conflict, has won (I would argue the U.S. won in Korea) through use of superior firepower.  Starting with the Vietnam Conflict, the enemies of the United States have found ways of negating U.S. firepower and even a judo-like way of using this U.S. strength to their own advantage.

So it was in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  The only way in which application of firepower helped in bringing down Al Qaeda was in driving Osama bin Laden from his mountain stronghold in Afghanistan to a more accessible hideout in a city in Pakistan.  In the end Osama bin Laden was destroyed not by bombings and drone attacks, but by detective work and effective covert action.

The legacy of Osama bin Laden

This two-part video series by Al Jazeera told me things I hadn’t known.  Osama bin Laden was the one behind the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.  The notion that he suffered kidney failure or was on dialysis was an urban legend.  Bin Laden was taken advantage of by the government of Sudan, but had a tight relationship with the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, whom he helped defeat his internal enemies.  More than any detail, it opens up a world to which I wouldn’t otherwise see.

It is a mistake to think of Osama bin Laden as yesterday’s news.  He is dead, but his example lives on and, unfortunately, will continue to inspire for some time to come.

The crimes of al Qaeda terrorism

We Americans remember Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda mostly for planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the earlier attacks on the USS Cole off Yemen and U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  But al Qaeda’s victims also include commuters in London and Madrid, dance hall patrons in Bali, hundreds of peaceful Shiite worshipers in Iraq and many others.

Madrid terror bombing

Click on the links below for a review of Al-Qaeda’s crimes.

Fact Sheet: Al Qaeda and Taliban Atrocities by the U.S. Department of State

al-Zarqawi’s toll of atrocities by Adam Fresco of the London Times

Timeline of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s atrocities by the London Telegraph.

Bin Laden’s global campaign leaves world bloodied by Luke Baker of Reuters

It is too bad Osama bin Laden can’t be put on trial.  This would have been a good opportunity to show the world the evidence of al Qaeda’s crimes.

And, no, I don’t think the misdeeds of the United States, Israel or other countries excuse or mitigate the crimes of al Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda and the death of Osama bin Laden

Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent for The Independent of London, has covered the Middle East from his home in Bierut for more than 30 years.  He interviewed Osama bin Laden three times.  Click on Robert Fisk for his web log.