 sk yourself one question -
if Osama Bin Laden is still alive, what would he hope the
US and the British will do? The answer is that he would like
nothing more than a US invasion of Iraq as soon as possible
with or without the support of the UN (and indeed preferably
with the support of the local Arab states that he has spent
so long trying to bring down).Nothing will consolidate support for his appalling
project quicker or more effectively amongst ordinary Muslims
in and beyond the Middle East. Simple logic ought to tell
Tony Blair that a movement that is fuelled by "martyrs" will
only gain from the many thousands of bereaved families that
any attack on Iraq is bound to cause.
Bush and Blair are not making war on terror. Terror is a
tactic -an approach
to struggle - not even Bush "the Global Village Idiot" can
make war on a tactic. One might as well make war on humour.
Instead of being a war against AlQaida's terrorism, an invasion
of Iraq will be a dangerous distraction from it. Worse than
this, its will play straight into Bin Laden's hands. Any attempt
to counter the new form of martyr-terrorism that itself creates
more martyrs is worse than self- defeating - it is positively
suicidal.
The most insidious characteristic of martyr-terrorism is
that it actively seeks to get its opponents to lash out wildly
and promote yet more hatred. Ultimately it expects to be able
to prod the West into a full scale Middle East war and thus
assist it in its own project to destabilise local regimes
and gain new supporters for its bloody jihad.
One of the most fatuous arguments put forward recently in
the US (and sadly increasingly by some in the UK) is that
the AlQaida network is directly related to Saddam. For many
years Al Qaida and other extremist Islamic groups have sought
to bring down the secular Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein
in Iraq and Assad in Syria. Conversely, at the end of the
Gulf war during the Shia uprisings against Saddam in southern
Iraq, the Iraqi Government forces and secret police assassinated
or tortured anyone who was seen as an islamist - indeed almost
anyone who wore a beard. Saddam has been conducting a ruthless
struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood and its more extreme
counterparts such as AlQaida for rather longer than have the
UK and the US.
Nevertheless the US in its myopic ignorance is all too willing
to believe in the false argument that because they have two
enemies, those enemies must be friends with each other. Ironically,
the US is about to act in such a way that it might just force
them to become so. Of course Saddam is an evil dictator and
no one should minimise the appalling breaches of human rights,
the torture, arbitrary executions and everyday violence that
characterises his regime. Yes Saddam is a bastard. The problem
is that until fairly recently he was "our bastard". Supported
and armed by the West as a bulwark against the Iranians, feted
at arms conferences and excused by the Western powers for
many of the outrages (such as the chemical attack on the Kurds)
that only now surface in their ritual denunciations that are
designed to urge us to support war.
Another insidious characteristic of Bin Laden's form of terrorism
is that it occupies a strange symbiotic relationship with
the other religious fundamentalisms that claim to be most
opposed to it. The rhetoric of a war between civilisations
is becoming increasingly shared between Christian, Jewish
and Muslim extremists (and indeed Hindu fanatics after the
recent troubles in Kashmir and Gujerat). Jihads and crusades
are all too similar.To
countenance a war on Iraq without a more concerted attempt
to restrain Israel and promote a just settlement between Israel
and Palestine will be a hugely dangerous and inflammatory
undertaking (see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban).
Of course Islamic extremists do not want such a settlement.
Many Christian fundamentalists in the US alongside the neo-conservatives
in Bush's Government clearly don't want one either. Nor do the extremists in the Israeli Government
or the settlers in the Occupied Territories. Jewish fundamentalism
and the settlers movement needs Hamas and Islamic Jihad and
vice versa. This is why whenever there is a small movement
towards any kind of talks on Palestine, either Sharon assassinates
a Hamas leader or conducts a military incursion into Palestinian
neighbourhoods or young Palestinian men and women are dispatched
to blow themselves up in Israeli townships. Christian and
Zionist fundamentalism will be as much to blame for the conflagration
that is likely to sweep the Middle East as the fanaticism
of Osama Bin Laden.
It has been estimated that as many as 40 million Christian
fundamentalists in the US seriously believe that a war on
Iraq and the consolidation of Judeah and Samareah (the WestBank
and Gaza) into a Greater Israel is an immediate precursor
to the coming of the Antichrist to be followed by the day
of judgement and the second coming of Christ as foretold in
St John of the Revelations. Books putting forward this bizarre
theory are piled high in every WalMart store in the US. This
is Bush's natural constituency and he is unlikely to face
them down whatever Tony Blair may say.
Over the last few months Al Qaida has gained appreciably
more support for itself in the Arab and Muslim world because
of its recent attacks on specifically Israeli targets in Mombasa.
Whether or not Osama is still alive, the decision to focus
more on Israeli and jewish targets shows the increasing influence
of the senior Al Qaida chief Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri,
who has been described as Osama Bin Laden's mentor, has long
been urging Al Qaida to focus more on the central question
of Palestine rather than the issues Bin Ladin has hitherto
pushed - US troops in Saudi Arabia and the defence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan. Zawahiri was the leader of the banned
Egyptian Islamic Jihad and has been described as "knowing
more about both Islam and the modern world" than Osama himself (Rashid) .
So far there is no evidence that Al Qaida has developed extensive
contacts with Hamas and some of the other Palestinian terrorist
groups, let alone with Saddam. This is likely to change significantly
in the event of a new Gulf War and the increasing influence
of Ayman al Zawahiri on the Al Qaida network. Yet again the
West is set to reap a whirlwind in the Middle East that is entirely of its own making.
The more Bush and Blair's irresponsible war-mongering has
continued, the more extraordinary hypocrisies have surfaced.
There has been no serious attempt to curtail the activities
of the only local state that actually is known to have nuclear
biological and chemical weapons - Israel. A move towards a
two state solution in Israel and Palestine might have been
the only way that Bush and Blair could have mitigated the
appalling consequences for World opinion and Muslim outrage
that will result from an attack on Iraq. To contemplate a
full scale attack on Iraq without any move to solve the problems
in the Palestinian territories is a quite extraordinarily
stupid approach. But of course the Christian fundamentalists
in alliance with the pro Israeli lobby in the US would not
contemplate this and Bush naturally fell in with them (followed
shortly afterwards by his British poodles).
The constant harping on about Saddam's use of poison gas
both in the first Gulf War and against the Kurds at Halabja
forgets not only that the West did nothing about these incidents
at the time they happened, and that the West sold him most
of the precursor chemicals necessary to make the things in
the first place. The US knew he was building them to use against
the Iranians. But it also forgets perhaps the greatest hypocrisy
of all - that the first people to use poison gas in the region
were the British during and after the First World War whilst
they were setting up the unstable and corrupt oligarchies
that are still so much a part of the problem today.
The more the US and the UK collude with Sharon, the more
we excuse the disgraceful abuses of Putin and the Russians
in Chechnya, the more we are seen to confront Muslim states
but fail to restrain Israel, the more we will be hated throughout
the world. Islam already sees itself as under world-wide attack
and its historic response to this is jihad. Whether or not
the UN is involved in a war on Iraq with the support of a
few Arab states will make little difference. The hatred felt
for the double standards of the US and its supporters has
already festered for so long that it is over-ripe to explode.
Such an explosion is very likely to follow an invasion of
Iraq and it would probably achieve many of the things that
Bin Laden would like. The toppling of a number of corrupt
Middle Eastern regimes - possibly even Saudi Arabia and Egypt,
the increased radicalisation of the Muslim masses, increased
support for suicide-bombers and other "martyrs", growing threats
to the West's trade and oil supplies. At the worst, nuclear
war if Israel is attacked with scud missiles. At the best,
world recession leading to increasing poverty in the South
and the growing desperation of those confronted daily on their
televisions with the vast and unobtainable wealth and waste
of the rich.
Blair is leading us into a growing cycle of poverty, fear
and terror because
he is afraid to stand up to a US administration dominated
by war-mongering fanatics. Only real leadership can extract
us from this desperate situation. The real lines of battle
are the fundamentalists of any persuasion against the rest.
Blair will not be forgiven if he sides with the fanatics. |
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