Geoff Arnold's Blog

Juan Cole has a piece in Salon entitled The Iraq war is over, and the winner is… Iran, in which he discusses the implications of this week’s love-in between Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (accompanied by eight cabinet ministers) and the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. I wonder how the neocons felt about al-Jaafari laying a wreath on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, not to mention all of the elaborate plans for joint oil projects, food shipments, electricity supply, and so forth. And how would the American voters feel about the fact that Iran will be providing a billion dollars in foreign aid to Iraq, to go along with the gazillions that the US taxpayer is contributing. (Of course the Iranian aid is unlikely to be recycled through American contractors.)

Money quote:

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq’s neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Over the last few days we’ve had to endure repeated expressions of incredulity by politicians and pundits about Islamism and the motivations of the London suicide bombers. Politicians such as Blair and Straw, op-ed writers like Cathy Young in today’s Boston Globe, and countless others reject the notion that there is any connection between Western policy – especially recent military actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – and the risk of terrorism.

Now on one level, such claims are trivially absurd. Simply consider the alternative: we are supposed to believe that terrorists who are clearly aligned with certain ideological groups such as al-Qaeda are entirely indifferent to the events that are held up by these groups as emblematic of their conflict. If there is no connection, why were New York, Madrid and London bombed, rather than, say, Paris, Beijing and Stockholm? Coincidence? A flip of the coin? A mere whim, unconnected to any historical reality? Of course not.

The reason for such illogic and denial is not hard to see. People confuse causality with responsibility, and responsibility with blame. There is no time to explore the complicated, messy nature of the real world: everything must be brought down to a simply dichotomy. Thus for Cathy Young, quoting a New York resident:

When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.” In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault.

The non-sequitur is breathtaking: a reasonable contributing cause is instantly transformed by Young into responsibility; “our fault” (and, implicitly, nobody else’s). And since this conclusion is (correctly) rejected, the original causal connection must be wrong! And the final twist: rather than recognizing her own muddled thinking, Young treats this as an example of “A moral muddle on the left”. This is pretty pathetic stuff from an editor of Reason magazine….

So where can we turn to for reasonable analysis, with logic and historical context? Johann Hari has two excellent pieces in the Independent which deserve your attention. First, cause and effect:: it all goes back to the way the Western powers carved up the Middle East, from Versailles to Yalta.

The reasoning of the perpetrators is explained in the 2001 book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man Bin Laden describes as his ‘mentor’. Into the 1990s, the Islamists became frustrated that they could not rally the ‘Muslim masses’ to overthrow their local tyrants. So they decided to strike the ‘big enemy’ – Western states – to re-energise Wahhabi jihadism and precipitate revolutions throughout the Middle East.

So Islamism is more a response to the decisions of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt than of Bush and Blair. Last Thursday was not the price for Afghanistan and Iraq; it was the price of decades of trading oil for tyranny without any regard to the consequences. These recent wars may have been useful propaganda tools for the jihadists, but saying they were their primary motivations does not match the evidence.

So much for the origins of the conflict: what about the response? In the piece just quoted, Hari considers, and dismisses, the simple solution: to give Bin Laden what he wants: concede Wahhabi control over all of historical Islam. As he points out, where would that end? Turkey? Spain? Kosovo? Much of India? Simplistic thinking, whether of military victory or defeatism, must be rejected.

In a follow-up piece last Friday, Hari argues for an alternative approach: a slower, messier, more complicated strategy. It has two key elements: engaging Muslim women, and eliminating Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil. On Muslim women:

One of the central tenets of [Wahhabism] is the inherent inferiority and weakness of women. Every jihadist I have ever met – from Gaza to Finsbury Park – has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression…. The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force.

And on dependency:

I have (reluctantly) begun to think that, until we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no amount of pressure will make our governments support real democracy and women’s rights in the region. The risk of another 1973-style oil-price shock will mean they will always support the “stability” of control over the gamble of proper democracy, no matter how enthusiastically the methods of control are rebranded or relaxed. Until we stop being addicted to the petrol and the status quo in the Middle East, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

AMERICAblog has a lengthy piece about how the British attempted to prevent an Al Qaeda bomb plot against London, and why they failed:

“ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year.”

This is essential – and infuriating – reading. It’s well documented, not conspiracy theory stuff. The Bush team inadvertantly* caused the name of a “mole” in Al Qaeda to become public, and…

“The appearance of Khan’s name in the New York Times on August 2 caused the British to have to swoop down on the London al-Qaeda cell to which he was speaking. As it was, 5 of them heard about Khan’s arrest and immediately fled. The British got 13, but it was early in their investigation and they had to let 5 go or charge them with minor offences”.

And the British authorities have now connected this group with last week’s bombing.

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* Let’s be charitable.

Sully admits, grudgingly, “Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let’s concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism?” How about the way that many of us proposed back in 2002-2003 while Sully was infatuated with Baghdad? Afghanistan and Palestine. Nail al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for which we had worldwide support, and really rebuild Afghanistan (thus demonstrating that we were serious about this not being a crusade). Meanwhile pull a Bush I on Israel and force through a real solution to the West Bank and Gaza. With all of that going on, it’s really doubtful that Saddam would have held out for more than a year or two….

And why on earth does Sully raise the spectre of Saddam helping al-Qaeda? Has he learned nothing? Is his argument so weak that he has to grasp at such totally discredited straws?

Of coure all of this is purely hypothetical, and presumes a basic competence in policy execution which is obviously absent in Bush’s team of bozos. In hindsight, since they were going to screw things up whatever they did, it would have been better if they’d done as little as possible to exacerbate the situation.