I’m not sure whether or not this is related to the recent resurgence of the US anti-war movement, but there have been two articles published over the last couple of weeks by academics (who else?) arguing that what we really need to do is negotiate with al-Qaeda.
This sentiment isn’t all that new, as I believe that UC Irvine’s Mark LeVine argued back in 2004 that what we really need is for the US to declare a truce with radical Islam. How exactly this is supposed to occur given that LeVine probably sees the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism as more of a “social movement” than an organized terror network is beyond me, but at the time I more or less dismissed his theory as being something that was so patently stupid on its surface that only an academic could believe it. The same is true of Pape’s occupation = terrorism foolishness, though at least that line pretends to follow some semblance of rational argumentation.
Well, two other academics recently published in the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times appear to arguing more or less the same thing. I’ll spare the whole “how dare the liberal media demean the sacrifices of our troops by peddling this crap during wartime” riff for now, so let me examine the substance of their arguments.
First of all, the two academics in question are Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, the Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard and Allen J. Zerkin, a research fellow at New York University’s Center for Catastrophic Preparedness and Response and an adjunct professor at its Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. I have never heard of them before this and I’m sure they’re nice people, but their arguments are little more than lunacy.
The basic gist of it, which I’ve heard in various forms online by people who’ve read but apparently not understood Imperial Hubris or the 9/11 Commission report, both of which argue that al-Qaeda hates the US for what we do in terms of policy rather than who we are as a society. The conclusion these individuals then reach is that because al-Qaeda hates us for our policies is that all we have to do is change our policies and they’ll be nice to us. There are a couple of problems with this, not the least of which being that it accepts al-Qaeda’s narrative of history as the correct one (or at least as close to being correct as post-modernism will allow among academics) without stopping to ask the question of how close that narrative is to reality.
For one thing, Al-Qaeda’s list of grievances is somewhat self-generating, as it includes the incarceration or prosecution of any member of the organization irrespective of their actions. It also includes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the independence of East Timor, the long-running conflicts in Algeria, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, and most recently the Pattani provinces of southern Thailand. Irrespective of just how great a role the US played in any of this, especially pre-9/11, the organization also argues that the US tried to use Serbia to de-Islamicize the Balkans during the early 1990s. I point this out because at some point you have to ask yourself how seriously one should consider these issues legitimate grievances and at what point they become enemy propaganda for recruiting purposes along the lines of “the Big Lie.”
But let’s just say that Ould Mohamedou and Zerkin are right and the US should just screw the Middle East and abandon just about anyone living in Eurasia or North Africa to the thrall of Osama bin Laden. You would think that people dealing in humanitarian policy and catastrophic preparedness would actually be concerned about the practical consequences of doing so, but I digress. What happens next?
Dr. Gunaratna addressed just that point back in 2002 for those of us who were actually interested in understanding our enemy:
As defined by Osama, Al Qaeda has short, mid, and long-term strategies. Before 9/11, its immediate goal was the withdrawl of US troops from Saudi Arabia and the creation there of a Caliphate. Its mid-term strategy was the ouster of the “apostate rulers” of the Arabian Peninsula and thereafter the Middle East and the creation of true Islamic states. And the long-term strategy was to build a formidable array of Islamic states - including ones with nuclear capability - to wage war on the US (the “Great Satan”) and its allies.
The Fifth Phase: This will be the point at which an Islamic state, or caliphate, can be declared. The plan is that by this time, between 2013 and 2016, Western influence in the Islamic world will be so reduced and Israel weakened so much, that resistance will not be feared. Al-Qaida hopes that by then the Islamic state will be able to bring about a new world order.
The Sixth Phase: Hussein believes that from 2016 onwards there will a period of “total confrontation.” As soon as the caliphate has been declared the “Islamic army” it will instigate the “fight between the believers and the non-believers” which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.
The Seventh Phase: This final stage is described as “definitive victory.” Hussein writes that in the terrorists’ eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the “one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn’t last longer than two years.
“About 45 seconds after the second round the third one landed on the roof of the south wing of the Capitol and exploded inside the building... We saw beautiful blossoms of flame and steel sprouting everywhere, dancing across the asphalt, thundering in the midst of splintered masonry and burning vehicles, erupting now inside and now outside the Capitol, wreaking their bloody toll in the ranks of tyranny and treason.”
“Then, of course, came the mopping-up period, when the last of the non-White bands were hunted down and exterminated, followed by the final purge of undesirable racial elements among the remaining White population ... But it was in the year 1999, according to the chronology of the Old Era — just 110 years after the birth of the Great One — that the dream of a White world finally became a certainty.”
As they say in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time saga, “No truce with the Shadow.”
