For why most of the Middle East academic establishment in the US has proven itself so utterly and completely bankrupt so as to ensure that under no circumstances whatsoever should it be trusted with anything relating to US national security.
UPDATE: Just because I’m in vindictive mood today:
Except that Bush probably wasn’t just talking about Abu Sayyaf, which is actually estimated at 200-500 members by our own State Department. Rather, he was probably also talking at least in part about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) which, as ICT notes:
Recently, the group has been in the spotlight due to revelations of links between key members and Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida network. In 1999, the group’s leader Hashim Salamat, admitted to recieving “significant funding” from bin Ladin. As many as several hundred MILF members from Mindanao are believed to have trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, and to have established ties with al-Qaida commanders. A number of the Jemaah Islamiah members arrested in Singapore in 2000 admitted to having trained at MILF camps, while one of the al-Qaida “consultants” who advised the Singapore cell had formerly worked as an explosives expert for the MILF.
Sorta helps to put things in context, no?
Moving right along:
This is such a crock, especially when one takes a look at the character of several of the major Islamist groups fighting in Kashmir according to the prestigious Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
First, the Lashkar-e-Taiba:
All of this, incidentally, is irrespective of the LeT role in carrying out terrorist attacks well outside of Kashmir or its role in the London bombings - the latter being a line of analysis that Juan himself supported at the time! But now that he wants to bash Bush, the Pakistani terrorists active in Kashmir are back to being post-colonial fighters and the Indians are mostly to blame for the violence.
Then there is the Jaish-e-Mohammed:
And the Harakat ul-Ansar:
Juan then continues:
Yet the demands of the Chechen jihadis now go far beyond mere autonomy. In the words of Amir Ramzan:
R: Yes, very much so. Not only we carry out raids to various areas in the Caucasus, but we also form local Jama’ats, militant sabotage groups locally. We are joined by a lot of Kabardinians, Dagestanis, Karachaevans, Ingushetians and even Ossetians (Muslims).
Q: That means that those in Russia who say that you want to create a caliphate in the Caucasus from sea to sea, are right?
R: Yes, it is so. Since they are unwilling to negotiate with us, then we’ll be doing what we can. And there is a lot we can do. Next year the war will seize the entire Caucasus from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Apart from Ossetia and Ingushetia, this year another guerrilla war has already started in two areas of Dagestan bordering Chechnya. I swear by Allah, this is only the beginning. Russian authorities are well aware of this and this is why they are trying to organize formations of the local residents in the area who could resist us effectively. Similar process is taking place in Chechnya. But it will come to absolutely nothing. Having reached a certain level of confrontation inside Chechnya, Russia will sooner or later have to withdraw its troops beyond the Terek River, for instance. In that case we will need no more than two weeks to destroy all the pro-Russian puppet formations.
He then asserts that the Algerian government has won its war with radical Islamists:
Well in case Juan hasn’t noticed, Islamist violence in Algeria is thankfully on the decline but it certainly isn’t over with just yet. Indeed, it is attacks like these that Juan repeatedly cites to highlight what he regards as the US failure in Iraq. Indeed, it is the continuing threat of the GSPC outside of Algeria that prompted the Pan-Sahel Initiative.
Actually the Pakistani elite felt badly burnt by the US after the Cold War and had been drifting heavily in the direction of China ever prior to 9/11. Right now, the US has an excellent relationship with the Musharraf government but still suffers from the problem that General Musharraf, for all his talents, has been unable or unwilling to implement the kind of reforms needed to fully dismantle the institutional support for jihad in Kashmir in his country.
So there you have it, then. Don’t intervene militarily anywhere in the Muslim world because Muslim radicals are such a powerful force that they’ll send US troops home by the thousand in bodybags.
And yet ...
The fact that Juan compares the threat posed by radical Islamists to that posed by the Weathermen is one of the primary reasons that makes his line of analysis so off the mark. The body count from a single al-Qaeda attack is more than the Weather Underground were able to inflict during the entirety of their miserable existence from 1969 to 1975.
And then he defends the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan!
Not surprisingly, he leaves out Carter in his discussion of who funded the Afghan mujahideen. One of the more amusing arguments from Cole is this insinuation that all Muslim states have a guaranteed sovereignty that the US must respect, though it appears the USSR need not.
Note that the radicalization of the Iraqi Sunnis is attributed entirely to Bush and the US invasion, not Saddam’s own campaign of religious radicalization in order to justify his Islamist credentials during the 1990s. Must be nice when you can blame all contemporary problems on just one man.
Another interesting thing about Cole’s remarks is that they more or less argue that the Western rationale for supporting Saddam in the 1980s because he was a bulwark against the spread of Islamic extremism was more or less correct. If you want to buy into that, that’s fine, but it makes it more than a little difficult for him to take up the stance of moral outrage whenever someone displays that famous picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
But who thinks this particular crackpot plan is in any way feasible? Look at America’s friends in the Middle East-- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, etc., etc. Which one of them is on the verge of being taken over by al-Qaeda? Why, al-Qaeda had to plan out 9/11 from Europe because it could not operate in the Middle East! An al-Qaeda meeting in Cairo would have had more Egyptian government spies in attendance than radical fundamentalists!
Actually, al-Qaeda planned 9/11 mostly out of Afghanistan. In answer to Juan’s question, an al-Qaeda victory in Iraq could easily leave Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait open to al-Qaeda coups, as could Pakistan in the event of a successful assassination of General Musharraf and his senior deputies.
Sudan is an Arab nationalist government?
I find this quite interesting given Cole’s earlier ethusiastic endorsement of Imperial Hubris, which argues pretty much the exact opposite of this tripe. Then again, he’s on one of his anti-Bush screeds, so I guess we shouldn’t expect anything on the order of consistency with his previous arguments on the subject he purports to be an expert in.
Not one, Juan? Then how exactly should one explain Syrian sponsorship of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. An overly intellectualized view of the Syrian regime prevents Juan from accepting this even when readily-recognized facts go against his arguments.
I’m sure they do. Most US allegations, however, tend to focus on the Revolutionary Guards, who have shown themselves willing to work with the Marxist PKK in the past despite their own concerns about Kurdish separatism and the complete suppression of communism inside Iran proper. What this might indicate is that the Iranians, for all their fanaticism, are far more capable of pragmatic thinking than Juan is willing to give them credit for.
Juan then proceeds to argue that Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the US occupation of Iraq give al-Qaeda’s ideology (since the actual organization isn’t a threat, per him) credibility, though his reference to the “creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem” leaves one wondering what exactly he thinks about the former issue. He also argues that the US withdrawing from Iraq won’t prompt any serious strengthening of al-Qaeda (a view accepted nowhere in counter-terrorism circles, even those that disagreed with the invasion) and that no one seriously believes they can beat the US. Color me quite skeptical on that particular note.
His repeated attempt to draw an analogy between al-Qaeda and the terrorist groups of yesteryear once again reaffirms that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about:
Baader-Meinhof only killed 30-50 people from its inception in the early 1970s to its 1998 dissolution. Zarqawi kills more people than that in Iraq in an average week, though Juan can’t accept that since it conflicts with his belief that the man doesn’t exist or isn’t a threat so that he can frame the militant opposition to the US presence in Iraq within the context of a grassroots nationalist campaign among the nation’s Sunnis. Except, of course, when he needs to criticize Bush on the grounds that the war in Iraq has increased the terrorist threat, at which point Zarqawi once again emerges as a force to be reckoned with.
Then he proceeds to personalize the argument:
Had Juan ever heard of bin Laden before 1998?
He then proceeds to argue that the US should force Israel to destroy its nuclear program. How exactly we’re supposed to do this is beyond me, but then he doesn’t appear to understand the differences between having a dictatorship with nuclear weapons and a democracy having them.
Then he argues that he isn’t really going to believe anything Bush says in any event while invoking class warfare:
In which case he should simply just write one two minute hate a day and repost it as needed. His arguments about Syria or Iran concerning their WMD capabilities are a red herring, given that Bush’s speech had to do with both of them being state sponsors of terrorism, not WMD threats to the US.
Then we get the fact that Juan simply doesn’t believe that Bush’s speech has much of a relationship to reality, which here again is one of the reasons why I think he removes himself from serious discussion on this issue. If he doesn’t think that there’s any relationship between the Kashmiri, Filippino, Chechen, or Algerian conflicts and the broader issue of al-Qaeda or international terrorism, then he’s ignoring a whole wealth of research on the subject by any number of serious people on the subject because it doesn’t fit with his worldview.
Reality-based community indeed.
