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March 8, 2005
Don't Stop With Syria's Occupation
by Juan Cole [http://www.juancole.com]
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=5106
Fareed Zakaria argues that Bush got one
thing right. Zakaria writes:
"Bush never accepted the view that Islamic
terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Instead, he veered toward the analysis that the
region was breeding terror because it had developed deep
dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost
total lack of political, economic, and social modernization.
The Arab world, in this analysis, was almost unique in that
over the past three decades it had become increasingly unfree,
even as the rest of the world was opening up. His solution,
therefore, was to push for reform in these lands."
I don't use the phrase "Islamic terrorism"
because "Islamic" refers to the essentials of the religion,
and it forbids terrorism (hirabah). But if Bush rejected
the idea that radical Muslim terrorism came out of religion
or culture, he was right.
I disagree with the rest of the paragraph,
though. Let's think about terrorism in the past few decades
in a concrete and historical way, and it is obvious that it
comes out of a reaction to being occupied militarily by foreigners.
The Muslim Brotherhood developed its Secret Apparatus and began
committing acts of terror in the 1940s in Egypt, which the British
had virtually reoccupied in order to deny it to the Italians
and then the Germans. The Brotherhood assassinated pro-British
judges and pro-British politicians (the British installed the
Wafd Party in power). The Brotherhood had grown to some half
a million members by 1948. Some Brothers also volunteered to
fight in Palestine against the rise of Israel, which they saw
as a colonial settler state.
After the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated
Prime Minister Nuqrashi in 1948, it was banned and dissolved.
It was briefly rehabilitated by Abdul Nasser in 1952-1954, but
in 1954 it tried to assassinate him, and he banned it again.
There was no major radical Muslim terrorism in Egypt in the
period after 1954 until Sadat again legitimized the Brotherhood
in 1971, despite Egypt being a dictatorship in that period.
The intimate connection between foreign
military occupation and terrorism can be seen in Palestine in
the 1940s, where the Zionist movement threw up a number of terrorist
organizations that engaged in bombings and assassinations on
a fair scale. That is, frustrated Zionists not getting their
way behaved in ways difficult to distinguish from frustrated
Muslim nationalists who didn't get their way.
There was what the French would have called
radical Muslim terrorism in Algeria 1954-1962, though the Salafis
were junior partners of the largely secular FLN. French colonialists
were targeted for heartless bombings and assassinations. This
campaign of terror aimed at expelling the French, who had colonized
Algeria in 1830 and had kept it ever since, declaring it French
soil. The French had usurped the best land and crowded the Algerians
into dowdy old medinas or haciendas in the countryside. The
nationalists succeeded in gaining Algerian independence in 1962.
Once Sadat let the Muslim Brotherhood out
of jail and allowed it to operate freely in the 1970s, to offset
the power of the Egyptian Left, it threw up fundamentalist splinter
groups like Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami and Sheikh
Omar's al-Gamaa al-Islamiyah. They were radicalized when Sadat
made a separate peace with Israel in 1978-79 that permitted
the Israelis to do as they pleased to the Palestinians. In response,
the radical Muslims assassinated Sadat and continued to campaign
against his successor, Hosni Mubarak. They saw the Egyptian
regime as pharaonic and evil because it had allied with the
United States and Israel, thus legitimating the occupation of
Muslim land (from their point of view).
The south Lebanon Shi'ite groups, Amal and
Hezbollah, turned to radical Muslim terrorism mainly after the
1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of South Lebanon,
which is largely Shi'ite.
The radical Muslim terrorism of Khomeini's
Revolutionary Guards grew in part out of American hegemony over
Iran, which was expressed most forcefully by the 1953 CIA coup
that overthrew the last freely elected parliament of that country.
Likewise, Hamas (the Palestinian Muslim
Brotherhood) turned to terrorism in large part out of desperation
at the squalid circumstances and economic and political hopelessness
of the Israeli military occupation of Gaza.
The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
in the 1980s was among the biggest generators of radical Muslim
terrorism in modern history. The U.S. abetted this phenomenon,
giving billions to the radical Muslim ideologues at the top
of Pakistani military intelligence (Inter-Services Intelligence),
which in turn doled the money out to men like Gulbuddin Hikmatyar,
a member of the Afghanistan Muslim Brotherhood (Jami'at-i Islami)
who used to throw vials of acid at the faces of unveiled girls
in the Kabul of the 1970s. The U.S. also twisted the arm of
the Saudi government to match its contributions to the mujahedin.
Saudi Intelligence Minister Turki al-Faisal was in charge of
recruiting Arab volunteers to fight alongside the mujahedin,
and he brought in young Osama bin Laden as a fundraiser. The
CIA training camps that imparted specialized tradecraft to the
mujahedin inevitably also ended up training, at least at second
hand, the Arab volunteers, who learned about forming covert
cells, practicing how to blow things up, etc. The "Afghan Arabs"
fanned back to their homelands, to Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, carrying with them the ethos that Ronald Reagan
had inspired them with, which held that they should take up
arms against atheist Westerners who attempted to occupy Muslim
lands.
To this litany of occupations that produce
radical Muslim terrorism, Chechnya and Kashmir can be added.
In contrast, authoritarian governments like
that of Iraq and Syria, while they might use terror for their
own purposes from time to time, did not produce large-scale
independent terrorist organizations that struck international
targets. Authoritarian governments also proved adept at effectively
crushing terrorist groups, as can be seen in Algeria and Egypt.
It was only in failed states such as Afghanistan that they could
flourish, not in authoritarian ones.
So it is the combination of Western occupation and weak states
that produced the conditions for radical Muslim terrorism.
Democratic countries have often produced
terrorist movements. This was true of Germany, Italy, Japan,
and the United States in the late 1960s and through the 1970s.
There is no guarantee that a more democratic Iraq, Egypt, or
Lebanon will produce less terrorism. Certainly, the transition
from Ba'athist dictatorship has introduced terrorism on a large
scale into Iraqi society, and it may well spill over from there
into neighboring states.
Morocco has been liberalizing for some years,
and held fairly aboveboard parliamentary elections in 2002.
Yet liberalizing Morocco produced the al-Salafiyyah al-Jihadiyyah
group in Tangiers that committed the 2003 Casablanca bombings
and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
Moreover, if democracy means majority rule
and the expression of the general will, then it won't always
work to the advantage of the U.S. Bush administration spokesmen
keep talking about Syrian withdrawal being the demand of the
"Lebanese people." But 40 percent of the Lebanese are Shi'ites,
and 15 percent are probably Sunnis, and it may well be that
a majority of Lebanese want to keep at least some Syrian troops
around. Hezbollah has sided with Syria and Sheikh Nasrallah
has called for a big pro-Syrian demonstration by Shi'ites on
Tuesday.
For true democracy to flourish in Lebanon,
the artificial division of seats in parliament so that half
go to the Christian minority would have to be ended. Religious
Shi'ites would have, as in Iraq, a much bigger voice in national
affairs. Will a Lebanon left to its own devices to negotiate
a social compact between right-wing Christians and the Shi'ite
Hezbollah really be an island of stability?
I'm all for democratization in the Middle
East, as a good in its own right. But I don't believe that authoritarian
governance produced most episodes of terrorism in the last 60
years in the region. Terrorism was a weapon of the weak wielded
against what these radical Muslims saw as a menacing foreign
occupation. To erase that fact is to commit a basic error in
historical understanding. It is why the U.S. military occupation
of Iraq is actually a negative for any "war on terror." Nor
do I believe that democratization, even if it is possible, is
going to end terrorism in and of itself.
You want to end terrorism? End unjust military
occupations. By all means have Syria conduct an orderly withdrawal
from Lebanon if that is what the Lebanese public wants. But
Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which belong
to Syria, as well. The Israeli military occupation of Gaza and
the West Bank must be ended. The Russian scorched-earth policy
in Chechnya needs to stop. Some just disposition of the Kashmir
issue must be attained, and Indian enormities against Kashmiri
Muslims must stop. The U.S. needs to conduct an orderly and
complete withdrawal from Iraq. And when all these military occupations
end, there will be some hope for a vast decrease in terrorism.
People need a sense of autonomy and dignity, and occupation
produces helplessness and humiliation. Humiliation is what causes
terrorism.
Juan Cole's informative blog -- Informed Comment:
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion -- can be
found at http://www.juancole.com
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