The Underwear Bomber and the war of ideas
- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Who is winning the war of ideas between the West and al Qaeda’s hate-driven version of Islam?
It is a question that merits asking again after a 23-year-old Western-educated Nigerian of privileged background, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to murder almost 300 people by bringing down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into the crotch of his underpants.
The administration of President Barack Obama, averse to the bellicose language of George W. Bush, has virtually dropped the phrase “war of ideas.” But that doesn’t mean it has ended. Or that Obama’s plea, in his Cairo speech this summer, for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world has swayed the disciples of Osama bin Laden, whose 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) against “Jews and Crusaders” remains the extremists’ guiding principle.
“To…kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” the fatwa said. “This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah (to) fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.”
That this exhortation is as appealing today, to a fanatical minority, as it was 11 years ago underlines that the United States has had scant success in meeting the objective the Bush administration set out in its 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. “Together with the international community, we will wage a war of ideas to make clear that all acts of terrorism are illegitimate, to ensure that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile ground in any nation…”
That aim was spelt out just weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, an event that provided ample ammunition for the extremists’ assertion that the West was stepping up an unrelenting war it has waged against the Muslim world for centuries. Such claims, and al Qaeda itself, should be easy to discredit, write two political scientists, Peter Krause and Stephen Van Evera in the fall issue of the Middle East Policy Council Journal.
America’s perennial Vietnam syndrome
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Prophetic words they were not. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all…The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Thus spoke a euphoric President George H.W.Bush early in March, 1991, shortly after the 100-hour ground war that chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the oil-rich U.S. ally they had invaded and occupied in the summer of 1990.
The specter of Vietnam, far from being buried in the Arabian sands, has risen again as President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering the course of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year, increasingly unpopular, and considered unwinnable even by America’s senior soldiers if it is fought alongside a corrupt government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
That the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well is obvious by the proliferation of analyses and commentaries drawing parallels, or dismissing them as nonsense, since Obama declared Afghanistan a war of necessity. (Type “Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam” into the Google search box and you get more than nine million references).
The cover of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is taken up by an iconic photograph of the Vietnam war, people clambering up a ladder to a U.S. helicopter waiting to evacuate them off the roof of a Saigon building the day before the city fell to communist forces on April 30, 1975. The story inside: what to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.
The answers to that question differ widely and the Vietnam analogy has come up routinely whenever the United States resorted to military action in the past three decades, from Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. Obama himself has dismissed the parallel.
If President Obama is uncertain about his future decision(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan, just have him visit Vietnam. He’ll know instantly that we shouldn’t have been there, and that we shouldn’t be in the Middle East now. We should pull out of Afghanistan TODAY and pull out of Iraq as soon as possible. Period…end of discussion.
George Bush and Iraq: ‘Shoe’denfreude?
Salim Adil is an author for Global Voices Online, a website that aggregates, curates, and translates news and views from the global blogosphere. The opinions expressed are his own and those of the bloggers he quotes.
Will this become one of those moments in history? In years to come will you recount to your grand children where you were when an Iraqi journalist, Montather Al-Zeidi, threw his shoes at the president of the United States? For me I was at home just getting my kids ready to sleep when my father called me insisting that I simply had to switch on the television immediately.
Iraqi bloggers reacted in much the same way with a number who wrote their first new post in months just to make their comment. Abbas Hawazin went as far to predict that shoe throwing will now be part of mainstream culture and has gone to look for a good-sized shoe to carry in his pocket, “in case I need to make any public expression of anger should the case arise.”
Last of Iraqis broke his once-a-week frequency to share his opinion on the incident. “In the Iraqi traditions or may I say Arabic traditions in general; it’s the maximum insult a man can do…it’s the maximum humiliation no word can accomplish”, he writes. And he gives his view of the Iraqi Street:
“Today I went to work as usual and all the people I saw were very very happy, it was like a national celebration…A female patient came to me for a filling and as we were waiting for the Anesthesia to take effect she said “do you know doc. That yesterday was an Eid to me; I haven’t celebrated Eid for the past 3 years because the Americans “accidentally” killed my husband and son and Bush is the reason why they are here so yesterday some of my revenge has been taken” …all the staff said the same thing “A statue should be built for Muntathar” in fact many of them have used the photo of Muntathar as a background for their mobiles but the really beautiful thing that made me even happier was that no one referred to his sect or anything…they were all proud of him…”
One person who does not think so is Nibras Kazimi who stood alone among Iraqi bloggers to defend George Bush:
“Personally, I got angry. Very angry. I will make a public promise: should I ever run into a certain reporter called Muntather al-Zaidi, presently of Al-Baghdadia TV, I will seriously consider beating the crap out of him… See, I will forever remain indebted to President George W. Bush. He is my hero. He liberated Iraq, and that’s how I will always see it. Had there been no President Bush, then Saddam would still be Saddam.”
A haiku…………..
Truth was his doormat.
The ‘liberated’ threw dirty soles
at his head.
The Islamic jihad was not the brainchild of Osama but that of the American Imperialism [with the aid and assistance of the most right-reactionary forces in every country of their occupation] whose only concern is to assist the MNCs and the TNCs in their exploitation of the abundant natural resources the world over.All talk of upholding the values- that too American ones[?]- of freedom, democracy, free choice,etc. is nothing more than a cliche to hoodwink those gullible guys in their own as well as other countries!
After all what business do the Americans have in those countries no matter what their social-economic-political systems are? If the former USSR was wrong in ‘exporting’ revolution to the third world countries how can the USA directly wage wars in the name of their brand of democracy? If America’s political evangelism is right then Osama’s and his ilk’s retaliation is also right! If America has every right NOT ONLY TO DEFEND BUT ALSO SPREAD ITS STYLE OF LIFE AND BELIEFS then how can one find fault with others who also feel that their values are being threatened?.After all it was this very same America which originally recruited and trained them in their ‘jihad’ against the truly humanizing socialist ideology that was sought to be practiced in such countries. IF communism was a taboo for them can the American way of life be sold to them in the name of pseudo-democracy?
AND lastly,no American other than the ones who are genuinely-not for tactical or personal/practical reasons-opposed to the neocolonialist wars of his country has any right to grouse against the backlash of his country’s atrocities elsewhere.Let them not gloat over their system which has driven thousands on to the streets in their own country and is ruining the lives of the millions in other countries.Because that system and its government in their country are not theirs but those of the warlords in the service of the MNCs and the TNCs.
A V Samikkannu, Pappireddippatti, Tamilnadu, India