[Peace-discuss] A History Lesson from Juan Cole

[David Green]

from juancole.com, with a link to Zakariya article.
Zakariya plays a "good Arab" in the mainstream media,
because he believes in "the curse of oil."

Monday, March 07, 2005
Foreign Occupation has Produced Radical Muslim
Terrorism

Fareed Zakariya argues that Bush got one thing right.
Zakariya 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 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 and 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-Gihad al-Islami and Sheikh Omar's
al-Gamaah 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 Shiite groups, Amal and Hizbullah,
turned to radical Muslim terrorism mainly after the
1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of
South Lebanon, which is largely Shiite.

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 US 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 US also twisted the arm of the Saudi
government to match its contributions to the
Mujahidin. Saudi Intelligence Minister Turki al-Faisal
was in charge of recruiting Arab volunteers to fight
alongside the Mujahidin, and he brought in young
Usamah bin Laden as a fundraiser. The CIA training
camps that imparted specialized tradecraft to the
Mujahidin 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 indepdendent terrorist organizations that
struck itnernational 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 Baathist 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 above-board 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 US. Bush administration
spokesmen keep talking about Syrian withdrawal being
the demand of the "Lebanese people." But 40% of the
Lebanese are Shiites, and 15% are probably Sunnis, and
it may well be that a majority of Lebanese want to
keep at least some Syrian troops around. Hizbullah has
sided with Syria and Shaikh Nasrallah has called for a
big pro-Syrian demonstration by Shiites 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 Shiites 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 rightwing Christians and Shiite Hizbullah
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 US
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 US needs to conduct an orderly and complete
withdrawal from Iraq. And when all these military
occupations end, there is 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. 

posted by Juan @ 3/7/2005 06:30:00 AM