Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate
Think of the new “caliphate” of the Islamic State, formerly the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney's gift to the world (with a helping hand from the Saudis and
other financiers of extremism in the Persian Gulf). How strange that
they get so little credit for its rise, for the fact that the outlines
of the Middle East, as set up by Europe’s colonial powers in the wake of World War I, are being swept aside in a tide of blood.
Had George and Dick not decided on their “cakewalk” in Iraq, had they not raised the specter of nuclear destruction and claimed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was somehow linked to
al-Qaeda and so to the 9/11 attacks, had they not sent tens of
thousands of American troops into a burning, looted Baghdad (“stuff happens”), disbanded the Iraqi army, built military
bases all over that country, and generally indulged their geopolitical
fantasies about dominating the oil heartlands of the planet for
eternity, ISIS would have been an unlikely possibility, no matter the
ethnic and religious tensions in the region. They essentially launched
the drive that broke state power there and created the kind of vacuum that a movement like ISIS was so horrifically well suited to fill.
All in all, it’s a remarkable accomplishment to look back on. In
September 2001, when George and Dick launched their “Global War on
Terror” to wipe out -- so they then claimed -- “terrorist networks” in
up to 60 countries, or as they preferred to put it, “drain the swamp,”
there were scattered bands of jihadis globally, while al-Qaeda had a
couple of camps in Afghanistan and a sprinkling of supporters
elsewhere. Today, in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
and an air power intervention in Libya, after years of drone (and
non-drone) bombing campaigns across the Greater Middle East, jihadist
groups are thriving in Yemen and Pakistan, spreading through Africa (along with the
U.S. military), and ISIS has taken significant parts of Iraq and Syria
right up to the Lebanese border for its own bailiwick and is still
expanding murderously, despite a renewed American bombing campaign that
may only strengthen that movement in the long run.
Has anyone covered this nightmare better than the world’s least embedded reporter, Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent? Not for my money. He’s had the canniest, clearest-eyed view of
developments in the region for years now. As it happens, when he
publishes a new book on the Middle East (the last time was 2008), he
makes one of his rare appearances at TomDispatch. This month, his latest must-read work, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising,
is out. Today, this website has an excerpt from its first chapter on
why the war on terror was such a failure (and why, if Washington was
insistent on invading someplace, it probably should have chosen Saudi
Arabia). It includes a special introductory section written just for
TomDispatch. Thanks go to his publisher, OR Books. - Tom
Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed
by Patrick Cockburn The Underrated Saudi Connection
There
are extraordinary elements in the present U.S.
policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting
surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is
carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and
trainers to help beat back the advance of the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known
as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S.
would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or
attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy
is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of
ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds
in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack
from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the
country, including most of its oil and gas
production facilities.
But U.S.,
Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to
overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens
to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria.
If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary,
since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest
of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense
in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a
“moderate” Syrian opposition being helped by the
U.S., Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis. It is,
however, weak and getting more so by the day. Soon
the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian
border to the Mediterranean and the only force that
can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian
army.
The reality
of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq,
but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that
group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq was
the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has
now become the political and media consensus in the
West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the
last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni
revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their
country as well. This has now happened.
By
continuing these contradictory policies in two
countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can
reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice
versa. So far, Washington has been successful in
escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all
the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has
created a situation in which ISIS can survive and
may well flourish.
Using the al-Qa'ida Label
The sharp
increase in the strength and reach of jihadist
organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been
unacknowledged until recently by politicians and
media in the West. A primary reason for this is that
Western governments and their security forces
narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces
directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core”
al-Qa‘ida. This enables them to present a much more
cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called
war on terror than the situation on the ground
warrants.
In fact,
the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about
are those with the official blessing of al-Qa‘ida is
naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for
instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa‘ida
leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence
and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian
jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa‘ida
in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told
me that “without exception they all expressed
enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same
thing would happen in Europe as well as the U.S.”
Jihadi
groups ideologically close to al-Qa‘ida have been
relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed
supportive of U.S. policy aims. In Syria, the
Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up
a “Southern Front” based in Jordan that would be
hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and
simultaneously hostile to al-Qa‘ida-type rebels in
the north and east. The powerful but supposedly
moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned
recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi
Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in
this new formation. But numerous videos show that
the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in
collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida
affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of
battle, these two groups would share their
munitions, Washington was effectively allowing
advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest
enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have
captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in
Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers
to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa‘ida in Syria.
The name
al-Qa‘ida has always been applied flexibly when
identifying an enemy. In 2003 and 2004 in Iraq, as
armed Iraqi opposition to the American and
British-led occupation mounted, U.S. officials
attributed most attacks to al-Qa‘ida, though many
were carried out by nationalist and Baathist groups.
Propaganda like this helped to persuade nearly 60%
of U.S. voters prior to the Iraq invasion that there
was a connection between Saddam Hussein and those
responsible for 9/11, despite the absence of any
evidence for this. In Iraq itself, indeed throughout
the entire Muslim world, these accusations have
benefited al-Qa‘ida by exaggerating its role in the
resistance to the U.S. and British occupation.
Precisely
the opposite PR tactics were employed by Western
governments in 2011 in Libya, where any similarity
between al-Qa‘ida and the NATO-backed rebels
fighting to overthrow the Libyan leader, Muammar
Gaddafi, was played down. Only those jihadis who had
a direct operational link to the al-Qa‘ida “core” of
Osama bin Laden were deemed to be dangerous. The
falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi
jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in
direct contact with al-Qa‘ida was forcefully, if
tragically, exposed when U.S. ambassador Chris
Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in
September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded
by Western governments and media for their role in
the anti-Gaddafi uprising.
Imagining al-Qa'ida as the Mafia
Al-Qa‘ida
is an idea rather than an organization, and this has
long been the case. For a five-year period after
1996, it did have cadres, resources, and camps in
Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the
overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently,
al-Qa‘ida’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a
set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of
an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return
to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and
the waging of holy war against other Muslims,
notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy
of death. At the center of this doctrine for making
war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom
as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This
has resulted in using untrained but fanatical
believers as suicide bombers, to devastating effect.
It has
always been in the interest of the U.S. and other
governments that al-Qa‘ida be viewed as having a
command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon,
or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting
image for the public because organized groups,
however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated
through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the
reality of a movement whose adherents are
self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.
Osama bin
Laden’s gathering of militants, which he did not
call al-Qa‘ida until after 9/11, was just one of
many jihadi groups 12 years ago. But today its ideas
and methods are predominant among jihadis because of
the prestige and publicity it gained through the
destruction of the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq, and
its demonization by Washington as the source of all
anti-American evil. These days, there is a narrowing
of differences in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless
of whether or not they are formally linked to
al-Qa‘ida central.
Unsurprisingly, governments prefer the fantasy
picture of al-Qa‘ida because it enables them to
claim victories when it succeeds in killing its
better known members and allies. Often, those
eliminated are given quasi-military ranks, such as
“head of operations,” to enhance the significance of
their demise. The culmination of this heavily
publicized but largely irrelevant aspect of the “war
on terror” was the killing of bin Laden in
Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011. This enabled
President Obama to grandstand before the American
public as the man who had presided over the hunting
down of al-Qa‘ida’s leader. In practical terms,
however, his death had little impact on
al-Qa‘ida-type jihadi groups, whose greatest
expansion has occurred subsequently.
Ignoring the Roles of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
The key
decisions that enabled al-Qa‘ida to survive, and
later to expand, were made in the hours immediately
after 9/11. Almost every significant element in the
project to crash planes into the Twin Towers and
other iconic American buildings led back to Saudi
Arabia. Bin Laden was a member of the Saudi elite,
and his father had been a close associate of the
Saudi monarch. Citing a CIA report from 2002, the
official 9/11 report says that al-Qa‘ida relied for
its financing on “a variety of donors and
fundraisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and
particularly in Saudi Arabia.”
The
report’s investigators repeatedly found their access
limited or denied when seeking information in Saudi
Arabia. Yet President George W. Bush apparently
never even considered holding the Saudis responsible
for what happened. An exit of senior Saudis,
including bin Laden relatives, from the U.S. was
facilitated by the U.S. government in the days after
9/11. Most significant, 28 pages of the 9/11
Commission Report about the relationship between the
attackers and Saudi Arabia were cut and never
published, despite a promise by President Obama to
do so, on the grounds of national security.
In 2009,
eight years after 9/11, a cable from the U.S.
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, revealed by
WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia
constituted the most significant source of funding
to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite
this private admission, the U.S. and Western
Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi
preachers whose message, spread to millions by
satellite TV, YouTube, and Twitter, called for the
killing of the Shia as heretics. These calls came as
al-Qa‘ida bombs were slaughtering people in Shia
neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another
State Department cable in the same year reads:
“Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism as Foreign Policy?” Now,
five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a
record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni
Muslims.
Pakistan,
or rather Pakistani military intelligence in the
shape of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was
the other parent of al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and
jihadi movements in general. When the Taliban was
disintegrating under the weight of U.S. bombing in
2001, its forces in northern Afghanistan were
trapped by anti-Taliban forces. Before they
surrendered, hundreds of ISI members, military
trainers, and advisers were hastily evacuated by
air. Despite the clearest evidence of ISI’s
sponsorship of the Taliban and jihadis in general,
Washington refused to confront Pakistan, and thereby
opened the way for the resurgence of the Taliban
after 2003, which neither the U.S. nor NATO has been
able to reverse.
The “war on
terror” has failed because it did not target the
jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not
aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two
countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a
movement. The U.S. did not do so because these
countries were important American allies whom it did
not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous
market for American arms, and the Saudis have
cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential
members of the American political establishment.
Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180
million and a military with close links to the
Pentagon.
The
spectacular resurgence of al-Qa‘ida and its
offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of
American and British intelligence services and their
budgets after 9/11. Since then, the U.S., closely
followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and adopted procedures normally associated
with police states, such as imprisonment without
trial, rendition, torture, and domestic espionage.
Governments wage the “war on terror” claiming that
the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed
to secure the safety of all.
In the face
of these controversial security measures, the
movements against which they are aimed have not been
defeated but rather have grown stronger. At the time
of 9/11, al-Qa‘ida was a small, generally
ineffectual organization; by 2014 al-Qa‘ida-type
groups were numerous and powerful.
In other
words, the “war on terror,” the waging of which has
shaped the political landscape for so much of the
world since 2001, has demonstrably failed. Until the
fall of Mosul, nobody paid much attention.
This
essay is excerpted from the first
chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The
Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni
Uprising, with special thanks to
his publisher, OR
Books. The first section
is a new introduction written for TomDispatch.
Source: Tom Dispatch
|