Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (21 page)

Again, let us give the Bush team the benefit of the doubt and say they did not intend to provide the religious predicate for a worldwide defensive jihad against the United States, but they should be cut no slack whatsoever on the issue of predictability. Not a lick of classified intelligence information was needed to know what repercussions the invasion of Iraq would cause; all that was needed was to read the words of our Islamist enemies, know a bit about Islam and its history, and ignore the advice of politically motivated experts like Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, Fareed Zakaria, Max Boot, Fawaz Gerges, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and the rest of that prowar media lobby that helped sink U.S. interests in the sands of Iraq. And it is important to note that the damage done to the United States was done when the invasion’s first air strike hit and the first armored unit crossed the start line in Kuwait. The looting of Baghdad, the disbanding of the Iraqi military, the complete de-Ba’athification of the bureaucracy, and L. Paul Bremer’s reign of ruin and easygoing corruption all worsened the situation, but even without these factors the Islamists would have won. Once U.S. and Western forces set foot in Iraq, bin Laden’s predictions were validated, and not even the tens of thousands of Islamic scholars and jurists who are fully owned and operated by Hosni Mubarak, Bashir al-Assad, the Algerian junta, and the Jordanian and Saudi kings could craft a credible theological argument to deny that the Koran’s conditions for launching a defensive jihad had been met and then some. The Bush administration lost the war in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, because it did not know history and believed that, in any event, history held no lessons for the United States.

And regarding the chances of a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq? Again, this was and is a no-brainer for anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Islamic and Iraqi history. Most Americans bought the White House’s denial that a civil war was occurring in Iraq for far too long primarily because of the absurd debate the administration generated with the media and academia over the definition of a civil war. Animosities between Sunnis and Shiites are deep, theologically substantive, a thousand years old, and always potentially lethal. No matter how dire the Afghan insurgents’ prospects were against the Red Army or how intense and bloody the Taliban’s campaign against Ahmed Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance, for example, they always had time and resources to take a break and slaughter Afghan Shias or Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers. Sunni organizations in Pakistan have long made murdering Pakistani Shia and their leading clerics a top priority. The Sunni regimes on the Arabian Peninsula worry about Iran getting a nuclear weapon not because of the weapon itself (Sunni Pakistan has the bomb, and only a fool would be confident that the Saudis do not have nuclear warheads nestled on the top of their China-provided CSS-2 ICBMs) but because the finger on the trigger would belong to a Shia hard-liner in Tehran. For most Sunnis, Shias are heretics of the deepest hue, and while the Islamic world is replete with examples of Sunnis and Shias living amiably side by side, both sides are well aware that at some point the two sects will have a violent final reckoning. Indeed, there are those on each side of the sectarian divide who long for such a cataclysmic reckoning; the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was one of them.

Within the context of this latent and millennium-old intracivilizational conflict, the twentieth-century history of Iraq left a legacy that would have made it shocking if a civil war had not ensued after the destruction of Saddam’s regime. For more than eighty years the Sunni minority had held the Shia majority, as well as the Kurds, in their murderous thrall. In the last thirty years Saddam held power by brutally instilling fear in all Iraqis and by delivering most of the necessities of life, while using his own Sunni sect as the instrument for oppressing Shiites and Kurds. Enter George W. Bush, his team of reality-defying Wilsonians, and the bipartisan support of Congress. Besides handing a victory to the worldwide, bin Laden-led Sunni Islamist movement, Washington knowingly destroyed the governmental mechanisms that ensured Sunni supremacy and then expected to put in their place a secular, power-sharing government made up of Sunni, Shia, and Kurd leaders that would, with the rest of the Iraqi people, live happily and democratically ever after. After eliminating Saddam, the Bush administration and the bipartisan Congress appear to have believed that democracy could be quickly installed and that that event would cause Shiites and Kurds to forget the murders, gassings, rapes, torturing, and other injustices that were routinely doled out by Saddam and the Sunnis. And the American governing elite did not live alone in this fantasy world. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Britain, a country that experienced a very similar disaster in Iraq just after the Great War,
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joined up, as did other NATO members and some U.S. allies from Asia and Latin America. As the radio host Don Imus often says when he is confronted by events or statements that seem singularly stupid: “You couldn’t make this stuff up.” But perhaps Machiavelli said it better: “And he deceives himself who believes that the great, recent benefits cause old wrongs to be forgotten.”
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The U.S. governing elite’s patent ignorance of the bitter Sunni-Shia schism also is visible in their belief that Iraq’s Muslim neighbors would pitch in to make the post-Saddam nation a happy, multicultural, and secular place, a Switzerland on the Tigris, perhaps. It is best to ignore the prewar assertions by the above-mentioned political pundits that the Muslim regimes surrounding Iraq opposed the American invasion because they knew Washington would successfully establish a secular democracy there that would eventually spread across the region and destroy their tyrannies and police states. From the beginning these regimes knew that the U.S. government would fail in Iraq. How did they know? Well, for two reasons. First, the nearly inevitable post-Saddam Shia-Sunni civil war ruled out any chance of secular, democratic pluralism, even leaving aside the affront to Islam that the very idea of such a system presented. The Sunni-Shia face-off in Iraq would also be intensified by drawing popular support from the surrounding countries, with Iran and perhaps Syria backing Iraqi Shiites and the entire Sunni world backing their Iraqi brethren.

The second reason the region’s Muslim regimes knew that the American plan for Iraq was going to fail was that they were going to make sure it failed. In a global sense, of course, the Sunni oil-producing states saw the end of the Cold War as greatly lessening their need to defer to the United States; they no longer needed U.S. military protection against the armed threat of Soviet Communism. From a regional geopolitical and national-interests perspective, moreover, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors found the idea of creating a second large-population, oil-rich Shia state in the Sunni heartland simply intolerable. For the Sunnis, Iran alone was enough of a problem and threat, but at least the power of Iran was steadily being eliminated by its rapidly dwindling energy reserves. Sunni governments knew that in fifteen years, more or less, Iran would be home to a huge Shiite population but would lack the oil revenues to provide the economic wherewithal to threaten offensive actions against its Sunni neighbors. The creation of an oil-rich Shiite state in Iraq that would be allied with Iran against the Sunni world, however, would right the balance that was otherwise shifting in favor of the Sunnis.

For reasons of both sectarian hatred and national security, therefore, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors would clandestinely intervene to whatever extent was necessary to defeat the U.S. effort. They were confident also that coalition-obsessed Washington would do nothing about their interference because it had long misled Americans by telling them that the Sunni states that would do most of the interfering in Iraq—Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen—were indispensable partners in the “Global War on Terrorism.” In addition, the possibility of a strong U.S. response to this Sunni interference, which was designed to kill as many U.S. military personnel in Iraq as possible, was ruled out because the U.S. economy and the U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were dependent on energy supplies delivered by the Sunni states of the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. governing elite’s failure to heed the warning sign attached to Saudi king Faisal’s 1973 oil embargo ensured that the king’s heirs could act with impunity to protect their national, as well as Sunni, interests in Iraq.

When it came to defeating U.S. efforts in Iraq, the Sunni states and Iran found their task almost ridiculously easy. They simply did nothing to contradict the jihad-is-the-road-to-paradise education that they had long delivered to their young; through their clerical establishments they identified the U.S. invasion of Iraq as proper Islamic justification for a defensive jihad; and they left open all or parts of their land borders with Iraq. By doing nothing out of the ordinary, therefore, these regimes acquiesced in the start of the flow of non-Iraqi Islamist insurgents to Iraq.
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Here a piece of historical information is useful. During the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union (1979–89), the Afghans played the most vital role in defeating the Red Army. Nonindigenous Muslims did, of course, travel to Afghanistan to assist the Afghans. How did the nonindigenous Muslim fighters get to the battlefield during the Afghan jihad? Well, their travel to the battlefield was certainly facilitated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations—and some members of those groups, like bin Laden’s close associates Shaykh Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Wael Juliedan, actually joined the fight—as well as by some wealthy Muslim individuals and Arab governments. It is well known, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s family business helped to get would-be mujahedin from across the Middle East to Afghanistan, and that Riyadh ordered Saudia, its international airline, to offer reduced-fare “jihad-fare” tickets to young men on their way to Afghanistan.
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While many of these non-Afghan Islamist fighters came to the anti-Soviet jihad on their own or were sponsored by wealthy individuals or private groups, many others came to Afghanistan out of the prisons of Arab states. The West often forgets that Arab prisons are built not only to house criminals but also to confine religious opponents of the regimes. Thus the prisons are generally full to overflowing with Islamist militants who, for example, oppose the brutality of Mubarak’s Egyptian regime or the al-Sauds’ greed, corruption, and opulence. Incarcerating these militants helps the regimes maintain societal control. Their detention, however, also has proved to increase their Islamic militancy because the extremist inmates tend to congregate and to be easy targets for instruction by jailed Islamist scholars and clerics, both of which breed a sense of fraternity. Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri emerged more militant and vicious after his incarceration and torture in post-Sadat Egypt, as did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his imprisonment in Jordan, during which he received extensive religious instruction by the renowned Salafi scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisis.
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Faced with a large population of young Islamists during the Afghan jihad, governments across the Muslim world found a release valve for the radical religious pressures in their societies by freeing religious prisoners on condition that they go to fight the atheist-Soviet invader in Afghanistan. Many such prisoners agreed and were released by regimes that hoped they would go to Afghanistan, kill some infidels, and be killed in the process. Many of these men fought and were killed, but some survived and returned home to bedevil their governments—even to this day. Currently, for example, Afghan jihad veterans lead several antigovernment political-military groups in Thailand, and in Bangladesh five or more Afghan veterans will run as candidates when the next parliamentary election occurs.
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And today? It is hard to know for certain whether history is repeating itself. We do know three things for sure, however: (a) every Arab government faces a domestic Islamist movement that is broader and more militant, though not always more violent, than those in the 1980s; (b) the insurgency in Iraq, because the country is the former seat of the caliphate and is located in the Arab heartland, is an attraction for would-be Islamist fighters far more powerful than was Afghanistan in 1979; and (c) the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and post-2001 Afghanistan seems to be more than sufficient to cause a steady combat tempo in each insurgency. Thus the situation seems ideal for Arab governments to try a reprise of the process that lessened their problems of domestic instability during the Afghan jihad.

This circumstantial argument—that the current situation in Iraq is an almost irresistible opportunity for Arab regimes to export their Islamic firebrands to kill members of the U.S-led infidel coalition and hopefully be killed in turn—is strengthened, if not fully validated, by the large numbers of Islamist militants that have been released by Arab governments since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Following are several pertinent examples drawn from the period November 2003–February 2007:

• November 2003: The government of Yemen freed more than 1,500 inmates, including 92 suspected al-Qaeda members, in an amnesty to mark the holy month of Ramadan.
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• January 2005: The Algerian government pardoned 5,065 prisoners to commemorate the feast of Eid al-Adha.
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• September 2005: The new Mauritanian military government ordered “a sweeping amnesty for political crimes, freeing scores of prisoners…including a band of coup plotters and alleged Islamic extremists.”
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• November 2005: Morocco released 164 Islamist prisoners to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
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• November 2005: Morocco released 5,000 prisoners in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. The sentences of 5,000 other prisoners were reduced.
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• November–December 2005: Saudi Arabia released 400 “reformed” Islamist prisoners.
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• February–March 2006: In February, Algeria pardoned or reduced sentences for “3,000 convicted or suspected terrorists” as part of a national reconciliation plan.
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  In March, 2,000 additional prisoners were released.
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• February 2006: Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali released 1,600 prisoners, including Islamic radicals.
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• March 2006: Yemen released more than 600 Islamist fighters who were imprisoned after a rebellion led by a radical cleric named Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi.
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• March 2006: The Libyan government released 132 Islamist political prisoners; 86 of the freed prisoners are members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya.
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• March–April 2006: The Egyptian government released 900 members of the Gama’ at al-Islamiyah organization.
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• May 2006: Kuwait authorities freed five of their nationals who had been held in Guantanamo Bay for raising money for al-Qaeda.
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• July 2006: Yemeni courts released 19 men linked to al-Qaeda, claiming a lack of evidence to justify their continued incarceration.
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• July 2006: Saudi authorities announced seven Islamist prisoners were missing from a Riyadh prison. “Somehow they left the prison, they ran away,” explained the interior ministry spokesman.
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• July 2006: The Mauritanian government released eight men linked to al-Qaeda and ten others linked to Algeria’s Salafi Group for Call and Combat, an al-Qaeda ally. Three other al-Qaeda fighters had “escaped” from a Mauritanian jail in the preceding April.
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• February 2007: The Moroccan government pardoned more than 9,000 prisoners—including twelve under death sentences—to celebrate the birth of a new daughter to King Mohammed VI and his wife. The releases came after Moroccan authorities had, in 2006, identified eleven networks moving would-be Moroccan mujahedin from Morocco to Iraq.
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