Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (24 page)

As
Indiana Jones
’s Holy Grail–guarding knight said, bin Laden “chose wisely” by discarding Khomeini’s debauchery-degeneracy message; instead, he based his appeal to Muslims on the idea that they and Islam are under attack by the policies of the United States and the West. The photos of Israeli soldiers killing Muhammad Dura as his father sought to shield him and those of the aftermath of the U.S. Air Force mistakenly bombing an Afghan wedding party are irrefutably more likely to motivate Muslims than is a call to kill Americans because of their excessive Budweiser consumption. A Russian-speaking Chechen, an Arabic-speaking Yemeni, and a Malay-speaking Thai—Muslims all—will find the glue of Islam-defending unity in the anti-Americanism inspired by such photos, as will many Muslims born and bred in the United States and Europe. Bin Laden has thus found what perhaps is the only means with which to bridge the diversity of a highly fragmented Islamic civilization and unite an increasingly large portion of that worldwide community in attitude, outrage, and sympathies, if not yet in action.

In conceiving how to produce a glue of unity, bin Laden’s focus on the impact of U.S. foreign policies in the Muslim world suggests either genius or extraordinary good luck on his part. As a former intelligence officer, I am not a big believer in coincidence; more often than not events occur because someone intends them to occur. Even at the risk of being accused of fawning over the man U.S. leaders refer to as a monster, therefore, I think it is best to give America’s most dangerous enemy the benefit of the doubt and judge bin Laden to be near a political genius. In no other area of U.S. foreign affairs are policies so completely enmeshed with domestic politics as those that are directed toward the Islamic world. Energy supply and prices, support for Israel, and the championship of democracy are all issues that have been fully integrated into U.S. political contests. At least at the level of federal elections, a candidate who demands major changes in these policies—or in the case of Israel, even minor ones—knowingly takes the risk of fatally handicapping his or her chances of victory. Urging the necessity of higher prices and taxes to promote energy self-sufficiency, for example, is not a likely way to positively influence voters. And for nearly twenty years, since William F. Buckley and the Israel-firsters joyously diced up Patrick J. Buchanan as an anti-Semite, urging any change in U.S. policy toward Israel amounts to a martyrdom operation for any American politician.
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This reality was driven home again in the summer of 2006 and fall of 2007, when the noted scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published a paper and then a book outlining their view of the negative impact of pro-Israel influence groups on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world. Walt and Mearsheimer were mercilessly attacked by the Israel-firsters, including some scholars and pundits whose contempt for the intelligence of Americans is so great that they denied the existence of anything that could be called an “Israeli lobby.”
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As I wrote in Anti-War.com at the time, the vicious attacks on the two scholars by leading Americans in the media, politics, and academics—in effect, Americans savaging other Americans in favor of a foreign country—smacks of nothing so much, at least for a former intelligence officer, as a superbly executed and very successful Israeli covert political action campaign.
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In sum, bin Laden has identified a set of U.S. policies, which are the daily focus of Western and Muslim media, that can be steadily and effectively used to persuade Muslims that the U.S. government is attacking Islam and that, at the same time, are the one set of U.S. government policies that is least liable to substantively change at any point in the foreseeable future. As I have written on previous occasions, U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world is the only indispensable ally of bin Laden and the Islamists, and at this time they have no cause whatsoever to worry that their ally will leave them high and dry by changing policy. Parenthetically, the current wartime situation faced by American taxpayers must be a unique one in their history; because of the policies and actions of our governing elite, Americans today fund the enemy’s war effort via their consumption of Arab oil and provide the basis for their enemies’ motivation. For U.S. leaders, this must be seen as a negative and self-destructive achievement of truly epic proportions.

While the Islamists’ ally in the form of U.S. policy appears entirely reliable, bin Laden and his lieutenants—good, forward-looking strategists that they are—have been looking for some redundancy in allies, and they may have found another that again is being provided by the United States and Europe. Polls taken in the Islamic world by reliable Western firms, Pew, Gallup, BBC, Zogby, etc., over the past fifteen-plus years invariably find two consistent realities. First, enormous majorities in Muslim countries, usually in the 60 to 90 percent range, express hatred for the same set of U.S. and Western foreign policies that Osama bin Laden and other Islamist leaders have identified as mortal attacks on Islam. Overall, the University of Maryland’s spring 2007 poll showed 80 percent of Muslims worldwide agree with bin Laden in seeing America as hostile to or an enemy of Islam.
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Second, majorities (sometimes sizable ones) in the same Muslim countries express admiration for the striving of Americans for political and social equity for all citizens, for American generosity after natural disasters, and for the ability of American parents to find work and housing, education, and health care for their children. Taken together, these poll results strongly suggest that U.S. leaders are lying when they tell Americans that they are being attacked for how they think and live and not for what their government does overseas.

Beyond that leadership’s lie, however, Americans have cause to worry about how long these two sets of poll results will show the same level of dichotomy. While the high percentages showing hatred for U.S. policies are rock solid as long as the policies are constant, those showing that Muslims do not hate Americans as Americans may prove softer and less durable. Since 9/11, Washington’s prosecution of the war on terror has produced a series of subsidiary events that have deeply dented the reputation of Americans for evenhandedness and decency. The handling of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison; the CIA’s rendition program—which I helped author and then ran for nearly four years; the burning of the bodies of dead Taliban fighters; the awarding and subsequent withdrawal of the Dubai ports deal; the publication in Europe of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad; the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI regarding Islam; Britain’s knighting of author Salman Rushdie; and the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan often have been handled in the U.S. and European media as instances of Bush administration lawlessness and Western Islamophobia, or as mistakes made in the confusion of war evidencing the U.S. military’s lack of respect for human rights and by Christendom’s history toward Muslims. The Muslim and Islamist media have portrayed them as interrelated parts of a comprehensive U.S. and Western attack on Islam.

It seems necessary these days to follow a recitation of such events by saying that one is not trying to shame, embarrass, or denigrate America by raising these issues. Indeed, as a principal architect of the CIA’s rendition program, I have been outspoken in identifying and defending its successes and urging its continuation.
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But I am also fully aware that the U.S. government is both too fearful and too politically correct to even publicly admit that the United States has a problem with Islam, let alone build a focused, multifaceted attack on the faith.
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Still perception is always reality, and across the Islamic world—and in parts of the U.S. media, Europe, and the Democratic party—the litany of these events is seen as part of an anti-Muslim campaign that is based on the West’s hatred for the Islamic faith and its followers, a hatred that both denigrates the Islamic religion and Muslim society as medieval, imperialistic, and barbarous and that assigns a far higher worth to non-Muslim lives than Muslim. The latter is a point on which al-Qaeda has focused for more than a decade and that was driven home in the summer of 2006 for Muslims when they perceived the West to be standing aside and allowing Israel to inflict casualties in Lebanon at a rate of more than ten Lebanese for one Israeli. “O My Muslim nation,” Ayman al-Zawahiri said at the time, “it has become known to you without doubt that the governments of the Arab and Muslim states are not only helpless, but also involved in collusions [against you]. The institutions are paralyzed and you are left in the field alone.”
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While these events have yet to cause a precipitate decline in Muslims’ positive views of Americans (as opposed to the U.S. government), it behooves U.S. officials and citizens to think about how to handle the unavoidable negative repercussions of these events and similar others that are bound to occur in the confusion and emergencies of war. To date, Washington has tended to regard the events as public relations problems that can be handled by a fuller public explanation of U.S. intent, a public apology, or the payment of cash to aggrieved parties, such as those individuals who lost family members in mistaken U.S. attacks on several wedding parties in Afghanistan. Such measures provide a temporary moderation of anger, but the Cold War is long over, and America today does not have the bottomless we-are-the-good-guys account that it had to draw on when confronting the Soviet Union. Over time these events have a cumulative negative impact and leave a wide and broadening perception across the Islamic world that Washington regards Muslim life as cheap and inconsequential. Once lodged in the Islamic culture’s collective perception, any U.S. public diplomacy argument to the contrary is likely to meet an impervious wall of made-up minds. At that point, polls would likely begin to show that Muslims are beginning to regard Americans in a less favorable light. Given that Washington is being overwhelmed by an Islamist opponent whose hatred for U.S. foreign policy is shared nearly unanimously among Muslims, anything that advances the tendency of Muslims to hate Americans simply because they are Americans would greatly complicate already-failing U.S. efforts to protect American interests at home and abroad.

An Islamic Reformation That Brings Not Peace But the Sword?

Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, the growth of Islamist power, popularity, and violence has been strengthened by bin Laden’s success in defining resistance to the United States as a Koran-justified defensive jihad that requires the obligatory participation of all Muslims. Bin Laden’s success in this regard is vitally important not only because it has pushed the anti-U.S. jihad from words to deeds and provided the glue of unity for the diverse Muslim world, but also because it has demonstrated to Muslims around the world that the Afghans’ defeat of the Soviet superpower was not a fluke, and that the United States, its allies, and their own local governments can be successfully challenged by the relatively lightly armed mujahedin. The actions of al-Qaeda and bin Laden’s rhetoric have inspired Muslims worldwide to jihad, but this inspiration has been magnified in such places as Thailand, Nigeria, and Bangladesh by local grievances that have few or no direct links to the United States or its foreign policy, unless Washington, in its wisdom, chooses to make someone else’s fight America’s. The combination of bin Laden’s leadership, Muslim hatred for U.S. foreign policy, and long-festering localized Muslim grievances, usually against oppressive regimes, has yielded a Muslim world awash in inflammable materials and potential.

Another important but less quantifiable factor that is facilitating bin Laden’s success in incitement is the declining influence of Islamic clerics, scholars, and jurists who work with and are employed by Muslim governments, especially those in the Arab world. When comparing Islam to Christianity’s many sects, it has long been a commonplace to claim that the former does not have the centralized, hierarchical leadership that the latter have established in Rome, Canterbury, and elsewhere. While this claim remains true, each Muslim country has long had a hierarchy of senior Islamic clerics to whom the population looks for religious guidance on issues ranging from the pedestrian to the earthshaking. Again, this is especially true in the Arab world. For most of the post-1945 period, these clerics had tremendous power over the decisions and actions of their national populations, as well as the manner in which those populations interpreted and understood domestic and international events. The clerics, in other words, have been the Arab regimes’ most important, nay indispensable, spinmeisters. That power is ebbing, however, and as it does, the Islamists’ campaign to win people to a more conservative brand of Islam and to jihad will become easier.

Why the ebbing? Part of the answer lies in the success that Arab governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates have had in coopting a large number of their country’s leading Islamic clerics, scholars, and jurists. Through their control of the state’s financial resources, censoring apparatus, and security services, these regimes have used carrots and sticks to control and influence their religious establishments. Clerics who reliably find Koranic justifications to validate the regime’s policies and actions, especially those that allow the immense corruption of various royal families, find themselves well paid and housed, comfortably ensconced in the pulpits of large and ornate mosques, as distinguished members of university faculties, and even as advisory members of their government’s ruling clique. Those clerics who have trouble finding immediate, on-demand religious validation for regime actions, however, tend to lose their pay, pulpits, professorships, and oft-times their freedom.