Descent into violence
The US occupation of Iraq will spark a new round of Islamist violence, Amr Elchoubaki predicts
In the aftermath of 11 September, the US's treatment of Islamist violence as a criminal phenomenon was accompanied by its considering anyone expressing interest in the reasons behind those attacks to be condoning or justifying them. The attacks on New York and Washington in the US's view were nothing more than acts of terrorism.
Since those events, the US administration has been prisoner to an extremist ideology, restricting its foreign policy to a quest for revenge against the perpetrators of the attacks, dealing with them as criminals who deserve to be punished -- even if this is outside the boundaries of the law. It launched its war in Afghanistan, putting an end to the fundamentalist Taliban regime and creating in its stead a weak regime that is still unable to assert its influence over the entire country. It also succeeded in undermining the military capabilities of Al-Qa'eda by arresting many of its members and people it suspects of belonging to the network.
Concurrent with those responses to 11 September, the US has divided the world between the evil, where it put its enemies and opponents, and the good, comprising its allies and clients. Foremost among those consigned to the evil side are Al-Qa'eda and political Islamist movements, along with the now deposed regime of Saddam Hussein, who was included in that group so as to justify the US occupation of Iraq.
This authoritarian outlook has brought Iraq another round of violence and destruction, evoking for some the situation in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War when the US stayed on in Kuwait after liberating the country and extended its presence to the largest state of the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia. The very presence of US troops there has been a source of incitement for Islamist movements, spurring some of them to take up arms in resistance and raise the cry of jihad. As a result, Osama Bin Laden went from being a proponent of Islamist ideology who had returned to Saudi Arabia after fighting in the jihad against the "Communist atheists" to an armed warrior fighting against the "American occupiers".
In the wake of 11 September, the US ignored opposition from around the world and lumped together all Arabs who rejected its policies in the Middle East. In Palestine, groups like Jihad, Hamas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- a secular movement with Marxist origins -- were all labelled as terrorist organisations because they favoured armed resistance against occupation. As such, they were put in the same category as the terrorist Al-Qa'eda organisation. It also put peaceful political Islamist movements like the Muslim Brothers in the same basket with those groups espousing violence, seeing them all as either participants or supporters of terrorism. On the global level, the war in Iraq shows the degree to which the US has set aside international law by embarking on a war outside the framework of the UN and the law. It ignored the enormous popular opposition to the war, and made clear to its European allies and its opponents in China and Russia its willingness to act unilaterally.
Europe, however, has a much more complex understanding of the Arab and Islamic stage. France and Germany fought a fierce battle to prevent the US from dragging them into the war, but the battle was waged according to the rules of peaceful, democratic conflict, for these nations are united by economic and commercial interests, as well as cultural and civilisational ties. In other words, the European-US conflict necessitated the use of democratic, peaceful means of conflict resolution, and all these nations are possessed of a democratic political elite who have the required skills for resolving such conflicts. As for the Arabs, true democracies have yet to appear, although there are many political forces, non-governmental organisations, and even some segments of the ruling elite who are trying to support democratisation in these countries. Indeed, part of this elite is optimistic about the ability of democratic nations to give real support to attempts at democratic development in parts of the Arab world.
The war against Iraq and the opposition of the European public showed a wide segment of the Arab public the solidarity that peoples of the world, regardless of colour, race, or religion, feel towards the Arab cause. Supporting the values of co-existence, the show of solidarity gave hope to many in the Arab world that peaceful opposition to US policies in the Middle East and the world at large might produce results.
But the US disregarded all forms of peaceful protest, leaving the Arab public feeling cheated, defeated, and impotent, with no modern democratic means at its disposal to express its anger and its rejection of US policies. The Arab public is thus unable to confront the US except through violence or through accepting the use of violence, that being the only means possible of protest given the breakdown of all peaceful means before the tyranny of the US military machine. The US aggression shattered the hopes that the Arab world had placed on the capacity of public opinion to pressure the US to forgo war, particularly given the impotence of official Arab discourse. The only means by which to act is violence -- not merely Islamist violence, but essentially violent resistance -- because the US administration has shut the door firmly on all peaceful means.
Given the current political and cultural situation, the US occupation of Iraq will no doubt reinvigourate violent resistance by Islamists. Although the Ba'athist regime was known for its hostility to Islamists, Saddam Hussein's government employed religious discourse in rallying opposition to the war, calling for jihad and describing the perpetrators of the invasion as "infidels". This represented an enormous transformation in Baghdad's stance towards the West, long referred to as "imperialist" in Ba'ath discourse.
The war against Iraq seems to have damaged what remained of those civic traditions that a number of Arab regimes had promoted, including the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, despite its dictatorial nature. At the discursive level, Iraq's conflict with the West and with its neighbours had long proceeded using purely political language; it only began to mesh with the jihad-oriented, Islamist discourse in the wake of US military and economic wars.
The new US fundamentalism, which divided the world into good and evil after 11 September, rejected all political avenues to pressure the Iraqi regime to change from within -- with or without Saddam -- and thereby avert the collapse of decades- old civic values and civil institutions that distinguished the country from its Gulf neighbours. The US squandered a historical opportunity by disregarding a rare international consensus that was achieved on the necessity of disarming Iraq peacefully and continuing to pressure the regime in Baghdad through political means, thus upholding international law. Instead the Bush administration allowed its extremism to lead it into war, thereby destroying the space in which conflicts could be resolved politically, and also effecting material destruction.
Violence, consequently, will be met with violence and occupation with martyrdom, drawing the region and the world into a vortex of fundamentalist violence that appears set to continue for some time.
* The writer is an analyst at Al-Ahram Political and Strategic Studies Centre.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 24 - 30 April 2003 (Issue No. 635)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/635/op172.htm