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The Media Tale of Sectarian Conflict
A frontpage NYT piece on Lebanon is, as the Angry Arab finds, extremely inaccurate and sounds like written by the Hariri press office. Today’s WaPo wrap up of the last week in Lebanon is a bit better, but still misses many aspects of the actual conflict. For reliable analysis one should read Karim Makdisi at Counterpunch or this account of an anonymous German Lebanon correspondent at Syria Comment.
What the two mainstream pieces try is to shape the meme of sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict as the base of what happened. This is the same tale the U.S. (and the Saudis) have used in their divide and rule strategy in Iraq. In reality the split is much more a political than a religious one and with many more groups and interests involved than just Sunni and Shia.
The NYT puts it right into the headline: Hezbollah’s Actions Ignite Sectarian Fuse in Lebanon
After almost a week of street battles that left scores dead and threatened to push the country into open war, long-simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions here have sharply worsened, in an ominous echo of the civil conflict in Iraq.
The whole piece is filled with minor anecdotes that reinforce the point Sunni hate Shia, Shia hate Sunni and Hariri’s poor Sunnis, not really a militia in the blind view of the author, lost the fight.
From the WaPo piece:
Meanwhile, many Lebanese agree that the hardening of Sunni-Shiite
animosities — reminiscent of the Muslim-Christian fault line during the
country’s 15-year civil war — is likely to make any future conflict
here more violent.
In contrast to this ‘official’ view, the Syria Comment author notes:
The good news (so far): while the conflict does have a sectarian dimension – the fighters are mostly Shiites on one side, Sunnis and Druze on the other – it is still first and foremost a struggle between two irreconcilable political agendas, and has not (yet) turned sectarian, despite the best effort of pundits in the pay of the government and its Saudi masters (who control much of the Arab media) to discredit Hezbollah as hell-bent on turning Lebanon and the Levant into an Shiite-Arab foothold of a new Persian Empire.
Karim Makdisi writes:
The continued US, Israeli and Saudi obsession with Iran (which these days is being used interchangeably with “Shia’a” in a bid to fan sectarian flames) means that they will already be planning ahead for the next battle, probably in Lebanon and almost certainly in Gaza (since Hamas is placed in the “Iran” column), in order to halt the perceived Iranian gain in Lebanon last week.
Neither the NYT nor WaPo mention how much this conflict is instigated and controlled from the outside. They of course can not really do so because they are major willing tools used in this game.
It is not only the Saudi controlled Arab media that is pushing the sectarian meme. The U.S. mainstream media are marching in lockstep with them to create the bigger war, the big cauldron in the Middle East the neocons are longing for.
These people that live in mansions and collect money from the poor are no more religous than a common thief as far as I’m concerned.
yeah i agree of course, i am not sure how we got from AQ not being secular (which is what i posted) to that translating into me defending the devoutness of anyone, including AQ. never the less, binny and AQ are not secular, like say..the most secular country in the ME, prior to our invasion.
The problem with trying to communicate in a limited setting is trying to convey ideas in as little words as possible…..An Iraqi nationalist that is trying to free his/her country from foreign influence via resistance to the occupation isn’t nesacarily joining Al Queda but in effect is joining Al Queda’s struggle. I thought I was using a figure of speech to elucidate an idea.
welllll, that was sort of my point. from b’s post
This is the same tale the U.S. (and the Saudis) have used in their divide and rule strategy in Iraq. In reality the split is much more a political than a religious
re ‘joining Al Queda’s struggle’. AQ is dead meat in iraq as soon as the US is gone. this concept is fundamentally turned around imho. while i certainly agree the US presence fuels AQ, without AQ the US would loose much of its justification for being in the ME or africa.
Actually Al Queda comes from an Arabic translation of the base
hmm, wiki being wiki…my point, i’m not so sure AQ named itself AQ. i’ve read otherwise.
and grew out of the struggle to free Afghanistan from Soviet occupation.
whose struggle? it didn’t organically grow all on its own. i think there is a little missing from this picture. from your link
As a matter of law, the U.S. Department of Justice needed to show that Osama bin Laden was the leader of a criminal organization in order to charge him in absentia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO statutes. The name of the organization and details of its structure were provided in the testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, who claimed to be a founding member of the organization and a former employee of Osama bin Laden.[27]
To quote the (BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares,)documentary directly: The reality was that bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had become the focus of a loose association of disillusioned Islamist militants who were attracted by the new strategy. But there was no organization. These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance. He was not their commander. There is also no evidence that bin Laden used the term “al-Qaeda” to refer to the name of a group until after September the 11th, when he realized that this was the term the Americans had given it.
Jamal al-Fadl
Al-Fadl was recruited to the Afghan mujahideen “through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn” (presumably when he was in the U.S. in the mid 1980s), and he became a “senior employee” of al-Qaeda. After embezzling $110,000 from the organization, al-Fadl “defected”. He contacted the CIA via the US’s Eritrean embassy and, receiving encouragement from FBI special agents Jack Cloonan and Dan Coleman (who were “seconded” to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit), he returned (after staying in Germany for a while) to the United States, in spring 1996.
For the next three years Cloonan and his colleagues oversaw al-Fadl in a safehouse. From December 1996 Al-Fadl began to provide “a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al Qaeda”; “bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more” — including the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. Al-Fadl, who had “passed the polygraph tests he was given”, became a key witness in the US v. bin Laden trial that began in February 2001.
blurb
In late 1993, bin Laden asks Ali Mohamed to scout out possible US, British, French, and Israeli targets in Nairobi, Kenya. Mohamed will later confess that in December 1993, “I took pictures, drew diagrams and wrote a report.” Then he travels to Sudan, where bin Laden and his top advisers review Mohamed’s work. In 1994, Mohamed claims that “bin Laden look[s] at a picture of the American Embassy and point[s] to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.” A truck will follow bin Laden’s directions and crash into the embassy in 1998. Mohamed seems to spend considerable time in Nairobi working with the cell he set up there and conducting more surveillance. He also is sent to the East African nation of Djibouti to scout targets there, and is asked to scout targets in the West African nation of Senegal. [Los Angeles Times, 10/21/2000; Chicago Tribune, 12/11/2001; LA Weekly, 5/24/2002; 9/11 Commission, 6/16/2004] Much of his work seems to be done together with Anas al-Liby, a top al-Qaeda leader with a mysterious link to Western intelligence agencies similar to Mohamed’s. In 1996, British intelligence will pay al-Liby to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi (see 1996), and then will let him live openly in Britain until 2000 (see 1995-May 2000). Al-Liby is said to be a “computer wizard” known for “working closely” with Mohamed. [New York Times, 2/13/2001; New York Times, 4/5/2001] L’Houssaine Kherchtou, an al-Qaeda member who later turns witness for a US trial (see September 2000), was trained in surveillance techniques in Pakistan by Mohamed in 1992. Kherchtou will claim he later comes across Mohamed in 1994 in Nairobi. Mohamed, Anas al-Liby, and a relative of al-Liby’s use Kherchtou’s apartment for surveillance work. Kherchtou sees al-Liby with a camera about 500 meters from the US embassy. [Washington File, 2/22/2001] Mohamed returns to the US near the end of 1994 after an FBI agent phones him in Nairobi and asks to speak to him about an upcoming trial. [Washington File, 2/22/2001]
sorry, i got side tracked. more about Jamal al-Fadl at the link…
again, i agree there are religious fanatics everywhere, but i don’t think this is the biggest problem. i think the biggest problem is any strong healthy powerful rational man/men who could bring peace to the ME, would probably be dead meat unless he was operating in servitude and alignment w/the US/IS. it is not as if those people don’t exist, in abundance. they are the ones that offer the gravest threat to the intended occupiers. they will be/are identified as subversives, terrorists, AQ, fanatics, you name it. we are inflaming fanatics because without them we could not have a war on terror, and for the purposes of the worst amongst us, this is essential.
ideally, i hope that all those countries do catch on and actually join together. but not as AQ. i think this would be a leap considering they are not the majority, or at least weren’t before we started the genocide.
Posted by: annie | May 20 2008 5:27 utc | 23
Lets see here, bin Laden openly declares war on international TV against the US and the Justice Department needed to show he was a criminal?
no, they did not need to show he was a criminal. they needed to show he was a leader of a criminal organization for the purpose of charging him under the Racketeering law. i imagine this is similar to establishing several co conspirators to establish a conspiracy.
gee, you didn’t address my point (allegation), which was that their isn’t any evidence of the origin of the identification coming from the organization itself. organization being a slippery term in this case.
nice divert.
alex grew out of OUR struggle to free Afghanistan from Soviet occupation.
No that’s not right.
really? you dont think AQ grew out of OUR struggle?…link provided below..former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan: ““Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”
It wasn’t only a US struggle; there was also an Islamic struggle.
correct, i never alleged it was only a US struggle. however, sam’s statement..never implied the US had anything to do w/AQ’s growth which it most certainly did.
we really don’t know what form the islamic struggle in afghanistan would have taken had we not spent billions, formed the ISI to channel funding… as i see it, the ORGANIZATION of the group itself, very much had roots in the US effort to organize it, thru binny, who traveled to the US for training, funded by the US.
“Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … [They are] freedom fighters.”
Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?
In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.
clip
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.
Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilize the Soviet Union.
….. in 1986 CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992
had that commitment by the cia, not been made, we really have no idea how or if the term ‘organized‘ could be applied.
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American “black Muslims” were taught “sabotage skills”.
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained “bin Laden’s operatives” in 1989.
These “operatives” were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.
might that be the SAME Ali Mohamed b real link’s to here, under the heading Context of ‘February 2008: Ex-US Soldier from Bosnia War Emerges as Al-Qaeda Leader in Somalia’???
binny and AQ are not secular
How do you know? Did you personally know any of the terrorists?
i read about his past. not my idea of secular. wtf difference does it make if i know any ‘terrorists’ personally.
Posted by: annie | May 20 2008 15:37 utc | 27
this is off-topic from the main post, but related to annie & sam’s discussion
from a 2004 interview w/ mahmood mamdani shortly after the release of his excellent book good muslim, bad muslim: america, the cold war, and the roots of terror
You argue in the book that it was US policy in the Reagan years to support terrorist movements across the Third World, from Mozambique and Angola to Nicaragua and Afghanistan, in an attempt to quash militant nationalism – then equated with Soviet expansionism – with no American loss of life. You point especially to the transition from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict and the shift in the locus of the Cold War from Europe to the Third World during the 1980s, both as significant reorientations of US war strategy. What was the significance of these changes for the global spread of terrorism?
I focus on what I call the late Cold War, which I date from the American defeat in Vietnam to the most recent invasion of Iraq. After defeat in Vietnam, the US was faced with opposition to overseas military intervention, both at home and abroad. Kissinger was the first to respond to this changed international context. The year the Vietnam war ended, 1975, was the year the Portuguese empire collapsed. The center of gravity of the Cold War shifted from southeast Asia to southern Africa, where the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola became independent. Kissinger looked for a pragmatic solution. Unable to intervene directly, the US looked for proxies. If the US could not intervene itself, it would have to find others to intervene on its behalf. Kissinger first tried this in Angola with South African intervention but it did not work. The day it became known, that very day it was discredited.
Ronald Reagan ideologized proxy war in a religious idiom. Reagan ideologized the Cold War as a war against “evil”, against the “Evil Empire.” His speech about the Evil Empire was first made to an annual gathering of American evangelicals. I think it is very important that we be clear about the political uses of “evil”: you cannot coexist with evil, you cannot convert evil, you have to eliminate evil. In that titanic battle, any alliance is justified.
The first alliance, which lasted throughout Reagan’s two administrations, was with apartheid South Africa, what was called “constructive engagement”. It was under the American protective umbrella that apartheid South Africa created Africa’s first genuine terrorist movement: Renamo in Mozambique, which was genuinely terrorist in the sense that it was not interested in fighting the military, its focus was on targeting civilians as a way of demonstrating that an independent African government was incapable of protecting its citizens, spreading fear. America’s responsibility in Mozambique was not direct but indirect. It did not provide direct assistance to Renamo but it did provide a political cover to apartheid South Africa for over a decade as South Africa nurtured, from scratch, a genuinely terrorist movement in an independent African country.
Whereas the US was an understudy in Mozambique, its embrace of terror became direct and brazen after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. In Nicaragua, the US created a terrorist movement called Contras, more or less as apartheid South Africa had created Renamo in Mozambique, also from scratch. The lessons it learnt from southern Africa and central America were put into practice in Afghanistan in the concluding phase of the Cold War.
You say that, “The Reagan administration took two initiatives that were to have lasting impacts on US foreign policy. The first was to turn to the drug trade for an illicit source of funds; the second was to turn to the religious right to implement those foreign policy objectives that Congress had ruled against, thus beginning a trend toward privatizing war.” What were the lasting effects of these developments?
As I traced the history of proxy war, I was struck by how it tended to run alongside another underground development, that of drug trade, whether in Laos, Nicaragua or Afghanistan. The reason was simple: if you don’t declare war, you don’t have access to public funds to wage it. The search for funds to wage an undeclared war time and again led the CIA into an embrace of the underworld, particularly the drug lords.
The Afghan war exemplified the extreme development of two tendencies: one, the ideologization of war in a religious idiom, and two, its privatization. War no longer had national boundaries; the US was no longer interested in any Islamist group with a national orientation, which it considered too narrow. It wanted internationalist groups, groups committed to an international jihad, groups that could be relied on to join a fight to the finish. In fact, the US wanted the war to be expanded to include the Muslim populations of the Soviet Union from the outset but backed down because the Soviets threatened to retaliate with an invasion of Pakistan.
With its ideologization, war ceased to be a necessary evil; rather, it became a way of removing evil. It became a praiseworthy thing. The ideologization of war was done in heavily religious terms. By the time Afghanistan happened, war was not even conceived as a national project, as with Renamo in Mozambique or the Contras in Nicaragua. The war in Afghanistan was justified as a global jihad. To wage it, the CIA recruited volunteers globally; Muslims everywhere, in the US, in Britain, all over the world, were invited to participate in this global war. The CIA was busy creating cells everywhere, the nuclei of the same cells they are busy trying to smash today as a network of terror.
The ideologization of war also led to its privatization. The Islamist network was both global and private. What we are reaping today is the whirlwind.
At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you suggest that the Reagan administration “rescued right-wing Islamism from [a] historical cul-de-sac.” How so?
Right-wing Islamism was preoccupied with the question of power and yet was allergic to mass movements. So it had either to embrace existing forms of power – like the Saudi monarchy or the Zia regime in Pakistan – or it would remain a fringe group. It is this cul-de-sac from which the late Cold War and the American strategy rescued it.
What we need to keep in mind is that without the American project it is difficult to see how this group of intellectuals could have translated an ideological tendency into a political project. How, indeed, it could have developed the numbers, the organization, the training, the self-consciousness, the sense of mission, strategy, tactics, and so on, and come out of it with the notion that they, the Islamists, destroyed the Soviet Union, and now it was time to destroy the other superpower. None of this would have been thinkable within the short span of a decade had it not been for American policy after Vietnam and in Afghanistan.
in the book, mamdani writes
The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for nearly a century. But now the CIA was determined to create one in service of a contemporary political objective. Of course, the tradition of jihad is contentious. Doctrinally, the tradition of jihad as “just war” can be located in the “lesser jihad,” not in the “greater jihad.” Historically, the tradition of “lesser jihad” itself comprises two different – and conflicting – notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin’s jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahhabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi’s anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth-century Sudan. The first was against occupying nonbelievers, the second against oppressive believers, the third against occupying believers, and the fourth, against a combination of occupiers, believers and nonbelievers. The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jihad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered “heretic.” This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam. Associated with the slaughter of Shi’a civilian populations in Iran and Iraq carried out by the Ikhwan faction of the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century – not to be confused with the later Egyptian Ikhwan (Society of Muslim Brothers)- this tradition is more akin to the Inquisition in Christianity than to any historical practice of jihad in Islam. The notion of a standing jihad – a state institution in defense of state interests – is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia. Precisely because of its association with sectarian practices enshrined in the history of a state with such close ties to official America, an armed standing jihad was particularly appealing to CIA planners.
This is the setting in which the United States organized the Afghan jihad and that informed its central objective: to unite a billion Muslims worldwide in a holy war, a crusade, against the Soviet Union, on the soil of Afghanistan. The notion of a crusade, rather than jihad, conveys better the frame of mind in which this initiative was taken. A secondary objective was to turn a doctrinal difference between two Islamic sects – the minority Shi’a and the majority Sunni – into a political divide and thereby contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a Shi’a affar. The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only in Reagan’s second term in office.
Posted by: b real | May 23 2008 3:42 utc | 37
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