Osama Bin Laden as Che Guevara, and Other Dumb Narratives

[ben ttech]

Osama Bin Laden as Che Guevara, and Other Dumb Narratives
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 7:32 AM on January 23, 2010.



Whatever we do, let's make sure it all fits neatly into a simplistic Cold War analogy.




Anne Applebaum writes for the Washington Post, a reflexive institutional supporter of Pax Americana. As you might imagine, WaPo opinion columnists don’t waste a lot of ink considering the concept of “blow-back.”

Perhaps that's why Applebaum wraps herself into a rambling and unnecessarily complicated sociological analysis of what motivated Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the educated physician who blew himself up at a CIA base in Afghanistan --and other members of what she calls a “Jihadi elite” -- to commit acts of lethal terror.

Ultimately, she omits the most relevant facts of the case on which she’s commenting, and ends up with a rather muddled picture as a result.

As we catch up with the column, she’s discussing Balawi’s widow, Defne Bayrak:

Bayrak is a shining example of what might be called the international jihadi elite: She is educated, eloquent, has connections across the Islamic world -- Istanbul, Amman, Peshawar -- yet is not exactly part of the global economy. She shares these traits not only with her husband -- a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians -- but also with others featured recently in the news. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example, grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London before trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day.



She cites a few more examples of relatively privileged terrorists in the news, and continues ...

These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, "Westernized" parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't "make it," or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

The flaw here is quite straightforward: truly international terrorism — with an individual or group moving from one country to another for the purposes of launching an attack — represents a tiny, almost insignificantly small share of all terror attacks (they're not insignificant in terms of effect, because the media pay quite a bit of attention to those high-profile incidents, and amplify the anxiety they cause). Her sociological analysis has plenty of problems, which I’ll get to, but even if it were accurate of the handful of high-profile jet-setting terrorists Applebaum focuses on, the truth is that the al Qaeda movement is broad and attracts a lot more of those “wretched of the earth” from Waziristan than it does high-flying physicians with connections in the Jordanian intelligence community. The latter may offer the kind of stories the Western media investigate in depth, but that doesn’t make them representative of the larger dynamic.

And from that flawed analysis comes some really poor conclusions:

Perhaps it sounds strange, but they remind me of the early Bolsheviks, who were also educated, multinational and ambitious, and who also often lacked the social cachet to be successful. Lenin's family, for example, clung desperately to its status on the lowest rung of the czarist aristocracy...

The analogy to the Cold War is as lazy as it is prevalent. And of course, it leads to the conclusion, as it inevitably does, that we need to waste more money on “public diplomacy” — propaganda to win “hearts and minds.”

What she doesn’t say about the case speaks volumes. The New York Times reported this key bit of background:

He [al Balawi's brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.

The brother said that Mr. Balawi was arrested by the Jordanian authorities after volunteering with medical organizations to treat wounded Palestinians in Gaza. The family is itself of Palestinian origin, from a tribe in the Beersheba region.

So, by accounts a normal family man, a physician, until he got a first-hand look at the effects of the U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Gaza. That, it seems, drove him into the waiting arms of radicalism. A more obvious case of blowback would be hard to imagine.

Recall what University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape — who studied every single incident of suicide terrorism in detail over a 25 year-period — concluded about the root causes of (suicide) terrorism:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

I’ve cited this several times before, and will continue to do so as long as the kind of analysis Applebaum offers is being splashed across the pages of our leading newspapers.

Applebaum's column is titled: "We need a smarter way to fight the jihadi elite." I won't argue that she's wrong. But I think we need to understand that terrorism is a cost of hegemony -- which serves us, if not the rest of the planet, quite well -- and ask an equally relevant question: is our political class's vision of a unipolar world under American "leadership" really worth it?


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[Intrinsic]

“The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland”
Just needed to be repeated imo.

Has The Prez ever officially said why “al kayda” is after us?
Or is the “they hate our freedom” still the official reason?

[ben ttech]

you can only exclude 95% of a subject occurance in your conversation about it,
if you adopt the restricted framing of the debate, which leaves the whole of the matter unaddressed...

[ben ttech]

christ that anne is a fucking villian....


did you read her original?

catch this ending...

The case of Bayrak and her ilk also suggests the need for another kind of anti-terrorism strategy. Too often, we still consider public diplomacy to be a sort of public relations activity, the "promotion" of American values. Instead, we should think about it as an argument. The Bayraks and Balawis of this world are engaged in constant debates -- in Internet chat rooms, in the halls of publishing houses, in mosques. Are they hearing enough counterarguments? Are we helping the people who make the counterarguments? I suspect that they don't and I'm certain that we aren't -- nearly a decade after Sept. 11 -- and that has to change. Intellectuals may wear glasses and read books, but neither prevents them from throwing bombs -- or from strapping them inside their underwear.