More Bang For Their Buck

"Al Qaeda is on the run," the president of the United States announced earlier this month."That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated ... They're not aproblem anymore." Last week, after the blasts in Riyadh but before the bombings in Casablanca, he soundeda more cautious note: "The enemies of freedom are not idle and neither are we."

The latter clause was, perhaps, superfluous - "the enemies of freedom" is a description that fitsall those who claim innocent lives in the pursuit of their objectives.

The Saudi and Moroccan cities, meanwhile, haven't been the only targets. The past week has also witnessedbloodshed in Chechnya. Shell petrol stations in Karachi have been targeted. Shortly after the first meetingbetween Palestinian and Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas at the weekend, a suicidebomber killed eight people in Jerusalem. Lebanese authorities claim to have foiled a plot to attack the USembassy and other American interests in Beirut. And six African countries have been cited as possible venuesfor terrorism, with Kenya the likeliest contender.

Al Qaeda has been named as the probable perpetrator of the outrages in Riyadh and Casablanca - a series ofcoordinated blasts, including suicide bombings, that caused dozens of fatalities in each case. The charges arespeculative but, in the circumstances, not exactly unreasonable, particularly in the Saudi case, where theauthorities reportedly failed to pay sufficient attention to weeks of warnings from Western intelligenceservices.

If the speculation is correct, then George W. Bush ought to acknowledge that these are hardly the actionsof an organization "on the run" that is "not a problem anymore". Hosni Mubarak - who isnot generally known for his opposition to Washington's foreign policy - had remarked at the outset of the Iraqwar that the US aggression would give birth to a hundred bin Ladens. As Mary Riddell commented in TheGuardian last week, "If the Iraq war was a gift to bin Ladenites, then Riyadh was the thank younote."

US vice-president Dick Cheney is quoted as having said in a speech, post-Riyadh: "The only way to dealwith this threat ultimately is to destroy it. There's no treaty can solve this problem. There's no peaceagreement, no policy of containment
or deterrence that works to deal with this threat. We have to go find the terrorists." There is plenty ofpotential for disagreement with the implication that the terrorist trends in Islam are unrelated to past andpresent American actions. However, even if one ignores, for the moment, the wider context, the obviousquestion his contentions raise is: Well, why not go and find the terrorists instead of mucking about inMesopotamia?

Although the war on Iraq was posited initially as a campaign within the broader so-called war on terror,that fiction became progressively harder to maintain. It's been a month since the Ba'ath administrationwithered away, but no weapons of mass destruction have been unearthed, nor any evidence of links with Al Qaeda.

Worse still, no coherent plan for Iraq's reconstruction exists, and the inability of the occupation forcesto restore the basic infrastructure and to maintain law and order prompted a second regime change within weeksof the first one. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld has made clear that, no matter what the majority of Iraqis want,an Islamist government is out of the question. So much for democracy.

While it's clear to all but the wilfully blind that the assault on Iraq was completely unrelated to theevents of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent hunt for terrorists ("Our leaders went to war because theycouldn't think what else to do," writes Riddell. "Al Qaeda, by contrast, has no lack ofideas."), it is widely assumed that the earlier war against Afghanistan was a more or less legitimateresponse to Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington.

The Taliban, predictably, weren't hard to dislodge. (Installing them in power hadn't proved all that hardeither for Pakistan's military intelligence, with Saudi connivance and tacit American support.) Tracking downAl Qaeda's command structure proved to be a much trickier proposition.

Notwithstanding the Torah Borah firefights, this objective was largely to be a failure from the Americanpoint of view. The hundreds of captives shipped out to Guantanamo Bay were, it would appear, mostly footsoldiers at best. When Bush warned last week that the Riyadh terrorists would feel the full weight of Americanjustice, it was hard not to think of Camp X-Ray - although American injustice has, since 9/11, also acquiredbizarre new forms in the continental United States.

Virtually all significant successes against Al Qaeda have been recorded on Pakistani soil, through policeaction rather than military manoeuvres. Had that been the main tack adopted from the outset - not just inPakistan but also in the Gulf, in North Africa, wherever there was evidence of Al Qaeda activity - it islikely to have yielded much more substantial results in terms of curbing terrorism, with negligible"collateral damage".

But within the constraints of a sensible course of action along those lines, it would hardly have beenpossible for the neo-conservative clique that surrounds Bush to keep alive their dream of world domination,through conquest if necessary. Afghanistan was effectively a practice run. Iraq was set up as more of achallenge, and the fall of Baghdad undoubtedly has struck fear in the hearts of neighbouring states (althoughneither the mullahs in Iran nor the Ba'athists in Damascus can be expected to crumble to their knees in awe orshock).

As far as the votaries of violence are concerned, however, the wars have had the opposite effect.Recruitment has become simpler than before, as US military aggression has encouraged fanatical tendenciesamong the devout. Besides, as Western intelligence agencies are now beginning to fathom, Al Qaeda, for whatit's worth, appears to differ substantially from terrorist groups they have sought to tackle in the past.Rather than the tight centralised control that characterises the IRA in Northern Ireland or the ETA in Spain,it seems to be a loose conglomeration of affiliates scattered throughout the world, with substantial room forlocal initiative.

It's akin to a multinational franchise like McDonald's or Starbucks, willing to outsource"martyrdom" operations wherever possible. It is such aspects of the organization that lead JohnGray, in his recent book Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, to describe it as a modernist phenomenon. Bethat as it may, it certainly cannot be construed as a modernizing influence: if it had its way, we'd betravelling back in time hundreds of years. But it is a product of its times: of globalisation, of imperialism,of the corruption and decay in the Arab world.

Which brings us, naturally enough, to the Saudi kingdom. It has lately been alleged that Al Qaeda hasinfiltrated the Saudi administration and its security and military forces at all levels. Whether or not thatis true, the brutal attacks on three elitist residential compounds in Riyadh suggests that the bin Ladenitesare not going to be placated by the gesture of US troops formally exiting the kingdom. Nor is there any reasonto believe that the House of Saud can reform the state structures to an appreciable extent without signing itsown political death warrant.

Although some of the Washington neo-cons wouldn't be averse to US-propelled regime change in Riyadh, thefear of bin Ladenism infecting the majority of Muslims ought to suffice as a restraint. But should the Houseof Saud begin to crumble, it is likely that the US will throw caution to the wind. In such circumstances, oilwill inevitably take precedence over Muslim sensitivities; after all, the Americans didn't assume control ofIraqi resources with the intention of letting the world's largest proven crude reserves slip out of theirgrasp.

Morocco, too, will feel some pressure, but can expect to be left largely to its own devices. After all, noAmericans died in Casablanca, although the violence was chiefly directed against Westerners and, equallyreprehensibly, against Jews. Although the regime in Rabat opposed the war in Iraq on account of its possibleconsequences, it remains staunchly pro-Western and has for a long time been on good terms with Israel.

Experts suggest that the killings in Casablanca didn't boast as many Al Qaeda hallmarks as the bloodshed inRiyadh, which points to a franchise operation. A large number of Muslim leaders have unreservedly condemnedboth incidents. That is unquestionably the correct response to acts of madness. Let us also in keep in mind,though, the fact that Al Qaeda and its affiliates draw sustenance from US actions and intentions.

John Gray veers close to the truth when he describes radical Islam as "a symptom of the disease ofwhich it is pretending to be the cure". Unfortunately, the same description also more or less fits thosewho have sworn to eliminate this symptom, but whose chosen remedies keep exacerbating the disease.

Courtesy, Znet