File:BRISMES 2010 lecture.pdf

BRISMES lecture, British Academy, 18 November 2010

America’s War against Islam

By Patrick Seale

Introduction

It must now be clear to everyone that President Barack Obama has failed to keep his promise to the Muslim world. In Cairo last year, and on subsequent occasions, he pledged that the United States was not, and would never be, at war with Islam. These words awakened immense hope throughout the Muslim world, but that hope has now given way to an equally immense disillusion. Most Muslims see little difference between Obama and his belligerent predecessor, George W Bush. For them, America is at war with Islam.

And some of them intend to fight back.

Two Views of President Obama

There is an element of perplexing ambiguity about President Obama. He sends mixed signals. According to one view – a view I myself have held for some time — he is a man of the Third World. His father was a Muslim. He spent some early years in Indonesia. He is the first black president of the United States. Everything about this background would suggest that he knows what needs to be done to defuse Muslim hostility and protect Western and American vital interests.

But there is another view of him, which has come to the fore, namely that he is really an all-American boy, who grew up in Hawaii, went to Harvard and then to Chicago, a very American town, and that he simply doesn’t really understand why Muslims are angry. Obama may prefer America not to be at war with Islam, but he has done nothing about it except to utter a few emollient words – such as his speech a week or two ago in Jakarta — as if Muslim hostility to the United States were only an unfortunate misunderstanding to be lifted by a little good will.

Instead of acting resolutely to defuse Muslim anger, he has placed himself in the hands of the very same people who have been making America’s disastrous Middle East policy under both parties for the past several decades. He has bowed to domestic pressures from powerful pro-Israeli lobbies and their affiliated think-tanks, from the US Congress, from a phalanx of neo-conservatives whose influence still reaches deep inside the Administration, from the higher ranks of the U.S. military, from hectoring TV channels such as Fox News, and from an ignorant and increasingly right-wing and Islamophobic American public, still demanding vengeance for the attacks on the American heartland of 11 September 2001.

As America wages war against Islam more ferociously than ever, so the threat of attack from radical Islamic groups has grown rather than retreated under Obama’s presidency.

At the start of his mandate, Obama outlined three clear goals: to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of a two-state solution; to resolve by negotiation America’s conflict with Iran over its nuclear programme; and to withdraw from Iraq. On the first count, he has been defeated by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the second, he was deflected from his goal of reaching out to Iran by the ‘Green revolution’ which erupted last year following President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s rigged re-election.

Be that as it may, gone today is any real attempt at reconciliation with Tehran. Instead, Obama has resorted to increasingly punitive sanctions. He may have thought this was the only way to tame the hawks, both American and Israeli, who clamoured for military action. But cranking up sanctions has caused great bitterness in Tehran, where the United States is seen more than ever as the enemy. This is hardly the right climate for reaching a reasonable compromise on the nuclear issue.

On Iraq, Obama has so far kept his pledge: 90,000 combat soldiers have left the country. But the United States has far from disengaged. 50,000 US soldiers remain in Iraq. And the vast fortified US embassy – the biggest in the world – bears witness to America’s ambitions in that country. Meanwhile, the situation remains highly dangerous and unstable. ‘Al-Qaida in Iraq’ has sprung menacingly to life– as was brought home by the recent grisly slaughter of Christian worshippers in the Syriac Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad.

Just who started the war between the United States and Islam is not my concern here. To answer that, one would have to examine the way the United States, after World War Two, inherited a neo-imperial role in the Middle East from its enfeebled European allies, Britain and France – who themselves laid the foundations for many of today’s conflicts by the way they chopped up and disposed of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after World War One, including, of course, Britain’s support for Zionist aims in Palestine.

My concern is to try and understand the present situation – a situation in which a number of radical Islamic groups have struck at American and European targets, and have threatened to strike again. Although ten years have passed, the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington are still in everyone’s mind. But there have been several others: the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; the assault on two of America’s East African embassies in 1998 which killed over 200 people; the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2000 which killed 17 US sailors; the attack on a train in Madrid in March 2004 which killed 191 people, the suicide bombings in London’s transport system in July 2005 when 52 people died. Other, potentially devastating, attacks – such as the packages of explosives recently sent from Yemen — have fortunately been foiled.

Western security chiefs --Jonathan Evans, head of Britain’s MI5, and Bernard Squarcini, his French opposite number — have drawn particular attention to the danger posed by British- French- or American-born youths who, having been radicalised by action in Yemen or Somalia, might seek on their return to strike at Europe or the United States.

Some would argue that terrorist threats such as these can best be dealt with by police and intelligence services, by electronic intercepts, by counter-terrorist operations and surgical strikes. Clearly, Western security agencies are now on high alert, while the CIA is waging a shadow war against extremists in a dozen countries – in the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of the Sahara, in Somalia and East Africa, in Central Asia, and increasingly in Yemen.

The Key Question

The key question, it seems to me, is this: are such methods sufficient on their own to deal with the threat or is a fundamental revision required of current Western policies? Hostility to the West has spread far beyond the confines of small militant groups, such as al-Qaida. Indeed, most Muslims would probably reject Al-Qaida’s violent methods, but this does not mean that they are not stirred by anger and humiliation at America’s wars against Muslim countries, at the situation in Palestine, at the insulting way Muslims and their religion are treated in the West. We are witnessing, if not yet a global insurgency, then something like a worldwide movement of Islamic resistance. Potential recruits for jihad are legion.