April 12, 2006
Tom Porteous is a syndicated columnist and author who was
formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.
We now know that Al Qaeda had nothing to do
with the London bombings in July 2005. This is the conclusion
of the British government's official inquiry report leaked
to the British press on April 9.
We now also know that the U.S. military is
deliberately misleading Iraqis, Americans and the rest of
the world about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in the
Iraqi insurgency. This was reported in The Washington Post
on April 10, on the basis of internal military documents seen
by that newspaper.
What do these revelations tell us about the
arguments of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Blair
that in Al Qaeda the "Free World" faces a threat
comparable to that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a
world-wide terrorist network which seeks to build a radical
Islamist empire over half the world?
That they are threadbare, to say the least.
But also that they are cynical, misleading and self serving.
The London bombings, it turns out, were the
work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to "international
terrorist networks", who had learned how to make bombs
by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated,
according to the report, by British foreign policies in the
Muslim world—a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to
undermine and discredit.
The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind
in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was
cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's
propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the
Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification
for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.
Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its
appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local
authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected
governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al
Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous
or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out
and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".
It's almost certain that as the United States
ratchets up the pressure on Iran in the coming months the
non-issue of Tehran 's "links" with Al Qaeda will
come to the fore. In fact the groundwork is already being
laid. Blair, no less, said ominously in a speech last month
that although "the conventional view is that Iran is
hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict
that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change."
So as the confrontation with Iran builds, watch out for leaked
reports from anonymous security officials about dastardly
Iranian-Al Qaeda conspiracies.
Stripped of exaggeration, romanticism, demonization
and myth making, the picture of Al Qaeda which has emerged
from the trial in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui
is of a fractious organisation that has been a magnet for
bewildered martyrdom-seeking fantasists. At least this has
a ring of truth to it.
This is not to say that Al Qaeda is not dangerous.
It is a serious security challenge. It may even one day be
a strategic threat, especially if it gets hold of some WMD.
But it is not the threat Bush and Blair tell us it is.
The recent revelations of the non-existent
role of Al Qaeda in the London bombings and of the Pentagon's
deliberate exaggeration of Al Qaeda's role in Iraq reinforce
the argument that in their response to the threat of Al Qaeda
(the so called "war on terror," or "Long War"),
the United States and its allies are making strategic errors
of monumental proportions.
First, this war, as it is being fought in
Iraq and Afghanistan, is not principally fighting "Al
Qaeda" but is creating and fighting new enemies: people
who don't like being invaded, occupied and kicked around by
foreigners and who are prepared to stand up and resist. These
people may eventually become terrorists. But it will have
been U.S. policies that created them. If Iran is next on the
Pentagon's list, the same thing will happen there. To the
extent that Israel is seen by the United States as pursuing
its own war on terror in the Palestinian territories it occupies,
it is happening in Gaza and the West Bank too.
Second, the Long War is a distraction from
the real issues which need to be addressed as a matter of
urgency in order to reduce conflict, violence and injustice
in the region and thus to reduce the radicalization of a generation
of angry and alienated Muslim youth at home and in the diasporas.
These include: ending the Israeli occupation of occupied Palestinian
territories through negotiation; pursuing peaceful nuclear
reduction throughout the region; and engaging seriously with
political Islam. Talk of "democratization" without
engaging with political Islam is nonsense.
Third, on the grounds that it is fighting
a "just war," the United States and its allies have
justified using levels of violence, coercion and repression—including
torture, collective punishment and the killing of large numbers
of civilians—which are not only of questionable tactical efficacy,
but have led to a collapse of U.S. prestige in a part of the
world where it has long been seen as a necessary protector,
stabilizer and arbiter.
The fact that there was no operational link
between the London bombers and Al Qaeda shows that its real
danger lies in its ability to inspire terrorist attacks. In
this it has no better allies and collaborators at present
than the United States and Britain under their current leaders.
Copyright © 2006 Tom Porteous / Agence
Global
