Cole: al Qaeda ahead of US in Overall Goals

Juan Cole makes a compelling case that bin Laden (or AQ, if you think he's dead) is further along in his long-term goals than the US in this conflict, and that the US has unwittingly helped him get there. Best bits:

Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's wisdom and foresightedness.

After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against US policies.

It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.

If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.

Bin Laden's dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.

Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.

Invading Iraq is still seen by many folks as having always been a necessary part of the conflict (I refuse to call it a "war on terror" any more). I didn't see it before the invasion and now see it even less. At least before the conflict, I suspected Bush had a better plan to win the peace in Iraq than he obviously had.

I continue to be convinced the invasion of Iraq was a long-standing Neocon plan with no connection to terrorism before 9/11 and nothing but rhetoric connecting it to terrorism after 9/11...until, of course, we screwed things up so royally. Now, ironically, it's totally connected to terrorism, just not in a way that serves our best interests.

merci Ondine

UPDATE: Also discussed on Kos.

Comments

[Jonas Cord]

I found the essay fascinating, up until the point at which it merely became contrived griping about Iraq. I wish he had cited this poll showing 80% support for an Islamic State - given that all the polls I've seen imply Iran-style theocracy is soundly rejected in similiar numbers - and perhaps this poll reflects a enthusiasm for what I'll call "Turkish Islamicism." The notion of Saddam's "secular" Baath regime being some strong fortress against creeping Islamic fundamentalism is a regrettable oversimplification. Great dictator protectors of radical secularism wouldn't be particularily likely to spend billions building immaculate mosques with korans written in the dictators blood, to my mind anyways.

[carsick]

jonas
If Saddam worried about radical Islamics gaining strength in and around his country a smart move would be to identify oneself with the movement to better control its spread and ramifications.
He was not a great dictator protector of radical secularism. He was a dictator with limited abilities to maintain his grasp on power in part due to the containment and embargo policies of the US.
His priority was his own power and it is a simplification to assume he cared about secularism at all.

[Jonas Cord]

His priority was his own power and it is a simplification to assume he cared about secularism at all.

I agree completely, and that's at the heart of my critique of the ending of the piece, if I wasn't clear.