All things aside, Bush will be remembered for his all-out war against his two biggest nemeses: Al Qaeda’s Usama bin Laden and the beheaded former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His was not only a war about survival, but also, and most notably, it was a costly fight for a place in history.
Of all three, and since history is made up of facts and figures and dates, only bin Laden seems to have already chiseled himself a cave in the mountain of history books.
After all, bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11-- the one indelible date which most certainly will go in the annals as the big bang which has suddenly catapulted the world into a wholly new ballgame. In all likelihood, the impact of September 11 will have lasting reverberations throughout the 21st century and maybe even beyond.
Contrary to Bush’s repeated vow not to let “the terrorists succeed in changing our lifestyle,” September 11 has already changed the behavior of a great number of people and shattered most of the old strategic doctrines and political dogmas across the globe. The good old “mutual deterrence” based on a fairly simple calculus of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, so much familiar in Cold War rhetoric, has faded away from today’s military lexicon and strategic studies; acronyms with frightening overtones, such as ABM and ICBM, have almost become a relic of the past.
The Terrorism Research Center, an independent institute founded in the US five years before the events of 9/11 came to the conclusion that “the attacks of September 11 will be the precipitating moment of a new kind of war that will define a new century.”
September 11 has prompted the Bush administration to review the strategic doctrine of the US. The outcome of such review was tested in some parts of the Muslim World; pre-emptive warfare has been waged where the US reckoned there was a ‘nexus’ between states and terror groups. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s regimes were first to pay the price of such a doctrine.
But if there are any telltales of Bush’s policy failures, as he is a few months away from leaving the White House, they can be summed up by the fact that the Taliban is regrouping again; that bin Laden is still out in the wilderness and, by Bush’s own admission, with some wind left under his wings; that the execution of Saddam did not make Iraq any safer for Americans, as US soldiers are entrapped in a swamp never seen since Vietnam; and that Bush’s popularity ratings have slipped to levels never seen since Nixon’s last days in office.
To bin Laden, having so far succeeded in dodging the US armada is only a bonus to his image as a historic legend. Bin Laden has effectively discarded the 20th century notion that military might comforts friends by deterring foes. Adding insult to injury, bin Laden will forever be remembered for having done so much damage with so little means. To foment and execute his horrendous coup, bin Laden did not have to resort to more than age-old rhetoric and weapons as rudimentary as box cutters and as wicked as civilian planes loaded with innocent people and brimming with cheap Kerosene.
Historically, foreign invasions gave rise to unorthodox methods of resistance among indigenous populations, especially in the Middle East, and suicide operations are not at all a new phenomenon in the region.
For example, (and there are striking similarities between bin Laden and him) a certain Hassan Sabbah, founder of the dreadful Shi’ia occult order known as the Assassins (Hashashin in the local parlance) who, in medieval times and from their strongholds in the mountains of the Levant, terrorized the invading European Crusaders as well as the sect’s adversaries among the Sunni Muslim community by way of suicide attacks.
According to many occidental and oriental chroniclers, Sabbah resorted to hashish - a potent form of processed cannabis- to influence young recruits and send them on suicidal missions, murdering Christian Crusaders and Muslim backers of the Turkish Seljuk dominion. But, since September 11, such a narrative has become more and more polemical, as some researchers are now taking a second look at the Assassins’ historiography.
But as the story went, Sabbah used to get his would-be assassins high on hemp, lock them up with beautiful women inside lush gardens with fruit-bearing trees and water fountains—a perfect worldly rendition of the promised Garden of Eden. While in there, they were supposedly indoctrinated and worked into religious delirium and led to believe that, once they died for the cause, the blissful living they had experienced in their beatific gardens was going to be theirs in perpetuity.
Some scholars now contend that those accounts were all but dubious inferences based on the Occident’s “fanciful impressions of the Orient” and the imagination of a few orientalists and Arab secularists to whom the concept of die-to-kill for a cause was unfathomable.
Back in the 11th Century AD, the returning Crusaders from the Levant, perhaps for pure folkloric imagery and a desire to give more impetus to the prevailing, popular exotic view of the Orient, named Sabbah ‘The Old Man of The Mountains” – an eerie description which, a millennium later, could perfectly suit Usama bin Laden.
One of Al Qaeda’s tapes aired on Al-Jazeera TV Channel, showed bin Laden with his reed and his medieval-looking outfit, strolling down a postcard-perfect, rock-sewn mountainside in some unknown location. The surrounding landscape looked conspicuously close to the mountains from which Sabbah once ruled over his secret cult.
But insofar as the man’s image goes, bin Laden’s grip over his disciples stems not from drug inhalations nor does it come out of some elaborate theatricals or unusual charisma, but rather from his command of the Arabic language, his theological liturgy, and, of all things, from his benign appearance and his modest looks. The effects of such attributes on bin Laden’s youthful followers seem to be just as potent as those of any drug known to humans.
Even more ironic is the fact that, as a collateral outcome, today’s suicide bombings may well give credence to those who are attempting to rewrite the history of the Assassins and shed new light on the real motivations behind those who wrote the sect’s historiography. Bin Laden’s movement may end up restoring the image of Sabbah and his followers, although considered heretics by mainstream Islam, as legitimate Mujahideen who led an honorable fight against the first Crusaders.
The old views held by the West regarding suicide attacks do not seem to have changed much since Sabbah’s time. Willing to sacrifice one’s life in order to kill for a cause, no matter how just the cause is, is still viewed as utterly insane. Hence, the Bush Administration’s constant refusal to admit that there is a link between September 11 and the widespread feeling in the Muslim World of bitterness, humiliation, and injustice.
Al Qaeda statements cite US unconditional support for Israel, US sanctions and actions in Iraq, the US bases in Arabia, as the core motives behind the group’s strikes against American interests in the world.
Saladin Meckled-Garcia, commenting on the root causes of radical Islam, wrote: “radical principles give expression and offer solution to grievances, which include humiliation by Israeli and US interventions in the Middle East.” He further argues that “placing the 9/11 attacks in the historical and social context of US foreign policy will show that retaliatory military responses will only underline the causes of these events rather than addressing them.”
But as long as the US continues to see suicide attacks as irrational, there is virtually no hope that the US will ever take a rational look at the root causes of such a phenomenon. As a US diplomat based in the Middle East put it, “there could be no coexistence with insanity.”
If history is of any counsel, the Bush Administration, which seems to be hell-bent on eradicating radical Islam first and then maybe talk, is doomed to fail. The US still does not comprehend the psyche of Arabs and Muslims and, in all likelihood, bin Laden’s self-propelled ideology will go on as long as the US keeps a blind eye on the real problems shaking the Middle East-- problems ranging from foreign occupation of Arab and Muslim land to domestic oppression and suppression.
At the heel of the US-led invasion of Baghdad, and as I was covering the events in Iraq, I was struck by the huge number of Iraqis who, after they finally got out of their bunkers, were queuing up at the heavily guarded gates of the dowdy Palestine and Sheraton hotels. They were there to meet journalists, hoping to peddle information and scoops of some intrinsic value, from the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, to where they last sighted a truck loaded with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), to the mass grave where Kuwaiti POWs were “seen” buried alive.
Sifting through the daily pile of scuttlebutt to verify the potentially good leads made my job and that of the journalists I met all the more difficult.
In the weeks following the war, the American officers in charge of running a population suddenly set free and let loose, were holed up in hurriedly-vacated or forcibly flushed out palaces in the center of Baghdad. There was no official spokesman representing the occupying force in Baghdad, to explain, deny or confirm.
CENTCOM, the only source for official views on US operations in Iraq, was in Qatar, and many seasoned journalists have fallen victims to the hodgepodge of misinformation and seemingly innocent witness accounts delivered by the Iraqis. And most of those Iraqi-citizens-turned-informers were talking to US intelligence operatives in Baghdad as well.
A young Egyptian field producer working at that time for L.A. Times introduced to me two well-groomed, middle-age Iraqi men. They had a large box full of videotapes they wanted to sell, promising dozens more if the price was right. The tapes, they claimed, had in them one-of-a-kind, exclusive footage never seen before, showing Saddam Hussein and his lieges in questionable activities and highly secret meetings. They both showed me badges given to them by the US military in Baghdad. The passes had, under their names and photographs, a brief inscription stating that they were “friendly individuals” to whom assistance was requested when needed.
One of the men maintained he had worked as a tea boy in one of Saddam’s palaces. He went into a passionate description of how he saw Saddam’s acolytes torturing a political foe, slowly cutting the man’s parts into small pieces, while Saddam sat on a rocking chair and smoke cigar. This was not a far-fetched account, given the horror stories of torment I had heard from a number of rescued Iraqi political prisoners.
But then, perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate his worth, my interlocutor moved closer to me, threw a look around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping, and said: “I have information nobody else has!” He paused to watch the reaction on my face. As I decided to go along and leaned forward to listen, he whispered: “I personally saw Usama bin Laden here in Baghdad. He was with a close aide to Saddam in one of the palace’s backrooms. It was a year or so before the attacks of September 11,” the man said. “I saw bin Laden and the aide looking at a slide of New York’s twin towers. The picture was visible to me because it was projected on a large screen,” he added. “I was bringing an ashtray into the room, when suddenly Saddam’s aide grabbed the ashtray ant hit me with it on the face. He had noticed that my eyes had veered towards the projection screen, and obviously he did not want me to see the picture.”
Off the cuff, this tale appeared to be worth millions of dollars, but like many other stories of similar caliber and scope, it turned out to be yet another fabrication, just as the videotapes which, having screened them myself later, turned out to be of no real worth.
Of the hundreds of accounts, as I recall, only a handful proved to be good leads which had later on materialized in news reports. I can only assume that, given the distrustful and cynical nature of the Iraqi people and their sense of humor, the US intelligence community in Iraq did not fare any better.
Eventually, it has become clear that most of the “informers” were actually double agents whose job was to mislead the US military-- and the journalists as well-- in order to drown the good leads in a sea of misleads. It was therefore not surprising to learn that, nearly five years since Bush declared it “mission accomplished” in Iraq, the US-led coalition forces, or what’s left of that coalition, have yet to receive the flowers they had anticipated from the Iraqi people.
Five years into the Iraq war and no traces of WMDs-- the main reason for which war was waged on Iraq—have been found. The US is yet to set democracy in motion, restore electric power and other vital services, and pump enough oil to generate the revenue the US needs to help reconstruct a country devastated by thirty years of sheer brutality compounded by ten years of debilitating sanctions.
Almost all the prewar scenarios which have been concocted inside the Pentagon wings proved to be wrong. And as the world has learned, the people who have cooked it all, mainly right-wing ideologues and neo-conservatives, were driven by sheer scorn for the others. And the others here include the people of the United Nations, Arabs and Muslims (including the Iraqis), and even people in the Bush Administration who do not see the world through their skewed prism.
Only time will tell if Bush’s hasty decision to go after Saddam has jeopardized the US task of fighting terrorism. The four-star
General Wesley Clark wrote in his Winning Modern Wars: “we had re-energized Al Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists with ready access to vulnerable U.S. forces. It was the inevitable result of a flawed strategy."
By invading a country historically known for its non submissiveness to authority, be it home-grown or coming from outside, Bush unknowingly, perhaps even gullibly threw his forces into a real quagmire and, with half-a-billion dollar tag to pay each day on those forces, put an unnecessary burden on the already-strained federal budget.
Contrary to the US Government estimates that the Iraq war would end up costing $500 billion, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize Economist, told the
Guardian that he had calculated that Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost the US alone a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. Britain and the rest of the world will probably account for about a similar amount.
Going back to my experience with ‘eyewitnesses’ in Baghdad, a young man, in his mid-twenties, who introduced himself as Hassan, claimed that he was one of the Arab Mujahideen who had fought the notorious Saddam Airport battle. He was furious about the way the Iraqi military, as he put it, “f*ed up the whole thing.” He delivered a fiery description of how the Mujahideen were betrayed by the Iraqis in uniform.
The next day, he brought with him his fighting fatigues and took us on a tour to places where he had seen many of his companions die in battle. “The problem was that 95 percent of all the Mujahideen never received any military training in their life,” he said. “The Iraqis took me and my comrades first to a high-standing hotel in town. We stayed there for a month or so. We felt humiliated because we did not come here to stay in hotels and be served good food,” he said.
Hassan also told me how he yelled at one Iraqi officer who had ordered the Mujahideen to take positions alongside the road leading to the Airport, less than ten meters away from the same road which was going to be, a few hours later, roaring with US tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.
“We had rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles,” he added, “and being that close to the road would have meant that if we hit any enemy vehicle, shrapnel from the explosion would kill us first.”
“When I complained to the Iraqi officer, he said to me: ’I thought you came here to die,’” Hassan said. “I was so furious that I thought about cutting his throat,” Hassan added.
Hassan was one of the very few credible witnesses I met in Baghdad. But the US military may have never had the chance to meet people like Hassan, except perhaps in gunfire battles across Iraq.
The third day, Hassan came one last time to see me. I met him at the barbwire fence ringing the hotel compound. He was unusually elated. He looked around and back at me. His eyes suddenly sparked and his face lit up. He nodded towards a passing US military convoy and said:”this is priceless, this is heaven, we never saw an American soldier this up close.”
Before he dashed away, I managed to ask the young man about his immediate plans. He answered with a nervous smile and droned: “I am going to Fellujah. I have a lot of work to do.” He then waved a hasty goodbye and, in the blink of an eye, drowned himself in the middle of the crowd.
From my conversation with Hassan, I concluded that he had no direct link to Al Qaida. He, like many others who entered Iraq prior to the US invasion, was rather a loose cannon whose willingness to fight and die was remotely induced by the sweltering rhetoric of bin Laden and his cohort. So when the US talks about dormant Al Qaida cells, I can’t help thinking that there are out there tens of thousands of individuals, like the young Hassan, whose dormant brain cells suddenly become activated by the searing outrage they feel when they see the dolorous daily television parade of Arabs and Muslims being massacred in Iraq and Palestine.
It would be a deadly mistake for the US to solely rely on military might to fight terrorism. Arab friends of the US believe diplomacy may still enable America to achieve what might won’t. But it’s hard to believe that, under this administration’s watch, the US will change its heads-on collision course with the entire Arab and Muslim culture.
Wesley Clark warns about this in his book: “It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy—encouraging what could look like a ‘clash of civilizations’—not a good strategy for winning the war on terror." This feeling is widely shared by people in the Muslim World and it will likely last as long as US foreign policy is dictated by special-interest groups and driven by the hawks at the Pentagon.
Perhaps as deadly for the US image, already highly tarnished by the occupation of Iraq, is the US giving the appearance that it is following the example of Israel in fighting terrorism. It is no coincidence that, since September 11, Israel has adopted a “hit-the-head-of-the-viper-first” strategy against Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. But the problem with this is that, whereas “the balance of power” had a meaning in 20th century, there can be no such thing as the “balance of terror,” which seems to be the main guiding policy of Israel since her go-it-alone, single-handed invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and her ill-fated war on Hezbollah guerillas in July 2006.
The Israelis seem to have had no problem convincing Bush that the US and Israel were in the same ditch fighting terrorism. Even the European friends of the Palestinians had dismissed the Palestinians’ concerns that Israel would ultimately drag the US into her own war against the Palestinian militant groups. It took little time before Europe came under heavy pressure from the Bush Administration to vote out Hamas as a legitimate political resistance movement.
An old-hand observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict put it this way: “After Bush had tabled his Roadmap hoping to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel turned the map around and drew her own Roadmap for Bush on how to wage war on terror.”
Given all the current elements in this dogged fight over postmortem eternity, Bush seems to have lost a lot of ground. Too many mistakes for a two-term president whose father lived in the White house for four years and who likes to boast that he was “born to win.”
In the heat of the September 11th disaster, just when the world expected to see real leadership and brinksmanship, George W. Bush caved in too quickly to the hawkish instincts of a few longtime dormant and marginalized cells in his entourage. In so doing, he nearly gave the kiss of death to an already weakened United Nations and wrecked the careers of many of his closest allies, chief among them former Britain’s Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
Bush also managed to compromise his own plans to fight terrorism, according to General Clark’s assessment. Clark wrote: “Barely six months into the war on terror, the direction seemed set. The United States would strike, using its military superiority; it would enlarge the problem, using the strikes on 9/11 to address the larger Middle East concerns. . . and it would dissipate the huge outpouring of goodwill and sympathy it had received in September 2001 by going it largely alone, without the support of a formal alliance or full support from the United Nations. And just as the Bush administration suggested, [the conflict] could last for years."
In comparison to Bush and bin Laden, Saddam Hussein seems to be the biggest loser of all. Under his regime, not only did he befall two devastating wars and years and years of punishing sanctions on his country, but he also failed miserably to demonstrate to the world that his country was free from weapons of mass destruction. Even when France, Germany, and Russia tried to help, and even when the UN inspectors came to his rescue under the watch of the highly skillful
Hans Blix and IAEA’s
Mohammad Al Baradei, Saddam kept exhibiting the look of someone who had something to hide. And Saddam did not need enemies to show the world videotapes where he could be seen walking and talking like a gangster ruling over a tough neighborhood.
In this, Saddam is not alone. Up until it was publicly announced that Iraq was WMD-free, Bush also had an easily discernible look on his face—the serene look of someone who was waiting for his turn to show those who had opposed the war just how gullible they were in their wrongheaded assumption that Saddam had no WMDs. Bush was poised to show the American people and the entire world how smart a move it was from him to go after Saddam. He never got the chance to do it.
Bush himself could do away with his square-headed assertions that his war on Iraq was part of a larger scheme to defeat terrorism; that it was late Yassir Arafat’s fault if the Roadmap did not even unfold; and that the US military intervention could bring democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq. If he only could take a hard look at these assumptions, he could still change the course of his own history, maybe for the better.
And for better or for worse, bin Laden may have reversed the course of world history for good. But the one sure thing he had failed to accomplish is change the fate of his own race. Bin Laden could have fared much better, had he, instead, decided to write a fiction novel. He could have titled it 9/11. He could have thusly spared millions of Muslims the atrocities of war. He could have gained much better fame and glory—even a place in history, among the best-selling horror novel writers of our time. He could have used cheap ink instead of priceless blood to pinpoint weaknesses in US intelligence, and maybe even open the American peoples’ eyes on their government’s foolhardy foreign policy.
By MAX DEMERSHED
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