Was bin Laden a Frankenstein-creation of the CIA
Like Steve Coll I have no dog in the fight about the CIA's culpability (or rather lack thereof)in the rise of the Afghan Arabs. While the CIA has got many things wrong, helping bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs is not one of them. The real story is that the Agency didn't have a clue about bin Laden's importance until around 1995. I examine this question in some detail in chapter 3 of my 2001 book Holy War, Inc. I have pasted in below a goodly extract of that chapter.
Were bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs a creation of the U.S. government? Various books and multiple news reports have charged that the CIA armed and trained the Afghan Arabs and even bin Laden himself as part of its operation to support the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. They argue, therefore, that the United States is culpable in the jihads and terrorism those militants subsequently spread around the world. As we shall see, those charges are overblown and are not supported by the evidence. However, the CIA certainly made tactical errors during the war, some of which encouraged the growth of anti-¬Western Afghan factions allied to Arab militants.
For the United States, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was an opportunity for a little payback: just as the Soviets had funded the North Vietnamese in their war against the United States, so now the Americans would finance the Afghan struggle against the Soviets. President Jimmy ¬Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it succinctly: it was time, he said, "to finally sow shit in their backyard." The CIA took the lead in arming the Afghans, and from a strategic point of view that operation was a brilliant success. The last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a little party was held in celebration.
But were the CIA and the Afghan Arabs in cahoots, as recent studies have suggested? One author charges: "The CIA had funded and trained the Afghan Arabs during the war." Another refers to "the central role of the ¬CIA's Muslim mercenaries, including upwards of 2,000 Algerians in the Afghanistan War." Both authors present these claims as axioms, but provide no real corroboration.
Other commentators have reported that bin Laden himself was aided by the CIA. A report in the respected British newspaper The Guardian states: "In 1986 the CIA even helped him [bin Laden] build an underground camp at Khost [Afghanistan] where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world in the revolutionary art of jihad." This defies common sense. American officials did not venture into Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets for fear of handing the communists a propaganda victory if they were captured. Bin Laden, meanwhile, had espoused anti-¬American positions since 1982, and thanks to the fortune derived from his ¬family's giant construction business had little need of CIA money. In fact, the underground camp at Khost was built in 1982 by an Afghan commander, with Arab funding.
While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they ¬don't make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of gray. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's military intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-¬Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.
Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran ¬ISI's Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987, explains with admirable clarity the relationship between the CIA and the Afghan mujahideen, or holy warriors: "The foremost function of the CIA was to spend money. It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan." A former CIA official told me: "As quartermasters we were okay."
Former CIA official Milt Bearden, who ran the ¬Agency's Afghan operation in the late 1980s, says: "The CIA did not recruit Arabs," as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight, and the Arabs who did come for jihad were "very disruptive; the Afghans thought they were a pain in the ass." I have heard similar sentiments from Afghans who appreciated the money that flowed from the Gulf but did not appreciate the Arabs' holier-¬than-¬thou attempts to convert them to their ultra-¬purist version of Islam. Peter Jouvenal recalls: "There was no love lost between the Afghans and the Arabs. One Afghan told me, `Whenever we had a problem with one of them we just shot them. They thought they were kings."
Moreover, the Afghan Arabs demonstrated a pathological dislike of Westerners. Jouvenal says: "I always kept away from Arabs [in Afghanistan]. They were very hostile. They would ask, `What are you doing in an Islamic country?" The BBC reporter John Simpson had a close call with bin Laden himself outside Jalalabad in 1989. Traveling with a group of Afghan mujahideen, Simpson and his television crew bumped into a Arab man beautifully dressed in spotless white robes; the man began shouting at ¬Simpson's escorts to kill the infidels, and then offered a truck driver the not unreasonable sum of five hundred dollars to do the job. ¬Simpson's Afghan escort turned down the request, and bin Laden was to be found later on a camp bed, weeping in frustration. Only when bin Laden became a public figure, almost a decade later, did Simpson realize who the mysterious Arab was who had wanted him dead.
In 1998 Milt Bearden wrote a well-¬received thriller, Black Tulip, in which a top CIA operative establishes a base inside Afghanistan that is used by a "handful of American officers." This is, of course, a total fantasy. CIA officers did not travel into Afghanistan. Indeed, the CIA had relatively few contacts with Afghans. Vince Cannistraro was the staff director of the interagency group at the National Security Council that coordinated Afghan policy during the mid-¬1980s. Cannistraro says there were only six CIA officials in Pakistan at any given time, and they were simply "administrators" who made up the entire Agency operation in the country. Furthermore, a former CIA official told me that the ¬Agency's officers in Pakistan seldom left the embassy in Islamabad and rarely even met with the leaders of the Afghan resistance, let alone with Arab militants. He recounted a story in which CIA officers had to literally beg to join a group of U.S. officials meeting with Afghan leaders in Peshawar in the mid-¬1980s
In short, the CIA had very limited dealings with the Afghans, let alone with the Afghan Arabs. And for good reason. There was simply no point in the CIA and the Afghan Arabs being in contact with each other. The Agency worked through ISI during the Afghan war, while the Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs, and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA. So the notion that the Agency funded and trained the Afghan Arabs is, at best, misleading. The ¬"Let's blame everything bad that happens on the CIA" school of thought vastly overestimates the ¬Agency's powers, both for good and ill.
Does the US/CIA deal with Pakistan-were they allowed to fly 'bad guys' out of Kunduz before the city was captured by the US/Northern alliance forces, in 2001 as Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020128fa_FACT
Did the Pakistani ISI send $$ to Mr. Atta in August of 2001, as widely reported and did this lead to the resignation of General Ahmad of the ISI, who by coincidence was in Wash. DC on 9/11/2001 see:
http://www.americanfreepress.net/08_02_02/Secret_Hearings_/secret _hearings_.html
"....According to the Times of India, Mohammed Atta’s financial bagman, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, had been fired as head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Security Agency (ISI) as “U.S. authorities [FBI] sought his removal after confirming that $100,000 had been wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan through Ahmad Sheikh at the instance [sic] of General Mahmoud...."
Why was "ISI Chief" removed (left blank -see link below) from the CNN and White House transcript of Condi Rice's news conference of May 16, 2002, "ISI Chief" is still missing from the official White House transcript present at this moment at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-13.html
(search for Pakistan on the page)
May 16, 2002: "Q: Are you aware of the reports at the time that ———— was in Washington on Sept. 11; and on Sept. 10, $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups in this area? And why was he here? Was he meeting with you or anybody in the administration? "
Who the heck did help Pakistan install the Taleban in Afghanistan, and make it a safe haven for terrorists, who let a lot of them fly out of Kunduz in 2001?
January 20, 2006 8:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your statement that the CIA was "unaware" of bin Laden is not true.
You quote Milt Bearden, who has specifically stated that although he never met bin Laden ,he was quite aware that bin Laden was "out there" and that bin Laden's primary function was recruiting funds from the Middle East to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars a year .
This is NOT being "unaware" of bin Laden.
There was also testimony in a terrorist trial in Europe to the effect that the CIA directly shipped sniper rifles to bin Laden's organization. Allegedly the United States company that made the weapons confirmed this.
Your suggestion that the CIA never entered the country and never directly aided bin Laden is a red herring at best and disinformation at worst. The CIA knew entirely what it was doing in Afghanistan. They started this program even BEFORE the Russians invaded because the head of Afghanistan at the time was a "leftist", possibly even a Communist, and the US wanted to prevent the social and economic reforms he intended to impose on the country. The US alao wanted to draw Russia into a "Vietnam" of the CIA's making. The US proceeded to support Muslim jihadists who were opposed to the secular government of Afghanistan.
Now that these jihadists have turned their sights on the US, the CIA would like us to forget all this. Conveniently you turn up with a book exonerating the CIA.
Sorry, won't wash.
I'll go further than that. I think you're outright lying about the depth of the CIA's involvement.
I'd say losing SIX HUNDRED Stinger missiles out of a THOUSAND sent to the Mujahideen is more than enough reason to blame the CIA for things like the shootdown of TWA Flight 800 at the very least.
You expect us to buy the lame story that the CIA flowed billions to the Afghans and yet had NO connection to what was going on?
Tell me another. Particularly tell me how I can get billions from the US government without any oversight except through some other government's intelligence agency.
You statements are ruminant evacuation, nothing more.
January 21, 2006 2:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly, I didn't even know the CIA actually existed, until 1998 or maybe even later. I thought that it was Hollywood or British flim fiction. Then too, in those years, I didn't read the newspapers or watch the history or documentary tv channels,
Since 1998 though, as a result of researching the India/Pakistan nuclear tests & non-proliferation , I have discovered an entirely new world, including the existence of this institution. And I guess I was flabbergasted to read what had been going on in that region.
In some ways, I am so glad that I thought it was a film fantasy. Yet, had I known what was going on, I might have been challenged to respond to these issues sooner. I regret that we are having to deal with them in the breach, as we do nearly 98 % of the time.
Again and again, they point to 7 salient trends in decision-making
1. Overgeneralizations
2. The prevalence of us/them mentality in every institution.
3. Selection & my side bias (privileging one or two sides)
4. Quick fix solutions (as a result of too little patience and too many deadlines)
5. An unwillingness or inability to generate alternatives that don't also contain some element of ego gratification, 'what's in it for me'!
6. Domain specific jargon that is not really adding much to the understanding of the world-at least in a depthful way, (the environmental sciences and the arts being an exception perhaps).
7. A disproportionate degree of prejudice that is simmering beneath the surface.
January 21, 2006 5:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oddly enough, Bib Laden also denies that any help came to him from the US. He says it all came from our very close allies, the Saudis. And certainly if all the perps tell the same story, it must be the truth.
Did the US help the Taliban? No, because it wasn't called "the Taliban" then. Maybe some of the same people, but not the Taliban per se.
Was the US in alliance with some of these people in the anti-Soviet war? -- Seems so.
Should we regret this now? -- I'd say so.
Was all the US money properly laundered? -- I doubt it, but I can't prove anything.
Did we have plausible deniability? -- We sure tried.
Anyone uncertain about the cynicism of US policy would have had their mind made up in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal, when the Afghans were abandoned to the warlords, some of whom, I surmise, may have had the teentsiest little bit of contact with the US -- though not the CIA, of course, because the CIA was involved in much more more important things during that period and couldn't be bothered with a chickenshit country like Afghanistan, which never had any importance to the US.
If anything had appened, it would have been bipartisan. Brzezinski still says that it was worth it. Norquist and Rohrabacher still admire the anti-Communist, family-values proto-Taliban they knew.
I'm sure relieved that nothing bad was done in Afghanistan. I had been woorried for a moment.
January 21, 2006 6:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Can anyone imagine the potential and current state of an incompetent presidency like GW Bush's without a national threat from either the Soviets, Bin Laden, or some other Bogeyman. It is the only way a minority party can govern by using a threat or fear to make the majority not think clearly or logically. Bin Laden's lack of capture by the most powerful, most sophisticated power on earth, while he supposedly hides out and runs his empire in caves on the Afgan-pakistani border, would not even qualify as a good fairy tale! Yet here we are 5 years later, and still both hearing this crap and believing it (well maybe).
Maybe Bin Laden was not created by the Bushies, but they sure are and have been using this Soviet surrogate bogeyman to their fullest advantage so far. Emphasis on the so far, as the cry wolf syndrome may well be starting to enter the equation! Therefore, do not be surprised if the golden goose (Bin Laden) meets his demise soon at the hands of the Bushies. It is likley already in the script!
January 21, 2006 7:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I can certainly see why the CIA would have chosen to funnel weapons and money through ISI rather than deal directly with the Afghan fighters. But does that really exonerate the CIA from any responsibilty for what happened to those supplies?
The CIA certainly made every effort to learn who exactly the recipients were. I find it incredibly hard to belief that they would hand over all this stuff to the Pakistanis without knowing in whose hands it is going to end up (and if only to make sure their operation was safe).
January 21, 2006 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
This passage underscores the fundamental folly:
This is only true if one accepts the framework of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. But this very framework was impossible to defend then--it depended on lying about our role in provoking Soviet involvement, for one thing, and it relied on a blatantly false, ideological and politicized misreading of Soviet strength and intentions, for another.
As explained by Anne Hessing Cahn, in "Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1993 pp. 22, 24-27 (vol. 49, no. 03), back in 1976, when Ford was being challenged from the right by Reagan, he moved to the right himself--a move later followed by Carter, and then continued by Reagan himself. It all resulted in rewriting the intelligence to make the actually-decrepit USSR look like a behemoth more powerful than we were. In the beginning, the CIA was the leading-edge target, but in the end, it capitulated, and became part of the problem. Arguably, the result prolonged the Cold War by at least a few years, with a costly arms build-up, and bloody proxy wars across the globe, including the one that birthed al Qaeda.
(There were, of course, many fine analysts within the CIA who continued to fight against this politicization of the intelligence. They mounted a fierce counter-attack years later, during the Gates confirmation hearings, run simultaneously with the Clarence Thomas hearings, so that few now remember them. They lost.)
A few excerpts:
It's wrong to blame the CIA when ultimate responsibility clearly lies higher up the chain of command. But it's wrong to absolve the CIA when the agency itself was clearly corrupted as a result, and many fine individuals within it suffered greatly for trying to do their jobs properly.
Had the agency as a whole demonstrated the same professionalism, integrity and courage, it would have genuinely protected us against creating the very evil we now face.
January 21, 2006 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tomorrow's Sunday Washington Post will carry a very positive review of Peter's book by Richard Clark. Clark, you will recall, served as White House counterterrorism coordinator under Presidents Clinton and Bush and wrote both "Against All Enemies" and "The Scorpion's Gate."
Let me share three excerpts from tomorrow's review.
(1) "Bergen, the author of the bestselling Holy War, Inc. (2001), has made a fresh contribution here by unearthing often obscure first-person accounts, attempting to establish their credibility and providing bridging and scene-setting narratives that link them together. Although these accounts are often self-serving and may be inaccurate, they still produce a far more detailed picture of bin Laden than the one that emerges from more conventional biographies.
Here, bin Laden hardly seems exceptional (or, for that matter, unusually bright). As a young man, he was strictly religious, according to many of Bergen's sources, but none of them tells us how and why he turned to zealotry. Osama's mother, stepfather, older brothers and boyhood friend next door were far less devout. Thus, on a key question about the young Osama's psyche, Bergen leaves us wondering.
On the other hand, Bergen does help detangle the complex bin Laden family. Osama was among the youngest of the 54 children whom his wealthy father, Mohammed bin Laden, had by multiple wives. Although Osama deeply admired his father, he seldom spent time with him and was raised as much by his stepfather and older brothers as by his beloved sire."
(2) "Bin Laden, who had inherited some money from his father's estate (far less than is widely believed, according to Bergen), helped out and became Azzam's deputy -- and, eventually, his rival. Bergen reports that the Services Bureau opened branches throughout the United States but was seen by the U.S. government as a friendly group supporting President Reagan's anti-Soviet policies. By 1987, bin Laden's all-Arab unit of jihadists had withstood a 22-day siege by Soviet special forces at a camp named al Masada, the Lion's Den, that he built near the eastern Afghanistan village of Jaji. Showing his skill with propaganda, bin Laden publicized the inconsequential battle of Jaji throughout the Muslim world. He became a hero; Azzam died mysteriously in 1989."
(3) "Bergen's own analysis comes through most strongly when he discusses the war in Iraq, which he argues has greatly strengthened the global jihadist movement for some time to come by helping make bin Laden's case that America has rapacious designs on the Arab world. On the other hand, because he relies mostly on the words of others, Bergen's fine volume has one key weakness: It says little or nothing about some important subjects regarding bin Laden that still lurk in the shadows, such as al Qaeda's past or present cell structure in the United States and the role of Iran's secretive, elite Qods Force in supporting Zawahiri. For those dogs that have not yet barked, historians will have to wait for a later book. * supporting Zawahiri. For those dogs that have not yet barked, historians will have to wait for a later book."
To all of Clark's praise, let me add how much I enjoyed reading the book this week for TPM's Book Club. It is enjoyable both for its method and for its content.
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
One was the intentionally blind trust in the ISI, and the refusal to model the composition or intentions of the ISI. Coll's book includes numerous instances of intelligence officers who were punished or pulled from the field for questioning the ISI middleman role in selecting the beneficiaries of U.S. aid (and Saudi -- the aid network was a synthesis of different aid packages).
The second was the striking down of a taboo that was directly attributable to the CIA. As Coll records, it was Bill Casey himself who directed the CIA to encourage attacks within the borders of the Soviet Union. I am surprised that you don't find it startling that the CIA encouraged erasing this taboo, or consider the unexpected result of encouraging this kind of attack. What the CIA wanted the Afghan guerrillas and their supporters to do became a pretty precise model for what Al qaeda has done to the U.S.
January 21, 2006 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
well, we've all been declared conpiracy theorists on another thread. Woe.
January 21, 2006 10:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Although these accounts are often self-serving and may be inaccurate . . . . Richard Clark commenting on Peter Bergen's The OBL I Know
How's that for a jacket blurb? Maybe for the second edition.
January 21, 2006 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: I'm sure relieved that nothing bad was done in Afghanistan. I had been wooried for a moment.-------------
lol! Now that actually funny. I'm cracking up here.
Yeah,...I suppose that we can come up with someone to ride a yak and sing a Pashtun ballad, titled:
Don't Khandaho-ha with my Mango
January 21, 2006 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
John, thanks for all your input this week on TPMCafe re my book.
January 21, 2006 12:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of interest to me is the pattern or strategy being fallowed by Bin Laden as it relates to Mohammed in the seventh century.
Bin Laden, I believe, thinks he's fighting an echo of Mohammed's war.
Lets go back to 609, the year before Mohammed began his preaching. The middle east was dominated by a bi-polar struggle between two regional super powers. The Sassanian Persion Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. That war had been going on in one form or another for over 500 years, begining with the Old Roman Empire and the Parthian Persian Empire.
The bipolor struggle weakened both parties, but the Romans, prevailed. But they weakened each other sufficiently to make them vulnerable to Islam. Bin Laden sees the same relationship between the Soviet Union, the United States, and the Dar Al Islam. His tactics also parallel Mohammed's.
Under pressure from the Meccan's, he escaped to Medina. Meccan's found his preaching threatened their position as a budding new trading economy (Mecca benefitted from the intensification of the war between the Eastern Romans and the Sassanian Persians - the east west trade routes were force to go around the boarders in conflict, rerouting trade around through Arabia, through Mecca), and an parallel business as a center for pagan worship (By 610 only the central Arabian peninsula was still pagan, the periphery was becoming Christianized).
Mecca had recently found wealth in Mercantile pursuits. Under the mercantile system, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. This contrasted with the more ancient Arab bedouin custom of sharing - a function of coping with the harsh climate. Mohammed's new religion emphasized fairness in the face of the laisse-faire free market system emerging in Mecca. Some of his early converts were the ones at the bottom end of the new arangement. The Meccan's felt Mohammed was threatening their 'rice bowl' and so made life difficult.
Rather than conform Mohammed found safety in Medina. Medina was smaller than Mecca, and lacked the commercial economy of Mecca. The Medina was an oasis region that practiced agriculture. Moreover there were a couple of Jewish clans living amongst the various Arab clans in the oasis. Mohammed was brought in to function as an arbiter to help settle disputes. An agreement was formed, perhaps the first constitution in history, laying out the arrangement between the existing clans and the immigrant muslims clan that came with Mohammed from Mecca.
The ex-Meccan Immigrant's were ill suited for farming - but they had to earn their keep. They immediately engaged in raiding Meccan caravans making their way up and down the penisula between Palestine and Yemen. Mohammed's strategy was one of provoking the Meccan's into a fight. Eventually they caused enough trouble that it threatened Mecca's trade and they had to do something about or begin losing allies, allegences, prestige and the rights negotiated with the various bedouin tribes along the trade routes.
Eventually the Meccan's had to address Mohammed. Eventually they went to attack Mohammed in Medina. Mohammed strengthened his position by chasing out one of the Jewish tribes (their theology crossed his own). Something he couldn't tollerate. Most of the Arab clans of Medina came under his influence. He also worked some of the neighboring bedoine tribes to either support him or at least not support the Meccans by the time they came at him. And come they did, with a large force. But Mohammed managed to build defenses reducing the battle for Madina to seige warfare.
Seige warefare was alien to the Arabs, who normally functioned on hit and run raids. The troops the Meccan's had accumulated weren't expecting a prolonged campaign - just a short excersion, then a battle, then come home. When they got to Mecca and settled into a seige, the Meccan army suffered from attrition as time went by. By failing to destroy Mohammed, the Meccan's became exposed. He attracted more adherents from Mecca and the surrounding countryside to his religion, and thus to his state.
Mohammed then brought his own, soon supperior army to Mecca. I am writing this all from recall, but it is very important from the stand point, that I believe that Bin Laden is attempting to follow in Mohammed's footsteps seeing a similar strategic situation/opportunity (Roman vs Sassanian = U.S. v Soviet Union / With Islam poised on the southern periphery).
Ideologically he sees the U.S. the same as the Meccans. A paganistic laisse-faire freemarket system that is amoral, immoral and areligious and anti-allah meaning wrongly guided, and where the rich get richer at the expense of the poor and that this all is an offense to God (allah).
Bin Laden believes that he dispatched the Soviets, much like the Muslims dispatched the Sassanian Empire, and now he's going after the West, just like the Muslims took over 2/3rds of the Eastern Roman empire, and eventually through the Turks, all of it. Bin Laden is using Mohammed's tactics as well. He's spent years provoking the U.S. And like the Meccan's with Mohammed, for a while he was a minor irritant. But when he attacked the USS Cole, the American's began to take notice. Now, had the Cole incident not come in the final months of Clinton's presidency, the U.S. might have done something then. But Clinton didn't want to start a war or an incident that Bush would have to clean, up and left it for him to handle. However, as we now know, Bush did nothing. He saw it as Clinton's problem, not his. Bush seems to have seen the Presidency as little more than a Fraternity Presidency, with the added benefit of looting the treasury for his cohorts.
911 was the result of Bush's irresponsible attitude. Regardless of Bush's competency and responsibility, 911 did to the U.S. what Mohammed managed to get from the Meccans - it forced the U.S. to go after him.
Bin Laden, like Mohammed before him, figured he just had to survive the American Riposte, and his prestige and movement, like Mohammed's would grow. For Bin Laden, so far so good. He has survived the Ripost, and like the Meccans at Medina, we are in a prolonged situation in Iraq that are Military is not well suited for. Time was the Meccan's enemy at Medina, and it is ours in Iraq. Likewise, our actions in Iraq are winning Bin Laden's movement more and new sympathies.
A U.S. failure in Iraq will hurt our prestige and help his. The whole of the Muslim world could quickly and easily become inflamed by our actions there. Taken in short we could not have handled ourselves worse. The Bush administration could not have done more to help Bin Laden's movement then had it been a sleeper cell for Al Quaida itself.
The U.S. governments perceived legitimacy and moral authority is at an all time low. This means that everything we do in the field of foreign affairs will cost more, and face more headwinds. More over, our legitimacy and moral authority is not just shrunk in the Middle East, it has shrunk globally, and even at home.
On 9/12 Bush could have called for universal conscription, today, less than 40% of the people have faith in his judgment and truthfullness. Of that 40% one has to wonder how many are too old to serve. Few responsible adults would favor their children serving under Bush, given his craven corruption, lies, poor judgment and incompetence. In a sense he has, like the Meccan's before Medina, lost the ability to attract an Army to his cause sufficient to destroy his enemy.
I am sorry but the situation seems earily similar. I would beg people to not underestimate the radical islamic movement. We are only a few slip ups away from facing some major problems, and it took some major slip ups and major corruption to get us to this point.
In 624 at the Battle of Badr, Mohammed had some 300 men to Mecca's 900. But Mohammed's were younger and more dedicated to the cause, and managed to route the Meccan's. In 636 heirs of Mohammed were sending armies in the tens of thousands, simultaniously against the Romans and the Sassanians. Persia was completely conquored by 650, and the Roman's lost the entire Middle East. Territory largely Christianized, that had been part of the West for roughly a thousand years, from when Alexander's Armies came through.
The success of the Islamic movement benefited from another phenomina. It was built upon a 'pyramid' organizational model. That means, the earlier you get in it, the better off you are, and the higher you are pushed up as the pyramid grows. Conversely the later you stay out of it, the worse your situation grows as your entry into it will either be at the bottom, or if you stay out, ostracized. Of course in the desert, ostracism means death. Thus the combination of carrot and stick, incentives and disencentives are such that pyramid organizations can grow very quickly.
You see this frequently in American corporations. (I worked for a time at Enterprise Rent-a-car and they used this type of model to grow from a $100 million company in 1980, to roughly $1 billion in 1990 and Roughly $10 Billion today - its quite effective if you have the right things going for you). Prior to the modern age, cohession was the most important organizational paradigm. War was, and still is, largely a numbers game. So as the "Islamic Pyramid" grew, it served to attract only more, which gave it competitive ness on the battle field. Throw in the ideological and spiritual impact on esprit de corp (most troups they faced were hired mercenaries) and the mobility they had as an army mounted on Camels and Horses and you can see how and why they were able to grow and achieve so much success so fast.
Despite the parallels between Mohammed's strategic and tactical options and opportutnities, and Bin Laden's, things are obviously different today than when Islam was first born. For starters, cohesion is less important in relation to specialization of task - which is the dynamic that finally altered the balance of power between Islamic world and the west. On the other hand you have laten nuclear capabilities out there and people who don't mind suicide.
Anyway, I know I did a hatchet job history leasson here - its been a while since I studied it, but, I wanted to point out the parallels, the dynamics and the seriousness and the potentiality for things in this war with Al Quaida to not necessarily go our way.
And Bush has helped Bin Laden out every chance he could, by not going after him and by wasting pressious resources, lives, and moral authority attacking Iraq, such that we are stuck there - else the place becomes a satelite for a proto-nuclear Iran. Bush's ideology of helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer also plays into Bin Laden's hands - Bush makes the United States look all that much more like Pagan Mecca, Islam's original enemy.
(During the cold war we were smart enough to give the working class a big enough slice of the pie so that they wouldnt be siduced by communist ideology, not so during this ideological war)
In short we are making all the mistakes that Bin Laden needs for us to make so that he can follow in Mohammed's footsteps. And that's not good for the world.
In addition to being the founder of a world religion, Mohammed was a politician and a demegogue. Bin Laden is too. (and for the record, though founder of a religion, Mohammed also was a politician, so I fall on the side of the Danes in lampooning him: If you go into politics, you are subject to being lampooned - even if you founded a religion - Mohammed doesn't get to play both sides of the street, he can't aviod accountability for his political legacy by hiding in his religous legacy, if you dabble in politics, in my book you are subject to lampooning) If Los Vegas were placing odds on the out come of the War on Terror, I suppose the odds would still favor us considerably. But I would caution people to look at the circumstances Islam originally emerged from. It is designed and built to fight just the kind of war that is taking place and has succeed once already against enormous odds.
If we don't straighten out our act soon we will be all out of money, bullets and moral authority. Then what? One thing for sure, regardless of the outcome, win, lose, or draw, or muddle through the next 50 to 100 years, Bush is well positioned to go down in history as the greatest fool to rule a great enterprise since Nero. As I recall, Nero had enough sense of decency to kill himself. But that, of course, required him to think that he had made a mistake.
February 5, 2006 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink