Seif
16-12-04, 15:19
The war for Muslim minds: an interview with Gilles Kepel
11 - 11 - 2004
From Fallujah and Peshawar to Amsterdam and Paris, is radical, militant Islam winning or losing its political battle for the support of the world’s Muslims? Gilles Kepel, leading analyst of post–9/11 global fractures, talks to openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler.
openDemocracy: The first section of your book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West explores the curious convergence at the crossroads of 9/11 between two diametrically opposed ways of thinking: those of the American neo–conservatives and the jihadis of the middle east – the subject also of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Power of Nightmares, which you advised and which tracks the thinking of Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss from 1940s America onwards.
How far would you push this “fatal symmetry”?
Gilles Kepel: No absolute equivalence can be drawn between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss, between Ayman al–Zawahiri and Paul Wolfowitz. Whatever criticisms might be made of the neocons, there is no reason to be suspicious of their stated goal – a democratic middle east. Leo Strauss was convinced that communism and Nazism, as he suffered them under the Weimar republic in his native Germany, were the main enemies of democracy, and that the ultimate struggle was for democracy – not a conviction shared by al–Zawahiri, for whom democracy is the antithesis of Islam.
The problem lies in the means that they use to achieve their aims. Both, in their sombre diagnosis of the middle east, see violence as the only way to change the present state of affairs. For the neo–conservatives, this means military intervention. The demise of the Saddam Hussein regime was already deemed desirable in the mid–1990s, as we learn from a text bearing the signature of some of the most prominent of today’s neo–conservatives in President Bush’s team and the Washington think–tanks.
In the 1990s, the jihadis meanwhile favoured the sort of guerrilla warfare which mimicked what they thought had secured their victory in the Afghan jihad. But with the failure of successive operations in Algeria, Egypt, and Bosnia, al–Zawahiri’s circle turned their attention to what they called “martyrdom operations” – in short, to terrorism.
But the defining moment, shared by what we might call the “pre–neocons” and the jihadis, was engineered in the 1980s in Afghanistan under Ronald Reagan, when Richard Perle (the “prince of darkness”) was – like Paul Wolfowitz today – under–secretary for defense. At the time, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al–Zawahiri were in training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan after their makeover turning them into freedom fighters against the Soviet army.
This, I would say – to reverse the title of Richard Perle’s book (with David Frum) An End to Evil: how to win the war on terror – was the beginning of evil: salafi jihadism born out of jihad in Afghanistan. The neocons and jihadis are equally in denial over this episode.
Neocons do not want to be reminded that help from Reagan’s administration made jihadism possible, then and now; United States backing alone made possible this breeding–ground where Qutbist thinking and salafi indoctrination coalesced.
The jihadis, claiming that they alone won the war against the evil empire of kufr (impiety) and its Red Army, also dismiss what they owe to American policy. But without the smart, ground–to–air, shoulder–borne Stinger missiles – brainchild of Albert Wohlstetter’s military thinking – the Soviet forces would never have been defeated. In this respect, the Afghan–bred mujaheddin is the metonymy or synecdoche – the best image of the geopolitical crossroads represented by 9/11.
openDemocracy: Is it significant that both traditions value the “noble lie”?
Gilles Kepel: In a way there is some sort of parallelism – though this is rather a general phenomenon in politics. I guess I would say it is not peculiar to them.
Much has been made of Paul Wolfowitz’s interview with Sam Tannenhaus in Vanity Fair (May 2003) when he said that the dossier about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a “winner” when it came to expediting the crucial prewar Congressional vote.
Wolfowitz’s formulation was defended at the time as a Straussian, Machiavellian, or even Platonist lie: the masses do not know what is good for them, but their leaders do, and moreover need to find some slogan with which to mobilise them – a slogan which, in Plato’s words, may always have more to do with rhetoric than truth.
Ayman al–Zawahiri’s pamphlet, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, considers jihad against Israel such a rhetorical device, one that will mobilise non–believers as well as the umma.
The Iraqi crucible
openDemocracy: Does the neocons’ commitment to such rhetorical devices help explain why their professed commitment to democracy is so distrusted?
Gilles Kepel: The neocons are indeed commonly considered a bunch of hypocrites. I don’t agree: I may be naïve, but I have seen many of them at work and read their texts intensively, and I think that they are indeed firm proponents of democracy.
Most of them, however, have a peculiar agenda in relation to the middle east, where all criteria except Israel’s security pale into insignificance. They do not understand or wish to see the contradiction between preaching the necessity of democratic regimes in the area and refusing to engage seriously in the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. Instead, they choose to believe that no requirement for democracy should be allowed to put the slightest pressure on Ariel Sharon. As long as this continues, the neocons have no chance to win the support of Muslims or middle–east civil societies against radicals and terrorists.
In recent discussions in Washington with US administration officials and agencies dealing with middle–east policy, I tried to persuade them of the centrality of the “war for Muslim hearts and minds” – and the fact that in this war, weapons cannot be an end in themselves, only a means. What Ayman al–Zawahiri calls “the Muslim masses” are ultimately the only group able to eradicate terrorism, to dry up the pond where people like him thrive. To tackle this, you must engage civil society.
This issue is decisive in Iraq today because the jihadis believe that Iraq is their new terrain. They believe that Iraq will follow 9/11 in setting an example for the Muslim world – exposing the weakness of the west, then mobilising and galvanising the masses, who will become fearless in the face of the enemy.
In cyberspace at least, they have already largely succeeded. The jihadis may have failed miserably in inspiring the masses to replace existing regimes with Islamic, sharia–driven states. But they have created a constituency of internet activists dedicated to spreading terrorism around the globe.
The crucial issue now is whether Iraq is the new land of jihad or of fitna – a war in the heart of Islam that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin (my book takes its French title from the term).
The example of Algeria in the 1990s is relevant here. Until 1996, militant Armed Islamic Group (GIA) or Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)movements controlled large parts of Algeria, and the regime seemed doomed; then, for disputed reasons – military security operations, infiltration activities and other provocations, the internal dynamics of the GIA – the Islamists suddenly seemed to have alienated the bulk of the Algerian population. They even lost support among those who had previously voted for them.
Today in Iraq, there are daily images of hostages being beheaded as traitors, of corpses of policemen in the rivers – a spectacle of horror designed to convince that jihad is on the rise and that the US will never prevail. Yet jihadi Islamism in Iraq can draw on only the 17% of the population who are Sunni Arabs. The Iraqi Kurds and Shi’a are beyond their reach.
The US, particularly its neocon element, is still committed to playing the Shi’a card – not just for Iraq itself, but because it is convinced that a secular, pro–western, Shi’a–majority–governed Iraq, would act as a magnet for neighbouring Iran.
In Iran, sentiment against the clerical regime is running high within the general population, but people are too afraid to organise themselves. The regime has been shrewd enough to redistribute some wealth to the middle classes, many of whom (like my Czech relatives under communism) live comfortable private lives but are reluctant to act publicly – because they know what they might lose, and are not sure of what they could gain. In this circumstance, a secular, Shi’a–dominated Iraq would boost the morale of the anti–regime sectors of Iranian civil society.
The Iranian regime has understood this – to it – dangerous prospect. In my view, it backed Muqtada al–Sadr in hopes that he might help avert it. The attempt failed: the Sadrists’ feeble insurgency collapsed when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made a remarkable political move – mobilising all the clerical resources of Shi’ism, and returning to Najaf and Karbala, to compel al–Sadr’s young school dropouts to pay their respects instead to him. As a result, Iraqi Shi’a representatives – Sistani and al–Sadr alike – have now agreed to take part in Iraq’s elections in January 2005.
Why have they agreed – and in a way that runs counter to the wishes of the insurgents in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Samarra? Because a large majority of Iraqis killed by car–bombings and assassinations each week are Shi’a, and the perpetrators radical Sunni.
This confirms the fact that the Sunni insurgents can rely only on a limited band of support in Iraq. The daily media diet of beheadings can so easily and wrongly suggest that the American army is being defeated. Terrorism, in order to win, has to gain momentum over time, by making an investment. It is the return on that investment that counts. In Iraq, it may not be in their favour.
Jihad or fitna in Iraq? We are approaching a watershed. If the majority of Iraqis decide that this is fitna and rejects the Iraqi radicals – then they have lost, as they lost in Algeria. But for this to happen, the concerns of the Iraqi population must be heard.
From the Arab perspective, fitna is a huge contemporary issue. Arabs have a real fear that they are being trapped between the neo–conservatives and the followers of Osama bin Laden. The victory of either, they are convinced, would be to the detriment of Arab civil society.
openDemocracy: Even if this assessment of internal Shi’a politics holds, it surely doesn’t address a deformity of neocon thinking in relation to establishing democracy in Iraq: namely, Muqtada al–Sadr’s significant support among many impoverished and dispossessed Iraqi Shi’a?
Gilles Kepel: The United States troops could, I imagine, have eliminated Muqtada al–Sadr with a smart missile had they really wanted to; but I guess that they perceive him as someone who can ultimately be coopted and inserted into the lower ranks of the Shi’a hierarchy. Like his distant cousin Musa al–Sadr in Lebanon, leader of the anti–communist Movement of the Dispossessed, the calculation is probably that Muqtada can act as a mediator between any future government and the large disenfranchised groups in Baghdad’s Sadr City and equivalent areas.
The main shortcoming of the neocon understanding of democracy, and indeed their whole vision of the world, lies deeper: in its strategic assessment that all it needed to accomplish in Iraq was to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime and thus free Iraqi society. The neocons completely failed to grasp what had happened during the previous sanctions regime – a colossal blindspot equivalent to that over jihad in Afghanistan. Over Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the neocons turned to the “war on terror” as a kind of forward flight rather than confront themselves.
Iraq under sanctions was governed by a welfare–state system of a fascist or communist type, where the ruler bought social peace by limited redistribution of oil wealth. This was of course built on tremendous coercion and violence, including genocide against the Kurds in the late 1980s and the massacre of the Shi’a in 1991.
This welfare system and what remained of Iraqi society was smashed under the decade–long embargo of the 1990s. As Saddam Hussein, his family and cronies controlled access to scarce goods, people became organised via competitive tribal and religious affiliation. This, not the romanticised civil society of neocon imagination, is what was lurking within Iraqi society when the Saddam lid was removed.
Here is the challenge of democracy in Iraq. First, how do the forces of occupation come to terms with complex Iraqi social realities? Second, how can they find a place for Sunni Arabs in tomorrow’s Iraq? Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, made a huge mistake in demobilising the Iraqi army, thus bitterly antagonising their Ba’athist and Tikriti officers. They had nothing to lose – so they went to Fallujah, with their ammunition, their weapons, their expertise, and their intelligence files.
As a result, Fallujah is a cocktail where disenfranchised Ba’ath army officers provide weaponry and intelligence; jihadi foreigners are able (thanks also to the army’s dissolution) freely to carry their ideology across national borders, coalescing with some Iraqi militants; and Sunni Arabs fleeing the Kurdistan they settled after the genocide of the Kurds (to secure the areas close to the Kirkuk and Hanikin oilfields) provide the suicide bombers.
openDemocracy: How should those who support the Iraqi government handle the situation in Fallujah and elsewhere?
Gilles Kepel: There are two options: to call all the insurgents jihadis and consider that crushing military force is the only solution; or to think through the reason why they have received support among many Sunni Iraqis.
Sunni Arabs can expect to be big losers in tomorrow’s Iraq. Even five million Iraqi barrels of oil a day at $55 per barrel (in today’s market), a tremendous amount of money, will not be so for the Sunni if revenues are shared according to the proportion of the different groups in the population. The Kurds, for example, have learned bitter lesson from the Lausanne treaty (1923) onwards: they are stockpiling weapons, so far with the tacit acquiescence of the “community of civilised nations”, as the only way to ensure that they will be taken seriously as oil partners and not discarded this time around. This issue is a crucible for democracy in Iraq.
11 - 11 - 2004
From Fallujah and Peshawar to Amsterdam and Paris, is radical, militant Islam winning or losing its political battle for the support of the world’s Muslims? Gilles Kepel, leading analyst of post–9/11 global fractures, talks to openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler.
openDemocracy: The first section of your book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West explores the curious convergence at the crossroads of 9/11 between two diametrically opposed ways of thinking: those of the American neo–conservatives and the jihadis of the middle east – the subject also of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Power of Nightmares, which you advised and which tracks the thinking of Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss from 1940s America onwards.
How far would you push this “fatal symmetry”?
Gilles Kepel: No absolute equivalence can be drawn between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss, between Ayman al–Zawahiri and Paul Wolfowitz. Whatever criticisms might be made of the neocons, there is no reason to be suspicious of their stated goal – a democratic middle east. Leo Strauss was convinced that communism and Nazism, as he suffered them under the Weimar republic in his native Germany, were the main enemies of democracy, and that the ultimate struggle was for democracy – not a conviction shared by al–Zawahiri, for whom democracy is the antithesis of Islam.
The problem lies in the means that they use to achieve their aims. Both, in their sombre diagnosis of the middle east, see violence as the only way to change the present state of affairs. For the neo–conservatives, this means military intervention. The demise of the Saddam Hussein regime was already deemed desirable in the mid–1990s, as we learn from a text bearing the signature of some of the most prominent of today’s neo–conservatives in President Bush’s team and the Washington think–tanks.
In the 1990s, the jihadis meanwhile favoured the sort of guerrilla warfare which mimicked what they thought had secured their victory in the Afghan jihad. But with the failure of successive operations in Algeria, Egypt, and Bosnia, al–Zawahiri’s circle turned their attention to what they called “martyrdom operations” – in short, to terrorism.
But the defining moment, shared by what we might call the “pre–neocons” and the jihadis, was engineered in the 1980s in Afghanistan under Ronald Reagan, when Richard Perle (the “prince of darkness”) was – like Paul Wolfowitz today – under–secretary for defense. At the time, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al–Zawahiri were in training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan after their makeover turning them into freedom fighters against the Soviet army.
This, I would say – to reverse the title of Richard Perle’s book (with David Frum) An End to Evil: how to win the war on terror – was the beginning of evil: salafi jihadism born out of jihad in Afghanistan. The neocons and jihadis are equally in denial over this episode.
Neocons do not want to be reminded that help from Reagan’s administration made jihadism possible, then and now; United States backing alone made possible this breeding–ground where Qutbist thinking and salafi indoctrination coalesced.
The jihadis, claiming that they alone won the war against the evil empire of kufr (impiety) and its Red Army, also dismiss what they owe to American policy. But without the smart, ground–to–air, shoulder–borne Stinger missiles – brainchild of Albert Wohlstetter’s military thinking – the Soviet forces would never have been defeated. In this respect, the Afghan–bred mujaheddin is the metonymy or synecdoche – the best image of the geopolitical crossroads represented by 9/11.
openDemocracy: Is it significant that both traditions value the “noble lie”?
Gilles Kepel: In a way there is some sort of parallelism – though this is rather a general phenomenon in politics. I guess I would say it is not peculiar to them.
Much has been made of Paul Wolfowitz’s interview with Sam Tannenhaus in Vanity Fair (May 2003) when he said that the dossier about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a “winner” when it came to expediting the crucial prewar Congressional vote.
Wolfowitz’s formulation was defended at the time as a Straussian, Machiavellian, or even Platonist lie: the masses do not know what is good for them, but their leaders do, and moreover need to find some slogan with which to mobilise them – a slogan which, in Plato’s words, may always have more to do with rhetoric than truth.
Ayman al–Zawahiri’s pamphlet, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, considers jihad against Israel such a rhetorical device, one that will mobilise non–believers as well as the umma.
The Iraqi crucible
openDemocracy: Does the neocons’ commitment to such rhetorical devices help explain why their professed commitment to democracy is so distrusted?
Gilles Kepel: The neocons are indeed commonly considered a bunch of hypocrites. I don’t agree: I may be naïve, but I have seen many of them at work and read their texts intensively, and I think that they are indeed firm proponents of democracy.
Most of them, however, have a peculiar agenda in relation to the middle east, where all criteria except Israel’s security pale into insignificance. They do not understand or wish to see the contradiction between preaching the necessity of democratic regimes in the area and refusing to engage seriously in the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. Instead, they choose to believe that no requirement for democracy should be allowed to put the slightest pressure on Ariel Sharon. As long as this continues, the neocons have no chance to win the support of Muslims or middle–east civil societies against radicals and terrorists.
In recent discussions in Washington with US administration officials and agencies dealing with middle–east policy, I tried to persuade them of the centrality of the “war for Muslim hearts and minds” – and the fact that in this war, weapons cannot be an end in themselves, only a means. What Ayman al–Zawahiri calls “the Muslim masses” are ultimately the only group able to eradicate terrorism, to dry up the pond where people like him thrive. To tackle this, you must engage civil society.
This issue is decisive in Iraq today because the jihadis believe that Iraq is their new terrain. They believe that Iraq will follow 9/11 in setting an example for the Muslim world – exposing the weakness of the west, then mobilising and galvanising the masses, who will become fearless in the face of the enemy.
In cyberspace at least, they have already largely succeeded. The jihadis may have failed miserably in inspiring the masses to replace existing regimes with Islamic, sharia–driven states. But they have created a constituency of internet activists dedicated to spreading terrorism around the globe.
The crucial issue now is whether Iraq is the new land of jihad or of fitna – a war in the heart of Islam that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin (my book takes its French title from the term).
The example of Algeria in the 1990s is relevant here. Until 1996, militant Armed Islamic Group (GIA) or Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)movements controlled large parts of Algeria, and the regime seemed doomed; then, for disputed reasons – military security operations, infiltration activities and other provocations, the internal dynamics of the GIA – the Islamists suddenly seemed to have alienated the bulk of the Algerian population. They even lost support among those who had previously voted for them.
Today in Iraq, there are daily images of hostages being beheaded as traitors, of corpses of policemen in the rivers – a spectacle of horror designed to convince that jihad is on the rise and that the US will never prevail. Yet jihadi Islamism in Iraq can draw on only the 17% of the population who are Sunni Arabs. The Iraqi Kurds and Shi’a are beyond their reach.
The US, particularly its neocon element, is still committed to playing the Shi’a card – not just for Iraq itself, but because it is convinced that a secular, pro–western, Shi’a–majority–governed Iraq, would act as a magnet for neighbouring Iran.
In Iran, sentiment against the clerical regime is running high within the general population, but people are too afraid to organise themselves. The regime has been shrewd enough to redistribute some wealth to the middle classes, many of whom (like my Czech relatives under communism) live comfortable private lives but are reluctant to act publicly – because they know what they might lose, and are not sure of what they could gain. In this circumstance, a secular, Shi’a–dominated Iraq would boost the morale of the anti–regime sectors of Iranian civil society.
The Iranian regime has understood this – to it – dangerous prospect. In my view, it backed Muqtada al–Sadr in hopes that he might help avert it. The attempt failed: the Sadrists’ feeble insurgency collapsed when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made a remarkable political move – mobilising all the clerical resources of Shi’ism, and returning to Najaf and Karbala, to compel al–Sadr’s young school dropouts to pay their respects instead to him. As a result, Iraqi Shi’a representatives – Sistani and al–Sadr alike – have now agreed to take part in Iraq’s elections in January 2005.
Why have they agreed – and in a way that runs counter to the wishes of the insurgents in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Samarra? Because a large majority of Iraqis killed by car–bombings and assassinations each week are Shi’a, and the perpetrators radical Sunni.
This confirms the fact that the Sunni insurgents can rely only on a limited band of support in Iraq. The daily media diet of beheadings can so easily and wrongly suggest that the American army is being defeated. Terrorism, in order to win, has to gain momentum over time, by making an investment. It is the return on that investment that counts. In Iraq, it may not be in their favour.
Jihad or fitna in Iraq? We are approaching a watershed. If the majority of Iraqis decide that this is fitna and rejects the Iraqi radicals – then they have lost, as they lost in Algeria. But for this to happen, the concerns of the Iraqi population must be heard.
From the Arab perspective, fitna is a huge contemporary issue. Arabs have a real fear that they are being trapped between the neo–conservatives and the followers of Osama bin Laden. The victory of either, they are convinced, would be to the detriment of Arab civil society.
openDemocracy: Even if this assessment of internal Shi’a politics holds, it surely doesn’t address a deformity of neocon thinking in relation to establishing democracy in Iraq: namely, Muqtada al–Sadr’s significant support among many impoverished and dispossessed Iraqi Shi’a?
Gilles Kepel: The United States troops could, I imagine, have eliminated Muqtada al–Sadr with a smart missile had they really wanted to; but I guess that they perceive him as someone who can ultimately be coopted and inserted into the lower ranks of the Shi’a hierarchy. Like his distant cousin Musa al–Sadr in Lebanon, leader of the anti–communist Movement of the Dispossessed, the calculation is probably that Muqtada can act as a mediator between any future government and the large disenfranchised groups in Baghdad’s Sadr City and equivalent areas.
The main shortcoming of the neocon understanding of democracy, and indeed their whole vision of the world, lies deeper: in its strategic assessment that all it needed to accomplish in Iraq was to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime and thus free Iraqi society. The neocons completely failed to grasp what had happened during the previous sanctions regime – a colossal blindspot equivalent to that over jihad in Afghanistan. Over Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the neocons turned to the “war on terror” as a kind of forward flight rather than confront themselves.
Iraq under sanctions was governed by a welfare–state system of a fascist or communist type, where the ruler bought social peace by limited redistribution of oil wealth. This was of course built on tremendous coercion and violence, including genocide against the Kurds in the late 1980s and the massacre of the Shi’a in 1991.
This welfare system and what remained of Iraqi society was smashed under the decade–long embargo of the 1990s. As Saddam Hussein, his family and cronies controlled access to scarce goods, people became organised via competitive tribal and religious affiliation. This, not the romanticised civil society of neocon imagination, is what was lurking within Iraqi society when the Saddam lid was removed.
Here is the challenge of democracy in Iraq. First, how do the forces of occupation come to terms with complex Iraqi social realities? Second, how can they find a place for Sunni Arabs in tomorrow’s Iraq? Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, made a huge mistake in demobilising the Iraqi army, thus bitterly antagonising their Ba’athist and Tikriti officers. They had nothing to lose – so they went to Fallujah, with their ammunition, their weapons, their expertise, and their intelligence files.
As a result, Fallujah is a cocktail where disenfranchised Ba’ath army officers provide weaponry and intelligence; jihadi foreigners are able (thanks also to the army’s dissolution) freely to carry their ideology across national borders, coalescing with some Iraqi militants; and Sunni Arabs fleeing the Kurdistan they settled after the genocide of the Kurds (to secure the areas close to the Kirkuk and Hanikin oilfields) provide the suicide bombers.
openDemocracy: How should those who support the Iraqi government handle the situation in Fallujah and elsewhere?
Gilles Kepel: There are two options: to call all the insurgents jihadis and consider that crushing military force is the only solution; or to think through the reason why they have received support among many Sunni Iraqis.
Sunni Arabs can expect to be big losers in tomorrow’s Iraq. Even five million Iraqi barrels of oil a day at $55 per barrel (in today’s market), a tremendous amount of money, will not be so for the Sunni if revenues are shared according to the proportion of the different groups in the population. The Kurds, for example, have learned bitter lesson from the Lausanne treaty (1923) onwards: they are stockpiling weapons, so far with the tacit acquiescence of the “community of civilised nations”, as the only way to ensure that they will be taken seriously as oil partners and not discarded this time around. This issue is a crucible for democracy in Iraq.