|
Keith, I was not
ignoring Great Britain’s extensive experience with home grown terrorists or history
of empire and occupations. I simply meant that I hope in this most recent
experience, the British do not fall prey to excesses of emotion and political
chicanery as we did here. Add to
that the ulterior motives of the PNAC neoconservatives. We are a ‘new kid on the block’ in
superpower terms, but we’re a ‘big kid’ and our successes and failures loom
large. Good point that
London’s banking industry is more important that defence contracts. Same
applies to international credibility, something Blair may be reconsidering. Lawry
speaks for many experts and commoners alike who predict that American integrity
and its role as a messenger for democracy have been profoundly damaged, and it may
take many years to recover. Sometimes it is
really very difficult to contain anger when analyzing the extreme consequences
that have been triggered by the risky and deceptive decision to invade an
oil-rich Middle Eastern country after routing the Taliban in Afghanistan post-9/11. Bush and Blair gave bin Laden what he
wanted, ignoring expert analysis and traditional measures of caution. But I
feel more comfortable about Blair’s next moves and Brown’s advice/agenda than
their counterparts here, especially if we have a 7/7-type event here. kwc CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll 071205: Bush’s numbers are up but "the
number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq has made the United States less
safe from terrorism spiked
sharply after last week's terror attacks in London, " jumping to 54 percent
from 39 percent in the poll conducted a week before the London attacks.
"53 percent said it was not worth going to war, up 1 point since June
24-26." http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/11/bush.terror/index.html?section=cnn_latest Iraq, Internet fuel growth
of global jihad
Analysts
suspect Thursday's attack in London was motivated by Britain's role in Iraq. By Dan
Murphy, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2005 CAIRO - Investigators still don't know who
carried out last Thursday's attacks in London. But they say those responsible
were probably Islamist terrorists who viewed their assault as revenge for
Britain's part in the Iraq war. The
attacks that killed at least 52 in London follow two years in which the Iraq
war has inflamed Islamist hatred of the US and key allies like Britain. According to US assessments, the turmoil in Iraq has
replaced the still-simmering conflict in Afghanistan as the chief recruiter of
international jihadis. Analysts say anger over the conflict is helping to
spread the ideology of global jihad to young Muslims in Europe. But it is the confluence of America's decision to invade Iraq
and new communication technologies that has created the most powerful machine
for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who
has tracked jihadi websites since the late 1990s. America and its allies are now facing a multifront war: In
Iraq, which is turning out a new generation of Arab jihadis; in Europe, where
Muslim admirers of Al Qaeda are embracing the cause because of anger over the
Iraq war; and on the Internet, which has become a megaphone for radical jihadi
ideologies. Counterterrorism officials often talk about the phenomenon
of "terrorist
dispersal," which is when radicalized foreigners carry jihad and their
guerrilla skills back to their homelands. But most analysts speculate that those responsible for
Thursday's attacks in London were not veterans of the Iraqi insurgency.
Instead, the best guess is that they were composed primarily of Muslims living
in Europe, inspired by Al Qaeda sympathizers who promise salvation and glory in
exchange for violence, much as was the case with the Madrid blasts that killed
190 last year. "The world is just
starting to understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university
of jihad,'' says Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the
Research of Islamic Movements in Israel. "Like
the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be viewed as an export of
the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of global jihad rather than
on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world." In the 1980s, the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan,
with its thousands of Arab fighters financed by the US and others, also served
as a potent rallying point for would-be martyrs. Not only was Al Qaeda - "the base" in Arabic - created from among these fighters, but
clandestine videos of brave Mujahideen attacks were spread around the world. Today, videos and messages of support for Islamist fighters
spread much faster. Insurgents in "martyrdom operations" appear on websites within days of attacks in Iraq,
and the latest calls to carry jihad to Western capitals from the likes of Ayman
al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2 and Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, spread
around the globe within minutes. "Whatever framework we use to talk about Iraq - take
Afghanistan for instance - it's whatever happened there, but on steroids,'' says Toby Craig Jones, a political
scientist and analyst of events in Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis
Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "It
seems to be proceeding much more quickly this time." To be sure, the vast majority of Muslims are as horrified by
such attacks as anyone else, and a growing number of Muslim scholars are
speaking out against the methods and motives the global jihadis. But Islamist terrorism has never been a widespread
phenomenon. "If we're talking about percentages, maybe the supporters of
global jihad are only 1 percent of the Muslim world,'' says Paz. A Saudi ideologue who goes by the handle "Lewis
Attiyatullah" online and with whom Paz held an e-mail correspondence with
until Lewis apparently went underground, spelled out what Al Qaeda and its
ideological allies see as the benefits of the US presence in Iraq in an open
letter to Tony Blair first published in April 2004. In
his letter, Lewis said he expects that fighting in Iraq will create "a
resistance that would develop into a culture of jihad," and that attacks
must be made on Western capitals like London that have supported the war in
Iraq. He also expresses pleasure about how Iraq, in his view, is inducting new
members into the global jihad. "I wish you could listen to what the
returnees from Iraq say. Fighting the enemy became their greatest pleasure ...
this notion became like a virus for them." Within Iraq, a small percentage of the insurgency is
composed of foreign fighters. The US military in Iraq estimates that there are
around 1,000 members of an insurgency that many others say numbers at least
15,000. But foreign fighters are far more likely to be suicide bombers than
Iraqi fighters, a reflection of the extreme religious convictions that underpin
their involvement. Paz calculated in a March 2005
paper that of around 200 documented suicide bombers in Iraq, 61 percent were
Saudi. In an assessment running through June by Mr. Kohlmann, of 300 foreigners
reported killed in Iraq, 165 were Saudi, 38 were Syrian, 16 Kuwaiti, and 14
Jordanian. Kohlmann says nine Muslims from Europe have also been reported
killed in Iraq, one of them from Britain. Both men expect that foreigners who survive the fighting in
Iraq are likely to carry the fight back to homelands like Saudi Arabia, a close
US ally whose monarchy is frequently attacked on Islamist websites as corrupt.
The foreigners in Iraq, based on "martyrdom wills" and websites linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian
militant who has been declared the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, appear to have few
qualms about even killing other Muslims. Paz says the frequency with which jihadis in Iraq are
willing to justify the killings of civilians and Muslims is a sharp departure
from the previous generation weaned on Afghanistan, which was brutal to be
sure, but generally had stricter limits on what were seen as legitimate
targets. "The Iraqi alumni are going to be more dangerous than the
Afghan alumni. They have no limits, no red lines," he says. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0712/p01s03-woeu.html |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
