Cross-posted at Daily Kos
I had another informative, and this time amusing, email interchange with Juan Cole. It started out seriously enough with this email:
Subject: What does al Qaeda want?
To: “Cole, Juan” <jrcole@umich.edu>
Juan,
With apologies to Dr. Freud, that is my question. Why are we being attacked? Is it because they “hate our freedom”? This is what Mr. Bush would have us believe.
But apparently not only Mr. Bush. The mantra about the freedom-hating Muslims has penetrated so deeply that it was repeated just yesterday by the mayor of London:
“But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.”
Please read the whole series after the flip…
The rest of my email to Prof. Cole:
Is this really the long-term objective of al qaeda, failing which they will continue to attack the west until the end of time? If it is, then our only response would seem either to show them our resolve, as the mayor recommends, or to curtail our freedoms and militarily attack arab countries, as Bush and Blair are doing. Either way the prognosis would appear to be dim.
But are Bush-Blair really going to war with the enemy they have, or rather with the enemy they would like to have? They are telling us that we must carry out a war for the ages, until every radical Muslim lies in the ground. Are they telling us this because it is indeed the case? Or is this a cunningly constructed straw enemy, an “Eastasia” for the 21st century that will allow Mr. Bush to remain a “war president”?
If the Bush freedom mantra is not the truth, or, at least, not the whole truth, then why are we being attacked? I would think that al qaeda may have made some pronouncements concerning their goals. Since I have heard that you have some knowledge of things middle eastern, perhaps you could shed some light into this rather dark corner of the public discourse.
Cheers!
Mark
What you dare to Dream, dare to Analyze
While awaiting his answer I surfed over to Salon. Lo and behold there was a front page article by Cole on this exact issue:
Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a “secret group” of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By Thursday afternoon, as the casualty toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was saying, “It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-related attack.” Although U.S. President George W. Bush maintains that al-Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies because of hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing of the sort. The attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of sacred revenge for British “massacres” in “Afghanistan and Iraq,” and a punishment of the United Kingdom for its “Zionism” (i.e., support of Israel). If they really are responsible, who is this group and what do they want?
Silly me! So I wrote again to Prof Cole:
“Mark” <markinsanfran0@yahoo.com>
Subject: Your Salon article
To: jrcole@umich.edu
Very funny. So you anticipate my questions and publish an article in Salon (and on the front page, no less) in advance of my asking! We really need to talk about the true nature of spacetime, given your apparent prescient powers 🙂
Mark
What you dare to Dream, dare to Analyze
Oh well. But back to the question at hand: what does al Qaeda want? Not that we should just give it to them, but understanding both their motivations and the motivations of their supporters is crucial to an effective response to their violence – at least to those of us in the reality-based community.
In re an effective response, Prof. Cole states:
From the point of view of a serious counterinsurgency campaign against al-Qaida, Bush has made exactly the wrong decisions all along the line. He decided to “unleash” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rather than pressing for Israeli-Palestinian peace and an end to Israeli occupation of the territories it captured in 1967. Rather than extinguishing this most incendiary issue for Arabs and Muslims, he poured gasoline on it. His strategy in response to Sept. 11 was to fight the Afghanistan War on the cheap. By failing to commit American ground troops in Tora Bora, he allowed bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape. He reneged on promises to rebuild Afghanistan and prevent the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaida there, thus prolonging the U.S. and NATO military presence indefinitely. He then diverted most American military and reconstruction resources into an illegal war on Iraq. That war may have been doomed from the beginning, but Bush’s refusal to line up international support, and his administration’s criminal lack of planning for the postwar period, made failure inevitable.
Indeed. Check out the whole article, it’s well worth it.
But what about Cole’s answer to my initial email? Well he actually did answer, and his response makes clear his view of al Qaeda’s ultimate, as opposed to proximate, goals:
RE: What does al Qaeda want?
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 16:28:02 -0400
From: “Cole, Juan” <jrcole@umich.edu>
To: “Mark” <markinsanfran0@yahoo.com>
Basically Bin Laden et al. want to force the United States and Europe out of the Middle East diplomatically, economically, and politically; they want to take it over and make it a Taliban Caliphate; and then they want to use the vast resources of the Caliphate to subject Western Christians and Jews and make them al-Qaeda’s bitches, on the theory that turn-about is fair play.
In other words, they are dangerous crackpots, sort of like Aum Shinrikyo but with more street cred because Reagan built them up in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.
cheers Juan
It would seem that Bush is already al Qaeda’s bitch extraordinaire, now that bin Laden’s dream of a US invasion of a Muslim country has come to fruition.
Update [2005-7-8 22:21:53 by markinsanfran]:Thanks to Sybil for this direct quote from bin Ladin himself:
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom.
If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 – may Allah have mercy on them.
No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.
But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
Osama Bin Laden
Nov, 1, 2004