I Cogitate

Getting a Grip
Is Bush Backing Al-Qaeda?

Michael I. Niman
Artvoice   

What do you call someone who knowingly gives money to Al Qaeda? There are a host of new laws, edicts and presidential declarations that criminalize even thinking of supporting Al Qaeda—or supporting anyone who supports anyone who supports anything that can be called Al Qaeda by anyone. If you’ve breathed the same air as Al Qaeda you can be accused and condemned for giving material support to terrorism—no trial and no questions asked.

So, wrap your mind around this: Seymour Hersh, one of the United States’ most respected journalists, published an earthshaking exposé in the New Yorker last week, alleging that the Bush administration has been covertly funding an array of militant Sunni extremist groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Whether or not the Bush administration is using American funds to directly fund Al Qaeda, the movement officially responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is a semantic point. Al Qaeda is not an organization—it’s an ideology. It has iconic “leaders,” but their role is mostly symbolic. That’s why it’s so difficult to stop. As long as the US provides a steady stream of visual images of American troops abusing Muslims or occupying Muslim lands, Al Qaeda, the ideology of confronting empire with terror, will grow.

There’s no centralized organization or leadership to defeat or co-opt. There’s just a deadly and pathologically destructive ideological umbrella uniting those that are sympathetic to its mission. This mission, however, is also morphing as it expands its target base to include not only the proverbial West, but Shiite and secular Muslims as well. Al Qaeda primarily comprises fundamentalist Sunnis responsible for much of the havoc targeting American troops and Shiites and secular Muslims in Iraq with fratricidal, Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism.

Hersh, citing his now legendary network of former CIA spooks, former Bush Administration officials, government consultants and congressional sources, ties together a web of clandestine programs in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, executed with the help of Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden and 16 of the September 11 hijackers hail from.

The “duh” factor

Here’s the “strategy,” if you can call it that. The “duh” factor is the reality that many of us predicted before the Iraq invasion, that Iran would be the only strategic winner in our horrendous folly of a war. Iran is a theocratic, fundamentalist Shiite nation whose regional aspirations have been held in check by a powerful, Sunni-dominated, secular Iraq—with a war between the two countries claiming millions of victims in the 1980s. Then along comes the government of George W. Bush, which hijacked the might of the US military to accomplish what Iran could never dream of doing—transforming secular, Sunni-dominated Iraq into an emerging Shiite theocracy with close ties to Iran. Iran’s fundamentalist leadership couldn’t say “Let’s roll” any more clearly. The US invasion of Iraq transformed Iran into a regional powerhouse.

To counter Iranian power, according to Hersh, Dick Cheney cooked up a new strategy to aid militant Sunni groups who would attack Shiites, and hence, in the eyes of Cheney, Iranian interests in the Middle East. Hersh details a web of US support for Sunni militants in Iraq as well as Syria, where they could destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad, and Lebanon, where they offer a political counterweight to the Shiite Hezbollah movement. These are militant terrorist groups that fall under the umbrella of what we call Al Qaeda—and some of them are directly responsible for much of the horrendous carnage in Iraq today—targeting civilians and US troops.

 RSS feed