Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (52 page)
Read Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Online
Authors: Michael Scheuer
76.
Dr. Alamgir Hussain, “Thailand Insurgency: It’s Jihad But Experts Don’t Get It,” www.americanchronicle.com, December 4, 2006; Matthew B. Arnold, “Who Is Behind the Violence in the South?”
Bangkok Post,
December 13, 2006; “Thai Army Commander General Sonthi Cuts Short Haj Pilgrimage to Return Home,”
Phuchatkan,
January 1, 2007; “Bangkok’s Bombs,”
Weekly Standard
, January 3, 2007; George Wehrfritz, “Thailand’s Muslim Insurgency Is Spinning out of Control,” www.msnbc.msn.com, August 12, 2007; “Rebels ‘ready for long years of fighting,’” www.bangkokpost.com, August 29, 2007; and Ian Storey, “Thailand Cracks Down on Southern Militants,”
Terrorism Monitor
5, no. 17 (September 13, 2007).
77.
“U.S. Voices Disappointment over Coup in Thailand,”
International Herald Tribune,
September 20, 2006; “U.S.-Thailand Alliance,” www.defenselink.mil; and Department of State, “Background Note: Thailand,” www.state.gov, November, 2006.
78.
“U.S. Involvement in Somalia,” Reuters, January 9, 2007, and Salad Dahul, “Official: Bomb Suspect Killed in Somalia,” Associated Press, January 10, 2007.
79.
Abdulgarim Omar, a Somali intellectual living in Mogadishu, made the following comments on the Arabs’ presence and purposes in Somalia in late 2003.
No one helps us anymore, except the Arabs, who are here in droves with their money, their Koranic schools, and with their humanitarian organizations, which in reality conceal other objectives. They do not teach Islam, but Wahhabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia…More than training, what the mosques offer is indoctrination, especially the new mosques that have been built with Saudi, Yemeni, and [United] Arab Emirate money, and portray portraits of bin Ladin, who by now in Mogadishu is almost considered a hero.
See Massimo A. Alberizzi, “Al-Qaeda Trains New Taliban in Somalia,”
Corriere della Sera,
November 27, 2003.
80.
Edmund Sanders, “Ethiopia’s Intervention May Destabilize Region,”
Los Angeles Times,
January 7, 2007; Martin Fletcher, “The Islamists Were the One Hope for Somalia,” www.timesonline.co.uk, January 8, 2007; “U.S. Involvement in Somalia”; Eric S. Margolis, “The Crusade Moves On to Somalia,”
Gulf Times,
December 30, 2006.
81.
Moahmed Olad Hassan, “Ethiopia Openly Launches Offensive Against Somalia’s Powerful Islamist Movement,” Associated Press, December 24, 2006: “State Department: U.S. Supports Ethiopian Military,” CNN.com, December 27, 2006; Guled Muhamed, “Somali Gov’t Close to Taking Mogadishu,” Reuters, December 28, 2006; and “Key Facts on Somali President Yusuf,” Reuters, October 29, 2007.
82.
The U.S. air strikes targeted three senior East Africa–based al-Qaeda fighters: Fazul Abdallah Muhammad, a Comoran involved in al-Qaeda’s 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; Abu Talha al-Sudani, al-Qaeda’s chief in East Africa and an explosives expert; and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan. See “America Intervenes in Somalia,” www.telegraphyindia.com, January 10, 2007; John Donnelly, “U.S. Uses Somali Events to Press al-Qaeda,”
Boston Globe,
January 10, 2007; and Karen DeYoung, “U.S. Strike in al-Qaeda Targets al-Qaeda Figure,”
Washington Post,
January 8, 2007. None of the three were killed, but that failure does not invalidate the attempt. For the foreseeable future, this sort of preemptive attack will be indispensable and must become a mainstay of U.S. strategy against the Islamists. In order to continue protecting America in this manner, however, U.S. leaders will have to learn to ignore the complaints and criticisms of the EC, human-rights groups, and other antinational organizations. They also ought to learn to order the attacks and then keep their mouths shut.
83.
Jonathan Clayton, “Raids Could Backfire on U.S.,”
Australian,
January 10, 2007. Within days of Ethiopian forces occupying Mogadishu, Somali Islamists were attacking their convoys and foot patrols, and by mid-January 2007 the transitional government had declared a ninety-day state of emergency to deal with the violence. See “Mogadishu Fighting Escalates,” www.hamiltonspectator.com, January 11, 2007; Hassan Yare, “Somali Parliament Declares 3-Month State of Emergency,” Reuters, January 13, 2007; and Sahal Abdulle, “Somali Gunmen Attack Convoy of Ethiopian Troops,” Reuters, January 15, 2007.
The always missing historical context for the U.S. decision to support the Ethiopian invasion includes the following points, which together make it reasonable to anticipate the slow growth of an Islamist insurgency in the country and perhaps the region.
a. Ethiopia and Somalia have been rivals throughout their history, and Ethiopian interventions in Somalia have been common in the past and have caused lengthy wars. Somalis have traditionally viewed Ethiopia as an expansionist colonial power eager to ease its land-locked status by acquiring ports on the Somali coast.
b. Ethiopian invasions when backed by a non-Muslim power have encouraged the rapid growth of Islamic militancy and readiness for jihad in Somalia’s traditionally moderate practice of the faith. Several British-backed Ethiopian invasions in the first decade of the twentieth century, for example, had exactly this effect in Somalia. If past is prologue, the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion may again prove “that foreign intervention is the fuel that allows political Islam to grow in an otherwise hostile [Somali] environment.”
c. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of Muslim Somalia and its subsequent destruction of the ICU government is likely to make Ethiopia a more acceptable target for all Islamists. Traditionally, Ethiopia has held a place of respect and distinction in Islamic history and theology because it was a Christian nation whose ruler provided refuge and protection for Muslims who had to flee from persecution on the Arabian Peninsula during the first years of Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, in recognition of the Ethiopians’ assistance to his brethren, said, “If you went to the country of the Abyssinians, ye would find there a king under whom none sufferth wrong. It is a land of sincerity in religion.” The ruler who protected the Muslims later converted to Islam. Because of this history, contemporary Islamists have been reluctant to attack the interests of a country honored by their Prophet. The December 2006 Ethiopian invasion, however, may lessen the strength of the Prophet’s injunction and result in attacks on Ethiopian targets. Indeed, Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmed, a senior ICU leader, has said that the Somalis’ response to the invasion would not be limited to Somali territory. “The war is entering a new phase,” Shaykh Ahmed warned. “We will fight Ethiopia for a long, long time and we expect the war to go every place.”
On the long history of Ethiopian-Somali hostilities, see Nicolla Nasser, “Commentary: Ethiopian Invasion to Spur Anti-U.S. Foment,”
Middle East Times
(www.metimes.com), January 9, 2006, and “Somalia’s Role in Horn of Africa Tensions,” Reuters, December 24, 2006. For a fascinating examination of the jihad-producing impact of Great Power–backed Ethiopian invasions of Somalia, see Andrew McGregor, “Expelling the Infidel: Historical Look at Somali Resistance to Ethiopia,”
Terrorism Monitor
5, no. 1 (January 2007). On Ethiopia’s historically privileged status in Islamic history and theology, see Lings,
Muhammad,
77–84; Ramadan,
Footsteps of the Prophet,
59–62; Scott Baldauf and Mike Pflanz, “U.S. Takes Hunt for al-Qaeda to Somalia,”
Christian Science Monitor,
January 10, 2007; and Salad Dahul, “Islamic Forces Retreat in Somalia But Say They Expect War ‘to Go Every Place,’” Associated Press, December 26, 2006.
84.
For bin Laden’s most recent statement on Somalia, see Osama bin Ladin, “To the Nation, in General, and the Mujahedin in Iraq and Somalia, in Particular,” Al-Sahab Media Organization (www.muslim.net), July 1, 2006. For al-Zawahiri’s most recent statement on Somalia see Ayman al-Zawahiri, “Rise Up and Support Your Brothers in Somalia,” Al-Sahab Media Organization (www.muslim.net), January 5, 2007.
85.
For a useful, well-argued Muslim analysis that concludes that the Ethiopian and U.S. actions in Somalia in December 2006 and January 2007 might well spark an Islamist insurgency/jihad in the countries of East Africa, see Nasser, “Commentary.”
86.
There has been a crop of books depicting the political portents and terrorism threats posed by the Muslim populations of Europe, and the befuddled efforts of EC politicians trying to cope with the realities of demography and Islamist militants. See Bruce Bawer,
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within
(New York: Doubleday, 2006); Melanie Phillips,
Londonistan
(New York: Encounter Books, 2006); Bat Ye’or,
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Crisis
(Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005); and Claire Berlinski,
Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too
(New York: Crown Forum Books, 2007).
87.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “On Europe’s Crisis of Culture,” www.zenit.org, July 26, 2005.
88.
Mark Lilla, “Godless Europe,”
New York Times,
April 2, 2006.
89.
Niall Ferguson, “The March of Islam,”
Daily Telegraph,
May 21, 2006, and Ferguson, “The Origins of the Great War of 2007—and How It Could Have Been Prevented,”
Sunday Telegraph,
January 15, 2006.
90.
Tony Blankley,
The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publications, 2005), 147–48.
91.
George Weigel,
The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 21–22.
92.
Steyn,
America Alone,
2, 32.
93.
Mark Steyn, “Bicultural Europe Is Doomed,”
Daily Telegraph,
November 15, 2005.
94.
Before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger warned Europe’s leaders that their developing confrontation with their Muslim citizens was based not on them being the last vestiges of Christianity on the continent but on “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own [Christian] foundations…It is not the mention of God that offends those who belong to other religions, but rather the attempt to build the human community absolutely without God.” Needless to say, the leaders of the EC, who are if anything more viciously anticlerical than the French philosophes, took no heed of the cardinal’s commonsense warning. Ratzinger, “Europe’s Crisis of Culture.”
95.
Gertrude Himmelfarb,
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments
(New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 150, 161.
96.
Quoted in ibid., 166.
Chapter 6. “The bottom is out of the tub”: Taking Stock for America in 2007
1.
The Lincoln-Meigs conversation is recounted in Ethan S. Rafuse,
McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Stuggle for the Union
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 170.
2.
See the results of a Pew Research poll published in June 2006 and a BBC poll published in January 2007. Brian Knowlton, “Global Image of the U.S. Worsening, Survey Finds,”
New York Times,
June 14, 2006; Jonathan Marcus, “‘Listen More’ Is World’s Message to U.S.,” http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk, January 23, 2007; and “U.S. Image Sharply Worsens,” Reuters, January 23, 2007.
3.
Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders have gone into great detail in instructing Islamists how to successfully defend themselves from initial U.S. “shock and awe” attacks, stressing that once that phase concludes, the U.S. forces are a far less formidable enemy than was the Soviet military. See “Statement by Usama Bin Ladin,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, December 27, 2001; Osama Bin Laden, “Message to Our Brothers in Iraq,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, February 11, 2003; and Sayf al-Adl, “The al-Qaeda Organization Writes a Letter to the Iraqi People,” www.alfjr.com, March 5, 2003.
4.
Writing in
Federalist 15
, Hamilton argued that when foreign powers looked upon the United States under the Articles of Confederation, they perceived not a strong sovereign power but rather “the imbecility of our government” that managed to produce ambassadors who are “mere pageants of mimic sovereignty.” This situation, Hamilton concluded, endangered America’s future as it strove to survive in the world. And so are we endangered today by Washington’s pageants of mimic military power. See Alexander Hamilton,
Federalist 15
, in George W. Casey and James McClellan,
The Federalist: The Gideon Edition
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2001), 68–75.