A revived caliphate: bogeyman, scapegoat and pinata
startelegram: At a time of growing political tension between the Muslim world and the West, a new bad idea is creeping into the discourse of European and North American political leaders and is being used to justify an intensification of Western political and military intervention in the Muslim world.
Donald Rumsfeld wheeled this bad idea out at a conference on global security in Munich, Germany. George W. Bush alluded to it in his 2006 State of the Union address in January. Tony Blair and his Home Office minister, Charles Clarke, have both spoken of it in the past six months. Dick Cheney has bandied it about for even longer. The rhetoric of the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests that she, too, has signed up.
The new bad idea is this: The "free West," having defeated German Nazism and Soviet Communism, now faces a new strategic challenge from the ambition of Muslim radicals to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and impose Islamic law on half the world.
As the U.S. defense secretary put it at the Munich conference, Islamic radicals "seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent. They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."
Ouch! A map without borders! Is this the new WMD?
It is true that many Islamist groups, including terrorist groups like al Qaeda, say they would like to see the reunification of the Muslim world under one political leadership. They also frame this in terms of the re-establishment of the political institution that unified the Muslim world in the first few centuries of Islam: the caliphate.
But does this make it sensible, wise or proportionate for the leaders of the most formidable military alliance in the history of the world to base their strategic posture for the early 21st century on the invocation of an al Qaeda- or Iranian-run "terrorist caliphate" stretching half way around the globe?
No, it does not, and here's why.
First, the evidence that al Qaeda or any similar organization is in a position to re-create and control a caliphate is nonexistent. The only country where al Qaeda was able to gain any kind of territorial foothold was in parts of Afghanistan. Even there it was dependent on the good will of local leaders, the Taliban, who had only come to power after Afghanistan had been reduced to ground zero by the combined policies of the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War and subsequent international neglect.
In Iraq, where the U.S. military invasion and occupation has created another opportunity for al Qaeda, Bush's claim that al Qaeda would take over the country in the event of a U.S. military withdrawal is nonsense. Al Qaeda has the same chance of imposing its political authority in Iraq as the United States does: nil.
As for Iran, in the 25 years since the Islamic revolution, Tehran has been unable to export its Shiite version of Islamist rule to any other Muslim state, in part because most other Muslim states are dominated by Sunnis. In fact, revolutionary Iran long ago gave up efforts to export its ideology to the wider Muslim world and has concentrated on cultivating influence among Shiite sectarian groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.
The second reason why raising the specter of a resurgent caliphate is foolish is that it plays into the hands of groups like al Qaeda that claim the "war on terror" is an assault on Islam itself. Read more
Donald Rumsfeld wheeled this bad idea out at a conference on global security in Munich, Germany. George W. Bush alluded to it in his 2006 State of the Union address in January. Tony Blair and his Home Office minister, Charles Clarke, have both spoken of it in the past six months. Dick Cheney has bandied it about for even longer. The rhetoric of the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests that she, too, has signed up.
The new bad idea is this: The "free West," having defeated German Nazism and Soviet Communism, now faces a new strategic challenge from the ambition of Muslim radicals to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and impose Islamic law on half the world.
As the U.S. defense secretary put it at the Munich conference, Islamic radicals "seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent. They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."
Ouch! A map without borders! Is this the new WMD?
It is true that many Islamist groups, including terrorist groups like al Qaeda, say they would like to see the reunification of the Muslim world under one political leadership. They also frame this in terms of the re-establishment of the political institution that unified the Muslim world in the first few centuries of Islam: the caliphate.
But does this make it sensible, wise or proportionate for the leaders of the most formidable military alliance in the history of the world to base their strategic posture for the early 21st century on the invocation of an al Qaeda- or Iranian-run "terrorist caliphate" stretching half way around the globe?
No, it does not, and here's why.
First, the evidence that al Qaeda or any similar organization is in a position to re-create and control a caliphate is nonexistent. The only country where al Qaeda was able to gain any kind of territorial foothold was in parts of Afghanistan. Even there it was dependent on the good will of local leaders, the Taliban, who had only come to power after Afghanistan had been reduced to ground zero by the combined policies of the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War and subsequent international neglect.
In Iraq, where the U.S. military invasion and occupation has created another opportunity for al Qaeda, Bush's claim that al Qaeda would take over the country in the event of a U.S. military withdrawal is nonsense. Al Qaeda has the same chance of imposing its political authority in Iraq as the United States does: nil.
As for Iran, in the 25 years since the Islamic revolution, Tehran has been unable to export its Shiite version of Islamist rule to any other Muslim state, in part because most other Muslim states are dominated by Sunnis. In fact, revolutionary Iran long ago gave up efforts to export its ideology to the wider Muslim world and has concentrated on cultivating influence among Shiite sectarian groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.
The second reason why raising the specter of a resurgent caliphate is foolish is that it plays into the hands of groups like al Qaeda that claim the "war on terror" is an assault on Islam itself. Read more
posted by exoplanet at 7:56 AM
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