All of these articles deal with the AQ, and how they've basically won due to the actions of Bush.
It talks about how, even though they're somewhat defeated, they have still won because America is turning millions of people against America.
It's about how AQ themselves are not at the heart of every little evil act of doom, even though they are often considered to be by some.
Pie in the eye.
(It's long)
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FB13Ak02.html
THE ROVING EYE
IRAQ AND AL-QAEDA
Part 1 - The usual suspects
By Pepe Escobar
Nearly 100 Iraqis have been killed in less than 24 hours in two suicide bombings in Iskandariya and Baghdad. Most of them were poor and unemployed and were trying to find a job with the new, American-approved Iraqi police and army. They were Shi'ites in Iskandariya, and mostly Sunnis in Baghdad. But for the anti-occupation guerrilla forces, they were just one thing: collaborators.
These two deadly attacks happened just as the Pentagon and the White house leaked information that allegedly proved the so far elusive link between al-Qaeda and terrorism in Iraq. According to the Bush administration, a "key al-Qaeda suspect" was arrested in Iraq carrying a 17-page memo on a computer disc, on his way to Afghanistan no less, where the disc was be handed over to Osama bin Laden, or his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The author of the memo was purported to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian national on the loose and longtime number one suspect of being the missing link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.
In the memo, al-Zarqawi allegedly appeals to the al-Qaeda leadership to help detonate a civil war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'ites as the next definitive step to get rid of the Americans. For the Bush administration's spin machine, this is "the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al-Qaeda".
This latest US intelligence, though, makes little sense. For starters, al-Qaeda pigeons are highly unlikely to move around with computer discs in their briefcases: since early 2002 a disabled al-Qaeda has used women couriers to deliver strictly verbal messages. The memo says that the resistance against the occupation is "struggling to recruit Iraqis". This is not borne out by the situation on the ground - the resistance continues, even rising, despite the capture of Saddam. The purported memo also says that the "new anti-American campaign" must start before "zero hour", when power is scheduled to be transferred to an Iraqi administration in June. Again, this is not true. The resistance knows all too well that only the responsibility for security will be transferred in June, not power. The Americans will remain behind their heavily fortified military bases, but will remain as occupiers.
Asia Times Online has been to Iskandariya. It's a dusty and very poor town roughly on the imaginary border between the Sunni triangle and the Shi'ite south. Sunnis and Shi'ites live close together with no major hassles. But Iskandariya is also fiercely anti-occupation. People there are proud of the local resistance attacks. This shows how the resistance is spreading, irrespective of sectarian, religious lines.
The memo says that "if we succeed in dragging them [Shi'ites] into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis, who are fearful of destruction and death at their hands." The last thing the Shi'ites want is to be involved in a civil war: they are fighting for strong political representation in a new Iraqi government. Sunnis most of all want the end of the occupation - and the bulk of the Sunni resistance is a nationalist movement: they may welcome technical support from al-Qaeda, but not for a civil war.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell was quick to defend the apprehended memo as giving "credence" to American claims, roughly one year ago, about an alleged connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime. Powell even addressed the United Nations Security Council and made these charges. Saddam denied it; the radical group Ansar al-Islam, in the mountains of northeast Iraq, denied it; and no proof was ever found to substantiate the Americans' claims. Now the same scenario is resurrected to explain at least some of the dozens of attacks against American soldiers and the new Iraqi police and army. Conveniently, al-Zarqawi in his memo claims responsibility for "25 operations, some of them against the Shi'ites and their leaders, the Americans and their military and the police".
The street version of one of the attacks differs from the official version - a suicide bombing via a pick-up truck loaded with explosives. Dozens of eyewitnesses said that they had heard a helicopter and the whoosh of a missile flying through the air just before the explosion. They later swore by Allah that the Americans brought a bulldozer to fill in the crater caused by the explosion. American commanders and Iraqi police chiefs continue to repeat the same mantra: the attacks show "al-Qaeda's fingerprints".
Who profits from exploiting these "fingerprints"? The Bush administration, of course. With full exposure of the weapons of mass destruction sham, the official Washington excuse for the Iraq war has changed: now the spin is that Saddam was a bad guy, and terrorism in Iraq (which did not exist in the first place) must be fought. The ever-elusive bin Laden remains the main justification for the Bush administration.
Yet what is qualified as "terrorism" in Iraq is being conducted by a cluster of the so-called "unaligned mujahideen", with only marginal input from al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The American non-governmental organization Iraq Body Count, in a still partial investigation that has not covered the whole country, has stated that there have been more than 10,000 civilian deaths in the Iraq war. As the number of seriously wounded in such wars is usually four times bigger than the number of fatal casualties, there may be 40,000 injured civilians. Russian observers estimate Iraqi military losses at 30,000 deaths and 120,000 seriously wounded. This means that many Iraqis now know that in the name of their "liberation", the Americans have killed or maimed 200,000 people. When something like this happens, you don't need any help from al-Qaeda to fuel your anger.
TOMORROW: Why al-Qaeda votes Bush
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB14Aa03.html
THE ROVING EYE
IRAQ AND AL-QAEDA
Part 2: Why al-Qaeda votes Bush
By Pepe Escobar
(Part 1: The usual suspects)
Sheikh Terror are the new underground sensation in ever-swingin' London. Their rap video called "The Dirty Infidels" has been sent by e-mail to the Arab-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat. The paper says the video - unlikely to end up on MTV - may have been produced in a London studio by young, radical Muslims, but mosque talk in London and northern England has attributed it to ... al-Qaeda. Sheikh Terror rap in favor of the "fight against the infidels", praise Osama bin Laden and ask for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to be "burned", while images switch from September 11 to shots of George W Bush, President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and a Russian soldier executed by a Chechen guerrilla with a Kalashnikov.
Bin Laden may not be cornering the rap market just yet, but this only goes to show how the al-Qaeda brand has taken in the collective consciousness of many. A few months ago, the Rand Corp - a think-tank sympathetic to the US industrial-military complex that boasts Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as one of its former directors - published an analysis of al-Qaeda by Bruce Hoffman. This was the heart of the system debating whether al-Qaeda was a concept or a virus; an army or an ideology. The author compared al-Qaeda to a bunch of fast, easily adaptable sharks. In essence, al-Qaeda was defined as an indestructible enemy because it's impossible to circumscribe it precisely. By describing the threat as inexorable, the Rand Corp could then justify relentless, inexorable repression.
This is the way in which the Bush administration also sees it. But is pure repression working against an al-Qaeda now configured as a mutant virus - a constellation of autonomous cells constantly morphing into new shapes and tactics?
It's no secret for anyone following Islamist movements that since the early 1980s in Pakistan, bin Laden has been instrumentalized by the real masters of what would become al-Qaeda. These were the key operatives at the Maktab al-Khidamat in Peshawar: Egyptians from the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudis and Kuwaitis such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed Atef, Abu Zubaida, Suleyman Abu Graith and Sayf al-Adl. These people were all inspired by the most extreme ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood: Sayyed Qotb. Their ultimate objective was to provoke a fissure between the Muslim world and the West, and then recapture power in Islamic lands. Previous experiments had been a total failure - as in Egypt - or a partial failure - as in Sudan. This until Pakistan-Afghanistan in the early 1980s became the perfect platform, with Osama - flush with money and charisma - incarnating the perfect marriage of medium and message.
These people were all Sunni Muslims. Suicide bombing was never welcomed by Sunni Islam. But it was very much part of the Shi'ite cult of martyrdom. Shi'ites sanction suicide because it represents expiation for the martyrdom of the first Shi'ite imams. Hezbollah in Lebanon used suicide bombing with great success to force the departure of the Israeli occupation force. Suicide bombing then became popular with the Palestinian struggle and all over the Sunni world. But as the years rolled by there was still an infinite abyss to close. Palestinians fighting an occupier who reduced their lives to hell needed no lecture to become suicide bombers. But what about educated Muslims living in comfort - how do they choose to die for a symbol and for a goal that may never materialize?
It's a testimony to the level of Islamic rage against the West that al-Qaeda managed to steer this large-scale conversion. September 11, 2001 - with its small army of aerial suicide bombers - indeed turned history upside down. But then the whole US intelligence matrix simply could not admit that the country had been struck by a small sect - and not by a sinister, global multinational with unlimited reach.
The al-Qaeda myth
Alain Chouet, a high-level expert at the French Ministry of Defense, is one among many to sustain that this is how the al-Qaeda myth was born - encouraged by the Bush administration spin machine and fully embraced, for the opposite reasons, by the Arab-Muslim world. But now there's a different situation: as Chouet puts it: "Bin Laden only existed by the interaction between his personality and the al-Qaeda capacity of being a nuisance." With the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, but now plotting a comeback, and most of al-Qaeda's leaders captured or killed, what happens to bin Laden is now largely irrelevant.
The looming big issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the spring offensive planned by the Pentagon to capture bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and the remaining al-Qaeda leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan, most probably Waziristan, where they are thought to be hiding. Asia Times Online has identified extreme skepticism about the operation, in Europe as well as in South Asia. For the Bush administration, as well as for Musharraf's government, the current status quo is the best option. If bin Laden is killed, he instantly becomes a martyr - and mini-bin Ladens, post-bin Ladens and crypto-bin Ladens will pop up like mushrooms all over Islam. This would also mean the end of the "war on terror", which is the Bushite passport for global intervention. If bin Laden is captured alive, like Saddam Hussein, he has to be judged: a trial would not only enhance his charisma, but reveal the explosive convergence of objectives between successive US administrations, the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and so-called radical Islam.
Alain Chouet maintains that since September 11, only 30 percent of all attacks and suicide bombings - invariably attributed by the Bush administration to al-Qaeda - "can be really linked to the activity of debris of al-Qaeda". So the bulk of what is defined as "international terrorism" is now in fact linked to "the internal context of the country where the attacks take place, and nothing links them to al-Qaeda". The targets may be international, as in Iraq, but the motivation and the objectives are local: in the case of Iraq, the end of the occupation by any means necessary. The attackers or suicide bombers may be radical Islamists, but they have nothing to do with Islam and don't even relate their actions to Islam.
Many in the European intelligence community now agree: political violence in the Arab-Muslim world has entered a new phase. It has nothing to do with Islam as a whole. It has nothing to do with a common threat. It has nothing to do with a messianic project. But it has everything to do with unresolved, and strictly local, political, economical and social problems. That's the case in Iraq: a nationalist movement fighting foreign occupation, just like Palestinians fighting Ariel Sharon's Israel.
Al-Qaeda may have given the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration the perfect motive for bombing Afghanistan and then invading Iraq. But even seriously disabled, al-Qaeda benefits enormously, although not directly. The fact is that the US military machine now rules over more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. Untold numbers are turning to a myriad Islamist radicals groups and sub-groups all over the Muslim world - which they identify as the only force, although incoherent, capable of at least facing and demoralizing bit by bit the American empire.
As for a weakened, disabled al-Qaeda, it is definitely voting Bush next November. Al-Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West. Al-Qaeda's and the Bush administration's future are interlocked anyway. European intelligence sources confirm that al-Qaeda has no capability of carrying out a major terrorist attack on US soil remotely similar to September 11. This hypothetical attack would certainly generate a strong backlash against the Bushite regime for being unable to prevent it. But al-Qaeda could certainly organize something like a small-scale suicide bombing in New York, Washington or Miami during the presidential campaign, with a few American casualties. This would be like help from above for the Bushites.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI11Ak03.html
THE ROVING EYE
Why al-Qaeda is winning
By Pepe Escobar
Three years after September 11, President George W Bush's crusade is a failure. "War on terror" is a meaningless myth: you can't combat a supple attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation that had nothing to do with terror.
This policy has actually increased terror attacks around the world. Last year in Cairo, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Sheikh Yamani, a man who knows one or two things about Arabs, violence and oil, said the invasion would produce "one hundred bin Ladens". They are here, and they have no one else but Bush to thank.
Bush's mission from God
Bush's key perceived strength - apart from his dynastic family name and extra-profitable connections - is his carefully polished image of a strong, straight-shooting, tough-talking commander-in-chief during times of war.
It should be very easy for the slumbering John Kerry campaign to smash that armory. Before Iraq turned into a quagmire - before the 1,000th dead American soldier, the 7,000th wounded American soldier, the 14,000th or maybe even 22,000th dead Iraqi civilian - Bush kept insisting that Iraq was "the new front in the war on terror". Now Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are doing everything in their power not to make the connection - because a majority of Americans seem to view Bush as relatively strong on terror, but a failure in Iraq.
Two related facts are undisputable: more Americans are facing death and destruction in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was captured than before; and now there are increasingly more global terrorist attacks than when Bush proclaimed his "crusade", or "war on terror". The Bush administration always sold the war on Iraq as part of the "war on terror". Reminding Americans about it is to fully certify Bush's overall failure.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in New York, Bush said that "the government of a free Afghanistan is fighting terror; Pakistan is capturing terrorist leaders; Saudi Arabia is making raids and arrests; Libya is dismantling its weapons programs; the army of a free Iraq is fighting for freedom; and more than three-quarters of al-Qaeda's key members and associates have been detained or killed".
But consider this: Osama bin Laden, his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar have not been "smoked out" or captured - "dead or alive", or otherwise - and most likely are still very much active in Afghanistan. And now al-Qaeda, in its delocalized mutation, is thriving around the world. There's nothing "free" about Afghanistan: the Taliban are back, controlling vast areas of the country, in the south and southeast, and the rest is controlled by warlords. In the Afghan presidential election next month, Hamid Karzai will be certified, at most, as the mayor of Kabul. In Pakistan, President General Pervez Musharraf - known as "Busharraf" - barely survives multiple assassination attempts as dictator-in-charge.
And there's nothing "free" about Iraq. Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani - who wants direct elections - and the militant Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr - who wants the end of the occupation now - are the most popular figures in the country. Former US asset turned American-imposed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi barely controls a few Baghdad neighborhoods. The 1,000th dead American soldier pales in comparison with the Bush administration losing the whole Sunni triangle to the Iraqi nationalist resistance. This loss is proof that the war is unwinnable. It also reduces the January 2005 Iraqi elections - if they ever happen - to a joke.
The bottom line: since Bush proclaimed his "crusade" or mission from God against terror, the United States, the Middle East and the world are immensely less safe.
Bush-Cheney '04 are afraid US voters will start making these connections as the November elections draw closer. For the apocalyptic Cheney - as on the campaign trail in Iowa - there's nothing left but the language of fear: "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again." So this is how it works: If you vote Bush, al-Qaeda won't strike. If you vote Kerry, al-Qaeda will strike. Kerry, therefore, is a threat to the US. The problem is, bin Laden votes Bush. Here's why.
The al-Qaeda makeover
Al-Qaeda is more of a multi-headed hydra than ever: the "global" head plus the "local" heads. "Global" al-Qaeda includes groups of multinational operatives striking in the US (as in September 11) or in Western Europe (Madrid's train blasts). These are above all Arab-Afghans, remnants of the jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. "Local" al-Qaeda on the other hand strike in their native countries against Western targets (for example in Casablanca, Bali and Istanbul): these are all part of the big al-Qaeda franchising.
The "historic" al-Qaeda is itself split in two: bin Laden's faithfuls, who have followed him since the Peshawar, Pakistan, days for more than two decades; and the new breed who "graduated" in Afghanistan from 1997 to 2001. Many of bin Laden's faithful have been killed or captured - in essence by Pakistani, not US, forces: they include Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubayda, Suleiman Abu Graith and the alleged mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
For a long time Western intelligence was prone to propagate the myth of al-Qaeda as a pre-September 11 organization with many heads, with sleeping cells occasionally galvanized into action. This is false. Al-Qaeda as a rule waits for no one - unless technical glitches occur, and these usually involve delays in recruitment, research, team-assembling and elaborate counter-security measures. The delays also prove that al-Qaeda is much less of a well-oiled organization than the Bush administration would like the world to believe.
Al-Qaeda subscribes to no political strategy, other than the strategy of total opportunism: as any kind of attack can happen any time, anywhere, it rules by fear - while at the same time demonstrating it is immune to any large-scale US war, from Afghanistan to Iraq. The rule-by-fear tactic also serves the Bush administration well, as fear is constantly used as a powerful political argument to justify the administration's policies ("Be afraid, be very much afraid, but you can count on us to protect you").
Unlike the Bush administration's spin, European intelligence experts in Brussels assured Asia Times Online that the Madrid bombing was only accidentally tied to Spain's national elections. It was not the case that "Spaniards had bowed to terror" (Washington's version), but that Bush ally Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government was mendacious enough to lie to the country, blaming Basque separatists when it already had evidence to the contrary.
The avant-garde brigades
The members of al-Qaeda's new elite were either born in Western Europe - many hold a legitimate European Union passport - or came to the West while still very young and then became radicalized. As Bush is a born-again Christian, they are sort of born-again Islamists. The most important fact is that this "return of the repressed" (Islam) is above all a political radicalization. The new breed's brand of political Islam is much more "political" than "Islam".
Very few of these new brigades come directly from Islamic countries. And their exile is one-way: they never come back to where their families come from. The classic itinerary was to sharpen the knives at a peripheral jihad - Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya - to become widely respected mujahideen, and then go back to Western Europe. They never went to fight in the Maghreb or in the Middle East - although the war in Iraq started to change this pattern.
In 1997, bin Laden obtained from his friend and admirer Mullah Omar monopoly control over the Arab-Afghan training camps in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis and the Uzbeks maintained their own training camps. This means that every single jihadi who was not Pakistani or from Central Asia who went to Afghanistan between 1997 and 2001 was trained at an al-Qaeda camp.
Unlike the faithful, none of the new breed of Arab-Afghans is close to bin Laden. But they definitely inherited a legendary al-Qaeda esprit de corps. The best and the brightest were trained to come back to Western Europe, wait and then raise hell. But the majority stayed behind fighting alongside the Taliban: among these were the hundreds captured by the forces of commander Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, before he was assassinated exactly three years ago, on September 9 - al-Qaeda's "signal" for September 11.
The best and the brightest of this new al-Qaeda elite form the current backbone of bin Laden's organization - the people who have masterminded and carried out global attacks for the past two years. They remain a very tight bunch, although now thoroughly globalized; treason - and squealing - is out of the question; and most astonishingly, there's nothing to it of a secret society. They work as a band of brothers, sharing everything - apartments, bank accounts - even in the open. Al-Qaeda's joint chiefs, the command and control structure, the base cells and the complex networks, everything works like some family enterprise in northern Italy, based on personal relationships, be they nurtured in Afghanistan or in any other country. But then a complex process of deterritorialization sets in, and the virus spreads.
For al-Qaeda, this poses a tremendous problem. It's easy for Western intelligence (or for the Pakistanis, when they're up to it) to grab a bunch of operatives after identifying a single one of them - as with the recent arrests in Pakistan timed to coincide with the Democratic convention. And with no al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan anymore, there are no places left to meet: Chechnya is too dangerous, the tribal areas in the Pakistan-Afghan border are teeming with US troops, and the Shawal region that straddles Pakistan and Afghanistan is too remote and under constant satellite surveillance.
Brand recognition the name of the game
This is a key reason al-Qaeda mutated still further. To survive and prosper, it needed more converts, and it needed to strike an array of strategic alliances. An additional problem was that al-Qaeda was never a political movement: it is basically an attack machine. Jihad yes, always. But the local objectives involved could not be more disparate - from Chechens fighting Russian occupation to Iraqis fighting US occupation.
Franchising, anyway, worked wonders. As more people in more countries - and the Bush administration - started blaming al-Qaeda for any attack, the desired cumulative effect was the same: al-Qaeda is everywhere.
Local al-Qaeda alliances now include everybody and his neighbor: Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (the Bali bombing) and Southeast Asia; warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyr's jihadis in southeastern Afghanistan; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (responsible for the Tashkent bombings in July); and perhaps even the mysterious, one-legged jack-of-all-trades, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, configured by the Bush administration as the new bin Laden in the Iraqi Sunni triangle.
Old-style al-Qaeda might well be pulverized by the Pentagon any time. But "al-Qaeda", the brand, lives, whatever the Bush administration spin. Zarqawi is the best example: he may not even be directly linked to bin Laden anymore, and he is now the sole boss of his own terrorist cottage industry.
Like a multinational product, "al-Qaeda" suits everybody. For President Vladimir Putin in Russia, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, even President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the Philippines, "al-Qaeda" is the ideal excuse for any repressive or inept regime presenting its credentials as a full-fledged member of the "war on terror". For al-Qaeda's purposes, bin Laden remaining the supreme evil is an invaluable propaganda coup. And for al-Qaeda franchises - free to pursue their own initiatives - using the brand means guaranteed media impact.
"Al-Qaeda" the brand has now embarked on an inexorable logic of expansion - in flagrant contradiction to Bush's assertion that the world is safer. Al-Qaeda will keep deepening its alliances with ethnic and nationalist movements - with Shamil Basayev, the emir of the mujahideen in Chechnya and trainer of the Black Widow squadrons of female suicide bombers, or with sectors of the Iraqi resistance in the Sunni triangle. "Global" al-Qaeda in all these cases works and will continue to work as a sort of "Foreign Legion", as French scholar Olivier Roy puts it, a capable military vanguard that is useful for local purposes for a determined period of time.
"Global" al-Qaeda may also even profit from the fact that national liberation movements, in desperation, decide to go on an all-out offensive, improving their alliances of circumstance with al-Qaeda. The al-Qaeda brand is also becoming attractive to scattered sectors of the extreme left, because more than appealing to radical Islam, al-Qaeda has succeeded in branding its image as the revolutionary vanguard in the fight against American imperialism. The cross-fertilization between radical Islam and disfranchised Muslim youth born and raised in the West is also performing wonders: when young people convert to Islam in a dreary suburb of Brussels, Paris, Hamburg or Madrid, it all has to do with political anger rather than discovering a direct line to Allah.
A nihilistic big business
At the Republican convention, while the Republicans were harping on September 11, Bush said the Iraq war was "his" war, part of a mission from God to bring freedom to the repressed. "Terrorists hate America because they hate freedom." Wrong: "terrorists" (in fact national resistance movements) hate America because America's imperial policies are the antithesis of freedom.
As nihilistic as it may be, al-Qaeda, from a business point of view, is a major success: three years after September 11, it is a global brand and a global movement. The Middle East, in this scenario, is just a regional base station. This global brand does not have much to do with Islam. But it has everything to do with the globalization of anti-imperialism. And the empire, whatever its definition, has its center in Washington. Bin Laden is laughing: Bush's crusade has legitimized an obscure sect as a worldwide symbol of political revolt. How could bin Laden not vote for Bush?
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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