Revival of Political Islam in the Aftermath of Arab Uprisings: Implications for the Region and Beyond

Authored by Dr. Mohammed El-Katiri.

Brief Synopsis

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Regime change during the Arab Spring allowed Islamist political forces that had long been marginalized to achieve political influence in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Morocco’s first government led by an Islamist party has been in power since January 2012. This trend caused widespread concern over the future direction of these states; but despite the tragic example of Egypt, few negative predictions have yet been borne out. The author cautions against an overly simplistic assessment of this rise in the influence and power of political Islam. He shows that the political crises besetting each of these Islamist governments are not necessarily of their own making, but instead are determined by objective circumstances. Dr. El-Katiri describes how, in several key respects, the aims of Islamist parties are in line with U.S. aspirations for the region.

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© 2014

Diary by Patrick Cockburn

The media that failed woefully in their coverage of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are the media that we are supposed now to believe are giving us the unvarnished truth in Syria.

Patrick Cockburn points out some of the reasons why we shouldn't trust journalists' war coverage.
He also makes some good points about how war's greater exposure in the modern media often changes the nature of the fighting for the worse. Jonathan Cook - Journalist

The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition have been hard-core jihadi fighters. Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power and establishing stable states.

More than most armed struggles, the conflicts have been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television and radio journalists played a central role. In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated. In 2001 reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003 there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011 the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine-guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, which was mostly brought about by Nato air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012 foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad.

These misperceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no further south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul. In Tripoli two years ago hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gaddafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored. This summer Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized by mutinying militiamen, and the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb ‘from the air and the sea’ the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market.

Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media since they had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaux, has also dropped off the media map although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month, mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage. In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.

It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. But irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but that it requires interpretation. In 2003 television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam. It was a pointer too to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: a year later the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.

War reporting is easier than other types of journalism in one respect because the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to camera, with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him, knows his report will feature high up in any newscast. ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ is an old American media adage. The drama of battle inevitably dominates the news, but oversimplifies it by disclosing only part of what is happening. These oversimplifications were more than usually gross and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonised the Taliban and later Saddam as evil incarnate, casting the conflict – particularly easy in the US in the hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 – as a black and white struggle between good and evil. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition were ignored.

By 2011 the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul if not necessarily to editors in London and New York. But by then the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different though equally potent form of naivety. A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the internet, traditional forms of repression – censorship, imprisonment, torture, execution – could no longer secure a police state in power; they might even be counter-productive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces. More

Whistleblower Reveals U.S. State Dept. Ships Arms Directly to al-Qaeda...

William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee started his career as a CIA contract pilot in the late 1950s, delivering guns and ammunition on behalf of the agency to Fidel Castro.

Plumlee confirmed that such arm deals are still common today, with the State Dept. shipping arms to al-Qaeda via the CIA.

During an interview with Alex Jones, Plumlee pointed out that Pat Smith, the mother of an information management officer also killed during the Benghazi attack, received little information from the Obama administration about her son’s murder.

“I began to wonder ‘why won’t they tell her anything?’” He asked. “Then a contact of mine in the Middle East, a high-ranking NATO official, mentioned to me that he had reports that the ambassador [J. Christopher Stevens] had been complaining about the dispatches and cables that he had got from the State Department about the weapons being received and [Islamic] radicals armed, including Stinger missiles.”

According to Plumlee, Steven was ordered to stand down after he asked the State Department what he should do about the American arm shipments to al-Qaeda.

“The ambassador and his people had written a series of field reports and cable dispatches advising our State Department that the rebel factions had been armed with U.S. weapons,” he said. “Now my contention is this: if that is the case, why is that classified as a national security matter?”

Plumlee mentioned that Steven’s field notes have not been released by the State Department.

These revelations suggest that after Stevens told the State Dept. that he did not want al-Qaeda receiving heat seeking missiles, he was killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi which was designed to take out witnesses to the arms transfer and to suppress Stevens’s reports.

The Obama administration then blamed the attack entirely on Islamic protestors enraged by the filmInnocence of Muslims while refusing to answer why U.S. special forces were ordered not to aid Stevens and others during the assault.

The missiles in question, as well as the other weapons given to al-Qaeda, were transported to Libya by C-130s under the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) program, which operates within the State Department.

As explained by New York Times best-selling author and former journalist Jim Marrs, the DCS program oversees the shipment of U.S. weapons and training to countries around the world.

Through its own internal investigations, the State Dept. admitted that firearms supplied by the DCS have ended up in the hands of foreign enemies.

Tying it all together, Plumlee stated that the weapons given to al-Qaeda were “U.S. made weapons that came from the DCS program, illegally transported by C-130s” into countries such as Turkey and Jordan and were “dispatched from CIA safe houses to the Syrian rebels.”

As we have documented in the past, the Syrian rebels are predominantly al-Qaeda fighters who want to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in order to install an Islamic state in Syria. More

 

Al-Qa'ida Cashes In 'If you feed a scorpion, it will bite you'

September 17, 2012 "The Independent" -- A Damascus friend of mine called this weekend and was pretty chipper. "You know, we're all sorry about Christopher Stevens. This kind of thing is terrible and he was a good friend to Syria – he understood the Arabs." I let him get away with this, though I knew what was coming. "But we have an expression in Syria: 'If you feed a scorpion, it will bite you'." His message couldn't have been clearer.

Libya

The United States supported the opposition against Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, helped Saudi Arabia and Qatar pour cash and weapons to the militias and had now reaped the whirlwind. America's Libyan "friends" had turned against them, murdered US ambassador Stevens and his colleagues in Benghazi and started an al-Qa'ida-led anti-American protest movement that had consumed the Muslim world.

The US had fed the al-Qa'ida scorpion and now it had bitten America. And so Washington now supports the opposition against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was helping Saudi Arabia and Qatar pour cash and weapons to the militias (including Salafists and al-Qa'ida) and would, inevitably, be bitten by the same "scorpion" if Assad was overthrown.

My friend's sermon was not quite in line with Syrian government policy. Assad's argument is that Syria is not Libya, and that Syrians, with their history, culture, love of Arabism, etc, did not want a revolution. But the Arab fury at Hollywood's obscene little anti-prophet video has occasioned almost as much rewriting of history in the West.

The US media has already invented a new story in which America supported the Arab Spring saved the city of Benghazi when its people were about to be destroyed by Gaddafi's monstrous thugs – and has now been stabbed in the back by those treacherous Arabs in the very city rescued by the US.

The real narrative, however, is different. Washington propped up and armed Arab dictatorships for decades, Saddam being one of our favourites. We loved Mubarak of Egypt, we adored Ben Ali of Tunisia, we are still passionately in love with the autocratic Gulf states, the gas stations now bankrolling the revolutions we choose to support – and we did, for at least two decades, smile upon Hafez al-Assad; even, briefly, his son Bashar.

So we saved Benghazi with our air power and expected the Arab world to love us. We ignored the composition of the Libyan militias we supported – just as Clinton and Hague don't dwell on the make-up of the Free Syrian Army today. We pay no attention to Assad's warnings of "foreign fighters", just as we largely ignored the Salafists who were moving among the brave men who fought Gaddafi.

Go back further, and we did pretty much the same in Afghanistan after 1980. We backed the mujahedin against the Soviets without paying attention to their theology and we used Pakistan to funnel weapons to these men. And when some of them transmogrified into the Taliban and nurtured Osama bin Laden and the scorpion bit on 9/11, we cried "terrorism" and wondered why the Afghans "betrayed" us. Same story yesterday, when four US Special Forces were murdered by their ungrateful Afghan police "trainees". More

 

Embassy Attacks A Wake Up Call For US

Angry demonstrations against an anti-Islam film spread to their widest extent yet around the Middle East and other Muslim countries on Friday. Protesters smashed into the German Embassy in the Sudanese capital and set part of it on fire, and climbed the walls of the US embassy in Tunis.

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter talks to RT. He says the series of attacks on US embassies across Arab world should be a wake-up call -- a red light flashing - for the national security elite in the US.
RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air

A World of Gray

CANBERRA – Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident turned president, and North Korean despot Kim Jong-il might have lived on different planets, for all their common commitment to human dignity, rights, and democracy. When they died just a day apart this month, the contrast was hard for the global commentariat to resist: Prague’s prince of light against Pyongyang’s prince of darkness.

But it is worth remembering that Manichaean good-versus-evil typecasting, to which former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair were famously prone, and of which we have had something of a resurgence in recent days, carries with it two big risks for international policymakers.

One risk is that such thinking limits the options for dealing effectively with those who are cast as irredeemably evil. The debacle of the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have taught us once and for all the peril of talking only through the barrel of a gun to those whose behavior disgusts us.

Sometimes, threats to a civilian population will be so acute and immediate as to make coercive military intervention the only option, as with Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, at least at the time of the imminent assault on Benghazi in March. But more often it will be a matter of relying on less extreme measures, like targeted sanctions and threats of international prosecution – and on diplomatic pressure and persuasion. More