See, this is where you (I assume deliberately) misread hose articles. There is no suggestion that Islamic terrorism is the fault of the West. It is that the West's reaction to and handling of militant Islamism has not helped the situation and in many cases has exacerbated it. It is not an admission of defeat to accept the notion that we might consider finding another way of working, since we have until is point completely failed to temper the surge in popularity of these organizations, particularly among disenfranchised young men in some of the world's poorest countries.
I am not a foreign policy expert, but it is madness in anyone's eyes to repeat courses of action which have failed so badly to have the desired impact. We are NOT responsible for Al Quaeda, but we must do all we can to avoid adding weight to their brand.
If you assume I "deliberately" misread the articles we can't have much of a conversation. Although I disagree with your argument I assume you're sincere. You might do me the courtesy of treating me the same way.
You say that there is no suggestion in the articles that Islamic terrorism is the fault of the West. Well I don't think you're
deliberately misreading the articles, but you're sure as hell not thinking intelligently about them if you believe that.
Just go back to the original post for a moment and consider what was said about the importance of understanding the indigenous roots of Islamism - rooted as they are in the North African, Middle Eastern and south Asian scenes.
Islamism is a crisis in the Muslim world and it has tribal, ethnic, socio-economic and ideological roots - as well as religious ones. As an ideology it goes back to the 1920s - long before the state of Israel emerged. Long before America played its supposed role as 'international policeman'. In other words the movement isn't a phantom created by America or Israel - some 'data base' created, Frankenstein like, from some misconceived CIA experiment. That view is frankly laughable. One cannot speak of Osama bin Laden purely in terms of him being a creature of America. One cannot hope to understand the rise of Islamism simply by pointing to global inequalities between North and South or West and East. And yet look at those articles, particular Seamus Milne's, which was shamefully written while the Twin Towers were still smoking and which have been repeated by him more or less ever since in his Guardian column. There is not a single hint in there that Islamism is anything but a response to American misdeeds. Hence the title, and the argument, of the piece: 'They Can't see why they are Hated'. Not Al-Qaida. But the Americans! The Americans, still counting their dead, can't see why they are hated!!
Why are they hated then? Milne is clear on this. They are hated because of their "unabashed national egotism and arrogance", because of global inequality and poverty, because the international economy has been fixed in American interests, because the US has sent troops to Bosnia and Kosovo (he calls them 'Yugoslavia'!), Somalia, and Iraq (he means Kuwait!), because of Israel and because the US (he means the United Nations!) has levied sanctions and trade embargoes on Saddam's Iraq after the Gulf War). All this is what "drove" the 9/11 terrorists (he doesn't call them that of course) to "carry out such atrocities,
sacrificing their own lives in the process".
God, they sound like great guys don't they?
But that is a travesty of what happened on 9/11. It is also an astonishingly one-sided view of what really drives Islamism. There's zero curiosity from Milne about the indigenous roots of the ideology and the bloody civil-war it is fighting in the Muslim world to capture hearts and minds, or rather intimidate whole sets of people and break the various economies in that part of the world. No, he'd rather make Osama bin Laden out to be another version of Seamus Milne. A good old pluralist, socialist, egalitarian, anti-imperialist fella who wants more "democracy" in the "global economy". Except of course (he concedes) they're braver than Seamus because they "sacrificed their own lives" to put the world to rights. Madness!
Apart from anything else Seamus Milne never attends to what Osama himself said. He had his reasons for attacking New York and DC. He listed them. Some are for western ears - the stuff about Israel - but some seem mystifyingly obscure. Take his line on East Timor, which Osama cited as a principal reason for the attack on 9/11 (and which Islamist terrorists repeated when they attacked Australian holiday-makers in Bali in 2003). You probably remember East Timor? I do. It was one of the great left-wing causes of the 1980s against Kissinger and Ford. We wanted the Americans to stop backing the Indonesian genocide in the (non-Muslim) half of the island of Timor. Pilger and Chomsky were the most famous spokesmen for this cause. Eventually, the western governments changed course and put an end to the genocide. The UN then intervened and granted independence to East Timor. A great liberation we all thought.
Not Osama though. This is what he said in his explanation for the attack on 9/11.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1636782.stmEast Timor and Somalia
Let us examine the stand of the West and the United Nations in the developments in Indonesia when they moved to divide the largest country in the Islamic world in terms of population. We should view events not as separate links, but as links in a long series of conspiracies, a war of annihilation.
This criminal, Kofi Annan, was speaking publicly and putting pressure on the Indonesian government, telling it: You have 24 hours to divide and separate East Timor from Indonesia. Otherwise, we will be forced to send in military forces to separate it by force. The crusader Australian forces were on Indonesian shores, and in fact they landed to separate East Timor, which is part of the Islamic world.
Therefore, we should view events not as separate links, but as links in a long series of conspiracies, a war of annihilation in the true sense of the word.And nor did the Islamists forget this. You'll the remember the horrendous Islmamist attack on the UN headquarters in Bagdhad? Course you do.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3165737.stmThen you'll also remember that they killed their main target - the Brazilian envoy to the UN, Sergio Viera de Mello. A brilliant man, a democratic socialist, and the man the UN chose to help construct a democratic Iraq in 2003. But of course he was also the man who the UN appointed to stop the genocide of Christians in East Timor and help a long-suffering and colonised people back on to its feet. That's why the Islamists killed him (and 22 other people).
What motivates the Islamists is Imperialism. It happens to be Islamic imperialism, and it also happens to be Fascistic in its politics. It is NOT a last-ditch anti-imperialist movement that is simply checking American aggression in the world, much as Seamus Milne gets his kicks from portraying it as such.
