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| What should we do about ISIS? |
| Withdraw all Western forces and hope for the best |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| Deploy a large number of ground forces into Iraq and Syria to defeat them, then rebuild both countries |
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41% |
[ 5 ] |
| Negotiate with ISIS to stop further attacks and expansion of the group |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| Allow Middle Eastern countries and militia groups to deal with the problem |
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8% |
[ 1 ] |
| It's too late! ISIS can't be stopped. |
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8% |
[ 1 ] |
| Containment from the air but no ground force invasion in Iraq and Syria (current policy) |
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8% |
[ 1 ] |
| Other (please explain) |
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33% |
[ 4 ] |
| No Idea |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
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| Total Votes : 12 |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| Tannin wrote: |
It is indeed a mainstream view, Wokko, as you say. The fact that even deluded right-wingers like you and TP agree with me - an unreconstructed leftie of many years standing - on this demonstrates just how mainstream it is.
Notice how David has completely failed to find a rationale for his belief that brave people should put their own lives at risk in order to defend cowards. Hell, he hasn't even tried to justify it.
There is no comparison with WW1, by the way. There were genuine and reasonable grounds for not supporting the Allied war effort in WW1, including the belief that (for example) Australians should not be compelled to go to the other side of the world and fight for an empire they had no allegience to or stake in. I'm not saying that these grounds were sufficient or that those citing them were correct or justified - that's another question which we shouldn't attempt to address here. I'm simply saying that there were valid reasons worthy of consideration. Compare with the situation in the Middle-east. Here we have people with their own homes invaded who are unwilling to fight to protect themselves, who are happy to take shelter behind the military barriers of NATO, but not willing to contribute to the maintenance of that safety. Call them "safety bludgers" if you like, people letting other people do their fighting, though the traditional term is "cowards".
What can possibly excuse such behaviour? One thing I can suggest is lack of a clear cause to support. It's easy enough to see the bad military forces in the ME (e.g., ISIS, Assaad) that need to be toppled. It's not so easy to see the good ones (or even less-bad ones) which are worthy of support. The Kurds are doing great things; apart from them you have a confusing mish-mash of others, some of them tainted by close association with the Americans (who caused half of this trouble in the first place and can never be trusted not to rig things for their own commercial benefit), others by nasty sectarian associations. Nevertheless, with the likes of ISIS taking over your homeland and killing your family members, you have to do something better than just running away and leaving it up to someone else to protect you. |
Assyrian Christians come to mind as worthy of support.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427304/christian-militia-assyrian-kurds-alliance-isis
I think Assad has set himself up as the necessary evil, the 'Devil you Know' and needs to be supported too, the 'moderate rebels' have no hope and supporting them just prolongs the war. The Kurds are indeed worthy in the eyes of the West, but ask the Turks what they think of the possibility of a Kurdistan stretching from Northern Syria into Iraq... they're not happy. |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Your posts in this thread have been pretty good, PTID, but you've veered off the point with that last one, I reckon. Think it through.
1: These regions are currently ruled by corrupt, evil regimes and an assortment of warlords. (The IS leaders are just warlords, no different in essence to any other warlord.)
2: Replacement of these evil regimes by other, better ones is essential. Without this first step, nothing good can happen. Armed resistance is the only feasible or possible way to achieve this. If you stand up to those bastards without a gun in your hand, you die. if you don't stand up to them, you either die anyway or live on as a slave without hope.
3: Western military force can get rid of the regimes (and has done exactly this in the past) but it can't replace them with anything better. The consequence of Western invasion is bloody chaos and/or another evil regime just as bad as the old one, if not worse. Because of the terrible Western legacy of paternalism and ruthless exploitation (mostly the latter) right across the Third World, no Western-led force has any realistic hope of gaining popular support and achieving long-term success.
4: It follows that the only, repeat only way to achieve a lasting result is for the opposing force to be indigenous, a movement which can attract and hold the trust and loyalty of people at large in the region. Western puppet movements will not work. They never do.
5: From this it follows in turn that the primary actions of the West should be (a) to cut off material support for the regime (money, arms, technology, anything that helps them stay in power) and (b) to provide material support for the popular opposition - money, arms, food, humanitarian supplies, and arms-length military help. As with any military campaign, air support is very important, including both bombing and intelligence gathering.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ Yep, pretty much agreed on all points, Tannin. If there is one silver liining in the dreadful events of the last few days in Paris, it is that we are finally awakening, I think, to the danger and starting to get serious about undermining the various murderous forces that are at work, here. The destruction of IS's oil business seems a good start, deepening of purposeful surveillance regimes in Western societies, the growing international unity, and the reinforcement of border controls all bespeak a new realism about this problem. It may take a few more sickening rampages to make it stick and bite, but the disease is now threatening enough to make the cure seem worth taking.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Tannin wrote: | | Your posts in this thread have been pretty good, PTID, but you've veered off the point with that last one, I reckon. Think it through. |
There's very little to think through until point five!
I have pretty much always held and reiterated points 1-4 ad nauseum (4 out of five points, no less!), so I'm not sure why you listed them as if they were points of difference  (Perhaps you were just reiterating your chain of thought yourself, which is fair enough, and not meaning I disagree with those points).
Second, point 5 has no basis in the chaos of the ground problem, but that is mystifying because you know that yourself already. You can't acknowledge warlords, factions, ethnic groups and religious sects from Nigeria to Russia and then move onto a solution which assumes it knows who the good and evil groups are. Just where among all these groupings is this "regime" and "popular opposition"?
Arming one faction or imposing economic sanctions on another faction is picking a side. You're trying to have a bit each way here, but you know the media version of events is nonsense; as nonsense as when a side was picked for Saddam Hussein one minute, and against Saddam Hussein five minutes later.
This is like 126 mini Germanies with no head to cut off. Pretty much anyone from any one group embedded in her local reality today is likely to be fine citizen shortly after if given a job and a chance. After getting Afghanistan and Iraq so wrong, how you think our mob are going to tell good from evil in 95% of cases without tossing a coin is beyond me.
In sum, you can't get involved and not get involved all at once. You can't agree there needs to be an indigenous solution, then think you know what the right indigenous solution looks like. On the other hand, like many wars past we could just kill another million people and pretend we knew they were evil, if we listen to brainwashing tapes nightly.
Change the economic parameters there so people can compete, give them something to hope and strive for without getting in the way. Anything beyond basic humanitarian work and some military security inevitably means picking sides and letting our own deranged oil and military corporations hijack the thing again and f^$cking it up even more, while providing still further motivation for the next social-media posting terrorist group to hit the front pages.
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Last edited by pietillidie on Fri Nov 20, 2015 11:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ Except we didn't kill a million people. Probably a few thousand in removing Saddam Hussein, most of whom were fighters. Maybe a few thousand more in Fallujah, during a period in which we were trying to keep the peace and rebuild. Thereafter the Sunnis, mostly, murdered hundreds of thousands because the Shiites started to dominate the country.
We should not have been there. But it is wrong to defile the work of our soldiers who did go there and tried to preserve life by suggesting that "we" killed a million people. It just feeds the grievance IS et al are trying to create through their own murders.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Please, don't be silly. I chose a million as a round number ("like many wars past"); we've had this discussion a million times!
No one knows where to draw the line of blame; why start up with that again? Are you bored?
Aggressive warfare is charged with all the blood which follows it from a certain POV, so 1M dead and 2.5M refugees might easily be understating it, no matter how righteous each and every soldier.
Putting aside our disagreement on that, the salient point is a new dumb intervention could lead to three million more deaths for all you know.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ fair enough. I brought it up again because it I do not think it is true, and you state it so factually ! But even if it was a bait, I was wrong to take it up, and you are right refuse to reel the issue in, at the moment. It can hibernate in the gathering English winter. This is really two countries - the tumbling spring and slow, slack summer, the glittering autumn are all one country - and then this bloody gloom, three or four damn months of it, is another. So yep, I'm probably bored.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Tannin wrote: | | 5: From this it follows in turn that the primary actions of the West should be (a) to cut off material support for the regime (money, arms, technology, anything that helps them stay in power) and (b) to provide material support for the popular opposition - money, arms, food, humanitarian supplies, and arms-length military help. As with any military campaign, air support is very important, including both bombing and intelligence gathering. |
The same side that the Russians are slaughtering? Do we really need a proxy war against Russia right now?
Basically, if we're to get involved, I can only see two viable choices for dealing with the Syrian rebels: 1) Back Assad or 2) Try to negotiate a ceasefire with the help of the Russian bloc, one that's palatable enough to the various rebel groups that they're not tempted to join up with ISIS. Given how appalling the first option is, I think we need to throw everything we have into the second.
This is one reasons why sending refugees back to fight is such a brainless idea. You want them to fight (and probably die) for what? Now Russia's involved, there's no prospect of overthrowing Assad, which is what a great majority of the refugees would be wanting to do. Let's help the victims without judgement and work to end this conflict as quickly as possible.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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By the way, Turnbull at least seems to be taking a sane approach to this issue. The question, as always now, is whether he can convert that into sane policy:
| Quote: | Turnbull contradicts the ‘slaughter our way to peace’ crowd
Bernard Keane
In one media conference yesterday, the Prime Minister spoke more sense on terrorism, the Middle East and Syria than his unfortunate predecessor said in five years as party leader.
In the transition from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, we’ve gone from a leader who seriously spoke of “baddies versus baddies” and contemplated a unilateral invasion of Iraq to one who demonstrates a basic understanding of what is happening on the ground in Syria and the profound problems that would ensue from further Western military intervention — views he shares with President Barack Obama. His remarks from his Manila media conference yesterday are worth quoting at length:
| Malcolm Turnbull wrote: | “The President’s position, and this is cutting straight to the chase, is as he has stated publicly — as he said he could send 50,000 marines into Syria and they would be able to retake Raqqa and Mosul of course in Iraq and they could achieve that success, but what happens after that and when they come home? His view… and I have to say this is the view of all of the countries’ leaders with whom I spoke in Turkey, all of them — his view is that the presence of foreign armies in that theatre at the present time would be counterproductive given the lessons of history, relatively recent history.
“The critical thing is the outcome of what you do and the plainly a political settlement is the objective, it is enormously difficult you know the enmities run very deep. But plainly, when you look at Daesh or ISIL, its base is a Sunni population that has felt disenfranchised or oppressed in Syria — and with very good reason — and also has felt left out of the new government in Iraq.” |
And later:
| Malcolm Turnbull wrote: | | The reality is that trust is broken down and that some degree of trust has to be re-established slowly and then over time, because plainly the position is catastrophic… one of the keys in undermining and moving in effect the support that Daesh has, because they are preying on and taking advantage of the deep unhappiness of large parts of the Sunni population in both Syria and Iraq. |
In those remarks, Turnbull has committed what for neoconservatives is one of the greatest sins: contextualising terrorism — that is, seeking to identify what is motivating terrorism and what role external forces, including Western military interventions, play in it.
| Malcolm Turnbull wrote: | | “The presence of foreign armies in that theatre at the present time would be counterproductive given the lessons of history, relatively recent history.” |
Recent history? That’s the Liberal successor to John Howard making it clear that the Iraq War was “counterproductive” in terms of terrorism. And making it clear that foreign military intervention will make the current problem — created by the Iraq War — worse, not better.
In acknowledging how “counterproductive” Western intervention would be, Turnbull is implicitly contradicting the myth peddled by major party politicians across the West — indeed peddled just this week by Philip Ruddock — that Western foreign policy has no impact on terrorism.
No wonder the hard right can’t stand Turnbull. This sort of nuanced, fact-based assessment of terrorism is anathema to the “slaughter our way to peace” policies advocated by some on his backbench, including failed PM Tony Abbott, and by News Corp. Worse, Turnbull dared to acknowledge that Islamic State has some perceived legitimacy in the Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq, because Sunnis “with very good reason” feel “disenfranchised or oppressed” (he might have more accurately said “slaughtered in the thousands”). Again, this is painful context for warmongers, who insist Islamist terrorism has no real-world motivation, but is instead a kind of mediaeval virus that turns its victims into zombies intent on destroying modernity.
News Corp, at least, has a commercial interest in promoting war and demonising Muslims — hate and fear are a crucial part of its tabloid business model, one that places it in an unholy alliance of interests with the very terrorists its outlets purport to despise. It’s not that its editors and commentators don’t understand that yet another Middle East invasion will not merely not solve the problem but yet again make it worse. Quite the opposite: they’re counting on it, because what better way to prop up its dying media model a bit longer than endless war and endless terrorism driving endless headlines of hate?
Politicians, on the other hand, have no such excuse. Turnbull at least has demonstrated that Australia is now governed by a leader capable of thinking beyond tomorrow morning’s front page. |
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Last edited by David on Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:06 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Mal has given about as factual and realistic an analysis as we will see anywhere in the world on this. Kudos for some terrific leadership here. The hysteria cycle has been broken, and the man love is reaching heights not seen since the days of Keating 
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Yeah, but could you actually vote for him?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Definitely, if better than the alternatives, which isn't very hard to achieve at this point.
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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I never thought I'd see the day when PTID actually likes a politician from the Liberal Party
Back on the topic, here's a great and lengthy article about Wahhabism by Alastair Cooke that was published last year (but still remains very relevant to today) and how it's connected to the foundation of ISIS' ideology and started in Saudi Arabia centuries ago.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html?ir=Australia
| Quote: | You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
The dramatic arrival of Da'ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed -- and horrified -- by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia's ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, "Don't the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?"
It appears -- even now -- that Saudi Arabia's ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite "fire" with Sunni "fire"; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da'ish's strict Salafist ideology.
Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan -- please note, all further references hereafter are to the Wahhabist Ikhwan, and not to the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan), but which nearly imploded Wahhabism and the al-Saud in the late 1920s.
Many Saudis are deeply disturbed by the radical doctrines of Da'ish (ISIS) -- and are beginning to question some aspects of Saudi Arabia's direction and discourse.
THE SAUDI DUALITY
Saudi Arabia's internal discord and tensions over ISIS can only be understood by grasping the inherent (and persisting) duality that lies at the core of the Kingdom's doctrinal makeup and its historical origins.
One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud. (The latter was then no more than a minor leader -- amongst many -- of continually sparring and raiding Bedouin tribes in the baking and desperately poor deserts of the Nejd.)
The second strand to this perplexing duality, relates precisely to King Abd-al Aziz's subsequent shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Ikhwani violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel the volatile Ikhwani current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.
But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's Jacobin-like hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
MUSLIM IMPOSTORS
The American author and journalist, Steven Coll, has written how this austere and censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab, despised "the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca."
In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition" (e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the divine).
All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.
Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this, essentially, is Salafism).
Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular interpretation of Islam should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."
One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.
Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph, if there were one). Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all.
There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque).
It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia.
BRIEF HISTORY 1741- 1818
Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power.
Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: "They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein... slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants ..."
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, "we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: 'And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.'"
In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.
But in November of 1803, a Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz, succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers, however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians, pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however, was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body).
In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the Ottoman's behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more. The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century.
HISTORY RETURNS WITH ISIS
It is not hard to understand how the founding of the Islamic State by ISIS in contemporary Iraq might resonate amongst those who recall this history. Indeed, the ethos of 18th century Wahhabism did not just wither in Nejd, but it roared back into life when the Ottoman Empire collapsed amongst the chaos of World War I.
The Al Saud -- in this 20th century renaissance -- were led by the laconic and politically astute Abd-al Aziz, who, on uniting the fractious Bedouin tribes, launched the Saudi "Ikhwan" in the spirit of Abd-al Wahhab's and Ibn Saud's earlier fighting proselytisers.
The Ikhwan was a reincarnation of the early, fierce, semi-independent vanguard movement of committed armed Wahhabist "moralists" who almost had succeeded in seizing Arabia by the early 1800s. In the same manner as earlier, the Ikhwan again succeeded in capturing Mecca, Medina and Jeddah between 1914 and 1926. Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary "Jacobinism" exhibited by the Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted -- leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them.
For this king, (Abd-al Aziz), the simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being discovered in the peninsular. Britain and America were courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a more sophisticated diplomatic posture.
So Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological takfiri purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious da'wa (Islamic call) and to justifying the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King's absolute power.
OIL WEALTH SPREAD WAHHABISM
With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power.
It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz's meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today.
Westerners looked at the Kingdom and their gaze was taken by the wealth; by the apparent modernization; by the professed leadership of the Islamic world. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life -- and that the management of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom, too, to modern life.
But the Saudi Ikhwan approach to Islam did not die in the 1930s. It retreated, but it maintained its hold over parts of the system -- hence the duality that we observe today in the Saudi attitude towards ISIS.
On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism.
ISIS is a "post-Medina" movement: it looks to the actions of the first two Caliphs, rather than the Prophet Muhammad himself, as a source of emulation, and it forcefully denies the Saudis' claim of authority to rule.
As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the Ikhwan message gained ground (despite King Faisal's modernization campaign). The "Ikhwan approach" enjoyed -- and still enjoys -- the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. In a sense, Osama bin Laden was precisely the representative of a late flowering of this Ikhwani approach.
Today, ISIS' undermining of the legitimacy of the King's legitimacy is not seen to be problematic, but rather a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.
In the collaborative management of the region by the Saudis and the West in pursuit of the many western projects (countering socialism, Ba'athism, Nasserism, Soviet and Iranian influence), western politicians have highlighted their chosen reading of Saudi Arabia (wealth, modernization and influence), but they chose to ignore the Wahhabist impulse.
After all, the more radical Islamist movements were perceived by Western intelligence services as being more effective in toppling the USSR in Afghanistan -- and in combatting out-of-favor Middle Eastern leaders and states.
Why should we be surprised then, that from Prince Bandar's Saudi-Western mandate to manage the insurgency in Syria against President Assad should have emerged a neo-Ikhwan type of violent, fear-inducing vanguard movement: ISIS? And why should we be surprised -- knowing a little about Wahhabism -- that "moderate" insurgents in Syria would become rarer than a mythical unicorn? Why should we have imagined that radical Wahhabism would create moderates? Or why could we imagine that a doctrine of "One leader, One authority, One mosque: submit to it, or be killed" could ever ultimately lead to moderation or tolerance?
Or, perhaps, we never imagined. |
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