Two emerging viewpoints have emerged since the sudden and spectacular assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda’s ostensive figurehead who loomed like a thick fog over the domestic and international politics of the US, the Western world, and the Islamic lands. The first outlook derives from the same motif of triumphalism in the West that arose after the end of the Cold War. This approach poses that with the passing of this arch villain of freedom and democracy, Al-Qaeda and other like-minded militant groups will eventually disintegrate and collapse from within, with only a remnant of “die-harders” that will gradually be swept away. On an ideological level, many now herald the entrance of a “post-Islamist” era in the politics of the Muslim World, and thus the end of terrorism in its current format, and even theculmination of violence as a method of resistance.
The second persuasion is deeply engrained in the sense of nihilism and paranoia amongst the prognosticators of permanent and evolving war, the dark underbelly of the neoconservatives within Washington and European centers that cannot intellectually and professionally survive without some sense of impending crisis. Their predictions are that with the assassination of such a key figure, there is now surely going to be a tide of vicious and violent reprisal, and thus more justification for the draconian internal and haphazard externalpolicies that that they have customarily advocated for.
Yet, underneath these differing interpretations liethe unaltered features that make up the core conflict between the United States and the Muslim world, and in some aspects, the larger Third World. The demise or capture of one figure, whether it be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Baitullah Mehsud, or Osama Bin Laden, will not alleviate this conflict until the fundamental reasons why anti-Americanism persists within that region is addressed. Elementally, they can be boiled down to the following: US support for autocratic regimes within the Islamic world in exchange for cheap, reliable access to hydrocarbon resources and strategic military bases within their territories at the expense of civil political freedoms in those respective countries. Subsequently, it is this interaction that garners popular resentment toward client regimes and patron great powers alike. While the recent American endorsement in the crushing of Bahrain and Yemen’s uprising and the sporadic demonstrations in Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia are clear examples of this phenomenon, this trend has a remarkable sense of continuity throughout the decades of great power involvement in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And since that consequential event, every great power that has sought influence, hegemony, or domination in this region has mimicked traditional American behavior and ultimately encountered the same forms of resistance that the US now faces.
Though the patron-client relationship is primarily intended for the great power’s benefit, the enterprise bears much offspring, evinced in the political and economic suffocation of the brunt of client state societies, leading to indifference, malaise, and despair, while forces from itsmargins engage in violence against the local autocrat and external supporting state. The former is its legitimate issue, the latter its bastard child. And only by successful popular uprising on a national level, of which is now manifest in some countries of the Arab world, is this cycle invariably broken.
Nevertheless, it is for this reason that the exhuberence exhibited in Western circles over the eradication of Bin-Laden is far more of a distraction to understanding the root of anti-American violence within the Muslim world as opposed to it being a harbinger of any “finality” or change. The simple reason for this has been the repackaging of history within the political imaginationof the West, ascertain dates often become caricatured into division points in history, as if they represented “year 1” in a war waged by “Muslims” upon the “West” (i.e. 1979, 2001, etc.).Although politically expedient, this approach short-cuts history, confuses cause-and-effect, and constructs false, primitive panaceas to complex and festering local and regional problems, of which great power intervention either exacerbates and at times, creates. Thus no objective public debate on the genesis of modern terrorist organizations deriving the Arab world and South Asia is held, only a hollow self-assurance of one’s own narrative of history.
And though the concealment of the history of great power involvement in this region leads to regressive policies that habitually manufactureother Bin Ladens, a sober look at the unvarnished account can also undo this trend. Thus, it is incumbent now to raise certain questions before the next generation of militants mature. Who was Bin Laden and what is Al-Qaeda? Do they really attack the US and its European allies by reason of some venomous hatred of “ Western civilization” or “values”? As the notable historian Fawaz Gerges chronicles in his trenchant account, The Far Enemy, were not these terrorists, the same fighters whom the CIA trained chiefly for the US funded jihad against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan? And what could possibly drive them to attack their former sponsor? If their grievances with the US and her allies are so existential, why have they not attacked nations whose values – social, economic, political, etc. – mirror that of the US? Why is not Brazil, Japan, or South Africa attacked? What is the relationship between the US intervention in that region and subsequent terrorism against Americans and US interests? And more curiously of all, why does the overwhelming majority of Al-Qaeda terrorists come from countries whose governments have close strategic and economic relations with the US and who virtually depend upon American power for survival?
Ultimately we know the answers to these questions, uncomfortable,as they might be to excavate and reexamine.And though it is in the interests of the aforementioned triumphalists or advocates of the perpetual national security state to construct a monstrous, ever-present edifice known as “Al-Qaeda”, in reality it is apparent that this venal movement is far more of an ideological free-trade zone of hate, that disgruntled subjects of US-backed client regimes enter and exit freely. Unlike the description that is sold to the public of Al-Qaeda as being a highly mobile, cohesive political force, it controls no territory, has no coherent ideology, and not a scintilla of remedy for the plagues that afflict their home societies. Their life-blood is the unending pool of despondency and avarice that is the sole creation of the patron-client dictatorial apparatus within the Muslim world, fostered top-down by great power intervention.
The death of Bin Laden, like the extermination of so many other militants before and after him, will virtually do nothing to change the dynamics that enduringly give birth to those of his ilk and disposition. And unfortunately for the West, no ideological justification or civilizational jingoism will choke the fountain of enmity within the wider Islamic world, until the conditions that have given rise to this hatred dissolve. This would mean a fundamental reevaluation and possible break with traditional American behavior in that region, essentially ending US support for dictatorships, the eventual removing of its military apparatus, allowing an organic indigenous security architecture for the region to be built by local states, and ultimately accepting the democratic will of Islamic societies, regardless of the domestic and foreign policy consequences. Disregarding the structural conditions that engender terrorism may bring short-term affirmation and respite to the US and her European allies, but in the long term, only treats the symptom and ignores the disease, until the disease can no longer be ignored.
Reza Sanati is a graduate fellow at Florida International University’s Middle East Studies Center.
