The Iraq War (14 page)

The events of 11 September – or 9/11 as the day soon became universally known – caused shock throughout the world. In the United States it provoked a revolution, changing national sentiment and redirecting national policy. Before 9/11 the American people, if largely uncomprehending of the outside world, viewed it through benevolent eyes; after 9/11 they saw enemies everywhere. Before 9/11 American governments had, for fifty years, sought to keep the peace by leading a Western alliance of the like-minded; after 9/11 Washington committed itself to the defence of America first and foremost. Thinking Americans, in and out of government, knew that their country still had foreign friends; but henceforth friendship would not be taken on trust. It would have to be demonstrated.

At the turn of the millennium, from twentieth to twenty-first centuries, a new world order was indeed born. It took, however, a form entirely different from that envisaged by the father of the new American President, George W. Bush. Bush senior had foreseen a world continuing to be dominated by the traditional blocs, a First World of rich states, led by America, and a Second World
of former Communist states, moving to join the Western system; the evolution of the Third World of poorer states would depend on the success of the first two in disseminating their wealth and ideas to that bloc’s peoples. Suddenly such stability had disappeared. The central power of the First World was under attack and would have to put its own security first. The source of the attack lay in the Third World and took forms against which traditional defence, nuclear deterrence and conventional forces organized in international alliances, offered little protection. The attitude of the Second World, for decades the main concern of Western foreign-policy makers, seemed suddenly irrelevant. Armies of experts who had made lifelong careers in the analysis of Marxist politics found themselves at a loose end. The urgent need was for an understanding of militant Islam.

Government officials in the United States were particularly ill-equipped to address the problem, its academic community little better. America has only a tiny Muslim community; Arabic is a language very few Americans, outside a handful of university departments, speak. Historically, moreover, America has little knowledge of the Arab world. A few oil company executives apart, Americans do not live or work in the Arabic-speaking lands or elsewhere in the Muslim world. In that respect, the United States is less well placed to understand Islam than Britain or France, both of which have ruled Arab and other Muslim countries within living memory, and have accepted Muslim immigrants from their ex-colonies in large numbers. British experts, however, struggle to follow the tortuous paths taken by modern Islamic thought. In France, a country with 5 million Muslim inhabitants and a tradition of intellectual involvement with Islam, specialist scholars have led the way in interpreting movements of Islamic thought to other Westerners; yet even the French find difficulty in penetrating the veil. The modern Muslim mind is alien both to Christian and Enlightenment ways of thinking.

What baffles Westerners is why Muslim militants hate Western civilization as bitterly as they do. There is, perhaps, no logical explanation; most modern Westerners would fail to supply a
persuasive explanation of the hatred felt between their Protestant and Catholic ancestors in the century of the Reformation. The hatred felt by Muslim extremists is, however, real and it has historic roots. In the years after the Muslim triumph of the seventh and eighth centuries, when Muslim armies conquered the old Christian provinces of the Middle East and North Africa, seized Spain and established a foothold in the Balkans, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the ancestors of modern Muslims became, in a sense, the Americans of their age. The system of government they established under the universal Caliphate was an enlightened one which guaranteed freedom of belief to all who acknowledged the Caliph’s supremacy, and his scholars were in the forefront of contemporary learning. They rescued Western classical thought from obscurity, they advanced the study of modern mathematics and the practice of medicine and they instituted the systematic study of political sociology.

Until the fourteenth century Islam was the most progressive intellectual force in the world west of China. Then, in a regrettable step, the religious leaders of orthodox – Sunni – Islam decided that its interpretative development, taking account of discoveries in non-theological thought, should come to an end. This ‘closing of the gates’ spelled an end to Muslim openness. Thereafter, right down to our own day, mainstream Islam found itself confined within intellectual boundaries set by scholars several hundred years dead. Not only was the practice of religious life to be defined by their decisions; so too was public, political and legal life. The law of
Sharia –
‘the path to the waterhole’ – thenceforth dictated how pious Muslims should relate to each other, to their business associates, to non-Muslims and to the state. Not that, in orthodox Muslim thought, the state had any existence independent of the religious world that defined it. Until the extinction of the universal Caliphate in 1925 at the behest of the secularist Mustapha Kemal of Turkey, where it had had its seat since the sixteenth century, orthodox Islam made no distinction between worldly and religious authority. One was the other and vice versa.

The interpenetration of the spiritual and the material was, in practical terms, a disaster for Islam. It prevented the separation of theological and pragmatic paths of thought which the Christian West had achieved, if not without a struggle, even before the Protestant Reformation. While, from the Renaissance onwards, Italy, France, Germany, Holland and Britain soared off into the heady altitudes of intellectual freedom that would usher in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Islam remained stuck on the path to the waterhole. Its intellectual life decayed, its political institutions, the universal Caliphate foremost, fossilized. In its heyday, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the Caliphate had conquered wherever it turned its steps. By the nineteenth century Turkey, meaning the Caliphate, which still ruled North Africa in name, the Arab lands and the Balkans as colonies, was the Sick Man of Europe. France and Britain fought Russia to prop Turkey up on its deathbed, for fear of the consequences of its final collapse.

Its collapse, when it came at the end of the First World War, gave France and Britain control of what remained of its empire, the Arab lands of which they had not already taken possession. The Arabs proved, however, turbulent subjects, even though promised eventual independence under the terms of the League of Nations mandate which authorized Britain and France to exercise authority over them. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and in particular Palestine, whose future Britain complicated by offering it as the location of a National Home for the Jews, chafed at the mandate terms. Their populations wanted immediate, not delayed independence.

Independence came. In the meantime, however, developments had occurred that made formal political arrangements a secondary issue. The onetime outposts of the Caliphate’s power that had been made French colonies, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, achieved independence by secession or armed struggle. Their British equivalents, Egypt and Libya, went the same way, as Iraq and Jordan had already done. Part of Palestine became a Jewish state. Syria and Lebanon achieved separation from France. Inside
the Arab world which was comprehended by these states, however, there raged an intellectual ferment which threatened to transcend the idea of mere independence from European rule. In one direction it took the form of an Arab political renaissance, imitating but stressing its separation from European political models; its instrument was the Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq. In another and later development it reverted to the earliest message of Islam: that the preaching of the Prophet has universal force, that it is his destiny to triumph and that those who oppose the extension of his power over the world are excluded from the promise of compassion that lies at the heart of the Islamic religion.

This perversion of the Prophet’s teaching, and that it is a perversion is admitted by the majority of Muslim teachers, was launched on the Islamic world by an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, during the period of Nasser’s Presidency. Imprisoned by Nasser for membership of the Muslim self-help organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, he moved by stages to an extremist interpretation of Muslim theology. Nasser’s essentially secularist version of Islam – though he was an overtly devout believer, his policies emphasized material at the expense of spiritual development in a Muslim society – led Qutb to denounce the Egyptian President as
jahili
, spiritually ignorant. His refusal to moderate his views led to his execution, after a long period of imprisonment, in 1966. Before his death, Qutb had elaborated his new interpretation of Islam to argue – convincingly to many young, frustrated Muslims – that, while the Prophet had undoubtedly preached compassion towards nonbelievers, he had also stressed the primacy of submission to his teachings, which were those of God, and that, until such submission was widely achieved, Muslims were absolved from the duty of showing compassion to those who rejected the preaching of the Prophet’s word.

In short, violence against nonbelievers was not sinful. Indeed, and here Qutb harked back to the teaching of Abul Ala Mawdudi, struggle –
jihad –
against the encroachment of the West on the Islamic world was an obligation. Mawdudi, Pakistani by nationality, had called for a universal
jihad
to fight the
jahiliyyah
(ignorance) of the West, just as the Prophet had fought against
jahiliyyah
in pre-Islamic Arabia. He argued that the call to
jihad
was the central doctrine of Islam, exceeding in importance the duty to pray and to give alms. Qutb went farther still. He called on Muslims to model themselves upon Muhammad in their personal lives, then to separate themselves from society and then to wage
jihad
in a violent fashion; an important distinction, since
jihad
can, and indeed should, take the form of a struggle against self. Only when the
jihad
against ignorance – which Qutb identified as the secular modern world – had been won should Muslims revert to the practice of compassion, within what would be a new universal Caliphate.

Qutb’s elaboration of Mawdudi’s teachings proved enormously influential. It inflamed, rather than inspired, a new generation of Muslims, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to train for war, to learn the methods of terrorism and to reintroduce into public life the ancient Islamic punishments of stoning and mutilation. It underlay the rise of the Taleban (‘students’), products of religious schools where his teaching was passed on. It motivated the assassination of secularist Muslim leaders, notably President Sadat of Egypt. It justified, if it did not directly motivate, the doctrines of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, whose methods are those of universal
jihad
and whose ambitions, the conversion of all to Islam and the establishment of a universal Caliphate, mirror those of Qutb.

The emergence of a new world order according to Qutb was the least expected outcome of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is most improbable that it could have been foreseen. True, the dissolving of the superpower blocs, what foreign policy experts called the ‘bipolar’ world, would be likely to result in a measure of instability. Terrifying though the bipolar world had been, with its opposed ranks of nuclear weapons, its nature assured that most states had to belong to one bloc or the other – the ‘unaligned’ states had no strategic significance – and that the bloc leaders kept their followers in order. Inevitably the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that some of its client states would cease to toe
the line determined by the Kremlin, but the presumption was that, at worst, they would resume old quarrels with neighbours. So at first it proved; the Balkan disorders had origins that long predated the Cold War and Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait was motivated by a dispute over frontiers that went back to a British disagreement with the Ottoman empire. The international system seemed adapted to coping with such problems. Then 9/11 demonstrated that there were malcontents in the post–Cold War world for whose wrongdoing the international system made no provision at all. The system, whether its roots are traced to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 or to the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War, is political in substance. It assumes the existence of states and that they will relate to one another in terms of self-interest. The
Salafists
who launched 9/11 –
Salafism
is an Islamic umbrella doctrine embracing all Muslims who reject the concept of the state and seek only a universal kingdom of believers – deny the right of mortals to make policy or frame laws, insisting that all they need to know of public life can be found in the Koran.

This
Salafist
new world order – little known in the West and even less understood – nevertheless indirectly provoked a Western response. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, which left Saddam in power, a group of Washington foreign-policy makers began to argue that acquiescing in his survival spelled danger to the West. Unaware that there were more dangerous figures active in the Muslim world, they advocated what would become known as the doctrine of pre-emption – striking first to avert a later danger. They included Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense to Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, also a Pentagon official at the time, and Richard Perle, a defence intellectual omnipresent in post–Cold War Washington. They and many of their associates had begun their political lives on the left of politics. As they moved towards the right, ‘rightness’ being associated with strategic realism, they acquired the description of ‘neo-conservatives’. In 1992, as the first Bush Presidency drew to its close, Wolfowitz wrote a defence policy paper which outlined his view of how a
strategy of pre-emption should work. He argued that, in the face of calls for a ‘peace dividend’ following the end of Cold War hostilities, the United States should spend to maintain its military dominance in Europe and Asia, preserve its strike forces and be ready to launch pre-emptive attacks against states which, on escaping the constriction of the superpower system, were setting up as possessors of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear foremost but also biological and chemical. Those he suspected were either historically unaligned or pro-Soviet – Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya and, of course, Iraq. His paper, though diluted by bureaucratic process, was eventually published under then Secretary Cheney’s imprimatur as an official document,
Defense Strategy for the 1990s
.