Are the Western critics of the War on Terror neo-colonialists?

When I saw Juan Cole’s post last Thursday, I was pretty distressed. It intermingled fact and fancy so thoroughly that I knew that some response was necessary. Rather than writing a response myself (which would essentially be a silent thud) I took another tack: I wrote to quite a number of the TTLB Ecosystem’s Higher Beings and Mortal Humans with whom I’m on the best terms with emails like this:

Dear Joe:

Juan Cole has a post up that deserves comment from someone who punches in a higher weight class than I do.

He’s summarized the War on Terror, opening with

“I take it this is because they have finally realized that if
they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys
in a gymn in Leeds.”

and proceeds through to

“That’s right. The old ‘war on terror’ was a war of the world’s
sole superpower on a few hundred people. (I exclude Iraq
because it is not and never was part of any ‘war on terror,’
though the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration
has contributed to the ability of terrorists to operate there.)”

I may have to withdraw the gentlemanly defense of Professor Cole I posted a week or so ago.

Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye
http://www.theglitteringeye.com

My friend and mentor, Dean Esmay, responded quickly with what remains the best critique of Professor Cole’s post. Check out the very interesting comments.

I see that others have had similar reactions to mine. Michael Totten responded with a photo montage clearly aimed at refuting the “four guys in a gym in Leeds” claim. In fairness while limiting the characterization of Islamist terroristm to “four guys in a gym in Leeds” is obvious claptrap individual cells may, in fact, be that small. Does that mean there is no problem or that the problem may require extraordinary measures to address it successfully? This post, too, drew an enormous and sometimes contentious stream of comments.

Juan Cole riposted with a photo montage of his own. I won’t fisk it thoroughly. It begins “Once upon a time” so that should give you the idea. There is one point, however, I do want to respond to.

I didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan either time he ran for the presidency. He was too bellicose for me. But characterizing Mr. Reagan as “a dangerous radical”, as Professor Cole did, is frothing idiocy. We’ve never had a radical president in this country. Our system makes it nearly impossible to elect one. Franklin Roosevelt had the same kinds of charges levelled at him—it was equivalently idiotic. Stupid, baseless partisan claims like that do nothing but discredit their authors.

Michael Totten has a further response this morning. Dan Darling of Winds of Change has a thorough examination of Professor Cole’s post.

One of the things that struck me about Professor Cole responding photo montage was the recurrent theme that Arab leaders were weak-willed and, essentially, unable to resist either the directions or blandishments of the malicious U. S. leaders. Is this a misstatement of his comments? I’m trying my level best not to make a strawman argument. Here are a some sample quotes from the post:

“Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass the Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to match US contributions. He had earlier imposed on Fahd to give money to the Contras in Nicaragua, some of which was used to create rightwing death squads.”

“Fahd was a timid man and resisted Reagan’s instructions briefly, but finally gave in to enormous US pressure.”

“At one point Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq to assure Saddam that it was all right if he used chemical weapons against the Iranians.”

“The US then turned its back on Afghanistan and allowed it to fall into civil war, as the radical Muslim factions fostered by Washington and Riyadh turned against one another and used their extensive weaponry on each other and on civilians.”

“A steady drumbeat of violence against Palestinians by Israelis, who were stealing their land and clearly intended to monopolize their sacred space, enraged the Muslim radicals that had been built up and coddled by Reagan.”

“The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan’s provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam’s Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was “the War on Terror.””

There are many more. Note that in each case Muslims are portrayed as passive responders.

This reminded me of Iraqi bloggger Hammorabi’s observations about the BBC recently:

BBC behaves in the same way of the colonial era of the 1930s when Britain was a Great Empire and used the principle of divide and role which was used at that time. The BBC never had a good cover about the suffering of the Iraqis caused by the terrorists and it is so often called them an insurgents or resistance or like that.

So, that’s my question, who are the neo-colonialists here? It looks to me like there’s enough paternalism on the part of the critics of the War on Terror (or whatever we’re calling it now) that the charge may be levelled at them as appropriately as it frequently has been on the neo-cons.

7 comments… add one
  • It rather strikes me everyone is rather overreading things. Bloody circus.

    Cole’s somewhat tedious post is rightly point out some aspects. In the process he’s underplaying others. It’s weak, but it’s the sort of domestic blither I ignore. The Reagan item, agreed, was silly. Generally speaking Cole’s domestic US political commentary is … well, rather pedestrainly what one expects out of a Left leaning professorial type in North America, and not very interesting. Why bother getting excited?

    Totten’s photo montage, as usual, manages to be even stupider. Hezbullah is not the same problem as al-Qaeda, no matter what the simple minded think. (The mingling of Dar Fur in with the issue is not just stupid it’s moronic and contemptible at the same time. Of course given his gullibility in re Lebanon, what can I expect?)

  • Thanks for commenting, Collounsbury.

    Cole’s somewhat tedious post is rightly point out some aspects.

    That was Dean Esmay’s take as well. But he, like I, was concerned about other aspects of his post which were, well, silly.

  • Hey Dave,

    I hadn’t realized Juan Cole had become a writer of fiction until your post.

    I’ve been around the bend with Cole on Afghanistan on Listservs several times and while he knows better, Cole can’t seem to stop apologizing for an incompetent Communist satellite regime that was considered to be an illegitimate abombination by most of the rest of the Muslim world – and that included most of the Muslim states hostile to the U.S. The Parcham-Khalq/KHAD/Watan regime had about as many friends outside the Soviet bloc as did the Taliban.

    Cole’s also wrong about the potential danger represented by apocalyptic terrorism. You don’t need large amounts of people, in fact larger amounts would simply attract attention and blow the cover of the network and end up getting blasted by USG military ( 10,000 semi-trained to highly trained al Qaida operatives dispersed globally is a better estimate, when you include affiliated groups and active support members – couriers, financiers, recruiters, documents, safe houses etc. – not ” hundreds”). I won’t even bother commenting on the part about giving Iran the benefit of the doubt as to its nuke program. That was just stupid.

    Historians – and Cole is a professional historian – seriously erode their credibility when they write things an undergraduate could shred.

  • I’m unimpressed by the cited Dean response. Cole’s note in re Iraq and terror was rather clearly in the context of a Sadaam connexion with Islamists in recent context. Perhaps slightly overstated, but no more sinful for that than the blithering idiocies of Totten confusing the Dar Fur with an al-Qaeda issue, or confounding Hizbullah with Sunni radicalism, or any other of the semi literate fantasies out there in regards to Iraq and al-Qaeda pre-war.

    It wasn’t a great post, indeed I skipped over it on its initial posting, but hardly merits the overdone squawking and shrieking from overreading his commentary.

    I note Hammourabi’s comment about BBC is plain infantile.

  • I have to jump to Cole’s defense here. Keep in mind that my opinion on Cole is basically the same as Dave’s, that he’s quite good in his specific area of expertise though he is prone to poor reasoning and stretching the truth.

    The first critique is that the idea of al-Qaeda as a few hundred guys is incorrect. Cole is taking this assessment from former CIA officer Marc Sageman’s study of al-Qaeda terrorists called “Understanding Terror Networks,” where he finds that those terrorists who have targeted the West are actually from a very narrow group of people who went to the same mosques in the West. Sage’s view is counter to conventional wisdom but is also a serious and important contribution to understanding al-Qaeda. Olivier Roy makes a similar argument, that these terrorists are mostly alienated middle-class Muslims, many of whom live in Europe, i.e. the Hamburg cell from 9/11. There are certainly other Salafist extremists in the Muslim world, but those targeting the United States are a small group. Whether we’ve decided to declare war on all of these groups, from the Phillippines to Indonesia, Algeria to Egypt etc, is a different story, but they are not a direct terrorist threat to the United States.

    Sageman: http://www.mipt.org/Understanding-Terror-Networks-Sageman.asp

    The second critique is that Iraq sponsored terror. I’m not going to get too deep into this, because it has been hotly debated. It seems to me though that at least the conventional wisdom right now is that the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were questionable if not false and that there was no threat posed by a Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. Cole says that “Iraq was never part of the ‘war on terror'”. That Saddam sponsored Palestinian terrorism is unrelated, because as far as I can tell, we haven’t declared war against Hamas.

    Dean’s response is a lot of ridicule and links to questionable articles that go against the vast majority of thought on this issue. Totten’s photos, as said above, conflate disparate events and organizations. This points to the wider question that was the subject of Cole’s post in the first place, the abandoning of the “war on terror” phrase.

    The phrase and the war itself have been so vague and poorly defined that everyone has a different conception of who our enemies are, from every Islamist government or organization to every organization that uses terrorism regardless of their objectives to any government that sponsors terrorism regardless of its nature. This is why people are able to argue that Saddam sponsored terrorism because he funded Palestinian terrorists. Technically it is true, but we are not at war with the Palestinians, there is no threat to the US from the Palestinians, their political objectives really have very little to do with us directly, and this is not a meaningful criteria for declaring war on other countries.

  • I’m just defending Cole’s first post. The second post was, yeah, pretty absurd.

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