Revolutionary Moderation

Okay, let's spell it out



There seems to be, both through the comments here and in posts elsewhere, some contention about my assumption that al Quada's goals revolve around establishing theocracies in the Arab world. From Matthew at Living in a Society, starting by quoting me (so that you don't have to wind your way down the page to follow it all):

First of all, al Quada? Really? Al Quada's raison d'etre was to destabilise secular governments in the middle east so that there would be opportunities to replace them with theocracies like the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Pissing off the Americans was a means to that end. That certainly doesn't explain the bombings on Thursday.

I wouldn't call that Al Qaeda's raison d'etre. I would say it's part of their plan. I would say their raison d'etre is more aptly defined by the statement of one of their founders: "we are not trying to negotiate with you, we are trying to destroy you." Their goal is not destabilization, their goal is destruction.



[Link here. Edited slightly for grammar - forgive me, Matthew]

I think I should spell out a little more clearly why I think the "we are trying to destroy you" quote can't be taken at face value. Let me start with a lecture Gwynne Dyer delivered to a crowd at Mount Royal College shortly before the recent war in Iraq began:

The first task towards getting God back on your side, to returning to traditional values, is to overthrow the existing Arab governments. The trouble is that 80 to 90 percent of the population, while not necessarily supporting the government, also doesn't want to go back to the village days. They saw what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. The Taliban paid no attention to traditional governmental roles, like the economy, health or education (except to restrict it), but "were obsessed with attire, beards and burkhas...these guys were hicks and most Arabs have no intention of doing that."



There are underground revolutionary Islamists in every Arab state, waging low level civil wars for the past 20 years in which hundreds of thousands have died, 100,000 in Algeria alone.



"There are 18 Arab countries, but not once has an Islamist government come to power. They have an unblemished record of failure."



Terrorism by itself does not bring down governments, Dyer said. You need either broad public support or a military coup, and the military traditionally sides with the government.



So how do you get public support? How do you bring people into the streets?



In 1998, bombs outside the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 240 people, mostly Africans in the street, and 24 Americans. About 5,000 were injured. Bill Clinton, not really knowing who to punish, unleashed 70 cruise missiles "into the blue," destroying, among other things, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that supplied half of Sudan's medicines.



"Al-Quida looks at the sequence of events...24 Americans, 70 cruise missiles fired essentially at random, and says, 'We can work with that. What we have to do is go to the U.S., kill thousands of Americans, and they'll go berserk. They'll get some of us, but we're ready to die, and thousands of civilians. And if we sucker them into doing that, we'll win'."

This seems logical and sensible to me. I'm not saying I like it, I'm not saying we should give in to it, but it's an actual strategy. "Let's kill a lot of Americans and Spaniards because they piss us off" is not a strategy, and I don't think it's a goal you can get a lot of people behind. You can get people behind the goal of changing their governments, in the hopes that it leads to better lives.



As for the "we are trying to destroy you" quote, these people are not stupid. They know that they can't knock down western civilization with a few airplanes. But they also know that what they want, we can't give them, so they aren't negotiating with us. They want to scare us into irrationality. As a result, we don't have to take them at their word - the statement about somehow destroying us was designed to add to the effect of scaring us, I suspect.



And this is the prompting behind my initial question about Spain - nothing I've seen or read so far convinces me that al Quada would have been in any way upset about the deposing of the infidel Saddam - quite the opposite, since it provides an opportunity to convince the people with a government more to al Quada's liking. And perhaps that's the real purpose - the invasion was fine by them, but they have to get rid of the occupying forces before a theocracy is completely free to arise.



As I said a few days ago, I don't have the answers. But if we don't ask, if we don't rigourously consider purposes, if we simply assume the bombers were driven by irrational hatred and had no larger purpose in mind (or worse, if we ascribe motivations to them only so far as they fit with our own ideological assumptions), we risk giving them exactly what they want.