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As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By


By SCOTT SHANE


For nearly two decades, the leaders of Al Qaeda have denounced the Arab world’s dictators as heretics and puppets of the West and called for their downfall. Now, people in country after country have risen to topple their leaders — and Al Qaeda has played absolutely no role.

In fact, the motley opposition movements that have appeared so suddenly and proved so powerful have shunned the two central tenets of the Qaeda credo: murderous violence and religious fanaticism. The demonstrators have used force defensively, treated Islam as an afterthought and embraced democracy, which is anathema to Osama bin Laden and his followers.

So for Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?

For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.

“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”

If the terrorists network’s leaders hope to seize the moment, they have been slow off the mark. Mr. bin Laden has been silent. His Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has issued three rambling statements from his presumed hide-out in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region that seemed oddly out of sync with the news, not noting the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose government detained and tortured Mr. Zawahri in the 1980s.

“Knocking off Mubarak has been Zawahri’s goal for more than 20 years, and he was unable to achieve it,” said Brian Fishman, a terrorism expert at the New America Foundation. “Now a nonviolent, nonreligious, pro-democracy movement got rid of him in a matter of weeks. It’s a major problem for Al Qaeda.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28qaeda.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

awakenings?...

“There has to be a major rethinking of how the U.S. engages with that part of the world,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to make clear that our security no longer comes at the expense of poor governance and no rights for the people in those countries.

“All of the givens,” Mr. Boucek said, “are gone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28qaeda.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Gus: I am not so sure... there is an opportunity for the extremists and fundamentalists to take power once the puppets' strings have been cut.... On the other side there is room for an "enlightenment" in the Arab Muslim world... Which will prevail?... It's in the lap of the ...

by the way .....

US-and Zionist-beholden Western media have been reporting the Arab Revolution underway in countries including Morocco , Algeria , Tunisia , Libya , Egypt , Jordan , Yemen and Bahrain. However while pro-Zionist, Western media and politicians laudably support the courageous protests for democracy in these countries, there is extraordinary silence in relation to the demands for democracy in Occupied Palestine and Occupied Iraq in which the indigenous inhabitants live under the tyrannical rule of genocidal European invaders rather than under the tyrannical rule of Western-backed indigenous dictators.

In the racist Zionist-controlled Occupied Palestinian Territory post-invasion excess deaths from Israeli-imposed deprivation total 0.3 million, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million and the Hamas MPs who won an overwhelming victory in the 2006 elections held under Occupier guns are holed up in the violently Israeli-guarded Gaza Concentration Camp together with 1.5 million other Palestinians, including  800,000 children.

There are 7 million Palestinian refugees and about half the 12 million Palestinians are forbidden to live in the land continuously inhabited by their forbears for thousands of years from the dawn of history. Of 12 million Palestinians only the adults of 1.5 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the racist Zionist-dominated Apartheid Israeli government that for 43 years has been ruling all  of Palestinian plus, variously, slabs of neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Syria (see "Palestinian Genocide": https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/)  

Western Media Ignore Iraqi Demand For Freedom

jaw-dropping and nauseating...

From Chris Floyd... Read more of Chris Floyd.

The howling hypocrisy of the American response to the uprising in Libya has been so jaw-dropping and nauseating that I've hardly been able to address it. Fortunately, Seamus Milne is on the case, and voices much of my thinking about the matter:

The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won't recognise.

Yes, does this not, as they say, take the cake ... and the plate and the forks and the napkins too? The United States pushing through a measure to refer Libyan leaders to an international court which the United States resolutely refuses to recognize -- lest its own leaders and their underlings find themselves in the dock for the most monstrous war crimes of this century? Yet even today, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was sternly wagging his finger at Gaddafi and his underlings, telling them they "will be held accountable" for their actions before the august institutions of international justice, which weigh the whole world in the balance ... except for the Peace prize-winning drone assassin and Continuer-in-Chief of a worldwide campaign of state terror, that is. But now back to Milne:

With Colonel Gaddafi and his loyalists showing every sign of digging in, the likelihood must be of intensified conflict – with all the heightened pretexts that would offer for outside interference, from humanitarian crises to threats to oil supplies.

 

oil wells of the world unite!...

The New York Times runs numerous articles about the role of Twitter and Facebook while simultaneously ignoring or reviling Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Of course, in any discussion of the role of the internet in fuelling the upsurges across the Middle East, WikiLeaks should be given major credit. Tunisians were able to read the unsparing assessment of the kleptocratic regime oppressing them, courtesy of US Ambassador Gordon Gray’s cables, secured by WikiLeaks. Egyptians were able to read hitherto secret details of the role of Omar Suleiman in renditions, of Egypt’s abject services for the US and Israel.

But WikiLeaks, along with Twitter and Facebook, all pale into insignificance next to the role of Al Jazeera.

Millions of Arabs can’t tweet. Facebook is unfamiliar to them. But they all watch TV, which means they all watch Al Jazeera. In comparison to the significance of Al Jazeera in motivating Arabs to rush to the main square in town and demonstrate, Twitter and Facebook are as two ticks on the rump of a water buffalo.

None other than the US Secretary of State herself, Hillary Clinton, finally paid fulsome tribute to Al Jazeera yesterday. Appearing before a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee, she was asked by Senator Richard Lugar to impart her views on how well the US was promoting its message across the world.

Clinton promptly volunteered that America is in an "information war and we are losing that war," and furthermore, that "Al Jazeera is winning".


Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/75850,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-hillary-clinton-admits-it-were-losing-the-war#ixzz1FfE5uwlf


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No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda, it's not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed "realism" of Years One and Two of President Obama's foreign policy - the "smart power" antidote to Bush's alleged misty-eyed idealism.

...

Facebook and Twitter have surely mediated this pan-Arab (and Iranian) reach for dignity and freedom. But the Bush Doctrine set the premise.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030304239.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

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Bullshit, Mr Krauthammer. The first tenet of the Bush Doctrine was to support the corrupt regime in Egypt in return for favours like renditions and other nasty stuff — as well as "supporting" Gaddafi (once he'd given up his WMDs, especially his nuke-stuff, which he didn't have so Gaddafi faked having some) as long as he supplied the good oil. The Bush doctrine has been to support the despot King in Saudi Arabia and other tinpot tyrants as long as the good oil flows as well... All the talk of "freedom" referred to the oil wells of the world as seen here. The only reason Bush and his cronies attacked Iraq is that Saddam (who had been left in place by Bush Senior to avoid Iraq falling into the arms of Iran — after Gulf War One) was selling "his" oil in EUROS and Roubles... the cad!... This promised to destabilise the monopoly that the US dollar has on the OIL TRADE.

Thus Bush and his cronies used the concept of Saddam having WMDs to whip his arse. Then as the concept was getting less and less traction at the eleventh hour, a new idea was put forward to sell "regime change" to the dozing public while all along the supply of oil was the essence. None of Bush's "ideologies" cut it at the United Nations and so far the three amigos — Bush, Blair and Howard — have been lucky they have not appeared in front of a tribunal to answer charges of war crimes...

The revolt in the Arab countries is a mixed bag of fundamentalism, progressive "enlightenment" and "freedom FROM Bush's bullshit".