9-28-06, 9:33 am
According to Ibish, Bush administration officials have gotten a lot of mileage out of fudging the picture of who the 'real terrorists' are. Creating an atmosphere of 'willful confusion' allowed the administration and its supporters to project the terrorist movement as a larger, more menacing threat. Such a threat could then be used to sustain endless war involving a potential myriad of bad foreign policy decisions such as the war in Iraq.
From Bush supporters, one can usually hear a variety of positions on what the war on terror means, its goals and who the enemy is, Ibish contended. Some describe it as a broad campaign to reform the Middle East and Arab culture. Some have called it World War III. Still others have even openly claimed it as a war on all of Islam.
In Ibish’s view, these broad definitions are dangerously confusing explanations with particular ideological and policy agendas behind them.
The simplest and clearest definition, that the terrorists who struck on 9/11 are part of a specific far-right religious movement on the fringes of Islam which most Arab and Muslim peoples and states are anxious to suppress, is often ignored because it doesn't motivate the emotional and irrational responses needed to sustain long-term and deadly military responses.
Much of the right wing’s inaccurate, ideologically motivated explanations for 9/11 and the war on terror are underpinned by racist thinking about the so-called Arab and Muslim world, Ibish said.
While there is no need to inject a racial and religious component into an accurate explanation, Ibish argued, 'the more elaborate, the more ambitious and ideological explanation of the war on terror become, the more racist and bigoted they are.'
The net effect of most explanations of the war on terror is to lump all nationalities and religious affiliations into a single group of enemies. 'They' are out to destroy the West. 'They' do not like 'us' and will strike 'us' regardless of what 'we' do.
This typical explanation relies on the racist notion that 'we' need not know much about the heterogeneity and complexities of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Indeed, policymakers in the Bush administration responded to 9/11, stated Ibish, not by relying on experts in Arab and Muslim politics, cultures, or languages, but on their self-styled omniscience and omnipotence that instinctively produced the notion that all we had to do was 'kick a little ass' and that would restore 'calm.' Indeed, killing a few thousand people there, so this thinking goes, is for their own good and they welcome it.
Bush administration policymakers approached dealing with the 'Arab world' with the old racist, imperialist notion that 'violence is the only thing Muslim people understand,' Ibish pointed out.
This confused and muddied thinking has hindered the war on terror, he added, and has even strengthened and emboldened the group of people who are behind the 9/11 attacks and their allies.
Muddied thinking has misdirected efforts – both intentionally and unintentionally. Ibish asserted that with 'an increasingly confusedly defined war and an open-ended enemy you end up with at least the war in Iraq.' This error, relying on the racialist notion that 'they' are all one and the same, and 'they' only understand violence, allowed Bush administration policymakers to miss the target.
Neo-conservatives in the Bush administration manipulated this confused state of thinking to push successfully for an attack on Iraq they had long wanted, Ibish added. Others in the administration less interested in invading Iraq were pushed along because they failed to develop a more complex and accurate view of who was behind the terrorist attacks.
Ibish flatly stated that there was absolutely no connection – operational or ideological – between the Saddam Hussein regime and the perpetrators of 9/11 and the movement they sprang from, no matter how many times Bush administration officials say it or imply it.
Racialist thinking fueled bad foreign policy decisions that have derailed whatever honest effort there may have been for bringing Al Qaeda to justice and its allied movement.
Racism, Terror and Domestic Policy
Allowing irrational responses guided by racist ideas to mold our response to 9/11 and to guide our actions in the war on terror has also led to serious domestic policy disasters, Ibish said. These types of responses fueled calls for racial profiling and other serious abuses of civil rights and liberties.
Ibish pointed out that legislative responses such as the USA PATRIOT Act and secretive programs like spying on people in the US without warrants are serious violations of the Constitution. But they aren't the main way civil rights and liberties have been abused in the US.
Immigration policy crafted within the racist anti-Arab and Muslim mindset that fueled the Bush administration's response to 9/11 has fostered the worst abuses. 'The immigrant community,' Ibish said, 'has borne the brunt of civil liberties abuses.'
The alien registration push following the September 11th attacks, for example, a drive to bring thousands of Arab and Muslim people, particularly young men, into close contact with federal law enforcement officials, 'had truly zero effect in terms of counter-terrorism,' Ibish stated.
According to him, federal authorities detained about 5,000 Arab and Muslim people, mostly men. Almost all of these cases were for minor immigration violations that would have been easily handled before 9/11, but since, turned into long periods of isolated detention with little or no access to a legal process and often ending in deportation. None of these cases dredged up any 'real terrorists.'
This mass round up did, however, 'certainly express the idea that Arabs and Muslims are by definition potentially dangerous and of interest to the authorities,' he added.
Racial and religious profiling of Arab and Muslim people as potential terrorists has been an unmitigated failure, Ibish said. Still, right-wing pundits continue to push for it. Why should we be concerned about an 80-year old white grandmother in an airport security line, they say, when 'the real terrorists' are probably Middle Eastern, Muslim, and so on?
According to Ibish, the problem with racial profiling, aside from that fact that it is literally impossible to do when dealing with the many language groups and nationalities that compose the Arab and Muslim world, is that it signals to potential criminals who law enforcement officials are looking for and provides them with a means of changing their appearance to no longer fit the profile. 'Why tell the potential terrorist what you are looking for,' Ibish asked.
For this reason, truly random searches in airport security lines, for example, have a better deterrent effect than profiling, which, he said, has been shown to be 'worse than useless.'
In fact, in 1999 the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that it used a computer system in airport security lines to profile Arab and Muslim men as potential threats. Its failure to stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11, however, was a serious blow to proving its effectiveness, Ibish said.
Now, since airports and the federal transportation security officials have gotten serious about security, racial profiling has become much more difficult to detect. Officials who are serious about security understand that racial profiling is an ineffective security measure.
The right-wing's demand for racial profiling is meant to use race and religion to lump Arab and Muslim into a category of people who are likely or potential enemies, but it shows how detrimental racist thinking can be to real security, Ibish concluded.
Will the real terrorists please stand up?
If the 'real terrorists' aren't among the Arab and Muslim population in the US, and they aren't in the Saddam Hussein regime, who are they? Who was behind the 9/11 attacks? What is this religious movement that appears to be behind so much violence in the Middle East?
In a post-lecture interview, Ibish held that Al Qaeda and 'like-minded' people are part of a complex supra-national Islamic movement (even this is a bit confused, he saexplained, as some within this movement have nationalist tendencies) that, once on the fringes on Muslim society and detested by most Arab and Muslim people, have seen their fortunes improve primarily not because it is natural or instinctive for Muslim and Arab peoples to hate the 'West,' but because of Western policies toward the Middle East and the response by the Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks.
Ibish described this movement as the Salafist-Jihadist movement. It is a specific religious ideological outlook that favors violence against people and groups it declares to be apostates, even other Salafists. For the most part, it envisions a Muslim world without borders and for this reason has aimed much violence at Arab and Muslim peoples and governments.
While its economic theory, if it could be said to have one, favors things like markets, private property, and wealth accumulation, its political and theological outlook dominates its thinking. Patronage and charity, for Muslims with correct thinking only, are key economic ingredients to a moral vision bounded by fierce religious chauvinism that views outsiders as potentially deadly enemies that have to be dealt with violently. It calls for a semi-feudal throwback to what it imagines was a 'golden age' under the direct teachings of the prophet Mohammed.
By no means can this ideology be said to be the mainline Islamic point of view, despite efforts by right-wing ideologues and religious spokespersons to paint it as such. In fact, just decades ago Salafists 'were pretty much dismissed as in the pocket of the US and Britain,' Ibish contended.
According to Ibish, it is closer in mode of thought to some of the right-wing Christian groups in America who fantasize about a golden age when Christianity dominated American life and envision making the country a theocracy.
Indeed, the Salafist-Jihadist anti-state ideology is at odds with most governments in the Middle East, including those deemed to be enemies of the US. Its violently sectarian nature has also put it into conflict with most people in the Middle East, even those people who are supposed to hate the US instinctively and naturally. For this reason, the overwhelming majority of the victims of this movement – from Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the land of the two rivers (mistakenly called Al Qaeda in Iraq), Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) to groups with nationalist tendencies such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – have been Arab and Muslim people.
The turning point for the prestige of the Salafist-Jihadist movement came early on as a result of US foreign policy during the Cold War. Then, with the US response to 9/11, it received a new boost.
US support for anti-secular movements throughout the Middle East, from Palestine to Afghanistan, as a tool against the the Soviet Union and its regional allies, was a key factor in strengthening the Salafist-Jihadist movement. A serious problem with Bush administration foreign policy, Ibish argued, is that it continues to reject the idea of working with secular movements, even to the point of regarding them as enemies.
Additionally, Bush's Middle East policy has simply played into the hands of this movement and its goals. Martial rhetoric adopted by the Bush administration in response to 9/11, the so-called war on terror, strengthened the Salafist-Jhadist movement by allowing themselves to be portrayed as victims of military aggression against Muslims, Ibish noted.
A better approach
Success in stopping Al Qaeda, discrediting it and its ideology, and neutralizing the Salafist-Jihadist movement requires a whole new approach, according to Ibish. First, discard the 'over-broad definition of the war on terrorism that includes issues, concerns, and targets that have nothing to with the groups and ideology behind 9/11.' This element, which is propelled by the imperial agenda of some in the Bush administration, Ibish called 'extraneous rubbish that is the real problem.'
The failure to 'keep it focused' on Al Qaeda has discredited the administration’s efforts because they have become framed as and appear to be in fact comprising a war on all of Islam.
Ibish also called on the administration and other policymakers to listen and take seriously the opinions and analysis of its own intelligence experts and of Arab and Muslim scholars and experts on its cultures, religions, histories, and politics. Above all, take the views and opinions of the Arab and Muslim peoples seriously, and not reject them out of hand as manufactured propaganda. 'Treat it as reasonable and legitimate,' Ibish suggested.
Working to unify the people and movements in the Arab and Muslim worlds who want to stop Al Qaeda and its ideology will have a far more positive effect than treating them all as the same potential enemies.
Reject the fallacy that better security requires a 'derogation of freedom.' In Ibish’s view, there is no evidence that freedom causes insecurity or that security requires a strengthened state that withdraws civil liberties or rights. Policies such as warrantless wiretapping and national security letters have to go.
Finally, other political institutions and civil society groupings – Congress, the courts, the media, democratic organizations and movements, and the people themselves – have to step up their role as overseers of the administration’s policies, Ibish concluded. On domestic security policies, they have to ask, how does this make us safer, and how does it safeguard our rights and freedoms? Does it contradict our basic values?
--Joel Wendland can be reached at
