America enabled
radical Islam: How the CIA, George
W. Bush and many others helped create ISIS
Abdel Bari Atwan - Excerpted
from "Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate"
[Der Autor zeigt im nachstehenden Artikel zwar geschichtliche Zusammenhänge deutlich auf, die tieferen Zusammenhänge erwähnt er aber nicht. Die Anhänger der wahabitischen Irrlehre sind keineswegs "radical Sunni Islam", sondern eine Sekte, deren Lehre - ähnlich der christlichen - Allah in Seine Schöpfung presst (huluul bzw. Inkarbation). Die Kultur dieser Sekte ist zwar kulturell sunnitisch orientiert, grundlegende Glaubensinhalte sind aber "radical anti-sunnitisch". Bemerkung: Muhammad Abu Bakr Müller]
Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the
affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading
or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran,
Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi
Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and
now Syria. Latterly these efforts have been in the name
of the War on Terror and the attempt to curb Islamic
extremism.
Yet for centuries Western countries have sought to
harness the power of radical Islam to serve the
interests of their own foreign policy. In the case of
Britain, this dates back to the days of the Ottoman
Empire; in more recent times, the US/UK alliance first
courted, then turned against, Islamists in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In my view, the policies of the
United States and Britain—which see them supporting and
arming a variety of groups for short-term military,
political, or diplomatic advantage—have directly
contributed to the rise of IS.
Supporting the Caliphate
The Turkish Ottoman Empire was, for centuries, the
largest Muslim political entity the world has ever known,
encompassing much of North Africa, southeastern Europe,
and the Middle East. From the sixteenth century onwards,
Britain not only championed the Ottoman Empire but also
supported and endorsed the institution of the caliphate
and the Sultan’s claim to be the caliph and leader of
the ummah (the Muslim world).
Britain’s support for the Ottoman Caliph—a policy known
as the Eastern Question—was entirely motivated by
self-interest. Initially this was so the Ottoman lands
would act as a buffer against its regional imperial
rivals, France and Russia; subsequently, following the
colonization of India, the Ottoman territories acted to
protect Britain’s eastward trade routes. This support
was not merely diplomatic; it translated into military
action. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Britain fought
with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and won.
It was only with the onset of the First World War in
1914 that this 400-year-old regional paradigm unraveled.
When Mehmed V sided with the Germans, Britain was
reluctantly excluded from dealing with the caliphate’s
catchment of over 15 million Muslims, reasoning that
“whoever controlled the person of the Caliph, controlled
Sunni Islam.” London decided that an Arab uprising to
unseat Mehmed would enable them to reassign the role of
caliph to a trusted and more malleable ally: Hussein bin
Ali Hussein, the sherif of Mecca and a direct descendant,
it is claimed, of the Prophet Muhammad. The British
employed racism to garner support for the uprising,
appealing to the Arabs’ sense of ownership over Islam,
which had originated in Mecca and Medina, not among the
Turks of Constantinople. A 1914 British proclamation
declared, “There is no nation among the Muslims which is
now capable of upholding the Islamic Caliphate except
the Arab nation.” A letter was dispatched to Sherif
Hussein, fomenting his ambition and suggesting, “It may
be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate
at Mecca or Medina” (Medina being the seat of the first
caliphate after the death of the Prophet). Again, the
British were prepared to defend the caliphate with the
sword, promising to “guarantee the Holy Places against
all external aggression.” It is a strange thought that,
just 100 years ago, the prosecutors of today’s War on
Terror were promising to restore the Islamic caliphate
to the Arab world and defend it militarily.
The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, fomented by
the British, got underway in 1916, the same year that
the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was made in secret,
carving up between the British and French the very lands
Sherif Hussein had been promised. Betrayal, manipulation,
and self-interest were, and remain, the name of the game
when it comes to Western meddling in the Middle East.
The revolt would last two years and was a major factor
in the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the
British Army and allied forces, including the Arab
Irregulars, were fighting the Ottomans on the
battlefields of the First World War. A key figure in
these battles was T. E. Lawrence, who became known as
Lawrence of Arabia because of the loyalty he engendered
in the hearts of Sherif Hussein and his son, Emir Faisal.
He was given the status of honorary son by the former,
and he fought under the command of the latter in many
battles, later becoming Faisal’s advisor. When the
Ottomans put a £15,000 reward on Lawrence’s head, no
Arab was tempted to betray him.
Sadly this honorable behavior and respect were not
reciprocated. In a memo to British intelligence in 1916,
Lawrence described the hidden agenda behind the Arab
uprising: “The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks.
If properly handled they would remain in a state of
political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous
principalities, incapable of cohesion . . . incapable of
co-ordinated action against us.” In a subsequent missive
he explained, “When war broke out, an urgent need to
divide Islam was added. . . . Hussein was ultimately
chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam. In
other words, divide and rule.”
Oil Security and Western Foreign Policy
Let us fast-forward to the 1950s and ’60s, by which time
oil had become a major factor in the West’s foreign
policy agenda. Again, the principle of “divide and rule”
was put to work: a 1958 British cabinet memo noted, “Our
interest lies . . . in keeping the four principal
oil-producing areas [Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and
Iraq] under separate political control.” The results of
this policy saw the West arming both sides in the
Iran-Iraq war—which brought both powers to the brink of
total destruction in the 1980s—and then intervening
militarily with a force of almost 700,000 men in the
First Gulf War (to prevent Iraq annexing Kuwait) in
1990–91.
The United States, UK, and European powers were also
deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab
Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s
Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies
in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge,
left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and
militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War
context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet
Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To
counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to
support Islamist tendencies within each country—mostly
branches of the Muslim Brotherhood—and also worked hard
in the diplomatic field to create strong and binding
relationships with Islamic, pro-Western monarchies in
Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. These
relationships endure to this day.
The most extreme manifestation of radical Sunni Islam
was Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism, which it had started to
disseminate via a string of international organizations
and its self-designated Global Islamic Mission. In 1962,
Saudi Arabia oversaw the establishment of The Muslim
World League, which was largely staffed by exiled
members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim
Brotherhood’s relationship with the West (and with the
Gulf monarchies) has always been inconsistent and
entirely selfish. In the run-up to, during, and after,
the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution against Hosni Mubarak,
the United States and UK were actively supporting the
Muslim Brotherhood as the most credible (or only)
experienced political entity. In 2014, both countries
came under pressure from the Saudis to declare the
Muslim Brotherhood a terror group: though neither has
yet gone that far, the UK duly launched an official
investigation into the group, headed by UK Ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, while in the United
States a bill was introduced in Congress, the Muslim
Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2014.
The House of Saud itself feared an “Arab Spring”
revolution and encouraged and applauded the June 2013
coup that deposed the Brotherhood’s legitimately elected
President Morsi; Saudi King Abdullah phoned coup leader
al-Sisi (now the Egyptian president) within hours to
congratulate him on his success. Egypt under al-Sisi
would prove a better friend to Israel and, like Saudi
Arabia, would brutally extinguish any new uprisings,
giving the kingdom moral support in its own battle for
survival. Saudi political pragmatism (or, as some might
frame it, hypocrisy) has been progressively informed by
its close relationship with the United States and UK—
and is now one of the most significant drivers of the
Middle East’s present chaos, including the emergence of
ISIS.
Communism: The First Public Enemy Number One
From the 1950s on, the Muslim Brotherhood was supported
and funded by the CIA. When Nasser decided to stamp out
the movement in Egypt, the CIA helped its leaders
migrate to Saudi Arabia, where they were assimilated
into the Wahhabi kingdom’s own particular brand of
fundamentalism, many rising to positions of great
influence. While Saudi Arabia actively prevented the
formation of a home-grown branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, it encouraged and financed the movement
abroad in other Arab countries. One of the most
prominent leaders of the Western-backed Afghan Jihad
(1979–89) was a Cairo-educated Muslim Brotherhood member:
Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI).
America and, to a lesser extent, Britain fretted about
the rise of communism, which was perceived and portrayed
as the “enemy of freedom”—a term that would later be
applied to the Islamic extremists. In geopolitical terms,
by the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union
comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass and was a
superpower capable of mounting a devastating challenge
to the United States. The White House was also concerned
about the future alignment of China, where the Chinese
Communist Party had seized power in 1949. Communism was
enthusiastically embraced by millions of idealistic
post-war Americans and Europeans, posing a perceived
domestic political threat. Meanwhile the West observed
with horror the increasing popularity of communism and
socialism in the Middle East; revolutionary, pro-Soviet,
Arab regimes would create an enormous strategic
disadvantage and threaten oil security.
For the West, radical Islam represented the best way to
counter the encroachment of Arab nationalism communism.
Following the Six-Day War in 1967, US and UK
governmental planners noted with satisfaction that Arab
unity and sense of a shared cause were finding
expression in a revival of Islamic fundamentalism and
widespread calls for the implementation of Sharia law.
This revival continued through the 1970s and, by the end
of the decade, produced the pan-Arab mujahideen that
would battle the Soviet armies in Afghanistan for the
next ten years.
As in Syria and Iraq, the Sunni jihadists were not alone
in the insurgency. There were seven major Sunni groups,
armed and funded (to the tune of $6 billion) by the
United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as the UK,
Pakistan, and China. Abdullah Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat
(the Services Office), which included bin Laden and from
which al Qaeda would emerge, was at this point only a
sub-group of one of these, the Gulbuddin faction (founded
in 1977 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Often overlooked in
retelling the story of this particular Afghan war is the
fact that the insurgency was pan-Islamic: there were
eight Shi‘i groups, trained and funded by Iran.
Of the Sunni entities it was backing, the CIA preferred
the Afghan-Arabs (as the foreign fighters from Arab
countries came to be known) because they found them
“easier to read” than their indigenous counterparts. In
2003, Australian-British journalist John Pilger
conducted research and concluded, “More than 100,000
Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986
and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the
SAS training future al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in
bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were
trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.” That Western
interference in Afghanistan actually precedes the Soviet
invasion by several months is rarely acknowledged. In
the context of this book it is worth tracing the motives
and methods employed by foreign powers to further their
own ends in that territory, as these have been repeated
and modified in Iraq and Syria.
Afghanistan’s location and long borders with Iran and
Pakistan make it a strategic prize, and rival powers
have often fought to control it. A coup in 1978 (the
third in five years) brought the pro-Soviet Muhammad
Taraki to power, setting off alarm bells in Islamabad,
Washington, London, and Riyadh. The Pakistani ISI first
tried to foment an Islamist uprising, but this failed
owing to lack of popular support. Next, five months
before the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter sent
covert aid to Islamist opposition groups with the help
of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Carter’s National Security
Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in a memo to his
boss that if the Islamists rose up it would “induce a
Soviet military intervention, likely to fail, and give
the USSR its own Vietnam.” Another coup in September
1979 brought Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin to
power; Moscow invaded in December, killing Amin and
replacing him with its own man, Babrak Karmal.
Brzezinski then sent Carter a memo outlining his advised
strategy: “We should concert with Islamic countries both
a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to
help the rebels.”
On December 18, 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed Washington’s approach
at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in New
York, even praising the Iranian Revolution and
concluding, “The Middle East is an area where we have
much at stake. . . . It is in our own interest that they
build on their own deep, religious traditions. We do not
wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of
imported Marxism.”
Because IS is a product of Western interference in Iraq
and Syria, none of the powers that backed the Afghan
mujahideen anticipated the emergence of alQaeda, with
its vehemently anti-Western agenda and ambition to
re-establish the caliphate. Pakistan’s President Pervez
Musharraf wrote in his autobiography, “Neither Pakistan
nor the US realized what Osama bin Laden would do with
the organization we had all allowed him to establish.”
Defining Extremism: The Western Dilemma
In the course of the 1990s, radical political Islam
became more extremist—a shift that was encouraged and
funded by Saudi Arabia. The star of the Muslim
Brotherhood began to wane as its leaders were castigated
for being too “moderate” and for participating in the
democratic process in Egypt; standing as “independents”
(since the Muslim Brotherhood was banned), its
candidates fared well, becoming the main opposition
force to President Hosni Mubarak. There was another
reason for the Muslim Brotherhood falling out of favor
with Riyadh—it had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1990
invasion of Kuwait. The House of Saud now linked its
survival with the rise of the Salafi-jihadist tendency,
which was consistent with its own custom-fit Wahhabi
ideology.
The West viewed this shift into a more radical gear with
some alarm as the Salafists’ battle became
international: Arab jihadists traveled to Eastern Europe
to fight with the Bosnian Muslims from 1992; New York’s
World Trade Center was first bombed by radical Islamists
in 1993; and in 1995, North African jihadists from the
al Qaeda–linked GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria)
planted bombs on the Paris Metro, killing 8 and injuring
more than 100.
The United States and UK adopted a remarkably laid-back
approach to this new wave of radical Islam. The UK
government and security services did not consider that
the extremists presented a real danger, allowing the
establishment of what the media labeled “Londonistan”
through the 1990s. It could be argued that this was a
successful arrangement in that, in return for being
allowed to live in the British capital and go about
their business in peace, the jihadists did not commit
any act of violence on British streets. The Syrian
jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri (aka Setmariam Nasar) was a
leading light among the Londonistan jihadist community,
which also included Osama bin Laden’s so-called
ambassador to London, Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Suri
confirmed to me that a tacit covenant was in place
between M16 and the extremists.
Saudi entities and individuals funded al Qaeda and other
violent Salafist groups to the tune of $300 million
through the 1990s, and the United States and UK remained
stalwartly supportive. A year after Margaret Thatcher
left parliament for good, she told a 1993 meeting of the
Chatham House international affairs think tank, “The
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a strong force for moderation
and stability on the world stage.” When challenged on
Riyadh’s appalling human rights record—which included
(and still includes) public executions, floggings,
stonings, oppression of women, the incarceration of
peaceful dissidents, and violent dispersal of any kind
of demonstration—she retorted, “I have no intention of
meddling in its internal affairs.” Later, Tony Blair
would talk of the Middle East’s Axis of Moderation,
meaning Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, the
Palestinian Authority, and Israel.
The First Gulf War brought two changes into play. The
first was that Saudi Arabia now became completely
dependent, militarily, on the United States for its
survival. The second was that, in an attempt to weaken
Saddam Hussein, the CIA encouraged Shi‘i groups in
southern Iraq to rebel, resulting in thousands of Shi‘a
being slaughtered by regime helicopter fire. George H.
W. Bush spent $40 million on clandestine operations in
Iraq, flying Shi‘i and Kurdish leaders to Saudi Arabia
for training, and creating and funding two opposition
groups: the Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Alawi (who
would collaborate in a failed coup plotted by the CIA’s
Iraq Operations Group in 1996) and the Iraqi National
Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi (who was close to Dick
Cheney when he was Defense Secretary). And yet, for the
next twelve years, Saddam Hussein remained in power
despite the punitive sanctions regime.
Washington and London continued to believe that an
alliance with “moderate” Islam was key to defeating the
extremists. A 2004 Whitehall paper by former UK
Ambassador to Damascus Basil Eastwood and Richard
Murphy, who had been assistant secretary of state under
Reagan, noted: “In the Arab Middle East, the awkward
truth is that the most significant movements which enjoy
popular support are those associated with political
Islam.” For the first time, they identified two distinct
groups within the political Islamists: those “who seek
change but do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes,
and the Jihadists . . . who do.”
This new paradigm gained traction. In 2006, Tony Blair
made it clear that the coming fight in the Middle East
would be between the moderate Islamists and the
extremists. The West, he told an audience in the World
Affairs Council in Los Angeles, should seek to “empower”
the moderates. “We want moderate, mainstream Islam to
triumph over reactionary Islam.” Blair enlarged on the
economic benefits this would accrue to the large
transnational enterprises and organizations he
championed: “A victory for the moderates means an Islam
that is open: open to globalization.”
The West continues to behave as if Saudi Arabia can
deliver the world from the menace of extremism. Yet the
kingdom has spent $50 billion promoting Wahhabism around
the world, and most of the funding for al Qaeda—amounting
to billions of dollars—still comes from private
individuals and organizations in Saudi Arabia. The
Sinjar Records (documents captured in Iraq by coalition
forces in 2007) provided a clear picture of where
foreign jihadists were coming from: Saudi nationals
accounted for 45 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq.
They swell the ranks of IS today.
The Arab revolutions muddied the waters even more,
particularly in Libya and Syria, making it almost
impossible to distinguish between moderates and
extremists. In Libya the West’s intervention
strengthened the radicals and liberated stockpiles of Gaddafi’s
sophisticated weapons, which were immediately spirited
away by the truckload to jihadist strongholds. In the
light of that error, President Obama dithered in Syria,
much to the fury of his Saudi allies, allowing the most
radical of the extremists to prevail: Islamic State.
Excerpted from “Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate” by
Abdel Bari Atwan. Published by the University of
California Press. Copyright © 2015 by Abdel Bari Atwan.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights
reserved.
Abdel Bari Atwan is a Palestinian writer and journalist.
He was the editor in chief of the London-based daily
al-Quds al-Arabi for 25 years and now edits the Rai
al-Youm news web site.