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	The Caliphate Myth by Tom Porteous, William Pfaff TomPaine.com / IHT   February 13, 2006   (Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst who was formerly with the BBC and British Foreign Office. He has lived and worked in the Middle East for many years).   At a time of growing political tension between the Muslim world and the West, a new bad idea is creeping into the discourse of European and North American political leaders and is being used to justify an intensification of Western political and military intervention in the Muslim world.   Donald Rumsfeld wheeled this bad idea out at a conference on global security in Munich last week. George Bush alluded to it in his 2006 State of the Union address in January. Tony Blair and his Home Office minister, Charles Clarke, have both spoken of it in the past six months. Dick Cheney has bandied it about for even longer. The rhetoric of the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests she too has signed up.   The new bad idea is this: the “free West,” having defeated German Nazism and Soviet Communism, now faces a new strategic challenge from the ambition of Muslim radicals to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and impose Islamic law on half the world.   As the U.S. Defense Secretary put it at last week’s Munich conference, Islamic radicals “seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent. They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."   Ouch! A map without borders! Is this the new WMD?   It is true that many Islamist groups, including terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, say they would like to see the reunification of the Muslim world under one political leadership. They also frame this in terms of the re-establishment of the political institution which unified the Muslim world in the first few centuries of Islam: the caliphate.   But does this make it sensible, wise or proportionate for the leaders of the most formidable military alliance in the history of the world to base their strategic posture for the early 21st century on the invocation of an Al Qaeda or Iranian run, “terrorist caliphate” stretching half way around the globe?   No, it does not. And here’s why.   First, the evidence that Al Qaeda or any similar organization is in a position to re-create and control a caliphate is entirely non-existent. The only country where Al Qaeda was able to gain any kind of territorial foothold was in parts of Afghanistan. Even there, they were dependent on the goodwill of local leaders, the Taliban, who had only come to power after Afghanistan had been reduced to ground zero by the combined policies of the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War and subsequent international neglect.   In Iraq, where the U.S. military invasion and occupation has created another opportunity for Al Qaeda, Bush’s claim that Al Qaeda would take over the country in the event of a U.S. military withdrawal is nonsense. Al Qaeda has the same chance of imposing its political authority in Iraq as the U.S. does: nil.   As for Iran, in the 25 years since the Islamic revolution, Tehran has been unable to export its Shi’ite version of Islamist rule to any other Muslim state, in part because most other Muslim states are dominated by Sunnis. In fact, revolutionary Iran long ago gave up efforts to export its ideology to the wider Muslim world and has concentrated instead on cultivating its influence among Shi’ite sectarian groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.   The second reason why raising the specter of a resurgent caliphate is foolish is that it plays into the hands of groups like Al Qaeda who claim the “war on terror” is an assault on Islam itself. Where, one wonders, have all those millions of dollars put aside by Washington and London for public diplomacy in the Muslim world gone? It surely would not have cost much to find out that, so far from being seen as a totalitarian tyranny, the early Muslim caliphate is highly venerated by most Muslims as a golden age of Islam. Comparing it to the Third Reich is therefore not a good way of winning friends and influencing people in the Muslim world.   The third problem with the caliphate idea is that it has led Western politicians to prepare for and fight the wrong kind of conflict. Al Qaeda is a non-state terrorist organization that presents a complex of threats to western interests, some quite serious but none existential. Its main resource lies not in controlling territory or armies but in its symbolic and ideological influence among young and alienated Muslims. This influence is directly proportionate to the degree to which such Muslims sense they and their religion are oppressed and attacked by the West.   The main policies of the U.S. and its allies since 9/11 have been to fight Al Qaeda as though it was a conventional territorial enemy. This has involved massive projection of military force throughout the Muslim world—from "North Africa to Southeast Asia,” to borrow Rumsfeld’s words—including two outright military invasions and occupations, a continuing buildup of Israeli military power, and now the threat of military strikes against Iran. But because the enemy is not a conventional one, these interventions have quickly degenerated into crude counterinsurgency operations involving the use of torture, prolonged detention without trials and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians.   The chronic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the occupied territories, the successes of Islamist political parties in elections in several Muslim countries and, to some extent, the furore over the Danish cartoons, all demonstrate how counterproductive and ill-judged these policies are. Among other impacts in the Muslim world, they are boosting the influence of Al Qaeda and other forms of Islamist radicalism, fostering anti-Western sentiment, undermining secular reformist trends and destabilizing states.   If Western leaders’ apparent obsession with the notion that the West faces a real threat from an emergent extremist caliphate is so foolish, why do they use it?   Three answers come to mind. First, whether they really believe in the threat or not, it is a convenient cover for their signal and deepening failure in the “war on terror.” By raising the menacing specter of another evil empire, Western leaders seem to be saying to their publics that the failures in Iraq , Afghanistan and elsewhere have nothing to do with their own shortcomings, lack of imagination or ideological blindness, but with the very terribleness of the threat we are facing.   Second, the notion that the West faces the extraordinary threat of an evil caliphate provides an excuse for avoiding the very real and difficult problems that the West does need to face in relation to the Muslim world, problems which the West is so far either unwilling or unable to address seriously. These include the need to engage with political Islam and undercut the appeal of extremists, to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, to help stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan and to prevent other states going the same way.   Third, in the febrile post-9/11 political atmosphere of the West, the exaggeration of the threat from Islam has in different ways (immigration, terrorism, values) come to be exploited by political entrepreneurs as a crucial means of winning political power, extending state control over scared citizens, and justifying the massive projection of military power abroad. So the notion of a threatening Islamic caliphate may be not such a bad idea after all. It’s just not true.   Paris. February 10, 2006   A "Long War" designed to perpetuate itself, by William Pfaff. (International Herald Tribune)   The U.S. Defense Department and the White House have decided that the United States is now conducting "the Long War" rather than what previously was known as the War against Terror, then as the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, and briefly - as one revealing Pentagon study described it - a war against "the Universal Adversary."   President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last month that the aim of his administration is to defeat radical Islam. This was a preposterous statement. Shortly afterward, radical Islam began burning embassies from Afghanistan and Indonesia to Damascus and Beirut. The United States is not going to defeat that.   There are a great many dismaying aspects of Bush"s Washington, but nothing more so than this combination of the unachievable with the hortatory in giving a name and purpose to the military campaigns that already have the U.S. Army and Marine Corps near exhaustion, and a major part of the world in turmoil.   It is customary, politically desirable and morally indispensable to say seriously what a war is about, if only so that the public will know when it is over; when the declared and undeclared measures of exception that have accompanied it, justifying suspension of civil liberties, illegal practices and defiance of international law and convention, will be lifted; and when the killing may be expected to stop.   What was originally to be a matter of quick and exemplary revenge, with lightning attacks and acclaimed victories, has now become, we are told, the long war whose end cannot be foreseen. The citizen is implicitly told to expect the current suspension of constitutional norms, disregard for justice, and defiance of limits on presidential power as traditionally construed, to continue indefinitely. We are in a new age, America"s leaders say. The Democratic opposition seems to agree.   What started as the war against terror, proclaimed by the president to Congress in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, has undergone a metamorphosis. The initial interpretation was that the people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks and other terrorist outrages against Americans and their interests would be discovered, defeated and killed or brought to justice.   Surely that is what most Americans thought when the search began for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and members of Al Qaeda. Today bin Laden and Mullah Omar are somewhere in Waziristan, in Pakistan"s tribal areas, tracked by the CIA and Pakistani soldiers (with different degrees of enthusiasm). There is an insurrection in Iraq, which had nothing to do with Al Qaeda when it started, but from which Al Qaeda and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi now draw global publicity.   Elsewhere, violent and alienated members of the Muslim diaspora in Europe claim the brand-identification of Al Qaeda to dramatize their own exploits, as do discontented sons of the Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern elites.   Yet even if you include the 9/11 casualties, the number of Americans killed by international terrorists since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting them) is about the same as that killed by lightning - or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts.   "In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States" wrote John Mueller of Ohio State University in last autumn"s issue of the authoritative American journal Terrorism and Political Violence.   As Mueller concedes, there is a definitional issue: Few insurgents in Iraq are internationals; most are homegrown. And if aspirant terrorists in London or Paris had nuclear bombs, the numbers would become rather different.   Nonetheless, a phenomenon that is scattered, limited and under control, and inevitably transient, has been conflated by Washington with something that is huge and very serious: the desperation among the Muslim masses that is directed indiscriminately against Western nations, which are held responsible for Islamic society"s backwardness, poverty and exploitation.   Al Qaeda and individual international terrorists are the object of worldwide intelligence and police operations. They are a marginal phenomenon. The Bush administration"s conflation of them with the social upheaval in their world is exploited to perpetuate changes in American society that provide a much more sinister threat to democracy than anything ever dreamed by Osama bin Laden. The radical threat to the United States is at home.
	UN envoy praises Burundi, Congo Democratic progress by Andrew Cawthorne Reuters   Nairobi, February 15, 2006   Democratic progress in Burundi and Congo is helping stability in Africa"s volatile Great Lakes region but the world must help build on early steps or risk a return to violence, the U.N. representative for the region said.   "These political, peaceful and democratic transitions in Burundi and DRC are very helpful in creating a more conducive climate," said Ibrahima Fall, United Nations special representative for one of the world"s most neglected and war-torn regions.   But the end of Burundi"s civil conflict and the election of a new government last year must now be complemented with funds to build all sectors of society shattered by more than a decade of fighting that killed 300,000 people, he told Reuters.   "From one standpoint, the political transition has been a success. The other standpoint is "what next?" in Burundi," Fall said at an interview in Nairobi late on Tuesday. "Unless and until the international community puts enough resources - together with the government - to create conditions for peace dividends to be seen by the population, the fear is that the country can go again to insecurity."   Echoing calls by former rebel leader and now Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza for outside aid with the mammoth task of rebuilding the small central African nation, Fall added: "Every sector in that country is an urgent issue."   Regarding the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the U.N. official said more peacekeepers were urgently needed to ensure the success of forthcoming elections intended to draw a line under the 1998-2003 civil war and its messy aftermath. An estimated four million people have died in DRC.   CONGO "MIRACLE"   "We need more people," Fall said, applauding an agreement by the European Union (EU) this week to back up the U.N. peacekeeping mission, which at 17,000 personnel is the world body"s largest anywhere.   "DRC is a big country, 2,345,000 sq km, it is quite as large as Western Europe," Fall said. "So this idea of the largest U.N. mission in the world is somehow exaggerated. In numbers, yes. But in terms of density, if you compare the surface of the country and peacekeepers per square kilometer, it will certainly be the last."   Despite the enormity of the task of stabilizing DRC -- where 1,000 people still die every day from conflict-related causes -- just the fact that it was heading toward mid-year elections was itself grounds for optimism, Fall said."It is quite a miracle that those who were battling militarily in the field maybe two years ago have been since then in the same government and have been working together and now they are preparing for the general elections," he said.However, he added: "Of course it is still very fragile."   Heads of state from 11 African countries around the Great Lakes region are due to meet in Nairobi later this year to develop a strategy for securing peace and rebuilding Great Lakes countries shattered by instability throughout the 1990s.   As well as the Burundi conflict, the Rwanda genocide in 1994, the Congo conflict which at one point drew in six foreign armies, and a proliferation of arms and rebel groups around the region, have all contributed to years of bloodshed, chaos and mass refugee movements for a region at Africa"s heart.   But Fall said the 11 countries who make up the International Conference On the Great Lakes Region had been working since a 2004 meeting in Tanzania to achieve sustainable peace, political stability, and economic and social development.   "We need to go from firefighting to peace-building. This will need a kind of "Marshall Plan" for the Great Lakes," he said. "And unless the international community, together with countries of the region, work closely to implement it, the risk is that the region goes back to instability and insecurity."
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