Pulling the Dog’s Ears

In his recent The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy (echoes of Niebuhr), William Pfaff argues that the real targets of Islamic violence are not Western or American but closer to home.  He notes that “For nearly a century Washington has supported the Saudi government and, indirectly, Wahhabi fundamentalism, against such secular reform movements as Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1950s ‘Arab Socialism’ and the originally modernizing and secular Ba’ath movements in Iraq and Syria.”  Why?  ”The secular reform parties were seen (no doubt correctly) as threatening American oil interests in the region and as actually or potentially sympathetic to Washington’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, supporter of radical liberation movements inside and beyond the Middle East.”

Enter al Qaeda: “Elsewhere than in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, al Qaeda’s existence remains largely notional.  Its real objective (and the base for its association with the Taliban) is destruction of the Saudi monarchy, which sponsors the rival Wahhabi interpretation of strict Islamic observance.  The phenomenon is essentially an affair of intra-Muslim doctrinal and political rivalry in which Westerners are secondary players (unwelcome, and ultimately dispensable).”

Similarly, the conflicts centered in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not really about the West either.

“The Taliban’s support by Pakistan places a strategically important border area under Pakistan’s influence and weakens India’s influence in Central Asia and, indirectly, in Kashmir . . . . Pakistan’s own interest lies in manipulating both Taliban and foreign Islamist elements – as well as the United States, when feasible – in its own defense against its permanent enemy, India.”  Pfaff charges that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration understands what they are stepping into.  Bush established “a cooperative nuclear relationship with India without, it would seem, appreciating the complexities of the situation into which it was stumbling.”

All in all, Pfaff is skeptical about the “enormity of the Islamic radical threat.”  He sees Islamic radicalism as a reaction to the power and incursions of the West, and places the violence of Islamic fundamentalism into the history of decolonization: “Colonial and postcolonial history are filled with conflict between the expanding and expansive West and the societies they were attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to overrun.”

Finally, one of Pfaff’s central theses is that Western, and specifically American, policy toward Islam is being inspired by a secular, Enlightenment millennialism and utopianism that he believes had caused far more destruction than “religious” movements over the past several centuries.