[A-List] The Caliphate Myth

[Erik Freye <efreye@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/13/the_caliphate_myth.php

The Caliphate Myth
              by Tom Porteous

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, and travels frequently to Iran.




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 furor 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.




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