Canadawide

I watched the News hour with Jim Lehrer a couple of days ago. Juan Cole (a professor from Michigan and well known Middle Eastern and Shia expert) and the Nation’s Christian Parenti were on. The subject they were discussing was the bombings the other day. Parenti had met up with some Iraqi insurgents. He claimed, as any good ideological Leftist would, that there was no way insurgents were involved and that the deed was the work of “Wahhabists”. (Some Leftists, most notably Chomsky, say that 911 was an understandable, but by no means condonable, response of a wounded beast to a cruel master. From what I can tell though, Frankenstein explanations are more popular. The dominant type of explanation has it that the US played Frankenstein to the Wahhabist monster. Without the US, they claim with some plausibility, the Saudi Monarchy would not have survived. As the predominance of Wahhabism is by product of the Saudi state and Al Qaeda a by product of extremist religious environment, the Americans can be said to have created the monster that now threatens them. This explanation has surpassed the US played Frankenstein to the Al Qaeda monster. Al Qaeda, so that argument goes, is a by byproduct of American efforts to ferment religious extremism during the Afghan War. Now, the accent of the former at the expense of the latter seems to be due to ideological reasons. Specifically, by conceiving of the monster as Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and not Al Qaeda, it is possible to accuse the administration of 1) holding a double standard in the war on terror (why just Afghanistan? Why not Saudi Arabia too?), 2) continuing to endanger its citizens by continuing to prop up the Saudi regime and 3) accuse Bush and company (the Carlyle group) of putting personal gain ahead of national security.) His evidence for this is that the insurgents he knew would never have carried out such an attack. Although he provided no such quote in the interview, he did quote an insurgent to this end in an essay. ‘We do not kill Iraqis, unless they are military interpreters or spies’ he quotes one Iraqi as saying. “To bolster his claim about not hurting Iraqis, he points out sites around Adhamiya where there have clearly been IED explosions. ‘See, there are no shops here, the roads are wide.’” One problem is that as the INC case shows words are one thing; actions are another. Another is that neither he nor his contacts are, by his own omission, in any position to say that some of Iraqi insurgents do not target Iraqis not connected with the US. According to Parenti, the resistance is “highly decentralized” and “organizationally fragmented”. Its members are isolated by fear of spies and a “lack of secure communications” and the movement lacks “ideological coherence”. Cole was right to jump down Parenti’s throat for dismissing out of hand the possibility that Iraqi insurgents were in anyway involved, but he revealed himself as a true Arabist when the downplayed the ideological coloring of the Wahhabi sect. (It seemed to me that Parenti was blinded by ideological need to characterize insurgents as pure and that none would ever stoop to the level of employing Al Qaeda like tactics or for that matter show a Bathian lack of concern for the welfare of their fellow Iraqis.)

Ideological bluster and the odd unsupported statement aside, I think Parenti is right to characterize the resistance fighters as follows. “The fighters seem to be less a movement than a collection of shamed and angry men with access to military training, weapons and targets.” If nothing else, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi’s words of a few weeks ago jive with this interpretation. He expressed dismay at Iraqi unwillingness to swallow the Al Qaeda message.