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Seeds of
Chaos – Roots of Terror
By William
Rowe
December 16, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Anti
War"
- What is required in combating Islamic
fundamentalist movements like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and
the Taliban is a deeper understanding of
them, their motives and missions, and the methods
behind their madness. Such knowledge could go much
further in defeating these enemies than simply
bombing and killing them, which paradoxically causes
them to grow stronger and more adaptively resilient,
and morph into even more sinister forms.
An
important element in understanding these regressive
religious ideologies, which represent the antithesis
of classical Western liberal values, is to realize
that they are all rooted in the same soil – social
and political instability and chaos. A recent
historical example of this can be traced back to the
1980s when the Mujahideen, a Muslim jihadist group
whose foreign contingent was organized and led by a
young Sunni warrior from Saudi Arabia named Osama
Bin Laden, successfully drove the Soviet Union out
of Afghanistan after it had occupied the country for
a decade. Bin Laden, Afghan warlords and a ragtag
army of insurgents defeated the mighty Soviet empire
(with the aid of the United States – Ronald Reagan
praised the Mujahideen as “freedom fighters”) and
were emboldened by their victory over the foreign
invading "infidels." Their success, however,
resulted in a bloody tribal war waged afterward by
competing warlords, and the chaotic void created in
the nation eventually became filled during the 1990s
by the Taliban, an ultraconservative Islamist
movement that controlled much of Afghanistan by the
end of that decade.
In the wake
of the defeat of the Soviets and their retreat from
Afghanistan in 1989, Bin Laden and fellow Mujahideen
fighters mutated into Al Qaeda, another group of
Sunni Islamic fundamentalists that would
eventually declare “holy war” on the United States.
This war was inspired by American Middle East
foreign policies, including the stationing of troops
by George Bush Sr. in Saudi Arabia during the
1990-91 Gulf War, an action perceived by Bin Laden
as an invasion of sacred Muslim lands, and America’s
strong unabashed support for the state of Israel. Al
Qaeda’s “holy war” (formally
declared in Fatwas issued in 1996 and 1998)
resulted in a number of terror attacks on overseas
American targets, including those on U.S. embassies
in Africa in the late 1990s and on the U.S.S. Cole
in Yemen in 2000, and culminated in the September
11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
Afghanistan
was left in war-torn chaos after the Soviet-based
central government collapsed in the late 1980s, and
the resultant social and political void was filled
by the previously mentioned Taliban, a Sunni Islam
sect composed primarily of Pashtun tribespeople that
ascended to power in the mid-1990s in its quest to
establish an ultraconservative Afghan society ruled
by Sharia (God’s) Law as prescribed in the Koran.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001
because the Taliban had provided sanctuary during
the 1990s for Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the
9/11 attack. That war against the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the longest in American history,
continues to be waged today with no clear end in
sight. It is one component of the seemingly
perpetual global "war on terror" originally declared
by George Bush Jr. in 2001.
As a result
of the Al Qaeda attack on America, and at the strong
urging of a
neoconservative think tank in Washington that
advocated US global military domination in the 21st
century and the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein, George Bush Jr. mounted an invasion of Iraq
in 2003. That war was based on false pretense –
egregious lies spewed by the Bush-Cheney
administration about Hussein possessing
weapons of mass destruction, being involved in the
9/11 attack, and posing an imminent threat to the
United States. As it turned out, Iraq possessed
no WMDs and Hussein was not involved in
the September 11 attack (in fact, the secular
Hussein and fundamentalist Bin Laden despised one
another, and 15 of the 19 responsible for hijacking
planes and plunging them into the World Trade Center
and Pentagon were citizens of Saudi Arabia, a
so-called ally in the "war on terror;" not one was
from Iraq or Afghanistan).
The Iraq
War, championed zealously by the Bush-Cheney
administration, supported by the “liberal”
mainstream media, and authorized by congressional
leaders in both political parties, led to the
dismantling of Hussein’s Baathist secular government
(and replaced by a corrupt pro-Iranian Shiite one
that persecuted Sunni Muslims) and army, and
resulted in years of social, political and religious
strife revolving around renewed conflicts between
the two major denominations of Islam – Sunnis and
Shiites – that stretch back over a thousand years.
The dumb war cost American taxpayers over 1 trillion
dollars and resulted in the loss of hundreds of
thousands of lives, and the chaos unleashed by the
US invasion, including Iraq becoming a powerful
magnet for anti-American jihadists throughout the
Middle East, continues to this day. (NOTE: Al Qaeda
did not operate in Iraq prior to the US
invasion; the terrorist insurgency problem in the
country occurred afterward, when members of
Al Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups flooded
into Iraq to wage battle against the American
"infidels"). In sum, the American
invasion of Iraq spearheaded by Bush and Cheney
helped to transform it into a Jihadi state.
ISIS, the
Sunni Islamic cult of true believing fanatics that
now controls large chunks of Iraq and Syria (as well
as territory in war-ravaged
Libya, a recently failed state that lapsed into
chaos after the US/NATO bombing of the nation in
2011 that toppled its leader, Gaddafi – a so-called
"humanitarian" intervention that turned into a
humanitarian nightmare), evolved in response to the
US invasion, and has recently split off from Al
Qaeda in Iraq to forge its own radical identity. The
ISIS cult, inspired by an ‘End of Days’
apocalyptic vision, is a virulent and dangerous
memetic* strain of Al Qaeda that is seeking to
establish a caliphate – a government led by a
caliph, a political and spiritual successor to the
prophet Muhammad – in the Middle East. In essence,
the small group (numbering only in the tens of
thousands) of religious fundamentalists is working
to create a “purer” form of Islamic theocratic
society by reverting back (regressing) to
seventh-century civilization – the time of Muhammad.
In their quest to fulfill this visionary mission,
ISIS warriors have succeeded in rapidly gaining
control of territory throughout the region in
nations like Iraq, Syria and Libya embroiled in the
social and political chaos in which extremist groups
like these flourish.
ISIS, which
is believed responsible for the recent terror
bombing attacks in Paris (arguably blowback as a
result of France’s waging of war against ISIS in
Syria, just as the 9/11 attacks were blowback for
American policies in the Middle East), has been
described by one prominent Western leader as a
‘psychopathic monster.’ If so, it is a monster that
evolved at least in part due to misguided
interventionist policies (George Bush’s invasion of
Iraq is arguably the greatest US foreign policy
blunder since Vietnam) that have sown the seeds of
tumult in the Middle East and helped to give birth
to the unimaginable, including media-hyped
beheadings, suicide bombings and other forms of
savage brutality perpetrated by narrow minded
religious zealots in the name of God.
The story
remains the same, whether the players are Al Qaeda,
the Taliban or ISIS. Western (primarily US) military
intervention in countries – Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya… – in the oil-rich Middle East has created its
share of death, destruction and chaos, which serves
to fuel the flames of anti-Western and anti-American
hatred and inspires Muslim extremists to join groups
like Al Qaeda and ISIS, which causes the West to
drop more bombs, conduct more drone attacks, and
kill more terrorists (and innocent civilians), which
further enrages radical Islamists, whose ranks
increase in size and strength and who commit more
heinous acts of terror, which get sensationalized in
the media and create more fear, hysteria and outrage
in the West, which leads to more bombings and deaths
in the Middle East, which… – an unending cycle of
violent madness.
Violence
begets violence…terror begets terror… and the hope
for a more peaceful and loving world begins to fade
from our consciousness like the colors of a setting
sun.
A seemingly
perpetual “war on terror” – one that has continued
into the Obama administration with its expanded
drone warfare program and recent military
escalations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and
elsewhere – is being waged against a hydra-like
enemy with no end in sight for our children and
their children. One of the only true beneficiaries
of this unending war is the US corporate defense
establishment once described by President (Gen.)
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Supreme Commander of
Allied Forces during WWII, as the
military-industrial complex, whose unchecked power
and influence he warned the American people about in
his
farewell address to the nation in 1961. It is
the same arms establishment responsible for building
"…all the guns, …the death planes, The bombs…”
that a young poet-songwriter railed passionately
against when he spoke truth to power in his classic
early ’60s Cold War anthem, "Masters of War."
Stephen
Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard,
in a recent
article compared the “war on terror” to the “war
on drugs” conducted in America over the last few
decades, a costly and counterproductive effort that
has failed miserably to accomplish its goals. The
same can be said for the former, and the time is
long overdue for what Walt and others have described
as a fundamental rethinking of American Middle East
policy that is necessary to help change the pattern
of repeated blunders in the region that have
contributed to making the United States less safe as
a nation.
One of the
most important lessons to be learned from recent
history is that foreign military intervention by the
United States and other nations often has unforeseen
and tragic long-term consequences. That seems
especially true when the intervention involves
taking sides in a civil war and/or deposing a
national leader, however despotic and brutal they
may seem, as in the case of Hussein in Iraq or
Gaddafi in Libya. The events of the last few decades
make it clear that such actions help to sow the
seeds of social and political instability and chaos,
richly fertile ground in which Islamic
fundamentalist groups like ISIS can root themselves,
grow and thrive.
In a
frequently cited biblical passage from Galatians it
is stated that, "A man reaps what he sows."
That same wisdom applies to nations as well as
individuals, and in many ways the United States and
its allies are now reaping what they have sown with
respect to their bellicose “war on terror” policies
in the Middle East.
A deeper
understanding of the underlying factors contributing
to the violent madness that is casting its dark
shadow on the modern world, including the painful
acknowledgment that the aggressive actions of
America and other governments have helped to create
and nurture that madness, can hopefully shine a
light that will lead us out of the darkness and
toward a more sane and enlightened world for future
generations.
Know thy
self… know thy enemy.
*Mimetic –
That which pertains to memes, the cultural analogue
of genes. Whereas genes, comprised of DNA, are the
basic units of heredity, memes, in the form of
ideas, values, beliefs, etc., are the basic units of
cultural transmission shared between persons and
across generations.
"Everybody’s
worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a
really easy way: stop participating in it."
~ Noam Chomsky
Sources
cited:
William Rowe is a retired college professor who
taught courses in psychology, human development and
brain science for 30 years in Florida. His interests
lie primarily in the areas of evolutionary
psychology, psychobiology, cognition and
consciousness, with a particular interest in the
psychology of terror, war and peace. He has recently
completed a manuscript,
Mind in the Mirror: Reflections on the Nature of
Consciousness, the Brain, Culture and Human
Evolution that will be
published in the near future, and has written
articles for local and national publications on
topics in the fields of psychology, education and
global affairs. |
