War on terror leads to unusual friendships

Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi met US President Barack Obama in New York in September. Photo: Reuters

Washington: Paris was almost as quick in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks as Washington was after the 9/11 attacks to declare war on terrorism.   Sadly, no time was taken to consider the errors in the US and global responses to September 11, 2001.

And a rider to the new declaration of war is the serial lecturing of Muslims as a global class on the religious reformation that they must have. But at least US Secretary of State John Kerry is casting the “war” as a multidimensional effort that will not be won in conventional battle.

The fight against violent extremism would continue for decades unless the root causes of despair and hopelessness were addressed, he told the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. “The outcome is going to be determined in classrooms, workplaces, houses of worship, community centres, urban street corners, in the perceptions and the thoughts of individuals, and in the ways that those perceptions are created,” he said.

The fight against violent extremism would continue for decades unless the root causes of despair and hopelessness were addressed, US Secretary of State John Kerry told the World Economic Forum. Photo: Reuters

Kerry might have added that it will take substantial changes to the appalling human rights records of so many of Washington’s key allies, especially in the Middle East, to turn the tide – but the Secretary of State did not broach the tactics.

With the wars of invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq seemingly forgotten and today’s Syria-Iraq quagmire reduced to background noise, the region’s great human rights abusers are more welcome in the global tent – but are we seriously to believe that the Saudi royals and the Egyptian military are part of the solution and not the problem?

The West still gives the region’s mostly unelected and largely undemocratic leaders an easy ride – the paeans of praise on the death of King Abdullah last week, in which the late Saudi leader was hailed as a reformer, ignored the reality of Riyadh’s shocking human rights record. And last year, Washington swooped in as leader of the fight against Islamic State, making it a Western war when it needs to be resolved as a regional conflict. As the Washington Posteditorialised in September: “Mr Obama’s outreach nevertheless has costs – among them, a softening of US pressure on regimes that responded to the Arab Spring’s demand for democratic change with brutal repression.”

Worse, the West hobnobs with them, such as at this week’s meeting of European Union officials in Brussels, which declared that the EU must work with the Arab countries and Turkey, especially by boosting intelligence sharing to counter terrorist attacks. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters: “We are looking at specific projects to launch in the coming weeks with some specific countries to increase the level of co-operation on counter-terrorism – and I would name Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and the Gulf countries.”

As the new best friends of the Europeans, the leaders of those countries will feel excused for their generally appalling human rights records – and their citizens will have good reason to become even more despondent at the prospects for human rights reform.

US President Barack Obama even deigned to meet Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in New York in September, prompting a letter of dismay from a phalanx of American foreign policy and human rights experts to the President. “Whatever assistance [Mr Sisi] may or may not provide in the fight against violent extremism in the region is already outweighed by the radicalism and instability he is cultivating every day in Egypt through his oppressive policies,” they wrote. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott also met al-Sisi in New York in September.

Such meetings spur along what Robert Springborg, of the Paris School of International Affairs, describes as “profound militarisation” in the Arab world in the wake of the Arab Spring. He describes as a “novel and dangerous development  … not simply business as usual” the remilitarising of Egypt and a further entrenchment of military power in Algeria and “the possible preparing [of] the Tunisian military for an unaccustomed role in the future” while noting that “in the monarchies, ruling families have bolstered their militaries by increasing their capabilities and by roping them together in collective commands”.

Springborg writes ominously of attempts to “coup-proof” the Gulf states: “The focus on counter-terrorism, with lines drawn in the sand between patriots and jihadis, real and imagined, raises political stakes and tensions while creating conditions associated with the realisation of Max Weber’s “paradox of the sultan”, whereby a ruler’s growing dependence on the forces of coercion ultimately results in his subordination to them.”

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain continues its crackdown on its Shiite majority – this week Nabeel Rajab, founder of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, was sentenced to six months jail for “insulting a public institution” for daring to tweet that many of the Bahrainis signing on with IS in Iraq and Syria had served in the Bahraini security services.

The Saudis, too, cannot wait to get on with the public lashing of blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 1000 lashes – to be administered 50 a week for 20 weeks – was fined more than $330,000 and jailed for 10 years for exercising the freedom of expression that his country’s leaders believe the French should have – but not Saudis. Badawi has been lashed once – but last week and again this week, doctors declared that he had not recovered sufficiently from the first caning to be given the second.

Accounts of the “we-must-share-with-the-Arabs” meeting in Brussels brought to mind a 1996 soiree at Sharm El-Sheikh, in Egypt, billed as the “Summit of Peacemakers”, at which then US president Bill Clinton and 28 leaders – including Sisi’s corrupt and autocratic predecessor Hosni Mubarak – appointed a “working group” to report within 30 days on enhancing the peace process, promoting security and ending terrorist attacks.

Obama and other world leaders dutifully go along with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ declaration that “it is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS”. But Sisi’s recent call for a religious revolution is a calculated appeal to mass distrust of Islam in the West in the wake of the Paris attacks – and, at the same time, for a global blessing of his emasculation of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have been here before – in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington didn’t say boo as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Ariel Sharon adopted the rhetoric of the US war on terror in their respective crackdowns on Chechens and Palestinians.

Sisi’s call for a “religious revolution” is unlikely to go anywhere, if only because his Saudi sponsors are hostages to the conservative clerics of the Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam, which Riyadh has spent massively to export across the Muslim world. Like the Saudis, Sisi condemned the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris – and days later ordered a ban on any foreign publications that offend Islam.

Former Jordanian foreign minister Marwan al-Muasher told The New York Times: “Both the secular authoritarian model, most recently represented by Sisi; and the radical religious model, represented now by ISIS, have failed.

“They did because they have not addressed people’s real needs – improving the quality of their life, both in economic and development terms – and also in feeling they are part of the decision-making process.

“Both models have been exclusionist, presenting themselves as the holders of absolute truth and of the solution to all society’s problems.”

Muasher warns regional leaders and wannabes such as IS, that the people of the region are not stupid – exclusionist discourse will persist in the region for some time, he reckons, but eventually results will trump ideology. “And results can only come from policies of inclusion, that would give all forces a stake in the system, thereby producing stability, checks and balances and, ultimately, prosperity.”

It is fascinating columnists as prominent as the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius could ignore all that we know of Sisi to hail him, almost in heroic terms, for his call for an Islamic revolution.

Only a few Western voices are challenging the simplicity of the challenges to Muslims – one of them is John Esposito, director of the Georgetown Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

“It’s interesting, if you actually look at the Koran and compare it to the Bible, the Bible wins hands down when it comes to violence and the advocating of violence, doesn’t it,” he asked in a conversation published by The Economist. “The Old Testament is the only sacred book, for example, that calls for genocide.

“Lots of people have done stuff in the name of religion, from the Inquisition to abortion clinic bombers, and that doesn’t mean that is, in fact, what their faith teaches.”

Alluding to the carnage in northern Nigeria, Esposito argued: “I don’t think that’s Islam – I think that’s Boko Haram.”

Esposito was not impressed by Sisi’s self-appointment as Islam’s revolutionary. “That’s got to be the most laughable speech I’ve ever heard – not because reform isn’t important, but you’ve got a guy who is a butcher …  in the little time he has been in, [Sisi] has engaged in more violence, killing and imprisoning people than anyone who came before … he’s moving against any and all opposition … you’ve got something like possibly 40,000 people in prison, and thousands were killed – most of them innocent civilians.

“Sisi wants to present himself as the critic of terrorism, but the problem is Sisi decides who is the terrorist and who isn’t.”

If a version of democracy is the antidote, then the Middle East has yet to get an opportunity to test it. With the so-called Arab Spring dead in the water, the regional political narrative has allowed for little apart from colonialism, exploitation and oppression.

Reformers need political space and oxygen. But how determined does a reform-minded citizen of the region have to be in the face of Riyadh’s brutal lashing and jailing of those who, either of their own volition or in response to Western lecturing, demand a loosening of the restrictive religious and social straitjackets in which they are bound by leaders who get to sup at the high table in Washington?

January 25 marked the fourth anniversary of Egypt’s “Day of Anger”, when tens of thousands found the courage to take to the streets in protest at the military-backed and US-approved dictatorship of Mubarak. It was the start of a revolution that the military, after catching its breath, ran out of town just as fast as it could.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/war-on-terror-leads-to-unusual-friendships-20150130-12xntq.html