Imagine if that had happened in Syria, or with a visiting US diplomat to Iran, Pentagon-based revenge already would be in effect
MENA (Middle East/North Africa) is on fire. The diffuse rage – even if manifested by a tiny minority, Saudi-funded Salafists in particular – is distinctly anti-American. Protests in Cairo have reached Yemen, Tunisia, Sudan, and even Bangladesh and Indonesia. The administration of US President Barack Obama is perplexed beyond belief. There will be revenge. What’s really going on?
It does not matter whether that infamous, crude, made-in-California anti-Islam and anti-Prophet Muhammad flick – actually financed/produced by an Egyptian Christian Copt and American protestants, instead of a non-existent Jewish real-estate developer – was just a pretext that led to the killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi and the protests in Cairo and beyond. Let’s try to identify the consequences.
The militia ballet
The strategic target of the Salafi-jihadis who killed the US ambassador in Benghazi was to torpedo the (already shaky) Obama-Muslim Brotherhood alliance.
Imagine if that had happened in Syria – or with a visiting US diplomat to Iran, for example; Pentagon-based revenge already would be in effect. US consulates were never attacked when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was in power in Libya; it happened under the watch of a “NATO rebel” regime fully sponsored by Washington and Saudi Arabia.
Libya is now militia hell – from neighborhood-watch outfits to mini-armies. They won’t disarm. They refuse to be part of government security forces because their logic is tribal. They’re fighting one another. No weak central government in car-bomb-infested Tripoli will rein them in. In fact there are already signs that elements in the Libyan government and security forces are loyal or sympathetic to the most powerful faction of mini-armies, the Saudi-funded Salafists.
Another way to put it is that “liberated” Libya is now warlord country, which remains under the shadow of Takfiri Salafist militancy, which as per Saudi ideology is not only anti-West, it is also opposed to mainstream Sunni Muslims, Sufi Muslims and Shiite Muslims.
The Salafi-jihadis – with whom Washington, London and Paris were unashamedly in bed during their humanitarian bombing campaign (humanitarian and “excellent” if one is to believe Quilliam and other naive or Saudi funded lobbyists and analysts) – are based in Cyrenaica, eastern Libya. Some have come from Iraq. Some are shuttling back and forth to and from Syria, aiming to destroy yet one more secular Arab republic.
They include the heavily armed gang that attacked the US consulate – the self-described Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades, which surfaced only four months ago. Three months ago, hundreds of AK-47-equipped Salafi-jihadis held Benghazi hostage demanding sharia law.
The (disintegrated) police and army of “liberated” Libya could not possibly face them down. Local tribes don’t care. Salafi-jihadis have been attacking Sufi mosques and tombs; Sufi Islam is infinitely more moderate – and intellectually sophisticated – compared with medieval Wahhabism.
It’s Hellfire time
The training camps are near Derna – which has a history of being a top source of al-Qaeda-style jihadis, especially active in occupied Iraq. This does not mean all the Salafi-jihadis are affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM); it’s a local Libyan affair, however, its external links not only with AQIM but also with Saudi Arabia cannot be ignored.
Anyway, by now Derna must be under watch, millimeter by millimeter, by Obama’s drones. Hellfire missiles will be raining down over Derna in no time. There will be collateral damage. No one will shed a tear.
As much as Salafi-jihadis are a minority in Libya and elsewhere in Muslim countries, they are a highly motivated, trained and weaponized minority. They have the motivation of Al Qaeda and funding of their generous sponsors in Saudi Arabia and other mini-state in Persian Gulf. They won’t go down quietly. They will react if the Obama administration goes for all-out droning and a Hellfire feast; they will attack the weak central government in Tripoli. Somalization looms.
USA’s honeymooon with Muslim Brotherhood
Egypt is a much tougher, nuanced proposition – because it’s the model for the uneasy Washington-Muslim Brotherhood (MB) love affair, with the US betting on moderate Islamists as provisional substitutes of friendly dictators of the Hosni Mubarak kind. A complicating factor is that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is in direct competition with local Salafis – who got 25% in the congressional elections. So the MB won’t be very forceful in denouncing them – even though they are hated by the Salafis. However, don’t ignore the fact that MB too has cosy relationship with Saudi Arabia. In their ideology and tactics MB too are Salafists, a tad more refined and camouflaged than the more Xenophobic Nour party.
There’s virtually nothing the Obama administration can do to pressure Morsi. He has been extremely cunning – playing the US, the House of Saud and Qatar against one another. Whatever happens, the brief honeymoon between the Obama administration and the MB is destined to sour. The only regional actor to savor this will be Israel – which detested the honeymoon in the first place.
The Obama administration was forced into this dead-end because – foolishly, one might stress – it has been playing the sectarian card, aligning itself with the medieval House of Saud and cunning mini-superpower Qatar, key protector of the MB, but also with all sorts of Salafi-jihadism, especially in Syria. All this to ultimately defeat the self-described “axis of resistance” – Iran-Syria-Hezbollah – whatever it takes. It takes facing repeated instances of blowback all across MENA and beyond.
In the meanwhile, Western media, analysts and think tanks continue to present a partial picture of affairs. UK based Quilliam Foundation is a case in point which thinks the attack on Benghazi is an isolated incident which has nothing to do with the joint patronage of Salafist militants by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Another example is a recent article in Wall Street Journal by former Pakistan ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqnai, which almost completely wipes out the fact that the US remains a key ally of Saudi-funded Salafists (Islamists). Haqqani’s article does not explain that USA remain a key guarantor of murderous Salafist regimes in KSA, Bahrain and other Gulf countries. Blaming Islamists (Takfiri Salafists to be specific) while ignoring their Saudi-US sponsors serves neither West nor Muslims.
So what is Obama to do? The cosmically mediocre Mitt Romney accused him of being weak in the face of “terra-rists”, but Romney is a foreign-policy pigmy, whose neocon-instilled agenda boils down to treating both Russia and China as enemies and bombing Iran. The Republican Party simply has no clue of what’s going on in MENA.
Not that Obama has much to rely on. The old, cozy, dictator-led order has collapsed after Tunisia and Egypt. Washington is being kicked out of Iraq. Obama himself cannot position Egypt as an ally or a threat. What’s left is to drone – somebody, anybody – to death. Send the marines. Deploy some warships. Display some military muscle. And hope for the best.
What the U.S. needs now is to develop a sound, coherent MENA policy. More importantly, the U.S. in particular and the West in general have to realize that they cannot hope to eradicate terrorism while continue to have their honeymoon with Saudi Arabia, keep looking the other way while Saudi based Sheikhs fund Salafist militants in Libya, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, even in Western countries. Incidents of 9/11 and Libya 9/11 show that Saudi-funded Salafist militants are single major threat not only to the West but also to the Muslim world. There will be no peace in the world unless West stops sponsoring and protecting the evil Salafist regime and helps Saudi people in installing a democratic government in Riyadh. Till then, we will continue to see more 9/11s – in New York, Washington DC, Benghazi, London, Madrid etc.
Source: Adapted and edited from Asia Times. Brother Obama, where art thou? Author: Pepe Escobar
The Salafists and their Jihadist faction are destroying the small state of Mali. Allowed to win in Northern Mali, the Jihadist ‘Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa’ known as MUJAO is wrecking havoc in the impoverished West African nation. Without anyone resisting it effectively, the MUJAO is said to have amputated five men accused of theft. MUJAO says it was simply applying the Sharia law.
Northern Mali is the victim of a poorly coordinated international community and the inability of leading governments around the world to grasp and analyze the realities on the ground. Instead, they have left the crisis in that country simmer, failing to solve the critically important Touareg crisis, and enabling the rise of the Jihadists with fatal consequences. Not only hands and feet are being chopped, but lawlessness is widespread. Algerian diplomats have been kidnapped and the top Algerian Consular Officer in Gao killed by the hands of these Jihadists. Today, Mali and the international community are wondering what to do in light of this chaotic development, when they could have empowered the Touareg people to safeguard Mali appropriately against foreign Jihadist fighters.
Could the rest of North Africa follow the same trajectory than Mali and fall prey to the Salafist offensive? While such outcome is unlikely given the strategic nature of the nations in question and the efforts to stabilize them, actions from the Salafists will continue in an effort to severely undermine what pro-Democracy activists have been seeking ever since the Jasmine Revolution. Young men, controlled by some obscure organizations will seek to derail any efforts to establish real democracies in the region. They will continue to use violence and threaten anyone who thinks differently. They will use as a pretext the sort of actions initiated by extremists among other religious groups, as was the case with the alleged anti Islamic film maker, to justify violent outbursts as we have been witnessing these days.
http://www.north-africa.com/naj_news/news_na/1septtwentyfour47.html
A must read. Not many in Western media are highlighting the Saudi-Salafist connection. Saudi lobbyist and generous founding at play just as it was post 9/11.
Under Qaddafi’s iron-fisted rule, Salafist groups were almost powerless, but when he was toppled by Saudi-US duo, Salafists became more powerful than the central government itself.
One of the hundreds of Islamic extremists freed from prison by the rebel brigades during the fighting against Qaddafi’s forces was Abu Idris al-Libi. His brother, Abu Yahya al-Libi, had escaped arrest in their native country and fled to the Afghan-Pakistan border region. He became the No. 2 commander of al Qaeda, and held that position until a U.S. drone strike killed him earlier this year in Pakistan.
Abu Idris (an adopted name, his real name is Abdel Wahab Qayed), now free from prison, has started appearing in online videos at Libyan security conferences, giving statements to reporters as the head of the National Border Guard for southern Libya – an agency run by the new Libyan government’s Defense Ministry.
According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat, Abu Idris al-Libi was elected to the Libyan parliament in July. While there’s no evidence that Abu Idris is now connected to the terror group which deputized his brother, he was locked up by Qaddafi and sentenced to death as a senior member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Abu Yaha al-Libi and at least one other former senior member of al Qaeda came to the organization from the LIFG.
These Libyan groups and other Salafists like them in Syria, Takfiri Deobandis in Pakistan and across the Muslim world are comprised largely of poorly educated young men, and they pose little direct threat to the U.S. or its interests. Attacks like the one on the U.S. consulate are worrying, but they are relatively limited in scope and represent a localized threat that can be controlled for with bolstered security measures.
On Wednesday, however, a U.S. source told CBS News there was also a possibility that al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror group’s North Africa franchise – and, according to CBS News terrorism consultant Jere Van Dyk, it’s most well-funded – might have been involved in the attack on the Benghazi consulate.
AQIM is of significant concern to U.S. security agencies, and has known links to the Yemen-based branch, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has launched several attacks on U.S. interests, including the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger jet over Detroit in 2009.
General Carter Ham, head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), expressed concern in June 2012 that the various Islamic militant groups of North Africa, including AQIM, al Shabaab in Somalia, and the Boko Haram group in Nigeria were linking up to share resources and training.
“Each of those three organizations is by itself a dangerous and worrisome threat,” Ham said. “What really concerns me is the indications that the three organizations are seeking to coordinate and synchronize their efforts … That is a real problem for us and for African security in general.”
In Egypt:
There are some worrying parallels between Libya and neighboring Egypt, where militant Islamic groups had been all but neutered under the rule of Western-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak, until he was toppled in his own country’s Arab Spring uprising.
In Egypt, rebels didn’t have to break down prison walls to free Islamic Jihadists as they battled the Mubarak regime. The country’s military leaders deliberately liberated dozens of hardline Muslim radicals, hoping the extremists would divide the opposition movement and thus make it easier to control. The move backfired.
The conservative Muslim Brotherhood won the nation’s first democratic elections in decades and its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, is now the president.
The Brotherhood and Morsi himself have vowed to work with the West and have thus far respected the nation’s long-standing treaties with Israel, but the far more extreme (and far fewer in number) Salafist Muslims – the militants and extremists who wish to topple democratic governments in Muslim countries and implement Sharia law (many of whom backed Morsi’s candidacy) are now freer to operate openly in the country, and to spread the ideology based on a contrived war between the West and Islam.
One of those freed by the military before Mubarak was toppled is another man with a very close familial link to al Qaeda. Mohammed al-Zawahiri is the brother of current al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Mohammed has now emerged as a conservative leader on Egypt’s political landscape, fronting the new Egyptian Salafist Jihadi Movement group.
He was one of several Salafist figures who called for protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo this week, ostensibly against the dubious anti-Muslim video clip which appeared online this summer.
While there has been nothing to suggest the U.S. government or any individuals connected to it had anything to do with the production of the vitriolic 15-minute clip on Youtube, Salafist groups around the world have been quick and effective in using it as propaganda to keep selling the narrative of an American war against Islam.
The video was a gift to the men who need to keep that belief alive, in order to stake their claim on power in the post-Arab Spring Muslim world.
http://www.kxlh.com/news/what-s-behind-violent-anti-u-s-protests-in-muslim-nations-/
In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called “a policy coup” engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11. After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”:
Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?”
He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Clark said the aim of this plot was this: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.” He then recounted a conversation he had had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991 — in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: “But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”
The current turmoil in the Middle East is driven largely by popular revolts, not by neocon shenanigans. Still, in the aftermath of military-caused regime change in Iraq and Libya (the latter leading to this and this), with concerted regime change efforts now underway aimed at Syria and Iran, with active and escalating proxy fighting in Somalia, with a modest military deployment to South Sudan, and the active use of drones in six — count ‘em: six — different Muslim countries, it is worth asking whether the neocon dream as laid out by Clark is dead or is being actively pursued and fulfilled, albeit with means more subtle and multilateral than full-on military invasions (it’s worth remembering that neocons specialized in dressing up their wars in humanitarian packaging: Saddam’s rape rooms! Gassed his own people!). As Jonathan Schwarz (or, as he would be called by establishment newspapers: “a person familiar with Jon Schwarz’s thinking on the subject who asked not to be identified”) put it about the supposedly contentious national security factions:
As far as I can tell, there’s barely any difference in goals within the foreign policy establishment. They just disagree on the best methods to achieve the goals. My guess is that everyone agrees we have to continue defending the mideast from outside interference (I love that Hillary line), and the [Democrats] just think that best path is four overt wars and three covert actions, while the neocons want to jump straight to seven wars.
The difference between seven and four overt wars isn’t non-existent or unimportant, of course, but it’s a question of means. The neocon end as Clark reported them — regime change in those seven countries — seems as vibrant as ever. It’s just striking to listen to Clark describe those 7 countries in which the neocons plotted to have regime change back in 2001, and then compare that to what the U.S. Government did and continues to do since then with regard to those precise countries.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/26/wes_clark_and_the_neocon_dream/
http://youtu.be/Ha1rEhovONU
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