FRANCE: Some people seem to think that if you overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will flower in Iraq. But as Lara Marlowe in Paris suggests, such action will more likely fuel Islamic extremism
Throughout 2002, terrible images associated with Islamic extremism continued to shake us, like after-shocks of September 11th. In February, the Pakistanis who kidnapped the US journalist Daniel Pearl video-taped his beheading. On April 21st German and French tourists were blown up in a synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba. On May 11th French defence industry workers were slain by another suicide-bomber in Karachi. Some 200 people, the majority of them Australian, died in the worst atrocity of the year, in October at a nightclub in Bali. Also in October, Chechen extremists took an entire theatre hostage in Moscow. Russian forces gassed to death 129 of the theatre-goers they were meant to save, and killed 41 Chechen Muslims.
In November, al-Qaeda staged its first attacks on Israeli targets, car-bombing an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa and unsuccessfully firing SAM-7 missiles at an airliner. Nine of the 12 murder victims were African, three Israeli.
Since September 11th, it often feels as if the US academic Samuel Huntington's prediction of a clash of civilisations between Islam and Christianity has come true. I Saw the Old World Finish, is the title of a recent French book on the subject. A threshold has been crossed, but we have short memories. Nearly 24 years ago, the Iranian revolution jolted us into an awareness of fundamentalist Islam. The storming of the US embassy in Tehran and the 15-month captivity of 52 US diplomats seem like small beer now.
In the intervening years, we almost forgot about militant Islam. Like Communism during the Cold War, it was largely "contained". But for Arabs and Muslims, the "before" and "after" division is artificial. They've lived for decades with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that inspires so many violent vocations. Arab regimes have long hunted down, tortured and killed Islamist opponents, while co-opting retrograde official clergy. Civil strife fuelled by corrupt rulers and fanaticism claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria. The novelty of the post September 11th world is not that extremists kill, but that they kill Westerners in large numbers; in holiday resorts, in our own countries. The agony of the New World Disorder has finally engulfed us.
To the extent that they worried about "the green menace", Western leaders feared Islamic revolution. "Algeria; the Next Fundamentalist State?" was the title of a study published by the Rand Corporation, a think tank close to the US government, in 1996. The CIA hedged its bets, cultivating Islamist contacts, just in case. As documented in the book Bin Laden, The Hidden Truth, the Bush administration negotiated with the Taliban regime until June 2001. September 11th burned all the bridges. As it became obvious that fundamentalists would take power neither through the ballot box nor at gun-point, the regimes of the Gulf, Levant and Maghreb exported their extremists to al-Qaeda, the Foreign Legion of Islam. The Islamists' target was no longer their own governments, but "heresy" worldwide. Without our noticing, Islamic extremism became globalised.
A report issued by the United Nations Development Programme last summer documents the appalling record of Arab governments in economic development, women's rights, education and democratisation. This is why North Africans are drowning in the attempt to cross the Straits of Gibraltar, why Kurds and non-Arab Muslims also congregate on the coast of the English Channel. The Arab nationalist ideologies of the 1950s, the vestiges of which are still in power in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, failed them. And with the subsequent failure of political Islam, Muslims are left with the extreme options of escape to the West or the nihilism of al-Qaeda.
The Muslim world lives in a kind of schizophrenia, pulled by the freedom and wealth of the West, but repelled by its moral and spiritual bankruptcy and by US double standards. But the attraction is usually stronger than revulsion, and the likelihood of Iranian-style revolutions is receding.
"Sociologically," the Iranian philosopher Javad Tabatabai told Claude Lorieux of Le Figaro newspaper, "the Islamic world is being Westernised. The more Islam fails in Islamist countries, the more these countries open up to the West."
That, Tabatabai says, is what happened in Iran and Afghanistan. But the backlash continues to fill the ranks of al-Qaeda.
"There will always be an implacable core of Islamists," Tabatabai continued. "The more setbacks suffered by [political] Islam, the more violent this core will be. If wars break out, they will not be between states, but with small groups who oppose Western interests."
Richard Perle, one of the chief ideologues of the Bush administration, says that "terrorism must be decontextualised". In other words, Russian atrocities in Muslim Chechnya, the war in Kashmir, US military bases in the "holy" land of Saudi Arabia, cannot explain the radicalisation of Islam. And especially not Palestine.
For hundreds of millions of Muslims, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an open wound. In the Arab psyche, it occupies a place far greater than the Spanish Civil War did in 1930s Europe. Between September 2000 and mid-December, 2,769 people - 2,040 Palestinians and 680 Israelis - were killed. Yet the conflict almost never figures in the rhetoric of the Bush administration.
"We don't like Saddam Hussein," says a Gulf Arab diplomat. "We'd be happy to see the Americans get rid of him, if only they'd obtain justice for the Palestinians. Our sheikhs and emirs and presidents keep telling Bush, but he doesn't listen. He's got to stop [Ariel] Sharon killing Palestinians."
But instead of addressing what is for Arabs and Muslims the heart of the crisis between Islam and the West, Mr Bush's "neo-conservative" or "neo-imperialist" ideologues have hatched the "domino democracy" fantasy, whereby they will overthrow Saddam Hussein and democracy will flower in Iraq. Iran - which enjoys a semblance of parliamentary democracy - would follow. The State Department this month issued a statement encouraging the restive student opposition in Iran, though it's doubtful Washington would intervene if the well-armed Hizbullah and Pasdaran open fire to protect rule by the clergy.
Relations between the US and Saudi Arabia have soured since September 11th. Most of the suicide hi-jackers were Saudi, and Princess Haya, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was last month accused of indirectly supporting one of them. Like the Iranian mullahs, the Saudi royal family are feeling vulnerable. Mr Perle has said he expects the Saudis to stop "propagating Wahabi extremism". Yet the legitimacy of the al-Saud family depends on its role as guardians of Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam.
If Washington pushes too hard, it will further destabilise the already fragile monarchy. In Saudi Arabia, the alternative is not a Westernised democratic opposition, but Bin Laden-style puritanism.
In the wake of September 11th, Vladimir Putin, Ariel Sharon and the Algerian generals all jumped on the anti-Islamist bandwagon, seeking Western support for conflicts that were largely of their own making. And they succeeded. This month, the US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns announced that the US will sell "military equipment for the war on terrorism" to Algiers.
Washington, Mr Burns said, "has a lot to learn from Algeria about how to fight terrorism." Up to 200,000 Algerians have been slaughtered in the 11 years since the military cancelled that country's first democratic elections because an Islamist party won. And it's not over.
If Algeria is the US model for countering Islamic fundamentalism, heaven help usall.