Left, Right and wrong
The 186th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth seems like an appropriate opportunity to dwell on an apparent paradox. To a certain extent it has ever been thus, but in recent years the phenomenon has become far more widespread.
I refer here to the tendency among people subscribing to disparate and even diametrically opposed political and personal philosophies, to see eye to eye on matters of considerable importance.
To cite a relatively insignificant example, my contributions on this page occasionally elicit laudatory epistles from readers of a deeply religious bent who evidently mistake me for a kindred spirit.
The assumption, apparently, is that anyone with a Muslim name willing to rail with some passion against the latest trend in American imperialism must perforce be some form of Islamist.
For the record, I find the prospect of a fundamentalist caliphate stretching across Asia - let alone the world - at least as distasteful as the risk of American hegemony.
And if it's the latter that stirs my ire week after week, that's primarily because it constitutes a much more immediate danger. Thanks in no small part to Al Qaeda's efforts, the Plan for a New American Century has already been put into effect. Sure, it appears to have got bogged down in Iraq. But that doesn't, by a long stretch, mean that this is the last we'll hear of it.
On the other hand, sporadic terrorist attacks from the Middle East to Southeast Asia are not the precursors to any sort of Islamic revolution. They are vile, murderous acts, worthy of unhesitant and unequivocal condemnation. But they are not advancing the cause of the caliphate. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The loss of innocent lives through brutal actions is anathema to those on the humanist Left, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators. Neither terror organized by fundamentalist groups, nor that arranged, more systematically and less secretively, by US military planners can be condoned.
Yet it's hardly necessary to emphasize that state-sponsored terror poses a more profound threat than the freelance variety. And when the state happens to be by far the most powerful country in the world, it's really not much of a contest.
For much of the left, the competing forms of bloodlust leave a bit of room for common ground on both sides. It is possible to broadly share the American view of Al Qaeda and its purported offshoots as deadly and unscrupulous, while disagreeing completely with the methods chosen to combat it.
Equally hesitantly, a similar courtesy can occasionally be extended to radical Islam: if one can be bothered to sift through the invective and the abuse, a lucid and reasonably accurate analysis of its foe can sometimes be discerned.
In both cases, however, there is little to build upon. Causes get in the way. Why do George W. Bush and his cohorts fear and loathe Osama bin Laden and his followers? Because the latter have declared war on all westerners and demonstrated an ability to score the occasional success, ranging from the bombing of US embassies in East Africa in 1998 to last week's shoot-out in Yanbu. The crucial event, of course, was the grotesque and spectacular attacks on American soil in September 2001.
Now, self-preservation is an instinct most of all can readily sympathize with. Three thousand American lives had been lost at a stroke, and no one expected the US to quietly absorb the blow.
But then again, not many people suspected that the nation's top leadership, for all its flaws, would be cynical enough to almost immediately start devising means of using the catastrophe as an excuse for attacking Iraq.
But even if one leaves Iraq out of the picture (which is all but impossible to do these days), the rest of the so-called war on terror has been pursued in a manner that has increased the terrorist threat. Is this the consequence of incompetence? A side effect of hubris? Or is it part of a let-there-be-instability ploy, aimed at rendering hegemony less unpalatable?
And all along there has been nary a word of acknowledgment about the crucial role played by the US in internationalizing the violent tendencies of a fanatical brand of Islam.
Most of the stalwarts of the present Bush administration were already in positions of power or influence when the US underwrote and co-sponsored, alongside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a war of attrition against Kabul's communist regime and its Soviet backers. Al Qaeda and the Taliban - and kindred spirits spread throughout the Arab world - were to a large extent the perhaps unintended but not entirely unexpected consequences of that foreign-fuelled conflict.
That particular "jihad", notwithstanding its frequent reliance on terror tactics, won rave reviews in Washington and London. And on the rare occasion that American veterans of the Cold War's final confrontation do reminisce in public about their exploits, they fail to recognize the irony in having nurtured a monster that in time turned on the US. As far as they are concerned, that was then. This is now. Allah's warriors were just the ticket back then. Now they must die.
This disconnect between yesterday and today applies to the other side, too. The jihadis of yore eagerly accepted American weaponry (even when it was routed through Israel) and basked in Ronald Reagan's plaudits. Now Reagan's ideological successors are denounced as infidels.
Is this pure hypocrisy? Or was the former alliance based (perhaps on both sides) on the old "my enemy's enemy is my friend" tenet? Perhaps it was natural for Islamists to view the Soviet Union as the greater of two evils, not despite but because of Moscow's broad support for Arab nationalism. Let's not forget, after all, that in the post-colonial era political Islam initially reared its head in opposition to Nasserism.
Given an exaggerated sense of their contribution to the demise of the USSR, the Islamists deemed it opportune to turn on their former partner in a much-consummated marriage of convenience, finally coming around to the Khomeiniite view of Uncle Sam as the Great Satan.
Their collaborator in perpetuating this perception was, of course, none other than Washington, which gradually dropped all pretence of even-handedness in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and has lately compounded the misery it wrought in Iraq over the preceding decade.
The documentary evidence that emerged last week of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by coalition soldiers and hired mercenaries - especially in Abu Ghraib prison, which enjoyed a notorious reputation under Saddam Hussein - was one of the biggest own-goals yet.
Through deliberate actions as well as by default, the Bush administration has shown itself to be remarkably adept at providing its bitterest foes with ammunition for propaganda.
It could be argued that the reverse is also true: after all, without the atrocities of September 11, it would have been much harder for the Bushies to build up public support - through a studied disinformation campaign - for an attack on Iraq.
But there's a crucial difference. Despite its broad contempt for Arabs, the US genuinely wanted to be seen as a regional saviour. It just never had the first idea how to go about it.
New York's twin towers, on the other hand, weren't knocked down as part of a hearts-and-minds campaign. Islamists of Osama's ilk wanted to provoke war. And they got their wish.
They have also succeeded, to an extent, in perpetuating the impression of a Muslim world under siege by infidels. This is, of course, an utterly false impression. Bush is anything but an infidel.
The US president and some of his colleagues are as liable as any Islamist to interpret the scriptures literally when it suits their purposes. On both sides the readings are selective - Bush appears never to have come across the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. Yet, confessionally and ideologically, he's driven by the blind faith of a fanatic.
The fact that there is essential agreement between American neoconservatives and Muslim conservatives on a range of fundamentals is demonstrated every time US delegates at UN conferences line up with representatives of governments with an Islamist bent in adopting a common stance on issues such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality.
In matters that they agree on as well as in terms of the contest they are engaged in, the position of the two sides can pithily be summarized: they are both Right - and wrong.
To liberal and left-of-centre forces tempted to turn their fury against rampant American imperialism into collaboration at any level with Islamist forces, all one can say is: Remember the Iranian revolution. Who did the mullahs turn on once the Shah and his royalists were out of the way?
That lesson is worth memorizing even though we are not faced with a parallel situation. In fact, it there's one small consolation amid the gloom, it's that the fundamentalist adversaries are engaged in a contest neither side can ultimately win.
Yet one crucial question remains unanswerable for the time being: How many deaths - how many 9/11s, Afghanistans and Iraqs - will it take before they back off, stop trying to re-mould in their image, and let us get on with our lives and with our struggles?
Email: mahirali2@netscape.net.