Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 2

By guest author Ian Hansen

CIA leaflet for bounty hunters, offering $5-10K for Al Qaeda and Taliban members, or even foreigners.
CIA leaflet offering huge bounties for capture of Al Qaeda and Taliban members (even “foreigners”). Image in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when many U.S. and international experts on terrorism said that Al Qaeda as such “did not exist.” The claim was that Al Qaeda, especially after the post-9/11 worldwide manhunt for its leaders, was effectively little more than an internet ideology that could inspire independent groups of people who wanted to kill Americans under religious cover. For a long time, Al Qaeda had no core managing operation–no Al Qaeda central pulling the strings.

I imagine this is still the case to a large extent, but it seems that all the attempts to use civilian-indifferent, law-indifferent, truth-indifferent mass violence to stamp out a quasi-non-existent group have brought it more fully into existence. These means of fighting a phantom enemy have also brought into existence groups like Al-Shabab, and the latter is effectively aligned with the ideological goals of Al Qaeda, if not with Al Qaeda itself.

And the flowering of this ideological pathology is arguably in the interests of those who profit from violence in this country and “the West” more generally (which now effectively includes cooperative parts of “the East” as well). The willingness to use such backfiring tactics in the “War on Al Qaeda and Associated Forces” is increasingly reminiscent of the vacuum cleaner salesperson who throws dirt on your rug and then vacuums it up.

The more Al Qaeda can be increased in worldwide presence by U.S. global imperialism, the more justification there is for the continued existence of our bloated military-intelligence complex, the national security and surveillance state, the scraps of core Constitutional and human rights protections, and the concentrations of wealth in increasingly few hands.

So I see nothing positive about the people of Fallujah being taken down by the violence-loving dominionist sociopaths of Al Qaeda. I hope the people of Fallujah push them out as they did the U.S., ideally with a nonviolent movement, since nonviolent movements tend to work best according to all the existing empirical research on how to overthrow autocracy and oligarchy.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.