Tag: al Qaeda

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

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.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part I

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Ian Hansen

As a supporter of human rights and locally-controlled democracy in Iraq, I am dismayed to see Fallujah fall to Al Qaeda.

Al-Qa'ida training manual
Al-Qa’ida training manual, CIA Virtual Museum. Image in public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

Some may see poetic justice for the U.S. in this development: the U.S. war of aggression has clearly backfired in Fallujah. But there’s no justice in it for the people of that historic city. I would have been happy to see Fallujah residents lead a nonviolent civil disobedience movement to regain control over their communities, but the ascendance of Al Qaeda there is a tragedy.

The people of Fallujah have already endured enough massacres, destruction of the city’s ancient buildings and mosques, and chemical weapons horrors from the U.S. siege in 2004. And although the draconian rule of the U.S.-aligned Iraqi Security Forces should be overthrown by local democratic rule, the siege by Al Qaeda is, if anything, a regression, not an improvement.

Al Qaeda is not a progressive organization, and there is nothing redeeming about it. It’s a violent oppressive scourge on Islam in much the same way that the Christian Coalition–and the U.S. military-industrial-ideological machine generally–is a violent and oppressive scourge on Christianity.

It is not a coincidence that Al Qaeda as a movement arises largely from the Arabian Peninsula, most of which is controlled by an oil-rich U.S.-Israeli ally (Saudi Arabia). Saudi Arabia–one of the most draconian autocracies in the Middle East–is playing a disgraceful role in the Syrian disaster right now; it just got around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Al Qaeda is at odds with the Saudi regime in obvious ways, but in other obvious ways Al Qaeda mirrors its core values.

And I don’t think that violent decision-makers in the U.S. actually want Al Qaeda to disappear (though until more evidence pours in, this is more of an accusation against our leadership’s unconscious intentions than their conscious ones).

Even at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda was originally a pretty paltry and unpopular group. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the drone assassinations, and the other Joint Special Operation Command-CIA paramilitary killings all over the world seem to have only magnified Al Qaeda’s international presence.

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.

Engaging peace with the Peace Corps

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Ellie Gutowski

The Peace Corps is an initiative of the U.S. government to promote peace and friendship among participating countries and the United States. It was started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, who called for Americans to serve abroad. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger and in Malawi from 2010 to 2013.

Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy discuss the Peace Corps in 1961
Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy discuss the Peace Corps in 1961. Image in public domain.

The Peace Corps helped me to understand the world from a broader  perspective. In Niger, I was a newcomer to a Muslim community where a family cared for me, listening patiently as I spoke in broken Hausa, pulling my water from a well that was over a football field deep, and sharing two meals per day of pounded millet and okra.

My time in Niger allowed me and my American friends and family to question and combat stereotypes perpetuated in the U.S. media about people from other lands.

I lived in that village for nine days until Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb ventured over the Mali border and kidnapped two French men from a restaurant. After hearing this news on the radio, the Peace Corps chose to evacuate, and I was reassigned. Peace Corps volunteers had to leave their communities, all due to what seemed like a relatively small group of desperate individuals.

Before the vehicle came to get me in the morning, I visited newborn twins and my Nigerien host mother finally let me pound millet–a difficult task that she had previously not allowed me to do. When I was back in America, she called me on my cell phone to greet me in Hausa.

I hope that the connections I made and my efforts to understand another culture were a step in promoting peace locally and abroad, and I am inspired by others doing the same.

Ellie Gutowski has spent the past four years working in the realm of social justice. Before joining the Peace Corps, she developed a peer support program at Whitman Walker Health in Washington, D.C. She served in the Peace Corps  as a Community Health Advisor, first in Niger and then for 27 months in the southern African country of Malawi, where she worked on HIV prevention. She is currently laboratory manager for the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) in the Boston University Psychology Department.

Syria: Between a rock and a hard place

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author, Michael Corgan

Does the ongoing Syrian civil war have echoes of the Spanish civil war of nearly 80 years ago?

Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria.
Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria. Photo by Bernd Schwabe used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

If the conflict were only between the Syrian government and rebel forces (as was true in opposing Franco), then it would be easy for liberal or humanitarian interventionists to oppose what Assad has done to his people and support the rebellion. Indeed, many have already done so.

During the Spanish civil war, as far as outsiders were concerned, there were communists versus Nazis, and a choice was unappealing on those grounds. In Syria today, outsiders of equally unsavory character and practices are intervening for their own purposes, and that makes choosing sides problematic.

Hezbollah supports Assad and Al Qaeda has an increasing role in shaping rebel efforts. How can one aid either side without aiding those Shia and Sunni extremist militant groups so fond of terrorists tactics, and so responsible, in Syria as elsewhere, for the deaths of many innocent Muslims?

As far as outside interests go, you also have the U.S. trying to assert some role in the area versus Russia, which is loath to abandon a long-time client state and lose its only overseas base.

The biggest problem is for the neighboring outsiders. Turkey can probably handle the huge influx of refugees from the fighting, but Jordan is strained and poor fractured Lebanon could fall apart as enlivened Shia-Sunni fighting spills into its land.

There seems to be no workable ending in sight. Nor even a less deadly one. The best that the watching world can do now is to take care of the refugees whose numbers continually swell.