The Jihad Against the Jihadis

Image by rogiro via Flickr

How moderate Muslim leaders waged war on extremists—and won.

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 12, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Feb 22, 2010

September 11, 2001, was gruesome enough on its own terms, but for many of us, the real fear was of what might follow. Not only had Al Qaeda shown it was capable of sophisticated and ruthless attacks, but a far greater concern was that the group had or could establish a powerful hold on the hearts and minds of Muslims. And if Muslims sympathized with Al Qaeda's cause, we were in for a herculean struggle. There are more than 1.5 billion Muslims living in more than 150 countries across the world. If jihadist ideology became attractive to a significant part of this population, the West faced a clash of civilizations without end, one marked by blood and tears.

These fears were well founded. The 9/11 attacks opened the curtain on a world of radical and violent Islam that had been festering in the Arab lands and had been exported across the globe, from London to Jakarta. Polls all over the Muslim world revealed deep anger against America and the West and a surprising degree of support for Osama bin Laden. Governments in most of these countries were ambivalent about this phenomenon, assuming that the Islamists' wrath would focus on the United States and not themselves. Large, important countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia seemed vulnerable.

More than eight eventful years have passed, but in some ways it still feels like 2001. Republicans have clearly decided that fanning the public's fears of rampant jihadism continues to be a winning strategy. Commentators furnish examples of backwardness and brutality from various parts of the Muslim world—and there are many—to highlight the grave threat we face.

But, in fact, the entire terrain of the war on terror has evolved dramatically. Put simply, the moderates are fighting back and the tide is turning. We no longer fear the possibility of a major country succumbing to jihadist ideology. In most Muslim nations, mainstream rulers have stabilized their regimes and their societies, and extremists have been isolated. This has not led to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy or liberalism. But modern, somewhat secular forces are clearly in control and widely supported across the Muslim world. Polls, elections, and in-depth studies all confirm this trend.

The focus of our concern now is not a broad political movement but a handful of fanatics scattered across the globe. Yet Washington's vast nation-building machinery continues to spend tens of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are calls to do more in Yemen and Somalia. What we have to ask ourselves is whether any of that really will deter these small bands of extremists. Some of them come out of the established democracies of the West, hardly places where nation building will help. We have to understand the changes in the landscape of Islam if we are going to effectively fight the enemy on the ground, rather than the enemy in our minds.

Once, no country was more worrying than bin Laden's homeland. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, steward of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, had surpassed Egypt as the de facto leader of the Arab world because of the vast sums of money it doled out to Islamic causes—usually those consonant with its puritanical Wahhabi doctrines. Since 1979 the Saudi regime had openly appeased its homegrown Islamists, handing over key ministries and funds to reactionary mullahs. Visitors to Saudi Arabia after 9/11 were shocked by what they heard there. Educated Saudis—including senior members of the government—publicly endorsed wild conspiracy theories and denied that any Saudis had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Even those who accepted reality argued that the fury of some Arabs was inevitable, given America's one-sided foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli issue.

America's initial reaction to 9/11 was to focus on Al Qaeda. The group was driven out of its base in Afghanistan and was pursued wherever it went. Its money was tracked and blocked, its fighters arrested and killed. Many other nations joined in, from France to Malaysia. After all, no government wanted to let terrorists run loose in its land.

But a broader conversation also began, one that asked, "Why is this happening, and what can we do about it?" The most influential statement on Islam to come out of the post-9/11 era was not a presidential speech or an intellectual's essay. It was, believe it or not, a United Nations report. In 2002 the U.N. Development Program published a detailed study of the Arab world. The paper made plain that in an era of globalization, openness, diversity, and tolerance, the Arabs were the world's great laggards. Using hard data, the report painted a picture of political, social, and intellectual stagnation in countries from the Maghreb to the Gulf. And it was written by a team of Arab scholars. This was not paternalism or imperialism. It was truth.

The report, and many essays and speeches by political figures and intellectuals in the West, launched a process of reflection in the Arab world. The debate did not take the form that many in the West wanted—no one said, "You're right, we are backward." But still, leaders in Arab countries were forced to advocate modernity and moderation openly rather than hoping that they could quietly reap its fruits by day while palling around with the mullahs at night. The Bush administration launched a series of programs across the Muslim world to strengthen moderates, shore up civil society, and build forces of tolerance and pluralism. All this has had an effect. From Dubai to Amman to Cairo, in some form or another, authorities have begun opening up economic and political systems that had been tightly closed. The changes have sometimes been small, but the arrows are finally moving in the right direction.

Ultimately, the catalyst for change was something more lethal than a report. After 9/11, Al Qaeda was full of bluster: recall the videotapes of bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasting of their plans. Yet they confronted a far less permissive environment. Moving money, people, and materials had all become much more difficult. So they, and local groups inspired by them, began attacking where they could—striking local targets rather than global ones, including a nightclub and hotel in Indonesia, a wedding party in Jordan, cafés in Casablanca and Istanbul, and resorts in Egypt. They threatened the regimes that, either by accident or design, had allowed them to live and breathe.

Over the course of 2003 and 2004, Saudi Arabia was rocked by a series of such terrorist attacks, some directed against foreigners, but others at the heart of the Saudi regime—the Ministry of the Interior and compounds within the oil industry. The monarchy recognized that it had spawned dark forces that were now endangering its very existence. In 2005 a man of wisdom and moderation, King Abdullah, formally ascended to the throne and inaugurated a large-scale political and intellectual effort aimed at discrediting the ideology of jihadism. Mullahs were ordered to denounce suicide bombings, and violence more generally. Education was pried out of the hands of the clerics. Terrorists and terror suspects were "rehabilitated" through extensive programs of education, job training, and counseling. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus said to me, "The Saudi role in taking on Al Qaeda, both by force but also using political, social, religious, and educational tools, is one of the most important, least reported positive developments in the war on terror."

Perhaps the most successful country to combat jihadism has been the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia. In 2002 that country seemed destined for a long and painful struggle with the forces of radical Islam. The nation was rocked by terror attacks, and a local Qaeda affiliate, Jemaah Islamiah, appeared to be gaining strength. But eight years later, JI has been marginalized and main-stream political parties have gained ground, all while a young democracy has flowered after the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship.

Magnus Ranstorp of Stockholm's Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies recently published a careful study examining Indonesia's success in beating back extremism. The main lesson, he writes, is to involve not just government but civil society as a whole, including media and cultural figures who can act as counterforces to terrorism. (That approach obviously has greater potential in regions and countries with open and vibrant political systems—Southeast Asia, Turkey, and India—than in the Arab world.)

Iraq occupies an odd place in this narrative. While the invasion of Iraq inflamed the Muslim world and the series of blunders during the initial occupation period created dangerous chaos at the heart of the Middle East, Iraq also became a stage on which Al Qaeda played a deadly hand, and lost. As Al Qaeda in Iraq gained militarily, it began losing politically. It turned from its broader global ideology to focus on a narrow sectarian agenda, killing Shias and fueling a Sunni-Shia civil war. In doing so, the group also employed a level of brutality and violence that shocked most Iraqis. Where the group gained control, even pious people were repulsed by its reactionary behavior. In Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, Al Qaeda in Iraq would routinely cut off the fingers of smokers. Even those Sunnis who feared the new Iraq began to prefer Shia rule to such medievalism.

Since 9/11, Western commentators have been calling on moderate Muslim leaders to condemn jihadist ideology, issue fatwas against suicide bombing, and denounce Al Qaeda. Since about 2006, they've begun to do so in significant numbers. In 2007 one of bin Laden's most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter criticizing him for "fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering, and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families." That same year Abdulaziz al ash-Sheikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudis from engaging in jihad abroad and accused both bin Laden and Arab regimes of "transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims." One of Al Qaeda's own top theorists, Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, renounced its extremism, including the killing of civilians and the choosing of targets based on religion and nationality. Sherif—a longtime associate of Zawahiri who crafted what became known as Al Qaeda's guide to jihad—has called on militants to desist from terrorism, and authored a rebuttal of his former cohorts.

Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest and most prestigious school of Islamic learning, now routinely condemns jihadism. The Darul Uloom Deoband movement in India, home to the original radicalism that influenced Al Qaeda, has inveighed against suicide bombing since 2008. None of these groups or people have become pro-American or liberal, but they have become anti-jihadist.

This might seem like an esoteric debate. But consider: the most important moderates to denounce militants have been the families of radicals. In the case of both the five young American Muslims from Virginia arrested in Pakistan last year and Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, parents were the ones to report their worries about their own children to the U.S. government—an act so stunning that it requires far more examination, and praise, than it has gotten. This is where soft power becomes critical. Were the fathers of these boys convinced that the United States would torture, maim, and execute their children without any sense of justice, they would not have come forward. I doubt that any Chechen father has turned his child over to Vladimir Putin's regime.

The data on public opinion in the Muslim world are now overwhelming. London School of Economics professor Fawaz Gerges has analyzed polls from dozens of Muslim countries over the past few years. He notes that in a range of places—Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh—there have been substantial declines in the number of people who say suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets can be justified to defend Islam. Wide majorities say such attacks are, at most, rarely acceptable.

The shift has been especially dramatic in Jordan, where only 12 percent of Jordanians view suicide attacks as "often or sometimes justified" (down from 57 percent in 2005). In Indonesia, 85 percent of respondents agree that terrorist attacks are "rarely/never justified" (in 2002, by contrast, only 70 percent opposed such attacks). In Pakistan, that figure is 90 percent, up from 43 percent in 2002. Gerges points out that, by comparison, only 46 percent of Americans say that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."

This shift does not reflect a turn away from religiosity or even from a backward conception of Islam. That ideological struggle persists and will take decades, not years, to resolve itself. But the battle against jihadism has fared much better, much sooner, than anyone could have imagined.

The exceptions to this picture readily spring to mind—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen. But consider the conditions in those countries. In Afghanistan, jihadist ideology has wrapped itself around a genuine ethnic struggle in which Pashtuns feel that they are being dispossessed by rival groups. In Pakistan, the regime is still where Saudi Arabia was in 2003 and 2004: slowly coming to realize that the extremism it had fostered has now become a threat to its own survival. In Yemen, the state simply lacks the basic capacity to fight back. So the rule might simply be that in those places where a government lacks the desire, will, or capacity to fight jihadism, Al Qaeda can continue to thrive.

But the nature of the enemy is now quite different. It is not a movement capable of winning over the Arab street. Its political appeal does not make rulers tremble. The video messages of bin Laden and Zawahiri once unsettled moderate regimes. Now they are mostly dismissed as almost comical attempts to find popular causes to latch onto. (After the financial crash, bin Laden tried his hand at bashing greedy bankers.)

This is not an argument to relax our efforts to hunt down militants. Al Qaeda remains a group of relentless, ruthless killers who are trying to recruit other fanatics to carry out hideous attacks that would do terrible damage to civilized society. But the group's aura is gone, its political influence limited. Its few remaining fighters are spread thinly throughout the world and face hostile environments almost everywhere.

America is no longer engaged in a civilizational struggle throughout the Muslim world, but a military and intelligence campaign in a set of discrete places. Now, that latter struggle might well require politics, diplomacy, and development assistance—in the manner that good foreign policy always does (Petraeus calls this a "whole-of-government strategy"). We have allies; we need to support them. But the target is only a handful of extremist organizations that have found a small group of fanatics to carry out their plans. To put it another way, even if the United States pursues a broad and successful effort at nation building in Afghanistan and Yemen, does anyone really think that will deter the next Nigerian misfit—or fanatic from Detroit—from getting on a plane with chemicals in his underwear? Such people cannot be won over. They cannot be reasoned with; they can only be captured or killed.

The enemy is not vast; the swamp is being drained. Al Qaeda has already lost in the realm of ideology. What remains is the battle to defeat it in the nooks, crannies, and crevices of the real world.

Taking It to the Streets - Harvard Magazine

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by Nell Porter Brown

DaviD C. grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With no father around and a drug-addicted mother, he moved through foster homes, gathering a fragile sense of worth from a gang of friends. “All I aspired to was being important on the street,” he says. “There was nothing about a future.” He spent five years in juvenile detention and a few in prison, and still has a reputation among local cops for living up to his nickname, “Devious,” for once escaping through the police-station roof.

At 37, he is still hanging out with the kids—in the schools, at their homes, the hospital, or the mall. But as a street worker with the city’s Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, he now prevents the very violence he once provoked.

Like David, most of the street workers are ex-gang members or former local criminals, says Teny Oded Gross, M.T.S. ’01, the institute’s founding executive director. Their backgrounds make them uniquely suited for what it takes to thwart a single act of violence: hours of face-to-face counseling of kids during their most heated, impulsive moments—when they might otherwise pull out a gun and do irreversible damage. “My job is not pretty—it’s not sending kids to Harvard, or anything fancy,” Gross explains. “It’s about keeping kids in this city alive between the ages of 14 and 23.”

The kids are even willing to die for their housing projects. “These beefs are territorial, not ethnic or racial,” David explains on a drive through the darkened streets to visit kids at the Chad Brown Housing Development. A group of teenagers eyes the passing car. “They look at every occupant, every car,” he says. “If you see one slow down with people inside wearing hoods, then you worry. That makes your hair stand on end.”

This fall, gunmen on foot shot a six-year-old boy, reportedly while aiming for his mother’s girlfriend because she was in a rival project—an accident racked up to “the cost of the game,” David says. “I tell them, ‘You’re willing to go down for something that doesn’t even belong to you—a building made of bricks, and land owned by the government—nothing you can even pass on to your kids. Why would you do that? Does that make sense?’ But it gives them a sense of purpose when there is nothing for these kids to do. If it were not for Teny and the institute, there would be no role models or people to help kids like I was.”

Gross is a philosophically minded, longtime street worker himself. During the 1990s anti-violence campaign known as the Boston Miracle, he was active in the Dorchester neighborhood, doing community outreach, gang mediation, job creation, and skills training. He also taught kids to document their lives with photography. Building partnerships—with the police, for example, despite local animosities—is a particular strength.

Being a former Israeli Army sergeant helps. “I’ve been both a victim of violence through [the legacy of] the Holocaust and then was top dog when it came to the Palestinians. I’m part of the weak and part of the strong; that’s a very humbling experience,” says Gross, who moved to Boston to be near his sister in 1989. “I always see things through the eyes of the kids and through the eyes of the police. Keeping those tensions in your head—some people would say that is what makes you good at this kind of work.”

The institute where he works now was established in 2001 by Father Ray Malm and Sister Ann Keefe, the pastoral team at St. Michael’s Church, in the poor neighborhood of South Providence. Catalyzed by growing youth violence and the death of 15-year-old Jennifer Rivera—shot in the head in front of her house to prevent her from testifying in a pending murder case—they drafted a broad mission: “To teach by word and example the principles of nonviolence and to foster a community that addresses potentially violent situations with nonviolent solutions” based on the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Gross has built the nonprofit organization from a few unpaid nonviolence trainers into a $1.2-million agency with a 28-member team. By the end of the year, he plans to open a four-story headquarters in St. Michael’s vacant convent, with tutors, a gym, art and theater classes, and plenty of musical outlets—including a sound- and video-recording studio—thanks to $4.5 million in contributions from private donors, foundations, the city, and the state. “We’re really good at going in and intervening,” Gross says, “but to do the work of really transforming someone takes a longer time. This building will focus on youth development.” Besides running the street crew, institute staff members operate a nonviolence training program (Gross has worked with young people from as far away as Belfast and Guatemala) and a victims’ support center; they also mediate conflicts in families and schools and coordinate a summer-jobs program.

“Teny is the single most important partnership we have to fight crime and violence,” says Providence police chief Dean M. Esserman, a former prosecutor and Dartmouth graduate. “Everywhere I go—to every shooting, the ER, in the classrooms, to every wake, to every funeral—I see Teny, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. He and the street workers are about building sustained relationships of trust. The kids know that they love them—they don’t get that from many adults.”

With a diverse population of 175,000, Providence is a small city in a tiny state. But it has the third-highest child-poverty rate in America (tied with New Orleans); more than half the city’s public-school children qualify for free lunches. Moreover, the state topped the nation for unemployment this fall, with an 8.8 percent rate, and reported a record number of home foreclosures. “We are two cities—one of wealth and one of poverty,” Gross says, “and they rarely meet.” Violence, he asserts, is sparked by environmental, not biological, factors: “In my mind it’s very clear: There is not a lot of opportunity—economic or otherwise—and these kids see failure all around them all the time. It’s traumatizing. They feel pushed into a corner and sometimes violence is the only way they feel they have some control over their lives.”

Violent crime in Providence fell overall between 2002 and 2007; Esserman attributes that to community policing, increased accountability—and the work of the institute. The hottest spot is in the West End, where most of the city’s 40 gangs (with their estimated 1,600 members) stake out their claims among the largest concentration of poor and minority families. “The problem is not all gangs—that is just the People magazine view,” cautions Esserman. “The problem is that the new drug in American culture is violence. Our children are growing up with it all around them—the media, the video arcade, in their neighborhoods. Their homes are not sanctuaries.” With the economy spiraling downward, Gross worries about the coming year. “Every day we see people just out of jail, trying to get out of gangs, and it’s extremely desperate for them to even find work,” he says. “We’ve got our finger in the dike now, but the pressure could be too much.”

Gangs aren’t the sole focus. Plenty of kids need helping staying in school and coping with family troubles. One night in November, a mother came to the institute with her 12-year-old son, who was being bullied by his older half-brother—recently returned from the Dominican Republic and on the cusp of joining a gang. As she met privately with David, Gross talked to the boy about cartoons and art, and they went through a book of photographs of Rhode Island’s civic and community leaders. “He’s hungry for this kind of interaction; he’s very sensitive,” Gross says later. “He would probably do well in a middle-class, artistic life. But he’s being harassed, and if you fail to protect him the way adults are supposed to, he could become very tough very quickly.” (Gross has since contacted the chairman of the board of the community art center to get the boy into some classes.)

He believes in the redemptive powers of art and culture. Just as Gross used to ferry Boston youth to hockey games, then over to Harvard Square’s bookstores and cafés, now David routinely takes his charges to museums, concerts, and to Brown University events. Often, a simple jaunt to suburbia “can be a revelation for these kids,” says David. “I like to show them how people can get along and shop in stores and feel free and happy without looking over their shoulders and worrying about getting shot at. To the kids, this life is like TV.” Adds Gross, “Becoming middle class and learning just takes thousands of interactions. It’s all about exposure.”

Gross’s home is filled with etchings, paintings, and sculptures from his family, friends, and wife, Julia Clinker, a photographer who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and takes primary care of their two young sons. It was while earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1990 that Gross, who had plans “to photograph how the police treated people,” first met Boston community activist Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III ’83; he ended up teaching art to kids through the Azusa Christian Community (begun as a Harvard student group in the 1980s), where Rivers was pastor, and its affiliated Ella J. Baker House, which serves high-risk families in Dorchester. During the next decade, he was based primarily at Baker House as a teacher, street worker, and community organizer.

The work was faith-based, but “whether you believe in God or not was (and is) not critical,” says Gross, who is basically agnostic after years of studying religion. “I believe that people are capable of living up to their potential if given love and attention and opportunities. I connect with the communities of faith because they are dedicated around principles that I agree with—that every human life is worth something and worth doing something about.”

Divinity School “was a great place for me to ask new questions; I’m a much more lethal debater thanks to Harvard,” he says. He was especially drawn to professors Harvey Cox and Kevin Madigan and former faculty member Father J. Bryan Hehir. He took “Justice” with Bass professor of government Michael Sandel and still listens to the lectures through his iPod while jogging. “Harvard was a respite from the streets,” he continues, “and it renewed me to come and do this”: move to Providence (where his wife grew up) and take on the job of building up the nascent institute.

Gross’s own religious background is complicated. His mother, a Serb, deplored organized religion. His father, a Croatian Jew, once aspired to become a Catholic priest largely because he was hidden in a monastery during World War II (his mother died in the Holocaust); his eventual move to Israel was to be near his sole remaining relative, a sister. “My father’s the one who taught me all about Jesus,” Gross says. “It was not an observant Jewish household; we also celebrated Christmas. But in Israel, you begin to absorb the culture and I did. I still love the slowing down on Fridays. I really miss that.”

Though far from being a violent young man, Gross says he has always tended to “question everything” and was somewhat rebellious. He recalls breaking a window, slapping a teacher, throwing a kid over a table—“typical, aggressive kid stuff”—and says fighting at school and on the playground was the norm. “In the U.S. now, these juvenile actions would have resulted in a criminal record,” he adds. “But I was also full of life and was interested in philosophy and ethics and the world. I read literature and studied in school.”

Childhood, he thinks, should be about making mistakes, and about adults helping you learn. Tightening the grip of authority rarely helps. “The British got tough on the Irish—and you got a rebellion. We got tough on the Palestinians and we got a rebellion,” he asserts. “You put someone to the wall and usually they will have to act back.”

Violence and aggression are inherently exciting, he notes, especially to young men. He recalls driving a van-load of Boston kids home once: they saw their enemies out the window and “It was like a battalion reaction—they got all excited and started talking about who they were and what they did, and how they were going to get them,” he reports. “These crews challenge each other like military units. They have their enemies and their friends, their fights, and their girlfriends, and the drugs and the drinking—it’s these same things that excite people all around the world.”

In such an environment, how does nonviolence compete? Gross mentions the case of one 19-year-old in Providence, “VA,” a suspected murderer assigned to David. VA’s mother is in federal prison on drug charges and his best friend was ambushed and killed last summer while sneaking up on a rival crew. “VA is a real leader,” Gross points out. “What would he be if he’d grown up in an affluent suburb? A jock, a star athlete, captain of the team. The kids who go to Harvard are not passive wimps—they’re very aggressive, very driven.”

But for street kids, he says, that sense of power too often “comes through mowing people down with an Uzi. I think what we’re pushing for is a more evolved form of aggression.”

Iran: Feisty Opposition Starts New Protest Campaign

By Robin Wright

Phase 2 has begun. Six weeks after millions took to the streets to protest Iran's presidential election, their uprising has morphed into a feistier, more imaginative and potentially enduring campaign.

The second phase plays out in a boycott of goods advertised on state-controlled television. Just try buying a certain brand of dairy product, an Iranian human-rights activist told me, and the person behind you in line is likely to whisper, "Don't buy that. It's from an advertiser." It includes calls to switch on every electric appliance in the house just before the evening TV news to trip up Tehran's grid. It features quickie "blitz" street demonstrations, lasting just long enough to chant "Death to the dictator!" several times but short enough to evade security forces. It involves identifying paramilitary Basij vigilantes linked to the crackdown and putting marks in green — the opposition color — or pictures of protest victims in front of their homes. It is scribbled antiregime slogans on money. And it is defiant drivers honking horns, flashing headlights and waving V signs at security forces. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

The tactics are unorganized, largely leaderless and only just beginning. They spread by e-mail, websites and word of mouth. But their variety and scope indicate that Iran's uprising is not a passing phenomenon like the student protests of 1999, which were quickly quashed. This time, Iranians are rising above their fears. Although embryonic, today's public resolve is reminiscent of civil disobedience in colonial India before independence or in the American Deep South in the 1960s. Mohandas Gandhi once mused that "even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled." That quotation is now popular on Iranian websites.

Its impact varies, but Phase 2 has begun to exact a price from those who ignore the popular will. Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former member of parliament, told me that some companies have cut back on TV advertising, and some stores have dropped advertised brands. A new boycott of text messaging could be costing a state company more than $1 million a day. "There is optimism that protests will continue one way or another," says Farideh Farhi, an Iranian analyst at the University of Hawaii, "because people who are normally not rabblerousers are finding ways to counter the government crackdown."

The new camaraderie of resistance was visible at the July 17 Friday prayer sermon given by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani at Tehran University. Nonreligious Iranians turned up for political reasons. The devout showed them how to carry out the rituals, with strangers handing out newspapers as substitute prayer mats for overflow crowds. Men and women prayed together, a regime taboo. When Rafsanjani referred to detainees, the crowd interrupted by roaring, "Political prisoners must be freed!" Calling for support of Iran's Supreme Leader, who backed the crackdown, another prayer official intoned, "We are all your soldiers, Khamenei! We await your orders!" But supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi shouted back, "We are your soldiers, Mousavi! We await your orders!" And when told to shout "Down with America!" the crowd instead chanted "Down with Russia!" — whose leaders had congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election and hosted him four days later. (See pictures of people around the world protesting Iran's election.)

The protests tap into a long Iranian tradition. The seeds of the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution — which produced Iran's first parliament and constitution — were planted in the Tobacco Protest of the 19th century, when even women in the royal harem stopped smoking their water pipes to protest an exclusive concession given by the Shah to a British company. Protests, strikes and boycotts prevented Iran from becoming a British protectorate in 1920, secured the reappointment of reformist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952 and — most significant of all — ended 2,500 years of dynastic rule in 1979 and ushered in the Islamic Republic.

The current uprising is nowhere near as widespread as that of 1979. Yet the activism is creating a new political space in Iran. The public is defining its own agenda, with Rafsanjani, Mousavi and other opposition figures responding to sentiment on the street rather than directing it. After meeting on July 20 with the families of people detained following the election, Mousavi warned the power structure, "You are facing something new: an awakened nation, a nation that has been born again and is here to defend its achievements."

As Iran's second phase of protests takes shape, the regime's future may depend on whether it heeds that warning.

Billion-Dollar Mystery in Iraq

posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 08/04/2009

A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

It involves what the New York Times calls an "extremist Shiite group" that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq's ministry of finance in 2007.

The story so far:

Today, the Times reports:

"An extremist Shiite group that has boasted of killing five American soldiers and of kidnapping five British contractors has agreed to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis, after meeting with Iraq's prime minister.

"The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, met with members of the group, Asa'ib al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, over the weekend, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, confirming reports. 'They decided they are no longer using violence, and we welcome them,' he said in a telephone interview.

"Mr. Dabbagh first revealed the negotiations in remarks on Monday to Al Iraqiya, the state television network. 'We have reached an agreement to resolve all problems, especially regarding detainees who do not have Iraqi blood on their hands,' he said. He did not say anything about British victims of the group."

In other words, Maliki met with a bunch of Shiite terrorists, welcomed them with open arms. Why would he do that?

In addition, the Times reports, the terrorists have a "liaison to the government." By coincidence, his name is also Maliki, and he wants to get into the government's favor and take part in the "political process":

"Salam al-Maliki, the insurgent group's liaison to the government, said in a telephone interview that the group had not renounced fighting the Americans. 'Of course we want to get into the political process, because circumstances have improved, and the United States is out right now,' said Mr. Maliki, who is not related to the prime minister. 'We told the government anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands, you should keep him in jail. We are only fighting the United States.'"

The Guardian, in a related story, suggests that the kidnapping of the five Britons was carried out with government collusion by a team of 80 to 100 men, dressed as Interior Ministry police officials and driving a convoy of 19 white SUVs. Here's the Guardian story:

"An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds.

"A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.

"Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet."

And this crucial piece:

"Moore was employed to install a new computer tracking system which would have followed billions of dollars of oil and foreign aid money through the ministry of finance. The 'Iraq Financial Management Information System' was nearly complete and about to go online at the time of the kidnap.

"The senior intelligence source said: 'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre [at the ministry of finance], this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed.'"

The Times story, which notes that the terrorist group also killed five US soldiers, says that the five British contractors were seized in retaliation for the detention of some of the group's leaders, after the killing of the Americans. But that makes no sense. Why would they organize and carry out a 19-SUV, 80-person raid on the finance ministry just as retaliation? And could this group have done so? As the Guardian points out, only a government agency could have pulled off the attack.

You can watch a 12-minute video on the case at the Guardian site.

Curiously, the Times report adds: "American military officials say the group is supported by Iran."

I tried getting some background on the League of the Righteous, and I found a posting on the Long War Journal about them, including alleged ties to Iran's Qods Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards.

There's more background here, too, at the Long War Journal.

Untold Truths About the American Revolution

By Howard Zinn, July 3, 2009

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

How many people died in the Revolutionary War?

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.

You might consider that worth it, or you might not.

Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.

Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?

Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.

What about class divisions?

Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.

It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.

There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?

We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.

And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.

Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.

We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.” The History Channel is running an adaptation called “The People Speak.” This article is an excerpt from Zinn’s cover story in the July issue of The Progressive.