Michael Scott Doran:
Jacques Chirac and others--including, most recently, Pervez Musharraf--have surmised that the war in Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place. It has, by their argument, enraged Muslim opinion, mobilizing recruits to al Qaeda. They are wrong. The real stuff of politics in the Arab world is conflict between Muslims, not America and its policies.
Any serious evaluation of the war on terror must gauge the balance of power between the U.S. and its enemies, not the level of American popularity with the Arab public. It is a fatal miscalculation to treat the war as a zero-sum game, with every mistake by the Bush administration somehow translating into a victory for Osama bin Laden. In order to win the war, America need not be popular. In fact, it can afford to be hated. What it cannot tolerate is a global balance of power that favors al Qaeda, kindred groups, and rogue regimes that might be tempted to supply them with nuclear weapons. In this balance, many Muslims who flaunt their anti-Americanism are either neutral or actively engaged in the struggle against the enemies of the U.S..
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A controversy brewing in Saudi Arabia is instructive. Several weeks ago, when the U.S. was gearing up for the assault on Fallujah, Salman al-Awdah, a popular preacher who had close ties to al Qaeda in the '90s, signed, along with 25 colleagues, a declaration that made fighting the U.S. in Iraq an obligation for able-bodied Muslims. This sly document left it an open question as to whether Iraqis and Saudis were equally obliged to fight. The authors of the declaration wanted to have it both ways--to garner the benefits of association with al Qaeda abroad without suffering any consequences at home.
But many Saudis have grown tired of this game, and are working to expose clerics for playing fast and loose with peoples' lives. The reformist newspaper al-Watan revealed that Mr. al-Awdah subsequently enlisted the aid of the Saudi security services in order to prevent his son Muadh from joining the jihad in Iraq. Muadh, it seems, had decided with some friends to go and fight America. "God permitting," he said in a message to his family, "we have an appointment with paradise." In an effort to prevent him from keeping this date, Mr. al-Awdah contacted Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, No. 2 at the Saudi ministry of Interior. The authorities quickly found the young men, and returned them safely to their families.
Mr. Al-Awdah's frantic call for help revealed two levels of hypocrisy. First, it shattered his carefully crafted image as a courageous fighter for Islam, a man who speaks truth to power. For someone supposedly independent of the regime, he has cozy ties with the Saudi secret police. Second, it unmasked his true feeling about the anti-American jihad: Let Iraqis kill themselves.
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The very trajectory of Saudi politics over the last 18 months destroys the thesis that the Sunnis are lining up to join al Qaeda. Anti-Americanism may have soared in the kingdom, but al Qaeda's fortunes have plummeted. After the fall of the Taliban, the greatest blow that al Qaeda has received has been at the hands of the Saudi security services. Since May 2003, a month after Saddam's fall, they have arrested hundreds of militants, confiscated huge weapons caches, stemmed the flow of money to al Qaeda, and established formal mechanisms for exchanging intelligence with the U.S. All of this took place, it is important to emphasize, after the exercise of President Bush's much-maligned policies: It is U.S. "unilateralism" that precipitated the open conflict between al Qaeda and the Saudi regime.
A backlash is developing against unbridled anti-Americanism. Those who argue that the Iraq war has been a great boon to al Qaeda are selectively reading the talk coming out of the Arab world, and paying no attention to its actions. Anti-Americanism is a clever alibi, but hardly a unifying force across the great divides of a society.
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