Saturday, November 13, 2004
Clash of fundamentalisms. posted by Richard Seymour
"'The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy,' said Colonel Brandl. ‘But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him.'" ( Lieutenant-Colonel Gareth Brandl , on his second tour of duty in Iraq and in command of one of the battalions "at the tip of the spear" of the assault on Falluja)
"The most important thing is our religion, not Falluja and not the occupation. If the American solders came to me and converted to Islam, I won't fight them. We are here not because we want to liberate Iraq, we are here to fight the infidels and to make victorious the name of Islam." ( Abu Ossama , a Jihadi from Tunisia in Falluja)
The "marriage made in hell".
In a debate hosted by the London Review of Books in 2002, Jacqueline Rose offered the audience three quotes and challenged them to guess the authors. All three were similar in tone, evoking some "evil" which had to be confronted on pain of assured destruction, so it was only mildly surprising to learn that the authors were, respectively, Ariel Sharon, Tony Blair, and Osama bin Laden. The “extraordinary proximity” of this language, far from suggesting a "pure antagonism" between these figures, connoted something more like a "marriage made in hell". (Jacqueline Rose et al, “The War on Terrorism: Is there an alternative?” Logan Hall, Institute of Education, 15th May 2002). To further emphasise the point, we might borrow the analogy from Slavoj Zizek of the Gestalt drawing which appears to be an outline of a goose's head or a rabbit's head, depending on how one looks at it. Zizek, referring to the Balkans war, says:
If we look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist leader engaged in ethnic cleansing ... If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of a new capitalist global order, defending the strategic interests of capital ... attacking a sovereign country... (Slavoj Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail”, New Left Review 234, 1999.)
Against this "double blackmail", he suggests that rogue states like that headed by Milosevic are not the opposite of Western civilisation, but rather "its symptom, the place at which the hidden truth of the New World Order emerges". Instead of "rogue states" opposing "international norms" defended by Western democracies, we might see them as constitutive of the international norm. It was, presumably, normal conduct for the United States to assist Mobutu, just as they had Suharto, Hussein and so on. (See, for example, William Blum, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two”, New York, 2003.)
Al Qaeda, too, are not mere creatures of fanaticism reacting against degenerate liberalism. As John Gray points out, the loose networks that put the Al Qaeda idea into practise are part of the modern world of inter-imperial rivalries, intelligence gathering, elaborate funding networks etc. (John Gray, “Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern”, London, 2003). Having worked with the CIA, Mossad and the ISI, Islamist footsoldiers are as comfortable with a laptop as they are with the Holy Qu'ran. (For Mossad involvement with Islamists in Afghanistan, see Tariq Ali, “Between Hammer and Anvil”, New Left Review 2, March/April 2002; for CIA and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) collaboration, see Ahmed Rashid “Taliban”, New York, 2001). Bombed marketplaces and falling towers are part of the same world of shifting alliances, of centripetal and centrifugal reactions, and of imperial power.
The fundamentalism of neoconservatives and the religious Right in the US is contiguous with that of weaker global forces, not strictly antagonistic to it.