notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part II)

(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'

the surge in history:
Military escalation was also LBJ's answer to unrelenting attacks by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in an uncontrollable civil war -- an increase from 16,800 advisers in 1963 to 545,000 combat troops by 1968. But compare that with Bush's increase of about 28,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. If more than half a million troops couldn't succeed in Vietnam, is a total U.S. force of more than 160,000 likely to pacify Iraq? And what can be done when one escalation doesn't do the trick? The more you double down, Johnson and Nixon found, the harder it is to cut your losses.
(...) [the chronology of withdrawal] We do know that despite Nixon's and Kissinger's behind-the-scenes pragmatism, they continued the fighting for four bloody years -- punctuated by their Cambodian "incursion" in the spring of 1970, a U.S.-backed South Vietnamese offensive in Laos in 1971 and the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972. Throughout, they knew that victory was impossible but hoped that military pressure on Hanoi would force the North Vietnamese into what Nixon called "peace with honor" -- a deal that could end the United States' commitment while preserving its international credibility.
(...) Bush's political concerns are far less personal. He wants a Republican successor, but he faces no direct electoral retribution. No matter what happens in Iraq, his presidency will end in January 2009. That frees him up considerably to stay the course -- despite the unease that doing so is creating among the GOP's presidential candidates and among congressional Republicans who fear that Iraq will cost them the chance to win back the Hill.

goodman interviews chomsky and zinn:
[goodman] The health ministry has found 70% of Baghdad school children showing symptoms of trauma-related stress.
(...) [chomsky] The most recent studies of the Red Cross show that Iraq has suffered the worst decline in child mortality, infant mortality, an increase in infant mortality known. But it’s since 1990. That is, it's a combination of the affect of the murderers' and brutal sanctions regime, which we don’t talk much about, which devastated society through the 1990's and strengthened Saddam Hussein, compelled the population to rely on him for survival, which probably saved him from the fate of a whole long series of other tyrants who were overthrown by their own people supported by the U.S.
(...) [chomsky] This is a clear-cut case of aggression and violation of the U.N. Charter, a supreme international crime and in the words of the Nuremburg Tribunal, aggressors simply have no rights to make any decisions. They have responsibilities. The responsibilities are, first of all to pay enormous reparations and that includes for the sanctions-- the effect of the sanctions, in fact it ought to include the support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980's, which was torture for Iraqis and worse for Iranians.
(...) [chomsky] about 80 percent think that the presence of U.S. Troops increases the level of violence. Over 60% think that troops are legitimate targets. This isn’t for all of Iraq, if you take the figures of Arab Iraq where the troops are actually deployed the figures are higher.
(...) [chomsky] I mean the question is not can you win. The question is should you be there.
(...) [chomksy] The United States certainly has the capacity to wipe the country out. If that's winning, yeah, you can win. It's -- in terms of the goals that the united states attempted to achieve, the U.S. Government, not the -- the United States, to install a client regime, which would be obedient to the United States, which would permit military bases, which would allow U.S. and British corporations to control the energy resources and so on, in terms of achieving that goal, I don't know if they can achieve that. But that they could destroy the country, that's beyond question.
(...) [zinn] We saw villages as far away from any military target as you can imagine, absolutely destroyed. And children killed and their graves still fresh by American jet planes coming over in the middle of the night. When I hear them talk about John McCain as a hero, I say to myself, oh, yeah, he was a prisoner and prisoners are maltreated and everywhere and this is terrible. But John McCain, like the other American fliers, what were they doing? They were bombing defenseless people. And so, yes Vietnam is something that by the way, is still not taught very well in American schools. I spoke to a group of people in an advanced history class not long ago, 100 kids, asked them how many people here have heard of the My Lai Massacre? No hand was raised. We are not teaching -- if we were teaching the history of Vietnam as it should be taught, then the American people from the start would have opposed the war instead of waiting three or four years for a majority of the American people to declare their opposition to the war.
(...) [chomsky] it’s worth remembering, one often hears today justified complaints about how little protest there is against the war in Iraq. But that's very misleading. And here is as Howard was saying a little sense of history is useful. The protest against the war in Iraq is far beyond the protest against Vietnam on any comparable level. Large-scale protest against the war in Vietnam did not begin until there were several hundred thousand U.S. troops in South Vietnam, the country had been virtually destroyed, the bombing had been extended to the north, to Laos, soon to Cambodia, where incidentally we have just learned, – or rather we haven't learned, but we could learn if we had a free press, that the bombing in Cambodia, which is known to be horrendous, was actually five times as high as was reported, greater than the entire allied bombing in all of World War II on a defenseless peasant society, which turned peasants into enraged fanatics. During those years the Khmer Rouge grew from nothing, a few thousand scattered people to hundreds of thousands and that led to the part of the Cambodia that we're allowed to think about.
(...) [chomsky] But the real protest against the war in Vietnam came at a period far beyond what has yet been reached in Iraq. First few years of the war, there was almost nothing. So little protest that virtually nobody in the United States even knows when the war began. Kennedy invaded South Vietnam in 1962. That was after seven years of efforts to impose a Latin-American style terror state, which had killed tens of thousands of people and elicited resistance. In 1962, Kennedy sent the U.S. Air force to start bombing South Vietnam, under South Vietnamese markings, but nobody was deluded by that, initiated chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover, and started programs which rounded openly millions of people into what amounted to concentration camps, called strategic hamlets where they were surrounded by barbed wire to protect them as it was said from the guerrillas, who everyone knew they were voluntarily supporting, an indigenous South Vietnamese resistance. That was 1962.
(...) [chomsky] In fact right through the protests, which did reach a substantial scale and were really significant, especially the resistance, it was mostly directed against the war in North Vietnam. The attack on South Vietnam was mostly ignored. Incidentally the same is true of government planning. We know about that from the Pentagon Papers and the subsequent documents, there was meticulous planning about the bombing of the North. Where should you bomb? And how far should you go? And so on. Bombing of the South in the internal documents there's almost nothing. There's a simple reason for it. The bombing of the south was costless. Nobody's going to shoot you down. Nobody's going to complain. Do whatever you want. Wipe the place out. Which is pretty much what happened. ... Which even in 1965, was triple the scale of the bombing of the North, and it had been going on for years. Now there is a great deal more protest.
(...) [zinn] Well, I suppose if you believe that Henry Kissinger deserved the Nobel Prize, you would think that the war ended because Henry Kissinger went to Paris and negotiated with the Vietnamese. But the war ended, I think, because finally after that slow buildup of protests, I think the war ended because the protests in the United States reached a crescendo, which couldn't be ignored. And because the GI's coming home were turning against the war and because soldiers in the field were -- well, they were throwing grenades under the officer's tents, the “Fragging Phenomenon.” There's a book called Soldiers in Revolt by a man named David Cortright and he details how much dissidence there was, how much opposition to the war there was among soldiers in Vietnam and how this was manifested in their behavior and desertions. A huge number of desertions and essentially the government of the United States found it impossible to continue the war. The ROTC chapters were closing down. ... And resistance movements -- and this is what we are finding out in Iraq today -- resistance movements against a foreign aggressor, they will get very desperate, they will not give in. And the resistance movement in Vietnam would not surrender.
(...) [zinn] That is, when we called in 1967, well, I wrote a book in 1967 called, Vietnam, the Logic of Withdrawal and the reaction to that was, you know, we can't withdraw. It will be terrible if we withdraw. There will be civil war if we withdraw. There will be a bloodbath if we withdraw. And so we didn't withdraw and the war went on for another six years, another eight years, six years for the Americans to withdraw, eight years totally. The war went on and on and another 20,000 Americans were killed. Another million Vietnamese were killed.
(...) [zinn] And when we finally withdrew, there was no bloodbath. I mean it wasn’t that everything was fine when we withdrew and there were re-education camps set up, and the Chinese people were driven out of Hanoi on boats, so it wasn’t -- . But the point is, that there was no bloodbath, the bloodbath was what we were doing in Vietnam. Just as today when they say, oh, there will be civil war, there will be chaos if we withdraw from Iraq. There is civil war, there is chaos and no one is pointing out what we have done to Iraq. Two million people driven from their homes and children in dire straits, no waters, no food. And so the remembrance of Vietnam is important if we are going to make it clear that we must withdraw from Iraq and find another way, not for the United States, for some international group, preferably a group composed mostly of representatives of Arab nations to come into Iraq and help mediate whatever strife there is among the various fractions in Iraq. But certainly the absolute necessary first step in Iraq now is what we should have done in Vietnam in 1967 and that is simply get out as fast as ships and planes can carry us out.
(...) [chomsky] They proposed a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border, a settlement, which included the wording of UN-242, the first major resolution, recognition of the right of each state in the region to exist in peace and security within secure and recognized boundaries, that would include Israel and a Palestinian state. It was vetoed by the United States and a similar resolution vetoed in 1980.
(...) [chomsky] I won't run through the whole history, but throughout this whole history, with temporary and rare exceptions, there is a couple here and here, the US has simply blocked the settlement and still does and Israel rejects it. Sometimes it's dramatic. In 1988, the Palestinian National Council, their governing body, formally accepted a two-state settlement. They tacitly accepted it before. There was a reaction from Israel immediately; it was a coalition government, Shimon Perez, Yitzhak Shamir. Their reaction was, quoting, that “there cannot be an additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Israel.” An additional implying that Jordan already is a Palestinian state. So there can't be another one and the fate of the territories will be settled according to the guidelines of the state of Israel. Shortly after that, the Bush number one administration totally endorsed that proposal -- that was the Baker plan, James Baker plan of December 1989 -- fully endorsed that proposal, extreme rejectionism.
(...) [chomsky] But that's the basic frame work, supported by the Arab world, by Europe, by the non-aligned countries, Latin America and others. It is supported by Iran, it doesn't get reported here. One loves Ahmadinejad's crazed statements, but do not report the statements of his superior, Ayatollah Khameni who's in charge of international affairs -- Ahmadinejad doesn’t have anything to do with it -- who has declared a couple of times that Iran supports the Arab league position. Hezbollah in Lebanon has made it clear that they don't like it, they don't believe in recognizing Israel, but if the Palestinians accept it, they will not disrupt it, they are a Lebanese organization. And Hamas has said, they would accept the Arab league consensus. That leaves the United States and Israel in splendid isolation, even more so than in the past 30 years in rejecting a political settlement. So it's contentious in a sense, but not in that there's no way to resolve it. We know how to resolve it.
(...) [chomsky] Israel invaded Lebanon and killed maybe 15,000-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon. They were able to do it because the Reagan administration vetoed Security Council resolutions and supported them and so on. ... The claim here, you know, you read Thomas Friedman or someone, is that Israel invaded in response to shelling of the Galilee from -- by Palestinians, Palestinian terror attacks and Carter repeats that, it is not true. There was the border, there was a cease-fire, the Palestinians observed it despite regular Israeli attempts, something as heavy bombing and others to elicit some response that would be a pretext to the planned invasion. When there was no pretext, they invaded anyway