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Showing posts with label Ayman al-Zawahiri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ayman al-Zawahiri. Show all posts

Sunday 11 September 2011

Who is America’s new enemy?





America’s new enemy?

By ANDREW SIA star2@thestar.com.my

Chris Riddell 11 Sept 2011

 It used to be the Nazis, the Soviet Union and then Osama and al-Qaeda. Now that he is dead, who will become the new enemy America focuses its energies on?

 SO what now? With Osama bin Laden dead, will his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue a new wave of terrorism against the West?

Yet a report in British newspaper The Guardian in late July indicates that most Syrian activists reject the new al-Qaeda leader. Mohammad Al-Abdallah, the spokesman of local coordination committees in Syria, said: “Zawahiri is trying to convince the world that he has supporters in Syria, which will provoke international public opinion against us and give the regime the right to commit crimes against our people.”



For Tom Engelhardt, academic, author and editor of Tomdispatch.com, al-Qaeda was a ragtag crew that engaged in some dramatic terror acts over the past 10 years but, in reality, it had limited operational capabilities, while the movements it spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven “remarkably unimportant”. While Osama sat isolated in a Pakistan mansion, ironically, it was the Americans who did the work of creating war and chaos (and increasing people’s resentment of the United States) for Osama!

“Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism,” writes Engelhardt, comparing Osama to the way a tai chi master fights – not with his own minimal strength, but leveraging on his opponent’s strength, in this case, America’s massive fire power.

 
China rising: Will the United States next turn its attention to China?

And what can we hope for 10 years after 9/11?

Journalist Robert Fisk, writing in British newspaper The Independent, said, “Bin Laden told the world that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.”

Jason Burke, author of The 9/11 Wars, notes that back in 2004, American intelligence agencies had foreseen “continued dominance” for many years to come. But in 2008, they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to “call the shots”.

“If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the West cannot afford many more victories like it,” he adds.

But in this second decade of the 21st century, will America learn the lessons of history?

Two years ago, when President Barack Obama intoned general platitudes about human rights for the Middle East in his landmark Cairo speech, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had this to say about the Egyptian dictator: “I consider President and Mrs Mubarak to be friends of my family.”

As the comedian and talk show host Jay Leno once joked, the invasion of Iraq was initially supposed to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation, until they realised that it spelt O.I.L. – and the name was then changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Haroon Siddiqui, a columnist at the Toronto Star, believes that Obama has reverted to Washington’s old double standard of one law for allies, another for adversaries. And so dissidents in Iran and Syria will be cheered on and materially backed to overthrow their regimes but not the people rising up in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Uri Avnery, a former Israeli Member of Parliament and author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflects that the American empire always needs an antagonist, an “evil, worldwide enemy” to focus its energies on, be it the Nazis or the Soviet Union.

“The disappearance of the communist threat left a gaping void in the American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama bin Laden kindly offered his services as a new global enemy.

“Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted-off for display. Islam the murderous, the fanatical, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values. Suicide bombers, 72 virgins, jihad,” he writes in the online “political newsletter”, Counterpunch. Avnery adds that the present Islamophobia hysteria is similar to how Europeans used to demonise Jews in the past.

American civil rights lawyer, columnist and author Glenn Greenwald predicts in online news and culture website salon.com that even though US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has acknowledged that al-Qaeda has a grand total of “fewer than two dozen key operatives” on the entire planet, the War on Terror will be continued by trotting out more “fear-mongering propaganda” against a new alliance of villains from Somalia and Yemen – the “scariest since Marvel Comic’s Masters of Evil”.

As the future unfolds, will other villains be found to replace Osama? How about China?

John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus (a project of the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies), notes that perhaps the only country in the world that has benefited from the War on Terror is China.

“Beijing has watched the United States spend more than US$3tril (RM9tril) on the war on terrorism, devote its military resources to the Middle East, and neglect pretty much every other part of the globe. The United States is now mired in debt, stuck in a recession, and paralysed by partisan politics. Over that same period, meanwhile, China has quickly become the second largest economy in the world.”

What a difference a decade makes. When US President George W. Bush came into office over 10 years ago, he called Beijing a “strategic competitor” rather than a strategic partner. When a US spy plane flying off Hainan Island was involved in an accident with a Chinese plane, the Americans refused to apologise.

Ten years later, after US government debt was downgraded, we see China’s official Xinhua news agency lecturing the Americans – in English, mind you – that “the days when debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appear to be numbered.”

In a Time magazine article in April, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that “the single biggest threat to our national security is our debt”.

While America is still building aircraft carriers at US$15bil (RM45bil) a pop, China is developing missiles expressly designed to sink them – at a cost of US$10mil (RM30mil) each. Talk about being cost efficient. Economix, a unit of the New York Times, reveals that the US accounts for 43% of all the military spending on Earth – six times as much as China, which accounts for 7.3% of world military spending: “We’ve waged war nonstop for nearly a decade in Afghanistan against a foe with no army, no navy and no air force. We send US$1bil (RM3.02bil) destroyers to handle five Somali pirates in a fibreglass skiff.”

Yet the irony is: “(The US is) borrowing cash from China to pay for weapons that we would presumably use against it. If the Chinese want to slay us, they don’t need to attack us with their missiles. They just have to call in their loans.”

If Time’s scenario ever comes to pass, then the war on terror would be ended by Chinese financial tai chi.

Friday 17 June 2011

Al-Qaeda names Zawahiri to succeed Osama






Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri has been named by al-Qaeda to succeed slain leader Osama bin Laden and vowed no let-up in its deadly "jihad" against arch-foes the United States and Israel.

"The general command of al-Qaeda announces, after consultations, the appointment of Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri as head of the group," the jihadist network said in a statement posted on an Islamist website on Thursday.

Zawahiri, the group's long-time number two, succeeds bin Laden who was killed by US commandos in a May 2 raid in Pakistan.



The statement said that under Zawahiri's leadership al-Qaeda would relentlessly pursue its "jihad" (holy war) against the United States and Israel.

"We seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite our nation to fight ... by carrying out jihad against the apostate invaders ... with their head being crusader America and its servant Israel, and whoever supports them," said the statement.

The fight would continue "until all invading armies leave the land of Islam."

The extremist network affirmed that it would not "recognise any legitimacy of the so-called state of Israel."

"We will not accept or adhere to any agreement or accord that recognises it (Israel) or that robs a mile from Palestine, whether it is the United Nations controlled by top criminals or any other organisation."

Al-Qaeda also voiced its "support (to) the uprisings of our oppressed Muslim people against the corrupt and tyrant leaders who have made our nation suffer in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya Yemen, Syria and Morocco."

A wave of revolts that have rocked the Middle East and North Africa since December have succeeded in toppling autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia while others, such as Libya's Moamar Gaddafi and Syria's Bashar al-Assad are still battling uprisings in their countries.

Al-Qaeda urged those involved in the uprisings to continue their "struggle until the fall of all corrupt regimes that the West has forced onto our countries."

The extremist Sunni group made no mention of the Shi'ite-led uprising in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, crushed in mid-March by the ruling Western-allied Sunni minority which was backed by joint Gulf Arab forces.

In the last part of the statement however, the network reminds that "our religion has forbidden oppression, against Muslims and non-Muslims, against friend and foe."

"Therefore, we assure every oppressed human in this world - most of whom are the victims of Western and American crimes - that our religion is that of justice and equality," it said.

Like his slain Saudi-born co-conspirator, the 59-year-old Zawahiri has been in hiding since the United States declared its war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Zawahiri, now Washington's most wanted man, was jailed for three years in Egypt for militancy and was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, and a 1997 massacre of tourists in Luxor.

Facing a death sentence, he left Egypt in the mid-1980s initially for Saudi Arabia, but soon headed for Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar where the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was based, and then to Afghanistan, where he joined forces with bin Laden.

Zawahiri, gifted with brains but bereft of bin Laden's potent charisma, has long been seen as the mastermind behind the global terror franchise.

From hiding, he has issued video missives calling for war on the West. The most recent was a filmed eulogy to bin Laden, vowing to pursue jihad in a tape reported by the SITE Intelligence Group on June 8.

It was a message of loyalty to bin Laden, whom analysts believe alone had the charisma capable of uniting an increasingly disparate group divided between Egyptians and non-Egyptian Arabs.

The eulogy came nearly a month after a Saudi newspaper reported on May 5 that as the struggle for power simmered within the network, Zawahiri led US troops to bin Laden through his courier.

Al-Watan newspaper, quoting an unnamed "regional source," had said the top two al-Qaeda men had differences and that the courier was a Pakistani national who knew he was being followed by the US military but disguised the fact.

With the return of an Egyptian figure in al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, last autumn from Iran, the Egyptian faction had hatched a plan to dispose of Saudi-born bin Laden, according to Al-Watan.

It said Zawahiri's faction had persuaded bin Laden to leave tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border and take shelter instead in Abbottabad near Islamabad where he was finally unearthed and shot dead by elite US Navy SEALs.

US-Pakistani relations have soured following the raid amid mounting allegations that bin Laden evaded capture for years thanks to the complicity or incompetence of Pakistan's authorities.

But Pakistan's civilian government has angrily dismissed the allegations and its powerful military has warned of unspecified reprisals if another unilateral US raid were to occur.

© 2011 AFP
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