Ivor Roberts Gets Busted!

Great Britain's ambassador to Italy. Per the International Herald Tribune:

Britain's ambassador to Italy has called President George W. Bush "the best recruiting sergeant" for Al Qaeda, Italian media reported Monday.

The comment, made at a closed-door conference last weekend, was denounced by one leading Italian newspaper editor, who issued an open letter criticizing the veteran ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts.

Roberts was quoted as telling an annual Anglo-Italian gathering in Tuscany: "If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it's Al Qaeda."

This isn't the first time I've heard this line. Michael Scheuer, in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, argues that invading Iraq plays into the hands of Osama Bin Laden, who is trying to convince the Muslim world that Islam is under attack by the USA, and that a defensive jihad is the duty of every Muslim. It's a good book, with convincing points, although Scheuer has clearly lost his detachment, a fatal flaw in a CIA analyst. However, it is consistent with his first book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America, which is written dispassionately, thoroughly, and persuasively. The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book.

A major bone of contention in the current presidential campaign is whether invading Iraq has weakened Al Qaeda, and made us safer. If the Iraq war aided Al Qaeda in attracting new jihadis, can that be true?

. . . . . . . .

I had hoped to find a online link to an excerpt from one of his books where he makes his case, but will instead have to do this the old fashioned way, by typing from his book, Through Our Enemies Eyes (any typos are mine, not the author's):

Central to bin Laden's position, and key to understanding his actions and appeal, is his belief that Islam and the Muslim world are being attacked by a more modern, powerful, and predatory version of the medieval Catholic Crusaders: the United States, Britain, or the West generally, allied with Israel, India, and Russia, and supported by apostate Muslim regimes. Armed with this version of reality, bin Laden has said that Muslims are required by God to wage jihad to defend themselves, their creed, and their land against the new Crusaders. the West, bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1994, wants to "keep Muslims weak and incapable of defending themselves."

U.S. support for Israel, the continued sanctioning and bombing of Iraq, and the West's occupation of holy sites in Saudi Arabia are, according to bin Laden, "crimes and sins committed by the Americans," and these actions are a "clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims." Therefore, bin Laden wrote in his August 1996 Declaration of Jihad, "It is no secret that warding off the American enemy is the top duty after faith and that nothing should take priority over it. . . .The main disease and cause of the affliction [in the Muslim world] is the occupying U.S. enemy. We should lie in wait for him until he is defeated, God willing."

Establishing the U.S.-led Crusaders as aggressors is vital to bin Laden in religious terms because it enables him to ask all Muslims to participate in a defensive jihad, just as they joined the Afghans' anti-Soviet defensive jihad. "Let all Muslims] know," bin Laden wrote in a letter the AP published in 1998, "that unless they take up the jihad, it will be an inescapable and inevitable catastrophe--a catastrophe in which faith and honor will be lost, as dignity and land have been lost. It will be a catastrophe with which we will turn [Muslims] into slaves in the hands of God's basest creatures, Jews and worshippers of the cross."

The aura of an offensive war waged by Christians against Islam is powerful in emotive terms, in terms of theological requirements, and in terms of collective historical memory. "In the technical language of the ulema," Professor Bernard Lewis has written, "religious duties may be collective, to be discharged by the community as a whole, or personal, incumbent on every individual Muslim. In an offensive war conducted by Muslims, the religious duty of the jihad may be discharged by volunteers and professionals. When the Muslim community is defending itself, however, jihad becomes and individual responsibility." Lewis's analysis was supported in April 2001 by the highly influential Egyptian Islamist scholar Shaykh al-Qaradawi--now in exile on Qatar--when he explained the difference between the two type of armed jihad recognized by Islamic jurisprudence. "First of all, there are two types of jihad," al-Qaradawi said.

"There is the call-up jihad and the defensive jihad. Muslim scholars call the call-up jihad collective duty. In other words, if some Muslims carry out this duty, the rest are absolved of it. This type of jihad calls for the recruitment of every rational, mature person who can fight. . . . As to the defensive jihad, it is when an enemy enters a country and occupies it. In this case everyone must carry out jihad, each according to his ability. This is called a state of public mobilization. In this case, all people resist."

So who is this Michael Scheuer, who writes as Anonymous? An article in Salon (free day pass required) describes him thusly:

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Scheuer is a Republican who was the first in his family to go to college. He worked as a crane operator to put himself through school, obtaining a Ph.D. in British imperial history from the University of Manitoba in Canada. He joined the CIA in the early 1980s after answering a newspaper ad. In 1999, he was removed from the bin Laden desk for becoming, as Scheuer describes it, too "intense" about the threat from al-Qaida. He says his superiors called him "myopic" -- unable to recognize the larger picture that included diplomacy, politics and international relations. "After 3,000 dead Americans, I take that as a compliment," he says, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

So, if some small percentage of Muslims buy bin Laden's defensive jihad pitch, say one percent, then based on an estimated one to seven million Muslims who live in the U.S., we would have ten to seventy thousand Al Qaeda allies right here in our country. If our war in Iraq convinced an additional one percent of American Muslims that bin Laden is right, our troubles double. For me, Scheuer's book casts serious doubt on the current administration's claims that the war made us safer.

See, I told you I ramble. 'Til next time.

If there's more, it's here.

Well, Alrightee Then

I think I can actually get some use out of this blog.

After all, it is free storage for people's ramblings, and I am known to ramble.

So I can ramble here, and provide helpful links to people I am boring in other forums. Plus I can get around length restrictions, too.

Of course, I'll have to figure out to do some of that cool stuff I see on other blogs.

Work, work, work. Blog, blog, blog. More to come, at some time.

If there's more, it's here.