Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Page B
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Political Science, Modern, middle east, Terrorism, World, Islamic Studies, 21st Century, Middle Eastern
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with his audience. He presumably already had the vision of the apocalyptic End Times that would be unleashed by the recreation of the caliphate, which now drives the whole ISIS project, but he wouldn’t necessarily have gone deeply into that at Camp Bucca either. What the troops needed was a vision of a glorious victory that could be achieved before they were too old, and—since they were very angry men—theological license to use extreme violence in the service of that goal. Baghdadi gave it to them, and by the time he left Camp Bucca in December 2004 he was a made man.
When Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was released by the U.S. occupation authorities as a “low level prisoner,” he immediately joined al Qaeda in Iraq. (Almost every militant who left Camp Bucca carried with him a list of useful contacts to help him rejoin the jihad; most had the telephone numbers written on the elastic of their boxer shorts.) By 2006 he was the general supervisor of the Islamic State of Iraq’s Shari’ah committee and a member of the group’s senior consultative council. After the death of Zarqawi in mid-2006 he became a senior adviser to the two men who shared the succession, Abu Ayyub al Masri and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, and when they blew themselves up to avoid capture in May 2010 he was elected leader of the ISI by a Shura council (a religious consultative assembly) in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh. Nine of the eleven members voted in favour of Baghdadi.
The organization he inherited was certainly not doing well. It continued to assassinate people and blow things up in crowded places, but it no longer controlled substantial chunks of Iraq territory as it had in 2005–07. Certain things were moving in its favour, however: the American troops were finally pulling out of Iraq; the Maliki government in Baghdad, in its second term after an election in 2009, was more corrupt and incompetent than ever but relentless in its anti-Sunni bias—and elsewhere in the Arab world revolutions were stirring. Not Islamist revolutions, but non-violent democratic revolutions against the sclerotic dictatorships that had ruined their people’slives for so long. The first came in Tunisia in December 2010. Less than two weeks after that revolution succeeded in overthrowing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011 (after twenty-four years in power), the Egyptians came out in the streets against their own dictator, Hosni Mubarak, the last of three generals who had ruled the Arab world’s biggest country and cultural capital for an unbroken forty-seven years. Further non-violent protests broke out in Morocco and Jordan (where the kings quickly offered major concessions to protesters), in Yemen, in Bahrain, and—most important for Abu Bakr al Baghdadi—in Syria.
The wonder is that it took so long for non-violent revolutions to come to the Arab world. The phenomenon only started to spread after the Philippine revolution of 1986, but by 2010 it was a quarter-century old and everybody knew (in principle) how to do it. Non-violent revolutions had brought down dictatorships similar to those of the Arab world in Thailand, Bangladesh and South Korea. Non-violent protests very nearly brought down the Chinese Communist dictatorship in 1989, and they did bring down all the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989–91. Others ended almost all of the dictatorships in Latin America, and the apartheid regime in South Africa was forced to negotiate its own retreat from power by the mere threat of one. As a result, for the first time ever, more than half of the world’s people lived in more or less democratic countries with free speech, the rule of law, and all the usual appurtenances ofdemocracy. The Arab world was bringing up the tail of the parade, but that was all the more reason why the Arab Spring should have succeeded. Unfortunately, apart from the admirable exception of Tunisia, it did not.
The Egyptian revolution did succeed in removing Mubarak
When Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was released by the U.S. occupation authorities as a “low level prisoner,” he immediately joined al Qaeda in Iraq. (Almost every militant who left Camp Bucca carried with him a list of useful contacts to help him rejoin the jihad; most had the telephone numbers written on the elastic of their boxer shorts.) By 2006 he was the general supervisor of the Islamic State of Iraq’s Shari’ah committee and a member of the group’s senior consultative council. After the death of Zarqawi in mid-2006 he became a senior adviser to the two men who shared the succession, Abu Ayyub al Masri and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, and when they blew themselves up to avoid capture in May 2010 he was elected leader of the ISI by a Shura council (a religious consultative assembly) in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh. Nine of the eleven members voted in favour of Baghdadi.
The organization he inherited was certainly not doing well. It continued to assassinate people and blow things up in crowded places, but it no longer controlled substantial chunks of Iraq territory as it had in 2005–07. Certain things were moving in its favour, however: the American troops were finally pulling out of Iraq; the Maliki government in Baghdad, in its second term after an election in 2009, was more corrupt and incompetent than ever but relentless in its anti-Sunni bias—and elsewhere in the Arab world revolutions were stirring. Not Islamist revolutions, but non-violent democratic revolutions against the sclerotic dictatorships that had ruined their people’slives for so long. The first came in Tunisia in December 2010. Less than two weeks after that revolution succeeded in overthrowing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011 (after twenty-four years in power), the Egyptians came out in the streets against their own dictator, Hosni Mubarak, the last of three generals who had ruled the Arab world’s biggest country and cultural capital for an unbroken forty-seven years. Further non-violent protests broke out in Morocco and Jordan (where the kings quickly offered major concessions to protesters), in Yemen, in Bahrain, and—most important for Abu Bakr al Baghdadi—in Syria.
The wonder is that it took so long for non-violent revolutions to come to the Arab world. The phenomenon only started to spread after the Philippine revolution of 1986, but by 2010 it was a quarter-century old and everybody knew (in principle) how to do it. Non-violent revolutions had brought down dictatorships similar to those of the Arab world in Thailand, Bangladesh and South Korea. Non-violent protests very nearly brought down the Chinese Communist dictatorship in 1989, and they did bring down all the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989–91. Others ended almost all of the dictatorships in Latin America, and the apartheid regime in South Africa was forced to negotiate its own retreat from power by the mere threat of one. As a result, for the first time ever, more than half of the world’s people lived in more or less democratic countries with free speech, the rule of law, and all the usual appurtenances ofdemocracy. The Arab world was bringing up the tail of the parade, but that was all the more reason why the Arab Spring should have succeeded. Unfortunately, apart from the admirable exception of Tunisia, it did not.
The Egyptian revolution did succeed in removing Mubarak
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