Dope

The article that you must go to today is on the New Yorker site. It is a profile of Osama bin Laden by a Mary Weaver, originally published last year.

Here's a key graf:

"He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries."

The article is pretty good, but it does ignore a few important facts - most notably, the high price we have paid for tying the US interest to the Saudi interest. There's a popular phrase - client state - that is often used by the left and right to characterize an unambiguous and unilateral flow of command from some superpower to some state fingerpuppet. In reality, however, such top down models ignore the pull of various interests that get into the channel with client states. And if the client state, like Saudi Arabia, has its own imperial circle to worry about, the relationship between sponsor and client is much more a dance, with the sponsor hopefully leading, than an imperative.
As the smoke clears, it becomes clear that the world trade center bombing is an act of war that has emerged from a frozen war - the Gulf war. When the US chose not to depose Hussein, and to, in effect, cave to Saudi and Kuwaiti interests (both of those states feared and fear Iranian influence), we made a fundamentally irrational decision. We allowed wishful thinking, instead of strategy, to dictate the terms of our co-existence with Iraq.
In the same way, we went along with the Saudi plan for Afghanistan. I've read an interesting book, Fundamentalism Reborn? edited by William Maley. Well, no, it isn't interesting, except insofar as this week's situation makes it so - it is dusty and strewn with factional names cluttered with hard to pronounce sounds that are, in addition, hard to remember. To cut to the chase, when the Taliban came out of Pakistan in the early 90s, they came out basically as the pawns of Saudi interest, which was worried that the Iranians supporting Rabbani and Massoud, the previous most powerful clique in the country, were gaining a strategic advantage. Iran, India and Russia made up an informal support group for this faction. Riyadh reacted by throwing its support to the Taliban.

When Weaver, in her article, writes of the Pakistani irritation over the US effort to punish bin Laden, she ignores this history. But as in one of those great Persian miniatures, the calligraphy of state interest in this part of the Middle East is intricate, esoteric, and not easily decyphered on first glance.

What is obvious is that al-Qaeda, bin Laden's group, has an on and off relationship with all the governments in the region. And that the phrase that Bush used, and that comes from the mandarin speak of US Foreign Policy people - sponsor states - is a bit of a misnomer. Aftter all, the USA was the first sponsor state for the prototype of this group. And our "allies" - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - have learned one thing from the disasterous relationship between the Shah's Iran and the US - the US is blind to the internal dynamics of its client states. So that the rulers play a more sophisticated game then the hapless shah did, bowing to US pressure on the one hand, but molding it on the other hand.

Conclusions:
1. the war on terrorism is not going to be won. That's because the structure of war - its institutions, its goals, its necessary wagers - are absent in the case of 'terrorism' tout court, which has become a covert addendum to every state's policy - including the US, with its widespread support of death squads in Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatamala and other places. In Egypt or Pakistan, individual terrorists can be captured, organizations can be taken down, but given the international context in which these people travel, and given the rivalries between countries, these will all be provisional police solutions.
2. bin Laden's organization can be taken down. I hope it will be. To really insure the extinction of support for anti-American groups in the region, the US is going to have to come to terms with Iran. If the people around Bush have any brains, they recognize this. Question is, how they are going to explain it to the Saudis.
3. Iraq is still a problem without a solution. The Bush regime certainly doesn't have the courage to risk splitting up Iraq - which means we will witness a continuation of the current stupid, stupid policy.