Dreaming of the Caliphate

The President actually sort of curtailed the demagoguery in today's radio address and offered a recognizable argument about his counterterrorism agenda:

So this week I've given a series of speeches about the nature of our enemy, the stakes of the struggle, and the progress we have made during the past five years. On Tuesday in Washington, I described in the terrorists own words what they believe, what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it. We know what the terrorists intend, because they have told us. They hope to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire across the Middle East, which they call a Caliphate, where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology.
Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks, "A great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous [Caliphate]." Al Qaeda and its allies reject any possibility of coexistence with those they call "infidels." Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: "Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us." We must take the words of these extremists seriously, and we must act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.

Now if you take this with the appropriate level of seriousness, it really does lead to the conclusion that there's no point in trying to redress Muslim grievances (i.e., engage in "appeasement") since the emergence of a pan-Islamic Caliphate organized along Taliban lines and bent on recovering swathes of lost Muslim land that include all of Israel and, from time to time, all of Spain is not going to fly. The flipside, though, is that I don't think we really should take these particular words all that seriously.

One imagines this really is what bin Laden and Zawahiri are after, since it's hard to say why they'd say it otherwise. But what one has to ask is how many people are actually motivated by this sort of thing. I saw a presentation from Robert Pape yesterday that did a good job of knocking this down. If you look at who actually conducts suicide terrorist attacks -- al-Qaeda or otherwise -- the overwhelming common thread is a concrete desire to coerce the withdrawal of foreign military forces from someplace or another. This is not the point of al-Qaeda as such, but it's the motive that drives the people who are essential to al-Qaeda actually being a problem. Osama in a cave is just a guy in a cave. Osama in a cave inspiring someone to crash planes into office towers is a serious threat to national security.

I'd heard that all from Pape before, but in yesterday's presentation he had some new material where you look at what actually gets said in recruiting materials. There's nothing about a Caliphate and very little about the content of Islamic theology. There's a lot of stuff about foreign soldiers and the civilian casualties Western and Israeli forces have inflicted here and there. This is the stuff that, in al-Qaeda's judgment, needs to be emphasized to get people to sign up.

This, then, is the real center of gravity of the al-Qaeda movement. It has this horrible goal, but it's also a fairly crazy goal that, seemingly, attracts very little in the way of volunteers. It also has these subsidiary complaints that it can leverage into foot soldiers and support -- whether passive or active. Dry up the complaints and you dry up the foot soldiers and the supporters. At that point you just need to carefully locate the leaders and kill them and even if they prove to be hard to locate (as certainly seems to be the case!) probably nothing terrible will happen as you're searching. Conversely, as long as there's a stready stream of recruits and supporters, killing the odd leader or foiling the occassional plot isn't really going to put a stop to anything.

The other thing to note about the Caliphate is that this is a genuinely goofy concept. Even the much more plausible notion of a unified Arab state has, despite attracting lots of adherents over the years, utterly failed to get off the ground. It's just too hard to do. Bin Laden's belief that US power and policy is the reason Muslims can't unify politically in that way is simply mistaken. Every American on the planet could drop dead tomorrow and the scheme would still be unworkable. Just look how difficult it is to get Kurdish Muslims to consent to live in a state mostly composed of Turkish Muslims or Arab Muslims in one tiny corner of the Islamic world. Nationalism is very real and cuts against hyper-ambitious geopolitical schemes of all kinds, not just American ones.

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Comments

But the obverse of the impossible caliphate fantasy, the neoconservative vision of an American empire encompassing the middle east, is, frighteningly possible, although abhorrent, given American military and economic power, if effectively applied.

Posted by: Albert Savoy on September 9, 2006 03:39 PM

it is important to discriminate between:

a) what people say they believe is important
b) and what you can infer is really important by their acts and unreflective utterances

the main problem with much of modern discourse on international affairs is the lack of multidimensionality in how humans behave. we are not just "rational actors" nor just ideological vessels. the beliefs we avow have complex and unpredictable implications in regards to how we behave. the reality is that our minds are not unitary, but modular, and the mind tha speaks is not always the mind that does, the mind that dreams.

on a concrete level taking islamic rhetoric at face value is a serious problem, because it probably isn't going to give you a good model of reality. but, it probably gives you a good model of how many islamists actually believe they perceive the world, even if the swarm of data implies radically different regressions in what independent variables can predict behavior.

Posted by: razib on September 9, 2006 05:43 PM

I think your argument is significantly strengthened if you look closely at Bush's quote of Bin Laden. Bin Laden said "Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us." Does "amongst us" refer to us being anywhere "on this earth" or maybe "in Saudi Arabia". Recall he began his terror war against the USA when US soldiers were stationed in Saudi Arabia. "on this earth" might mean "as opposed to in heaven." You argue convincingly that this or any Bin Laden quote is not central to understanding the al Qaeda threat.

However, I think it is very striking that, even in the quote chosen by Bush's well read aids in an effort to convince us that the Bushes' projection of US forces into Arab countries has nothing to do with the problem, there is clear evidence that Bin Laden knows perfectly well that that is the argument he has to make to recruit followers.

Also, by the way, has any President ever done as much damage just by speaking as Bush did when he called the war on terror a "crusade." Maybe the plan was to make Bin Laden die of joy or something. Pity idiocy isn't an impeachable offence.

Posted by: Robert Waldmann on September 9, 2006 06:42 PM

I agree. What Bin Laden wants is different from what motivates people to follow them.

On the other hand, I don't think that Bin Laden thinks Americans are the real impediment for his Caliphate vision. If you read one of his or Zawahiri's diatribes, it's pretty clear that his aim is to use America in a jiu jitsu maneuver. By attacking America, the logic goes, America is drawn in the middle east, thus she continues the policies that alienate the population.

That helps in recruitment, but most importantly, by going after America and America responding, he puts the authoritarian regimes which were his real enemy in the middle; the regimes now, can't defuse pressure by exporting antiamericanism and they are pressed by the US to to take some steps which ostensibly

Osama's hope is that the regimes are going to wilt under the pressure.

Lest we forget, the reason Osama chose to persue this strategy is because he was defeated domestically. He took them directly on and he got exiled. And for the past 5 years, this little, marginal, defeated guy is playing the most powerful nation in the world...

Posted by: Nick Kaufman on September 9, 2006 08:49 PM

George W. Bush is the best friend Islamic terrorism ever had. And hopefully, ever will have.

Posted by: MQ on September 9, 2006 11:37 PM

The insane dream of a Muslim caliphate is an important motivating factor for that percentage of Muslim terrorists who are insane dreamers. There are enough of them to constitute a real problem, but not enough to constitute a real political movement. These are the people who are best viewed as a law enforcement problem. They tend to be Europeans, for one thing.

It might be compare the relationship between, on the one hand, the insane dream of the Muslim caliphate, broad anti-American sentiment among Muslims, and violence by Muslims against Americans; to, on the other hand, the relationship between the insane dream of the Rapture, broad American anti-Muslim (and anti-secular) sentiment, and violence by Americans against Muslims. A not insignificant percentage of those Americans who hate or fight Muslims believe in the Rapture. Does that mean there is no point in Muslims trying to appease America, because we will always hate them, given that our ultimate goal of universal conversion to Christianity is an insane fantasy?

Well, okay - maybe.

Posted by: brooksfoe on September 10, 2006 12:23 PM

When we look at our enemy, we see ourselves.

The Muslims actually got a bellyful of living in an empire when they lived under the Turks. During that time, the Muslims traded down the African coast and east to the Phillipines (they were a great maritime people). Their traders established trading enclaves in many states, and Islam became a very popular religion with many adherents, but there is little evidence of their trying to take over states and convert them to Islam, and even less of any effort to establish a grand government of the entire region.

Americans have become accustomed to the size of the U.S. acting as a 'bully pulpit' from which we threaten the world. We assume that everyone else must also want to form such a country. In reality, most of the world has proven quite cool to the idea of forming, say, a United States of South America.

Maybe they're not too impressed with the example we've set.

Posted by: serial catowner on September 10, 2006 03:41 PM

Yeah, what you said. And more. Bush got a bad case of OCD

Posted by: The Heretik on September 10, 2006 04:43 PM

One of the barriers to Arab unity has been rivalry for leadership among Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. The Caliphate adds Istanbul, Teheran, and Jakarta.

Posted by: David Tomlin on September 11, 2006 02:06 AM

"Dry up the complaints and you dry up the foot soldiers and the supporters."

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