About Fawaz A. Gerges
Article: Some call for new strategies in war on terror
The Journal News , Sept. 11, 2006.
On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration still says cutting down rogue states like Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the way to fight al- Qaida.
But as Iraq's Sunnis kill Shia, Shia kill Sunni and insurgents kill U.S. forces, fewer Americans are persuaded.
How else can the country protect itself against the Muslim militants who would defeat us?
Ask Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and international affairs at Sarah Lawrence College, and he compares al-Qaida to a criminal network, a mafia, that demands a criminal response.
Al-Qaida is a tiny fringe movement, he says. By declaring war on it, the United States has played into its hands.
"You are legitimizing the movement," Gerges said. "You are really making the movement much bigger than it is because you are talking about bands of roving jihadis in the valleys and mountains of Afghanistan."
Of course, Gerges is not alone in questioning whether a war made sense. After the United Kingdom announced it had broken up a plot to mix explosives aboard commercial airplanes, commentaries were full of the differences in the way the British and Americans have handled the threat.
"In Britain, they look at it as a criminal investigation always," Gerges said.
But Gerges has gone back to study what he calls the founding fathers of the jihadist movement in a new book called "Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy."
He compares that generation of militants, the men who in the 1970s tried to overthrow the Egyptian state, with Osama bin Laden and other Afghan Arabs.
Gerges is a Christian who grew up in a Lebanese village during that country's civil war. His brother, an army colonel, was killed by the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia.
"The Lebanese Civil War, as it is now called, was an internal struggle for the soul and future of the Arab and Muslim world, and it shook the very foundation of Arab society," he writes.
In his book, he allows the men he profiles to tell their stories themselves. He hopes Americans will get a sense of the generations of jihadists, what beliefs they hold in common and what divides them.
"It is a book of voices," he said.
So you meet Kamal al-Said Habib, who 30 years ago helped to launch modern jihadism and plot the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He was one of his generation's brightest, first in his class in political science and economics, and he could have done anything, Gerges said.
"What motivated this particular generation to risk it all?" he asked.
You hear from Abu-Jandal, bin Laden's former personal body guard, who began his jihad in Bosnia. He went to defend Muslims against the Serb ethnic cleansing, the killings and rapes, the concentration camps.
"Change the names, the language, the dress, and we can see in Abu-Jandal the young volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, heading off to defend democratic Spain in the 1930s, or from the opposite ideological scope 'the contras' in the jungles of Nicaragua lauded by President Ronald Reagan as 'freedom fighters,' " Gerges writes.
A key difference between the two generations, Gerges says, is their enemy. The earlier jihadists focused on their own governments, the so-called near enemy. Al-Qaida switched the target to the far enemy, first the Soviet Union and then the United States, the head of the snake.
"The pioneer generation, the founding fathers, they had no interest in waging war against the far enemy," Gerges said.
Al-Qaida's choice was not popular, he says, and by 2002, it was struggling to survive. It had no social base. There was wide opposition to the attack on the World Trade Center not only within the Muslim world but also within the jihadist movement.
"Al Qaida was in a coma," he said.
Iraq revived it. Iraq became its recruiting tool.
Now a third generation of jihadists has emerged from the chaos there, and they are the most brutal, he says. They are battling both enemies in an all-out war to the end.
Gerges asks whether it makes sense to lump all militants together, even those who oppose al-Qaida.
"You're playing into its hands by lumping global jihadists with mainstream Islamists," he said. "You're also making more enemies and causing a great deal of hatred because many Muslims who do not really care for al-Qaida feel very obliged to defend the faith."
So even as the Bush administration argues that the lack of attacks over the last five years shows its strategy is working, Gerges thinks America must rethink its strategy. "Listen, five years after that horrible morning on 9/11, I think there's a need for reassessment," he said, "even though the president seems to be escalating the rhetoric now."
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