The New Islamists

How the most extreme adherents of radical Islam are getting with the times.

BY OLIVIER ROY | APRIL 16, 2012

The following is an excerpt from the book The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are,  which will be released on April 18 by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The longstanding debate over whether Islam and democracy can coexist has reached a stunning turning point. Since the Arab uprisings began in late 2010, political Islam and democracy have become increasingly interdependent. The debate over whether they are compatible is now virtually obsolete. Neither can now survive without the other.

 

In Middle Eastern countries undergoing political transitions, the only way for Islamists to maintain their legitimacy is through elections. Their own political culture may still not be democratic, but they are now defined by the new political landscape and forced in turn to redefine themselves — much as the Roman Catholic Churchended up accepting democratic institutions even as its own practices remained oligarchic.

At the same time, democracy will not set down roots in Arab countries in transition without including mainstream Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ennahda in Tunisia, or Islah in Yemen. The so-called Arab Spring cleared the way for the Islamists. And even if many Islamists do not share the democratic culture of the demonstrators, the Islamists have to take into account the new playing field the demonstrations created.

The debate over Islam and democracy used to be a chicken-and-egg issue: Which came first?  Democracy has certainly not been at the core of Islamist ideology. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has historically been strictly centralized and obedient to a supreme guide, who rules for life. And Islam has certainly not been factored into promotion of secular democracy. Indeed, skeptics long argued that the two forces were even anathema to each other.

The age of irrational petro-exuberance

In our now half-decade-old era of regularized black swans, a few energy thinkers are cautioning against a bubble of wishful enthusiasm with regard to U.S. oil — a widely embraced paradigm shift that, if true, would disrupt geopolitics from here to the Middle East and beyond. A shift is afoot, but not a new world, says Dan Pickering, co-president of Tudor, Pickering, Holt, a Houston-based energy investment firm.

The new abundance model goes like this: Americans currently consume about 18.5 million barrels of oil a day, of which about 8.5 million barrels are imported. But in coming years, the U.S. will have access to another 10 million to 12 million barrels a day of supply collectively from U.S. shale oil, Canadian oil sands, deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and offshore Brazil. Add all that up, and account for dropping U.S. consumption, and not only do you get hemispheric self-sufficiency, but the U.S. overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as the biggest oil producer on the planet.

Pickering calls this calculus “a pipedream” founded on the extrapolation of data. Excluding Brazil, whose numbers he finds difficult to nail down, he is forecasting a lift in North American production of around 2.5 million barrels a day — up to 1.5 million barrels a day from shale oil, and another 1 million barrels a day from Canada. In 2020 and beyond, he says, the U.S. will still be importing some 6 million barrels a day from outside North America.

Technically, that does not make Pickering an outlier: The official U.S. Energy Information Administration also says the U.S. will remain a big importer into the next decade; the EIA import number overshadows Pickering’s — 7.5 million barrels of oil a day in 2020, or 40 percent of U.S. supply (see here, page 11).

Will China Stop Iran?

March 05, 2012 By Joel Wuthnow

Beijing may be reluctant to intervene in the Iran crisis. But if an Israeli strike seems imminent, there are several things it can do to pressure Tehran.

This coming week, U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will hold a crucial meeting on how to confront the Iranian nuclear problem. It’s doubtful that the United States and Israel will see eye-to-eye on the potential use of force, but any friction between the two could have an upside: fearing an Israeli airstrike, China may be more willing to use its own influence to pressure Tehran.

The argument Netanyahu is likely to make is that, as Iran draws closer to a nuclear weapons capability, Israel’s window of opportunity to conduct a successful strike is closing. As a result, Israel will agree not to attack only if it obtains a firm guarantee that Washington will act militarily down the road, assuming that sanctions continue to prove ineffective. If the U.S. can’t supply such a pledge, “Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can.”

With little appetite to become enmeshed in another Middle East conflict, the Obama administration is unlikely to do more than reiterate existing statements that, while force technically remains on the table as a last resort, it will continue to use a mix of diplomacy and sanctions to prod Tehran. Netanyahu may well leave more inclined to attack while time remains.

The ‘lone wolf’ — the unknowable face of terror

By Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister

February 18, 2012 — Updated 1434 GMT (2234 HKT)

Amine El Khalifi is charged with plotting to bomb the U.S. Capitol.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Amine El Khalifi is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction
• He is alleged to have worked with others he believed to be al Qaeda operatives
• Terrorism cases where individuals act alone are on the rise, experts say
• In many ways, such cases are the worst nightmare of counterterrorism officials

(CNN) — The arrest of a 29-year-old Moroccan living illegally in the United States has focused attention again on the danger posed by “lone-wolf” terrorists.

Amine El Khalifi has been charged with plotting to carry out a bombing on the U.S. Capitol and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against federal property.

He is alleged to have worked with others he believed to be al Qaeda operatives, who provided him with a suicide vest and conducted a demonstration of explosives in a quarry in West Virginia, according to a Department of Justice affidavit.

For more than a year, undercover agents were in contact with El Khalifi after his intentions became known during an ongoing criminal investigation, according to one source.

According to the affidavit, an FBI informant brought El Khalifi, who was arrested Friday, to the attention of law enforcement in January 2011 after he told others at an Arlington residence that “the group needed to be ready for war.”

GLOBAL RESEARCH ONLINE INTERACTIVE READER SERIES GR I-BOOK No. 2

The Globalization of War

The “Military Roadmap” to World War III
Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham (Editors)
December 2011

INTRODUCTION

[scroll down for Reader's Table of Contents]
The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest.

The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

The concept of the “Long War” has characterized US military doctrine since the end of World War II. The broader objective of global military dominance in support of an imperial project was first formulated under the Truman administration in the late 1940s at the outset of the Cold War.

In September 1990, some five weeks after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, US President and Commander in Chief George Herbert Walker Bush delivered a historical address to a joint session of the US Congress and the Senate in which he proclaimed a New World Order emerging from the rubble of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union.

Bush Senior had envisaged a world of “peaceful international co-operation”, one which was no longer locked into the confrontation between competing super powers, under the shadow of the doctrine of  “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) which had characterized the Cold War era.

George H Walker Bush addressed a Joint Session
of the US Congress and the Senate, September 1990
Bush declared emphatically at the outset of what became known as “the post-Cold War era” that:
“a new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times… a new world order can emerge: A new era freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.”

Of course, speeches by American presidents are often occasions for cynical platitudes and contradictions that should not be taken at face value. After all, President Bush was holding forth on international law and justice only months after his country had invaded Panama in December 1989 causing the deaths of several thousand citizens – committing crimes comparable to what Saddam Hussein would be accused of and supposedly held to account for. Also in 1991, the US and its NATO allies went on to unleash, under a “humanitarian” mantle, a protracted war against Yugoslavia, leading to the destruction, fragmentation and impoverishment of an entire country.

Raids on Bosnian homes follow terror attack on U.S. embassy

Image via Wikipedia

By ALMIR ALIC and AIDA CERKEZ Associated Press

GORNJA MAOCA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Special police units raided homes Saturday in a Bosnian village linked to the gunman who fired an automatic weapon at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in what authorities called a terrorist attack. The raids came as 17 suspected associates of the shooter, all said to be members of the ultraconservative Wahhabi Muslim sect, were briefly detained in Serbia.
A convoy of police vehicles entered the isolated northern village of Gornja Maoca, known to be inhabited by many Wahhabis, and officers wearing black masks and camouflage uniforms surrounded several houses, according to an Associated Press video. The reporter saw the security forces enter some homes before officers asked him to leave.
The gunman, identified by police as 23-year-old Mevlid Jasarevic, is accused of shooting at the embassy building in Sarajevo for at least 30 minutes Friday, wounding a policeman guarding the facility, before a police sniper immobilized him with a shot in his leg.
An amateur video obtained by the AP shows what appears to be Jasarevic roaming a deserted intersection, waving his gun and occasionally turning toward the embassy building, shooting at the fence and facade.
Another video caught him dropping on the ground after the sniper shot him.

The Qaddafi Files

How we found Muammar al-Qaddafi‘s secret trove of private photographs — and what they tell us about his long, sordid, and curious rule.

BY PETER BOUCKAERT | OCTOBER 20, 2011

For exclusive photos from the Qaddafi family scrapbook, click here.

The glass crunched under our boots as we walked through the abandoned compound of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s military intelligence headquarters in Tripoli. It was late August, and the city had just fallen. Pancaked buildings destroyed by NATO airstrikes littered the grounds, and we entered one of the remaining undamaged buildings. For months now, we had followed the rebel offensive in Libya, monitoring the conduct of both the rebels and the Qaddafi loyalists, as well as NATO. Along the way, we were also working to ensure that the intelligence archives of the Libyan state were quickly secured and not looted or burned, as we knew they contained important answers about what had happened in the secretive country over the past 42 years of Qaddafi rule.