“War is attractive to young men who know nothing at all about it”, wrote Phillip Caputo, and the Washington Post is carrying an article today about some young men who still find it attractive. The article is about how the insurgents who had flocked to Iraq to fight Americans have returned to the countries from which they came and are now proselytizing for more violence. This article is about Lebanon and a man named Abu Haritha.
“It’s an open battle, in any place, at any time,” he said, his voice calm. “History has to record that there was resistance. Iraq is a badge of honor for every Arab and Muslim to fight the American vampire,” he said.”
Bush and the neocons don’t get how wrong they were to go into Iraq. The Arabic Middle East was full of countries with high unemployment, broken governments and a religious order which blamed everything on the West, particularly, the United States. Press organs, with the blessings of these broken states, printed lies and outright fabrications about the West to satisfy the need to blame someone other than themselves.
Through history, Lebanon, with its relatively free environment and a weak state, has often emerged as a laboratory of forces elsewhere in the Middle East…
Some of the fighters didn’t go to Iraq to become martyrs. Some went to learn, and they have now gone back to countries of origin to forment violence. It is not clear that they have a political goal, other than to fight against the West. For most of these people, the only political goal is the destruction of the current order which they see as corrupt, and the establishment of a more just society, based on Islamic law. They don’t have the historical perspective to see that the countries of the Middle East once were all run under Islamic law, were filled with social injustice and they still fought each other. They can’t see that Islamic law will not usher in a time of peace.
At a cafe in the old city of Tripoli last week, Bilal Shaaban, the leader of the Islamic Unity Movement, a Sunni group, reclined on a sofa. Shaaban ticked off what he called the successes of Islamic activists like him in Egypt, the Palestinian territories and now Somalia. “In every place, why does the Islamic current reach its goals?” he asked. “Because it expresses the people’s sentiments against the Americans. It’s a reaction to American policy. They are planting the seed of hatred that is going to last generations.”
Men like Shaaban, of the Islamic Unity Movement, praise the insurgency in Iraq but deny any hand in subversion. At the same time, the growing reach of their groups in the poor neighborhoods of Tripoli — through newspapers, radio stations, mosques and social welfare, the bread and butter of Islamic groups — has gone far in transforming a predominantly Sunni city that was traditionally home to a vibrant mix of Arab nationalism and leftist and Islamic politics.
How much of this is real and how much is posturing?
“We thank the Americans,” said Ibrahim Salih, a founder of the Committee to Support the Iraqi Resistance, which he described as a group that disseminates information. “No one can repress us anymore,” said Salih, 52, who was educated in France. “We are a power here in Tripoli.”
Real or posture, this is a problem. And we have added to it.