How to fix Al Qaeda, and why they don't want to be fixed
I see a lot of articles asking how we, the West, can win the war in Iraq, or the War on Terror in general, so I read Beyond Fear author Bruce Schneier's recent blog post asking for readers to submit 'movie-plot style terrorist threats' to use against us with great interest. I'm one of those people who finds the bad guys a lot more interesting than the good guys: Lex Luthor pulled himself up from Metropolis' 'Suicide Slum' to become one of the world's richest men and at one time president of the United States, Superman was just born on Krypton as opposed to Earth. Magneto saw his family exterminated by the Nazis, Professor X had a stepdad who was kind of an asshole.
In real life it's harder to sympathise with freedom-hating evil-doers. Leaving aside questions of morality, the nearest we get to comic-book villains are drab, sexless, ranting zealots, and whereas Lex Luthor has the unparalelled genius for science and tactics to manifest whatever plan or device his unlimited imagination concieves of (vulnerable only to Superman's two-fisted American bravery), real villains just aren't effective. Oh, I know that the Luthors and Lensherrs in fiction will always be defeated, but when they want to do something they can do it, up to the point where it actually changes the status quo by the end of the comic. That drive and competence makes them dangerous enough to write about. Even Batman's foe The Joker, whose mental state is to crazy what a grain of sand is to Ayres rock, can mix up lethal gasses and execute elaborate plans whenever he feels like leaving Arkham to stretch his legs and add to his bodycount. It's been almost five years since 9/11 announced their presence to the world and they are no closer to their stated goal of reducing Western influence on the Islamic world. Instead, two Islamic countries have been invaded by the U.S-led Coalition and the eyes of U.S policymakers are fixed firmly on regime change on the rest of the Middle East, now with an excuse of 'Fighting Terror' whereas on Septmber 10th 2001 they had nothing. Another attack on the scale of 9/11 hasn't happened. Nuclear, Biological and chemical weapons haven't been used so logic dictates they're not as easy to find as we were told- though the drugged-out hippie members of the Aum Supreme Truth sect had no problem making Sarin for their gassing of the Tokyo subways.
There's three conclusions we can draw from Al Qaeda's acute second-album syndrome, either The Power of Nightmares (via Youtube) is right and the threat they pose has been greatly exaggerated (very likely), that the West's security has been tightened so much that another attack is impossible (disproved by every journalist who makes the front-page by taking a knife onto a plane) or my working assumption for this article: they're just a bit dim. They're five cans short of a six pack. Their deadly Jihad against the West is, when looked at right, Laurel and Hardy pushing a piano up a flight of stairs.
Now, while Adam Curtis had a great deal of research to prove the thesis of his excellent documentary, I've got nothing. In fact, everything we know about Al Qaeda says that their military and business wing is run by smart people. World-class bastards, of course, but capable of thinking their way out of a wet paper bag. Instead of proving Al Qaeda is run by people more suited to licking short-bus windows than destroying the infidel with a lot of facts and numbers we'll probably all forget anyway, I'm going to prove my point by showing that even I am capable of devising a strategy far more effective than anything we've seen so far.
Step one: Know your brand
Al-Qaeda ('The Base' or 'The Foundation') has a brand saturation on par with, perhaps excelling, Nike, McDonalds and Microsoft. It has achieved greater name recognition per dollar spent than perhaps any organisation in history. A single cassette tape mailed to Al-Jazeera can achieve more press coverage than a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Like many international brands the rest isn't that important. The aim is to change people's minds, not kill them, so guns, bombs and people willing to use them are of secondary importance to an effective media machine.
Step Two: Making friends and influencing people in Iraq
'Zionists', 'Crusaders', Shiites, Sunni 'traitors', Kurds... the list of groups Al Qaeda considers fair game is extensive. It's also counter-productive.
After the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who made it the policy of Al-Qaeda in Iraq to kill Shiites (80% of the country), the main body of Al Qaeda had a golden opportunity to distance themselves from him and his actions and get the Shiite majority in Iraq on their side. With a simple message of Islamic unity in the face of those naughty Zionist Crusaders and a humble, heartfelt apology for allowing Zarqawi to target fellow Muslims they could have built bridges between the two communities. Instead, and as usual, they've squandered another golden opportunity.
From there the next step is to work on a community level to improve the quality of life for regular Iraqis- Shiite, Sunnis, Kurds, even Christians- by setting up power generators and water purifiers, rebuilding the infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, keeping the streets safe. Essentially recasting Al Qaeda in Iraq, and its allies, as a mixture of the Red Cross and Black Panthers. Make sure that evrywhere Al Qaeda goes things get better for ordinary Iraqis, and if they are pushed out of an area emphasise in press releases how those same ordinay Iraqis are now suffering. Make sure the rest of world knows every last detail of your humanitarian acts. Pretty soon even Western journalists will start to question whether Al Qaeda are really such bad people.
And that's exactly what you want.
Step Three: Making friends and influencing people in the Middle East
While Al Qaeda in Iraq is winning a moral war on their turf the rest of Al Qaeda needs to adapt if it's going to survive. Rebranding as a Muslim organisation as opposed to exclusively Sunni is step one. Of course it increases the number of young Muslims willing to work for or with Al Qaeda, and the number of people (and governments, such as Iran and Syria) willing to support the group with finances and logistics. The West is going to sit up and pay attention too. For one thing Al Qaeda will stop looking like kill-crazy barbarians and start looking like people with real grievences, and anything that can be done to make Americans question the logic of fighting is a victory bigger than anything that can be achieved with bombs.
As in Iraq, Al Qaeda can also be rebranded as a populist grassroots movement in the Islamic world at large, from Central Africa to Malaysia. But, like Iraq, it has to do so under the watchful eye of the U.S and its allies. This is a problem, but also an opportunity. Why not have the fatwah committee of Al Qaeda issue an edict banning female circumcision? It's a quality of life issue affecting millions of Islamic women, a ruling would be in accordance with the Koran and, crucially, it is public-relations gold in the West and among moderate Muslims. It's bold moves like this that are key to our next step:
Step Four: The American Problem
While Al Qaeda is winning Islamic hearts and minds they can't neglect their primary cosumer: the American public. Even if they had 1.3 Billion Muslims on their side, or at least not opposed to them per se, Al Qaeda would still be vulnerable to the most powerful nation in all of human history. They hold all the cards and the only way Al Qaeda wins is if America says it's okay. To persuade them Al Qaeda must learn to speak American.
Firstly, I mean that literally. Up until now Al Qaeda's press releases have been in Arabic, meaning the message is edited into a few soundbites for CNN and FOX and only available in its entireiy online. To communicate effectively Al Qaeda needs a fluent English speaking representative. Not just that, but one with charisma, good looks and a flawless accent. And a suit, a nice one, Armani or something. He needs to be in a studio, shot with a digital camera. This spokeperson wouldn't use the word 'Al Qaeda' once, he would refer to his organisation as 'The Foundation', and his sucess would be judged on by how many Western newspapers and television networks follow suit. The broadcasts need to burned to a DVD and converted to digital video for internet distribution. A weekly broadcast (or even podcast) could be uploaded to Youtube- resulting in a massive media buzz and millions of viewers.
You want to know what else?Al Qaeda TV would be one of the world's most trusted news sources on the Middle East. If the Western media is to be believed then the Arab peninsular is divided into bug-eyed fanatics wearing explosives and huddled masses of nonentities waiting for American supermen to civilise them. Al Qaeda's messages to the world can present a view of the region that is fair, nuanced and accurate.
But we're talking about the guys who blew up the twin towers here, right? Aren't they arch-enemies in an apocalyptic a Clash of Civilizations(tm)?
Well, like most enemies they have more similarities than differences. You've probably heard the phrase 'American Taliban' used to describe the United States' Christian Right, and the similarities between them are so many and obvious that repeating them is banal. So far Al Qaeda has failed to build bridges with their counterparts in America, but under my enlightened leadership they wouldn't
miss an opportunity to speak out against abortion, evolution, gay rights and other issues where they and the Christian Right converge. The message Al Qaeda needs to convey in its addresses to the West is that they, like the American people, are simple God-fearing human beings just trying to get by and there's nothing they'd like more than to end this whole mess and go home. At the end of the day, we would say, we have oil and need money, you have money and need oil, if we work together we can both get what we want.
My Al Qaeda would take cues from the people Americans are listening to right now, the Ann Coulters and Michael Moores and Pat Robertsons and Howard Sterns. It would read DailyKos and the Drudge Report and as many US news sites as possible to learn the way America creates truth, and every week we would see their message to the world get more sophisticated, polished and persuasive. Soon you'd see articles in some of smaller Right-wing journals questioning the policy of regime change in the Middle East. They won't say it out loud, but if a few ideas can reach the American public a grudging respect may develop between Fundamentalist Islam and the American Right. Think of the Axis powers of World War Two: Germany and Japan were both imperialistic cultures utterly convinced that they and only they should dominate the world, and yet they worked together because they had more in common with each other than they did with the liberal, pluralistic allied nations. If Al Qaeda got smart then the same 'special relationship' could develop between the United States and the Middle East, lubricated by trillions of barrels of oil. Read those American Taliban quotes again if you don't believe that these two cultures are compatible.
Conclusion
All of this is a pipe-nightmare of course.
If we discount the possibility that Al Qaeda may really be a media bogeyman that makes a complex thing like international terrorism easy to understand and believe instead that they are vast and well-organized network of evil-doers constantly plotting our destruction then we have to ask ourselves why they think the way ahead is occassional terrorist attacks against the only people who have the power to give them what they want, attacks that have gained them nothing but two invasions of Islamic countries and the tightening of security to make sure they can't attack again. Right now it's unthinkable that American troops be removed from Saudi Arabia, or that the U.S allow governments like the Taliban to come to power. The United States of America is the proverbial eight-hundred pound Gorilla, and it'll go where it wants.
So why use tactics which invite reprisals from said Gorilla? Why 'terrorise' the American people when it rallies them around a government willing and very, very able to kill you and everybody who happens to agree with you.
It could be because they're big tough men. There's this conception of masculinity, present in just about every culture, that men are supposed to be fighting, when they're not fighting they're waiting for a fight. It doesn't have to be a physical battle, but its preferred. Nobody is going to question your masculinity when you've just cut off your enemy's head. This article, for example, points out that a common factor tying together the perpetrators of 9/11, Madrid and 7/7 was their frequent visits to gyms. It was here they fostered "the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission". The forms of warfare I advocate above don't involve physically subduing an enemy so they're not 'masculine', and anybody who's been through the school system knows how to assiduously avoid anything even slightly feminine and the fate that awaits those who do. Didn't Governor Schwarzenneger deride the Democrats, a party only a fraction of percentage as enthusiastic about killing as their opponents, as 'girlie-men'? Didn't it work? Don't people see pacifism, no matter how weak, as an essentially feminine trait? Aren't we told that the whole reason they're hating on our freedom right now is to actualise a creepy sex fantasy?
The reasons for Al Qaeda's campaign are at least faintly rational. If one believes that the presence of (friendly) foreign troops within the same arbitrary borders of Islam's holiest sites is an affront to their chosen diety then they certainly have legitimate greivences. The same goes for the situation in Palestine, which should have resulted in the creation of a Palestinian state a long time ago. I don't believe there's a rational reason for something as irrational as Al Qaeda's current ideas for changing the world to their liking. If it weren't occassionally lethal, we would Al Qaeda's solipistic, misguidedly elitist, primitive, reactionary campaign for what it is, a cry for somebody smarter than they are to step in and move things forward.
In real life it's harder to sympathise with freedom-hating evil-doers. Leaving aside questions of morality, the nearest we get to comic-book villains are drab, sexless, ranting zealots, and whereas Lex Luthor has the unparalelled genius for science and tactics to manifest whatever plan or device his unlimited imagination concieves of (vulnerable only to Superman's two-fisted American bravery), real villains just aren't effective. Oh, I know that the Luthors and Lensherrs in fiction will always be defeated, but when they want to do something they can do it, up to the point where it actually changes the status quo by the end of the comic. That drive and competence makes them dangerous enough to write about. Even Batman's foe The Joker, whose mental state is to crazy what a grain of sand is to Ayres rock, can mix up lethal gasses and execute elaborate plans whenever he feels like leaving Arkham to stretch his legs and add to his bodycount. It's been almost five years since 9/11 announced their presence to the world and they are no closer to their stated goal of reducing Western influence on the Islamic world. Instead, two Islamic countries have been invaded by the U.S-led Coalition and the eyes of U.S policymakers are fixed firmly on regime change on the rest of the Middle East, now with an excuse of 'Fighting Terror' whereas on Septmber 10th 2001 they had nothing. Another attack on the scale of 9/11 hasn't happened. Nuclear, Biological and chemical weapons haven't been used so logic dictates they're not as easy to find as we were told- though the drugged-out hippie members of the Aum Supreme Truth sect had no problem making Sarin for their gassing of the Tokyo subways.
There's three conclusions we can draw from Al Qaeda's acute second-album syndrome, either The Power of Nightmares (via Youtube) is right and the threat they pose has been greatly exaggerated (very likely), that the West's security has been tightened so much that another attack is impossible (disproved by every journalist who makes the front-page by taking a knife onto a plane) or my working assumption for this article: they're just a bit dim. They're five cans short of a six pack. Their deadly Jihad against the West is, when looked at right, Laurel and Hardy pushing a piano up a flight of stairs.
Now, while Adam Curtis had a great deal of research to prove the thesis of his excellent documentary, I've got nothing. In fact, everything we know about Al Qaeda says that their military and business wing is run by smart people. World-class bastards, of course, but capable of thinking their way out of a wet paper bag. Instead of proving Al Qaeda is run by people more suited to licking short-bus windows than destroying the infidel with a lot of facts and numbers we'll probably all forget anyway, I'm going to prove my point by showing that even I am capable of devising a strategy far more effective than anything we've seen so far.
Step one: Know your brand
Al-Qaeda ('The Base' or 'The Foundation') has a brand saturation on par with, perhaps excelling, Nike, McDonalds and Microsoft. It has achieved greater name recognition per dollar spent than perhaps any organisation in history. A single cassette tape mailed to Al-Jazeera can achieve more press coverage than a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Like many international brands the rest isn't that important. The aim is to change people's minds, not kill them, so guns, bombs and people willing to use them are of secondary importance to an effective media machine.
Step Two: Making friends and influencing people in Iraq
'Zionists', 'Crusaders', Shiites, Sunni 'traitors', Kurds... the list of groups Al Qaeda considers fair game is extensive. It's also counter-productive.
After the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who made it the policy of Al-Qaeda in Iraq to kill Shiites (80% of the country), the main body of Al Qaeda had a golden opportunity to distance themselves from him and his actions and get the Shiite majority in Iraq on their side. With a simple message of Islamic unity in the face of those naughty Zionist Crusaders and a humble, heartfelt apology for allowing Zarqawi to target fellow Muslims they could have built bridges between the two communities. Instead, and as usual, they've squandered another golden opportunity.
From there the next step is to work on a community level to improve the quality of life for regular Iraqis- Shiite, Sunnis, Kurds, even Christians- by setting up power generators and water purifiers, rebuilding the infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, keeping the streets safe. Essentially recasting Al Qaeda in Iraq, and its allies, as a mixture of the Red Cross and Black Panthers. Make sure that evrywhere Al Qaeda goes things get better for ordinary Iraqis, and if they are pushed out of an area emphasise in press releases how those same ordinay Iraqis are now suffering. Make sure the rest of world knows every last detail of your humanitarian acts. Pretty soon even Western journalists will start to question whether Al Qaeda are really such bad people.
And that's exactly what you want.
Step Three: Making friends and influencing people in the Middle East
While Al Qaeda in Iraq is winning a moral war on their turf the rest of Al Qaeda needs to adapt if it's going to survive. Rebranding as a Muslim organisation as opposed to exclusively Sunni is step one. Of course it increases the number of young Muslims willing to work for or with Al Qaeda, and the number of people (and governments, such as Iran and Syria) willing to support the group with finances and logistics. The West is going to sit up and pay attention too. For one thing Al Qaeda will stop looking like kill-crazy barbarians and start looking like people with real grievences, and anything that can be done to make Americans question the logic of fighting is a victory bigger than anything that can be achieved with bombs.
As in Iraq, Al Qaeda can also be rebranded as a populist grassroots movement in the Islamic world at large, from Central Africa to Malaysia. But, like Iraq, it has to do so under the watchful eye of the U.S and its allies. This is a problem, but also an opportunity. Why not have the fatwah committee of Al Qaeda issue an edict banning female circumcision? It's a quality of life issue affecting millions of Islamic women, a ruling would be in accordance with the Koran and, crucially, it is public-relations gold in the West and among moderate Muslims. It's bold moves like this that are key to our next step:
Step Four: The American Problem
While Al Qaeda is winning Islamic hearts and minds they can't neglect their primary cosumer: the American public. Even if they had 1.3 Billion Muslims on their side, or at least not opposed to them per se, Al Qaeda would still be vulnerable to the most powerful nation in all of human history. They hold all the cards and the only way Al Qaeda wins is if America says it's okay. To persuade them Al Qaeda must learn to speak American.
Firstly, I mean that literally. Up until now Al Qaeda's press releases have been in Arabic, meaning the message is edited into a few soundbites for CNN and FOX and only available in its entireiy online. To communicate effectively Al Qaeda needs a fluent English speaking representative. Not just that, but one with charisma, good looks and a flawless accent. And a suit, a nice one, Armani or something. He needs to be in a studio, shot with a digital camera. This spokeperson wouldn't use the word 'Al Qaeda' once, he would refer to his organisation as 'The Foundation', and his sucess would be judged on by how many Western newspapers and television networks follow suit. The broadcasts need to burned to a DVD and converted to digital video for internet distribution. A weekly broadcast (or even podcast) could be uploaded to Youtube- resulting in a massive media buzz and millions of viewers.
You want to know what else?Al Qaeda TV would be one of the world's most trusted news sources on the Middle East. If the Western media is to be believed then the Arab peninsular is divided into bug-eyed fanatics wearing explosives and huddled masses of nonentities waiting for American supermen to civilise them. Al Qaeda's messages to the world can present a view of the region that is fair, nuanced and accurate.
But we're talking about the guys who blew up the twin towers here, right? Aren't they arch-enemies in an apocalyptic a Clash of Civilizations(tm)?
Well, like most enemies they have more similarities than differences. You've probably heard the phrase 'American Taliban' used to describe the United States' Christian Right, and the similarities between them are so many and obvious that repeating them is banal. So far Al Qaeda has failed to build bridges with their counterparts in America, but under my enlightened leadership they wouldn't
miss an opportunity to speak out against abortion, evolution, gay rights and other issues where they and the Christian Right converge. The message Al Qaeda needs to convey in its addresses to the West is that they, like the American people, are simple God-fearing human beings just trying to get by and there's nothing they'd like more than to end this whole mess and go home. At the end of the day, we would say, we have oil and need money, you have money and need oil, if we work together we can both get what we want.
My Al Qaeda would take cues from the people Americans are listening to right now, the Ann Coulters and Michael Moores and Pat Robertsons and Howard Sterns. It would read DailyKos and the Drudge Report and as many US news sites as possible to learn the way America creates truth, and every week we would see their message to the world get more sophisticated, polished and persuasive. Soon you'd see articles in some of smaller Right-wing journals questioning the policy of regime change in the Middle East. They won't say it out loud, but if a few ideas can reach the American public a grudging respect may develop between Fundamentalist Islam and the American Right. Think of the Axis powers of World War Two: Germany and Japan were both imperialistic cultures utterly convinced that they and only they should dominate the world, and yet they worked together because they had more in common with each other than they did with the liberal, pluralistic allied nations. If Al Qaeda got smart then the same 'special relationship' could develop between the United States and the Middle East, lubricated by trillions of barrels of oil. Read those American Taliban quotes again if you don't believe that these two cultures are compatible.
Conclusion
All of this is a pipe-nightmare of course.
If we discount the possibility that Al Qaeda may really be a media bogeyman that makes a complex thing like international terrorism easy to understand and believe instead that they are vast and well-organized network of evil-doers constantly plotting our destruction then we have to ask ourselves why they think the way ahead is occassional terrorist attacks against the only people who have the power to give them what they want, attacks that have gained them nothing but two invasions of Islamic countries and the tightening of security to make sure they can't attack again. Right now it's unthinkable that American troops be removed from Saudi Arabia, or that the U.S allow governments like the Taliban to come to power. The United States of America is the proverbial eight-hundred pound Gorilla, and it'll go where it wants.
So why use tactics which invite reprisals from said Gorilla? Why 'terrorise' the American people when it rallies them around a government willing and very, very able to kill you and everybody who happens to agree with you.
It could be because they're big tough men. There's this conception of masculinity, present in just about every culture, that men are supposed to be fighting, when they're not fighting they're waiting for a fight. It doesn't have to be a physical battle, but its preferred. Nobody is going to question your masculinity when you've just cut off your enemy's head. This article, for example, points out that a common factor tying together the perpetrators of 9/11, Madrid and 7/7 was their frequent visits to gyms. It was here they fostered "the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission". The forms of warfare I advocate above don't involve physically subduing an enemy so they're not 'masculine', and anybody who's been through the school system knows how to assiduously avoid anything even slightly feminine and the fate that awaits those who do. Didn't Governor Schwarzenneger deride the Democrats, a party only a fraction of percentage as enthusiastic about killing as their opponents, as 'girlie-men'? Didn't it work? Don't people see pacifism, no matter how weak, as an essentially feminine trait? Aren't we told that the whole reason they're hating on our freedom right now is to actualise a creepy sex fantasy?
The reasons for Al Qaeda's campaign are at least faintly rational. If one believes that the presence of (friendly) foreign troops within the same arbitrary borders of Islam's holiest sites is an affront to their chosen diety then they certainly have legitimate greivences. The same goes for the situation in Palestine, which should have resulted in the creation of a Palestinian state a long time ago. I don't believe there's a rational reason for something as irrational as Al Qaeda's current ideas for changing the world to their liking. If it weren't occassionally lethal, we would Al Qaeda's solipistic, misguidedly elitist, primitive, reactionary campaign for what it is, a cry for somebody smarter than they are to step in and move things forward.
posted by G at 2:54 PM
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