America’s great mistake was to make too much of al Qa’eda

Tony Karon

• Last Updated: June 14. 2008 9:27PM UAE / June 14. 2008 5:27PM GMT

Following the manic preaching of Ayman Zawahiri from his far-off cave, it’s hard not to think of Leon Trotsky. It’s not just the beard and the granny glasses, or the feverish fantasies about the imminent collapse of his enemies and the “betrayals” by those in his own camp.

Trotsky, with his insistence on ideologically pure “world revolution” in contrast to the more nationally based communism adopted by Joseph Stalin, found himself holed up in Mexico City by the 1930s, frenetically firing off communiqués inconsequential to the actual unfolding of events. He had become irrelevant.

Like Trotsky, Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden have become irrelevant to the unfolding of events in the Middle East, even at a moment when US hegemony faces an unprecedented nationalist-Islamist challenge throughout the region. (That may be the reason Zawahiri reserves so much bile for the likes of Hamas, Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood over their participation in democratic elections, and their willingness to consider truces with their enemies. Vintage Trotsky.)

And even the US media has begun to get it, asserting that al Qa’eda can no longer seriously be viewed as a strategic challenger. It was ever thus, of course, but to attempt rational reflection on the nature of bin Laden’s movement was to invite ridicule in the years following the 9/11 attacks. Just ask John Kerry. The Democrat who ran against President Bush in 2004 sounded eminently reasonable when he told the New York Times: “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”

Needless to say, Kerry was pilloried by the Bush administration for “failing to understand the threat against our country”, and, of course, he lost the election. Today, however, even some Washington hawks proclaim that al Qa’eda has been defeated in Iraq, and poses no serious challenge to the US. They note that the movement hasn’t managed to stage an attack on US soil since 9/11, and that even if one were to occur tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the basic calculus: an attack every seven years is not a strategic threat; it’s a nasty law enforcement challenge.

Curiously, the growing realisation that far more has been made of al Qa’eda in US foreign policy than is wise coincides with a moment in which the US strategic position in the Middle East is weaker than at any point in the past half century in the face of nationalist-Islamist challenges. That, of course, may be the point. Al Qa’eda was an ideological flight of fancy by a group of exiled Egyptian Islamic Jihad members who dreamed of folding dozens of regionally based Islamist insurgencies fighting specific grievances into a global command centre to fight the “far” enemy – the US, whose defeat al Qa’eda ideologues insisted was the key to local victories.

The unacknowledged precedent for this scheme was the Communist International, created by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 to forge leftist parties around the world into a single organisation. Lenin, of course, represented a state with its own set of interests – a principle acknowledged by Stalin, who advocated a national interests-based foreign policy against Trotsky’s demand that the USSR “export” its revolution. Stalin won that battle, which is how Trotsky ended up in Mexican oblivion. He created a “Fourth International” to supplant Stalin’s Comintern, but nobody took much notice.

Al Qa’eda is a latter-day Fourth International, a marginal force even where Islamist nationalist forces are in their most intense confrontations with the West. Those forces, in contrast to al Qa’eda, are nationally based, with clearly defined objectives, and with a strong, political base to complement their armed activities.

If Trotsky had managed to blow up a few stock exchanges and provoked Western powers into launching a “war” against him, he too might have enjoyed more of the limelight, although probably not for long. Al Qa’eda’s significance has always derived almost exclusively from the reaction its violent provocations have elicited, starting with the cruise missiles President Bill Clinton launched in response to the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998. That reaction only boosted the legend bin Laden was trying to build for himself among radical Muslim activists everywhere. And if 9/11 created a frisson of excitement among jihadists everywhere, the US response, which included invading and occupying Muslim countries, simply played into his branding strategy.

But in Iraq, the US has learnt that al Qa’eda represents a marginal element in the challenge it faces, and the same is true throughout the Middle East and central Asia, where the US and its allies are nonetheless losing ground to Islamist-nationalist challengers. In each instance, those elements are championing specific national grievances. Bin Laden and Zawahiri have always hoped to fold all of them into a single global challenge to the US, and in this, they have largely failed. It turns out, to paraphrase an old rule of American politics, most jihad is local.

The reason Zawahiri devotes so much of his airtime to castigating Hizbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is that it is to these groups, rather than al Qaeda, that Muslim populations confronting the US have turned for leadership.

Negotiating with al Qaeda is pointless – it represents no specific set of national interests or demands that can be engaged. Bin Laden’s problem is that he represents nothing substantial in the field of politics, unlike the nationally based movements. And with those movements, of course, there is plenty to negotiate. President George Bush, of course, like Zawahiri, takes a dim view of such negotiations. But then Bush, like bin Laden and Zawahiri, has become increasingly irrelevant to the unfolding events in the Middle East.

Tony Karon is a New York-based analyst and editor, who blogs at Rootless Cosmopolitan Tony Karon