Milt Bearden, who has 30 years of experience in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations, claims in today’s New York Times that Al-Qaeda “is an ideological and spiritual movement rather than a cohesive, quantifiable foe.” Without dismissing Bearden’s statement, I want to draw attention to the fact that in his terrorist recruiting video tapes, Osama bin Laden constructs a political, and not spiritual, argument for waging jihad.

In order to both understand the political nature of the jihadist argument, and to gain a sense of the powerful nature of the propaganda, it is helpful to visit the section of the
Columbia International Affairs Online website that examines bin Laden’s recruiting video tape and offers insightful analysis and commentary on the subject.  

Fawaz Gerges, in his article “Eavesdropping on Osama bin Laden,” offers a thoughtful analysis of the bin Laden’s recruiting tapes.  Gerges writes: “portrayal of infant death and malnutrition in Iraq is used effectively to stress America’s brutality and Arab rulers’ culpability in this continuing tragedy.”

Without raising questions about the legitimacy of the above mentioned US actions, I want to underscore the fact that grievances regarding the United States and its foreign policy towards the Middle East and Muslim world that have been effectively co-opted and articulated by Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden does appear in the videotape, he wears the white robes of a sheikh, he delivers speeches, and there certainly is a religious flavour to he video.  However, Richard Bulliet of Columbia University notes:  

“While religious appeals suffuse all three scenes and reference is made to the example of Muhammad and his early followers, the many and complex theological, social, and religious issues that surround discussions of jihad in Islamic intellectual history remain unmentioned.‘

What bin Laden presents in his propaganda is not a complex theological argument to wage jihad against America. Rather, his argument is a political one that draws on powerful imagery — the murder of a very young Palestinian boy named Muhammad Durra, women in Islamic dress being degraded by Israeli soldiers — and political frustration to demand that Muslims unite in an international jihad against impious governments and rescue the international Muslim community that is currently under attack. In bin Laden’s portrayal, the Saudi government is an irreligious puppet that is subservient to America and, as such, both the Saudi and the American governments are subject to jihad.  

To dismiss the call to jihad as a retrograde crusade against the western way of life is to be blind to the political and emotional arguments to wage international jihad that have been heard and answered to devastating effect.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Disregarding the fact that 120,000 Zambians – out of a total population of a mere 10.8 million – die of AIDS every year, Andrew Mulenga, Zambia’s Education Minister, has banned the distribution of condoms in schools.  

Unsurprisingly, Mulenga’s rationale is that the distribution of condoms promotes immorality by encouraging young people to have premarital sex.  

Zambia has been devastated by AIDS, and the government is well aware of the fact. According to the BBC, the Zambian ministry of health cooperates with NGOs to promote awareness campaigns in which condoms are distributed to students in schools. Such campaigns are crucial in a country where the average annual income is a heart-breaking $320 U.S. dollars and where AIDS has destroyed much of the professional class.  

Mulenga’s directive, then, contradicts extant government programs to combat AIDS, and will further plunge the nation into AIDS-racked devastation. The life expectancy in Zambia is 33 years for men and 32 years for women — in contrast to America, where men can expect to live until they are 74 and women until they are 80 — and Mulenga’s ban on condoms will certainly worsen these numbers.

Mimi Hanaoka

Collateral Damages and The First 24 Hours, two documentaries about 9/11 playing as a double bill at Film Forum in New York City, offer a sober and eerily quiet portrait of the events that led us down the rabbit hole of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The First 24 Hours depicts the devastation at Ground Zero in the hours after the attacks, and Collateral Damages catalogues the psychological damage inflicted by the attacks through interviews, conducted over a year after the attacks, with firefighters from three companies.

Director Etienne Sauret was one of the first cameramen at Ground Zero, and yet in many of the shots, there is no pandemonium; the images of chaos and screaming rivers of people that I was fed on CNN and have come to associate with 9/11 are replaced by an uncomfortable silence. There is no musical score in either of these films, and the images of the rubble of the World Trade Center and the testimony of the firefighters appear all the more stark against the silent background.  

While many of the images — the enormous pile of rubble at Ground Zero, the thick grey cloud of smoke that settled on lower Manhattan, the endless teams of firefighters attempting to find people buried in the ruins of the WTC — are of the type that were broadcast by news networks in the days and weeks following 9/11. Sauret repeatedly turns to the less publicized and jarring shots from the Staten Island landfill where some of the WTC debris was dumped. Sauret’s handheld camera captures numerous scenes in which large machines in a Staten Island landfill disembowel the trucks, cars and ambulances that were damaged in the 9/11 attacks. Juxtaposed against the silence and the slow pace of work at Ground Zero — where firefighters attempt to dig out survivors by using handheld tools — the machinery at the landfill appears grotesque, monstrous and loud. The machines look like they are cannibalizing one another, and the images, while they involve only a few people, are disquieting.  

In addition to serving as a record of and meditation on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, these two films should be seen with a mind on the fact that President Bush has milked the events of 9/11 for all they are worth in his recent campaign ads. President Bush’s recent campaign ads feature images from the 9/11 attacks, and one of the ads shows firefighters carting out the flag-draped remains of a victim. Despite pressure from firefighters and the families of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said he “will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency.”

Many are still mourning their losses from 9/11, and to manipulate this tragedy for electoral leverage is certainly reprehensible and deeply troubling. Political mud-slinging is fair game; manipulating the highly emotional images from 9/11 is cheap and vile.  

Mimi Hanaoka

George J. Tenet, head of the C.I.A., today stated to a Senate committee that he has, on several occasions, corrected faulty public statements on intelligence made by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

Tenet’s motivation in making such statements could be to save his already damaged hide. Tenet has recently been under enormous scrutiny for his agency’s ability or lack thereof to gather, process and interpret intelligence. The 9/11 attacks produced in the collective American consciousness not only a sense of devastation and vulnerability but also a stunned horror at the intelligence community’s ability to prevent such attacks. I wondered if heads were going to roll, and if Tenet’s would be leading the pack.  

Tenet’s statements, which certainly could not have endeared him to Bush and Cheney, were nevertheless evasive.

Tenet was asked whether he had attempted to correct statements made by the Bush administration in the days leading up to the Iraq war, such as the claim that Iraq’s weapons stock included what could cause a “mushroom cloud.” In a particularly vapid statement, Tenet responded by claiming:  

“I’m not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was and what I did or what I didn’t do … You have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it. I don’t stand up in public and do it. I do my job the way I did it in two administrations.”

While it may be the case that Tenet is trying to salvage the bruised reputation of the intelligence community and particularly the C.I.A., it is at least heartening to see that the intelligence community is beginning to at least correct, if not censure, politicians who bandy about questionable or disputed intelligence to the public as if it were fact.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Paul Richardson, the assistant bishop of Newcastle, recently criticized Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, as a violent film that borders on pornography. Richardson went further and claimed that the Lord of the Rings had “stronger religious themes.”

While I am loathe to give Gibson’s film — which has been lambasted as both historically inaccurate and as rife with potentially anti-Semitic material — yet more publicity than it has already received, Richardson’s comment is important in that it underscores the fact that the film should be seen as a meditative piece born of director Mel Gibson’s own religious beliefs and not as an accurate portrayal of historical fact.

As Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, a distinguished historian of the early Christian period, stated:

“It’s important to remember that this is Lent, and meditations on the Passion of Christ are an important part of the cultural interpretation of human suffering. There’s a context for the movie in the history of art. When Christians read the Gospels as historical acts, they will say what Mel Gibson says: that this is the truth, this is our faith. But the important thing is that this film ignores the spin the gospel writers were pressured to put on their works, the distortions of facts they had to execute. Mel Gibson has no interest whatsoever in that.”

The Passion of the Christ is an expression of Gibson’s religious faith; it is neither history nor fact, and to risk misinterpreting it as such would further encourage anti-Semitism inspired by a feeble understanding of history.  

Mimi Hanaoka

As Christopher Allbritton of Back to Iraq and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo have noted, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, recently and happily admitted to manipulating the United States. Chalabi wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and with the appropriate “intel,” encouragement and war-mongering, America invaded Iraq.

As Josh Marshall documented in his blog:

“ ‘As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.’

Those were the words last week of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the INC, member of the IGC, and central player in a scandal the scope of which Americans are only now beginning to grasp.

The ‘what was said before’ that Chalabi is referring to, of course, are the numerous bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction he peddled into American governmental channels over the last half dozen years and more.”

The weapons of mass destruction, which were the ostensible reason for America’s rushed entry into war with Iraq, have yet to be found. The upshot of all this is that President Bush got his war, Chalabi got rid of Hussein, and Halliburton began to joyously engage in war profiteering.

Halliburton’s war profiteering is a disgusting example of crony capitalism, but it is important to keep in mind that Iraq suffers from similar problems. Chalabi has his dirty little fingers in every dirty little pie. Crony capitalism is alive and well in Iraq, and Chalabi and his friends benefit from it.  

America helped plunge Iraq into its present chaos. One of America’s and Iraq’s goals must be to eliminate this sort of crony capitalism — both in America and on the ground in Iraq.

Mimi Hanaoka

With Kerry having secured the nomination for the democratic presidential candidate, we can now expect more focused mud-slinging and vitriolic attacks between the two camps — fair enough. Bush and his cronies are war profiteering in Iraq — this is both disgusting and unconscionable. But that Bush would milk the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for political gain and tactical electoral advantage is deeply offensive.

As Adam Entous reports from Reuters, on Thursday, the Bush team began running television ads, two of which refer to the 9/11 attacks. As Reuters notes:

“One television spot shows the ruins of the World Trade Center behind an American flag while another shows firefighters removing the flag-draped remains of a victim.

The commercials have angered many victims’ relatives, outraged at what they say is an attempt to politicize one of the darkest days in the nation’s history. The Bush administration has defended the ads as relevant and ‘tasteful.’

Despite pressure from Sept. 11 families and firefighters, Bush said he ‘will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency.’”

President Bush no doubt considers his handling of 9/11 as one of the definitive events of his political career, and it is understandable that he should want to “speak about” his response to the terrorist attacks. That he should manipulate this tragedy for personal benefit, against the pleas of victims’ families and against the complaints of the firefighters that rushed to the scene, is despicable and undermines the gravity of the tragedy.

Mimi Hanaoka

Today’s brutal attacks on the Shia in Iraq highlight, in the most gruesome and inappropriate way, the divisions between the Sunni and Shia communities in Iraq and beyond. The occupying coalition forces are being lambasted, particularly on the ground in Iraq, for their failure to prevent today’s atrocities. It is unclear who masterminded these attacks — Iraqi Sunnis, foreign Sunni Islamist groups, and specifically al-Qaeda are all being eyed warily. The motivation of these attacks, however, is clearer — it was likely perpetrated in order to further destabilize Iraqi society, to encourage civil war between Arab Sunnis and Arab Shias, to provoke further fragmentation within the Islamic world and within Iraq, and to encourage Iraqi fury toward the U.S. forces for America’s inability to have prevented these attacks.  

Today’s terrorist attacks, and the increased fragmentation and anger they may inspire, add to the ever-present question of what is to become of the Kurds in the new Iraq.

The timing of the these attacks is both tragic and lamentable — these attacks occurred during Ashura, an important Shia festival of mourning that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 A.D. During this ritual, hoards of faithful Shias flagellate themselves with chains and swords to atone for Hussein’s martyrdom.

Had these attacks occurred at any other time, they would have sparked division and fear. Now, with the American occupation of Iraq, the imminent handover of sovereignty from American hands to those of the Iraqis in June, and during this most important Shia festival, Iraq may become home to chaos and horrific sectarian violence.

America is in a worse situation than it has ever been before.  President Bush bullied his way into war and subsequent occupation in Iraq, and the Iraqis — not to mention other members of the international community — rightfully resent the American presence. The reconstruction of Iraq is a hotbed of crony capitalism. If President Bush wants, finally, to do something that is correct and just, he must do his utmost to increase the level of defense, order and security in Iraq and, most importantly, Iraqis need to have a role in this creation of order and security. America stripped Iraq of much of its humanitarian and political infrastructure, and America must now help to rebuild it. Reconstruction, after all, is not all about Halliburton and oil contracts.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in today’s New York Times tackles, with intelligence and nuance, the issue of American double standards regarding Israel.  

Kristof asks: “This week’s hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel’s ’security fence‘ raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?”

I agree with Kristof’s reply to his own question: The answer is a resounding yes.  

As Kristof notes, there is more to the issue than a facile acknowledgement that America has one set of standards for its friends and one for its foes — such an observation is more a statement of fact than an astute critique of U.S. foreign policy. Israel, a country that violates U.N. resolutions, can rely on American support and bucket loads of money. Iraq, another country that defied U.N. resolutions, was invaded by American forces.  

Kristof rightly insists, however, that we must examine the type and nature of the violations that these countries commit. Kristof argues that America is clearly guilty of double standards regarding Israel, just as the nations that criticize America as a bullying pro-Zionist machine have their own sets of double standards. Ultimately, mutual hypocrisy proves and accomplishes nothing, and Kristof believes that America must more forcefully condemn the wall that Israel is currently constructing on Palestinian land.    

I want to add additional emphasis to Kristof’s article and posit that it is imperative that the U.S. speak out now against the Israeli wall in order to restore some of its credibility in the international community and Islamic world. America is currently an occupying force in Iraq, and America must not underestimate the incredible resentment this occupation has inspired. Nations in the Middle East have a long and bitter memory of unjust and illegitimate rulers, and this list includes not only the likes of Saddam Hussein but also the colonialist occupying forces. America may be seen as the unwelcome successor to the previous French and British forces that occupied the region. Just as the Israeli wall is further problematizing the politics of the region, the American silence on the issue further delegitimizes the United States in the eyes of the world.  

Mimi Hanaoka

In a splendid tidbit that highlights the disparate Islams that exist throughout the world, today’s installation of the BBC Online’s photojournalism series illustrates the quotidian life of Sulayman Ag-Mohamed, a Tuareg nomad in northern Mali. This piece is visually stunning and highlights the diversity of Islamic life and practice that exists within the Islamic world.

Tuareg men wear indigo clothing, and against the backdrop of their desert environment, their blue robes are striking, as is the fact that Tuareg men also wear, from about the age of twenty, a blue turban that covers the face. Women and girls are proudly and culturally appropriately unveiled. In another inversion of popularly accepted norms, Sulayman Ag-Mohamed’s wife was selected by his brother.  

In addition to being an educational and beautiful morsel — the piece consists of a mere seven photos and short pieces of commentary — this item is timely. In an era when the Bush administration can rightly be accused of treating political Islam as the monolithic and evil heir to international communism, bringing attention to this diversity in the Islamic world should disabuse the world of such a feeble understanding of Islam. Contrary to what some policy makers may imagine, Tehran is not the only, or even dominant, type of Muslim society. The shocking blue robes of the Tuareg men are a fascinating counterpoint to the black robes of the mullahs in Iran.  

This informative piece of photojournalism should chip away at the myth of a monolithic Islam and instead underscore the richness of the disparate Islams that exist throughout the world.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Oil and the staggering greed it inspires has led to war profiteering in Iraq by the likes of Halliburton, and oil has now added a less sinister but certainly interesting new dimension to the events in the Middle East: Japan has signed a deal with Iran to develop the oil field in Azadegan.

As a tiny but energy-hungry island nation, Japan relies heavily on imports; oil — eighty-eight percent of which it imports from the Middle East — supplies half of the nation’s energy. After three years of negotiations, Japan has won access to the estimated twenty-six billion barrels of oil in Azadegan.  

Richard Boucher, spokesman for the U.S. State Department, stated that he was “disappointed,” by the deal that Japan has brokered with Iran.

Boucher may be rightfully suspicious of Iran, particularly in light of Iran’s recent admission that it purchased nuclear equipment from black market dealers. Iran insists it is using such devices for peaceful purposes, which may or may not be true. Only last year, Iran admitted that it had been concealing its nuclear activities for years. However, a deal of this magnitude certainly adds an intriguing new facet to the world-wide scramble for oil. America, distrustful of Tehran and thirsty for oil, must confront the fact that a newly militarized Japan is now an important and very visible player in the region.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Under the erroneously simplistic impression that national service will bridge racial divisions, Malaysia is now implementing a system of mandatory national service. The system is not a draft, since those who are called up will not engage in military training or be deployed overseas. Rather, the system is more like a bizarre marriage of boot camp and an Outward Bound course; this year, 85,000 eighteen-year-olds will undergo three months of training, which will include physical exercise, community service, and what the BBC ominously calls “lessons in nation-building.”
  
The official national service website eerily juxtaposes an image of uniformed and bereted young men engaging in physical training next to a photo of a young woman happily feeding tea and cakes to the elderly. This, apparently, is the face of tomorrow’s happily racially integrated Malaysia.

An article in today’s The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, was cautiously and diplomatically optimistic about the program.

The BBC, however, offers a more insightful analysis of the situation. The BBC notes that there are serious rifts that fall along racial lines between the nation’s Malay, Chinese, Indian and tribal communities, and that these racial and ethnic divisions are reinforced by race-based economic policies. The new system of national service will do nothing to speak to these race-based policies and the resultant atmosphere of tension and racial inequality.  

While it may be the case that the droves of teenagers corralled together during their national service will foster friendships that cross racial divides, the fact will remain that race-based economic policies still will be firmly in place when these teenagers return from their three-month hiatus from quotidian life. National service may foster personal relationships that are blind to race and ethnicity, but the government will continue to operate with an eye to racial differences.

Mimi Hanaoka