Month: February 2005

Freedom House is a well-established bipartisan group (founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie) whose mission is to be a "vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorships of the far left and the far right."  They go beyond mere elections and address real elements of human freedom, measuring the civil liberties and political rights of a country’s citizens.  Iran may have elections, for example, but you can go here and find that Iranian elections are a joke.  On a scale of one to seven, with seven being least free, Iran is "not free", scoring a solid six.

The Center for Religious Freedom is a division of Freedom House.  Its mission is to defend against "religious persecution of all groups throughout the world. It insists that U.S. foreign policy defend Christians and Jews, Muslim dissidents and minorities, and other religious minorities in countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran and Sudan. It is fighting the imposition of harsh Islamic law in the new Iraq and Afghanistan and opposes blasphemy laws in Muslim countries that suppress more tolerant and pro-American Muslim thought."

When Freedom House calls Sunni Wahhabism a "hate ideology", it is time for all to sit up and take notice.  Defeating al Qaeda and other terrorist groups militarily is obviously important, but equally important is the defeat of the heretical ideology that provides these terrorist groups their philosophical underpinning, and one of the most prominent terrorist-friendly ideologies is Wahhabism.  As I wrote here and here, this sect of Islam is inimical to the interests of the United States.  Worse, the House of Saud is inextricably intertwined with Wahhabi extremists, and the government of Saudi Arabia is directly responsible for the worldwide spread of this hardline and unforgiving belief system.  With the power of Saudi money behind it, Wahhabists have been infiltrating and crowding out the other more moderate and tolerant denominations of Islam, and expanding in their own right.  While its chief imam may have made conciliatory noises a couple of weeks ago (as Edward noted), no fatwas were cancelled and his one-time pronouncement cannot be reconciled with his long history of hate speech and intolerance.

Last Monday, the CFRF issued a report titled Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques, which details one aspect of Saudi-backed Wahhabi indoctrination in America.  The group gathered over 200 books and publications from over a dozen mosques and Islamic centers across the country.  These materials have the direct backing of the Saudi government.  While books and publications are just one component, it defies all common sense that this ideology is restricted just to written materials. For example:

The King Fahd mosque, the main mosque in Los Angeles, from which several of these publications were gathered, employed an imam, Fahad al Thumairy, who was an accredited diplomat of the Saudi Arabian consulate from 1996 until 2003, when he was barred from reentering the United States because of terrorist connections. The 9/11 Commission Report describes the imam as a “well-known figure at the King Fahd mosque and within the Los Angeles Muslim community,” who was reputed to be an “Islamic fundamentalist and a strict adherent to orthodox Wahhabi doctrine” and observed that he “may have played a role in helping the [9/11] hijackers establish themselves on their arrival in Los Angeles.”

Several hate-filled publications in this study were also gathered from the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in Fairfax, Virginia. According to investigative reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., served as chairman of this school’s Board of Trustees, and some 16 other personnel there held Saudi diplomatic visas until they were expelled for extremism by the State Department in 2004. Until late 2003, the institute was an official adjunct campus of the Imam Mohammed Ibn-Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, part of Saudi Arabia’s state-run university system, funded and controlled by the Saudi Ministry of Education. Although Saudi Arabia claims to have severed official links with it, the Institute the Saudis established continues to operate in northern Virginia.

Some of the works were published by the Al-Haramain Foundation, run from Saudi Arabia with branch offices in the United States until the FBI blocked its assets in February 2004, finding that it was directly funding al Qaeda. In October 2004, the Saudi government’s Ministry for Islamic Affairs dissolved the foundation, and, according to a senior Saudi official, its assets will be folded into a new Saudi National Commission for Charitable Work Abroad.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.  There is no perfect analogy, but if the pre-Mandela South African government had a policy of spreading the concept of white power and white separatism to American churches, there would be a massive public outcry.  Wahhabism preaches religious separatism, intolerance, prejudice and a highly physical form of jihad.  Why no outcry when a root cause of terrorism is allowed to spread across American mosques without complaint and without protest?  Maybe because it’s been around for awhile.  Maybe because our stated policy is that Islam is a religion of peace.  I don’t know.  I believe that many forms of Islam are indeed peaceful, but Wahhabism clearly is not.  It is a Sect of War.

Am I obsessing about the threat of Wahhabism?  Maybe.  But the New York Times agrees with me, so I can’t be too far off base, no?  When Islamic intolerance and violence is found, too often Wahhabists are the cause.  Wahhabism is a part of Sunni Islam, and how much of a role it plays in Iraq is unclear.  As it is, the enemies of freedom and democracy are mostly Sunnis, Zarqawi included.  The numbers of those Sunnis who are Wahhabis is not known, but my guess is that they’re significant.

So what are my solutions?  Should these materials be banned?  To the extent that they call for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, yes.  Otherwise, no.  I’ve said before that Wahhabism shouldn’t be treated the same way the magical community treats Voldemort, as the enemy that must not be named.  We need to name it and expose it.  We need to identify its financial backers and its prominent imams.  We need to know the mosques in America that adhere to–and preach–this hate ideology.  Do we tolerate the White Power movement?  No, the FBI has been all over them.  These aren’t specific details, I know, but they’re something.  From page 14 of the CFRF report:

Saudi Wahhabism is dominant in many American mosques. Singapore’s main newspaper recently published an interview with Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the Lebanese-American chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, based in Washington, D.C.: “Back in 1990, arriving for his first Friday prayers in an American mosque in Jersey City, he was shocked to hear Wahhabism being preached. ‘What I heard there, I had never heard in my native Lebanon. I asked myself: Is Wahhabism active in America? So I started my research. Whichever mosque I went to, it was Wahhabi, Wahhabi, Wahhabi, Wahhabi.’”

Jersey City is where the slaughtered Armanious family lived. Coincidence?  Possibly, but we don’t know yet.  We need to put Wahhabism front and center in the marketplace of ideas and defeat it.  For example, in Yemen, Islamic scholars went head-to-head against al Qaeda members in a Koranic duel, and al Qaeda lost:

When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen’s Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his "theological dialogues" with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda fought Islamic law, and the law won.  We need to more fully back the more tolerant strains of Islam, and give the more tolerant practitioners the tools to widen and grow their messages.  We need to put the screws on the House of Saud through constructive engagment and, if progress is not made, begin a process of dissociation from this corrupt government. At the risk of getting dirty looks and scoldings from my fellow editors, I’ve cut and pasted a chunk of CFRF report below the fold.  The Introduction is also a must read.

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We’ve heard it again and again in the Iraq invasion: steadfastness wins the day. Setting and then moving heaven and earth to meet a deadline (whether it be creating the CPA, the symbolic June 30th handover, or the January 30th elections) has been heralded as our best tool in ensuring the transparent achievement of our goals and intentions. Stating clearly to the world what we intend to do and then doing just that. Watching the milestones go by. It’s what you’ll see the President pat himself on the back for in his SOTU address tonight.

But now, when there are more Americans who declare they want to start bringing the troops home than those willing to watch the occupation drag on, we’re told a timetable is a bad thing. In fact, its so bad that even a distinguished Senator can be labeled a traitor for suggesting it’s time to start discussing it. For the record, if that’s the case, according to the poll above, 47% of Americans are traitors.

Now I’ve gone on record here repeatedly arguing that Iraq’s security remains Job 1. Bringing the troops home must take second place to ensuring the Iraqis can defend themselves against enemies from without and within. But we’ve reached the point in all this where a timetable could serve to stop one of the insurgents’ main recruiting methods: occupation resentment. As Michael O’Hanlon and James Steinberg explain in today’s Washington Post it "is now inescapable that [US troops] are helping fuel the insurgency.":

Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz argue against setting any American exit strategy to a calendar. That is an argument the Bush administration has, at least for now, itself endorsed. Kissinger and Shultz’s logic would be right for the Balkans, or Germany and Japan after World War II, or any nation-building effort not challenged by a strong insurgency. But such logic does not apply in Iraq, where the resistance appears to be gaining most of its growing strength from indigenous hostility to the foreign military presence.

No exit strategy for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq should be abrupt or radical. We must not cut and run. We should not plan to withdraw our forces entirely by any set date. And we should announce a schedule for partial withdrawal only in conjunction with the new Iraqi government being formed. But the case for a fairly prompt major reduction in foreign forces, announced publicly and set to a schedule, increasingly appears to be the best way to help produce a stable Iraq under a government accepted as legitimate by most of its people.

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This isn’t really about the eight million who voted in last Sunday’s election, I just love the sound of the phrase. When Edward wrote of the surface similarity of last Sunday’s election and a September 1967 New York Times account of an election in Vietnam,  I wrote a blurb in comments and then Gary Farber comes along and asks me, like, 50 questions (exaggeration alert).  Rather than answer them point-by-point there, I thought it’d be better to expand my thoughts here.  The reference to an election in 1967 Vietnam is interesting but not apt to 2005 Iraq.  This strikes me more as a clever tack to by some on the left (not Gary) to talk down this major milestone.

The Guardian and New York Times picked up on the meme as well.  Kevin Drum distanced himself by saying "this doesn’t mean Iraq is Vietnam", but the message from the anti-Bush liberals is clear:  Stop the cheerleading because an election doesn’t mean we’ve won the war.  No, we haven’t won, but this is a major victory.  Why?  Because an opposite result could have significantly changed the course of history.  We have to ask ourselves this:  What if the turnout were 27% instead of 57%?  [Update:  Assuming the 8 million figure is accurate and that the denominator is 14 million eligible voters, the turnout is 57%] The election would have been called a failure, and so would the interim Iraqi government and American efforts to rebuild this country.  The "insurgents" would have won, and the Ted Kennedys and Harry Reids and John Kerrys would’ve been front and center calling for an exit strategy (oops, they already have been).  If the election were a failure, the legitimacy of the interim government and our presence in-country would have been called into question, and perhaps rightfully so.  With success, we can proceed to the next step, a path toward a non-theocratic representative government that will uphold the rule of law.  Kind of a like a single-elimination tournament.  The election was that big of a deal.

So is there a real comparison between September 1967 in Vietnam and January 2005 in Iraq?  The short answer is no.  The Times article was a snapshot of an historical moment, and it does not provide a reasonable context.  We were reticent to go into Vietnam in the first place because the Diem regime was corrupt and incompetent.  While the Kennedy and Johnson administrations made some efforts to improve the South Vietnamese government, the proof was in the pudding.  No real or substantive changes were made when it counted.  It remained a bribe-ridden ineffectual regime until it collapsed in 1975.  One of our major failures in Vietnam–and there were legion–was that we didn’t give the people something to fight for.  The Vietnamese people were not given a higher cause, or an ideal for which to defend.  We focused most of our efforts on military matters and didn’t pay enough attention to political reforms.  The result was that too many of the people did what was best for their families or communities, choosing to forsake their national leadership.  Too many hung back and ended up supporting whoever had the upper hand at the time.  In America in Vietnam, Guenter Lewy offered a coherent perspective:

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