ISIS: Put the blame where it belongs: Bush. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Reagan

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/03/put_the_blame_where_it_belongs_bush_reagan_kissinger_and_the_real_history_of_the_rise_of_isis/

If you think it’s a bit crazy when elite conservatives try to blame Obama for the rise of Donald Trump, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Check out Damon Linker’s establishment apologia, “The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism,” unfurled in the wake of the Brussels bombings, which seeks to stand history on its head, burying the actual anti-Communist roots of al Qaeda’s genesis, and replacing them with their exact opposites. It’s yet another case of envious reversal [I’ve written about this before here and here], which conservatives so often employ to cast themselves either as victims of liberals’ illiberalism, or else as liberalism’s true champions—touting anti-gay discrimination as “religious freedom,” for example. Although Linker is a conservative, he’s not writing as one in this instance—he’s writing on behalf of bipartisan elitism, in the name of liberalism no less—you know, the good old-fashioned John Locke, Adam Smith, just-don’t-read-them-too-closely kind. But the envious reversal is still in full force.

To be fair, writers are not responsible for headlines, and Linker’s argument is broader than that—it’s a sweeping defense of the Western elite status quo. But it is a crucial part of what he’s arguing, and it helps illuminate much of what’s wrong with the rest of what he has to say, as well as what’s wrong with a much wider chorus ofstatus quo voices. So let’s take out the headline absurdity first, and then survey Linker’s argument more generally, to see what we can learn.

Linker warms to his subject, citing “totalitarian forms of political argument—and specifically the tendency of those influenced (sometimes unknowingly) by Marxism to embrace the goal of “heightening the contradictions,” but his real concern isn’t political argument—it’s actions:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there haven’t been a lot of doctrinaire communist revolutionaries running around. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of heightening the contradictions has disappeared. On the contrary, it has spread like a virus to other forms of anti-liberal political extremism.

Radical Islam, for example, is a highly potent mixture of motifs drawn from the Muslim past and Marxist-Leninist ideas imported through the writings of such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi.

Groups like ISIS and al Qaeda don’t think they can defeat the West through terrorism, Linker argues; they want to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash, which will radicalize persecuted Muslims to join in further terrorism:

Attack, crackdown, worse attack, more draconian crackdown, on and on, with the West eventually weakening enough that a resurgent Islam can rise as a triumphant global power.

Make things worse to make things better: a classic case of heightening the contradictions.

Some of what Linker says here is true, particularly what he says about the aims of ISIS and al Qaeda, which has been pointed out repeatedly by terrorism experts, as well both leftist and libertarian critics of U.S. interventionism. What’s utterly false is the flimsy core of his argument, that Marxism is responsible for ISIS and al Qaeda, when the truth is almost entirely the opposite.

It’s well-known that al Qaeda grew out of the U.S.-funded proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war designed to give them their own Vietnam. ISIS, in turn, came out of our invasion of Iraq and subsequent actions, including the destruction of the Iraqi army. In the article linked to where Linker claims a Marxist heritage for “such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi,” we find nothing more detailed to substantiate the claim. There is some truth in it, but as Mahmood Mamdani makes clear in his book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror,” it’s equally true that their ideas gained a foothold in large part because they were useful in the Cold War fight against Soviet Communism. Moreover, the U.S. turned to supporting terrorism as a Cold War stratagem beforethings got started in Afghanistan. A summary of some of Mamdani’s key arguments can be found in this like-named essay, where he cites 1975 as a turning-point year: America’s defeat in Indochina, the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa, and the shift in Cold War focus to apply the Nixon Doctrine, that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars,” in Southern Africa, both to prop up apartheid South Africa, and to partner with them:

South Africa became both conduit and partner of the U.S. in the hot war against those governments in the region considered pro-Soviet. This partnership bolstered a number of terrorist movements: Renamo in Mozambique, and Unita in Angola. Their terrorism was of a type Africa had never seen before. It was not simply that they were willing to tolerate a higher level of civilian casualties in military confrontations — what official America nowadays calls collateral damage. The new thing was that these terrorist movements specifically targeted civilians. It sought specifically to kill and maim civilians, but not all of them. Always, the idea was to leave a few to go and tell the story, to spread fear. The object of spreading fear was to paralyze government.

There was nothing Islamic here, even in pretense, much less was there any thread of Marxist influence on the U.S./South African side. It was pure Nixon/Kissinger realpolitik. Nothing intellectually deeper than that.  And what began in South Africa in the mid-’70s then spread: