03/24/09 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And it's my pleasure to introduce Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
He writes the blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com.
And welcome back to the show, Juan.
Thanks so much, Scott.
And you're on a book tour right now for your brand new book, is that right?
That is correct.
And it's in the mail, but too late.
But it's on its way.
I can't wait to read it.
What's the name of it?
It's Engaging the Muslim World.
Engaging the Muslim World.
That sounds like a good idea for a book, rather than, say, obliterating them all, which apparently has been the policy.
Yes.
It's amazing if you think about it.
In the last few years, the United States has invaded two major Muslim countries and militarily occupied both of them.
This is something that hasn't been done since World War I.
Right.
And, of course, the regime change in Somalia, I don't think, went unnoticed, even though it was only a few American soldiers on the ground, mostly an Ethiopian thing.
That's right.
Well, there have been lots of interventions, of course.
Here's the thing, Juan.
I've done a couple of radio interviews with right-wing war party hosts in the past couple of weeks, as the anniversary of the Iraq War has come up, in the name of Antiwar.com, defending my point of view from them.
Apparently, there's an entire giant faction on the right that says the Iraq War is basically great, that everybody there is still, like they used to say back in 2004, they're way better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein.
The whole thing is a great success, thanks to General Petraeus and the rest of these things.
I was thinking, not that I can't refute these lies pretty well myself, but I thought it would be nice to give people an opportunity to hear an actual State of the Iraqi Union kind of report about how that country really is doing, after all these years of American occupation.
Well, how people are doing would depend on what your ultimate interests were.
Obviously, the people you're talking about don't care that there are 4 million displaced Iraqis huddling in shelters or abroad, running out of money, whose lives have been disrupted.
That's 4 million out of 27 million.
That's a big proportion of the country that's homeless.
And then you have another big proportion that's been killed or wounded.
So, if your criterion is that they've had a few elections and they had to lock down the country to have them, then you can declare that it's all a great success.
But if your interest is the welfare of the people, then it's hard to see it as a success.
Then, if you're talking about U.S. interests in the region, the Saddam Hussein regime was horrible, but it was a bulwark against Iranian influence in the Middle East.
You've now got a government in Baghdad, which the American right will never admit, but it's run by the Islamic Mission Party, which is a Shiite fundamentalist party that is close to Tehran.
And so, Iran's power in the Middle East has been quadrupled by the Bush administration's actions.
So, you've got a country...
Is that faction you refer to, that's the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution?
Well, no.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has changed its name, says it's now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, because the revolution has already occurred.
Yeah, they were successful in that part, thanks to the 3rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.
That's how they view what has happened, is that they had an Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
So, they're the largest, the most important party in parliament, but the Prime Minister is from a coalition partner of the Islamic Supreme Council, the Dawa Party, or the Islamic Mission Party.
The Islamic Mission Party, I guess I haven't heard it referred to as that before.
Well, it's not usually translated, or it's not usually referred to at all, but it is the party of the Prime Minister.
It did the best in the provincial elections in the Shiite South in the recent January 31st.
But, you know, the American press just has an odd way of putting things.
So, they said that the secular party did well.
Right.
Well, does the Islamic Mission Party sound to you like a secular party?
No, although, is it true, or to what degree is it relevant that al-Maliki is actually from one faction of Dawa that is a bit less pro-Iranian than, say, Jafari's faction, and that he actually is more of an Iraqi nationalist?
Because I think secular, in the American media, they use those terms interchangeably, but they're saying that he's trying to govern across sectarian lines.
I guess it's another question whether that's actually true or not.
Well, I mean, I think in a parliamentary system you have strange bedfellows.
The Hezbollah in Lebanon allies with Christians like Michel Allen.
Right.
It doesn't mean that they're secular.
But in any case, the point being that al-Maliki was an exile in Damascus rather than Iran.
He did hang out in Iran as well.
And so he's not as close to the Ayatollahs as some of the other Shiite leaders in Iraq.
But he is also close to them.
And he's gone to Iran a couple times and had very warm consultations.
Ahmadinejad came to see him in Baghdad.
So, you know, the American political elite, the politicians and pundits, just don't want to see that reality, which is that Iran is making hay in Iraq, and the new government that we installed is allowing them to.
Well, and they even try to blame, or at least in years past, have tried to blame all their problems on Iran, even though the Iranians have basically been their partners in installing the Maliki government.
Exactly.
The Iranians supported the elections.
They supported the Constitution.
If you read, you know, the Iranian press secretary, it sounded exactly like an echo of whatever Bush's press secretary was saying.
Well, and although, to be fair to the Bush regime, they didn't mean to do that, right?
It was because Sistani said, hey, if you believe in God, go outside and demand one man, one vote.
And Bush and Blair's plans for regime change were disrupted and replaced by the Ayatollah's plan.
Yeah, well, the original Bush administration plan was to go in, overthrow Saddam, put what they called the secular Shiites in power, because they believed that Iraqi Shiites were secular, and then leave.
And then the secular Shiites in Iraq would be a game changer for the whole region.
Well, it was a crackpot plan.
It was based on false information, poor analysis, unrealistic expectations, and, of course, it all collapsed.
But what they ended up doing really was to expand Iranian power in the region, and then to ruin a lot of Iraqi lives.
So, you know, I think just the sheer fragility of the current situation is not widely understood.
You had four bombs go off in Iraq yesterday, a couple of them pretty big bombs.
One in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.
Another in a Kurdish city in Diyala province.
And this is Arab on Kurdish violence.
25 killed in that one.
So that's, you know, a shoe that could drop Kurdish-Arab conflict.
And so things are not hunky-dory in Iraq.
You know, it is a basket case.
Well, and all the headlines today, in fact, are, well, I forget if it was the Times of London or who it was, antiwar.com.
We have our own treatment on the subject by Jason Ditz about the Awakening Fighters rally against Maliki government.
The former Sunni insurgents put on the payroll by General Petraeus.
They were supposed to be absorbed onto the Iraqi payroll and made part of the Iraqi army at some point.
But it seems like that some point keeps getting pushed off and pushed off, and they're getting mad.
Yeah.
This was a New York Times story today.
It has been long known that Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, did not intend to put most of those Awakening Council members, the Sunni Arab fighters who started taking salary from the Americans, to fight what the Americans call al-Qaeda in Iraq, that these guys were never going to be incorporated into the Iraqi armed forces or security agencies in very large numbers.
Al-Maliki doesn't trust them.
He sees them as former insurgents and who could easily try to make a coup against him if they were in the military.
Which is true, right?
Well, you know, he has his reasons for not trusting them.
So I think some small proportion of them might be brought into the police or the military.
But most of them, if they get a salary at all, it's going to be a desk job, kind of a make work job of some sort.
And the ability of the Iraqi government to give out desk jobs has declined rapidly with the decline in the price of petroleum this year.
So a lot of those guys, you know, they're not even getting paid anymore.
There is worry on the American side that if Al-Maliki doesn't pick these 100,000 nearly Sunni Arab fighters up, that they'll go back to taking a salary from the al-Qaeda types.
Well, so correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm sure you have a lot better memory than I do and wrote a lot more about it at the time.
I just talked about it.
Weren't all the benchmarks of the surge supposed to be completed by October of 2007?
Oh, yeah.
And that was all the political reconciliation between the different Arab factions and the Kurds, etc.?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, they were supposed to.
Well, you know, things have been done that sort of were attempting to meet those benchmarks.
But often they backfired.
The new law on the treatment of the members of the former Ba'ath Party was passed, and it was passed by the hardline Shiites, and the former Ba'athists all yelped about it and didn't like it.
And then Bush came out and touted it as an achievement for national reconciliation.
So, you know, a lot of these things have been met in name only.
You've got the Obama administration now.
I've got a chapter in the book Engaging the Muslim World about how Iraqis and Middle Easterners saw and experienced the Iraq War and what a disaster it was for them.
Even if you just took the people who were killed, wounded, displaced, you know, you've got a population here of people badly affected by this thing that proportionally would be like the entire state of California.
Yeah, well, I'm an individualist, so I'm not sure about all that proportional stuff.
But you know what?
Four million is a lot of refugees.
And I guess what you say, that's half of them went to Syria and Jordan.
The other half are internally displaced somewhere, huddling by a fire somewhere.
Yeah, they're all around the country, a couple tens of thousands in the Kurdish area.
And what do you think is the approximate estimate of the number killed in Iraq, the excess deaths, they call it, people who have died under the occupation above and beyond the proportions that they would have been dying just under the blockade?
Yeah, well, that's all very controversial because it's based on projections.
But if you took all the people who've died of violence and also of infrastructural failure, like a water purification plant was knocked out so the kids got diarrhea and died of dehydration.
Yeah, the checkpoint was between here and the hospital, so the person died on the way.
Yeah, if you took all those people, I can't see how it would be any less than 300,000.
And some estimates have it at a million.
Yeah, you know, I did interview Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research.
And in fact, the story is I tried to get him on, I guess, in the fall of 2007.
And they put me off and then eventually got back to me and said they decided to do it again because it's such a controversial number, they really want to make sure.
And so they did it again, and they spent another six months doing the study again.
And then that was when I finally interviewed them was when they came back and said, yep, a million.
Yeah.
And there was just the UN report that came out that said there are 750,000 widows, so that sounds about right.
Yeah, of course, some of those widows were created by earlier wars.
But yeah, I mean, I think personally, I think that a million dead is plausible.
And I think if the situation ever does really settle down, the kind of studies that need to be done, people know, you know, when their uncle was killed by a bullet.
So eventually you'd be able to do a study that would satisfy everybody that would give the real number.
But, you know, let's not quibble.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died in this thing.
And the U.S. military didn't kill most of them, but our invasion set this paroxysm of violence off.
And it's certainly the case, you know, people used to say that Saddam was responsible for 300,000 civilian deaths over his reign.
It's certainly the case that more than that have died as a result of Bush's invasion.
So as I said, you know, how you total up the deficits and the advantages of an enterprise like that would depend a lot on what your goals were and what your values are.
Well, and access to the basic facts as you explain them, because I think most Americans just don't have access to them.
They've never heard a debate about whether it was between, you know, 300,000 and a million.
Yeah, the other thing is that those refugees are not just an abstract number.
Those are real human beings.
And I went to Jordan last August to find out about their situation.
I interviewed NGOs that were working with them, interviewed some Iraqis, and it's not a good situation.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates there are 50,000 Iraqis in Jordan that are vulnerable.
Vulnerable is the technical term in their line of work, which I think means just about running out of their last penny and facing a very, very dire situation.
So, you know, the United States really hasn't done much for those people, even though it caused them all this grief.
Well, and we can't let them back into this country, because they might have a grudge against us.
Well, actually, the Bush administration, I think, was afraid of that refugee situation blowing up on them during the election.
And so they did put a little money in, and they also took 12,000 last year of the refugees, and they're taking another 12 this year.
So, baby steps.
But, you know, Sweden took 40,000, and it didn't have anything to do with the whole thing.
Yeah.
Well, they've got a lot bigger hearts than we do, I guess.
Well, and again, they probably know what the crisis is like, whereas most Americans, I mean, this just is not on TV.
They'd rather talk about Obama's clothes than his Iraq policy.
Which brings me to Obama's Iraq policy.
George Bush negotiated a SOFA.
Basically, with his back up against the wall, he negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement that capitulates, basically, on all of his previous demands.
No bases, no permanent military presence, everybody gone by January 1, 2012.
Do you believe in that?
Do you think that Obama is going to actually stick by that at all?
Well, I think mostly.
That is to say, the big issue is the Army and the Marines, the infantry and the armored corps, the fighting troops on the ground.
And I just don't think that the Iraqis want them patrolling their cities, and indeed, the Status of Forces Agreement specifies that there won't be U.S. patrols as of July 1 of this year.
And then that starts to really raise the question of what they're doing there if they're not patrolling.
And I was talking to a U.S. officer who'd been in Iraq a couple times and was there in December, and I asked him, you know, what's the capability of the Iraqi Army now?
And he said that they're capable of patrolling.
And if they get in a firefight, they will stand and fight.
He said they're not good at logistics still, so they, you know, supplying the troops with water for a five-hour fight instead of a one-hour one, that they're not so good at yet.
But they will patrol, they will stand and fight.
And so, you know, the Iraqis increasingly just don't need U.S. infantry.
They still need U.S. air support.
And that's the thing that a lot of anti-war folks are going to be upset about, which is the Iraqi Air Force doesn't exist.
And it's got, the Iraqi government has orders in for helicopter gunships and fixed-wing aircraft.
Those won't be delivered until 2013, and a lot of them are sophisticated machines.
They're going to need years of training for the pilots.
So the U.S. Air Force and also U.S. arms contractors, U.S. trainers, they're going to be there a long time.
But there will be relatively few of them.
Well, and that's what they're talking about, right?
One of the things they were, Jim Michalczewski talked about on NBC after his discussions with Pentagon people there, was talking about, it was something I think Hillary Clinton floated in the primaries.
Well, maybe we can just put bases in Kurdistan.
They still like us, and we can put a permanent couple of air bases there.
Right.
Well, there will be some kind of air facilities there for some time, I think.
And the Iraqis want that.
That is to say, the Iraqi government wants it.
Because they're aware that their troops could get into trouble with some militia.
But the problem with putting the bases in Kurdistan is that the next big fight may be between the Iraqi army of Nouri al-Maliki and the Peshmerga paramilitary of Kurdistan.
And, you know, the Kurds have things set up so that the Iraqi army can't step foot in Kurdistan territory.
I joke that they have a better deal than Alabama.
No federal troops.
However, also, the Kurds have sent their Peshmerga paramilitary 200 miles beyond the border of Kurdistan into surrounding regions, on the grounds that those often have fair Kurdish populations.
And al-Maliki sees this as a kind of expansionism, and wants to roll it back.
Well, whatever happened to the good old days of the Kurdish-Shiite alliance?
Well, it's falling apart.
The Kurdish-Shiite alliance, which was a fact of life, and which dictated Iraqi politics and the Constitution, really from 2003 until very recently, that alliance is falling apart.
And, in fact, the big divide in Iraqi politics is between what you might think of as centralizers, as people in favor of a very strong central government, and what the Iraqis call federalists.
But it doesn't mean the same thing there as it means here.
They mean by that states' rightsers.
Well, Hamilton twisted the meaning of that term in the beginning.
That's why we use it wrong.
They use it correctly.
They're using it correctly.
So the states' rights versus the centralizers is the big fight.
And al-Maliki is the centralizer, and the Kurds are states' rights.
So the Sunni Arab groups, who have now entered Iraqi politics, and have seats in parliament, and did well in the Sunni provinces in the recent provincial elections, they're also centralizers.
So, basically, you've got Arab factions, both Shiite and Sunni, that are centralizers, who can put together a majority coalition.
And you have the states' rights people, who are the Kurds, and some of their Shiite allies, like the Islamic Supreme Council, also wanted more autonomy for the Shiite South, and they got very badly beaten in the provincial elections.
So the Shiites, who are most favorable to the Kurdish project of states' rights, are in decline.
And the centralizing Shiites have come up.
And they've got more in common with the Sunnis.
So there's an increasing Arab-Kurdish divide over this issue.
And if you put American bases in Kurdistan, that's kind of a signal that we're in favor of the states' rights groups.
And if it goes to violence, if the Iraqi army actually takes on the Peshmerga, which did happen last August, then which side is the U.S. going to choose?
Well, this is what Joe Biden has said he's wanted all along.
This is the Richard Haass-Joe Biden plan, is to divide the country up.
Well, I think that plan's dead.
The country's not going to be divided up.
The Arabs don't want it.
And the Turks don't want Kurdistan becoming semi-autonomous.
And so I think local forces have overruled Mr. Biden.
I haven't heard him talk about it, at least recently.
But then again, like you say, if we do keep bases in Kurdistan, that's going to be a major bone of contention between these parties that are already splitting apart.
Well, yeah, what I'm saying is just it's not a realistic plan.
So let me just ask you— I'm just not sure whether that's ever stopped them before.
Well, I'm saying there are things that will stop them of a practical nature.
For instance, if you put U.S. bases in Kurdistan, how are they going to be supplied?
Great question.
It's a landlocked, distant area.
Right, the Turks aren't going to allow it.
There's only one way to supply a base in Kurdistan.
It's from Turkey.
Well, the Turks are the big objectors to Kurdistan.
So how come they're going to let us put a base in Kurdistan and then supply it from Turkey?
And if it did go to actual military conflict between the Arabs and the Kurds, the Turks would certainly side with the Arabs.
So we could see our troops just cut off from supply.
It's a terrible idea.
Well, your analysis sounds good to me.
Let's hope that the rest of them have considered that.
They haven't really seemed to have a problem strategically with creating very tenuous supply lines across Iraq so far.
Well, 70% of the materiel going into Iraq comes through Turkey.
And the Turks have an interest in building up the new government in Iraq and having some stability on their borders.
But if we get out of Arab Iraq and get into Kurdistan, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
It changes the equation.
So, well, I really can't imagine them putting our troops in that kind of situation, because if things got...
I mean, the whole point of having them there would be to try to prevent things from getting hairy.
But if things got hairy, you wouldn't want them cut off from supply.
Right.
Okay, well, so when it comes to the question of the Maliki government seems to be getting closer and closer to the point where it really is able to stand on its own without American support, what about that unresolved conflict with the Sunnis?
You say that the former insurgents, basically their centralizers, they'd like to be the ones in charge, but they certainly want to keep an Iraqi state together.
It seems like Maliki has a lot of incentive to work things out with them, rather than leave this festering problem, which would remain an excuse for continued American occupation.
Right.
Well, I think Maliki is trying to reach out to the Sunni Arab parties, not necessarily the ones that we favor.
For instance, there was an Arab nationalist party up in Mosul, which is more or less Baathist-lite, called Al-Hadwa, which got 50% nearly of the seats in the provincial council.
So Maliki is trying to work with them, and some of the Awakening Council groups ran as parties and did well in Al Anbar or Diyala provinces, and Maliki is in talks with them as well.
So it's perilous, you know, things can break down, but the signals coming out of Baghdad are actually better than they were last year this time, on cooperation between the Dawa, the Islamic Mission party of the prime minister, and then the Sunni parties.
And in fact, the Washington Post did a piece, Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, knows Arabic, is in Baghdad, did a piece on the possibility that Maliki would try to break with the more hardline Shiite groups, the Islamic Supreme Council and the Sadrists, and make his alliances with the secular Iraqi list of Yad Allawi, and then with the Sunni Arabs, that he put together a cross-sectarian coalition.
I don't know if that's stable or if it's doable, but nobody was talking like this a year ago.
Right.
All right, now, you're a professor of history at the University of Michigan, your new book is Engaging the Muslim World.
I guess the major question kind of overriding all of this, that usually goes kind of unsaid and unaddressed, but is a major part of this, is kind of the underlying belief on the part of many people in this country, that Islam is a dangerous alien force, that it is, I guess, as one of Giuliani's fundraiser guys was caught saying on camera out loud, Islam is rising and we must stop it, there's this clash of civilizations, and the presence of powerful Islamic societies anywhere makes us unsafe.
That's kind of the premise that I think a lot of Americans believe, that sort of informs their willingness to allow the politicians to do what they've been doing over these past years.
So it seems like this is the kind of thing you're trying to address in this book.
Can you give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of the point here?
Yeah, well, I mean, that kind of fear of Islam or Islamophobia, that is so much a part of the rhetoric, especially of the American political right, is very pernicious and misleading.
I mean, first of all, there are groups like Al-Qaeda in the Muslim world that mean the United States harm.
So that's clearly something that should be acknowledged.
But the thing to say about them is that they are fringe political cults, and they're not representative of the mainstream.
And, you know, religion of Islam does not command Muslims to kill non-Muslims.
That's just a lie.
Murder is actually forbidden in the Quran, and the Islamic legal tradition grants to Christians and Jews liberty of life and property in Muslim societies.
So, you know, just outrageous things are said like that.
The infidels being referred to in the Quran that advises one to fight are the militant pagan Meccans who were trying to kill the Muslims.
So the Quran suggests the Muslims not allow themselves to be killed.
So that was a particular story about a particular battle, not an injunction from here on out.
Yeah, well, and moreover, nothing to do with Christians and Jews who are in a different category from the militant pagans.
So the Quran says that the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and the Gospels are full of guidance and light.
It praises the children of Israel.
There's a verse that says that the Christians are closest in love to the Muslims.
That one doesn't get quoted enough.
And then if you look at the geopolitical realities, you know, the United States has a NATO ally, Turkey.
It's a Muslim-majority country.
By Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, Turkey has pledged to defend the United States from its enemies.
And indeed did fight side-by-side with U.S. troops in Korea.
And Turkey has troops fighting in Afghanistan.
So here's a major ally, a Turkish ally of the United States.
And it's true that it has a secular tradition in politics, but recently it's been experimenting with a more Islam-tinged kind of politics.
And the majority of the people are Muslim.
When you take Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, they've all been designated by presidents as non-NATO allies of the United States.
We only have 14 non-NATO allies, so nearly half of them are Muslim-majority states.
That's the same category as Israel is in.
That's exactly right.
Israel is not a formal ally of the United States.
There's no treaty, but it has been designated a non-NATO ally.
So our relationship with Morocco is on paper exactly what it is with Israel.
And the United States does joint military exercises with the Egyptian military.
The non-NATO allies have special access to certain categories of weapons from the United States, and so on and so forth.
Bahrain offers the United States facilities for a Navy base.
So I don't think that there's any other culture region in the world outside Europe where the United States has as many allies as it does in the Muslim world.
Well, there you have it, folks.
And what about al-Qaeda?
You mentioned al-Qaeda there.
Is this 1,000th of 1% of people in the Muslim world?
How many people are left in al-Qaeda these days?
A couple of dozen?
Yeah.
Well, al-Qaeda, the old al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, mostly, I think, is gone.
They've been killed, captured, or dispersed.
I don't think there's any command and control left.
And you get these Arab volunteers who go off to Waziristan and hide out with the Pushtuns, and I guess you could call them al-Qaeda, but I don't know.
I don't think they have Osama bin Laden's cell phone number.
So it is a tiny group that's left.
And the dangerous thing, I suppose, is that news of radicalism, radical techniques, bomb-making, jihadi ideas, now have migrated to the Internet.
And so you can get three or four young guys who meet at some coffee shop or gym or something who are reading this stuff and chatting each other up and making a hothouse atmosphere and working themselves up to the point where they do something foolish.
But that's a very different kind of challenge, and I think it's basically a policing challenge, than a large terrorist organization with a base in a major country, 40 terror training camps, command and control, official positions, and so forth.
I think that kind of thing is over with.
Well, you know, the foreign policy counts so much.
And Michael Shoyer has another article along these lines on antiwar.com today, saying they don't hate us for what we are, they hate us for what we do, even as narrowly or broadly as one might define they in this instance.
And I was reminded of the controversy over the cartoon of Mohammed a couple of years back in Europe.
And it seemed to me that the point then was not that the whole Muslim world will demand that you get beheaded if you dare insult the Prophet, but that they will if their countries happen to be under the occupation of your country at the same time, or your same civilization, because there's not too much difference between Europe and America at this point, as far as it's the West compared to the Middle East.
And as long as the West is supporting dictators there and occupying countries in the Middle East, then things like a Mohammed cartoon will drive people into the streets and riot, but it's only part of a larger picture.
And that really, you know, the kooks reading the Internet and deciding they're going to do something crazy, there's always going to be people like that.
The question is, how many reasons are we handing them to want to do something like that to us?
Well, yeah, and you know, the invasion and occupation of Iraq certainly extended the life of Al Qaeda tremendously.
I think it would just have disappeared after 9-11 and the steps that the U.S. took against it, if it hadn't been given a second life by something like that, which was a great recruiting tool for the jihadis, especially, you know, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the invasion and destruction of the city of Fallujah, things like that caused more terrorism.
So, yeah, I mean, a lot of Muslim reactions and sort of what the West sees as touchiness about their culture does have to do with this history of Western colonialism, of being ruled by supercilious white people who, you know, put down their culture and their religion.
When the French were in charge of Algeria, they weren't exactly sensitive about these things.
And so it's just a very painful reminder to a lot of people of that humiliation of being ruled by foreigners, having their lives shaped by foreigners and having their religion and culture constantly put down.
I mean, the French tried to make Arabic into a kitchen language in Algeria and, you know, proper Algerians should be speaking French.
And Miss Macaulay Minot strove to make the Indians, including the Indian Muslims, into proper Englishmen.
And then there were all these scurrilous attacks on Islam and attempts to marginalize it and so forth, but for imperial purposes, because Islam is a very good rallying point against European dominance.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's an extension of anti-imperialism when they react that way.
For the most part, of course, there are fanatics in every culture and there are touchy people in every culture.
But if you look at where the big reaction to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad occurred, they were in Beirut and Damascus.
Those are not hotbeds of fundamentalism, I want to tell you.
So it sounds to me more like secular anti-imperialism.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it at that.
I really appreciate your insight on the show, as always.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
The book is Engaging the Muslim World.
I was about to say that.
It's Wong Cole.
Informed comment is the name of the blog at WongCole.com, the new book, Engaging the Muslim World.
Thanks very much.
Thanks so much for having me.
This is Antiwar Radio.