Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

MEMRI, December 21, 2007

A polemic has recently erupted between noted Egyptian sociologist and reformer Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim and Iraqi liberal authors over the war in Iraq. The controversy centered on recent articles by Ibrahim comparing the Iraqi resistance to the Vietnamese fighters at Dien Bien Phu and to the Algerian FLN. In response, a number of Iraqi liberals – Dr. ‘Abd Al-Khaliq Hussein, Kazem Habib, and Iraqi Kurdish author Hosheng Broka – rejected Ibrahim’s historical comparisons, and accused him of supporting Ba’thist and Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for crimes against the Iraqi people.

The following are excerpts from Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s articles and the Iraqi authors’ responses to them:

Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim: “Foreign Occupation Must Inevitably Give Rise to National Resistance”

On October 27, 2007, Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim published an article titled “Vietnam and the Search for Iraq’s Future” in the Qatari daily Al-Raya and in the Egyptian opposition daily Al-Masri Al-Yawm. The article, written during a visit to Vietnam, was a reflection on U.S. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s recent statement that the Iraq war was “a nightmare with no end in sight,” interspersed with reflections on the author’s student days as an anti-Vietnam War activist. [1]

It was Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s follow-up article, “From Vietnam to Algeria to Iraq,” that became a source of controversy, as it seemed to express sympathy for the Iraqi “resistance.” Following are excerpts:

“As I was traveling in Vietnam with my wife and son… I called to mind stories from the past. I remembered the biographies of the great historical leaders of this poor Asian country who led a popular resistance against three foreign occupying forces in the 20th century – Japan, France, and the U.S. – and was victorious over them all, despite the heavy sacrifice of its people’s blood.

Conn Hallinan, The Algebra of Occupation, Foreign Policy In Focus, November 27, 2007In 1805, the French army out maneuvered, outsmarted, and outfought the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years later it would flounder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish guerrillas.

In 1967, it took six days for the Israeli army to smash Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 2006, a Shiite militia fought the mightiest army in the Middle East to a bloody standstill in Lebanon.

In 1991, it took four days of ground combat for the United States to crush Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War. U.S. losses were 148 dead and 647 wounded. After more than five years of war in Iraq, U.S. losses are approaching 4,000, with over 50,000 wounded; 2007 is already the deadliest year of the war for the United States.

In each case, a great army won a decisive victory only to see that victory canceled out by what T.E. Lawrence once called the “algebra of occupation.” Writing about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in World War I, Lawrence put his finger on the formula that has doomed virtually every military force that has tried to quell a restive population.

Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has cited Lawrence to this effect: “Rebellion must have an unassailable base…it must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form a disciplined army of occupation too small to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in a striking force, and 98 percent passive sympathy. Granted mobility, security…time and doctrine…victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive.”

David Ignatius – The Dignity Agenda – washingtonpost.com, October 14, 2007

After I mentioned Brzezinski’s ideas about dignity in a previous column, a reader sent me a 1961 essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which made essentially the same point. A deeply skeptical man who resisted the “isms” of partisan thought, Berlin was trying to understand the surge of nationalism despite two world wars. “Nationalism springs, as often as not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the desire for recognition,” he wrote.

“The craving for recognition has grown to be more powerful than any other force abroad today,” Berlin continued. “It is no longer economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense of the ambivalence of their social status — doubts about where they belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong.”

A final item on my dignity reading list is “Violent Politics,” a new book by the iconoclastic historian William R. Polk. He examines 10 insurgencies through history — from the American Revolution to the Irish struggle for independence to the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation — to make a stunningly simple point, which we managed to forget in Iraq: People don’t like to be told what to do by outsiders. “The very presence of foreigners, indeed, stimulates the sense first of apartness and ultimately of group cohesion.” Foreign intervention offends people’s dignity, Polk reminds us. That’s why insurgencies are so hard to defeat.

Danny Rubinstein, How many were arrested last night? – Haaretz, September 24, 2007

Shortly before his death three years ago, the sociologist Gadi Yatziv wrote that in the IDF struggle against terrorism, victory is part of failure. It is impossible to win because every raid, assassination, arrest and roadblock stir[s] rage and hatred and broaden[s] the pool of conscripts for terrorist cells. But it is also impossible to fail because the spokesmen of the Israeli security establishment will always claim that without these raids and roadblocks, terrorism will be much worse. It is an argument that cannot be refuted.