The Question Is NOT-Why Do They Do This?

[Annie]

It's past time to stop thinking that way:

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/50968.htm

TERROR'S GLOBAL AMBITION

By AMIR TAHERI

THE terrorist attacks in London this month have triggered an avalanche of speculation about the possible causes of the atrocities and the motives of the perpetrators.

By a week ago the prevalent view according to the British media was that the attacks were carried out by young men "angry about British involvement in Iraq."

This created the illusion of a rational cause-and-effect. The London daily The Independent put it starkly: Osama bin Laden had warned that if "we bomb his cities in Iraq" he would bomb "our cities" in the West.

The London daily did not bother with such uncomfortable questions as why, if Iraq were the motive, no Iraqis were involved in the attacks. Nor did it stop to wonder why Iraq should belong to bin Laden, who has never even seen the place except on a secret visit in 1999, and not to the Iraqi people. Needless to say it also did not mention that the terrorists who are killing Iraqis in their cities belong to the same ideological family as those who attacked London.

At any rate, most Britons, having paid attention to their media and read reports of an analysis by the Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs, a think-tank which also claimed that London was attacked because Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, were about to go away convinced that they knew why Britain had been targeted.

Then came news of several terrorist operations thousands of miles away. These included explosions in three Algerian cities, in the Pakistani city of Quetta, in the Lebanese capital Beirut and, the deadliest of them all, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The same media that had wrapped things up by identifying the liberation of Iraq as the reason for attacks on London began to wonder if other reasons may have been involved.

That, in turn, led to the revival of the classical explanations for the latest attacks.

One explanation was poverty. Those who massacred innocents in Sharm el-Sheikh were angry about poverty, one pundit observed with a straight face.

The truth, however, is that most of the 90 or so people who died in Sharm el-Sheikh were poor people who had just found jobs in the tourist industry and were beginning to build a modest life for their families.

The attacks against Sharm el-Sheikh will not only not help alleviate poverty in Egypt but are sure to increase it dramatically. If tourism, the flagship of the Egyptian economy, is hurt it will plunge the country into recession, threatening over 100,000 jobs, according to official estimates.

Another explanation, by an American pundit, was that young Muslims were angry with the loss of their identity and were trying to revive their traditions. This, however, assumes that car bombs and random killing of people in public transport constitute part of the Islamic identity and tradition.

With the exception of the attacks in Lebanon, which may safely be imputed to Syrian secret services, other recent terrorist operations, including those of London and Sharm el-Sheikh, are clearly the work of elements known under the al Qaeda brand name.

The attacks in Egypt come almost two years after the Gama'a Islamiyah (Islamic Society) and its offshoots such as Takfir wal-Higrah (Anathema and Withdrawal), which had waged a 20-year terrorist campaign against the state, decided to throw in the towel.

Those groups focused on destroying the Egyptian state, which they regarded as "pharaonic," and had no global jihadist ambitions.

Even the Ikhwan al-Moslemeen (The Muslim Brotherhood), whichmust be regarded as the ideological grandmother of all Arab and Pakistani terrorist movements, never developed a strategy of global conquest. The demise of the traditional Islamist terror groups and the Muslim Brotherhood's change of strategy, from one of armed violence to one of winning power through permeation, created a vacuum that has been partly filled by the neo-terrorists of the kind known under the al Qaeda brand.

But even then these groups, including those that hit London and Egypt this month, subscribe to the most radical version of the al Qaeda world-view.

Within that worldview some theoreticians of terror argue in favor of a regional strategy. They want the Islamic "ghazis" (holy raiders) to focus on winning power in as many Muslim countries as possible before moving to a strategy of global conquest for Islam.

They have identified Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt as the most immediately vulnerable nations. Among supporters of that analysis one finds individuals and groups that, though ideological siblings, do not necessarily maintain organizational links. Pakistan's principal Islamist figure, Fazlur Rahman; the Taliban's "emir" Mullah Muhammad Omar; the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2; the Sudanese Islamist Hassan al-Turabi, and Yussuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based preacher share this view.

But that analysis is opposed by other theoreticians of terror including bin Laden, Abu-Hamza al-Masri and Mullah Haqqani, who favor direct and spectacular attacks against the major "infidel" powers, especially the U.S. and Britain.

Their argument is that the "infidel" can be terrorized into fleeing from the Muslim world, thus leaving the local regimes vulnerable to attacks by the "ghazis." In this reading the immediate task of the "ghazis" is to force the United States and its allies to withdraw from the targeted regional states. The latest attacks in London and Sharm el-Sheikh were authored by those who share the strategy advocated by this second group of terrorist theoreticians.

This is clear from the code-names used by the groups that have claimed responsibility for the attacks. In the case of the London attacks the code-name used was Abu-Hufs al-Masri, the al Qaeda military chief of staff who was killed by the Allies when liberating Afghanistan. The Sharm el-Sheikh attacks have been claimed by a group using the code-name of the late Abdullah Azzam, a Saudi-Palestinian who became the godfather of "Arab Afghans" fighting the Red Army in the 1980s.

The groups behind the latest attacks in London and Sharm el-Sheikh are motivated neither by anger over the liberation of Iraq nor any sufferings caused by poverty and/or identity crisis.

They have a clear, coldly calculated strategy aimed at changing the regional balance of power in their own favor, by driving the Western "infidels" out, so that they could seize control of several Muslim countries — some with immense oil resources. And that would be the first step toward putting Islam back on the path of world conquest for the first time since the Ottomans abandoned their siege of Vienna in the 16th century.

Any show of weakness by the West in meeting that challenge would only help clinch the current debate within the Islamist circles in favor of those who advocate the most radical terrorist options.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian author of ten books on the Middle East and Islam. He's a member of Benador Associates.