Al Zawahiri
I have been a little slow in pointing this article out which was recommended to me by Ayman. It is quite long, and contains the history of Al Zawahiri.
So I finally found the time to finish this… He is one messed up dude. I mean he wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government and install a new caliphate from the time he was 15. I’d say he started out pretty messed up. Torture doesn’t help, that’s true, but he was pretty messed up to begin with.
The thing I found most interesting (terrifying?) about the article is how there is nothing in the world that is unrelated. You can sort of follow a chain from one event to the next and connect all the dots to create the avalanche which we are now in the middle of. Starting with Qutb and his misadventures in the US (apparently seeing all the “sin” he was surrounded by in the US was much more formative than the article let on, I gather that many of his writings for the following decade focused on the lack of virtue in the west which was one of the Ayatollah’s big inspirations) to Iran through Egypt and Afghanistan then on to Yugoslavia, Chechniya, Kazakstan, who knows.. All of it is related. Of course in the cold war our hands were tied to some degree (if you want to believe that, and wether or not it was actually true, I’ll give that it at least appeared to be true at the time, especially given the mess we made in vietnam) but that whole time this completely connected, completely hidden culture of hate was forming. That just totally scares me.
I’m starting to think that we had a moment, after the end of the cold war when we could have really effected change in the world. If Bush I/Clinton had really sat down and thought about the state of the world, and our role in it, I think much of the horror of the past five years could have been avoided. But we went on blind to what was happening. And when we did do something it was reaction, not preventative. I’m starting to think that ending the first gulf was the way we did was the start of everything going down hill. If we were doing then what we are doing now in Iraq, the would would be a very different place. The Shia would not have been as bitter and bent on revenge, the Kurds would not be so hungry for an independence they have now known for 10 years. We could have devoted more energy to the problem of terrorism, Saddam wouldn’t have been supporting the families of Palestinian terrorists at the expense of his own people. Honestly the Iraqi people would have been more ready for democracy, they hadn’t been broken under a decade of cruelty.
Reading articles with sweep like that really make me scared for the future. How many more connections are we missing now? Abu Saayf? Jammaea? Will the next Ayatolla be in the island countries? Are we completely missing popular discontent in China? It is so easy to look back and make the connections, but it is so hard to do it in the present. And even if we could make the connections is there really anything that we could do about it.