Good for Crikey, fighting a lone hand in bringing debate to the rush to war.
From Bernard Keane:
Yesterday’s massive anti-terror raids were, apart from the success of possibly disrupting an alleged murder plot, quite a media event…Examined a little more closely, the details became more problematic. Despite talk of a “cell”, a total of two people were charged, including one for firearms offences, which for such a vast operation seems disproportionately small — surely more charges will be laid? The Queensland raids led to further charges against two men already in custody, not new arrests. The “beheading” turned out to be assumed by the media, rather than asserted by the police. Some outlets didn’t even bother using “alleged” in relation to the charges. Cory Bernardi spoilt things by linking the raids to his frankly depraved obsession with how Muslim women dress (although, not to be outdone, Jacqui “voice of the people” Lambie backed him). The wall-to-wall media coverage was in peculiar contrast to a possible plot by a white man to engage in a far bigger terror attack a month ago. And murdering a single individual or perhaps a small number of people was a far cry from the “existential threat” that Attorney-General George Brandis warned of earlier this week.
It hasn’t been revealed what prompted Tuesday’s call between Mohammad Baryalei and the alleged plotter Omarjan Azari, in which police claim murder was discussed. Possibly it was in direct reaction to the government’s commitment of forces to attack IS. Possibly it was, as the politicians claim, merely because IS is filled with loathing for everything in the West, and would have occurred regardless of what the government had done in relation to Iraq.
Whatever the timing and specific causation, there’s still a bizarre reticence on the part of politicians to own the consequences of their actions — both the Howard government and the Blair government reacted angrily to officials asserting there was a connection between the increased danger to their own citizens and their decision to join the 2003 Iraq War.
And from the always superb Guy Rundle:
How far will the violence and disorder expand? Take a look at the map. From the Iraq-Iran border — a real division between cultures — across to the Atlantic coast of north Africa, there is not a single border that was not created by Western fiat, sleazy deals and attempts to sequester and divide the Arab people. For a century the Arab nationalist movement was pan-Arabist in its ambitions, reaching its apogee with the United Arab Republic — the fusion of Egypt and Syria (and briefly south Yemen) — in the 1960s and ’70s.
The movement was anti-imperialist first and religious a very distant second, with most of its leaders combating Islamism and making no links with non-Arab Muslims per se. Partly to break the pan-Arabist-Marxist hold, Israel helped found Hamas, a creation that rapidly got out of control. Such movements, if they succeed, lay a base for stable political development (even if a fraught one). Libya, often incorrectly seen as part of this wider disarray, is the only place — due to a successful revolution — where secular forces can go toe-to-toe against Islamists in the standard civil conflict aftermath of a revolution.
But when they decompose, nationalism and Marxism prove thin motivators. Pseudo-religious in their character, they yield to the real thing easily — a balaclava, an AK-47, money coming in from diverse sources, and a promise of paradise in the next world, with fierce meaning in this one. The Islamic State is the beneficiary of the defeat of radical pan-Arabism — just as, for example, the Los Angeles gang scene arose from the violent crushing of the Black Panthers by the US state in the early 1970s.
When a more liberatory and abstract cause is removed, power and energy will flow to a more concrete and simply enunciated version of it — hence the strategic advantage of creating a cult of personality (Mao, Ocalan, Albert Langer/Arthur Dent) when dealing with a non-literate, or minimally educated, insurgent force. In the absence of that, when you combine a religious ummah with linguistic unity (imagine if everyone from Portugal to the Ukraine spoke the same language), a vast cable-TV media, a series of discredited political ideals, cookie-cutter state borders that enforce the power of client elites, decades of economic stagnation, and a movement that should win a Gold CLIO for its branding — then you’ve got a movement that could potentially pop up everywhere right across to Western Sahara and down to Niger.
Keep it up fellas.
