by Robert Manne
Recently, of course, in the story of WikiLeaks and Assange, something even more important than the Snowden affair has taken place. When Russian intelligence hacked into the Clinton campaign emails and those of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, with the purpose of harming her and helping her rival, the hackers chose WikiLeaks as their avenue for publication in order to maintain plausible deniability. In the weeks before the presidential election, the US media – from Fox News to the New York Times – flooded the country with information that WikiLeaks released drip by drip. Trump himself made use of this material on more than 150 occasions. Without the contribution of WikiLeaks it is possible that Donald Trump would not have been elected as president.
These events are covered in Risk, but superficially, and without any forensic intent or attempt to place what has just occurred in the overall assessment of the work of WikiLeaks and Assange. This seems to me a failure of nerve and an evasion. Assange’s willingness to assist in the election of Trump is the overwhelmingly most disturbing question that all former WikiLeaks supporters such as Poitras (and myself) must now ponder.
In 2006, Julian Assange established WikiLeaks as a revolutionary political organisation tailored to the new age of electronic communications. According to WikiLeaks’ foundational theory, corrupt state and corporate institutions could be weakened and ultimately destroyed by the fear of whistleblowers, whose identities could be kept secret by use of encryption software. The fears of corrupt institutions would force them to expend energy covering their tracks, what Assange called a “secrecy tax”. Accordingly, only morally and politically fit state and corporate institutions would thrive and survive. What we have learned from recent events, however, is that WikiLeaks was itself vulnerable to a radical form of corruption if the leaks it published came not from upright whistleblowers but from manipulative political actors, such as the agents or intermediaries of an intelligence service. There was quite simply nothing in Assange’s theory that might have dissuaded him from co-operating with Russian intelligence in its clandestine anti-Clinton, pro-Trump operation. A revolutionary movement born of idealism and the hope of creating a better world has thus ended by assisting in the election of the most dangerous president in the history of the United States.
I am writing this review less than a week after Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord. The strengths and weaknesses of Julian Assange form the principal subject matter of Risk. However, it is not the real or supposed defects of his character but a fatal flaw in his thinking – in which Laura Poitras shows little interest and appears not to understand – that can best explain Assange’s modest contribution to the current crisis of civilisation that we now face.
The Monthly, July 2017
THE ISLAMIC STATE
THE MIND OF THE ISLAMIC STATE
In June 2014 the armies of the group that would soon call itself the Islamic State, a group that already controlled large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, entered Mosul, the second or third city of Iraq. The Iraqi army, in which the United States had invested, or perhaps wasted, US$25 billion, fled in fear. Shortly after, the group announced the restoration of the Muslim caliphate, which had been dissolved in 1924 by the leader of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk.
Before these events virtually no one in the West, apart from a handful of scholars and intelligence officers, had given the Islamic State a second thought. Six months before the fall of Mosul, US president Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State, with a withering contempt, as the junior league partners of al-Qaeda. Since then, however, the proudly publicised dark deeds of the Islamic State – the beheadings, the stoning to death of adulterous wives, the immolations, the crucifixions, the mass slaughters, the killings of homosexual men, the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women – have become only too well known.
As an undergraduate seeking to understand the Holocaust, I read Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide. It is the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document that “revealed” the Jewish plot for world conquest and became a fundamental element of the Nazi world view. Ever since, I have believed that there is nothing more dangerous in human affairs than beliefs capable of convincing their followers of the nobility of mass murder and other savage acts. For this reason, recently I set out to try to discover the thinking of the Islamic State’s leaders. The more I read the more convinced I became that the Islamic State’s barbarous behaviour could not possibly be grasped without some real familiarity with the character and content of their ideology. As so often in history, it is ideas that kill.
Political ideologies invariably take decades to crystallise. In the case of the Islamic State its world view is grounded in the thought of the Egyptian visionary Sayyid Qutb, whose Milestones is a seminal text for an understanding of both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Following Qutb’s execution and martyrdom in 1966, his thought was subject to a process best called, to borrow a phrase from the scholarly debate about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, “cumulative radicalisation”. This process occurred through the writings of a series of influential revolutionaries. The Egyptian engineer Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj, author of The Neglected Duty (referring to jihad), which inspired the 1981 assassination of his country’s president, Anwar Sadat, made Qutb’s thought operational. The Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, who wrote Join the Caravan and inspired the first army of jihadists during the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979, made Qutb’s already operationalised vision global. The Saudi-Yemeni businessman Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, in combination, created al-Qaeda, converted Qutb’s vision into the ideology of the most consequential global jihadist movement prior to the emergence of the Islamic State.
With al-Qaeda, Qutb’s revolutionary movement underwent significant change, coming to reflect the confluence of two very different movements within radical political Islam: the minority extremist-assassination wing of Egypt’s jihadi movement that had broken with the Islamist party the Muslim Brotherhood, represented by Zawahiri, and the alienated and politicised tendency of the purist Wahhabist–Salafi movement of Saudi Arabia, represented by bin Laden. After a series of false starts – Islamism (too broad), radical Islamism (too vague), fundamentalist Islam (too Christian), Islamo-Fascism (too polemical) – eventually both Western scholars and members of the revolutionary movement itself settled on a name for the movement and the ideology: Salafi jihadism. This term accurately reflected both its inner content and its hybrid Egyptian–Saudi origins. The ideology of the Salafi jihadist movement by the time of September 11 was in detail rather complex. There were many significant disagreements between its adherents over theological niceties and strategy and tactics. However, its core, which consisted of several theologically freighted key political concepts, can be outlined relatively simply in the following way.
Since the Golden Age of the Prophet Muhammad, his “companions” and followers (the salaf), the entire world had descended into the state of ignorance (jahiliyya) that had prevailed among the polytheist (shirk) Arab tribes before the victory of Islam. This state of ignorance was now found both among the People of the Book, namely Christians and Jews, who had rejected the message of the final prophet, and of course also among the followers of the two principal contemporary secular-materialist political ideologies, capitalism and communism. But ignorance’s dark shadow had spread much further, reaching all the tyrannical and apostate (taghut) rulers of the world’s supposedly Islamic regimes.
This state of near-universal ignorance was, according to Salafi jihadist ideology, a tragedy for humankind. Islam was the one and only religion of truth. Its restoration now relied upon a tiny revolutionary vanguard who understood the faith. Political and military struggle on behalf of the faith (the act of jihad) was the most profound duty Islam required of its followers. Jihad had to be waged to restore true Islam to the supposedly Muslim world and the lands the Muslims had lost during the long era of their decl
ine, and then, at long last, to bring the blessings of Islam to the infidel (kuffar) world in its entirety. The meaning of all this could not have been clearer. The resurrection of humankind from the era of near-universal jahiliyya rested on the success of the jihad of the Islamic vanguard.
What tasks must they then accomplish? Most vital was the creation of a world where the Oneness of God (tawhid) – monotheism is too abstract a translation – was acknowledged by all peoples. All innovations (bida) in the religion of Islam that had corrupted the faith since the Golden Age of the two foundation cities, Mecca and Medina, had to be rejected. As did all the fundamental political convictions and institutions of the contemporary world. A single Islamic world community (the umma) had to triumph over the nation-state, that grotesque formation that had divided human beings since the Peace of Westphalia.
Sovereignty in the umma had to rest exclusively with God (the idea called hakimiyya). Democracy, representing the sovereignty of the people rather than the sovereignty of God, was an obscenity and an impertinence. The law in the umma was to follow the Shar’ia, dictated to Muhammad by God in the Qur’an. Laws made by men in parliaments or elsewhere were an abomination. The punishments (hudud) set out in the Qur’an had to be strictly enforced to the letter. The Qur’an, and the accounts of the life and sayings of the Prophet, as recorded in the authentic hadiths, contained almost everything that humans needed to know about how societies should be formed and how men and women should live. Only where there existed doubts might there be a need to consult the most reliable religious authorities, like the Salafi jihadists’ favourites, the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyyah or the eighteenth-century co-founder of Saudi Arabia Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
The ideology of Salafi jihadism also imprinted a tragic version of history on the minds of its followers. Once, expansionist Islam had represented the most glorious and powerful civilisation, ruling over the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and parts of Europe, including Spain. As the true faith was corrupted and forgotten, Islam had descended into its present state of abjection and humiliation. In the essentialised historical imagination of the Salafi jihadists – where the base motives and vicious characters of whole categories of people remained unchanged despite the passing of several centuries – the Crusaders (the Christian West) were the most enduring and dangerous enemy of Islam.
In the view of the Salafi jihadists, at the end of World War I, the Crusaders had carved the Ottoman Empire into a series of colonial states. The process was encoded in the ideology as the “Sykes–Picot conspiracy”. At the end of World War II, the Crusaders had committed the most heinous crime and inflicted the most painful wound: the creation of a Jewish state at the very heart of historical Islam. The Salafi jihadists were convinced that the Jews controlled one of the post-war superpowers, the United States. Because they believed that Islam was under direct attack from the Zionists and the Crusaders, they argued – according to the vital theological distinction between state responsibility for offensive jihad to expand the faith and individual responsibility for defensive jihad when the umma is under threat – that jihad had become a solemn and unavoidable duty (fard al-’ayn) for all Muslim men.
For many years, the Salafi jihadis argued with one another as to whether this jihad should first be waged against the “near enemy”, the apostate Muslim regimes, or the “far enemy”, Israel and the United States. In the early 1990s the Salafi jihadists had suffered defeats – in Egypt and Algeria – in their struggles against the near enemy. They believed that they and God had been responsible not only for the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 but also for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. They were appalled that, before the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia had permitted the United States to station half a million troops near the site of the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. As a result of all this, in the mid-1990s the most important Salafi jihadist movement of that time, al-Qaeda, opted for jihad against the far enemy. Al-Qaeda now called on its followers to kill Americans and Jews whenever the opportunity arose. As everyone knows, al-Qaeda’s overwhelmingly most significant success was the surprise attack on the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Center in September 2001.
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Following September 11, to judge by his writings collected in Messages to the World, Osama bin Laden believed it only a matter of time before the great enemy of the umma, the United States, would suffer total defeat. Bin Laden had witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union shortly after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was now “a figment of imagination”. He attributed its defeat to the courageous armed struggle of the mujahidin behind which stood the blessing and the guiding hand of God. Bin Laden was convinced that the Soviet Union had been a far more formidable superpower than the United States. He believed the Americans were cowards, having observed their humiliating flight from Somalia in the early 1990s when opposed by a handful of courageous mujahidin. He also believed theirs was the most decadent culture in human history, obsessed by the pursuit of wealth and luxury, corrupted by a depth of moral licentiousness never before seen.
The myth of American power had been exposed to the world by nineteen devout and courageous Muslim student martyrs. The greatest buildings of the Empire had fallen. Wall Street had been paralysed by panic. The fig leaf of human rights had been abandoned. Bin Laden was contemptuous of the argument put by the “gang of criminals in the White House … whose idiotic leader claims that we despise their way of life”. The action had been mounted because the Americans and Jews had believed they could inflict untold misery on the umma without fear of reprisal, or even any concern that the world would take notice of its suffering. Bin Laden’s most persistent examples were the oppression of the Palestinians and the murder of the million or more Iraqi children who had died as a result of US sanctions following the First Gulf War. Finally, with September 11, “the balance of terror” had to some extent been “evened out”. In fear of further strikes on their own soil, Americans, he hoped, would now find that life had become “an insupportable hell”.
After September 11 came the greatest Crusade in history. In reprisal for an action that had cost the mujahidin a paltry half a million dollars, the United States had spent a trillion dollars or more, invading first Afghanistan and then, in March 2003, Iraq. Afghanistan, the world’s only true Islamic state, had been invaded to destroy the threat posed by the Taliban. Bin Laden believed, however, that the ultimate Crusader ambition was to take control of the entire Middle East – in part because it wanted the “black gold” on which the prosperity of the American Empire relied, but more deeply in pursuit of total victory in history’s final drama: the “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West. The victory of one civilisation would bring darkness to humankind. The victory of the other would bring liberation and light.
Bin Laden was convinced that Islam would prevail. He had personally witnessed how the might of the Americans’ air power had been incapable of overwhelming the Muslims in the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. He was immensely encouraged by the quagmire the United States had sunk into after its invasion of Iraq, “screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the whole world”. He was certain that Islam would emerge victorious. God willed this victory. Moreover, at “the pinnacle” of Islam was the stipulation “You fight, so you exist”. Yet how exactly the victory of the mujahidin could be achieved was, to put it mildly, far from clear in the messages of Osama bin Laden. That explanation relied on the writings of other, more systematic, Salafi jihadist thinkers.
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The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass was published online in 2004 under the nom de revolution Abu Bakr Naji. Most of the book appears to have been written following September 11, with a section added after the invasion of Iraq. It is in part military-cum-political science, in part history, in part theology. The argument is intricate and occasionally arcane; the style is sometimes foren
sic, sometimes poetic, sometimes prophetic. Many serious scholars of Salafi jihadism regard it as a vital source of inspiration in the creation of the Islamic State. Its translator, the American William McCants, describes it as a “blueprint”. So far as I am concerned, it is one of the most astonishing and terrifying political books that I have ever read.
The argument begins with an analysis of the geopolitical situation following World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States took control of the world, forcing almost all countries to orbit around one superpower or the other. The superpowers dominated through their wealth and their weaponry, and through their pretence to both invincibility and benevolence, which Naji describes as their “deceptive media halo”.
The Soviet Union had now collapsed, however. Its prolonged and costly war in Afghanistan against the mujahidin had exposed the fraudulence of its media halo and the sources of internal vulnerability, like the spiritual death found in a materialist society and the danger it faced by relying on the distribution of “worldly pleasures” as its sole source of legitimacy.
Since September 11, the situation of the United States had become similarly parlous. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States had fallen into the trap set for it by the mujahidin. It was in danger of the “military overstretch” that the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who is cited, once warned it would be. The United States was even more vulnerable than the Soviet Union had been in the 1980s. As a consequence of its cultural decadence, its soldiers were “effeminate”. As a consequence of its geographical distance from the Middle East, the wars it was fighting against the Muslims were more difficult and ruinously expensive.