Informant38

The Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel
Part 1: Sleeping with the enemy
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The latest developments have proved once again that American conservatives' pocket futurology is dead and buried. There has been no "end of history". There has been no "death of ideology". Instead of these pre-Galilean platitudes to which all would have been forced to submit, now it's Medievalism all over again - with clashing sectarian apocalyptic visions (born-again Christian fundamentalists against radical Islamists), Inquisition tribunals (Guantanamo) and the horrors of war (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine).
It's Medievalism - but mixed with the epitome of modernity. As John Gray, a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics argues in his latest book (Al-Qaeda and what it means to be modern, London, Faber & Faber), al-Qaeda is a by-product of globalization: "Its most distinctive feature - projecting a privatized form of organized violence worldwide - was impossible in the past." Gray goes to great lengths to stress that on September 11, al-Qaeda "destroyed the West's ruling myth". And he sharply demonstrates how "like communism and Nazism, radical Islam is modern. Though it claims to be anti-Western, it is shaped as much by Western ideology as by Islamic traditions. Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All are convinced they can remake the human condition. If there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it."

Just as the US re-invented and financed jihad in the early 1980s to combat the "evil" Soviet empire in Afghanistan - and so contributed to the emergence of this modern myth - by invading Iraq the US has opened up a new Pandora's box, facilitating the alliance of Wahhabi, Afghan-Arab jihadis with secular, Ba'athist operatives: "the deadliest of combinations" according to European intelligence experts. The White House and the Pentagon won't admit that Iraq is not tribal Afghanistan - and that the rule of anarchy everywhere around Kabul cannot prevail in a country that George W Bush wants to portray as the window of his democracy export program to the Middle East. If the Iraqi adventure fails, it's the end of the American pretense of fashioning the new world order, and it's the death knell for the unilateralist neo-conservatives who have held the world hostage since September 11.
�Pepe Escobar/Asia Times 09.10.03
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Part 2 : The roadmap of human folly