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The bellicose rhetoric used by both Bush and Bin Laden now belongs to another age, argues Gilles Kepel. While US Middle East policy under Obama is still unclear, Europe and the Gulf may combine to offer solutions.

Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election suddenly aged the two narratives that had dominated the first years of the 21st century: George W Bush’s ‘global war on terror’ and Osama bin Laden's jihad through martyrdom.

The failure of the first, prolonged by the unbelievable mismanagement of the banking system and global economic crisis, was no small incentive for voters to engineer a change of such magnitude in US institutional politics as to elect the non-establishment figure par excellence – the first-ever 'black' (actually mixed-race) president.

The failure of the second plunged the salafi-jihadist underworld into turmoil, with former activists putting the blame on Ayman al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number one ideologue, for "spilling illicit Muslim blood" and aborting the long sought-after mobilisation of the Muslim masses worldwide under the banner of the radicals – the very process that the attacks of 11 September 2001 were expected to trigger.

But that assessment of failure leaves open the question of what policies the Obama team will implement in the Middle East. Not much light has been shed on this matter as yet, except for criticism of his predecessor’s rationale and action. There is also a big question mark over the political dynamics of the Muslim world in the post-Al Qaeda phase: will Islamist movements dissolve into some sort of a pluralistic model that approaches an indigenous path to democracy, or will a creeping ‘Islamisation’ destroy quietly liberal values with more efficiency than violent jihad?

To answer those questions, one must take stock of the two grand narratives of the war on terror and of jihad via martyrdom. Doing so implies that we go back to the ‘rationale’ of 9/11: in Jihad, I wrote that 9/11 was a testimony to the political failure of radical Islamist movements and an attempt to reverse it. Beyond the paradox, which was widely derided, was the hard fact of the incapacity of jihad groups in Egypt, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir to topple the powers-that-be in the 1990s and mobilise Muslim masses to that effect.

So theorised Ayman al Zawahiri in his leaflet 'Knights Under the Prophet's Banner' (posted 2001 on the web): the old focus on the “nearby enemy” or the “apostate rulers” of Muslim countries had to be replaced by a direct attack on the “faraway enemy”, in other words, the impious west. Toppling the Twin Towers would demonstrate that the superpower was a giant with clay feet and would be unable to back its lackeys ruling the Muslim world. The masses were not to be afraid anymore and they would rise, following the jihadists’ lead. Suicide attacks were to be the sublime paradigm of that fight against the west and its arrogance – and 9/11 was but a magnifier of the suicide attacks against Israeli citizens in buses and pizza joints during the second Intifada. This was a very popular cause in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where telethons were organised to send money to the families of the ‘martyrs’. Al Qaeda was ready to hijack the Palestinian issue for its own sake – something that was to prove more complicated than expected.

In order to retaliate for the attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration chose to launch the 'war on terror' against an elusive enemy whose visible dimension would be dubbed the ‘axis of evil’ - the so-called rogue states of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Cold Warriors in power in Washington, however, didn’t have a clue as to how they would fight an enemy that had no territory and was more software than hardware – against which conventional anti-Soviet weaponry proved inefficient. Bombing Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban regime didn’t translate into the destruction of Al Qaeda. It continued to plant bombs from Bali to Casablanca and Madrid to London, and its leaders were paraded relentlessly on Al Jazeera airwaves and online.

Washington needed symbols: the orange jumpsuit-clad inmates at Guantánamo Bay became the metaphor of the defeated terrorists, a tit-for-tat attempt at countering the images of beheaded hostages and carnage that Al Qaeda relished in posting on the internet or passing on to Al Jazeera. What seemed good for US public opinion soon would turn into a human rights nightmare – and a mockery of the rule of law and the Constitution. It would eventually lead to the feeling by many American citizens that the values they cherished against all odds were being betrayed by a president who would end his term miserably, with the lowest-ever popularity ratings.

Invading Iraq was to be a means to win the victory that couldn’t be won against Bin Laden: Saddam had a tangible territory, old Soviet-era tanks that were great targets for the US’s Abrams models, an army in rags and a derelict and paranoid state apparatus. The whole embargo-sapped Iraq crumbled in a few days but Washington, obsessed by the ‘fall of the Berlin wall’ model, fell short of turning its pyrrhic military victory into political success.
Downing Saddam’s statue was to duplicate the downing of Lenin’s statues in the former Soviet empire; but Iraq was more complex. US intelligence had scorned human intelligence and US universities had cut down on Middle Eastern studies ripe with conflicts that had to do more with partisanship than scholarship. They may have hoped that democracy would flourish spontaneously on the ruins of Saddam’s autocracy, but what came in its stead was sectarian strife that tore the Iraqi social fabric.

So much for the democratisation model that neoconservatives said would succeed in Baghdad. It became the new standard for the region, toppling one by one the authoritarian states at the root of the terrorist phenomenon, friends and foes alike – Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the one hand, Iran on the other. But there was a subtext to the fairy tale of democratisation: Iraq had to be severed from its Arab Sunni environment. Controlled by a Shiite-Kurdish alliance that was supposed to have no contention with Israel, it would facilitate the acceptance of the Jewish state in the region. It would also pump non-OPEC oil, minimising the swing capacity of Saudi Arabia, once the darling of US Republican administrations, now the devil that had breast-fed Bin Laden with the poisonous milk of Salafism and Jihadism, ultimately leading to 9/11.

As there was no place for the Arab Sunni community in this vision of Iraq, they started a bloody insurgency. They were helped in that task by global jihadists, who believed their time had come. After all, the invasion of Arab and Muslim Iraq by impious armies under US control was but a remake of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Red Army from 1979 onward. A similar call to worldwide jihad would resonate in all corners of the Muslim Umma. They would raise in arms behind the Al Qaeda banner and repel and defeat the invader, before wiping America off the map and make for the global victory of Islam.

A self-proclaimed Islamist ruffian, Abou Moussab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian former convict, became Bin Laden’s man in Iraq, but he proved to be even more interested in the massacre of ‘heretic’ Shiites than in the killing of foreigners. So the long-awaited final and triumphal jihad turned into a disastrous fitna - the internecine war of Muslims against Muslims that leads to the destruction of the community.

Meanwhile, Tehran, the common nemesis of both the Bush administration and the Sunni jihadists, was quietly pushing its pawns on the Iraqi exchequer. Iraqi Shiite militias – trained, equipped and financed by Iran - started to overcome Sunni radicals, who would sell out to the US after Zarqawi was killed for fear that they would bear the fury of their now fearless Shiite compatriots. The jihadi pipe dream vanished and so did US hopes of keeping Iraq under control. The irony of all this became apparent when President Ahmadinejad of Iran visited Baghdad in April 2008. Protected by American soldiers, he met in the Green Zone with Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi nationalist, US basher, Kurd killer and anti-Iranian warrior, must have spun in his grave.

What is to come out of such a catastrophe? Even though Iran looks like a king-maker in Iraq, it won’t be able to go too far because of tremendous domestic pressures. Post-Ahmadinejad plans, even within regime circles, are already preparing for the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in the summer, when new teams in Tehran might have to answer to offers made by Europe and the new US administration.

Another solution for the present crisis will certainly come from major changes in the sociology of Muslims that are taking place and setting new standards among Muslim populations in Europe. In spite of the bombings in Madrid and London, in spite of the banlieue riots in France in the autumn of 2005, a new generation of people of Muslim descent in tune with the daily challenges of a modern democratic society is emerging. They are engaging with upward social mobility and taking part in political life at the highest echelons. Together with significant change taking place in the post-9/11 Arabian peninsula, including Saudi Arabia, these trends are likely to begin important debates within Muslim cultures, leading to some form of aggiornamento.

In the multipolar, post-American world, Europe and the Gulf may well be two poles that, brought together, help settle the conflicts in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and recreate an area of prosperity in what was once the cradle of civilisation. 

Gilles Kepel is the author of Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. His latest book is Beyond Terror and Martyrdom