At the time, I thought the agitprop from The Emperors New Clothes website and Tanjung, the Serbian news agency about (what came to be known later as) al-Qaeda and the muslim militias fighting the Serb chauvinist ethnic cleansers, was exaggerated or outright false. Reading, more recently, much about al-Qaeda, books and websites and journal articles from experts on terrorism and the Balkan conflicts of the 90's, (Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe : The Afghan-Bosnian Network by Evan F. Kohlman)I realize they and you have a point. However, I wouldn't say, "so many, " as you do. There were a few hundred "Arab Afghans, " as the phrase goes, never integrated into the official Bosnian Army or KLA later. KLA, itself had origins in Maoism and pro-Enver Hoxha ideology, as well as having distant links to the SS divisions organized by "Hitler's Mufti, " (uncle of Arafat?) during WWII.
Accts. like, "Devils Game: How the United States Unleashed Fundamentalist Islam, " by Robert Dreyfuss have details on these connections berween Islamists, Nazis and the post WWII US administrations.
On 11/17/05, cord macguire <cordymac at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I agreed with this essay, until the part critical of some Leftists for not
> supporting the Bosnian & Kosovar uprisings. That so many of those
> secessionist militias were al Qaeda connected would seem to make them
> unpalatable, as well, to Peter Hudis', who just finished criticizing some
> Leftists for tacitly supporting the reactionary, jihadist militias in Iraq.
> Bosnia was an early training & recruiting ground for terrorism.
> Fraternally, -Cord
>
>
> Subject: [SOCUNMOD] Resistance or retrogression? The battle of ideas
> overIraq -- News & Letters, November 2004
> Date
> Michael wrote: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:52:00 -0700
>
> http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2004/November/Essay_Nov2004.htm
> from the marxist-humanist newspaper
>
> NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004
> Essay
> Resistance or retrogression? The battle of ideas over Iraq
>
> by Peter Hudis
>
> The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a quagmire of nightmarish
> proportions, with many now calling it the most serious setback for
> U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War. This is seen in everything
> from the way western Iraq has come under the control of Taliban-like
> fundamentalists to the fact that jihadists from neighboring lands are
> flocking to Iraq to take advantage of hatred of the U.S. occupation
> and to further their effort to create a reactionary "Islamic state"
> upon its ruins. Clearly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq--which would have
> continued even if Kerry won the presidential election--created fertile
> ground for reactionary and terrorist forces to take root and flourish.
>
> At the same time, many left-wing critics of the war have fallen into
> an ideological quagmire by failing to acknowledge the reactionary
> character of much of the Iraqi "armed resistance." Some are even
> speaking out in its defense. The most egregious examples are recent
> comments by Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, long considered leading
> spokespersons of the movement against global capital.
>
> TAILENDING FUNDAMENTALISM
>
> At the time of the protests at the Republican National Convention in
> New York last August, Klein wrote in an article "Bring Najaf to New
> York": "Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers are not just another group
> of generic terrorists out to kill Americans; their opposition to the
> occupation represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in
> Iraq."(1) The statement is patently false. Al-Sadr's militia has
> fought U.S. troops in the name of a reactionary, fundamentalist agenda
> that opposes women's rights, gay liberation, and workers'
> self-emancipation.
>
> In April, when al-Sadr ordered workers in aluminum and sanitary supply
> plants in Nasariyeh to hand over their factories for use as bastions
> to fight the U.S. military, the workers refused, stating: "We
> completely reject the turning of workers and civilians' work and
> living places into reactionary war-fronts between the two poles of
> terrorism in Iraq: the U.S. and their allies from one side, and the
> terrorists in the armed militias, known for their enmity to Iraqi
> people's interests, on the other."(2)
>
> Klein and others fail to distinguish between the fundamentalist agenda
> of the Shi'ite and Sunni militias and the views of many independent
> Iraqis. As Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has covered Iraq,
> wrote, "Neither the resistance groups cheered by many on the American
> Left nor the governing parties championed by the American Right seem
> to reflect the views and aspirations of most Iraqi people, who seem to
> be hoping for the rise of groups independent of both Saddam's regime
> and the increasingly dictatorial Allawi government."(3)
>
> Arundhati Roy has also fallen into the trap of failing to distinguish
> between reactionary and progressive opponents of U.S. policies. She
> recently wrote in her "Public Power in the Age of Empire": "The Iraqi
> resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire.
> And therefore that battle is our battle...Terrorism. Armed struggle.
> Insurgency. Call it what you want. Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and
> dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is
> war. Terrorists...are people who don't believe that the state has a
> monopoly on the legitimate use of violence." (4)
>
> Nowhere does Roy mention that these "terrorists" whose "battle is our
> battle" oppose women's rights, democracy and self-determination for
> national minorities. Nowhere does she mention that they want to create
> a totalitarian religious-based state that makes the reformists she
> rightly scorns, like Kerry in the U.S. or Lula in Brazil, look like
> angels by comparison. And nowhere does she mention the genuine
> liberatory forces inside Iraq, like the Federation of Workers'
> Councils and Unions (FWCUI) or the Organization for Women's Freedom
> (OWFI)--both of which have come under increasingly sharp attack by
> both the U.S. occupiers and right-wing Islamists.(5)
>
> How can such a vocal supporter of women's rights express virtually
> uncritical support for reactionary forces in Iraq? She writes of the
> Iraqi resistance: "Like most resistance movements, it combines a
> motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals,
> Islamists, fed up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is
> riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality.
> But if we are only going to support pristine movements, then no
> resistance will be worthy of our purity."
>
> Liberation movements are never "pristine." But that hardly defines
> al-Sadr, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the Jordanian-born terrorist behind
> many attacks on U.S. forces) or Lashkar-e-Taybe--the Pakistani Sunni
> group that in the past few months has sent hundreds of "holy warriors"
> to Iraq. Their problem isn't (as Roy says) that they suffer from "the
> iconization of leaders, a lack of transparency, a lack of vision and
> direction." They know their "direction" only too well--they want to
> destroy anything that comes in the way of a totalitarian control of
> society by religious extremism. Which is why they target not just U.S.
> soldiers but also Iraqi civilians, feminists, and anyone else who
> happens to oppose their reactionary agenda.
>
> In this respect the fundamentalist militias fighting the U.S. in Iraq
> closely resemble the Christian Right in the U.S., which wants to roll
> the clock back on everything from women's rights to freedom of
> expression. One of the supreme ironies of our times is that many
> leftists who are worried to death about the power of the Christian
> Right in the U.S. are making excuses for forces in the Islamic world
> which share its basic agenda!
>
> ALL ROADS LEAD BACK TO BOSNIA
>
> Moreover, some of the same people now making apologies for Islamic
> fundamentalists, on the grounds that "liberation" movements are never
> "pristine," refused to solidarize with the Bosnians and Kosovars in
> the 1990s against the genocidal policies of Serbia's Milosevic on the
> grounds that they were "nationalists" and "not truly revolutionary."
> Where was the argument that liberation movements are never "pristine"
> when it was time to defend the Bosnians and Kosovars (or the Rwandans
> for that matter) from genocide?
>
> It isn't that Klein and Roy are uninformed observers. They are surely
> capable of understanding the reactionary nature of the Iraqi militias.
> So why are they and so many others falling into such an ideological
> quagmire? The answer is that they have one standard for judging those
> who openly oppose the U.S. and another for those who do not.
> Overwhelmed and frustrated at the failure thus far of mass protests to
> halt the U.S. drive for world domination, they ally themselves with
> ANY force, no matter how reactionary, so long as it opposes the U.S.
<SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese, away to overpostage lbo-talk guillotine i go