By Richard Parker
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas The death of Osama bin Laden rightly brings to Americans a sense of justice even revenge. But the death of the worlds most wanted man is more
than payback. It instead suggests that ideology may be changing in the Arab world. Bin Ladens ideology of death for Americans Europeans Arabs and others was a reaction to the misery to which many Arabs were consigned in the modern world.
But other ideologies have taken root in the Arab world before and now perhaps yet another will move in to supplant al Qaedas culture of death.
First it needs to be said: Nobody deserved being killed as richly as bin Laden. Well before the nightmare of 9-11 bin Laden had killed innocents in Africa not to mention Americans in embassies and aboard the USS Cole. After 9-11 he and al Qaeda killed Britons in London Spaniards in Madrid Australians and Balinese in Bali and fellow Arabs.
Al-Qaeda was a perversion of Islam built upon projecting blame for misery largely upon the West and namely upon America As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright ably describes in his book The Looming Tower." It deftly averted its gaze from the corruption of local ruling elites and proposed just one solution: mass murder.
Bin Ladens ideology was practically nihilist of the world and one that preferred death dressed up as heaven to life.
Al Qaidas track record perfectly reflects this grim reaper world view. Certainly 3000 Americans perished on 9-11; an unspeakable tragedy that unfolded out of a clear late summer sky on the East Coast. The reason as Wright described in his book and to me personally a few years ago was that bin Laden wanted to draw America into a war in the Middle East so that more people would continue to die. The ill-conceived invasion of Iraq was precisely the war and the carnage that he wanted.
But as the years wore on Arabs increasingly were the people killed not just by Americans but by al Qaeda.
A West Point study found that non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by al Qaeda than were Westerners. Between 2004 and 2008 for instance al Qaeda attacks killed 3013 people; only about 12 percent were Westerners.
The studys authors wrote: Since al-Qaida has limited capability to strike against its Western enemies the group maintains its relevance by attacking countries with Muslim majorities.
But bin Ladens ideology was powerful because it was a mad vision built upon a single kernel of truth. The globalized world that emerged from the Cold and Gulf
Wars meant that the vast majority of Arabs were indeed doomed to earthly lives of privation and misery both by the globalized world and by their local rulers
whether dictators kings or presidents. And of course local rulers were all too glad to see scapegoats made from Westerners as opposed to themselves.
Now the vision of the Arab street is fixed upon them though resentment of the West lingers of course. This is the inflexion point at which history now finds itself.
The local rulers in Egypt Syria Yemen and Libya now find themselves the focus of the rage and the reason is simple. Many of them attempted to engage with globalization by reforming their economies essentially re-structuring them so they had banking systems which allowed them to steal more. And that collided with the imbalance of global fuel and food supplies setting off the Arab revolution.
Terrorism will remain a threat certainly. But ideology is changing in the Arab world. Liberalism discredited itself through its cozy relationship with colonialism. Pan Arab nationalism was defeated in the wars with Israel.
Extremist violent Islamicism has now played itself out over 20 years. It may in fact finally be briefly spent not merely by bin Ladens death but by its seeming irrelevance in the Arab revolution.
The hope which is never a strategy is that there is now a brief opening for a truly indigenous Arab liberalism to grow. That is much easier said than done.
In addition to Syria and Libya there are two giant blank spots on the new map that is being unrolled: Saudi Arabia and Iran. No regime in the region represents the very thing that is most reviled than the one in Riyadh. Whether the fundamentalism at the core of the Iranian Revolution has run its course is an open question too.
Of course ideologies in the Middle East have only given way to each other hand-in-hand with death. It may for instance be necessary for NATO to kill Moammar Gaddafi as it apparently tried to do just as it was vital for the United States to kill bin Laden.
But better a handful of violent killers than the thousands or millions they would conspire to kill.
Richard Parker is a journalist & regular contributor to McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. He can be reached at info@parker-media.com.
