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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Sunni

Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, al-Qaeda, Bush Doctrine, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Harry Kreisler, Imperialism, Iraq, Iraq War, Lawrence Wright, Red Army, September 11th, Shia, Sunni, Taliban, USSR

ISIS

Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.

They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.

Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.

If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.

Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.

So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.

It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.

So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.

__________

Messrs. Wright and Kreisler, chatting about Wright’s fantastic chronicle of the origins of the war on terror The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Keep going:

  • The story of how Christopher Hitchens was almost killed in a lynch mob in Pakistan
  • In 1907, Joseph Conrad already realized the psychology of terrorists
  • From Wright’s book — inside the mind of Muhammad Atta

Lawrence Wright

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Hooman Majd on the Difference Between Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, and Persians

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism

≈ Comments Off on Hooman Majd on the Difference Between Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, and Persians

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Arabic, Christianity, Fashion, George Washington University, Hooman Majd, Imam Hossein, Iran, Islam, Jews, Ken Browar, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muhammad, Muslim World, Muslims, Persians, Reza Shah, Shia, Style, Sunni, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, The House of Majd, The House on Iran Street

Hooman Majd

“It is notable that Arabs, when and if they wish to disparage Iranians, more often than not will also refer to them as Persians: the ‘other,’ and, because they’re Shia, the infidel. Some Sunni Arabs in Iraq have taken it one step further, calling all Shias, including Iraqi Shias, ‘Safavids,’ the name of the Persian dynasty that made Shiism the state religion of Iran, and a clear move in sectarian times to associate non-Sunni Arabs with the non-Arab Persians. Shia Islam, however, because of its beloved saint Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and an Arab, conveniently bridges the Arab-Iranian schism through Hossein’s wife, a Persian princess he wisely (as far as Persians are concerned) wed and who bore him the half-Iranian great-grandchildren of the last Prophet of Allah.

The often contradictory Iranian attitudes toward Arabs can be difficult to explain. What can one make of Iranians who shed genuine tears for an Arab who died fourteen hundred years ago, who pray in Arabic three times a day, and yet who will in an instant derisively dismiss the Arab people, certainly those from the peninsula, as malakh-khor, “locust eaters”? As one deputy foreign minister once said to me, lips curled in a grimace of disgust and right before he excused himself to pray (in Arabic), ‘Iranians long ago became Muslims, but they didn’t become Arabs.’ His scorn was meant, of course, for desert Arabs who brought Islam to the world, and not necessarily Syrian, Egyptian or Lebanese Arabs, whom the Iranians place a few degrees higher on the social scale than their desert brethren. The disconnect between Arab and Muslim for Iranians is not unlike the disconnect between certain anti-Semitic Christians and Jews — a disconnect that conveniently ignores not only that Christ was a Jew but also that Christianity, at least at its inception, was a Jewish sect. (The peculiar Iranian disconnect can work both ways, though, for many Arabs today, or at least Arab governments, would rather Israel remain the dominant power in their region than witness, Allah forbid!, a Persian ascent to the position.)”

Hooman Majd

__________

Hooman Majd, writing in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

Every now and again, the pictures on this blog make it look like one of those innumerable, indistinguishable “style” Tumblrs that that college friend of yours made, promoted on Facebook, and maintained for about a week before exhausting her collection of Jon Hamm pictures. I try not to be so superficial, but denying the impulse is ridiculous: some people just look cool, and Majd is one of them. If cool-looking people have something sharp to say, well then that’s even better — and plus, there’s enough weighty stuff here to get you through the day’s pensive minutes.

But about the substantive part. Several pages prior, Majd offers a telling personal detail which should color his above clarification:

I had discovered two years earlier, and there is no way to verify it because Iranians didn’t have surnames, let alone birth certificates or even records of births prior to the reign of Reza Shah in the 1920s, that I am a descendant of his and, more interesting, that he was a Jew: a brilliant mathematician and scholar… In my father’s village of Ardakan, moreover, some people apparently still think of my family as “the Jews.” During my Ashura week visit to my cousin Fatemeh’s house, where a few people I hadn’t met before seemed to drop in from time to time, as is not unusual in small towns in Iran, I was introduced to one older woman who asked, “Majd? Ardakani Majd?”

“Yes, Majd-e-Ardakani,” I replied, using my grandfather’s original name (which just means “Majd from Ardakan,” and Majd actually being the single name of my great-great-grandfather).

“Oh,” she said. “The Jews.”

It is worth keeping this in mind if you to decide to open the book, because many of its conversations and interactions, especially with Iranian officials, revolve around then-President Ahmadinejad’s public denials of the Holocaust and his highly touted, “scholarly” conferences on the subject. Majd confronts these officials, in a restrained but unmistakable way, with the treatment they deserve: disbelief, contempt, and muted ridicule.

Above all of this, however, Majd is an important voice on Iran because although he was born in Tehran to a well-established family (his maternal grandfather was an Ayatollah), he gravitated to the West — first to St. Paul’s school in London, then George Washington University in Washington, then to live in New York City, where he still resides. So there is a very literal sense in which he traverses the boundary between East and West.

If you want to read a shorter piece of non-fiction, check out his essay on rediscovering his childhood home, “The House on Iran Street”. If you came here for the look, click on his style blog The House of Majd, which he maintains with fashion photographer Ken Browar.

Hooman Majd

Hooman MajdHooman Majd Bag

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Dexter Filkins Tells a Tragic, Symbolic Anecdote about the Fate of Iraq

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ Comments Off on Dexter Filkins Tells a Tragic, Symbolic Anecdote about the Fate of Iraq

Tags

conflict, Dexter Filkins, Dora, Gazaliya, Insurgents, Iraq War, Journalism, Saddam Hussein, Sadiya, Shia, Sunni, The Forever War, The New York Times, War, Yusra al-Hakeem

Dexter Filkins

“In places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it, mountains of it, and there wasn’t any bread. Then they started killing the teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash. Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood.

Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the Iraqi interpreters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually tore it from her head the second she walked inside the Times compound. ‘Stupid thing,’ she’d say, hurling it onto the couch.

And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her usual way. ‘After 1,400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq—bring back the Sunnis!’ And then a laugh. Yusra didn’t mean it—she loathed Saddam. But the danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the years of Saddam.

‘I am so tired,’ Yusra said. ‘In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because’—she picked up her abaya—‘I don’t wear my stupid hejab.’

She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra’s way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter’s notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.

‘This was Saddam,’ she said. ‘He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.’

She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.

‘The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi,’ she said. ‘From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.’ She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.

‘We Iraqis,’ she said. ‘We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.’

And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria—and then, if she was lucky, for America.”

__________

From The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.

Read on:

  • Andrew Bacevich cites the theological concept of original sin to answer a political question about future warfare
  • My all time favorite debate: Christopher Hitchens versus George Galloway on the Iraq War
  • I wrote a post about how the incentives of the U.S. political system, and structure of our military, perpetuate endless wars

Iraq War

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