Thursday, May 05, 2011

Srdja Trifkovic on Osama bin Laden

The first time I ever encountered the word mujahideen (or one of its variant spellings) was back in the late 1980s, in the foreign news section of The Washington Post. The articles were about the efforts by the CIA to recruit, fund, and train Muslim radicals to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Since the president at the time was a Republican, the Post was critical of the attempts to mobilize the jihad fighters, and thus provided a lot of background detail about what was happening in Afghanistan.

As I recall, there were seven different mujahideen factions, all vying against each other as well as the Soviets. None of them were the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, which arose later, but many of the jihad fighters who later formed those two groups were veterans of the Afghan war and had had CIA or MI6 training.

The WaPo analysts were concerned that the United States had no coherent plan about what to do with the mujahideen once the Soviets were gone from Afghanistan. Considering that it was the 1980s, the correspondents had a remarkably good grasp of what motivated the jihad fighters, and why they would destabilize the region and endanger the security of the United States after the Russians left.

I hate to say it, but The Washington Post was right. Our foreign policy experts and national security professionals were feckless about Islam back then, and they are feckless about Islam today.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic was interviewed earlier today by RT about the assassination of Osama bin Laden and its significance in relation to what went on back in the 1980s. The video is below the jump; many thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing this clip:

9 comments:

ANTI-ISLAMIST said...

The tale of Hussein Obama, the gardener in in the yard of conspiration theories.

Osama bin Laden was not present at the May 1 celebrations in Abbottabad as U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 turned up to greet him. He died namely during a bombing in Tora-Bora mountains 8 years ago and is now totally consumed by worms , snails and cockroaches. The seals did not know this, so while they searched for the master of the house - who was not at home - they unfortunately shot a woman in her foot and killed some of the holy warriors in the building. But, so that the whole effort should not be in vain, they collected a cadaver (se picture) and brought it with them, after having appointed it to be the master-mujahideen himself and threw it into the sea.

Anonymous said...

ANTI-ISLAMIST, when you are translating and quoting verbatim from Hodjas Blog please include the link. The above quote is completely "out of context" and merely an example of the conspiracy theories now blooming up everywhere. Which is blindingly clear if you had quoted and translated the entire text.

ANTI-ISLAMIST said...

kepiblanc, my intention was to allude in diffidence and not without irony to the hectic presentations of diverse theories about dear old Osama. As an active radio-listener I have forcily been fed various theories these last days. My text was to ca ¾ stolen from Knute's comment on his own blog to what Berit had written, and the nice picture, that the Wite House has not released, was taken from snaphanen. Hower, the brain substance all over Osamas face, they enthusiastically have described, was not to be seen The entry wound was surprisingly neat. I usually seldom visit Hodjas Blog, and have not done so lately. Nothing was pinched from that blog, as you so convincingly state. I hop I have made a tiny contribution to the foolish confusion.

Hesperado said...

It seems we are seeing the birth of another "-ther" movement, following upon the heels of the Birthers, and before them, of the Truthers -- now the "Deathers".

All these "-ther" movements include within their ragged edges reasonable skeptics who merely desire basic questions to be answered but draw no conclusions where no evidence substantiates them, and at the polar extreme from them, outright conspiracy theorists (while between these poles there may be varying degrees of skepticism).

Hesperado said...

Trifkovic writes:

"I hate to say it, but The Washington Post was right. Our foreign policy experts and national security professionals were feckless about Islam back then, and they are feckless about Islam today."

Firstly, I doubt that those Washington Post journalists whom Trifkovic read in the 1980s were right for the right reasons and then drew the correct conclusions from that basic stance of being right. I.e., I doubt that they identified Islam itself as the sole and vital source of the problem of Americans temporarily strengthening these proto-Taliban proto-al Qaeda mujahideen.

Secondly, even had our government not been feckless about Islam but had been Islamorealists, at the time using mujahideen would have been unproblematic, as long as we realized the potential problems down the line that Islam would cause. I.e., an enlightened exploitation by us of those mujahideen -- at that time and place of "hot battles" in the Cold War -- would have temporarily strengthened them to use them to fight Soviets, then when we no longer needed them, to neutralize them and/or take measures to make sure they cannot in their turn exploit whatever materiel and intelligence they may received from us.

Thirdly, concerning the larger issue of the West's "fecklessness" about Islam. Prior to the Age of PC MC (referring to the period of time during which PC MC becomes dominant and mainstream -- approximately the last 60 years -- as opposed to being just one fairly marginal stream of thought within a West that was dominantly non-PC MC), the West had already fallen into a relatively non-PC MC fecklessness about Islam: namely, that of Western Amnesia about Islam.

As I analyzed at length in my essay, this had to do mainly with the geopolitical fact that Islam's power and influence had sunk to an all-time low beginning in the 17th century and exponentially sinking lower and lower with each passing century after that, while at the same time the West was enjoying the opposite process -- a stupendous rise to global dominance, exponentially increasing with each passing century. In such a circumstance, it was only natural for the "Orient" to sink into a quaintly harmless curiosity at best (this further facilitated by the slowness of travel and communications technology). This was also facilitated by the West's relatively non-PC MC typification of Muslims as inferior culturally (as all non-Western cultures were so deemed, and rightfully so).

It has taken a concatenation of various events -- chief among them the process of PC MC becoming dominant and mainstream with the dogma of anti-racism being its crux -- in the 20th century to coalesce into circumstances highly favorable to a rejuvenation of a vitally dangerous Islam around the world.

Baron Bodissey said...

Hesperado --

Actually, the introduction is entirely my own, and not Dr. Trifkovic's. I'm flattered!

Yes, the WaPo and NYT writers back then were right for the wrong reasons. They were gloomy, gloomy, gloomy about the mujahideen because Reagan was president. Had it happened during the Clinton years, they would have been gung-ho about the "freedom fighters" -- which is actually the way the Republican cheerleaders talked about them.

Both parties mapped their own Western mindsets onto the jihadis, without delving into the ongoing worldwide resurgence of Islam.

However, because they were looking for bad stuff to zap the administration with, the press dug up a lot of dirt about the jihad. It was the first time I learned about any of that in detail.

Profitsbeard said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Profitsbeard said...

Baron B-

This was not an "assassination" of Bin Laden, but, at most, an execution.

However, considering that he was a terrorist, and could have been luring the SEAL Team into a booby-trapped environment to kill them all with one push of a plunger trigger, it was a reasonable move to shoot this illegal enemy combatant and war criminal, known for dishonorable methods of murder posing as "holy warfare", before he could strike.

Gort said...

Anti-I notes that "Hower, the brain substance all over Osamas face, they enthusiastically have described, was not to be seen The entry wound was surprisingly neat."

Ball, or fmj slugs are not explosive and since a 5.56 slug is going more than 3000 feet per second when it leaves the muzzle (maybe 10 feet from the target?) it will leave a hole about its own diameter or about 1/4 inch. The back of the head will more than likely be removed in an untidy manner and the former contents distributed willy-nilly due to hydrostatic shock.

So, don't expect to see anything more than a tidy hole above his left eye.

If Kepi-B actually wore one he knows this already.

Cheers.