The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
and the forces of barbarism,” as he wrote in his 1986 tract on terrorism and “how the West can win.”
Netanyahu had cleverly reimagined right-wing scholar Richard Pipes’ vision of a global struggle between communist and “anti-communist” nations as a battle over “values” waged between the civilized “Judeo-Christian” West and the barbaric Eastern hordes. When Washington embarked on a “war on terror” two decades later, the clash of civilizations narrative Netanyahu helped construct provided the George W. Bush administration with the language it needed to market its unilateral military doctrine to a discombobulated American public. The crude mantra of the post-9/11 era in America, “They hate us because we’re free,” seemed to have flowed directly from Netanyahu’s world-view and into George W. Bush’s teleprompter. History had been erased and the West was cast as a blameless victim of stateless totalitarians driven by nothing more than a pathological urge to dismantle democracy. Anyone who attempted to place Al Qaeda in context, particularly by explaining how its early antecedents emerged thanks to semi-covert US warfare, was likely to be accused of “blaming America first.” Either you were “with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” Bush and his supporters often said, putting a distinctly Texan spin on Netanyahu’s Manichean discourse.
But only a few months after the first Jonathan Institute conference, in December 1979, Netanyahu’s understanding of “terror” had begun to resonate throughout the West. By this point, much of the American public was transfixed by the US embassy crisis in Iran that had erupted a month before, tuning in to nightly news coverage that focused in on the ayatollah as the new icon of international terror. Meanwhile, another event was unfolding largely below the radar of the Western media that would impact the future of the Middle East at least as much as Iran’s revolution. Islamist fanatics had laid siege to the Grand Mosque at Mecca, trapping some 100,000 pilgrims inside. The insurgents were guided by a millenarian preacher named Juhayman al Utaybi, who had been trained in the Saudi Arabian National Guard and inspired by the resurgent Wahhabi religious movement.
During breaks from the guard, Utaybi soaked in the jeremiads of Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the blind and unsightly cleric who was far and away the leading opponent of Saudi Arabia’s process of modernization. Bin Baz issued decrees against the display of wall art by the royals, urging his followers to destroy it wherever possible. He opposed the public clapping of hands and railed against the appearance of women on national news broadcasts, warning that the mere sight of them could cause ten-year-old boys to become sexually aroused. The sybaritic, American-oriented royal family was destroying Islam from within, he declared, and he fumed at its flagrant disregard for his orders. Under the influence of bin Baz, Utaybi fantasized about a popular uprising that would drive out the royals and replace them with a pious order that adhered to the true origins of Islam—at least, as he and other Wahhabi cadres saw it.
Drawn from the philosophy of eighteenth-century cleric Abd al-Wahhab and the Salaf, the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad, Wahhabism represented much more than an exceedingly fundamentalist vision of Islam; it was also a sociopolitical movement that saw non-Sunni Muslims as rejectors and encouraged conflict with non-believers. It therefore provided the basis for the toxic doctrine that labeled Muslims who opposed its sectarian designs as takfir, or self-hating apostates. This concept of belief served as the ideological justification for groups like Al Qaeda to massacre fellow Muslims, whether they were Shia or conscripted Sunni soldiers of secular governments.
Because the strictures of Islam forbade violence within the Grand Mosque, the royals were forced to turn to their sworn foe, bin Baz, for a fatwa authorizing the use of force to retake the mosque from Utaybi’s militia. In exchange for his edict, the royals entered into a Faustian bargain with the country’s rigidly conservative clerical class, agreeing to spend billions in petro-cash to project Wahhabism across the Muslim world.
The deal also expanded the clergy’s domestic influence, granting it more authority than ever to impose its hyper-conservative vision on Saudi society. Rather than repressing the extremism gestating within its borders, the House of Saud decided to co-opt it as a tool of internal political suppression and external soft power.
In the months and years after the traumatic battle to extricate Utaybi’s band of fanatics from the holy heart of Mecca, bin Baz rolled out more characteristically fanatical pronouncements. He issued a fatwa denouncing photography, condemned driving by women, forbade them from shaking hands with men (although he endorsed the use of Viagra), and urged Muslims to make exodus from non-Muslim countries, or at least, “less evil countries.” Under the watch of Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Saudi morality police known informally as the mutawain, or the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, were given free rein to crack down on gender mixing, seize “anti-Islamic” films and outlaw movie theaters. Even as the kingdom’s modernization process continued, Sharia law prevailed.
On December 25, just three weeks after the siege of the Grand Mosque was broken, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a loyalist communist government facing a swelling armed rebellion. A deeply conservative rural population led the insurgency, ferociously rejecting the secular modernization projects organized out of Kabul. The invasion was triggered by a scheme enacted five months prior by President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who sought to bleed the Soviet Union from its soft underbelly by funneling billions in arms and aid to the mujahedin.
A hard-line anticommunist born to Polish nobility and seared by his family’s experience in World War II, Brzezinski was the driving force behind the Carter administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. He eventually conceded that his intention had been “to induce a Soviet military intervention,” explaining to the French journal Nouvel Observateur in 1998, “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’”
To fulfill Brzezinski’s policy, Carter was forced to roll back hopes for comprehensive reforms to restore public trust in the intelligence agencies following revelations of the Phoenix assassination program that the CIA conducted during the Vietnam War. A 1977 interagency memo distributed by none other than Brzezinski concluded, “Public trust and confidence in the Intelligence Community have been seriously undermined by disclosures of activities in the past that were illegal, injudicious or otherwise improper by today’s standards.” Two years later, however, the Carter administration was setting the stage for perhaps the most consequential covert intelligence operation in US history. Worse, Carter allowed Pakistan’s Islamist-oriented military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and his Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) to control the distribution of American military assistance to the mujahedin, giving him and his military junta a free hand, while dooming any chance to impose more transparency on the CIA.
Washington was furthermore forced to look away as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program advanced. As Jack Blum, the staff attorney with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who led several investigations into the CIA’s illicit activities, later explained to me, “Pakistan was a wonderful staging area for war, it was so convenient. We needed it as a refuge for the mujahedin, so we completely ignored the fact that they were building a nuclear bomb. We knew about this way before this became public.”
It was also thanks to the CIA’s Afghan proxy war that President Zia was able to consolidate his regressive national vision. “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state,” Zia explained in 1981. “ Take out the Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.”
In doling out cash and US arms, Zia’s ISI gave preference to Afghanistan’s radical Islamist factions and thereby propelled them from the fringe to the mainstream. As the Ugandan scholar of international affairs Mahmood Mamdani wrote of the elements armed by the CIA and ISI, “the right-wingers had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror. Until the Afghan jihad, right-wing Islamists out of power had neither the aspiration of drawing strength from popular organization nor the possibility of marshaling strength from any alternative source.