Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free PDF

power in the terrorists’ own countries, is just too demeaning to bear. For a generation of Americans who take pride in belonging to “the greatest power on Earth,” being the unwitting tool in somebody else’s strategy is inconceivable, so the United States (and other Western countries) generally fall back on simple-minded explanations like “they hate our values” to explain the attacks.
    The first generation of Islamist revolutionaries in theArab world emerged in the late 1970s in response to the abject failure of the military regimes to keep their promises about delivering economic growth, military might, rising living standards and the defeat of Israel. In this situation it was inevitable that many younger people would turn to thoughts of revolution, but it was not going to be a Marxist revolution: that particular ideology had been thoroughly discredited by the dictators for whom it had been the guiding star. Instead, large numbers of the young revolutionaries turned to Islamism, which proposed an entirely different route to the same goals of prosperity, military security, social justice (and the ultimate defeat of Israel).
    Islamist ideology argued that the patterns of development that had worked for the infidel West were completely inappropriate for Muslim societies. Instead, the right course of action was to ensure that everybody strictly observed all the rules laid down by God (in the rather extremist interpretation of Islam favoured by the Islamists) for the behaviour of good Muslims. And once everybody in the society had stopped smoking, stopped drinking alcohol, stopped listening to music, stopped the disgusting mixing of the sexes in social and work situations; once the men had stopped trimming their beards, and once everybody was living as true Muslims had done in the time of the Prophet, 1,300 years ago—then God would ensure that people in the Muslim countries had the power, prosperity and respect they longed for.
    It was magical thinking, of course, but a significant minority of Arab Muslims were desperate enough to be seduced by it. To make revolution a reality, however, they needed bigger numbers. So the first task of any Islamist was to start in his own country and build a popular base of support that would one day be able to put tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, risking their lives to bring the old regime down.
    The strategy, as in most revolutionary situations, was terrorism. Partly, terrorism is simply “propaganda of the deed”: a way to make yourself and your ideas known to the population when the public media are under government control. But terrorism also creates significant possibilities for pushing the regime into a policy of extreme repression that alienates the public and drives new recruits into the ranks of the Islamists.
    Terrorism in the modern style is not an Islamist invention. It is a technique that has been around for at least a century, and revolutionaries of every imaginable variety—the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Shining Path in Peru, the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany—have availed themselves of terrorist strategies. Generally they have failed, since terrorism’s tactics are far from foolproof. But when you are hopelessly outmatched by the military, political and financial resources of the governments you seek to overthrow, you employ the strategy that’s available to you.Viewed in that context, the Islamist revolutionary movements have made quite effective use of the technique.
    Not all Islamist revolutionary movements turned immediately to violence. At the end of the 1980s, for example, many of the Algerian Islamists persuaded themselves that they might actually win power through the ballot box (although they did not believe that democracy was compatible with Islam, and were unforthcoming on their longer-term plans for the Algerian