The dangerous U.S. double standard on Islamic extremism
The death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials in Libya last Wednesday should serve to draw much-needed attention to an increasingly untenable contradiction in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Even while it seeks to recover from this latest attack by Islamic radicals, the United States continues to support or tolerate the mobilization of adherents of that very same ideology elsewhere in the region, most clearly in Syria and in Bahrain. There, U.S. policymakers should expect equally frightening results.
The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was carried out by suspected members of Ansar al-Sharia, or Partisans of Islamic Law, a group adhering to the same Salafi (or Wahhabi) religious interpretation more commonly associated with Saudi Arabia. And while the popular anti-American protests that have continued to spread across the region cannot be painted with a single brushstroke, and doubtless have roots in local political grievances, still one feature they share is the conspicuous presence -- and organizational power -- of Sunni Islamists.
When demonstrators in Cairo and Sanaa succeeded in gaining entry into their respective U.S. embassies, in each case they replaced the U.S. flag with a black pennant bearing in white the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God." The banners, which U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland downplayed disingenuously as a "plain, black flag," should by now be familiar enough to administration officials. It is the same one adopted by other Salafi extremists, including those belonging to al Qaeda and its regional affiliates, from Mali to Yemen. Not coincidentally, it has made an appearance in each of the mass protests witnessed thus far -- in Benghazi, in Tunis, in Khartoum, and even in Doha.
That the Obama administration would fail to acknowledge the flag's overt symbolism is indicative of an uncomfortable yet enduring truth about U.S. policy in the Middle East: that the United States' enemies in one country are its allies of convenience in another. Even as it reels from the first death of a sitting ambassador in more than two decades, the United States continues to supply logistical and other "command-and-control" support to rebels in Syria, while Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar pour in money and arms. Of little or insufficient concern, apparently, is the nature of those being empowered, or the broader ideological forces underlying their struggle.
While the Free Syrian Army is famously far from homogeneous, prominent among its factions are armed Salafi groups not unlike Libya's Ansar al-Sharia. Indeed, local newspapers in Yemen havereported that members of the country's own militant organization of the same name have recently left Yemen to join in the fight in Syria. In early August four members, including the deputy head, of Bahrain's Salafi parliamentary bloc, al-Asalah, traveled to Syria to break bread with their counterparts in the Free Syrian Army, boasting on Twitter of their support -- ideological and monetary -- for "the falcons of al-Sham [the Levant or Damascus]" in their fight against "the hated Safavids," i.e., Allawi Shiites. Upon their return to Bahrain, the members of parliament (MPs) took up a new cause, leading the charge against a planned new Catholic church, which one al-Asalah legislator insisted, "cannot be built in the Arabian peninsula ... [which is] the domain of Muslims."
Notwithstanding the willingness of such groups to coordinate with the United States temporarily in Syria, therefore, one should harbor no illusions about their political and religious orientations, and what these mean for U.S. interests in places where this dubious alliance does and will not operate. As seen in the sectarian language quoted above, one common feature of the Salafi current is a distinct lack of religious tolerance, especially for Shiite Muslims.. Read more:
