Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
Det finns en rad amerikanska politiker – i båda partierna – som alltid ser militära insatser som den enda riktiga lösningen på världens problem.
Fareed Zakaria (känd från CNN och Washington Post) kommenterade nyligen om en av de mest naiva företrädarna för denna föreställning:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently offered the most honest reason why some in Washington advocate military assistance. Although it doesn’t seem likely to work, it’s a way of doing something in the face of Russian aggression. “I don’t know how this ends if you give [Ukraine] defensive capability,” Graham said at the recent Munich Security Conference, “but I know this: I will feel better because when my nation was needed to stand up to the garbage and stand by freedom, I stood by freedom.”
But the purpose of American foreign policy is not to make Lindsey Graham feel better. It is to achieve objectives on the ground. That means picking your battles and weapons carefully.
Idag skriver han om ett annat krig som en del obetänksamma ”hökar” gärna vill driva, nämligen ”kriget mot ISIS”:
Radical Islam, by contrast, is severely limited in its global appeal. Almost by definition, it is deeply unattractive to all non-Muslims. What Christian would want the forced imposition of sharia law? Even within the Muslim world, radical Islam does not resonate. In the half of that world that holds elections — including Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iraq, even Pakistan — such ideologies have not garnered many votes. The Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral success in Egypt is a partial exception to this rule, but it fared well for a variety of reasons unrelated to its Islamic ideology (which was also not nearly as radical as Egypt’s military dictatorship claims).
Because the ideas at stake are potentially seductive only to Muslims, the ideological war today is really a struggle within Islam. It’s a cultural war that has to be waged by Muslims. If outsiders such as the United States want to play a role, they should listen to and support Muslims fighting the good fight. One such person is the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, whom I interviewed this week in Amman.
President Obama is inclined not to describe the Islamic State as “Islamic,” and the king supports this, saying, “They’re looking for legitimacy that they don’t have inside of Islam.” But the truth is that it’s irrelevant what Obama wants to call these terrorists. What matters is what the king and other locals here in Jordan and across the Arab world call them. And uniformly, they choose not to call it the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL. Instead, they call it Daesh, a rough acronym that is seen as derogatory because it sounds like the Arabic word “daes,” which means to crush underfoot. The word that King Abdullah prefers is “khawarij,” which translates to “outlaws” or “renegades” of Islam.
“It’s not a Western fight,” the king said to me. “This is a fight inside of Islam where everybody comes together against these outlaws.” He wants international support and involvement, of course, but is wary of Western troops. Jordan is on the front line of this battle, but other countries, from Iraq to Egypt, are finally joining in, and not just on the battlefield. This week, the head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious academy, denounced “extremist violent groups” that have