What Al-qaida Really Wants

[Amadeus]

From Spiegel International

 

If there is anyone who might possibly have an inkling as to what al-Qaida are up to, it is the Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein. He has not only spent time in prison with al-Zarqawi, but has also managed make contact with many of the network's leaders. Based on correspondence with these sources, he has now brought out a book detailing the organization's master plan.

 

....

 

What he describes between pages 202 and 213 is a scenario, proof both of the terrorists' blindness as well as their brutal single-mindedness. In seven phases the terror network hopes to establish an Islamic caliphate which the West will then be too weak to fight.

 

The First Phase Known as "the awakening" -- this has already been carried out and was supposed to have lasted from 2000 to 2003, or more precisely from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington to the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The aim of the attacks of 9/11 was to provoke the US into declaring war on the Islamic world and thereby "awakening" Muslims. "The first phase was judged by the strategists and masterminds behind al-Qaida as very successful," writes Hussein. "The battle field was opened up and the Americans and their allies became a closer and easier target." The terrorist network is also reported as being satisfied that its message can now be heard "everywhere."

 

The Second Phase "Opening Eyes" is, according to Hussein's definition, the period we are now in and should last until 2006. Hussein says the terrorists hope to make the western conspiracy aware of the "Islamic community." Hussein believes this is a phase in which al-Qaida wants an organization to develop into a movement. The network is banking on recruiting young men during this period. Iraq should become the center for all global operations, with an "army" set up there and bases established in other Arabic states.

 

The Third Phase This is described as "Arising and Standing Up" and should last from 2007 to 2010. "There will be a focus on Syria," prophesies Hussein, based on what his sources told him. The fighting cadres are supposedly already prepared and some are in Iraq. Attacks on Turkey and -- even more explosive -- in Israel are predicted. Al-Qaida's masterminds hope that attacks on Israel will help the terrorist group become a recognized organization. The author also believes that countries neighboring Iraq, such as Jordan, are also in danger.

 

The Fourth Phase Between 2010 and 2013, Hussein writes that al-Qaida will aim to bring about the collapse of the hated Arabic governments. The estimate is that "the creeping loss of the regimes' power will lead to a steady growth in strength within al-Qaida." At the same time attacks will be carried out against oil suppliers and the US economy will be targeted using cyber terrorism.

 

The Fifth Phase This will be the point at which an Islamic state, or caliphate, can be declared. The plan is that by this time, between 2013 and 2016, Western influence in the Islamic world will be so reduced and Israel weakened so much, that resistance will not be feared. Al-Qaida hopes that by then the Islamic state will be able to bring about a new world order.

 

The Sixth Phase Hussein believes that from 2016 onwards there will a period of "total confrontation." As soon as the caliphate has been declared the "Islamic army" it will instigate the "fight between the believers and the non-believers" which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.

 

The Seventh Phase This final stage is described as "definitive victory." Hussein writes that in the terrorists' eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the "one-and-a-half billion Muslims," the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn't last longer than two years.

 

 

So, by 2020, there will be a new world order then - scary to see that this conflict has been planed and expected to last so long..

[The Old Git]

So, by 2020, there will be a new world order then - scary to see that this conflict has been planed and expected to last so long..

 

And then it's our turn to be the terrorists, and so it continues...

[Slim]

You see, the thing about extremist nutters is that they have extremist nutter views. They may thing that they can turn the tide against the evil west and create entire islamic nations that'll follow their ideals, but they're wrong. Most muslims disagree with their actions and methods and extreme beliefs, they simply will never get widespread popular support from anyone.

[The Old Git]

Most muslims disagree with their actions and methods and extreme beliefs, they simply will never get widespread popular support from anyone.

 

They might not need widespread support. A few beheadings or stonings and they may be able to rule by fear.

 

Did the Taliban in Afganistan have widespread support?

[Slim]

Are they still in power?

[The Old Git]

Are they still in power?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

No, but how were they got rid of?

 

It was a serious question and I'm still reading up on the subject, but I imagine there's a few Islamic states that aren't democracies and rule the people by a fair bit of fear

[the-rhymes]

What side will China and India be on?

[mollag]

could be im on my own here but did anyone see the recent program. The power of nightmares"?

 

Seems too fly in the face of the previous post which to me sounds an awful lot like the protocols of the elders of zion.

 

There are a lot of people keen to publish propoganda on both sides of the dispute

but that seven phase plan seems very blatantly like black propoganda.

 

personaly i reckon if we stopped putting in troops and puppet governments in the middle east then we would have no grief coming back.

[the-rhymes]

Halal and really tasty:

 

http://web.bilkent.edu.tr/mirrors/bb/28/32.html

 

or

 

http://web.bilkent.edu.tr/mirrors/bb/28/81.html

[mollag]

i could murder one of those kebabs right now!

[ButterflyMaiden]

personaly i reckon if we stopped putting in troops and puppet governments in the middle east then we would have no grief coming back.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The whole situation is problematic. Western economies are dependent on oil supplies being available from the Middle East and Saudi in particular.

Unfriendly regimes could very well result in a whole new set of problems visiting us.

It is, of course, possible, that depletion of the Middle East oil reserves might solve all the problems in one hit. But we may have to wait another 50 years for that to happen !

[Lonan3]

From a historical perspective, a reasonable case could be made to say that the crusades did more to unite Islam than anything that had gone before. The invasion of Iraq appears to be doing the same.

[the-rhymes]

I'm really hoping the USA will withdraw in the next few years... That has to diffuse the situation.

 

If we started to really use other forms of energy we would be in a much stronger position. Mr Bush wouldn't like that though would he, it would hit him and his oil baron pals right in the pocket. And after all that's what most of these fighting's about isn't it, Money.

 

What I also said about India and China is an important point they are massive mostly non Islamic countries that will not be dominated.

 

The best thing we could do in my opinion would be to get Turkey inside the EU and help them be a negotiators between east and west.

[simon]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1544584,00.html

 

Do keep a sense of proportion

 

The terror threat is serious, but it also has a touch of the ridiculous

 

Peter Preston

Monday August 8, 2005

The Guardian

 

There are two things missing in this long trek of a terrorism debate. One is a sense of time and place. The other is a sense of the ridiculous. The place, as we know, is basically London, a media capital emptied of newspaper editors, home secretaries and top TV producers - but stuck with many broadcasting hours and column inches to fill. There are still real stories amid the fluff, but day in and day out your basic B-team diet is "miracle escapes", repeats and old movies: endless time for empty places. It's August. It's the non-miraculous moment of escape. It's the silly season.

 

Silly-silly or silly-ridiculous? The missing link seems natural enough when you think about it. Let's quote from Ben Wilson's excellent new book, The Laughter of Triumph (which was also the power of journalism to put corrupt 19th-century politicians in their place): "It is perhaps a curiosity of British history that laughter was the spring of liberty," he writes. "It seems so trivial: hardly a motor of change, the stuff of heroic resistance to repression. But laughter is impossible to silence".

 

Brutal satirists like William Hone cleared away the detritus of official deceit and hooted a fat, fornicating monarch out of court. They were, and remain, an essential part of freedom's defences. Bremner, Bird and Fortune - plus their newsprint equivalents in the Steve Bell hall of fame - aren't mere entertainers on the fringe. Their mockery helps drain the pompous pus from governing life.

 

Is everything fair game for such acid attack? Bush, Blair and all the usual suspects take it on the chin, to be sure. But where, pray, is a matching sense of the ridiculous when it comes to grey beards and turbans, courtesy of Osamavision? If this bout of terrorism was itself an old movie, it wouldn't be The Sum of All Fears meets Mission Impossible - more Dog Day Afternoon meets The Ladykillers.

 

We have a batch of home-made bombs that don't go off. We have notebooks scattered liberally between knapsacks, as though for some kids' party treasure hunt. We have more mobile phones with logged calls than you find on an average Orange Wednesday. Wasn't bin Laden, long ago, traced to Afghanistan because the CIA got his mobile number? Does nobody in the organisation learn simple lessons?

 

And as for Ayman al-Zawahiri, a B-team stand-in reading Apocalypse News, what are we to make of his latest turn, wrapping Baghdad and Tavistock Square in one tatty bundle delivered four weeks late? The "infidel armies" memorial lecture, as first aired for Saudi consumption while dear old King Fahd was away in Marbella leaving hotel staff $300,000 tips? If Zawahiri is the ideological mastermind of masterminds, you can see Anne Robinson's lip curling already.

 

Of course, there are some profoundly serious points to be made here. The carnage of July 7 is grief and anger without thought of grin. Even incompetents can kill and maim. Even zealots can orchestrate destruction. But that's where the debate should start, not where it should end.

 

This is the silly season, remember. Those empty spaces have to be filled. And the danger of filling them with random clerics on disability benefits and bookshops that cater for a particularly demented trade is that the threat itself balloons out of all proportion. August is a wicked month for rational policy-making as perspective goes on holiday, too.

 

Perspective, summoned back for a special stint, might tell us many instructive things at the moment: that the enemy, in so far as it exists in any cohesive sense, is low on technology, training, coordination or absorbing past lessons; that "mastermind" is a non sequitur in this bloody farrago, as ludicrous as Richard Reid trying to light the bomb in his shoe with a damp book of matches; that Osama himself, last seen ordering America's voters not to re-elect George W, appears to have taken rather a long vacation to his hide his frustration.

 

None of this means there is no threat, but all of it suggests that the threat can be drastically overblown when Fox or CNN has another hour to pad out with "terrorism experts" playing the kind of special guests who never go on holiday. One plane heading into a ravine near Toronto airport could have cost more lives than global, non-Iraqi terror has claimed this year.

 

Why shouldn't we, then, be allowed a grim smile at some of the ramshackle claims and ramshackle people who seek, without much success until Bush gave them a hand, to peddle their wares on the Arab street? If this is a war, replete with invocations of the Blitz and sundry stuff, then the 1940s were full of war films, feisty derision and cockneys making just the same silly jokes you find on today's London bus.

 

Come in Kenneth More, Johnny Mills, Ronald Shiner, your time may be coming again. And, in a month of repeats, one is probably more needed than others. Dad's Army could do a proper job here, with only a little lyric adjustment. Who do you think you are kidding al-Qaida, if you think we're on the run?

[Gladys]

Not to devalue a drop of blood, let alone a life lost in this obscene pandemonium, but yes, the Grauniad does have a point! Thanks Simon for the usual rationlisation!