Today Newspaper, Singapore – 6 Dec 08 AND THE WINNER IS … IRAN How Al Qaeda and the Bush administration lost the plot Venessa Lee Assistant Foreign Editor venessa@mediacorp.com.sg

BOTH antagonists, the Bush administration and Al Qaeda, had great expectations. While President George W Bush’s war on terror has floundered, what is less recognised is the fact that Al Qaeda’s competing “grand narrative” of jihad has also failed.

And, according to a renowned Middle East expert, the measure of their spectacular failure has been the triumph of a common foe — Iran.

French Professor Gilles Kepel says that the American President’s goals quickly widened beyond tracking down Al Qaeda, following the terrorist network’s audacious suicide attacks on United States soil on Sept 11, 2001.

Speaking in Singapore about his latest book, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom, Prof Kepel said Mr Bush’s global war on terror entailed “the whole reshuffling of the Middle East scene”. This project included the democratisation of the region, as a bulwark against extremism, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

The rival enterprise of Osama bin Laden’s group was “jihad through martyrdom”, which “aimed at mobilising the Muslim masses so they would follow in the footsteps of Al Qaeda … in order to build a true Muslim state”, said Prof Kepel, an Arabic speaker who also specialises in radical Islam.

To this end, Al Qaeda also planned to destroy Israel, strike at the US and other allies of the Jewish state, and topple Arab regimes deemed to have compromised with the West, such as Saudi Arabia.

“Iraq was the cemetery of both grand narratives,” Prof Kepel said at the launch of his book, organised on Thursday by the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

One reason for this is the Shia Muslim factor, which also led to Shia Iran’s ascendency in the Middle East, a region dominated by Sunni regimes.

The US, having overcome Saddam Hussein’s army, were “unable to transform their military success into a political victory. This became obvious when the Sunni minority in Iraq started … to fight against the American occupation”, said Prof Kepel, who is the Professor and Chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, at the Institut d’tudes Politiques de Paris.

In May 2003, the US banned at least 30,000 “former regime loyalists” — many of whom belonged to Iraq’s ruling Sunni minority — from public office. Stripped of their jobs, many of these Sunnis made up the first wave of insurgents, the 53-year-old academic writes in Beyond Terror and Martyrdom.

Furthermore, many Sunni insurgents — as well as foreigners who travelled to Iraq to answer Al Qaeda’s calls for global jihad — were more interested in killing the numerically superior “heretic” Shias, traditional underdogs and rivals whose fortunes had changed in Iraq.

“They actually killed a lot more Shias than Americans,” said Prof Kepel. The sectarian violence, fuelled by Al Qaeda, backfired on the Sunni terror group. In Iraq, “what was to be the ultimate jihad turned into fitna, strife among Muslims”, said Prof Kepel.

Al Qaeda’s battle to mobilise Muslims alienated its intended audience, as did its killings of Muslims in other Muslim countries.

The Shia population fought back in Iraq, organising militias linked to Iran’s Shia regime. “The common nemesis of the US forces and the Sunni jihadists — that is to say, Iran — became the kingmaker in Iraq due to their access to Shia militias, which they equipped, trained and financed,” said Prof Kepel.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government was further emboldened by the perceived success of Hezbollah — the Shia militia supported by Iran — in its brief 2006 war with Israel in Lebanon.

Al Qaeda has failed in galvanising its “grand narrative” of global jihad, said Prof Kepel, although he acknowledged the cachet of the terrorist outfit. “Al Qaeda is a brand name now; the rating must be close to Coca-Cola,” he joked, adding that terrorist movements currently active were often “franchised” with the Al Qaeda brand.

Precipitated by factors such as the controversy over terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay and the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail, President Bush’s counter-terrorism efforts have also failed “because he sold the war on terror for the Iraq issue which had nothing to do with it,” Prof Kepel told Weekend Xtra, in reference to post-invasion revelations that Saddam Hussein, executed in 2006, was not found to be linked to Al Qaeda.

In terms of global counter-terrorism efforts, Prof Kepel finds surprising inspiration in Europe, notwithstanding contrarian examples like the London suicide bombings and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who criticised Islam.

In his book, Prof Kepel concludes that Britain and the Netherlands have taken multiculturalism too far, resulting in the segregation and alienation of radicalised youth. He offers as a model his native France instead, where he reads the ban on headscarfs as a fruitful insistence on forging a common, secular national identity for all ethnic groups. The riots by fire-starting Muslim youths in Paris suburbs in 2005, were not a cry for Islamisation, but rather for further integration into a society from which they felt excluded, writes Prof Kepel.

In the Middle East, despite Iran’s role as “kingmaker” in Iraq, President Ahmadinejad’s position is far from secure.

“Iran is facing tremendous domestic difficulties. The price of oil has gone down, and the economic situation of the poor in Iran is much worse” than it was when Mr Ahmadinejad took control in 2005, said Prof Kepel, who added that he would not bet on the Iranian President being re-elected in polls next June.

Therein lies the opportunity for the US to reverse the tide in the war of terror: President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to withdraw from Iraq, and switch the focus to Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda and Taliban militants operate, “then he may very well win the war on terror,” Prof Kepel told Weekend Xtra. “In order to pull out the troops from Iraq, (Obama) has to reach a deal with Iran,” to neutralise the Shia militias in Iraq, Prof Kepel said.

“He probably needs to have a deal with the Iranians who I believe are not necessarily the present Iranian administration, but one that will be elected after Ahmadinejad leaves.”