Syria, Yemen Conflicts only seem to be about Sunni-Shiite from 30,000 Feet

Juan Cole writes that Syria, Yemen Conflicts only seem to be about Sunni-Shiite from 30,000 Feet.

JUAN COLE: I see evidence of al-Qaeda thinkers, like Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the number-two man for a long time, before bin Laden was killed, being influenced by Marxist thought, and radical Marxism. This is very clear in the technical terms that the Muslim far-right uses. They talk about a vanguard. This was a Leninist term. In some radical forms of Marxism, activists were impatient with the working class, which seemed not to want to fulfill its historical duty by rising up against the business classes, and so it engaged in sabotage—not everywhere all the time, but there were some groups that did that kind of thing in hopes of provoking a class war, because they knew the business classes would call upon their agents, the police, to crack down hard on sabotage and workers’ activism and so forth.

I think that al-Qaeda picked up this kind of thinking from the Marxist fringe in places like Egypt and so forth. I think that it is a deliberate strategy on their part, the sharpening of contradictions, or the heightening of contradictions, as it’s called. I think it explains everything that happened in Iraq.

I remember reading a New York Times piece in 2005 or so that al-Qaeda in Iraq had blown up a pet shop. There were pieces of rabbits and snakes wiggling on the ground. This author in The New York Times expressed himself with amazement. He said, “We should get out of Iraq now, because we can’t understand why you would do that. And if you don’t understand what your enemy is doing, then you should not be there.”

I understood exactly what they were doing. They were hitting soft targets. They were hitting businesses. It was a Shiite-owned pet shop. What they were trying to do was to get the Shiites’ goat in Iraq. They were trying to provoke a civil war, because they hoped that the Shiite clans who were being hit would go and attack Sunnis, and if they went and attacked the Sunnis, then al-Qaeda could go to the Sunnis and say, “Gee, you seem to be being attacked. We could protect you.”

So by provoking attacks on their own community, they actually could parlay that into power.

At the time, I was skeptical that they could succeed in this, but you come to last June, and they took over Mosul, the second-largest city in the country, in exactly this way—by continually provoking the Shia, getting reprisals going, and then going to the Sunnis against whom the reprisals were waged and saying, “You need protection.” By that time, the Mosulites said, “Yes, we do. Would you please come in,” even though Mosulites are cosmopolitan, secular-minded people. But they were willing to bring in this radical fundamentalist group just because they were tired of being targeted by the Shiite government.

Emphasis Mine

Marxists should always be sharpening the contradictions—but only through political means. We are offering an alternative political explanation for events. We want to show that there are Communist and Capitalist narratives at play in the world around us.

Marxists have rejected the terrorist mentality. Terrorism, as shown by events over the past twenty (20) years, has strengthen the Capitlist state through greater legal power, greater reliance on force, and the ready support of such measures by the population. Support for the government is almost reflexive once the terrorism aspect is highlighted.

The Capitalist is always willing to suppress the working class whenever it feels its interests are threatened. But it can, and has, retreat before determined resistance by a significant portion of the working class.

Marxists, at this stage of the struggle, are engaged in educating and radicalising the working class through mass actions, propaganda, and agitation. We join in the daily struggle to sharpen our political awareness of how the world works.