Iranian-born award-winning author Reza Aslan
discussed his latest book Monday at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco.
Photos by Luke Thomas
By Fanny Dassie
May 14, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI’s recent commentary suggesting religion is being exploited to fuel continuing wars is a concept familiar to award-winning author Reza Aslan.
Aslan, 35, who spoke Monday before a packed audience at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco to promote his latest book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, discussed religious ideology and extremism and its destructive impact on the world.
According to Aslan, the former Bush administration’s self-proclaimed “War on Terror” was never about terrorism. If it were, Aslan argues, the war would have included terrorist groups like ETA (Basque separatists), or the Iranian group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, for example. Instead, the US war on terror is specifically targeting Islam and Muslims, in areas of the world where the US has oil and gas reserve interests.
“That is what it is. The war on Islam,” Aslan said. “That is how it was deliberately conceived and it was how it was consciously propagated.”
Aslan criticized the United States for failing to understand the differences between nationalist and non-nationalist Islamic groups and, in doing so; the number of Islamic enemies targeted has expanded to include nation states like Iran and Syria.
“We created an undifferentiated enemy,” he said.
Aslan said Hezbollah in the Lebanon and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka are nationalist Islamic groups with a primary goal of advancing a narrow political agenda within their respective national borders. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, on the other hand, are Jihadist anti-nationalist groups, have no political agenda and believe in “quintessentially utopian ideologies.”
Islamist groups want something very specific, Aslan said. “What they want may be unacceptable for us – but at least they want something. And if you want something, you can be talked to, you can be negotiated with.”
By contrast, “Jihadists want nothing, absolutely nothing. They are not fighting a real war; they are fighting a war of the imagination that I call a ‘cosmic war.’” The Jihadists who attacked the US on September 11, 2001 were fighting a cosmic war, Aslan said.
Jihadists’ “very sense of self and identity” is what drives them. Losing would amount to a “loss of faith” and is not part of the Jihadists’ equation.
Aslan criticized former President George W. Bush for his cosmic worldview when he proclaimed the US would rid the world of evil. The use of evil in Bush’s speeches demonstrates that the US is also fighting a cosmic war, a war that cannot be won.
“If a cosmic war is unlosable, unfortunately, it is also unwinnable,” he said. “It is a never-ending war.”
“The war is between the cosmic forces of good and evil,” in which “god is believed to be directly engaged on one side against another,” Aslan said.
Aslan said Bush’s rhetoric amounted to “an evangelical cancer.”
“We have proved, unwillingly perhaps, their main argument which is that this is a war on Islam,” Aslan said. “We have turned the war on terror into a cosmic war.”
Among the possible solutions proffered by Aslan include the promotion of democracy and political participation in the Middle East as a way to deal with nationalist groups.
“Iran and Syria have to be treated like nation states,” Aslan said. “Iran is not a country on the verge of another political collapse. The Islamic Republic of Iran is here to stay, and the sooner we actually figure that out, the sooner we can deal with it, and hopefully change it.”
Unlike Al Qaeda militants who use grievances as “abstract symbols to rally around” and who “have to be hunted down and destroyed,” nationalist groups have fundamental and legitimate grievances that the US needs to recognize before rapprochement is possible.
“This is a window of opportunity that is fast closing,” Aslan cautioned. “We have to make sure that our actions begin to match our words.”
Luke Thomas contributed to this report.
More Info
Reza Aslan’s bio
The Hunger Site
May 16, 2009 at 7:51 am
Reza Asian has identified two motives behind the War on Terror: a new Christian Crusade for control of petroleum resources, the new Holy Grail in Islamic nations.
And he’s right. Those are two of its motives, but only two. The War on Terror serves many motives and interests.
“Welcome to the Congo,” the deadliest front in the War on Terror, in a Christian nation in the heart of Africa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mBCeuhLIjg
May 14, 2009 at 11:04 am
So long as the US unilaterally supports Israel against the Palestinians and so long as the US puts its desire for cheap petroleum from the SW Asian oil patch before the interests of people who live there, we will continue to see a reservoir of resentment which will serve as the raw materials of which violent responses are made possible.
Terrorism in this case is a response rather than an initiative.
-marc
May 14, 2009 at 10:20 am
The Bush war in Iraq was not about terrorism. Bush gave up on the war on terror to take over Iraq. BTW, Basque separatists have not attacked US Soil. That is a BIG difference. That is why they weren’t included. Iran and Syria fund terrorist organizations, and provide safe harbor. That’s why they are included. Also, does the author suggest North Korea is an Islamic state? They were included….
May 14, 2009 at 9:37 am
No matter how sophisticated a spin revisionists put on the dark and aggressive global strategy which was first sold as a “War on Terror”, and then as a moral crusade (to provide freedom and democracy)– the reality is that to date there is no proof that Muslims ever attacked us on 9/11.
The preponderance of incontrovertible physical and historical facts point to a cabal of operators protected by criminals in our own government.
So long as Americans ignore these facts we will be shepherded in almost any disastrous direction, much as we were when almost 60,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese lost their lives in Vietnam. Back then, the arch-anti-communists overcompensated for their “humiliation” in Cuba by killing John F. Kennedy whose directions to pull U.S. troops from Southeast Asia were never implemented.
Did we learn nothing from those times? How much trivia and disinformation has been shoveled at us from that time to this! And to what avail?
It appears to me that President Obama is being manipulated to wage war more widely and “smarter”. To do so requires a host of apologists and revisionists like Aslan to divert our attention, soften our logic, and shore up our delusions of superiority. Such “experts” are too expert to understand that planes do not fly through steel buildings at the same speed which they do flying through air. They are too expert to give credence to any questions about the origins and physical involvement of any of the alleged hijackers on 9/11. Behind their sophistry lurks a hatred that tells us that we need experts like themselves to tell us with whom we can negotiate and with whom we cannot.
[For facts about Muslims and 9/11 please refer to Elias Davidsson; for facts about Kennedy please refer to JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.]
May 14, 2009 at 9:11 am
It’s interesting watching groups try and wedge away from policy in an attempt to badger the people who set policy. “We know better than you do, lets just talk to them, that always works when dealing with religious nuts, it works so well with born againers”
Bush’s war in Iraq was ridiculous. No getting around that, picking away at the sides isn’t going to change that. All the attempts in the world to understand the nut cases in the middle east will not change the stupidity of going to war in Iraq. You can talk and negotiate until you are blue in the face with these crack pots and end up with noting.
Set a date and leave Iraq, if we stay they will hate us, if we leave they will hate us. When they last group standing starts selling oil start buying again.
Negotiating with these crazy Muslims is like negotiating with the North Vietnamese after we invaded and bombed the shit out of them, never going to work. We will lose national will and lose interest in their sandy holes long before they will listen to any sort of reason.
also, loved your letter Rob.
May 14, 2009 at 8:12 am
Negotiate with Osama Bin Laden? That’s preposterous. The Pakistani government tried to make a deal with their fundamentalists, but it didn’t work out very well, did it?
President Obama has rightly made some goodwill gestures toward Iran, but as long as Iran fnances and arms Hamas and Hezbollah and threatens Israel with extinction, his approach seems unlikely to bear fruit. There’s state-sponsored terrorism, and there are more or less autonomous non-state terrorist groups, and both have to be fought. The car-bombers and the suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown no interest in negotiating.
This has never been a war on Islam, but funny how all the terrorists happen to be Moslems.
We have had our own home-grown terrorists, like the Christians who attack abortion clinics and shoot abortion doctors, and the Feds went after them and busted them. That form of domestic terrorism doesn’t happen much anymore. That’s the way you handle terrorists, whether foreign or domestic.