Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky... Huh? How does the comparison apply?

"Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).  Read more…

So let's have more torture! Because chaos is the plan:

“The fact that we have television programs now in which torture is glorified and taken for granted is alarming not only to citizens who care but even to West Point and the military,” insisted [the Reverend George] Hunsinger. According to the reverend, the organization Human Rights First is bringing the producer of the Fox television show 24 to West Point to discuss how its depiction of torture is giving young recruits wrong ideas. “Experts in interrogation agree these tactics don’t work and are in fact counterproductive. The organization Al Qaeda actually began in the torture chambers of Egypt, as you can read in the opening pages of The Looming Tower, which is a history of Al Qaeda.”

So, everything is going according to plan!

Nice to read a Christian who isn't a Christianist. More:

CNN is repeating the comment, attributed to "Lebanese government officials," that the massive fighting that has broken out in Tripoli is the fault of "Al Qaeda"*. By eerie coincidence our friend Juan Cole has some very profound observations just today, about this "organization" we call Al Qaeda:

Another important impetus to al-Qaeda's survival is that it has taken the place of the Communist Party as radical response to the status quo. Al-Qaeda's top leadership is rich, not poor, and it is a movement of the Right, not the Left. But it is a radical, populist Right that can attract the dispossessed.

This cannot be too often repeated, because it is one of those say-whaaa?? sort of things that takes many repetitions and a good deal of thought to soak in. But look at the longer version of Cole's post on the subject and it's really been there in front of us all along:

[On rereading this post, I'm thinking that, really, the foreign policy establishment thinks that the administration is, well, batshit. DFH types, obviously.]

In the latest issue of the very establishment Foreign Afffairs, Bruce Riedel has an excellent* analysis of the state of play in the waronterra, in particular how Al Quaeda, with the help of the Bush penchant for creating chaos, has reconstituted itself. This paragraph of Al Qaeda Strikes Back caught my eye (remember that AQ is Sunni, unlike the majorities in Iran and Iraq, who are Shiite):

Bin Laden might also be nurturing bolder plans, such as exploiting or even triggering an all-out war between the United States and Iran. Indeed, there is evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq -- and elements of the Iraqi Sunni community -- increasingly consider Iran's influence in Iraq to be an even greater problem than the U.S. occupation. Al Qaeda worries about the Sunni minority's future in a Shiite-dominated Iraq after the Americans leave. Propaganda material of Sunni jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere openly discusses their fear that Iran will dominate a postoccupation Iraq and seek to restore the type of regional control that the Persian Empire had in the sixteenth century. In a remarkable statement last November, Zarqawi's successor, Abu Hamza al-Masri, thanked President George W. Bush for sending the U.S. Army to Iraq and thus giving al Qaeda the "great historic opportunity" to engage Americans in direct fighting on Arab ground. (He also said that Bush was "the most stupid and ominous president" in U.S. history.) But he warned that the invasion had "revived the glory of the old Persian Safavid Empire in a very short period of time." Similarly, the self-proclaimed emir of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, issued a statement in February 2007 welcoming news that the U.S. government was considering sending more troops to Iraq and saying that he was eagerly looking forward to an American nuclear attack on Iran.

Al Qaeda would especially like a full-scale U.S. invasion and occupation of Iran, which would presumably oust the Shiite regime in Tehran, further antagonize Muslims worldwide, and expand al Qaeda's battlefield against the United States so that it extends from Anbar Province in the west to the Khyber Pass in the east. It understands that the U.S. military is already too overstretched to invade Iran, but it expects Washington to use nuclear weapons. Baghdadi has told Sunnis in Iran to evacuate towns close to nuclear installations.

Translation: Al Qaeda to Bush: Let's you and Iran fight.

And when the going gets tough, the tough get foily: