Yes they need our high interest loans and our restructuring of their economies and our training of their dictators and our weapons we sell to them and our drug trade and our rock stars holding concerts in their name and our humanitarian interventions with our NGOs providing ample ideological support so they can all just somehow get poorer, but don't worry they're developing, they're just a little slow. Actually they need us to fuck off, the people of Iraq have spoken and said as much, but we can pretend that we didn't hear, and that they're just being hotheaded Arabs all ululating n shit (I saw it on TV), and anyway we are just waiting to make sure we don't do anything rash like tell hired killers to go home because that might kill more people than we already do all the time.
This ex-poppy thread has certainly become a floating signifier!
But what's really ironic about the apologists for all the current (and proposed) Western invasions and interventions is their inability to see how all such interventions, particularly in the Middle East (largely via US neo-conservative dogma), has directly provoked a resurgent religious climate from which political Islam continues to benefit. We all know of the longstanding connections between the US and the numerous political-Islamists like bin Laden that they directly helped to create in the first place; so we should hardly be surprised to discover that the US appears to be totally indifferent to the fact that the previously secular Iraq has acquired its first Islamic constitution, that - indeed - all of the countries in that region of the world are increasingly turning to political Islam, from Pakistan to Iran, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Lebanon to Palestine, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, etc. It more corresponds to an inter-exciting feedback mechanism in which so-called Western 'Islamophobia' feeds the development of political Islam which strikes back (9/11 etc), leading to an escalation of Western interventions (combined with both repressive domestic policies and a retreat into religious obscurantism), leading to yet a further Islamicization of politics in those countries, and so on.
Objectively, then, the US-led onslaught in the Middle East has nothing whatsoever to do with the religion of Islam - at all. On the contrary, it has led directly to the strengthing of fundamentalist regimes almost everywhere, in keeping with the neo-con Project For A New Fundamentalist Century. As K-punk argued some time ago, "Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the US in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian. But he was 'Muslim' in the way required by the racializing fantasy; Middle Eastern, dark complexion, not Israeli.... This racist delirium, which equates sworn enemies like Saddam and bin Laden (the only thing they have in common is that they were both funded by the US), will therefore find victims amongst Sikhs, Hindus , atheists, anyone, in fact, whose skin tone or look belongs to a certain ill-defined category, as well as amongst Muslims. So any defence of Islam spectacularly misses the point of what Islamophobia actually involves."
The way forward, then, for those opposed both to political Islam and to US fundamentalist hegemony in these countries as elsewhere requires a politicization of Islam rather than the Islamicization of politics, but as the latter seems to be what is largely practised by all the multiple permutations of really existing political Islam, this is a tall order.
But at least some are doing it.
Extract
Political Islam exists because it was created in the final analysis by the policies of Western governments. And, I am not referring to the Iraq war alone or Western intervention in Afghanistan. These are only the most recent examples. Western governments have basically been supporting political Islam for some twenty to thirty years now, including the Taliban vis-à-vis the former Soviet Union. They created the climate for the problems we are faced with today. Political Islam rose to power when Western powers supported Khomeini against the Shah in order to control and in fact defeat the revolution in Iran. These are the roots of the political Islam that we see today. And that is only one aspect of the reality we are faced with.
The other is the way that Islam and religion are promoted as a whole in Western society. With Reaganism, Thatcherism, and neo-conservatism, religion has been given a growing role in education and our system of values in the name of multiculturalism and toleration of cultures.
Basically, then, if you want to find a solution to a problem, you must first understand what the problem is. The problem is not extremism. The problem is not only terrorism. The problem is political Islam.
....
First pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. Second, declare that you support secularism everywhere in the world. Break ties with religious regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Condemn Islam in government everywhere, including in Saudi Arabia or other countries allied to the West as well. Don't put West and East as a factor in your position and fight against terrorism. Don't just call it terrorism but political Islam. Fight political Islam and religion in political systems anywhere in the world.
The second step is to declare secularism and civil society as a universal value and goal for governments and people all over the world. It means that you have to condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan. It is not only a question of withdrawal from certain countries but the promotion of civil values, secular and humanistic values of the French revolution all over the world.
They can do this easily but they don't because when you think about it, you see that this is actually part of the policies of Western governments and the Western ruling classes. The problem is that having Islam and religion as a whole as a component of the political system is part of the new doctrine of Western neo-conservatism. It is a part of Thatcherism and Reaganism. It is a part of what Mr. Bush as done in the recent US election; his campaign was promoting himself as a representative of god in the White House.
This has to be fought. Everybody knows that Western governments won't do this because their policies won't allow it; they are fact promoting the exact opposite. They want to have some sort of even extreme Islam active in the world and support governments like Saudi Arabia for example and at the same time they do not want terrorism. You cannot do this. Either you stand against the whole thing and declare secularism, civil societal values, universal, humanistic philosophy of society, or you are condemned to having terrorism occurring all over the world again and again. That is the fact of life these days. A very concrete way of fighting political Islam is declaring and defining secularism as a universal value everywhere in the world.