Listen to our conversation:
NR: ... There has been a relative decline in violence since the peak of the civil war period, 2005 to 2007 or 08. You no longer see militias controlling the streets and checkpoints in neighborhoods. You no longer see Americans conducting patrols or arrests. But Iraq is destroyed and broken and dirty and decaying and sick. Thomas Friedman talked about "a million acts of kindness" [as the US contribution]. I think for any Iraqi that would be outrageous, and they would remember a million explosions, a million assassinations and killings and deaths and displacements and arrests. And they would blame the US for this, because all this followed the American occupation and the chaos we created and the sectarian structures we imposed on the country. So a million acts of occupation and brutality may be more correct from an Iraqi point of view.
Over the course of a long war, Nir Rosen is observing, we Americans have learned to euphemize our own brutalities, at the same time we have adopted and embellished the enemy's bluster about the stakes.
NR: It's ironic that we've adopted Al-Qaeda view of the world. Al-Qaeda believes there's some kind of global battlefield, a global war against Jews and Crusaders and infidels, that countries don't matter. And Obama has continued all the pathologies of the Bush administration: it's a global war against a sort of undefined enemy, an idea, a movement, a symbol, not a nation-state -- Al-Qaeda or Islamic extremism. But ironically, as a result of our wars, Al-Qaeda has gone from being a marginal, insignificant phenomenon to a much more important one throughout the Muslim world. You had 200 guys who belonged to Al-Qaeda, more or less, at the time of 9-11. And they got lucky in 9-11 and were able to murder 3,000 people. But as a result of that we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we bombed Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and conducted operations in other countries as well, and we spent trillions of dollars on this war without end. All for a couple hundred relatively unsophisticated extremists who, in the grand scheme of things, were able to conduct only a pinprick on the great American empire, which didn't cause that much damage. The damage was caused by our overreaction to September 11, internally and externally.
CL: ... You remind me of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations notion. I said to Sam Huntington once on the radio: 'it seems to me that you've developed methadone for Cold War addicts, that you've invented a clash of cultural significance and worldwide scope that could go on forever, partly out of nostalgia for this enormous, long Cold War confrontation with Russian Communism.'
NR: Yes, it was as if we got rid of one enemy [in Russian Communism] and now we need to find another one to justify our massive military expenditure and our militaristic approach to dominating the world. For now, Muslims are a good candidate. But Al-Qaeda is such a marginal phenomenon in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, it just doesn't make any sense. ... They've become more important thanks to us, thanks to our approach, but it's not a threat. It's a nuisance really. And we treat them as if Al-Qaeda threatens to take over and dominate the Muslim world, when it's just a joke. There's no war of ideas here, and no threat militarily. If you visit the Arab world nobody cares about them.