Friedman

Thomas Friedman, the NYT columnist, had an interesting comment on the attacks in Amman. He believes a line is crossed in this attack. It made me think of a BBC documentary I saw about a year ago (sorry the title completely escapes me) in which it was claimed that there were some interesting analogies between the rise of Al Quaida and the neo-conservative movement in the USA: the US and Al Quaida in a perverse way
need each other to legitimize their own agenda.

However, beneath all that bull shit was a very interesting reconstruction of the origins and developments of Al Quaida that led to 9/11. At one point the documentary made an implicit prediction. They made an analogy with the history of the Algerian civil war between the authoritarian army-led government and the GIA factions in the nineties. As you may know, this was a terribly period in which ordinary civilians were continuously targeted by both the government and the GIA guerilla fighters. However, in the end the government became more democratic (though not as much as you or I would want) while the GIA factions started bickering (violently) among themselves. The implicit prediction was that this is likely to come about in Iraq (although it may be that the predicition is more my imagined recollection and reconstruction than that it is actually in there): as Al Zawhari becomes more and more desparate about the very limited success he has had so far, he is likely to target more and more civilians in an effort to stamp out those not-so-fundamentalist muslims who continue to frustrate his overall success. In doing so, the "revolution" will eat its own children and it will sink slowly into oblivion. Before that timeunfortunately many more people will die.

One reason why the process of decline will be more painful and longer drawn out than in the Algerian case (which took 10 years or so and about 3 millions deaths!) is that there is more money, more weapons and moreattention in the Iraq case.

Anyway, Friedman's indignation over the latest attacks in Amman is right, but perhaps he fails to see this bigger picture: it is the next step in the slow, painful and horrible process of the fundamentalistrevolution in the middle east eating its own children.

Finally, I think that this is completely independent of what is going to happen in Europe since the attacks there mostly seem to be domestically grown and are not related to the whims of Osama bin Laden or AlZawhari.

Any thoughts?