Got a forwarded email this morning from a relative who attached some right-wing thing about "Islamo-fascism." I wrote up a response and figured it was worth posting here too since I think many of the Left buy into some of the rhetoric equating Islamic fundamentalism with Al Qaeda and figured it was worth getting some responses to the argument I used since I'm not 100% sure about parts of it.
The straw-man version of the argument I'm trying to counter is that Islamic fundamentalism is dangerous and can't be reasoned with due to violence in Islamic history, writings of Wahhabists etc...
My response is mainly to question whether attacks against the US were and are that related to fundamentalism.
A proper response would probably point out that most attacks on the US in Iraq and Afghanistan are not by extreme Islamic fundamentalists. Attacks are instead by nationalists and people wanting revenge for immediate relatives who were killed by US actions.
A better response would deal with the ideology of those behind larger attacks. Unfortunately, that's a bit harder since there isn't that much proof out there as to what the beliefs of such people were.
From most of the stuff I've read, I would guess that the hijackers on 9/11 were not extreme in their fundamentalism since some went to school in Germany before they started planning and I think one was seen drinking at a strip-club before the attack. Bin Laden is a fundamentalist but his motives behind attacks on the US were much more about getting rid of the government of Egypt and bringing down the Saudi royal family than they were about the US. From his interviews with Fisk, one does sense he thought that drawing the US into Afghanistan would end the same as it did for the USSR. But, I would guess the hostility towards the US really came from a belief that changing the governments of Egypt or Saudi Arabia would only be possible if US funding could be cut off. Many of the ranks of Al Qaeda are from educated middle-classes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia; perhaps one reason is due to the anger of young people growing up in such countries. If you are educated about freedom and democracy but do not see it at home (and see anyone standing up against the government tortured or killed), you will naturally be drawn to a movement wanting to bring down your government. Youth in such countries could get drawn to reformist secular Western groups but such groups are weakened by the US backing for their governments (Egypt's government probably couldn't exist without US backing) and young people are more likely to be drawn to simplistic movements that they see as "actually doing something" (even if that something is highly destructive) than they are to reformists who just talk. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the ties between the US and Saudi Arabia is strong but the royal family has its oil wealth and could get other countries as military backers if the US stopped supporting it; the tendency to equate the royal family with a US conspiracy is probably more a result of things like Saudi leaders hanging out in Aspen and the like than anything concrete.
Wahhabism and the religious conservatism of Saudi Arabia perhaps plays some role in attacks on the US but I think it is overplayed. Wahhabists tended to be pretty pro-US when they were fighting the USSR in Afghanistan (most fighters were Afghan nationalists but the US did work with the Saudis to help recruit fighters internationally with a clear message that this was a fight against "godless Communists"). The Taliban were not particularly anti-US and like the Islamic Courts in Somalia were mainly focused on using religion to overcome warlords (but obviously took it to a horrible extreme). Mainly local factors drove their support and rise to power. While Al Qaeda had a base in Afghanistan, few attacks on the US have ever involved Afghans so since the Wahhabist like beliefs of the Taliban were actually popular among some Afghans (for local cultural reasons as well as a reaction to excesses of warlords) it would be hard to see the beliefs as the reason behind attacks on the US (groups like the Amish may want to live in communities ruled by religious laws but that isn't the same as working to force people elsewhere to live under such laws). The Al Qaeda types may have had the idea of spreading Islamic law worldwide but even if such ideas were voiced by any small subset of them I doubt it is the motive for any attacks (which in most cases after 9/11 seem to be focused on things like revenge or pushing countries like Spain out of the Iraq war). Saudi Wahhabists have an almost evangelical desire to convert Muslims in other countries to their view but it seems mainly restricted to poorer Muslim communities and with many of the religious schools in Pakistan coming from the Saudi royal family (who are the main enemy of Bin Laden) its hard to see how one can equate Wahhabism and the motives and beliefs of groups like Al Qaeda.
In any case, talk of "Islamo-fascism" is pretty unproductive since it plays into Bin Laden's original desire for a war between the US and conservative Muslims. It equates the problems of Wahhabism with the problem of attacks on the US when such attacks hardly existed before Bin Laden (who started on his path to being opposed to the US as a result of his fighters from Afghanistan getting rejected by the Saudis as being the army that would fight to kick Saddam out of Kuwait). Attacks in the 80s were largely by Shias who are seen as non-Muslims by Wahhabists. The ideas found in articles on "Islamo-fascism" are not openly anti-Muslim but the focus on apocalyptic beliefs of some Muslims (like the re-establishment of the caliphate) and focus on how one cant reason with "Islamo-fascists" contains elements of traditional anti-Muslim European beliefs going back to Dante and having some similarities with traditional anti-Semitism (mainly because of the equation of any non-Christian beliefs with evil). Before the last few years the majority of suicide attacks worldwide were by the Tamil Tigers who as Marxists often didn't even believe in an afterlife. Islamic fundamentalists are now equated with suicide bombers and equated with the existence of evil (much as Communists were during the Cold War). The problem with something like the War on Terror is that it creates the very problem it seeks to fight; if Communism became popular on US college campuses in response to the over-reactions of the red scares combined with a desire by young men not to be drafted, the US promotes its assumed version of what it is fighting in the Islamic world (as those facing the problems of war turn against the US by adopting the views the US claims to be fighting).