From The Khaleej Times
By Fawaz A. Gerges

Four years ago the US and its coalition of the willing plunged into Iraq to punish it among others for an alleged connection with the 9/11 attacks. In a self-fulfilling prophesy, what was not true then has come to pass: Iraq has become the mecca of terrorism against people of all faith. It is as good as an occasion as any to examine the roots of an American blunder and its consequences.

The US has long viewed terrorism as ahistorical and apolitical, more of a moral mutation than a social phenomenon, which can be battered away with military might. Analysing jihadists as social actors driven by political, religious and geostrategic concerns may prove beneficial to the US and the world at large in seeking a lasting and nuanced political-diplomatic strategy to deal with this essentially social phenomenon.

Three background points are in order:

The jihadist enterprise represents a tiny fraction of the larger Islamist movement, which renounced violence in the early 1970s and which dominates the social and political space in most Muslim societies.

From the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, the jihadist movement targeted Arab and Muslim governments, particularly in Egypt and Algeria, and labelled them as the near enemy.

It was not until the second half of the 1990s that a small fraction of jihadists, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, decided to target the US and some of its Western allies, and labelled them as the far enemy.

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