Al-Qaeda and Obama

The two weeks after the arrival of Barack Obama to the White House were enough for al-Qaeda to declare war against the new face of the U.S. administration.

Egyptian physician and mastermind of Osama bin Laden’s organization, Ayman al-Zawahiri, declared in a new videotape: “America has a new face, but its heart is full of hatred and its soul that spreads evil will remain unchanged.”

With the victory of Democrat Obama, al-Qaeda lost its preferred enemy, Bush, who used to fuel its propaganda machine with sufficient gas because of his narrow-mindedness and extremism. He used these qualities to give his war against al-Qaeda a quasi-religious cover when he qualified it as “a crusade.”

This was the first gift given by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives to bin Laden, who attacked the center of American capitalism in New York, killing more than 3,000 people in one day.

The second gift given by George Bush to al-Qaeda was the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Before this, al-Qaeda fighters had great difficulty reaching American soldiers. It spent a lot of money and risked its men in order to bomb a housing complex in Saudi Arabia and destroy a navy ship in Yemen. Bush put 150,000 troops within its reach in a torn-apart, sectarian Iraq.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was an outlet for al-Qaeda, which was badly beaten in Afghanistan following the September 11th attack due to the collapse of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of the Arab camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Anyone who wants to know to what extent al-Qaeda benefited from the U.S. invasion of Iraq should examine the fame and influence gained by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. He became a hero, competing with bin Laden as he lead a battle against the world’s largest army in an open battlefield under the slogan “Expel the Occupier.”

Other slogans appeared, such as “Affronting Abuse of Arabs in Abu Ghraib Prison” and “Affronting Shiite Presence in Mesopotamia,” in addition to other stereotypes that reinforced al-Qaeda’s popularity in Arab streets and largely strengthened its polarizing capability in the Muslim world, which suffers from great crises and psychological frustration.

Al-Qaeda lost all of these advantages after the election of a Democratic intellectual president who is determined to “withdraw gradually from Iraq and narrow the battlefield against terrorism.”

The new president wants to bring the battle against al-Qaeda to the Afghan-Pakistan border only, shut Guantanamo, and free Americans from bin Laden’s ghost, which was amplified by the Republican administration in order to pass a larger “imperial” project which aimed at dominating the world by military force.

Through his innate intelligence, Zawahiri is aware of all these facts, and this why he focused on the relationship between the Jews and Obama. The background of the video posted by al-Qaeda on the Internet was a picture of Obama visiting a Jewish temple, although all researchers know that al-Qaeda’s priority is not to liberate Palestine or wage war against Israel; its goal is to strike the major supporter of Arab regimes…America.

Al-Qaeda was not enthusiastic about the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah. Al-Zarqawi had even accused Shiites of being unbelievers and considered them more dangerous to Sunnis than Israel.

Four years is not enough time for Obama to clear all of Bush’s sins. America’s interests and the power of the Israeli lobby will not allow this administration, as was the case with its predecessors, to make progress in the way of a fair solution to the Palestinian issue.

In addition, Arabs are absent from the international arena and no one will volunteer to defend strategic and security interests on their behalf. International relations has never seen and will never witness the creation of these types of “charity organizations.”