Al-Zarqawi may be dead, but America's problems in the Middle East and throughout the world are far from over, writes Ayman El-Amir* The killing of Al-Qaeda's maverick lieutenant, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, is a victory for US forces in Iraq but marks a gathering storm for US policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. It will serve the revival of the old confrontation between the way the US conducts business with the world and the inexhaustible forces of change that refuse to submit to the American model, especially when it appears to have lost its moral connections to the forces of globalisation. For most of the 20th century, it was capitalism versus communism; for the coming decades of the 21st century, it will be Americanism against nationalism. That struggle subsided over the last decade because of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, but Iraq provided a battleground for its resumption. In this new battle, the fundamentalist form of Islam that emerged from Afghanistan may prove more enduring as fuel for revolutionary change than the failed ideology of communism. The killing of Al-Zarqawi is a reminder of an older chapter in that struggle. It was 39 years ago that lethal US Special Operations forces licensed to assassinate political leaders spearheaded the hunt for another wanted maverick -- the legendary Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, a comrade-in-arms of Cuba's Fidel Castro. In October 1967, US Special Forces and CIA agents led Bolivian troops to ambush Guevara in the jungle, where he was apprehended, summarily executed and buried in an unmarked grave near a deserted airfield. Before his burial, Guevara's hands were chopped off and sent to Argentina for confirmation of his identity by police forensic experts. Like Al-Zarqawi, Guevara was 39 years old when he was captured and executed; he believed in exporting the Cuban brand of revolution throughout Latin America and he was on a collision course with US interests in a region which even the communist Soviet Union at the time recognised as America's backyard -- not much different from the Gulf region now. Unlike Al-Zarqawi, Guevara was an intellectual and a visionary who wanted to reshape the Third World through revolution. He was an educated man and a highly complex personality, compared to Al-Zarqawi -- a school dropout who was dedicated to violence. Guevara's death made him a worldwide icon that rallied young revolutionaries everywhere and directly inspired the 1968 student uprising in Paris and other revolutionary movements in Latin America that followed. Both Guevara and Al-Zarqawi believed in a transformed world order, viewed from two different ideological perspectives, communism and Islam. Al-Zarqawi's struggle, like that of Guevara, was marked by fatal errors. For Al-Zarqawi, crossing the line between resistance against the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq and inciting sectarian violence between Shia and Sunnis created a backlash. Moreover, the price of resistance -- what the US military usually call "collateral damage" among civilians -- was getting too high for the average Iraqi to accept. The means Al-Zarqawi and his group used proved so painful that they exceeded the ends they sought to justify. The bombing of three hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman in November 2005, resulting in the death of more than 60 persons, brought the full force of Jordanian intelligence into collaboration with the US. To Al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, Al-Zarqawi became more of a liability than an asset. His brand of resistance in Iraq gave jihad a bad name. Someone, or a group of people, finally reached the conclusion that his head was worth the $25 million the US had set for it. Still, he was a symbol of the struggle against the US invasion and -- in ways comparable to Guevara's tactics -- he helped spread the cause of Islamic insurgency from Afghanistan to Iraq. Whether Al-Zarqawi goes down in history as a martyr or a terrorist is beside the point. The US invasion of Iraq ignited flames of sectarian violence that will be difficult to extinguish for years to come. What is more important is that it gave the forces of change in the Middle East and beyond a casus belli against the US and its protégés and made Iraq the melting pot of the jihad-based culture of armed resistance. The liquidation of Al-Zarqawi, celebrated by as many Muslims as it was mourned by others, is but one page in the almost forgotten book of the history of the Third World revolution that blossomed half a century ago, energised by the dream of shaping a post-colonial new world order. Fifty years ago, half of the world's independent countries today were colonial territories and peoples who struggled for and attained independence after decades, and sometimes centuries, of European colonisation. That revolution suffered major setbacks as a consequence of the Cold War, military coups, totalitarian regimes, civil and inter-state wars, the rabid ambitions of pseudo-nationalist leaders and the political intrigues of foreign powers. As the leaders of that revolution tried and failed to transform their revolutionary visions into stable democratic societies and consistent development strategies, they borrowed totalitarian tactics and experimented with hare-brained political and economic formulas. The Arab world's post-independence development was hamstrung by the conflict with Israel and a ragtag of political regimes, ranging from mediaeval style monarchies to Marxist-Leninist dictatorships -- all under the banner of Arab nationalism. When all formulas failed to achieve the aspirations of people, Islamists moved in. As they had proved their credibility in Afghanistan, they returned to their failed homelands to declare a new brand of faith-based revolutionary activism, proclaiming, "Islam is the solution". It was a rallying call that few could dispute and it spread like wildfire to wherever a muezzin praised the name of Allah, from Algeria to Afghanistan, from Morocco to Sudan. Anti-Soviet era jihadists from Afghanistan confronted dictatorial regimes in their own countries. Yet their blend of religious indoctrination and violence failed to produce any Islamic state model to build on. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 provided rare opportunity for jihadists to confront US hegemony in as much as it demonstrated US determination to control the Gulf region and other outlying Middle Eastern Arab states. In retrospect, it is interesting to note that the same jihadists who had emerged fresh from the battle to roll back the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan never attempted to confront the US-led multinational campaign when, in 1991, it sought to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The cause was different then: Kuwait was a Muslim country to be saved from the ambitions of secularist Saddam Hussein. The dying embers of Third World revolution are being rekindled by a confrontation of Islamic fundamentalism with Western globalisation. Iraq is serving as the testing ground but other versions are emerging elsewhere in Nepal, Nicaragua and Somalia. A new front of anti-US leaders is coalescing in Latin America, bringing together Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Resistance in Afghanistan is on the rise, and the unipolar world order that dominated the international scene since the downfall of the former Soviet Union is coming to an end. As for the Middle East, America's unequivocal support of Israel's murderous policies against the Palestinians, its backing of decades-old totalitarian regimes that brutally suppress their own peoples, and its littering of the region with military bases and installations to control oil resources may prove the bane of America's existence in this part of the world. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
