Islam not source of Middle Eastern conflicts, former CIA official insists

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Posted: 1/30/08

Islam not source of Middle Eastern
conflicts, former CIA official insists

By Douglas Todd

Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (RNS)—Angry, violent reformers and terrorists would have arisen out of the Middle East whether Islam had been born or not, a former top CIA official has written.

“A world without Islam would still see most of the enduring bloody rivalries whose wars and tribulations dominate the geopolitical landscape,” Graham Fuller, the CIA’s former head of long-term strategic planning, writes in the cover story of this month’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Fuller, 69, who lives in semi-retirement north of Vancouver, says in the article a terrorist attack on the U.S. like that launched on Sept. 11, 2001, probably would have occurred even if the Muslim religion never had existed.

“If not 9/11, some similar event like it was destined to come,” Fuller, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, argues in his opinion piece, titled “A World Without Islam.”

Islam provides a convenient scapegoat for those trying to explain the origins of terrorism, he writes.

“It’s much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world’s sole superpower,” said Fuller, who spent most of his career with the CIA in Muslim countries, advising top U.S. government officials.

“In the bluntest of terms, would there have been a 9/11 without Islam? … It’s important to remember how easily religion can be invoked when other long-standing grievances are to blame. Sept. 11, 2001, was not the beginning of history.”

It’s too comfortable for Western observers to ignore a long history of Western colonialism in the Middle East while blindly identifying Islam as the key source of global tension, he writes.

If Muhammad had never founded Islam in seventh-century Arabia, Fuller writes, the Middle East likely would have become dominated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which has had a history of violent conflict with the West and the Roman Catholic Church, including during the Crusades.

“Today, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would be no more welcome to Iraqis if they were Christian. The United States did not overthrow Saddam Hussein, an intensely nationalist and secular leader, because he was Muslim. … Nowhere do people welcome foreign occupation and the killing of their citizens at the hands of foreign troops.”

He notes the “principal horrors” of the 20th century “came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their ‘world wars’ twice upon the rest of the world—two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.”




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