ABSTRACT
A decade ago the Gulf War ended with a tickertape parade in Manhattan for General Schwarzkopf and other American heroes who had returned victorious from the battlefield. Also around ten years ago the Russian War in Afghanistan ended in a defeat of the Russians. Afghanistan had been Russia’s Vietnam and, in some readings, Russia’s defeat had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus, again, the victory of the United States. Some philosophers even thought that history had ended with the end of the competition between capitalism and communism. But perhaps neither history nor these wars themselves ended. Ten years later Manhattan was the target of an attack, in which a majority of young Saudis, strongly opposed to the presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia near the Islamic holy places, during and after the Gulf War, played a dominant role. This protest had been voiced in many ways by religious leaders who criticized King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, ‘the guardian of the two noble Sanctuaries’ (Mecca and Medina), but the religious form of the protest and its significance in the Saudi polity had been ignored, since it was hardly recognizable and interpretable for Western media. In one of the many ironies of recent history, the CIA had brought many of the radical opponents of the close collaboration between the Saudi regime and the Americans to Afghanistan where they had successfully driven the Russians away, but subsequently had helped their fundamentalist Pathan allies, the Taliban, to establish a radical Islamic state. The most important of the Arab supporters of the Taliban was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who used Afghanistan as a base for an anti-American terrorist network, called Al-Qaeda. The Americans therefore decided to attack Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, and the war ‘ended’ with an American victory in Afghanistan. But, again, the seeds of a new war were already visible in the relatively fast toppling of the Taliban regime. President Bush Jr. decided that he should finish what his father had not accomplished in the first Gulf War, namely the ousting of Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, together with his entire regime. With the Bush family in charge in these wars, one gets the feeling of watching a television miniseries with different episodes.
