ABSTRACT
Since 9/11, the global war on terror (GWOT) has been used by the US to further expand and entrench its global imperial interests, while its allies, often nothing more in the developing world than the authoritarian elites of regional proxy powers, have used the empowerment given to them by their alliance in the GWOT to increase their own repression and control over subordinate and often minority populations. One of the best examples of this process is seen in the way in which the GWOT was launched, and has been subsequently ‘developed’, in North Africa and the Sahel. Indeed, as this chapter reveals, the regional North African Al Qaeda franchise, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is not just ‘in the West’ (as the word Maghreb means in Arabic),2 but ‘for the West’. Moreover, the way in which ‘terrorism’, mostly ‘state terrorism’, has been ‘fabricated’ and ‘imagined’ in the region has not only resulted in the US government’s initial and false portrayal of the region as a ‘Terror Zone’ becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it raises serious issues and questions about the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The repressive authoritarianism of all North Africa’s regimes, as well as most of those of the Middle East, has, since 9/11, been underpinned by the GWOT: the ‘war’ on political Islam, Al Qaeda and almost all else that has stood up to and opposed the new imperial order. And yet, in the uprisings that have swept most of North Africa and the Middle East since the beginning of 2011, Al Qaeda and Islamists have been noticeable by their absence. Much of the alleged Al Qaeda activity in these countries has, in fact, had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or political Islam, but has been fabricated state terrorism used to justify the GWOT and the further crack-down on minorities, civil society movements and almost all forms of legitimate opposition. It is because the West’s intelligence services have been so trapped in their ideological cul-de-sac of the GWOT and its Islamist and Al Qaeda ‘bogeymen’ that the US, France, the UK, Italy and the rest were all caught flat-footed by the recent Arab uprisings.
