KSM… Still, with the Discrediting of Claims

Captain Ed:

After the release of the transcript from the Guantanamo tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, many people expressed skepticism about his claims of involvement in so many terrorist plots. Some even postulated that Mohammed had fallen prey to American torture, even though he denied acting under duress during the hearing, or that he had gone insane during his American detention. However, the one Western journalist to have interviewed the al-Qaeda mastermind believes that Mohammed understands he has come to the end of his run as a terrorist, and now wants to establish a record of his legacy as a reaction to his current impotence….

…In the end, KSM’s lack of faith has led him to give up, now that he has no way of breaking free from US control. Binalshibh, as Yosri Fouda notes, would see this as just another phase of the jihad, but KSM has no such illusions to bolster him. He knows his days are numbered, and that seventy-virgins will not await him at the end of his journey.

There is something to be said for the idea that he is exaggerating his claims and his involvement for the purpose of bolstering his own legacy.  Rather like what we saw in terms of legacy bolstering at the end of the Clinton administration. But the article insists it’s not so…

Mohammed wants to exit the stage as brashly as he strutted upon it. He wants to ensure that his reputation lives far beyond his actual presence on Earth, even if that means being remembered as the most bloodthirsty butcher outside of a dictatorship in long memory. What’s more, Fouda insists that he is not exaggerating much, if at all. Fouda even notes that one attack with his fingerprints managed to get missed by KSM in his tribunal statement, the tanker attack on a Tunisian synagogue in 2002 that killed 21 people. If anything, Fouda postulates, he may just have blurred lines between what he did and what he planned to do.

And therein lies the defeat of the argument that KSM was not central to the movement that eventually became al-Qaida.

But here is the point that stands out like a sore thumb to me:

The master terrorist without the faith of his brethren has been exposed as nothing but a psychopath who likes to kill people for whatever reason he finds handy. He has nothing left but his mouth and his history, and he will use them both to establish his legacy — which is the reason he’s talking to the Americans now.

Possibly.

But what does this say about these plans, these attacks he had such a hand in, being religiously motivated? If we take as given that this KSM creature is not particularly religious, as is being cast, here , what in the world would cause him to do the things he did? Even a madman operates from a certain level of reasoning and has some primary motivation at the root of their actions.

I mean, clearly, he’s not fighting on a religious scale, but on a cultural one; he’s fighting to support his culture, or at least, he was. That’s right, I mean to say that this is a culture-centric conflict.

I submit , that the majority of those who claim to be fighting this war from the Islamist side on religious ground, are liars.  Even to themselves. How many cultures in history, even those recall cheers of our own the present day culture, have fought there wars in the name of whatever god they worshiped?  I dare say that if you look closely, you’ll find that god had very little to do with any of them.  So it is with the situation with Islam, today.
What they’re fighting this over, is culture.  The rest of the world has mostly gone over to western culture; even China, For all that governmental controls over their cultural life have been a part of things since the days of Mao, is also influenced heavily by the west.  Men such as KSM, correctly see their culture, such as it is, with it’s 14th century values, dying.

By the same token then, it can easily be said that the war against terror is not a war against Islam.  Rather, it is against those denizens of the fourteenth century, who happen to be Muslim, who seek our overthrow… and who see that goal as the salvation not of their souls, so much as the salvation of their culture.
Where this starts getting murky, however, is that even Islamists of the west who have adopted, mostly, the modern day western culture, still find themselves culturally rooted in the fourteenth century, much the same as any other cultural transplant would find themselves tied to their ancient cultural ties. And here, I’m referring to, as examples, German, Irish, Italian, African, and so on.  Thus do we see anti American, and anti western activities from some Muslims here in the west; The loyalties of such people can be at best muddled.

So it is, that the discussions regarding Islam versus the war on terror become problematic; the lines are not clearly drawn.  And thus do we see clearly confused responses from people like Dean Essmay, for example.

(No, I’m not singling out Dean, here, he merely happens to be the most recent, loudest example of rather muddled thinking on the subject, which led to the flatly stupid response of limiting discussion on the matter.  )

I have no immediate solution for these misperceptions. They are understandable, certainly, but they are damaging our efforts to remove the violence from the situation.

I suppose, however, that the first step toward solving the problem is correctly identifying it.

Discuss.