*US troops have entered the southern reaches of the Shiite holy city of Najaf and are receiving a relatively warm reception from the 560,000 largely Shiite locals. They have been engaged in a fierce battle with Republican Guards for the city, which is on a key strategic route linking the south of Iraq with Baghdad. It is revered by approximately 100 million Shiites throughout the world, including neighboring Iran, as the site of the golden-domed tomb of Imam `Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, who for Shiites is the St. Peter of Islam--the successor to the Prophet. (See my article at the History News Network, below or by googling it). Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post reported that Col. Ben Hodges said, ' "We've hit them very hard the last two days, wherever they're firing at us, from homes, from schools. But the one place I've absolutely told them they cannot fire is into the mosque" at the Ali tomb, Hodges said. "I believe they were shocked that we would shoot that close and hit that hard. But look, the gold dome is still standing." ' Give than man a medal. If the tomb had been hit, it had the potential for stirring up enormous anti-American feeling in Iran, Lebanon, Bahrain, etc. Scheherezade Faramarzi reported such concerns in Iran for AP. Her interviewees there thought that there would be enormous anger in Iran, especially in traditionalist places like Qom and Mashhad (the latter has its own shrine), if Ali's tomb were damaged.



US officers said they thought Najaf was now "contained." That locals would be glad to see the Americans is plausible. Najaf rose up against Saddam in spring of 1991 and threw off Baath rule briefly. But then the Baathists came in with tanks and helicopter gunships and put them down brutally. My Iraqi Shiite friends speak of 40,000 dead in Najaf alone, nearly 10% of the population, and although that may be an exaggeration, the number killed was in any case monstrous. Likewise, about 100 Shiite clergymen were killed or made to disappear. The Grand Ayatollah in Najaf, Ali Sistani, was subject to an assassination attempt by the Baath in 1996 and since then has been cautious. He was forced to issue a fatwa last September forbidding cooperation with the Americans, but everyone thinks it was coerced. US officers say the Najaf clergymen are still on the fence. If they come over to the US, that will be a very important cultural and political victory.



*A major push on the other Shiite shrine city, Karbala, has now begun. Damaging its shrines or causing substantial casualties among its civilian population would hold the same dangers for the US as had Najaf. In other news, the British say they have taken the western third of Basra, Iraq's second largest city.



*AP says about 100 Iraqis from a tribal background are now fighting alongside the Anglo-American forces. That's a development the US should seek to expand. The problem with the war so far is that it isn't creating *Iraqi* heroes, outside Kurdistan. But such heroes, forged in the war against the Baath, would potentially be very important in running the country after the war.



*Asharq al-Awsat says 50,000 marched against the war in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city, and that some were demanding that the door be opened to holy war against the United States. The scary thing is that the biggest recent anti-war demonstration, on Sunday, was in Jakarta, Indonesia. Egyptians don't have a democracy and are stuck with the quasi-military Mubarak government. But if unrest continues to brew over this issue in Indonesia, an anti-American government could come to power in Indonesia eventually, and Islamists could become powerful. They aren't, now, and Indonesia's experiment in open society has certainly been damaged by the US war in Iraq. People like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz think they can have their cake [war in Iraq, support for Sharon in Israel] and eat it too [spread of liberalism and democracy in the Muslim world]. But it is possible that these two goals are incompatible with one another. Isaiah Berlin warned us about incompatible ideals. The chickenhawks in Washington are imbued with a utopianism (at least in their rhetoric) of which he would have disapproved.

*The killing of some 7 Iraqi civilians by US troops because their vehicle refused to stop at a checkpoint demonstrates the kind of public relations difficulties the US is being drawn into during the Iraq War. The suicide bomber who earlier took advantage of the troops at that checkpoint did more than kill four of our young men. They forced our troops to take a highly suspicious posture toward civilians. The civilian deaths were not an accident; they were forced on us by the guerrilla tactics of the enemy, who is seeking to create bad feeling between us and the general Iraqi populace. The US military must be very careful not to be pushed into causing large numbers of civilian deaths every day, or they will begin to lose the war on the political and diplomatic front, whatever happens on the military front.



*The failure of the British or US troops to turn up any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons is striking. Perhaps it is the case that they are well hidden or that they are hidden in Baghdad or to the north. It is dangerous to get out on a limb here and say they just don't exist. But the possibility that they just don't exist now has to be taken increasingly seriously. We know (scroll down) that the Bush and Blair case for Iraq having started back up its nuclear weapons program after 1998 has collapsed and was based on faulty or actively forged "evidence." So among the major reasons given for voting for the war by the US Congress has evaporated. The likelihood is that Iraq destroyed almost all its chemical and biological stockpiles in the 1990s. As even Forbes is noting, the Bush administration has now backed off WMD as its major reason for the war, now focusing on 'links to terrorism' and on the Iraqi regime's human rights abuses (well, genocides is more like it). The major link to terrorism is Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish group not in the territory under Baath control. The US would not have needed to invade Iraq to clean it out--it was already in the no-fly zone under US and Kurdish dominance, and the Kurdish pesh merga fighters could have been sent in after it with special ops support. As someone who was myself alarmed last fall by reports of Saddam getting nukes, I have to say that I increasingly feel I have been duped. But I hold on to the belief that the Baath regime in Iraq has been virtually genocidal (no one talks about the fate of the Marsh Arabs) and that having it removed cannot in the end be a bad thing. That's what I tell anxious parents of our troops over there; it is a noble enterprise to remove the Baath, even if so many other justifications for the war are crumbling. But it looks to me like an increasingly bad idea for the US (read: the Pentagon) to try to run Iraq in the aftermath. We should win, cut our losses, and turn Iraq back over to Iraqis.

*

*The British are announcing that they have taken an important suburb of Basra, al-Qassib, after a fierce firefight with Iraqi military forces. This is said to have been the biggest battle of the war so far for the British troops. They have been infiltrating commandoes into the city for days to establish forward posts from which they can direct air strikes on the Republican Guards and Fedayeen Saddam. A couple of nights ago a team destroyed two statues of Saddam Hussein. Although the signs of progress at Basra are heartening for our side, one has to remember that two weeks ago the Pentagon was hoping to have the city in three days so that cheering crowds of liberated Shiites could be shown on television.



*What about hearts and minds? Andrew Buncombe is reporting in The Independent on interviews with Basrans at British checkpoints and he finds enormous anger against the British for besieging and bombing the city. One man said that it was "an occupation" and if Saddam's forces would give the citizenry weapons they would rise up to fight the invaders. One cannot know if this is a minority or majority view, of course. Another report suggests that the British are penetrating farther into Basra with the help of local civilians, though. And there was after all a neighborhood uprising against the Baath in one Basra neighborhood last week. But every indication is that a fair proportion of the populace is greeting this invasion rather sullenly. I have to say I am a little surprised that the Shiite South feels this way, if it does. They have been brutalized by the Baath. But Shiite Iraqis were always the most devoted to specifically Iraqi nationalism, and an imperialist invasion may be a hard thing for them to swallow, even if it does remove their tormentor.



*A further irony: Muslims in the Indian city of Lucknow demonstrated yesterday against the war, and the press interviews they gave show that some at least are Shiites. In the 1980s the Lucknow Sunnis and Shiites used to fight among themselves because the Sunnis were supporting Saddam and the Shiites were supporting Iran. Bush has managed to promote pan-Islamic sentiments of solidarity even in Lucknow!



*On the other hand, I have for a long time tried to warn that the Sunni Arabs, including the Republican Guard, would make a strong stand against the invaders. They are like the white farmers of Rhodesia--if the system falls, they are likely to lose everything to the majority Shiites and the newly autonomous Kurds, and they know it very well. The idea the Pentagon apparently had that a few bombs would make them hand over Saddam and give in was always unlikely.



*Iraq says 4000 Arab volunteers have arrived, planning to carry out suicide and other operations against the US. This number seems plausible to me. There have been reports of Saudi young men slipping across the border to help Iraq against the Americans, and the Pakistani fundamentalists have called for volunteers to go, as well. Some 500 fighters are alleged to have gone to Iraq from Lebanon's Baalbak region (which has a big Shiite/ Hizbullah population). The borders are porous, and the road from Amman to Baghdad is apparently still open, if awfully dangerous. Such volunteers do not pose a serious threat to Bradley tanks, but as Beirut demonstrated, they are a threat to sleeping Marines in their barracks. And, the psychological impact of such tactics can be profound. A recent poll finds that a majority of Americans oppose the war if US war dead reaches 5,000, and the same is true if 5,000 Iraqi civilians are killed. The lowness of the numbers at which Americans flip over to opposing the war suggests that the Pentagon would be well advised to spend some time figuring out how to prevent any more suicide bombings of our troops. (As for the number of Iraqi civilian deaths, it is likely to be rather more than 5000 if the Republican Guards withdraw into the residential neighborhoods; they are said to have watched the film Blackhawk Down a lot as their training manual.)



*It is not good news for the US that the Saudis have closed their airspace to US Tomahawk cruise missiles. These had been being fired at Iraq from US subs in the Red Sea. It is desirable for the US to be able to fire on targets from a variety of directions--too narrow an approach corridor for the missiles makes them less effective.



*Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi says Iran will not accept a US-installed government in Iraq. He also said that fears of Kurdish autonomy were shared by Iran, Turkey and Syria. There have been small government-backed demonstrations against the war in Tehran. President Khatami has criticized the US for acting like a big brother to the rest of the world.

*The US forces have recently begun bombing the Republican Guards near Baghdad, which some think is a sign that Iraq's air defenses have now been substantially degraded. Apache helicopters fly low, and are vulnerable to enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Iraqi regime had put in a sophisticated fiber optic system to link its anti-aircraft equipment, and one presumes that the bunker busting bombs recently dropped on strategic buildings in Baghdad aimed at disabling it. Unlike in Basra, the Republican Guards' tank corps have been drawn up outside the city, presumably because they felt they were under the umbrella of the anti-aircraft defenses. If it is true that the latter are largely disabled, one may see the tanks withdrawn into residential neighborhoods, and/or positioned near hospitals, schools and mosques, as happened at Basra and Nasiriya.



*A big meeting of 300 Iraqi dissidents (Independent Iraqis for Democracy) in London Saturday cheered wildly when Iraqi elder statesman Adnan Pachachi proclaimed that a US military administration of Iraq was "in no way acceptable." This meeting was an alternative to the Iraqi National Congress identified with Ahmad Chalabi. The Independent Iraqis for Democracy mainly consists of liberals, but the meeting included two prominent Shiite clergymen, Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum and Husayn al-Sadr. The problem for the US is that the military campaign was planned far more meticulously than the aftermath. The Bush administration seems to be afraid that if it turns Iraq over quickly to a provisional government, one would see a situation similar to Afghanistan, plagued by warlords and lacking central authority. But I think it will find that the proposed alternative, of an American military and then civilian government of the country, is even more problematic--and that it will be targeted by Iraqi suicide bombers and prove extremely unpopular with nationalist Iraqis, even those opposed to Saddam.



*The suicide bombing that killed four US troops near Najaf Saturday is a very bad sign. The US is planning to have a very large footprint in Iraq for many years to come, and so may face such bombings as a constant threat. Worse, civilians here in the homeland may end up being targeted, as threatened by Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan: "I am sure that the day will come when a single martyrdom operation will kill 5,000 enemies. The Iraqi people have a legal right to deal with the enemy with any means." Actually, such warnings from the Iraqi Baath party are probably empty, since it is about to cease to exist. The real danger remains al-Qaeda and similar radical Islamist organizations. One worries that Iraqi Sunnis, having been disappointed by the failure of nationalist secularism, may turn to radical Islamism as an alternative. That is what happened to some Egyptians after Abdel Nasser was defeated in 1967. In a sense there is a straight line from 1967 to September 11, 2001. Likewise, there is a menace from jihadi volunteers flocking to Iraq to attack the Americans there. Ramadan said, "Thousands of volunteers and fedayeen (martyrdom fighters) are coming into Iraq and major contingents of these volunteers will be seen in the coming days."



*The Guardian reports that Jay Garner, who is to administer Iraqi reconstruction on behalf of the US, "is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq. Patriot was made famous in the 1991 Gulf war when it was used to protect Israeli and Saudi targets from attack by Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles. Garner was involved in the system's deployment in Israel." This background is raising alarums at the UN and elsewhere about his suitability for the high profile post of US Proconsul of Iraq (can the Iraqis really warm to someone who was so closely involved in developing the weapons that have killed so many of them?) I mentioned other reasons for which Garner's appointment would be a disaster a couple of days ago (scroll down)



*The Islamic Action Council, the ruling party in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, is going ahead with plans to implement a Taliban-style form of Muslim law as the law of the land in that province. Since its members trained the Taliban, this development is not surprising. One wonders, though, whether the NWFP voters really had this in mind when they voted against the traditionally dominant parties in last October's election. Personally, I think the Federal government should step in to stop the implementation of a medieval interpretation of shariah (Islamic law) in one province. This must be unconstitutional in some way. It is ironic that the main US response to September 11 has been a) to put the fundamentalist Jami`at-i Islami in charge of Afghanistan; b) to preside over the rise to dominance in NWFP and Baluchistan of the teachers of the Taliban; and c) to destroy one of the few secularist regimes in the region, Baathism in Iraq.

*The British forces ringing Basra have called on civilians to leave the city. Many are walking to Basra, 12 miles away, in search of water. The British would ideally like to empty the city of 1.2 million so as to have a clear shot at the Baathist forces that remain behind. The water situation is apparently become unbearable in the city. It seems to me a little unlikely that over a million civilians can be evacuated under these conditions, and it also seems increasingly likely that a British assault on Basra will be forced to target Baath troops who have nestled in residential areas. This could get very ugly, and the scenarios the Pentago hoped for of joyous Basrans dancing in the streets to be relieved of Saddam are unlikely ever to be realized. Washington though Iraq would be like Afghanistan. The two are not comparable. Iraq is a modern industrialized country, if beaten down by the sanctions, and the Baath is a sophisticated political party, quite unlike the Taliban. One is always fighting the last war, and always making mistakes because of that.



*According to the wire services, the Shiite uprising in Basra was very limited and was quickly repressed by Baath forces. An spokesman for Iraqi Shiites said that "there had been up a civilian uprising in the main southern city of Basra, but said it affected only one working class neighborhood. “The uprising, which was limited to this neighborhood, took place after coalition forces bombed government positions,” Akram Hakim, an official of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), told Al-Jazeera. He said the situation remained “explosive” yesterday morning in Basra. " When Shiites in Basra rose up against Saddam in spring of 1991 after the first Gulf War, the US stood by while the Baath brutally repressed them, so they have reason to hold back this time.



*The heavy fighting by US forces and the Republican Guard near Najaf has all knowledgeable observers worried that the US may accidentally inflict damage on this holy Shiite city, home of the shrine to Imam `Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. Such incidents could ultimately affect the attitude toward the US war in Iraq of the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran, not to mention the Shiites of Bahrain (who form a majority of the population there; it is home to the US naval fleet in the Gulf) and Lebanon. Even the Hazara Shiites of Afghanistan, so far allies of the US, could be alienated if things go wrong in Najaf.



*Speaking of Shiites, the 15,000 trained fighters of the anti-Saddam al-Badr Brigade have so far not shown up as a factor in the war. A report out of Pakistan recently suggested that the Iranians, who are the hosts of the Badr Brigade, have thrown up barriers to the infiltration of these troops into Iraq. There had earlier been reports of Brigade fighters slipping into Kurdistan in the north. The Iranians, whose Revolutionary Guards held a rally on the Iran-Iraq border yesterday, so far appear to want to be perceived as neutral. They hate Saddam, who attacked Iran in 1980 and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iranian war dead. But they also deeply distrust the US and are afraid they are being surrounded with a view to the eventual overthrow by the US of the current Iranian government. The political wing of the Badr Brigades, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has had an up and down relationship with the US war effort. They seemed to be supporting it last summer and fall. But when National Security Council point man on Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad began talking about a US military and then civilian administration of Iraq after the war, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, a SCIRI leader, called him a bully. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI has recently as much as said that SCIRI would use military force to oppose any long-term US presence in Iraq. I think the Arabic word for quagmire is probably al-mustanqa`. Washington will probably have to learn to pronounce it.



*Mark Sedra in Foreign Policy in Focus is arguing that the lessons of Afghanistan for Iraq policy are depressing. There have been 400 attacks on US and Afghan security in the past year, and most of the country is ruled by warlords. [Reporters without Borders is issuing a report critical of the harsh crackdown on the press in Ismail Khan's Herat.] The donor aid promised at Tokyo has often not actually been forthcoming, and was in any case an vast underestimate of the actual need. It looks increasingly as though Iraq's infrastructure is going to be severely damaged by the US war. I can only think that the US did not initially use air power to inflict heavy attrition on Iraqi conventional forces outside Baghdad because they hoped against hope that they could decapitate the regime and retain an Iraqi military for the future. Since, however, the Baath and the Republican Guards are standing firm, it seems less and less likely that there will be much salvageable from the bureaucracy and military for reconstruction purposes after the war. So, restoring and maintaining security, and rebuilding the bureaucracy and the country are going to be slow and very expensive.



*

*The British are asserting that there has been a popular revolt in Basra against the Republican Guards and other forces loyal to Saddam. The Iraqi government has denied the report. The British also say that the Iraqi military is firing mortars on the rebels. Since the British can pinpoint the origin of mortar fire, they have been using this activity to target the Republican Guards mortar positions, so as to help the rebellion. I wonder myself if the "rebellion" isn't being in part led by Special Forces agents infiltrated into the city. It is also possible that elements of SCIRI (the Shiite "Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) from the Badr Brigade have slipped into the city from Iran. A Basra rebellion would not be impossible. It happened on a large scale in 1991, and there were also disturbances later in the 1990s, especially when Grand Ayatollah Sadr was assassinated by Saddam. But Basrans would also remember that the US hung them out to dry in 1991 and let Saddam crush them. They will be wary, and their friendliness to the British cannot be assumed.



*My analysis of the Iraqi strategy is that it is similar to what Sadat did in 1973. Ariel Sharon left lots of Egyptian forces in his rear as he raced to encircle Cairo. That is similar to what the US forces are doing. But Sadat won the peace by getting the UN security council (especially the Soviet Union, which reportedly threatened to intervene) to insist on a cease-fire. Saddam has already gotten a condemnation of the war from the Arab League and is seeking one from the Security Council. The difference is that this time the Russian successors to the Soviet Union are weak and economically dependent on the US, and won't go to the mat for Saddam. So, the strategy will almost certainly fail, but the parallel seems to me striking.



From a discussion on a list about how the war in Iraq is going:



Military analysts have for some time been nervous about the Rumsfeld plan to start the war before all units were in place. A lot of analysts, including Wesley Clark, cannot understand why the equipment for the Fourth Army Infantry was left in ships off Turkey long after it seemed obvious that they were not going to be allowed to be positioned on Turkish soil. These are now being moved to Kuwait. They worried that things could go badly wrong in the meantime. They have. It may be that some units are being held in reserve for the north, but if so that still means they cannot be used in the south, which continues as far as I can see to be in a condition of chaos.



Speaking of the Suez Canal, one remarkable development is the widespread

calls among Egyptians, especially leftists and Islamists, for Egypt to deny

use of the Canal to the U.S. Since Camp David in 1978, I have never seen

this degree of rage and anti-US feeling in Egypt, and one worries that the

Canal can probably be stopped up with a well-executed terrorist attack on

an oil tanker.



The good news for the Anglo-American forces that they have completely

secured Umm Qasr, as the British spokesman claims, is surely offset by the

fact that Umm Qasr is a dinky little port town near Kuwait that a massive

invading force should not have had any trouble securing immediately in the

first place. What I read in the press was that the British were being

pinned down by as few as 100 Iraqi soldiers. This is very bad news for the

Anglo-American side, since Iraq has lots of bunches of 100 soldiers.

Likewise, al-Nasiriya has been the site of numerous anti-Saddam uprisings,

and should not have been so hard to take.



This is not to mention the very bad news indeed that Republican Guards

units have positioned their artillery and tanks in civilian neighborhoods

of Basra and have forced the British to withdraw from the city. Despite

earlier Pentagon promises, Basra's electricity and water purification have

been knocked out, and civilians are getting shelled. Presumably some of

the food shipments coming in to Umm Qasr would be for Basra, which the

British do not hold.



And, what is to stop the same thing from happening in Baghdad? If it does,

what will that do to world public opinion? So far the US and British look

like British redcoats, marching in straight lines and annoyed that the

colonists are not playing fair. If substantial numbers of the 300,000

Iraqi troops turn guerrilla fighters and stand their ground against the

invaders, this could be a disaster.



My analysis is not meant to support an anti-war or pro-war position. Like

most people, I have mixed feelings about all this (I despise the Baath

Party).





Replying to someone who asserted that Iraqi Shiites remained loyal to their clergymen in the 1980s, not to their nation:



The notion that most Iraqi Shiites have the sort of relationship to their "source for emulation" that is common in Iran is erroneous. Rural Iraqi Shiites in the South for the most part have a fairly recent (18th-19th centuries) past as pastoralists and the Iranian type of Shiism that foregrounded trained clerics and jurisprudents was important only in a few urban settings (the Shrine Cities of Najaf and Karbala e.g.) which incidentally had large Iranian heritage populations (most of whom were deported by Saddam).



Iraqi Shiites most certainly did stay loyal to the Iraqi nation during the Iran-Iraq war. They were throughout the 20th century among the main proponents of an *Iraqi* nationalism as distinct from pan-Arabism (in which they would have been swamped in a sea of Sunnis). I suspect that a lot of the Marsh Arabs (500,000 of the Shiites until the ethnic cleansing and swamp-draining of the 90s) couldn't have told you which jurisprudent they emulated, and if they named one it would have been pro forma--they wouldn't actually know his rulings.



The late Hanna Batatu actually figured out the ratio per person of mullas in Iran and Iraq, and found it vanishingly small in Iraq.







from a discussion on a list about the origins of radical Islamism:



The strain of thought we are considering is properly thought of as

neo-Kharijism. The Kharijite sect in early Islam was trigger-happy about

declaring people who did not agree with their ways of doing things to be

non-Muslims. A Kharijite declared Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites and

the Fourth Caliph of the Sunnis, to be a non-Muslim and assassinated him

as such. In contrast, the Sunni tradition frowned on kicking anyone out of

the Muslim community for any but the most egregious crimes or heresies.

If one acknowledges the 4 Orthodox Caliphs and a few other simple principle,

you can be an ex-con and still be a Sunni Muslim. The Kharijites tolerated

no slight deviance from their orthodoxies and ideas of morality.



The temptation to revive a Kharijite mindset (I am not arguing for actual

historical influence) was particularly strong in British India, where many

Muslims were converts from Hinduism and/or retained Hindu usages, and

where many Muslims learned English and/or worked for British firms or the

British government. In addition, 18th and 19th century South Asian Islam

was highly influenced by Shiism via the impact of Safavid and Qajar Iran.

Those hardline Sunni Muslims threatened by what they saw as departures

from pristine Islam were thus tempted to declare the hinduized or iranized

or britishized Muslims to be actually non-Muslims altogether. Among the

major such streams in North Indian Islam with this attitude was that of

Sayyid Ahmad Rai-Barelvi in the 1820s and 1830s, whose movement the

British dubbed "wahhabism" by analogy. This British confusion has

confused generations of researchers; the two are not related and are very

dissimilar in many ways.



Maududi in my view simply gave a modernist cast to Sayyid Ahmad

Rai-Barelvi's approach. Sayyid Qutb imported many of Maududi's ideas into

Arabic. So there is a complex international Islamist web of neo-Kharijism

going back to the 19th century, which is highly intertwined with the

history of Western colonialism in the Muslim world.



The connection between Sayyid Qutb and Saudi Arabia goes right back to the

1960s. The Saudis clandestinely gave aid to the Muslim Brotherhood,

including its Qutbist wing, as a way of undermining their enemy, the

secular nationalist & socialist Abdel Nasser. Abdel Nasser succeeded in

cracking back down on the revival of the Brotherhood in the early to

mid-1960s, which had militant overtones and openly discussed assassinating

him. In 1965-66 the plot was busted up, with hundreds (some say

thousands) of arrests, and that was the occasion of Sayyid Qutb's

execution. There is every reason to think that the would-be assassins of

Abdel Nasser were at the least inspired by his work, and the connection

could have been even tighter.



Some of the survivors of the 1965-66 crackdown among the Muslim

Brotherhood in Egypt managed to escape to Saudi Arabia--which had been

their patron--where they became prime conduits for the spread of Qutbist

ideology. As Dick Norton notes, Sayyid Qutb's brother was among these.

Thus, the mere conservative Machiavellianism of the Saudi leadership in

using the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical wings against Abdel

Nasser blew back on them insofar as those chickens came home to roost.



Nowadays Saudi ministers and princes (well, I've been redundant) routinely

denounce the Muslim Brotherhood as political in a way the Wahhabis never

were.