Bush in Mongolia

Wonder if Bush thought through all the public diplomacy ramifications of his visit, before going to Ulaan Bator?

As Bush’s official White House terrorism expert Michael Doran noted in his Foreign Affairs article Somebody Else’s Civil War:

When thinking about the world today and their place in it, the extremist Salafis do not reflect only on the story of the foundation of Islam. They also scour more than a millennium of Islamic history in search of parallels to the present predicament. In his “Declaration of War,” for instance, bin Laden states that the stationing of American forces on the soil of the Arabian peninsula constitutes the greatest aggression committed against the Muslims since the death of the Prophet in AD 632.

To put this claim in perspective, it is worth remembering that in the last 1,300 years Muslims have suffered a number of significant defeats, including but not limited to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate by the Mongols, an episode of which bin Laden is well aware. In 1258 the ruthless Mongol leader Hulegu sacked Baghdad, killed the caliph, and massacred hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, stacking their skulls, as legend has it, in a pyramid outside the city walls. Whatever one thinks about US policy toward Iraq, few in America would argue that the use of Saudi bases to enforce the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime constitutes a world-historical event on a par with the Mongol invasion of the Middle East. Before September 11, one might have been tempted to pass off as nationalist hyperbole bin Laden’s assumption that U.S. policy represents the pinnacle of human evil. Now we know he is deadly serious.

The magnitude of the attacks on New York and Washington make it clear that al Qaeda does indeed believe itself to be fighting a war to save the umma from Satan, represented by secular Western culture. Extreme though they may be, these views extend far beyond al Qaeda’s immediate followers in Afghanistan. Even a quick glance at the Islamist press in Arabic demonstrates that many Muslims who do not belong to bin Laden’s terrorist network consider the United States to be on a moral par with Genghis Khan.

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