Journal Entry #5
Abbey Masters
Journal Entry #5
Last week in World Cultures we ended Picture Theory finally and now we are discussing Good Muslim Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdami. My group read the conclusion of the book, which at first I thought would be best because then we would get the gist of the whole book. However, after reading it I found I would have liked to read more of the book besides just the conclusion. I found it hard to understand how the title related to the book and I wanted to know more in depth of what was discussed in the conclusion. I think for the next class they should read the whole book and maybe just not read as many books in total so there will be enough time. It would save a lot of time in class, though, if the class read the whole book because we wouldn’t really have to explain the book we could actually discuss it instead of summarizing it. All of the groups ahead of us really go into depth of what we got the outlines of, and so presenting it might be a little repetitive, but I guess that is okay. In the beginning of my section Mahmood Mamdami talks about how terrorism is not a crime, it’s a political problem. He claims that terrorists are not discouraged by punishment as long as they have support. The author kind of rebukes the United States by saying that terrorism has no military solution because if you isolate terrorists it addresses the issues that the terrorists want to be raised. His example explaining this theorem is when America bombed Afghanistan and he says that it is only remembered as bloodshed and revenge and not a fight against terrorism. Mamdami draws a parallel between September 11th and the war on terror by saying that George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden both want a fight to the finish and that there is no middle ground. He claims that both sides of the war “understand justice as revenge”. I found this interesting because it made perfect sense to me and I could clearly see he was right about Bush and Bin Laden. Neither of them were willing to compromise as far as I’m aware and that seems strange to me that they both jumped into this war without even trying to solve it without bloodshed. After he states all of this, he also says that the Bush administration jumped into this war so quickly because they wanted “to settle unfinished business from the Cold War”. This also clears up my aforementioned questions about why we got into the war with no compromise. He continues in the conclusion by talking about how “political terror comes out of a government’s or guerilla movement’s failure to win civilian support”. Basically the citizens of wherever the government is failing there will be some sort of terrorism. He states that civilians had to be targeted because terrorists relied on them for money and support to continue doing whatever they needed to. The difference between guerillas and terrorists would be that guerrillas depend on the people and usually reside within a city where there are a lot of people around to help them. Terrorists are usually isolated from civilians and keep their support within their own ranks. Mamdami goes on to talk about the CIA’s involvement with terrorists and the drug trade which we also already talked about in class. He says that one cost of the Afghan War was that we trained a lot of the terrorists who are now against us and using our techniques against us. He talks about how Osama Bin Laden is the most popular terrorist that the CIA trained, but there were many more that infiltrated the United States and conspired against us. “The co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing included two other veterans of the Afghan Jihad.” These two conspirators were trained by the CIA and created a bomb that they were taught how to make by the CIA. The bomb exploded underground of the World Trade Towers and made a two hundred feet deep crater. Along with teaching terrorists how to terrorize the United States, the CIA also got involved with “illicit drug trafficking”. When the CIA was short on funds to continue their secret works, they would make friends with drug lords and make some money off of them. Charles Cogan, the CIA director of the Afghan operation says that they “sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War”. But he also says it was for the right reasons because in the end the bigger picture was the most important which was winning the Cold War and not winning the Drug War. It seems to me that the government often gets caught up in the bigger picture and not the side plots. With every big step we take there are a million other little steps getting messed up. The drugs that the CIA helped manufacture ended up with some of the Vietnam soldiers and eventually there were ten to fifteen percent of “low-rank soldiers [using] heroin on a regular basis”. Those numbers are insane due to the total number of soldiers in Vietnam fighting. Also while the Afghan Jihad was being trained by the CIA, Afghanistan became the top heroin producer in the world. It supplied sixty percent of the United State’s demand for heroin. Not only were there a lot of heroin users in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but it also affected the United States directly. David Musto, who is the former White House adviser on Drug Policy, claims that, “the number of drug-related deaths in New York City rose by seventy-seven percent”. Cocaine users in the United States rose to 5.8 million. It is unbelievable how many drug users came out as a direct influence of the CIA, which is supposed to be helpful to America not harmful. Based on these statements made mostly by Mamdami and others I am shocked at the amount of bad connections the CIA made in the past and probably still going on in the future. I knew the CIA had some run-in with terrorists and training them before they were actually terrorists, but I had no idea to what extent it actually went. I had no idea at all that the CIA had a past in drug trafficking for more funds to help train terrorists. That part of my section was alarming to read, considering we don’t know what the CIA is up to even now. I guess we’ll find out in twenty years what they were doing right now. For the whole, I thought my section of the conclusion was very interesting and informing. It was a very easy read, which was good for me because I tend to zone out while reading and not pick up anything. It’s been even easier to understand while listening to the in-class presentations so I can understand what’s going on in the conclusion better and more in depth. I hope our government has learned from its mistakes, even though I guess it hasn’t since we’re still under the influence of people who have taken part of things that harmed us in the past. So hopefully we will see change with the next election.
