Sharif and Said Kouashi, the two brothers for whom the French police are searching, were born in Paris of Algerian parents…. [Farid] Benyettou took them on the internet, and showed them images from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.”…. Without Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is not at all clear that Sharif Kouachi would have gotten involved in fundamentalist vigilanteism. And if he hadn’t, he would not have gone on to be a point man in murdering out the staff of Charlie Hebdo along with two policemen…. Maybe the staff at Charlie Hebdo would be alive if George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney hadn’t modeled for the Kouashi brothers how you take what you want and rub out people who get in your way.
I suspect that trying to boil down the reasons for this week’s terrorist attacks in Paris would be an exercise in over-simplification, but I think it’s helpful to try to understand why the Kouashis might have thought it appropriate. Racism and lack of economic opportunity in France probably laid the groundwork for two angry young French Muslims looking to lash out. That there were those willing to exploit this anger and radicalize them seems clear based on what’s known about the brothers. The question is what could have pushed them over the edge…and it seems quite likely that our very own Iraq War might have been that last straw.
In their effort to fight terrorism and appease the generalized American blood lust and desire for revenge after 9/11, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney capitalized on an opportunity to purchase a war in Iraq that they’d wanted all along. 9/11 merely provided cover for the invasion and violent subjugation of a country that had nothing to do with the the attacks. Bush and Cheney wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein…and they did so, at the cost of an illegal and immoral war that saw close to 5,000 young Americans sent home in flag-draped boxes.
The images of aggression and mistreatment of Muslims have been used by those with a radical Islamofascist agenda to bring others (often young, angry, unemployed males) into their fight. In that sense, an argument can be made that the lies employed by Bush and Cheney are at least partially responsible for radicalizing the Kouashis to the point where they felt mass murder to be an appropriate response to what they may have perceived to be a war against Islam.
I’m not about to place sole responsibility for the attacks at the feet of Bush and Cheney. The Kouashis made the decision to attack the Charlie Hebdo offices…but without the war in Iraq, things may well have taken a different course. At the very least, much of the current radicalization of young Arabs can be directly attributed to Bush and Cheney’s illegal and immoral aggression in Iraq…and yet they still walk the Earth as free men.
Small wonder that it’s proven so easy to radicalize young Arab males, eh?
