Today's Stories

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

December 11, 2008

The New Schism in the Jihadist Movement

The Zarqawi Generation

By VICKEN CHETERIAN

I met Abu Talha last summer in Majdel Anjar, a village in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. The meeting wasn't easy: a few days earlier, Lebanese security forces had discovered an al-Qaida cell in nearby Bar Elias and arrested a number of returnees from Iraq.

Abu Talha said: "I agreed to meet you because we want our ideas to reach your readers." He explained how, after the US invasion of Iraq, he had responded to the call of the Islamist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to join the Iraqi resistance. He had not been among the first group from the village to go to Iraq. It took six months before he received the message that he could join a group on their way to Baghdad. "They needed to check my identity and resolve because of the complex logistics of the trip," he explained.

Abu Talha joined a group of four, all pretending to be businessmen, and travelled to Qamishli in Syria, near the border, where someone took $300 from each of them to take them to Baghdad. But Syrian security forces surrounded the border village before they could cross, forcing them to escape into the desert. After several days of wandering they reached Baghdad but it was too late to meet their contact there. They wandered for a few more days and finally met Abu Anas al-Shami, an aid to Zarqawi (both were later killed in the fighting).

Abu Talha waited for a month in apartments in Baghdad and then Falluja, with several other volunteers from various Arab countries. They were all waiting their turn for a suicide mission, but there were too many candidates and the logistics were complicated. After a month in Iraq, Abu Talha was sent home. However, he promised to spread the word and send money to the network. During our conversation, he frequently mentioned Zarqawi, and called him "noble and courageous. Since his martyrdom, no one has been able to replace him, or his leadership". When I asked him about his ties with al-Qaida, he replied: "al-Qaida is more of an idea than an organization."

Months before the US invasion, volunteers from a number of Arab countries went to Iraq to defend Saddam Hussein's regime. Its rapid collapse left them demoralized and lacking any sense of purpose, and those who succeeded in returning to their countries of origin were often physically and psychologically broken.

They were replaced by a second wave of volunteers who went to Iraq, not to defend Saddam but to fight the US forces there. They were Islamists inspired by jihadist and pro-takfir (excommunication) ideologies and by the generation of "Afghan Arabs" who preceded them in the fight against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Unlike the earlier Afghan Arabs, who had support and encouragement from various Arab states and from the US administration, the returnees from Iraq have complex relations with different governments: some encourage them, then repress them later; most look on them with apprehension. All use them.

In the 1980s, the Afghan Arabs had semi-official offices in a number of Gulf countries. Volunteers flying to Pakistan to join the mujahideen bases were received and given reduced fares. The new generation of jihadists get no such privileges. Thousands of them have been captured by the Syrian or Jordanian authorities and sent back to their countries of origin, where they are arrested and imprisoned: there have been more than 900 such cases in Tunisia and 400 in Algeria. Some sources put the numbers of returnees at more than 2,000 from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Tunisia, and more than 1,000 from Jordan. (A high-level Saudi chief was quoted in 2005 as saying: "The number of Saudis who went to fight in Iraq was between 2,000 and 3,000; most of those fighters went there either through Syria and joined the group of Abu Musib al-Zarqawi, or through the northern border of Iran and most of those joined the Army of Ansar al-Sunna". )

These figures are high in comparison with the Afghan Arabs: though 10-15,000 Arab volunteers are thought to have fought in Afghanistan, most did so in the late 1980s when the fate of the war was already decided.

Thanks to these volunteers, the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) has become the al-Qaida branch in the Maghreb. The group had reached a low several years ago, and started recruiting as if for jihad in Iraq, and then used the new recruits for operations inside Algeria .

Until the invasion of Iraq, the jihadist movement had been peripheral to the core values, causes and struggles of the Arab world. It was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, forged in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and it went on to fight in Bosnia and Tajikistan in the early 1990s, and in Chechnya, with the arrival of 12 jihadists led by the Chechen rebel commander Khattab in early 1995. Yet for the Arab-Muslim world, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya remain marginal, both geographically and symbolically.

The debate about the jihadists' non-involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the central struggle of the Arab-Muslim world) dates back to Afghanistan, and is still relevant today.

Abdullah Azzam, the "father" of the Afghan Arabs, was Palestinian and was often asked why he had sought jihad in Afghanistan rather than in Palestine. Abdullah Anas (real name Boudjema Bounoua), his companion and son-in-law, told me: "He said that although Palestine was his country, Arab regimes and the leftist movements had not allowed us to fight for its liberation. We didn't have the choice between jihad for Palestine or Afghanistan. When young people seeking jihad had the chance to go to Bosnia, they went. When there was a chance to go to Chechnya, they went to Chechnya. It was not the result of any strategic decision, but rather an opportunity created by circumstances."

The question of Palestine was also a source of conflict between Zarqawi and his mentor Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. After both received a royal pardon and were released from a Jordanian prison in 1999, Zarqawi left for Afghanistan - and later Iraq - while Maqdisi, a Palestinian from Nablus, thought the jihadist struggle should focus on the central question: liberating Palestine.

Two points are key to understanding jihadist culture. Travelling to a foreign land for jihad is often described as a migration or hijra in Arabic. The same term is used for the flight of Mohammad and his companions from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which is central to Islam and marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. For jihadists, to go to Afghanistan or Iraq is a mystical experience comparable to the journey of the Prophet and his companions. Many jihadist militants, such as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, Zarqawi's alleged successor in Iraq, take the nom de guerre muhajer, which means "migrant".

The second powerful myth is that of the destruction of an empire by a handful of lightly armed youths - made possible only by a mystical dimension. Many Afghan Arabs believe that their struggle in Afghanistan caused not just the withdrawal of the Soviet army but the fall of the Communist empire itself. There is now a strong myth surrounding Zarqawi and 30 of his initial followers, and how they "defeated" the Americans in Iraq.

Zarqawi's group emerged from the periphery to become the dominant jihadist movement. Unlike other groups, such as al-Qaida, which was mainly composed of Saudis, Yemenis or Egyptians, Zarqawi's supporters were mainly Jordanians, Palestinians and Syrians. When Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan for the second time, he established his camp near Herat in the west, away from the traditional jihadist bases near Jalalabad and Kandahar. Although he worked with Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri, Zarqawi saw his own group, Monotheism and Holy War (al-Tawheed wal-Jihad), as independent from al-Qaida: his aim was to prepare his network to return to Jordan.

For this purpose, he prepared safe houses and contacts in Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, where he moved before the US invasion of Iraq. Zarqawi moved the holy war from the Islamic hinterlands to one of the religion's most prestigious territories: Mesopotamia, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) and the crowning glory of Islamic civilisation.

The relationship between Zarqawi's group and al-Qaida was complex. They differed on a number of issues: Zarqawi criticised al-Qaida's soft stance on a number of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, and refused to fight alongside the Taliban in the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. In Iraq, he declared war on the Shia (though not on supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr): the assassination of the Shia religious leader Sayed Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim was a suicide bombing carried out by Yassin Jarad, the father of Zarqawi's second wife. Al-Qaida denied responsibility for the killing. Zarqawi presented himself as the leader of the resistance against US occupation. But by October 2004 he is thought to have pledged allegiance (baya'a) to Bin Laden.

The new generation of jihadists are ideologically more radical than the Afghan Arabs or al-Qaida. Their military experiences have been more brutal and are reflected in more violent worldviews. When Zarqawi arrived in Iraq in 2002, he had no more than a handful of loyalists. After the US invasion, hundreds of volunteers poured into Iraq from Arab and Muslim countries to fight the US occupation of a Muslim land.

The "Zarqawi generation" are creating a new schism within the jihadist movement. Hungry for military action, their vision is centred on violence. Their activities are creating new sources of instability, for example in Yemen.

 Yemen has long provided a safe haven for jihadists. And there were some 3,000 Yemenis among the Afghan Arabs. After the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the Yemeni authorities accepted returning Yemenis, but also jihadists from other countries. North and south Yemen united in 1990, but contradictions between the regime of Ali Abdallah Saleh and his southern Socialist partners were clear. During the 1994 civil war that followed, Afghan Arabs played a leading role in suppressing southern moves towards secession.

 Yemen is also the ancestral home of the Bin Laden family.and after 9/11 Yemen came under heavy pressure amid US suspicions that the country was a logistical base for militants. According to a specialist in jihadist networks based in the Yemeni capital Sana'a: "There has been no al-Qaida operation without a link to Yemen: it is always either a source of arms or money, or one of the perpetrators is a Yemeni, or one of the operatives has passed through it." Fearing a US attack on Yemen, Saleh flew to Washington and agreed to cooperate with the US war on terror. However, Yemeni policy towards jihadist movements was multi-layered: while dozens of jihadists were arrested after 9/11, including the Egyptian jihad theoretician Sayed Imam al-Sharif (better known as Doctor Fadl), others remained at large.

The Yemeni authorities also launched a project to establish dialogue with imprisoned jihadists, led by Judge Hamoud al-Hitar, now minister of religious affairs. "The dialogue project is one of the cornerstones of official Yemeni policies to fight terrorism", he told me. "We found that every terrorist movement has an ideological basis, and that ideas can only be countered by an opposing idea. The use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq has failed to bring peace and stability to those regions. Al-Qaida is based on two ideas: takfir of Arab regimes and ejecting foreign armies. In our dialogue we show that the Yemeni government is legitimate. We also show that differences in religion or religious practices cannot justify war."

The dialogue project was designed to correct these misconceptions based on religious references. Al-Hitar said the project ended in 2005 as a result of pressure from within the Yemeni government, which wanted to use other means to fight "terrorism". He added that the project had been for Afghan Arabs but not for returnees from Iraq.

There has been much criticism of Yemen's "counter-terrorism" policies, mainly from the United States. The US authorities were furious when Jamal Badawi, thought to be one of the masterminds behind the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, was released from prison in October 2007. He has since been returned to prison, but the US is pressing for his extradition. Another source of contention is the escape of 23 al-Qaida suspects from a high-security prison in February 2006, possibly with the help of prison guards. Among them was Nasser al-Wahayshi, thought to be the new amir (leader) of al-Qaida in Yemen.

 One of the main sources of conflict with the US is Sheikh Abd el-Majeed al-Zindani, a theologian who is said to have influenced Bin Laden during the jihad in Afghanistan. Zindani is the head of Al-Iman Islamic University in Sana'a, and an influential leader of the opposition al-Islah Party, but has close ties with the Yemeni authorities. He is wanted by the US authorities, and is on the UN Security Council's Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee list. Yet Zindani enjoys broad support among tribal alliances in the north, Salafists and the Yemeni authorities.

 Following an attack on tourists in Yemen in July 2007, Nasser al-Bahri (nom de guerre Abu Jandal), one of Bin Laden's former bodyguards, talked about "a new generation" disconnected from the original organization: "This is not Sheikh Osama bin Laden's strategy... The new generation is not the generation of Bin Laden, it is the generation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which is different from al-Qaida, although the word al-Qaida is used by some groups. It is the Iraq generation; they are young people who went there for jihad. They are inexperienced, misguided and wrongly mobilized. They think that the old generation has become unable to confront, and are cowards and agents or are spying on them".

 This idea is shared by Said al-Jamhi, a political scientist and author of a book on al-Qaida. "The government is focusing on groups with links to al-Qaida, and is not paying attention to the new generation," he told me.

 A series of mortar attacks aimed at western targets in Sana'a since mid 2007 is believed to be the work of a younger generation of jihadists, calling themselves Kataib al-Jund al-Yaman. They are pressing the Yemeni authorities to release Islamist militants from prison, end their security cooperation with the West, and grant free movement to anyone who wants to seek jihad abroad - in Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia. This new generation is inspired by Zarqawi rather than al-Qaida. Their activities could endanger the existing informal pact between the Yemeni authorities and al-Qaida activists, which amounts to an agreement not to carry out attacks on Yemeni soil in return for permission to provide logistical support for jihad elsewhere.

The Yemeni government needs the support of the jihadist movement in response to the growing disquiet in the south of the country, where some would like to see a return to the independence they enjoyed before unification in 1990. The government also needs its support to counter a rebellion by Zaidi tribal groups in the north of the country, which began in 2004.

What is sure is that, for as long as political vacuums and insecurity continue in Yemen, Lebanon and beyond, young jihadists will find new leaders, new inspirations and new forms of organization.

This article appears in the December edition of the excellent monthly, Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features several articles from LMD every month.

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