Demosophia

I wonder what you think about my (admittedly half assed, not fully formed) theory:

I now think term "Al Qaeda" was an invention of Clarke or a subordinate (some counter-terrorism guy), coined as an in-house codeword which they used amongst each other for "Bin Laden's organization".

I've seen little evidence that Bin Laden ever actually used the term himself for example. I don't remember ever hearing it before 9/11 (though I had heard of Bin Laden of course), and it's just starting to seem as too convenient and tidy a little box to wrap up all terror-attacks inside of.

According to this theory, Clinton or others would indeed not have necessarily recognized or used the term "Al Qaeda" (or wouldn't have wanted to use it in public anyway, it being more like an internal government code or nickname for the organization, not its actual "name") but at the same time, they would have been perfectly aware of "Bin Laden's organization", and failure to say "Al Qaeda" in public would not be any kind of evidence against their taking him/it seriously. (This would also simultaneously explain, vindicate, and defuse Clarke's odd mind-reading criticism of Rice as "not recognizing the name 'Al Qaeda'". Indeed: maybe she didn't! But that doesn't mean she didn't know Bin Laden had a jihadi terror army at his disposal...)

My read of Clarke's behavior just says to me that here's a bureaucrat who found a good paradigm to latch onto (non-state actors are dangerous! we need to pay attention to them! we're too focused on states which is "Cold War thinking"!) and took that ball and ran with it as far as it would take him (which was: quite far, under an administration not eager to take a strong direct military stance towards terror states), even to the exclusion of contraindicative evidence and just plain common sense. Under this hypothesis Clarke would have seen coining and spreading a NAME for the organization "Al Qaeda" (the actual term taken off of some terrorist's seized laptop, I read somewhere...) as an important, crucial step towards getting his superiors to take them *seriously*. And, for this he would indeed deserve some credit. The evil must be NAMED before it can be successfully fought.

However, he clearly took it too far in his continued, weird, inconsistent insistence on a total firewall between "Al Qaeda" and certain states. He also started to mistake the NAMING of the thing for the fighting against that thing, as he stood there on 9/12/2001 with nothing to say but "Al Qaeda did this" as if that were both an answer and a self-contained solution. If "Al Qaeda did this" then it's utterly USELESS to look for Iraq links; he's NAMED the culprit, that's his job, that's how he got where he is, what more is there to do? In fact, both his bizarre 9/12 stance to Bush and his outrage over Rice not appearing to recognize the term, seem to betray (to me) a kind of jealous provincialism over this term / name / paradigm he has coined and is seemingly intensely proud of. "How dare Rice not have heard of 'Al Qaeda'! Doesn't she realize how important it is?" Which just gives me more confidence in my half-assed hypothesis. ;-)

But I do wonder what you would think of it.

For the record, here's the article where I originally read the laptop-explanation for the origin of the name "Al Qaeda". Most of it is about a speculated Asimov inspiration for bin Laden ("Al Qaeda" = "The Foundation"?) but look at the last few paragraphs in particular. Key points: "The term only came into general usage after the group's bombing of the US embassies in East Africa in 1998, when the FBI and CIA fingered it as an umbrella organisation for various projects of Bin Laden and his associates" [much of this "general usage" springs from news articles covering trials of e.g. embassy-bombing terrorists; the prosecution alleges they're "in" Al Qaeda, etc]; "By the time Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, his roster of jihadis had been computerised. Flying back to Afghanistan on a C-130 transport plane, he is said to have had with him, along with his wives and 150 supporters, a laptop computer containing the names of the thousands of fighters and activists who would help him further expand his struggle against the west. This qaida ma'lumat, this "information base", seems a very plausible source of the name." [i.e. not bin Laden's name for it at all, but our government's, based on presumably a computer filename]. "Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident and former Afghan mujahideen, thinks the term is over-used: "Well I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about al-Qaida as an organisation of Bin Laden." Al-Qaida was just a service for relatives of jihadis, he said, speaking to the American PBS show Frontline. "In 1988 he [Bin Laden] noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organised and arranged for proper documentation." "[Yossef Bodansky:] Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."

"There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. "

Is it possible that Richard Clarke deserves both the credit for that conceptualization, and the blame for the fallacious paradigm and blind spots (and: any copycat-ism) that resulted from it? One reason for the need to "conceptualize" Al Qaeda as a cohesive terrorist organization seems to have sprung from our law-enforcement approach to terrorism in e.g. 1998 re: embassy bombings. Again, a search of news articles at that time find that most mentions of "Al Qaeda" come from government prosecutors working on those cases. Was "there's an organization called 'Al Qaeda' and he's in it" a convenient prosecution theory based on hyperbole? Even if, at the same time, Richard Clarke was perfectly correct about the underlying need to take Bin Laden seriously?

I don't know....

I wonder what you think about my (admittedly half assed, not fully formed) theory

Well heck, it really sounds quite brilliant, and I was a dufus for failing to remember that acquiring a name for the organization that Bin Laden controlled was a rather recent development. The article I read indicated that Condi had given a talk in the late 1990s on "Al Qaeda" but she may not have actually used the term, and may have been talking about "Bin Ladenism" in general, or even Islamist Terrorism. All are not terribly accurate terms, and even the term I use "Totalitarianism 3.x" might be misleading in some respects. We derive models and names in order to comprehend something, but as Jorge Louis Borges suggested in The Circular Ruins if you insist on too much precision you may end up with a map the exact size and shape of the problem, that not only proves useless, but gets in the way.

Correction: It wasn't in The Circular Ruins. I had the wrong book. In fact, it was in a book with a slightly more appropriate title:

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. --Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy

Al-Qaeda is entirely a US law enforcement invention, though it has been used since 1998 by bin Laden to describe his followers for reasons of media terminology. Before that, al-Qaeda was known as the International Islamic Front or the Islamic Army. What most Americans think of al-Qaeda is actually only the core network of the IIF, which is a coalition of over 40 different terrorist organizations operating under a common banner, ideology, and command structure for the purposes of fighting both their own domestic opponents as well as the much broader global war against the West.

Dan:

Thanks for the backgrounder. And welcome to the DC Metroplex. Be advised that were it not for air conditioning the area in and around DC would be all but uninhabitable in the summer, so plan to dress accordingly. Prior to A/C most people left DC during the dog days, and came back when they were over. Even now that's a widespread practice.