On January 27, 2009, a week after his inauguration, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama gave his first interview to a foreign TV channel. It was the Dubai-based and Saudi-financed Al-Arabiya Arab television network. The interview was actually a verbal dissociation from the policy of Obama’s Republican predecessor. “The language we use matters,” Obama said in the interview. Shortly after, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded that “changes in words” would not be enough.

The attention given by the new U.S. leader to the Islamic factor from the very first days in office is quite understandable, as almost all problems in the U.S. foreign-policy agenda are in one way or another related to Islam.

These problems include the protracted “war on terror,” launched as a response to the 9/11 attacks, which official Washington blamed on Islamists from Al-Qaeda. Another one is the war in Iraq, where resistance is put up mostly by Islamic groups and where the country’s post-occupation prospects largely depend on these groups. The third problem is Iran, which has been gaining weight in the Middle East with its increasingly real “Islamic nuclear bomb.” The fourth problem is the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, which does not let the United States and other NATO countries control hydrocarbon traffic from post-Soviet Central Asia. This problem is coupled with the Taliban’s attempts to seize power in nuclear Pakistan or to ruin that country. Another problem is posed by the Islamist Hamas movement, which stands in the way of Palestinian-Israeli settlement. These are only a short list of U.S. foreign-policy problems related to Islam.

All these problems cannot be solved and even discussed without working out a special discourse that would appeal to Islam and without conducting a sensible policy that would take into consideration the Islamic factor. The previous, Republican, period of the U.S. presidency has shown that things are not that good with either the discourse (suffice it to mention the term “Islamofascism”) or policies. The “war on terror” in Iraq has brought about thriving terrorism and, what is perhaps more important and dangerous, the legalization of terrorism in the eyes of a large part of the Islamic world. At the same time, many of the current conflicts are rooted in events of 30 years ago.

THE YEAR 1979 AS A STARTING POINT

In the late 1970s, the United States began to tie a tight knot of problems and conflicts, centered around Islam, in international relations. The war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), which was an episode in the global Cold War rivalry between the two superpowers, was presented as an anti-Soviet jihad against Communist “infidels” and Afghan “apostates.” The declared goal of the jihad was the “liberation of Islamic lands from atheist invaders.” In line with this logic, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was explained by the need to “defend Islam and Muslims,” although in fact it was intended to create a geo-strategic bridgehead near the border of Iran, where an anti-American “Islamic Revolution” had taken place. For obvious reasons, Americans could not employ jihadist discourse and jihadist practices, so they delegated this task to their allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which mobilized mujahideen.

The Soviet Union’s defeat in the Afghan war deluded the United States into a belief that it had “caught Allah by the beard,” meaning that it could control Islam and use it to serve its own interests. In those years, it could play on the political differences between various regimes and on internal conflicts in Islam itself (centuries-old self-destructing conflicts between Sunnis and Shias repeatedly broke out in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries). At the time when the U.S. entered the region in the wake of the anti-Communist jihad, it used differences between Sunni-dominated Afghanistan and Shia-dominated Iran to serve its purposes.

The Afghan war was met with enthusiasm in Islamic countries – initially for domestic political reasons. Large-scale U.S. aid, both military and non-military, was only one of the advantages. More importantly, the ruling regimes received an opportunity for exporting internal tensions.

The aggravation of social and economic problems in the Middle East in the 1970s sparked outbreaks of discontent and even uprisings under Islamic slogans. It happened, for example, in Saudi Arabia in 1979, when a group of the Ikhwan (traditionalist Salafis close to Wahhabis) seized the Holy Sanctuary in Mecca and declared a young man named Muhammad bin abd Allah al-Qahtani to be the Mahdi, or redeemer of Islam. In Syria in the same year, members of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood organization carried out an attack on the Military Academy of Aleppo, killing more than 60 cadets. In 1982, the Brotherhood led an insurrection in Hama, which was suppressed by the military who carried out artillery and air bombing of the city, killing more than 20,000 people.

These tensions largely stemmed from a conflict between the needs for modernization and Islamic traditions which began to stand in the way of progress. Algeria, Egypt, the Republic of Yemen (North Yemen), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some other countries began to drive out “passionary elements” – as Russian eulogist of “fiery Islam” Alexander Prokhanov would put it – out of the countries, instigating them to participate in the jihad in Afghanistan. It was then that a mechanism was built for transferring extremists and terrorists: a place was named for conducting jihad and violence-prone Muslim oppositionists were sent there by state and non-state organizations. The official clergy shaped an ideology and practice of “non-returnees from jihad” – the so-called shahids.
There was also a foreign-policy factor that caused Arab Islamic states to participate actively in the Sunni anti-Communist jihad in Afghanistan – it was hope for success of the U.S. struggle against Khomeini’s Iran, which began to display expansionist ambitions after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Later that year, an uprising, apparently inspired by Tehran, took place in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich and Shia-populated Eastern Province (Al-Hasa).

Three decades later, Iran has not given up its expansionist plans. Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, advisor to Supreme Leader Khamenei and presidential candidate in the 1997 election, in February 2009 referred to Bahrain as Iran’s 14th province. Ever since the revolution, Tehran has been seeking to increase its influence in the Arab world, mainly by using and expanding the Shia presence. In addition to the war with Iraq (1980-1988), Iranian exclaves have been created in southern Lebanon and in southern areas of Beirut. The Islamic Revolution has been exported to Yemen, where a Shia (Zaidi) uprising, led by the Al-Houthi family, has been going on since 2004, as well as to Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Iran has occasional territorial disputes with the United Arab Emirates over three islands in the Persian Gulf, and is actively involved in the Shiazation of Syria, as it did in Lebanon. The formation of a “Shia crescent” evokes deep concern among Arab states, which are now more afraid of Iran than Israel.

The 30 years that have passed since the beginning of the Soviet Union’s Afghan campaign have made Washington even more confident that it can use Islam as a factor of international politics. Shias from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Shia forces from the Badr Brigade, based in Iran, were used against the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. The “democratization” of Iraq after its occupation was a step backwards even in comparison with the secular state of the leftist and nationalist Baath Party. The U.S.-imposed religious system has begun to tear apart the country and its large cities, above all Baghdad, along ethnic and religious lines.

Now the United States is encouraging (and possibly arming and financing) the Sunni Jundallah (Soldiers of Allah) organization, which is fighting against the Shia regime in Iran. Most likely, the current presence of the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan is aimed, among other things, at creating a bridgehead for attacking Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. is planning to divide the Greater Middle East along confessional lines. It would seem that religious-political “levers,” of which Islam is the main one, can be used infinitely.

“GLOBAL JIHAD” AS A POLITICAL IMPERATIVE

It was after the Afghan war that U.S. allies that had participated in it began to create in droves Muslim extremist and terrorist groups to serve their own international purposes. Today, these groups number no less than 500. They let states move their international political activity into the “grey zone” which is not governed by international law or international custom and which, most importantly, does not allow states that are targets of “unconventional aggression” to exercise their right to the application of Article 5 of the UN Charter.

The most successful, Sunni, project patronized by Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf monarchies was named Al-Qaeda (“The Base”). Al-Qaeda created a global network, setting up branches in Sunni-populated areas or “absorbing” opposition and/or rebel or extremist and terrorist groups operating in those areas.

Al-Qaeda became an instrument for implementing global geopolitical and geo-economic interests of its patrons: first of all, the control and regulation of the hydrocarbon market using non-economic methods and force. Al-Qaeda realizes its goals in zones of interests (areas where it is particularly active coincide with areas of hydrocarbon production and transportation), fighting, for example, against Americans and their allies in Iraq and against the growing Iranian influence, and far away from these areas by means of terrorist attacks and other forms of pressure on sensitive points (the Madrid train bombings in the spring of 2004, and the terrorist acts in London in the summer of 2005).

However, this project revealed serious shortcomings which negated its advantages. Many veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan and later in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Fergana Valley, Iraq and elsewhere (80 to 85 percent) returned to their countries and formed groups with increased “passionarity,” i.e. readiness to kill and be killed for the ideals of Islam, as they had been made to understand these ideals. The number of jihad veterans around the world is now estimated at not less than 150,000 people. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the backward waves of the “global jihad” brought rebel wars and/or terrorist attacks to Saudi Arabia and other Arabian states, as well as to Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan and other countries.

Afghan War veteran Osama bin Laden broke with the Saudi royal family and leveled criticism and even used violence against it after it allowed U.S. troops to be deployed in the country during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which stayed on Saudi territory for almost two decades after that. If Abdullah Azzam, the late mentor of bin Laden and the ideologue of “the defense of Islamic lands from infidel occupiers” during the Afghan War, had now looked at the Arabian Peninsula, he would have definitely said that the “Land of Two Shrines” is almost entirely occupied by these “infidels”: a dozen U.S. bases have been deployed in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. For a veteran of jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq, it is logical to wage war against “infidel occupiers” who have seized Muslim lands and against apostate rulers that have invited these “occupiers.”

Backward waves are dampened by a carrot and stick. Jihad veterans are destroyed, arrested, sent to prisons and detention camps, and rehabilitated, and those rehabilitated are rewarded. However, it is impossible and, perhaps, not planned to “digest” so many “passionaries,” as “global jihad” is very convenient and effective as a foreign-policy instrument.

Now the heads of Arabian and other Arab special services are pondering where to redirect the backward wave of the “global jihad” from Iraq after the war there is over. According to some reports, several regions are now viewed as potential fields for “global jihad”: Lebanon, Chechnya and the Palestinian territories. Many of the returning mujahideen apparently remain in reserve for a possible war against Iran. To this end, radical anti-Shia sentiments are maintained among the warring mujahideen and war veterans. Obviously, Islamic states are constantly interested in the existence or creation of “global jihad” fronts beyond their borders.

“CALIPHATE” AS A SUBJECT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

It is generally known that Al-Qaeda is a horizontal network structure without vertical subordination and links with specific states, which implies the absence of ties with official authorities. Through target-specific efforts, a coordinating center builds a network of cross-border groups which implement a common geopolitical project in their territorial “areas of responsibility.” Al-Qaeda territorial branches emerge or are implanted in various regions. They turn into latent states – “emirates,” “vilayats,” “Sharia zones” and other religious-administrative units that form as latent a “caliphate.” Al-Qaeda operates only where there are Sunni Muslims or where they appear as a result of spontaneous or controlled migration. The zoning of territories for this global project is done according to historical and geographical areas as they formed in the times of the Islamic Caliphate.

Let me begin the description of these branches with “Al-Qaeda on the Island of Arabs,” although this branch was set up on the territory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Arabian monarchies later than the other branches. Arabian Al-Qaeda members believe that Prophet Muhammad told Muslims before his death: “Remove polytheists from the Island of Arabs!” The prophet’s words became Al-Qaeda’s official slogan. Pre-recorded statements by 9/11 hijackers were released with this slogan on screen, which real Muslims cannot ignore. It makes them fight against all “polytheists” (“infidels” and “crusaders”) that have settled on the Island of Arabs, as the Arabian Peninsula was called in the prophet’s time, and against the authorities that have invited them and that have thus become “apostates” and “infidels.” According to a basic precept of Islam, those who are friends with “infidels” become “infidels” themselves.

“Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers (Mesopotamia)” consists primarily of foreign mujahideen and operates in Iraq in parallel with the national Resistance. It has already proclaimed the establishment of an Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni-dominated regions of Iraq. Should Iraq break up (which cannot be ruled out) into independent states (for example, a Kurdish, a Shia and a Sunni state), the “Islamic State of Iraq” may be recognized by Arab countries that support “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” as an outpost for containing Iran’s expansion and Kurdish separatism and expansionism (Kurds also have territorial claims over areas beyond Iraqi Kurdistan). Interestingly, official materials of the “Islamic State of Iraq” describe it as “the core of the Caliphate.” Baghdad was the capital of the caliphate in its heyday. However, Sunnis in Iraq and beyond it seem to be more interested not in Baghdad but Kirkuk, an oil-rich area in northern Iraq, to which Kurds have claims and which the U.S. Republican administration promised to give them.

“Al-Qaeda in Khorasan” deserves special mention. This organization is little known to the general public, yet it plays an exceptional, symbolic and propaganda role in the “global jihad.” In the period from the 3rd to the mid-18th century, Khorasan was a large region without clearly defined boundaries, which comprised the north-eastern part of modern Iran, the Merv oasis, oases in southern areas of modern Turkmenistan, and the northern and north-western parts of modern Afghanistan. Khorasan holds a special place in Muslim beliefs, as the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have predicted the coming of the Mahdi (“divinely guided one”), who is the Caliph of Allah, in the “last hour.” One of his prophesies said: “If you see Black Flags coming from Khorasan, then you must join them, even if you have to crawl on snow, since among them is the Caliph of Allah, Al Mahdi.”

The Al-Qaeda propaganda emphasizes that the Al-Qaeda flag is black and that this organization was established in Afghan territory, that is, in Khorasan. For many mujahideen, this must imply that the Caliph of Allah is no other than the father and leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, whose coming was predicted by the Prophet Muhammad.

But that is not all. This “heart of Asia” is the prophesied site of a “last hour” battle between the Mahdi and Dajjal (“The Impostor Messiah”), in which the Caliph of Allah will win an inevitable victory. The “infantry” of “Al-Qaeda in Khorasan” and the allied Taliban may view NATO troops as Dajjal’s army, to which they must give the final battle in history – especially as Al-Qaeda and Taliban da’is (preachers) consistently instill this idea into their minds. In other words, mujahideen believe that the Mahdi/the Caliph of Allah has already come under Al-Qaeda’s black flags and that the final battle in history is going on.

Another Al-Qaeda branch is “Al-Qaeda in Al-Sham” in the so-called Greater Syria, which includes territories of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine. It is not as real as, for example, the “Islamic State of Iraq.” There was a failed attempt to establish an “Islamic Emirate” in northern Lebanon, where Al-Qaeda’s branch Fatah Al-Islam, which consists mostly of Saudis, was engaged in fighting. Groups of “Al-Qaeda in Al-Sham” are also trying to settle in Gaza to counter Iranian infiltration through the “Iranization” of the Hamas movement.

There is “the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb,” which operates in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, as well as in limitrophe countries of Black Africa, in particular in Mali. To the east, Egypt is an “area of responsibility” of “Al-Qaeda in the Land of Kinana” (the ancient name of Egypt). To the south-east, in Somalia. “Al-Shabaab” does not conceal that it is an organization allied to Al-Qaeda. Similar to the Algerian “Salafist Group for Call and Combat” and the “Group of Monotheism and Jihad” in Iraq, which became Al-Qaeda’s branches, it is ready to swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and to be called, for example, “Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa.” In the north, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” is targeted against Europe. Its mujahideen have committed or prepared terrorist acts in European countries.

One can also speak of “Al-Qaeda in Europe,” which committed terrorist acts under distracting names, such as “the Abu Hafs al-Misri Brigade,” named after one of the closest associates of bin Laden, who was killed in Afghanistan during a counter-terrorist operation in the autumn of 2001. It must be noted, though, that the Caliphate never included the whole of Europe, unlike the Maghreb, “the Land of Al-Sham” or “the Land of Kinana.” The Caliphate included only part of modern Spain – Andalusia – and the island of Sicily. However, by preparing and committing terrorist acts in Europe, Al-Qaeda not only exerts pressure on European governments (for example, the attacks in Madrid forced Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq, while the attacks in London were committed by natives of Pakistan, which is interested in expansion into Afghanistan) but also “fights for the liberation of Islamic lands” in Europe.

Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in one of his latest works lauded by jihadists, described “Islamic lands” as territories where Allah’s laws, that is Sharia, were applied for least one day. Meanwhile, Sharia is widely used, along with state legal systems, in all European countries where there are Muslim diasporas. For example, there is a Sharia court in the UK, which, by the way, sentenced Tony Blair to death in his tenure as prime minister.

Let me conclude this brief review of Al-Qaeda’s “political geography” with two more Al-Qaeda branches opened in different parts of the world.

One is “the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus,” which actually is an Al-Qaeda branch in “Caucasia,” as Abdullah Azzam described the Caucasian region in his fatwa, “Defense of the Muslim Lands.” This emirate is divided into “vilayats” according to North Caucasian ethno-religious zones.

The other is located on the Indian subcontinent, where a group calling itself “the Deccan Mujahideen” (after the Deccan Plateau, which is about one million square kilometers in area) committed terrorist acts in 2008 in India’s Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Thus, this group, with links to Al-Qaeda, seeks to involve the larger part of the subcontinent into an Al-Qaeda-controlled zone.
Al-Qaeda as a global structure interacts with the Islamic Party of Liberation (Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami), whose black flag is similar to the Al-Qaeda flag. The party has also divided the territory of Eurasia into “vilayats,” including, for example, “the British Vilayat.” The party’s goal is to combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate. Al-Qaeda is an ally to the Taliban movement, which operates not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan. (The Taliban has declared the establishment of two states: “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” on Afghan territory in September 1996, and “the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan” on Pakistani territory in February 2006.) At the same time, Al-Qaeda is a bitter rival to the Shia Hezbollah organization, as the latter seeks control over the same geopolitical zones.

So, there are many expansionist cross-border Islamic clerocratic quasi-states in the present world. They become subjects of international relations and may turn into full-fledged states recognized de facto by the international community or part of it. For example, it became known in September 2008 that the Taliban, with Saudi Arabia’s financial participation and Britain’s support, was engaged in secret negotiations on the termination of the conflict in Afghanistan. In August of the same year, Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey expressed her readiness to even “sit down at the same table as Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden” to tackle global terrorism. Thus she became the first foreign minister of a democratic country to allow for such a possibility. Hezbollah, headed by Hassan Nasrallah who is a representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Lebanon, has been advancing to the role of the main political force in the “Cedars’ Land” and is already establishing relations with some anti-American regimes, in particular with Venezuela.

THIRTY YEARS AFTER

U.S. President Barack Obama has tried to change the U.S. rhetoric and, partly, policy vis-?-vis Islam now that extremist organizations and ideology are on the rise. The addressees of Obama’s messages respond with haughty statements.

As regards Al-Qaeda, in early February 2009, two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, Ayman al-Zawahiri released an audio message through the Islamist Internet, in which he criticized the U.S. president for not mentioning the war in Gaza during his inaugural address. Al-Zawahiri called on Muslims around the world to attack U.S. targets in revenge for the U.S. support to Israel during the operation in Gaza. His patron Ali Khamenei in March commented on Obama’s video message to the Iranians on the occasion of the major Iranian festival of Nowruz, a 12-day holiday that marks the arrival of spring and the beginning of a Persian New Year. Addressing his supporters in Mashhad on the occasion of Nowruz on March 21, 2009, Khamenei replied to Obama’s message: “If you change, we will also change our behavior.”

Obviously, the new U.S. president holds much hope for his “I’m one of you” campaign targeted at Muslims. Interestingly, a few weeks before Obama paid a visit to his first Islamic country (Turkey) in April 2009, Istanbul was visited by his half-brother from Kenya who performed namaz in the Sultan Ahmet Mosque. In a speech to Turkey’s parliament, Obama said that he came from a Muslim family and that “the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam” but fights against “a fringe ideology.” The result of this campaign has so far produced more effect in the U.S. rather than in the Islamic world: according to public opinion polls, 10 percent of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim. Meanwhile, many Muslims around the world associate themselves with Al-Qaeda and view the fight against it as struggle against Islam. (Hardly any rank-and-file member of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda in Khuzestan or Waziristan knows what “fringe ideology” is, but if they understand what it is, they will only feel insulted.)

On the whole, Muslims of the world view – not without some grounds – the coming of Obama (“a bit Muslim”) to power as their own victory. Some of them (probably adepts of the “fringe ideology”) take it as a step towards turning the United States into an “American Vilayat” of the Caliphate. (Many Muslims believe that, way before Columbus, America was discovered by Muslims and that therefore it is an “Islamic land” which must be “liberated.”)

The mass media in Islamic countries actively discussed Obama’s Nowruz message to Iranians. The president proposed putting an end to years of hostility and mistrust between the two countries and said that “we seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” However, a couple of weeks before his “conciliatory” video message to the Iranian people, Obama had extended for another year the sanctions imposed against Iran by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Americans could not fail to foresee the possible reaction – skepticism, irony and alienation, and it seems that the message was a deceptive maneuver intended to show that Iran is rejecting an olive branch extended to it, thus forcing Washington to seek other ways to influence that country.

During the war in Iraq, the Americans established who was fighting against them and what hid behind the names “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” and “the Islamic State of Iraq.” They successfully organized resistance of local Sunni Arab fighters from among Awakening Councils (Majalis al-Sahwa) against Sunni Arab mujahideen from other Arab countries, mainly from Saudi Arabia and other Arabian monarchies. This experience of General David Petraeus, the former commander of the Multi-National Force – Iraq and now the commander of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) whose area of responsibility is in the Greater Middle East, is now being extended to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. seeks to sow discord between local Pashtun members of the Taliban and “newcomers” from Arab Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thus mobilizing the local Taliban movement to struggle against the “strangers.”

This tactic is nothing new. In the summer of 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who had direct and indirect (via Pakistanis) ties with Americans, as a result of secret accords began to break with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. As a first major step, he issued a fatwa that disavowed all anti-American fatwas of bin Laden as a man incompetent in matters of Islamic law and without a proper education. The “divorce” between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in U.S. interests was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks.

U.S. success in these efforts is not ruled out, although recent years have seen a kind of “Al-Qaedization” of the Taliban, which has been increasingly becoming a group associated with Al-Qaeda and embracing its ideology, slogans and methods of struggle, for example, terrorist acts committed by suicide bombers (shahids).

Another area of the new U.S. administration’s “Islamic policy” is more active involvement of Europe in its Afghan-Pakistani operation. The goal is to share with Europeans the burden of military spending and political responsibility.

First, Washington proposed transferring inmates of the Guantanamo Bay prison, which Obama ordered to be closed, to European countries. It is another matter how practicable the idea to release Guantanamo Bay detainees is, as the “global jihad” thus will receive new leaders with the aura of “martyrs” and strong anti-American views. For example, one Guantanamo Bay detainee from Yemen became the leader of “Al-Qaeda in Southern Arabia” as soon as he returned to the country and committed a series of terrorist attacks against Americans.

Then, Obama continued pressuring the European allies in NATO to send more troops to Afghanistan (and, by implication, to Pakistan). However, to all appearances, the European nations seek not to be associated with the United States (although to little effect, as Afghans view all NATO troops as Western “crusaders”) but to participate largely in humanitarian and economic projects, educational programs, and etc.

In other regions of the Islamic world, European nations are bitter competitors of Americans: suffice it to mention France, working on a Mediterranean Union, and Italy, which is building almost brotherly relations with Libya. Europe is obviously showing Obama red lines marking the areas of its interests, which he should not cross. One such controversial issue is Turkey’s bid to join the European Union. French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a clear signal to the U.S. president in April 2009 that “when it comes to the European Union it’s up to EU member states to decide” on membership. Obviously, Obama wanted to support Turkey’s EU ambitions in exchange for Turkey’s efforts to create favorable conditions for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and for its subsequent support for a pro-American status quo in the north-western part of the Greater Middle East.

There is also a purely speculative assumption that the new U.S. administration may continue the policy of its predecessors to “Islamize” Europe. This would help it increase pressure on the European countries through the use of religious and political leverage, which the United States has been so good at in the Greater Middle East.

Islamic states – and not only they – are looking forward to see what President Obama will do with respect to organizations, institutions and projects that the United States helped to create and develop in the far-off 1970s.