Al-Qaeda endorses McCain?

Nicholas Kristof makes light of an al-Qaeda supporter’s endorsement of John McCain in the U.S. presidential election:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

There are two ways to read this: either al-Qaeda has finally found a winning media strategy, or, as Kristof argues, there’s no cynicism involved, and it genuinely wants McCain in the White House. I can’t remember the last time I agreed with Kristof about anything, but there is, sadly, a case to be made in his favor. Being a Sunni fundamentalist outfit, Al-Qaeda devotes a great deal of vitriol to the Iranians, whom it regards as apostates. McCain’s no fan of Iran, either, and he’s less likely than Obama to make nice with it. (By randomly interjecting promises to protect Israel against an Iranian nuclear attack, McCain manages both to make the entire American public think such an attack is a lot more likely than it is, and to stoke the outrage against America throughout the Muslim world. I suspect McCain’s references to a nuclear attack against Israel are backfiring on him more than he recognizes, because they suggest on some level that not only would he continue Bush’s blunderous policies, his presidency would even witness a second Holocaust.)

Paradoxically, the best ally the U.S. has in Afghanistan is Iran, which shares American objectives almost across the board — or did, until we kicked it to the curb, some time after 2002. (The Taliban killed some of Iran’s diplomats in Afghanistan, and Iran hates it with a passion.) And the worst ally the U.S. has in Afghanistan is Pakistan, which we’ve been rewarding with billions of dollars in aid. This in spite of the fact that it created the Taliban in the first place, and to this day maintains it as a way of gaining strategic depth in Afghanistan.*

Who else wants McCain to win? The Saudis and the Pakistanis. Both regimes tend to fare better under Republican presidents, and both are as culpable as any state could be for al-Qaeda’s continued existence. Which makes it all the comical that Iran is the only one of these countries with which we can’t get along. Saudi Arabia’s primary regional adversary, like Pakistan’s, is Iran. (The Saudis and Pakistanis would be happy to see us bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, but even happier to see Israel do it, which would allow them to exult in seeing two of their enemies taken down a peg.)

If we could remember how to think strategically about the Middle East like we think about East Asia and every other part of the world, we’d recognize the benefit of having a cooperative relationship (if not a fully normalized one) with Iran. And if all of a sudden we looked as though we might actually accede to an Iranian nuclear weapon — a much bigger problem for the Saudis and Pakistanis than for us — I’ll bet the boys in Riyadh and Islamabad would start thinking seriously about how much trouble they could afford to give us with al-Qaeda…

*It’s worth noting that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton lose points for taking Pakistan for granted after the Cold War and enforcing the Pressler Amendment, which forced the Pakistanis to pay several years’ worth of rent to house a bunch of F-16s they’d bought from us in Arizona until we changed our minds and delivered them. That contributed directly to the movement within the Pakistani military and the ISI to create the Taliban, which was, after all, an unconventional way of projecting power in Afghanistan and preventing it from tilting toward India — which, if you’re trying to defend yourself against India, you can’t allow.