Terrorism Monomania
*By Terrell E. Arnold
8-18-6
On August 10, British police announced that they had arrested 21
people said to be involved in a terrorism plot. The scheme, police
spokesmen revealed, was to take component chemicals on board
transatlantic flights, create binary explosives on board, detonate
and destroy the aircraft. More slowly, it was also revealed that the
21, alleged "home-grown" plotters, were all from Britain's large
Muslim communities.
I
Media immediately picked up on the implicit theme of Islamic
terrorism, and the battle lines, already tightly drawn by US
leadership, quickly closed ranks around what President George Bush
called "Islamo fascism". Conditions for unlimited future focus on
the War on Terrorism had thus been refurbished. But what was wrong
with this picture?
For some observers, the timing of this announcement was more
interesting than the substance.
The report was released on a day when Israel's IDF forces were
struggling in Lebanon to decimate Hezbollah, and while IDF planes,
unopposed, were systematically destroying targets of choice all over
Lebanon. Since there was no imminent US-British aviation threat in
the announcement, it could easily be concluded that the British bomb
plot discovery was meant to take attention off Lebanon long enough
for the IDF to demolish Hezbollah. The distraction succeeded, but
the IDF did not.
This reported plot may not represent either a real or an imminent
threat to Britain or the United States, or the countless people of
all nationalities who fly out of Heathrow for the United States. It
does highlight, however, a disturbing and dangerous fixation that US
and British leadership have on potential Muslim sources of
terrorism. The global terrorism universe is and always has been
much more complex. Both the focus and the fact of the War on
Terrorism are sadly misplaced.
Just who is a terrorist anyway? The definition was hardly reliable
before 9/11, and it has become less reliable since. Today the single
focus is on potential acts by so-called Islamic extremists, and
reports about terrorism, particularly in US media, are, with rare
exception, confined to incidents that seem to be of Muslim origin.
In that framework, the only attacks or threats that appear to matter
are those directed against the United States and its allies or
Coalition members. This tends to focus attention almost exclusively
on incidents or groups in the Middle East or of Middle East origin.
These definitions of terrorism or terrorist are dangerously close to
an ego trip, and they underplay or deliberately ignore what is
happening in the rest of the world. Here are the data. To start
with, all 26 people on the FBI most wanted terrorist list have
Muslim names, with, of course, Osama bin Laden at the top. The list
thus looks highly political. Last year, 2005, by the new and all
inclusive rules adopted by the Bush administration, there were
11,100 terrorist incidents worldwide. Casualties were 14,500
non-combatants killed, 56 Americans killed, 25,000 people wounded,
and 35,000 kidnapped. These raw data suggest a world that is a
terrorism mess, with 235 or so casualties being recorded every day.
As the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) itself indicates,
the data for 2005 indeed are raw. Attacks in the Near East (mainly
Iraq and Palestine) and South Asia (mainly Afghanistan, Pakistan and
India) accounted for three-quarters of all attacks and 80% of the
casualties. As the NCTC indicates, more than 50% of all terrorism
(now called noncombatant) fatalities occurred in Iraq. Suicide
attacks, again mainly in the context of the Iraq war, caused 20% of
the deaths. As might be expected with the above data, the majority
of civilian casualties were Muslims killed in Iraq.
Outside of the mayhem that centered on Iraq, Afghanistan and
Palestine, where and what were the main terrorism troubles? The
NCTC data show 35,000 kidnappings, a whopping number in any year.
However, the NCTC notes that almost 95% of the victims were in Nepal
where a major hassle--in which whole schools or villages are taken
hostage--has been in progress between political dissidents and the
monarchy. Fighting was renewed in Sri Lanka as the Tamils continued
the generations-long struggle with the Sinhala government in
Colombo. Numerous attacks occurred in Colombia as the main rebel
groups continued their at least weekly bombing of an American oil
pipeline--in part spite for American support of the government in
Bogota. A few incidents occurred in the Philippines and Indonesia as
dissident groups--alleged al Qaida affiliates--continued their
struggles of many decades with governments in Manila and Jakarta.
The net result of these data is that the reader is deluged with
information that has little bearing on the actual implementation of
any policy respecting terrorism. However, these numbers, touted in
gross by officials, have great political utility in justifying the
War on Terrorism.
Closer to reality, the State Department still keeps tabs on at least
61 terrorist groups, only about half of which are "designated
foreign terrorist organizations." Less than a third of the 61
groups are associated with Muslim countries and virtually half of
the so-called Islamic terrorist groups are products of the
Palestinian struggle with Israel. One terrorist group, al Qaida, is
known to devote itself principally to international incidents, but
it thrives on the grievances most terrorist groups have against
their own national governments or the elites affiliated with or
supporting those governments.
Most groups on the State Department list are in (1) states that are
failed or failing, (2) states that have virtually immovable
autocratic leadership, (3) states that have never really finished
forming, e.g., in Sub-Sahara Africa, (4) states such as the
Philippines that have yet to listen to or accommodate their out
groups, or (5) states such as Indonesia whose present borders
enclose fairly large and conflicting ethnic interests. Such problems
exist in a number of states in high intensity conflict zones,
including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The problems in
every one of these states long antedate the War on Terrorism and are
likely to persist after the War's demise.
Little if any progress has been made by governments in those
countries to deal with the grievances of their dissident (better,
insurgent) groups. Rather, where governments buy into the
US-sponsored War on Terrorism their aim is usually to suppress their
dissidents. Thus, the roster of grievances against at least sixty
governments in the world community at best remains static. The
roots of terrorism world-wide are basically socio-political
constants. Military or paramilitary attacks have been shown to be
more provocative than productive. In essence, the War on Terrorism
is a waste of time and resources, because it distracts leadership in
those countries from necessary actions to mediate internal
differences that would accommodate their own people.
The global face of this situation has become equally depressing. The
remarkable tragedy of the global situation is that wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as continued American insensitivity to the
Israeli repression of the Palestinian people, have worked to
radicalize many people, not all of them Muslims. The individuals
and groups radicalized are often, if not always, associated with
dissidents who have existed for many years in the countries on the
State Department list. As often noted by experts, US support for
those governments has directed some of the dissident energy against
the United States. But the newest version of this long-standing
problem is refusal of the United States to do business with a
freely-elected government it does not like, as in the case of the
Hamas political landslide in Palestine. That kind of a US, indeed
European reaction is a signal of no hope for dissidents in numerous
countries, even when they work within the system.
It is a misnomer as well as an elitist policy error of the present
US leadership, along with American and other Western media, to
bloc-label all Muslims who oppose their own governments or the
government of the United States as Islamic radicals. American
foreign policies at this time are egregiously self-serving, whether
the subject is war or resource acquisition, or trade policy, or
finance. The one-sided alliance with Israel, as demonstrated in
actual physical support for the destruction of Lebanon, has further
attenuated the extremity of reactions to US policies and to Americans.
Labels such as "Islamo fascism" and a narrow focus on so-called
Islamic extremists represent a gross American misreading of what is
happening in the Muslim world. The use of the word, "Islamic", is
now classed by many Muslims with the epithet, "nigger", in American
history. By using such terms, the President of the United States
simply talks down to all peoples of the Muslim world.
The virtual total failure of the War on Terrorism comes down to two
vital weaknesses. One is that the very structure of the campaign as
a "War" simply by-passes any focus on the real causes of and
solutions to terrorism and insurgency. The notion that all
disagreements with others can be resolved by force--the central
model of Israeli policy now borrowed by the US--simply ignores the
core realities of the human condition. Poverty, hunger, social and
political exclusion of many groups, actual repression and denial of
political participation will not go away because you kill some of
the people who complain or fight back. Resistance simply will grow.
The second and likely most costly weakness of the War on Terrorism
is the US focus, as exemplified by Presidential speeches, on
so-called Islamic radicalism or the cant phrase "Islamo fascism."
The wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan are--along with US-facilitated
and supported Israeli destruction of Lebanon and Palestine--driving
the people of the Muslim world progressively away from the United
States.
The monomaniac shoe fits tightly on the American foot: US military
radicalism and a growing drift toward fascism in American decision
making and foreign policy are driving the rest of the world away
from us. The principal immediate victims of those American choices
are in the Muslim world. The solutions lie with getting out of Iraq
and Afghanistan, and with turning the War on Terrorism into a
development assistance program with specific focus on help to the
many excluded minorities. Terrorism and insurgency will not end
without this kind of treatment.
**********
The writer is the author of the recently published work, A World
Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist on
rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US
Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions were as
Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter-Terrorism and
Emergency Planning, and as Chairman of the Department of
International Studies of the National War College. He will welcome
comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.
**
