THE BUSINESS OF TERROR
The war of a thousand years
IRAQ is burning. You could see this as a consequence of superpower arrogance or of the ignorance of the United States about local realities elsewhere. (Fallujah is not a town in Texas, nor is it Marseille during Liberation in 1944.) But at a deeper level the setbacks in Iraq stem directly from the very idea of the war against terror that was launched by President George Bush after 11 September 2001.
In the US view each incident in Iraq fits into a certain logic: the attacks in the Sunni triangle must be the work of supporters of Saddam Hussein or of international terrorists linked to al-Qaida; Muqtada al-Sadr’s resistance is explained by the involvement of Iran, classified as part of the axis of evil; each armed action is further proof that "they" hate western values.
As a US corporal in Iraq said: "We have to kill the bad guys" (1). But for every bad guy that the US kills, several more are created each time an apartment block is bombed or a village is subjected to search and destroy operations.
There are other far simpler ways of understanding the drama in Iraq. Iraqis are happy to be rid of a loathsome dictatorship and free of the sanctions that for 13 years drained the life out of Iraq. All they want now is a better life, freedom and independence. But the reality is that no promises made about postwar reconstruction have been kept. There are still widespread power cuts, insecurity and increased poverty. US troops gave the final shove to a regime already weakened by the pressure of multiple embargos. Then they allowed the ministries to burn and dissolved the national army, as they had done in 1945 in Japan.
But Iraqis have no interest in living under an occupation that they suspect of being interested only in oil and regional strategic domination. The days of colonialism are over. The 1920 revolt against the British has been celebrated in Iraq over the decades and has as strong a hold on the popular imagination as the Resistance and the Liberation have in France.
Iraqis share an aspiration to independence with other nations and we do not need to plumb their psychology or their souls, or submit the Qur’an to detailed analysis, to understand it. The behaviour of the Iraqis is entirely rational and the only solution is a rapid withdrawal of US troops and Iraq’s return to full sovereignty.
A world in black and white
The way in which the leaders of a major power read geopolitical developments determines their strategic and diplomatic choices: how will a choice benefit a power? How will its enemies react? Who are its allies in any area? For decades the cold war provided the framework for interpretation in world diplomacy. When something changed somewhere, the first question for strategists, analysts and reporters on both sides was: is this good for the Soviet Union? Or it is good for the US? The consequences of this black and white worldview were clear in two major conflicts in the 1970s - Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
In July 1979 the Sandinistas took power in Managua after a long armed struggle that had ended the dictatorship of the Somoza family. They launched a bold programme of social reform, particularly in agriculture. Basic liberties were respected, opposition political parties were permitted and a way was opened for Nicaragua to begin to emerge from its history of poverty and underdevelopment. But that was not how the US saw it: this defeat of a US ally meant the advance of communism and the USSR in the US’s Central American backyard.
The CIA began to arm former Somoza military personnel. From Honduras these "freedom fighters" began an all-out war against the Sandinista regime, including acts of terrorism, while Washington tried to mobilise public opinion and its allies against what it perceived as a totalitarian threat in Central America. Cuba, and to a lesser extent the USSR, increased aid to the Sandinistas. Nicaragua was caught in an East-West trap.
The relentless pressure of the US and the impoverishment of Nicaragua by economic sanctions led to the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat on 25 February 1990. Whereupon the US lost interest in Nicaragua and dropped its former protégés. The country sank back into poverty. But it was never going to be communist.
Afghanistan is even more telling. In April 1978 its government was overthrown in a communist coup even though it was an ally of the USSR. The new authorities began a harsh programme of radical reform in this conservative country and met strong resistance, particularly in the countryside. Washington began to arm the mujahideen resistance. In December 1979 the Soviet army invaded and changed the leadership.
The international community was quick to condemn this as a colonial venture. But the US and the West chose to see it as proof of the USSR’s hegemonic intentions and confirmation of the Kremlin’s centuries-old schemes for gaining access to warm seas - the Gulf.
The incoming Reagan administration in the US saw it as a chance to give the Red Army a bloody nose, even if that meant an alliance with the devil. With the help of Pakistani and Saudi secret services it began to arm the extreme fundamentalist forces to the detriment of the moderate opposition. It opposed all attempts at political and diplomatic settlements by the United Nations and deliberately prolonged the conflict (2).
We know the result. The Soviets decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. But having won, the US then lost interest in Afghanistan and the radical Islamist networks that it had helped create with the help of Osama bin Laden. Left to its own devices Afghanistan lapsed into civil war until in 1996 it fell into the hands of the Taliban.
We now know that, far from being part of major expansion plans, the Soviet decision to intervene in Afghanistan was taken by a divided political bureaucracy that was concerned that a bordering country and traditional ally should not fall into the hands of extremist Islamists. We also know that, despite its appearance of military power, the USSR was in reality incapable of threatening the world, let alone dominating it. But in the West the Soviet threat was always cited when it was needed to mobilise public opinion.
In 1983, two years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, the French political commentator, Jean-François Revel (with his usual perspicacity) declared the imminent demise of the world’s democracies, as they were incapable of resisting "the most threatening of those external enemies, communism, which is a present-day variant and fully developed model of totalitarianism" (3). In reality that "fully developed model" had only a few years left to run.
Of course the East-West approach to reading geopolitical developments had a certain reality. Both the US and the USSR were defending their interests as major powers. But the collective political destiny of individual countries was more than just an international chessboard on which the White House and the Kremlin made their moves - Washington unrepentantly supporting dictatorships in Latin America and Suharto in Indonesia; and Moscow intervening brutally in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
This over-simplification underestimated any national realities that didn’t easily fit and all the other threats that humanity faced: environmental degradation, chronic poverty and the spread of new diseases, notably Aids. The world finally emerged from the cold war. The US had won but the same challenges remained; as did the same causes of instability.
A new enemy
The collapse of the Soviet Union orphaned not only the US and western military and intelligence services, all deprived of the enemy that had justified their existence and sanctioned their bottomless budgets, but also the strategic research centres that had believed in Moscow’s strategic superiority to the extent of predicting a Soviet invasion of western Europe. Where could they find a replacement for the evil empire?
In the 1990s the American academic Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, proclaiming the definitive victory of western liberalism and its extension over the entire planet. The theory proved popular. A section of the conservative right, those who had opposed any detente with the USSR and any understanding with Gorbachev, began to seek a new strategic enemy. They announced that, even though the US now had no rivals, it was threatened by obscure forces even more dangerous than communism: terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. In a parallel development, analysts and journalists diagnosed the growing power of a new adversary, Islam, with a strong ideology and a potential power base of more than a billion people.
In 1993 Samuel Huntington of the US popularised the phrase "clash of civilisations" (4). He wrote: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics."
But this remains speculative, since none of these doctrines was able to gather a consensus among the elites. It took 11 September to instil the idea that the West was again engaged in a world war to be taken as seriously as had been the cold war and the second world war. Traumatised by the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, US public opinion rallied behind the war against terror, a war in which, it was proclaimed, "you are either with us or you are against us".
But what is this new enemy that has replaced communism and Nazism? Is it terrorism? Terrorism is a method of political action, not an ideology, and we would be hard put to find a common thread between the IRA, the independence fighters of Corsica and the Aum sect. Is it al-Qaida? But surely fighting that is more a matter of policing than military mobilisation (see Al-Qaida brand name ready for franchise,). What about rogue states? Not only is it nonsense to link North Korea and Iran as the axis of evil, it is also hard to see how their regional threat matches that of the Soviet Union in its prime.
At war with ‘barbarism’
Nevertheless the idea that is taking shape through carefully targeted ideological campaigns is that of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West. With the exception of North Korea and Cuba all the countries that are currently targeted by the US - Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan - are Islamic: unconditional US support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon confirms the bias. As President George Bush put it, civilisation is at war with barbarism. To which Osama bin Laden replied: "The world has been divided into two camps: one under the banner of the cross, as Bush, the head of the infidels, said; and another under the banner of Islam."
If this theory is true, then no accommodation is possible. "They hate us" - not because of anything that we do but because they reject our ideas of liberty and democracy. So there is no point in prioritising any of the injustices that afflict the Islamic world. This view necessarily leads matters towards war. It views every conflict as a clash of civilisations, a conflict which is never-ending and without solutions: the struggle of the Palestinians, a terrorist bombing in Java, the resistance in Iraq, an anti-semitic incident in a high school in Paris, an inner-city riot in a European city - all are seen as evidence of a general offensive by Islam. We are engaged on all fronts, including the domestic front, in a world war.
General William "Jerry" Boykin, formerly of Delta Force, the US army’s anti-terrorist unit, was appointed in June 2003 as the deputy undersecretary of defence with responsibility for intelligence. He is an evangelical Christian who once told a congregation in Oregon that radical Islamists hated the US "because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judaeo-Christian . . . and the enemy is a guy named Satan" (5). On another occasion he said: "We in the army of God, in the house of God, the kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this." During the fighting against Islamic warlords in Somalia he had , said: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol" (6).
The general offered a few excuses for his utterances, kept his job and was able to use his talents in exporting the prison system created in Guan tánamo Bay to Iraq: we know all about the results of this (7). The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, defended him at the beginning but the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, then stepped in to say: "This is not a war between religions. No one should describe it as such." How are we supposed to believe that when we read the statements of tortured Iraqis, who were forced to renounce their religion (8)?
All ‘savages’
Islamophobia is rampant in the media despite occasional protests. Ann Coulter is a popular rightwing commentator in the US. She is regularly invited on such radio and TV news programmes as Good Morning America and The O’Reilly Factor. In her view France will be taken over by Muslims within 10 years. She once said: "When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we’re up against absolute savages . . . We’ve been under attack by savage, fanatical Muslims for 20 years. It wasn’t al-Qaida that took our hostages in Iran, it wasn’t al-Qaida that bombed the West Berlin discotheque which led to Ronald Reagan bombing Libya."
When the interviewer commented that Libya was an Islamic country, she said: "You can make the argument, but I just keep seeing Muslims killing people" (9).
Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said on 26 September 2001: "We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation . . . a system that has guaranteed wellbeing, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights." He went on to observe that because of "the superiority of western values" the West would continue to conquer peoples as it had conquered communism even if it meant a confrontation with "another civilisation, the Islamic one, stuck where it was 1,400 years ago" (10).
In his book L’Obsession anti-américaine Jean-François Revel celebrates the fact that Bush and European leaders visited mosques after 11 September, mainly to avoid Arab Americans becoming the targets of unworthy reprisals. He says: "These democratic scruples do credit to Americans and Europeans but should not blind them to the anti-western hatred of the majority of Muslims living among us" (11). Those were his words - "the majority of Muslims". We do not know if he is suggesting that we expel all of them from France.
Such statements are echoed in public opinion. The cold war, particularly during the 1980s, didn’t mobilise people. It was mostly played out at the level of military high commands. Communism had already lost much of its attraction and the red threat no longer provoked witch-hunts. But the war on terror is proving popular. Parts of both western and Islamic opinion are prepared to believe that, behind the present conflicts, civilisations really are clashing. The key divisions in society are no longer between the powerful and the weak, rich and poor, haves and have-nots, but between them and us. The countries of the West should forget the struggle between classes and line up in the battle against the Other. What would be the result? A thousand-year war whose only result would be to bring comfort to the established (dis)order.
Alain Gresh
Le Monde Diplomatique
IRAQ is burning. You could see this as a consequence of superpower arrogance or of the ignorance of the United States about local realities elsewhere. (Fallujah is not a town in Texas, nor is it Marseille during Liberation in 1944.) But at a deeper level the setbacks in Iraq stem directly from the very idea of the war against terror that was launched by President George Bush after 11 September 2001.
In the US view each incident in Iraq fits into a certain logic: the attacks in the Sunni triangle must be the work of supporters of Saddam Hussein or of international terrorists linked to al-Qaida; Muqtada al-Sadr’s resistance is explained by the involvement of Iran, classified as part of the axis of evil; each armed action is further proof that "they" hate western values.
As a US corporal in Iraq said: "We have to kill the bad guys" (1). But for every bad guy that the US kills, several more are created each time an apartment block is bombed or a village is subjected to search and destroy operations.
There are other far simpler ways of understanding the drama in Iraq. Iraqis are happy to be rid of a loathsome dictatorship and free of the sanctions that for 13 years drained the life out of Iraq. All they want now is a better life, freedom and independence. But the reality is that no promises made about postwar reconstruction have been kept. There are still widespread power cuts, insecurity and increased poverty. US troops gave the final shove to a regime already weakened by the pressure of multiple embargos. Then they allowed the ministries to burn and dissolved the national army, as they had done in 1945 in Japan.
But Iraqis have no interest in living under an occupation that they suspect of being interested only in oil and regional strategic domination. The days of colonialism are over. The 1920 revolt against the British has been celebrated in Iraq over the decades and has as strong a hold on the popular imagination as the Resistance and the Liberation have in France.
Iraqis share an aspiration to independence with other nations and we do not need to plumb their psychology or their souls, or submit the Qur’an to detailed analysis, to understand it. The behaviour of the Iraqis is entirely rational and the only solution is a rapid withdrawal of US troops and Iraq’s return to full sovereignty.
A world in black and white
The way in which the leaders of a major power read geopolitical developments determines their strategic and diplomatic choices: how will a choice benefit a power? How will its enemies react? Who are its allies in any area? For decades the cold war provided the framework for interpretation in world diplomacy. When something changed somewhere, the first question for strategists, analysts and reporters on both sides was: is this good for the Soviet Union? Or it is good for the US? The consequences of this black and white worldview were clear in two major conflicts in the 1970s - Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
In July 1979 the Sandinistas took power in Managua after a long armed struggle that had ended the dictatorship of the Somoza family. They launched a bold programme of social reform, particularly in agriculture. Basic liberties were respected, opposition political parties were permitted and a way was opened for Nicaragua to begin to emerge from its history of poverty and underdevelopment. But that was not how the US saw it: this defeat of a US ally meant the advance of communism and the USSR in the US’s Central American backyard.
The CIA began to arm former Somoza military personnel. From Honduras these "freedom fighters" began an all-out war against the Sandinista regime, including acts of terrorism, while Washington tried to mobilise public opinion and its allies against what it perceived as a totalitarian threat in Central America. Cuba, and to a lesser extent the USSR, increased aid to the Sandinistas. Nicaragua was caught in an East-West trap.
The relentless pressure of the US and the impoverishment of Nicaragua by economic sanctions led to the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat on 25 February 1990. Whereupon the US lost interest in Nicaragua and dropped its former protégés. The country sank back into poverty. But it was never going to be communist.
Afghanistan is even more telling. In April 1978 its government was overthrown in a communist coup even though it was an ally of the USSR. The new authorities began a harsh programme of radical reform in this conservative country and met strong resistance, particularly in the countryside. Washington began to arm the mujahideen resistance. In December 1979 the Soviet army invaded and changed the leadership.
The international community was quick to condemn this as a colonial venture. But the US and the West chose to see it as proof of the USSR’s hegemonic intentions and confirmation of the Kremlin’s centuries-old schemes for gaining access to warm seas - the Gulf.
The incoming Reagan administration in the US saw it as a chance to give the Red Army a bloody nose, even if that meant an alliance with the devil. With the help of Pakistani and Saudi secret services it began to arm the extreme fundamentalist forces to the detriment of the moderate opposition. It opposed all attempts at political and diplomatic settlements by the United Nations and deliberately prolonged the conflict (2).
We know the result. The Soviets decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. But having won, the US then lost interest in Afghanistan and the radical Islamist networks that it had helped create with the help of Osama bin Laden. Left to its own devices Afghanistan lapsed into civil war until in 1996 it fell into the hands of the Taliban.
We now know that, far from being part of major expansion plans, the Soviet decision to intervene in Afghanistan was taken by a divided political bureaucracy that was concerned that a bordering country and traditional ally should not fall into the hands of extremist Islamists. We also know that, despite its appearance of military power, the USSR was in reality incapable of threatening the world, let alone dominating it. But in the West the Soviet threat was always cited when it was needed to mobilise public opinion.
In 1983, two years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, the French political commentator, Jean-François Revel (with his usual perspicacity) declared the imminent demise of the world’s democracies, as they were incapable of resisting "the most threatening of those external enemies, communism, which is a present-day variant and fully developed model of totalitarianism" (3). In reality that "fully developed model" had only a few years left to run.
Of course the East-West approach to reading geopolitical developments had a certain reality. Both the US and the USSR were defending their interests as major powers. But the collective political destiny of individual countries was more than just an international chessboard on which the White House and the Kremlin made their moves - Washington unrepentantly supporting dictatorships in Latin America and Suharto in Indonesia; and Moscow intervening brutally in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
This over-simplification underestimated any national realities that didn’t easily fit and all the other threats that humanity faced: environmental degradation, chronic poverty and the spread of new diseases, notably Aids. The world finally emerged from the cold war. The US had won but the same challenges remained; as did the same causes of instability.
A new enemy
The collapse of the Soviet Union orphaned not only the US and western military and intelligence services, all deprived of the enemy that had justified their existence and sanctioned their bottomless budgets, but also the strategic research centres that had believed in Moscow’s strategic superiority to the extent of predicting a Soviet invasion of western Europe. Where could they find a replacement for the evil empire?
In the 1990s the American academic Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, proclaiming the definitive victory of western liberalism and its extension over the entire planet. The theory proved popular. A section of the conservative right, those who had opposed any detente with the USSR and any understanding with Gorbachev, began to seek a new strategic enemy. They announced that, even though the US now had no rivals, it was threatened by obscure forces even more dangerous than communism: terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. In a parallel development, analysts and journalists diagnosed the growing power of a new adversary, Islam, with a strong ideology and a potential power base of more than a billion people.
In 1993 Samuel Huntington of the US popularised the phrase "clash of civilisations" (4). He wrote: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics."
But this remains speculative, since none of these doctrines was able to gather a consensus among the elites. It took 11 September to instil the idea that the West was again engaged in a world war to be taken as seriously as had been the cold war and the second world war. Traumatised by the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, US public opinion rallied behind the war against terror, a war in which, it was proclaimed, "you are either with us or you are against us".
But what is this new enemy that has replaced communism and Nazism? Is it terrorism? Terrorism is a method of political action, not an ideology, and we would be hard put to find a common thread between the IRA, the independence fighters of Corsica and the Aum sect. Is it al-Qaida? But surely fighting that is more a matter of policing than military mobilisation (see Al-Qaida brand name ready for franchise,). What about rogue states? Not only is it nonsense to link North Korea and Iran as the axis of evil, it is also hard to see how their regional threat matches that of the Soviet Union in its prime.
At war with ‘barbarism’
Nevertheless the idea that is taking shape through carefully targeted ideological campaigns is that of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West. With the exception of North Korea and Cuba all the countries that are currently targeted by the US - Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan - are Islamic: unconditional US support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon confirms the bias. As President George Bush put it, civilisation is at war with barbarism. To which Osama bin Laden replied: "The world has been divided into two camps: one under the banner of the cross, as Bush, the head of the infidels, said; and another under the banner of Islam."
If this theory is true, then no accommodation is possible. "They hate us" - not because of anything that we do but because they reject our ideas of liberty and democracy. So there is no point in prioritising any of the injustices that afflict the Islamic world. This view necessarily leads matters towards war. It views every conflict as a clash of civilisations, a conflict which is never-ending and without solutions: the struggle of the Palestinians, a terrorist bombing in Java, the resistance in Iraq, an anti-semitic incident in a high school in Paris, an inner-city riot in a European city - all are seen as evidence of a general offensive by Islam. We are engaged on all fronts, including the domestic front, in a world war.
General William "Jerry" Boykin, formerly of Delta Force, the US army’s anti-terrorist unit, was appointed in June 2003 as the deputy undersecretary of defence with responsibility for intelligence. He is an evangelical Christian who once told a congregation in Oregon that radical Islamists hated the US "because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judaeo-Christian . . . and the enemy is a guy named Satan" (5). On another occasion he said: "We in the army of God, in the house of God, the kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this." During the fighting against Islamic warlords in Somalia he had , said: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol" (6).
The general offered a few excuses for his utterances, kept his job and was able to use his talents in exporting the prison system created in Guan tánamo Bay to Iraq: we know all about the results of this (7). The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, defended him at the beginning but the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, then stepped in to say: "This is not a war between religions. No one should describe it as such." How are we supposed to believe that when we read the statements of tortured Iraqis, who were forced to renounce their religion (8)?
All ‘savages’
Islamophobia is rampant in the media despite occasional protests. Ann Coulter is a popular rightwing commentator in the US. She is regularly invited on such radio and TV news programmes as Good Morning America and The O’Reilly Factor. In her view France will be taken over by Muslims within 10 years. She once said: "When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we’re up against absolute savages . . . We’ve been under attack by savage, fanatical Muslims for 20 years. It wasn’t al-Qaida that took our hostages in Iran, it wasn’t al-Qaida that bombed the West Berlin discotheque which led to Ronald Reagan bombing Libya."
When the interviewer commented that Libya was an Islamic country, she said: "You can make the argument, but I just keep seeing Muslims killing people" (9).
Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said on 26 September 2001: "We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation . . . a system that has guaranteed wellbeing, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights." He went on to observe that because of "the superiority of western values" the West would continue to conquer peoples as it had conquered communism even if it meant a confrontation with "another civilisation, the Islamic one, stuck where it was 1,400 years ago" (10).
In his book L’Obsession anti-américaine Jean-François Revel celebrates the fact that Bush and European leaders visited mosques after 11 September, mainly to avoid Arab Americans becoming the targets of unworthy reprisals. He says: "These democratic scruples do credit to Americans and Europeans but should not blind them to the anti-western hatred of the majority of Muslims living among us" (11). Those were his words - "the majority of Muslims". We do not know if he is suggesting that we expel all of them from France.
Such statements are echoed in public opinion. The cold war, particularly during the 1980s, didn’t mobilise people. It was mostly played out at the level of military high commands. Communism had already lost much of its attraction and the red threat no longer provoked witch-hunts. But the war on terror is proving popular. Parts of both western and Islamic opinion are prepared to believe that, behind the present conflicts, civilisations really are clashing. The key divisions in society are no longer between the powerful and the weak, rich and poor, haves and have-nots, but between them and us. The countries of the West should forget the struggle between classes and line up in the battle against the Other. What would be the result? A thousand-year war whose only result would be to bring comfort to the established (dis)order.
Alain Gresh
Le Monde Diplomatique
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