The Golden Strawberry

Long article here in the New York Review of Books about terrorism; its aims, tactics and capabilities. The author agrees with the theses of the books he is reviewing. Suicide terrorism does not represent insanity, nor does it constitute a grave threat to the West. Instead, it is a shrewd and calculated method of warfare used by the weak to strike at the strong. The author claims that Iran, a country currently in the grip of Islamic theocrats and holocaust deniers represents no great threat to the United States:

Compared, say, to the threat of atomic obliteration posed by the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1989, the possibility of an Iranian attack on the United States does not seem very large. Even a nuclear-armed Iran would never dare strike the superpower because it would risk annihilation in response. Obviously America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States. And perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran's oppressive and unpopular government.

Yet the Cold War was between two relatively stable power blocs with each bloc run by a group of people who had no interest in suicide. Iran and the terrorists of Al Qaeda are of a fundementally different mindset. The USSR was run by atheists who maintained no belief in an afterlife and, therefore, had no wish to see a mushroom cloud outside the window of the Kremlin because a good chunk of the world rejected the tenents of Marxism-Leninism. Do we give Osama Bin Laden or the Mullahs of Iran the benefit of the doubt and believe that they love life just as much as we do?  Seeing that Bin Laden has expressed his desire for a universal Caliphate that would wage war against the infidel West countless times, we would be foolish to do so. Or, instead, do we look at their operational record and apocalyptic rhetoric and decide to face the threat rather than try to contain it?

The article constantly scorns the Bush Administration's use of the phrase 'War on Terror':

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism," says Richardson bluntly, "has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure." In declaring such a war, she says, the Bush administration chose to mirror its adversary:

Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.

In essence, America's actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden's organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower's undivided attention. Even as it successfully shattered the group's core through the invasion of Afghanistan, America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics.

But this is a war, one that the West did not start and one that the United States had no material or ethical interest in pursuing before it was declared. The Cold War was a period of foreign policy realism; it was perfectly acceptable for the US to back brutal dictators in the third world as long as they made anti-Soviet noises. The containment of Bolshevism overrode all other foreign policy factors. This cynicism and realpolitik, with men in suits in the West deciding which mass murderer would rule over which poor country, gave birth to the Horrorisms we now live with today.

And a proper analysis of the actual ideology professed by Bin Laden and his ilk is precisely what is missing from the NY Books article. Martin Amis does a good job of it here, in his Observer essay:

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

For Rodenbeck (the author of the NY Books piece), Islamist terrorism is something to be beaten by methods more familiar to the police than to the military. He is right to an extent, but he tends to underestimate the capabilities of worldwide terrorist networks. Proof of their determination, their savagry and their callousness can be seen in any of their works. Indeed, one needs only to look at the cataclysm of Iraq, encouraged as it was by the fools in Washington, to see what happens when large numbers of Islamists engage in terrorist activities in concentrate. Ethnic strife it may be, but it is fueled by religious zealotry.

The declaration of a war on terror has not been the problem, nor has the use of the military and armed force. The problem has been the hubristic and imperial over-application of these assets in a manner not conductive to the destruction of such a slippery foe. More caution, more skepticism and less charging about like a bull in a china shop with regards the US army and the Arab world would perhaps prove to be a more fruitful long term strategy. But make no mistake, this is a war and we must prosecute it. The Theocratic wing of Islam must be destroyed. Not 'by any means' but by the right means. Backing Muslim liberals and ensuring that the zealots have no place to hide are two wings of the same strategy.

-posted by Adam