Why we are losing the war

[Gość: Tomasz]

Why we are losing the war

In the wake of Mombasa, Foreign Affairs Editor Peter
Beaumont argues that the atrocities will continue until the
West finally grasps the fact that we are fighting a lethal
idea rather than a tangible enemy

Sunday December 1, 2002
The Observer

When the dust has settled and the blood and tears have dried,
we will be able to say one thing with certainty about last week's
terrorist attack in Kenya. Anyone who tells you the war against
terrorism is being won is lying.

It is the great heresy of free societies, so speak it softly, but the
accumulating evidence of the past four years is that terrorism
can - and does - work. And it is working on a global scale.

It is a simple fact that is more terrifying than any of attacks
themselves - 11 September included. That a tiny group of
extremists, for the most part using the most basic of
technologies, could effect such a startling paradigm shift that
has transformed the world we live in. But to what end? The
answer is more surprising than our political classes appear yet
to have grasped.

Strip away the millenarian agenda and its language of
apocalyptic struggle - the Great Satans, the enemies of God,
references to the Crusaders. Strip away, just for a moment, its
extreme religious aspects and what you are left with is a
non-negotiable political agenda. That aim is to remove - or
neutralise - American and Western influence from large areas of
the globe, including states that are not exclusively Islamist.

It is a tension that was in part foreseen by Benjamin Barber in
1992 in his essay 'Jihad versus McWorld', which predicted that
the greatest threat to democracy would be the clash between
the spread of a homogenising American culture - paradoxically
indifferent to what was happening in the world it touched on -
and a new kind of anti-political tribal politics which, he predicted,
would see 'the breakdown of civility in the name of identity; of
comity in the name of community'.

Barber thought that breakdown in civility would likely come from
the kind of gang warfare then beginning to grip the Balkans.
Instead, the real challenge to McWorld has been the unforeseen
emergence of an extremist version of radical Islam literally at
war with the West and all it stands for. For the time being at
least, it seems it is the terrorists who are winning.

It is a pessimistic outlook, but an easy case to make. Let's start
with the most obvious economic impact. The fear engendered by
a spate of attacks by Jihad International - al-Qaeda and groups
that share its agenda - is crippling the long-haul tourist industry,
threatening the West's airline industry and has almost shut
down tourism outside of the US. That cost is likely to amount to
billions of pounds in the long run, its impact being felt as keenly
in countries such as Indonesia and Kenya which are heavily
dependant on tourist dollars.

What is less quantifiable is what John Stevenson, senior fellow
in counter terrorism at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies describes as al-Qaeda's aim of 'neutralising' America
and the West's influence in large areas of the world. Already the
US and other countries have reduced embassies in vulnerable
areas of the world, like other nations - Britain included - closing
down missions at times of threat. But it is not just diplomats
who carry our message into the world. Business too is
supposed to fly the flag for our values. And as businesses
become more wary of operating in threatened areas, they too
will withdraw to safer areas of operation.

And in our withdrawal from exactly those places where the kind
of Islamist extremism we fear most is at its most threatening,
we give up the intellectual and psychological space to those
who most threaten our values. Because the real war with
al-Qaeda, as James Thomson, president of the Rand
Corporation think-tank, pointed out in the organisation's summer
review, is not simply one of missiles, snatch squads and bullets.
It is quintessentially one of ideas.

And it is in the war of ideas that we are most notably failing in
the war on terrorism. As Thomson's overview points out, even a
year after 9/11 America and its allies still have little idea of the
roots of the discontent that has made Jihad International so
attractive to so many young Islamist men, or the etiology of the
hatred of America.

Not only is the message not getting across, but there seems to
be a fundamental misunderstanding of where the real
sophistication of Jihad International comes from. It is not in its
ingenious and despicable skill in butchering innocent civilians, or
even in its apparently formidable organisational skills, which in
reality may be far less formidable than assumed, but in
syndicating and marketing its brand of terror. This is not the old
terrorism of the IRA or ETA, with structures, doctrines and

[Gość: Tomasz]

Dalsza częsć tekstu
Not only is the message not getting across, but there seems to
be a fundamental misunderstanding of where the real
sophistication of Jihad International comes from. It is not in its
ingenious and despicable skill in butchering innocent civilians, or
even in its apparently formidable organisational skills, which in
reality may be far less formidable than assumed, but in
syndicating and marketing its brand of terror. This is not the old
terrorism of the IRA or ETA, with structures, doctrines and
pseudo-military organisation. What Bush and Blair and all their
allies do not understand is that it is the idea of al- Qaeda, not its
physical reality, that is the key, an idea which has taken deep
root in countries from Afghanistan to South East Asia and
Africa.

At the centre of that idea is an oppositional discourse that
seeks to drive the west - particularly America - out of what
Osama bin Laden has claimed as the wider Islamic nation. That
misunderstanding is represented at its worst by George Bush
who - it is said - keeps a list of 12 names of the top al-Qaeda
terrorists in his desk and ticks them off as they are captured or
killed.

But al-Qaeda is less a hierarchical organisation out of James
Bond led by a sinister mastermind, than a dynamic dialogue
between like-minded radicals conducted via mosques, radical
publications and the internet. A specific order is almost
redundant as individual groups know exactly what must be done
and when, adapting themselves to new security constraints and
to new targets.

And what appears to have been 'understood' before the attack on
Mombasa was that it was the right time to polarise the war on
terrorism. Just at the moment Bush and his allies had
constructed a grudging consent from the Arab world for its tough
line on Iraq, Jihad International brought in Israel. In his
belligerent threat to hunt down the perpetrators of the Mombasa
attacks, Israel's right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon has
threatened to upset the delicate consensus between America
and its allies on the issue of the war on terrorism, and on the
Security Council over Iraq.

Few o Sharon's friends among the hawks that surround George
Bush are unaware of his motto - 'Always escalate' - and his long
history of ill-conceived military responses from the Gaza raid,
the invasion of south Lebanon to his handling of the al-Aqsa
intifada, that have delivered a quick political or military fix at the
cost of long-term disaster.

By bringing Israel explosively into the mix a week before the
deadline for Iraq's weapons declaration, Jihad International has
shown a political and operational astuteness that is quite
terrifying.

What is more terrifying still is the notion among the West's
political classes that it is an organisation, not an idea, that they
are fighting. With each new arrest, each new targeted killing, we
congratulate ourselves that we are winning - until the next
atrocity takes place. All the while, we fail to tackle the ideas
that replace each arrested or dead terrorist with a new recruit.

As the tens of millions dead in the last century demonstrated,
ideas - no matter that they are venal ones like Nazism or
Stalinism - can be as hard to kill as they are lethally and
stupidly persistent.

But in a war of ideas, to do nothing is the worst of all options.

[Gość: Mazur]

Tomasz, ciekawy artykul.

"Few o Sharon's friends among the hawks that surround George
Bush are unaware of his motto - 'Always escalate' - and his long
history of ill-conceived military responses from the Gaza raid,
the invasion of south Lebanon to his handling of the al-Aqsa
intifada, that have delivered a quick political or military fix at the
cost of long-term disaster."

Zrodla tego konfliktu tkwia w Izraelu. Bedzie on eskalowal dopoki nie zostanie
zastosowane jakies pokojowe rozwiazanie zadawalajace obie strony. Nie sadze,
ze sa ku temu jakies szanse gdy po jednej stronie stolu siedzi byly terrorysta
Arafat a po drugiej zbrodniarz wojenny Szaron.

Smutne jest to, ze w konflikt ten zostal wciagniety tzw swiat chrzescijanski.

[Gość: -]

Ta wojna , mieszanka partyzantki czyli terroryzmu z ludobojstwem rozprzestrzeni
sie na caly swiat, bedzie to wojna przeciwko kazdemu i kazdej organizaji, wojna
totalna przy uzyciu kazdego rodzaju broni, w imie wybranej klasy ludzi. Wojne
ta oficjalnie i otwarcie zdeklarowal GWB, ale poczatki byly juz od czasow wojen
religijnych w Europie. Poprostu trudno zrozumiec ze po 500 latach religia jest
dalej podstawa konfliktow zbrojnych i rewolucji. Ideologie ateistyczne,
okazuje sie mialy na celu nie zasady humanitarne, ale zniszczenie innych religi
i europejskiego systemu wladzy. Dzis jest to widoczne, popatrzmy sie w czyich
rekach jest wladza polityczna, finansowa, prasa, edukacja itd.

Gaworzymy sobie o d.pie Maryni?

[Gość: krupski rypczak]

Nigdy przed atakiem 11 wrzesnia Al Qaeda nie przejawiala zainteresowania
konfliktem izraelsko-palestynskim. Wytyczne byly scisle religijne.
Cywilizacja zachodnia zagraza islamowi stad tez nalezy prowadzic z nia wojne
wszystkimi dostepnymi srodkami, dazyc do jej zniszczenia i dokonac konwersji
chrzescian na islam. Tylko ostatnio dla celow propagandowych Al Qaeda
zaprzegla palestynczykow do ciagniecia swojej utopijnej walki.
Konflikt bliskowschodni nie bedzie rozwiazany gdyz jedna ze stron takiego
rozwiazania nie chce. Dazac do calkowitego zniszczenia panstwa Izrael
zaprzepaszczono wiele szans na pokojowa koegzystencje. Prosze przypomniec sobie
kiedy nieco ponad dwa lata temu Arafat odrzucil plan pokojowy, o ktorym
niedawno powiedzial ze to byl z jego strony blad.
Dopoki nie uzmyslowimy sobie, ze to nie Izrael lecz arabowie sa zrodlem
przedluzania i podsycania konfliktu wszystkie tezy o pokoju nie warte sa
grosza. Jedynie akceptacja istnienia panstwa Izrael w rozsadnych,
wynegocjowanych granicach przez wszystkie panstwa arabskie przyniesie pokoj.
W przeciwnym razie mrzonki o zepchnieciu zydow do morza nie pozwola nawet na
zawieszenie broni. Niestety najbardziej poszkodowani sa sami palestynczycy,
ktorzy cierpia niedostatek bedac pionkami w rekach politycznych graczy.

Gaworzymy sobie dalej.