The Latest Terrorist Arrests

[JewelSong]

I saw a very interesting little segment on the BBC the other night. An interview with a researcher named Page (I think, can't remember his first name) from the University of Chicago. He (along with a group, I think) have made a study of more than 400 suicide bombers/terrorists from the early 90s on...these are people who actually did the deed.

He found that, in 95% of the cases, the motivating factor was not religion at all, but was anger at a military presence in their country or in lands that they held sacred. And he emphasized the military.

He called it "political activism gone horribly wrong." The interviewer asked why the current governments found this so hard to accept; why the prevailing line was that this was some kind of religious fanatacism. Page responded that he didn't know; that these findings were the result of long-term and meticulous research and that in fact, he supported Bush. But he said the the results were clear that the over-riding factor for a suicide terrorist was to express their rage to the countries in question (Great Britain and the USA) at their continued military presence in various locations in the Arab world.

I think, and have thought for a long, long time, that we should just get the hell out of the Mid-East. Period.

[Túrin Turambar]

You may be referring to Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

I don’t doubt that most jihadis are inspired by what they see as western occupation of Muslim lands and oppression of Muslim people. The challenge is that what we see as being occupation and oppression and they see as being occupation and oppression can often be two different things.

For example, Bin Laden’s list of greviences include the American presence in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and American support for Israel. These seem to make some sort of sense. But he also, as do most militant Islamists, have a problem with the existence of Israel itself. He subscribes to the theory that once land has been part of a Muslim state, it is Muslim land forever – hence his calls for the recapture of Al-Andalus, which is currently taken up by Spain and Portugal. He viewed the Australian intervention in East Timor as being an attack against Muslims.

I do wonder what would happen if all western intervention in the Middle East ended. It could end with a winding back of Al-Qaeda and its efforts being directed at Middle Eastern Governments rather than us. On the other hand, it could be seen as a victory and result in a stepped-up Jihad against Europe.

There are a few reasons why I don’t trust Bin Laden. One is that he was taught jihad by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who was a student of the effective founder of the modern Islamist movement, Sayyid Qutb. I went into Qutb more on TORC (including reasons for and against being bothered about him), but suffice to say that he took the view that Muslims should actively bring the benefit of Islam to the whole world. As he said, you have no right to deny God. Another, more practical, reason, is that this doesn’t seem to have worked well in Israel. Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon resulted in Hezbollah attacking Israel itself. Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories saw Hamas come to power. I have come to understand that it is critical in fighting terrorism that terrorism must not be rewarded. Finally, I am concerned about the radical clerics who live in the west now, especially in Europe.

So I don’t buy George W. Bush’s ‘they hate us for our freedom’, but I’m strongly suspicious of the idea that they’re really just decent folks when you get to know them.

[JewelSong]

Oh, I don't trust Bin Laden...or any of them, for that matter. But this intervention for the sake of keeping them contained (so to speak) really doesn't seem to be working and reminds me of the whole Vietnam War debacle, where our reason for being there was to prevent the spread of Communism. As far as I can see, Communism has not spread and in fact, has fallen in on its own (with the dissolution of the USSR) without much help from us.

It seems to me that we have two reasons for our presence in the mid-east. One is the defense of Israel and one is oil. If we developed an alternative fuel source, I really wonder how long our presence would last.

I am far from politically astute. But I would like to see us get out and let them sort it out for themselves. It might be a bloodbath, but it kind of already IS a blood bath. And things might take a different tone once the benefits of the west were removed, as well.

I think the mid-east needs to evolve on its own. Social evolution can't be forced into being. In my humble and woefully uninformed opinion.

[truehobbit]

And I have to say that when I look at the wars the US has been involved with during my lifetime, we have not waged any of them successfully; that is, we have not waged them in a way that terminated the threat.

Look at how WWI and WWII were waged with regards to Germany. It seems that decisive defeat, long occupation and help with rebuilding are necessary to make a friend of an enemy. We haven't done that recently.

Um, no I don't think that this is some sure recipe for success, I think that the fact that things worked out so well after WWII are a very lucky coincidence.
Sure, help with rebuilding went a long way, but if the American culture imported at the time hadn't been so welcome, if Coke and Rock n'Roll hadn't caught on and become the cool thing, occupation would have been felt as a grievance rather than a renewal, I think.
Freshly imported American culture (e.g. Jazz) had been hailed with enthusiasm since the twenties, but this trend had been suppressed in the Nazi era. Even though part of the population bought into the propaganda that condemned "black" music, another part kept wanting it back. So, the occupation at least by some of the western allied forces was a cultural liberation - I guess you can sum it up as "fun".
I think this is quite different in Arab culture.

That said, I do think that some kind of re-education programme as they had in Germany after WWII, together with help for rebuilding (comforts do go a long way to make a new set of values palatable) would be the thing for the Middle-East or also Arabs living in Western countries, because I don't believe that they "think" anything at all in the strict sense of the word.
IMO, they are conditioned to their form of behaviour. It's not really caused by anything (poverty, previous history with the West, etc) and it's not their own willing decision (at least I believe that clear-thinking people make decisions that are to their own physical disadvantage only in exceptional cases). How to change this conditioning is a question I can't answer, of course.

[vison]

eborr, there's an old saying, "Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs."

There's little in your post that I haven't said myself. But it's not that simple.

"Perhaps there have been valid means for protest, but disenfranchised means exactly that - many young muslims in Britain believe that." They are wrong to believe that. They are not disenfranchised, the reality is that they haven't tried any peaceful means. They have been caught up in this lust for martyrdom, sitting at the feet of monsters.

And once you make your comment about Israel killing more innocents than were killed on 9/11, you lose me anyway. Tell me why Israel has gone on this killing spree? Western support for Israel doesn't persecute Muslims except in the minds of people like bin Laden and his supporters. Muslims persecute Muslims: the suicide bombers and their ilk might be lying in Paradise in the arms of all those pretty virgins, but their fellows on Earth are becoming as hated as the wicked Americans. What have all the Muslims on earth done for the Palestinians?

I'm afraid I think you have swallowed a lot, hook, line, and sinker. Just what is it that these nice, anguished, disenfranchised young men are seeking? Let's see, just for starters: kill thousands of tourists by blowing up civilian aircraft over the ocean, drive the infidel from the Holy Land, eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth, seize Spain and Portugal. The first goal is realistic but thankfully averted. The others? Are these reasonable?

Nope. The time has come when they have to wake up and smell the coffee. Their legitimate grievances won't be addressed anywhere until they use politics, not terror, to advance their cause. Moderate, non-fanatical Muslims have to take back their religion, something one hears more and more from them.

[axordil]

Vison:

Hate can only feed on itself so long as there is something tangible to hate, AND someone to keep the fires stoked. That someone right now consists of those on BOTH sides who profit from the current atmosphere. Hate is essential but not sufficient, since it doesn't come with a bank account.

Not-quite-war, properly handled, is the ideal growth medium for a lot of things. Racial/religious/ethnic tension, fiery rhetoric, profiteering, staying in power. I think a lot of people in the West figured that out after WWII: Hitler's main mistake, from their brutally practical and funadamentally amoral point of view, was in actually starting a shooting war instead of encouraging fascism as a continental ideology. Thus the Cold War, with occasional minor (that is, non-nuclear) conflicts to keep things going.

And thus what we have now.

I'm not saying that our leaders and the Islamic fundies are in cahoots. They don't have to be co-operating to both get what they want, they have to be in conflict, but not TOO much conflict.

[vison]

*sigh*

Very true.

But there's right and there's wrong. I'm not such a relativist as the current Pope and his henchmen, for instance.

That there is plenty of wrong on both "sides" I do agree. But the balance tips one way more than the other.

[Túrin Turambar]

Oh, I don't trust Bin Laden...or any of them, for that matter. But this intervention for the sake of keeping them contained (so to speak) really doesn't seem to be working and reminds me of the whole Vietnam War debacle, where our reason for being there was to prevent the spread of Communism. As far as I can see, Communism has not spread and in fact, has fallen in on its own (with the dissolution of the USSR) without much help from us.

Islamism, like communism, is almost certainly unsustainable over the long run.

The U.S.S.R was always living on borrowed time. But there’s two things that make the situation more complex than that. Firstly, you can do a lot of damage even on borrowed time (eg: Fascism) and secondly, you can borrow a lot of time indeed.

To the first point – containment. In the late 1940s, communism made three moves in Europe – the blockade of West Berlin, the attempt by the U.S.S.R to draw Turkey into the Warsaw Pact by getting a military presence in the Dardanelles, and the attempt by Tito-supported communists to get control of the Government of Greece. All were thwarted by a tough containment-driven response by the U.S. and local anti-communist forces. Had that response not been made, the people of West Berlin, Turkey and Greece would have been put under Stalinist-style regimes. Importantly, these moves did not cost the U.S. too much (in terms of lives, political capital, even money, ect) – there was a good deal of gain for little outlay. In that case, a tough response succeeded in checking the damage that Soviet communism did over its run (raise a cheer for Harry Truman). Vietnam, of course, did not succeed. Personally, I think that the western allies overstretched themselves – Vietnam was lost in 1954, and we should have focused instead on containing communism in Malaysia (which we did successfully throughout the Malaysian emergency). Still, in my view, containment is a better strategy than a) doing nothing or b) all-out war.

The second question is whether or not the policies of the west influenced the decline of communism, be it by speeding or delaying its fall. This is a tough one. What it usually comes down to is whether Reagan’s arms race outspent the U.S.S.R and bankrupted them while he single-handedly rallied the forces of freedom behind his banner (as the right seems to argue) or whether it was movements inside communist countries that did it and all Reagan did was spend too much money and delay the process by acting the cowboy on the international stage (as the left seems to argue). I take something of a third view – both Reagan’s toughness and Gorbachev’s far-sightedness played an essential part. It is a simple reality that you get concessions in international diplomacy through strength, not weakness. Reagan knew when to push and when to hold back. Gorbachev was originally a hard-line communist, but he was smart enough to realize that communism had seen its day. Would he have seen that without a display of strength by the U.S.? This is a pretty inadequate discussion on the end of the cold war, but I don’t want to be here all day.

So, back to Islamism.

One of our problems is that Bin Laden views the west as an easy target. The U.S. withdrew from Lebanon after a bomb killed 241 marines, and withdrew from Somalia when it lost a helicopter. The war against the Soviets also played a part – the U.S.S.R was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan through a guerilla war. These events persuaded him that he could force the U.S. to cede to his demands through terrorism. The approach of the international community to Palestinian terrorism must also take some responsibility here. This comes back to the axiom of foreign policy that I mentioned earlier – you make concessions through strength, not weakness. You must also not reward terrorism – if it is not rewarded, it dies. For example, the Kurdish terrorist campaign in Turkey was very short-lived because it got no attention and resulted in a crack-down on Kurdish dissidents. This is why that, even if we do decide with withdraw from Saudi Arabia or whatever we must give Al-Qaeda a kicking first. It may not continue to bother us after we withdraw from the Middle East, but even the possibility of a stepped-up terrorist campaign over Spain, Kashmir and East Timor should caution us.

It seems to me that we have two reasons for our presence in the mid-east. One is the defense of Israel and one is oil. If we developed an alternative fuel source, I really wonder how long our presence would last.

This comes back to what I was arguing about alternative energy being essential for national security.

Israel is another matter. Personally, I think that it would be wrong to abandon Israel now. The west created the state in the first place, and it is the only liberal democracy in the region. Even support for Palestine is guarantee of protection against Islamist violence – look at what has happened in Europe recently.

Either way, we cannot totally avoid being in the Middle East, for the time being at least. We can (and should) intervene less, but for the time being I think the question is how we minimize the damage that Islamist terrorism can do.

[axordil]

Vison--

This is one of those rare cases where it may not be possible to achieve justice if peace is desired. For one thing, the people who set the whole thing in motion are all long dead, so we are left with second- and third- generation accomplices everywhere.

And look, if you will, at Iraq, and what happened when we purged the Baathists and dissolved the security services, both of which were on a moral basis defensible actions. Chaos. Chaos, despite what GWB and neocons may say, does not turn into democracy, any more than a forest fire turns into a bunch of weinie roasts. Those decisions probably doomed us--and certainly doomed Iraq--to a generation of war, and so far as I can tell, it was motivated by a sense of moral judgment and a desire to see justice done by penalizing the people who had been the tyrant's helpers. Good intentions. Or as Graham Greene said, "God save us from the innocent and the good."

It would be best for the world if Bin Laden died quietly in his sleep. Not very satisfying, is it? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth too. But the wish to balance things, or even to recognize that there is a balance to be measured, is not compatible with the change that needs to happen. What price are we willing to pay for our sense of justice? How many innocent people are we willing to see killed on ANY side, in order to accomplish our stated aim?

[axordil]

LM--

The underlying question of course, is why we were in Somalia, and why we were in Lebanon. If there had been a sense among the American people in either case that we had any real cause to be there, I suspect we would have sucked up the casualties a lot easier. But the very nature of being involved in a guerilla action almost guarantees that we DON'T have a good reason to be there. To wit: if we're in the middle of a guerilla action, we're in the middle of somebody ELSE's war.

At least until Iraq.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Chaos, despite what GWB and neocons may say, does not turn into democracy, any more than a forest fire turns into a bunch of weinie roasts.

Ax, I'm afraid I'm more cynical then you appear to be. I don't believe for a second that purging the Baathists was "motivated by a sense of moral judgment and a desire to see justice done by penalizing the people who had been the tyrant's helpers." Because these same Baathists (not to mention the tyrant himself) were considered allies and helpers by many of the same people that are in charge of the American government today (like Donald Rumfeld). And the Baathists (and the tyrant) were just as morally suspect then as they were when we removed them from power. In my opinion our moral hypocracy is one of the main drivers of the hate that fuels Islamic terrorism. If we want to seek a permanent answer to the problem, that would be a good place to start.

[axordil]

V-man:

I think there was more than one agenda at work. There is of course a deeply amoral but pragmatic element in the neocon agenda, but there are also people who I believe have drunk the ideological Koolaid and liked the taste, so to speak--like Bremer. I think there were some behind-the-scenes disagreements about the management of the immediate aftermath of the invasion that manifested in some of the more spectacular fubar moments. Certainly the military units on the ground didn't want it to happen. I think what happened is that the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis just didn't care that much about the details of what happened, while the ideologues (I'm thinking Wolfowitz and his Iraqi exile toadies like Chalabi) DID. And Bremer moved towards them in the absence of direction from the real bosses.

And of course, once it was done, undoing it was impossible. Those eggs were broken big time.

[vison]

Iraq is a completely separate issue, to me. I thought the invasion of Iraq was wrong from the getgo, no matter what the reasons were. It was up to the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam.

My sticking point is Israel. At some point the Arab world and the rest of the Muslim world, are going to have to recognize Israel. We, that is WE the West, cannot enter into or accomodate any other course of action. Israel is non-negotiable.

There is a time for accomodation and compromise and attempts at understanding other cultures. But there is also a time for the simplicity of Right vs Wrong. Are we never to stand up and say, "This far, and no farther"?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's easy to see who is wrong, but a lot harder to see who is right.

[vison]

It's easy to see who is wrong, but a lot harder to see who is right.

True enough as far as it goes.

As I've said before, there is wrong enough for everyone.

But.

Whatever else happens, Israel is there to stay. There is no alternative.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

We certainly agree about that, vison.

[Túrin Turambar]

The underlying question of course, is why we were in Somalia, and why we were in Lebanon.

Yes, that is why we need to choose our interventions carefully. It can be very hard, though – for example, we now know that a few thousand soldiers could have probably reduced the death toll in the Rwandan genocide by hundreds of thousands of people. Should we (generic we – anyone) have intervened? I don’t know.

I don't believe for a second that purging the Baathists was "motivated by a sense of moral judgment and a desire to see justice done by penalizing the people who had been the tyrant's helpers." Because these same Baathists (not to mention the tyrant himself) were considered allies and helpers by many of the same people that are in charge of the American government today (like Donald Rumfeld). And the Baathists (and the tyrant) were just as morally suspect then as they were when we removed them from power.

I’m with Ax – there were definitely good intentions behind the invasion of Iraq, even if some suspect ones as well. When Bush says that he sees it as his mission to democratize the world, I tend to take him at face value. Besides, what is there to gain from the Iraq war? Some lucrative contracts, but on the whole not that much.

In my opinion our moral hypocracy is one of the main drivers of the hate that fuels Islamic terrorism. If we want to seek a permanent answer to the problem, that would be a good place to start.

I’m not sure how many Muslims know or care about the moral hypocrisy of the west in these matters. The usual complaints are - support of Israel, troops in Saudi Arabia, not paying enough for Saudi oil, war in Iraq, unspecified comments about western imperialism, that sort of thing.

Personally, I would also like to see an end to the moral hypocrisy of Islamic Fundamentalism, so I suppose it cuts both ways.

It's easy to see who is wrong, but a lot harder to see who is right.

This comes back to what I was arguing before about foreign policy.

We cannot roll in guilt over whatever and expect to make gains against the Islamists. If we are to overcome Islamism as an ideology, then we must put up a strong front. Indecision and paralysis will damage us badly, just as overreaction will (and in Iraq, is). We need to keep trying to be better, but we also need to approach the problem with confidence and focus.

We were guilty over Versailles, and that played an essential part in the rise of Adolph Hitler – we were unwilling to enforce the sanctions we had laid down against him until it was almost too late. Yes, Versailles was overly harsh, but opposing Hitler was the right thing to do.

As I said above, concessions are made to the strong, not the weak. We will not force concessions from Islamists by rolling over. This is not neocon apologia – I think Iraq was, in the words of Talleyrand ‘worse than a crime…a mistake’. It is a recognition of simple realities of foreign policies – war only takes one aggressor, and even aggressors who can’t be reasoned with can be deterred.

[axordil]

Vison--

There is a danger in the "Israel right or wrong" position, which is really that democratic societies are imperfect; they are capable of pretty much the same exact range of atrocities as nondemocratic ones. They aren't prone to them in the same way of course, but under the "right" circumstances, they end up there. It is entirely possible that Israel or any other democracy could engage in democratically-sponsored genocide.

Again.

LM--

When Bush says the world should be democratized, what he actually means is safe for American corporations to exert influcence in and extract profits from. Thus we diddled Iraq and not Saudi Arabia, arguably a much greater threat, because we do just fine there, business-wise.

We can buy influcence in democracies. We can buy influence in most secular dictatorships (as we did in Iraq in the 80s, as we do now in China, although that begs the question of who is influencing whom). We can even buy influence in some religious dictatorships if the religious dictator profits from it. But there are a handful of places our money doesn't work, and it drives people like Rumsfeld and Cheney insane.

There were certainly people, mostly (like Wolfowitz) out of academia, who had less pecuniary motives for Iraq. But they (and PNAC) were used to provide cover for the actual agenda: they were driven, not driving.

I maintain: pull out the oil, pull out the support of major players, and Islamism reverts to being a bunch of cranks without support or the means to do anything, and loses the street soon thereafter.

Remember, Hitler was only a crank until he attracted the attention of German corporate types. Then he became a well-funded crank. Then he became the head of a popular movement with what passed for media saturation then. THEN he killed a lot of people.

V-man--

I'm not sure any major power has deliberately done anything "right" within our lifetime in terms of foreign policy. I think Canada may have done something right a few times, and perhaps Sweden, and NZ.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I’m with Ax – there were definitely good intentions behind the invasion of Iraq, even if some suspect ones as well. When Bush says that he sees it as his mission to democratize the world, I tend to take him at face value. Besides, what is there to gain from the Iraq war? Some lucrative contracts, but on the whole not that much.

I'm afraid I don't think that what Bush says or even believes matters very much. I believe that (like Reagan before him) he is no more then a puppet. As for the powers behind the thrown gain from the Iraq war? Chaos, mainly, which I believe is exactly what they were looking for. Continued destabilization of the most volatile region in the world.

[tinwë]

Oh, I don’t know V. I think there were certainly those among them who actually believed that they could put in place a friendly regime that would allow them to maintain a permanent military presence in the region on a scale they could only dream of in Saudi Arabia. I think Rumsfeld actually believed that they would welcome us with flowers. I think he actually believed they would create a secular democratic government that would be our ally. I don’t think any of them imagined things would go as horribly wrong as they have.

But now that they have, I think they are willing to settle for the next best thing (in their mind), which is a perpetual state of chaos.