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MCCAIN LAYS BARE THE FALLACY AT THE HEART OF 'THE WAR ON TERROR'
by Tony Karon
The National
Nov 2 2008
United Arab Emirates
Desperately scrambling to reel in Barack Obama's lead last week,
John McCain urged undecided Americans to imagine their priorities in
a way that might make them more likely to choose him. "For weeks now,
the attention of our country has been focused on the serious financial
troubles we face," he began. "When the jobs and financial security
of our people seem at risk, it is hard to spare much thought even for
the great and abiding concerns of this nation's security... But these
dangers have not gone away while we turned our attention elsewhere."
Senator McCain's aversion to focusing on the economy is quite
understandable: it's an issue on which more American voters trust
Senator Obama to steer them through what they know will be a long and
vicious storm. So Mr McCain instead sought to persuade them that,
in fact, the economy will soon correct itself, and then the next
president will have to confront the key challenge of our times: "Is
[Barack Obama] a man who has what it takes to protect America from
Osama bin Laden?"
The suggestion that al Qa'eda poses more danger to the well-being of
ordinary Americans than a tanking economy that threatens the jobs and
homes of millions seems preposterous to any sober observer: al Qa'eda
is a small conspiratorial organisation that once, seven years ago,
managed to pull off a spectacular attack on US soil, and has over
the same period pulled off a few more such grisly stunts in London,
Madrid, Casablanca and Bali. It controls no territory and is incapable
of disrupting the defences of even the weakest states on the planet,
much less the most powerful. To suggest it poses a greater risk than
the most profound slump in three generations made a good Halloween
story, nothing more.
But if McCain was simply trying to scare people into voting for him,
he was inadvertently laying bare the fallacy at the heart of the Bush
administration's "War on Terror", which made the organising principle
of US foreign policy a campaign against a handful of extreme jihadists.
Terror - politically motivated violence against civilians - has
always been a tactic favoured by marginal groups, who are able to
amplify their importance through the publicity garnered by grotesque
acts of carnage. But in itself, terrorism is rarely able to transform
the balance of power in favour of the terrorists. Palestinian radical
groups used the tactics of terror very effectively in the early 1970s
to prevent their people joining the Armenians in the panoply of the
world's displaced and forgotten nations. But it was not until the
intifada that began in 1987, which made the occupation politically
untenable, that the PLO forced Israel to begin seeking a political
solution.
Unlike mass insurrection or insurgency, a campaign of terrorism
can be waged by a couple of dozen individual. Terrorism, after all,
is not warfare in any traditional sense; it does nothing to disrupt
the functioning of a state. It is simply a particularly brutal form
of marketing an idea. The power of the attacks of 9/11 was primarily
symbolic, making the whole world take notice - indeed, it is unlikely
that those who devised the plan believed the twin towers would fall;
the fact that they did was equivalent to windmills crumpling before
Don Quixote's charge.
Like Che Guevara on his doomed adventure in Bolivia, the leaders
of al Qa'eda hoped that by demonstrating that they could bloody the
"far enemy" on his own soil, the global ummah would turn a marginal
jihadist movement into an insurrectional challenge to US-aligned
regimes all over the Muslim world. Nothing like this happened, of
course, and even in the most vulnerable pro-Western Muslim polities,
the balance of power remained unchanged. Even Islamist insurgencies
fighting US allies in places such as Gaza and Lebanon viewed al Qa'eda
with scepticism.
But when the Bush administration responded by invading first
Afghanistan and then Iraq in the name of stamping out the threat
of terrorism, it turned the Muslim masses against the US far
more effectively than the 9/11 attacks had done, and brought on a
spectacular decline in US strategic influence. Pakistan's suggestion,
in the weeks after the attacks, that the US pursue a policy aimed
at separating the Taliban from al Qa'eda was swept aside and the US
plunged in to a war that is now proving unwinnable - and the original
Pakistani suggestion is becoming conventional wisdom.
In Iraq, it was only once the US decided to isolate the small bands of
al Qa'eda fighters by negotiating with (and even paying the salaries
of) many of the insurgents that had been killing American troops, that
they managed to turn things around. In Pakistan, a policy prioritising
military attacks on the communities hosting a handful of al Qa'eda
leaders has helped ignite an insurgency that has threatened the
viability of the Pakistani state.
In Somalia, the fact that a handful of al Qa'eda operatives were
sheltered by an element in the Islamist movement was enough for
Washington to back an Ethiopian invasion; but a political solution
that includes the Islamists will be the only way to restore stability
and end the piracy plaguing the Somali coastline.
Even domestic political liberty and the US constitution have suffered
egregious damage at the hands of the "war on terror", whose obsession
with al Qa'eda has become self-destructive to US global interests on
a scale commensurate with that wrought by Captain Ahab's pursuit of
Moby Dick.
To the extent that the next president has much time for anything
beyond extracting the economy from a very deep ditch, the overriding
priority will be cleaning up the mess created by President Bush's
obsession with Osama bin Laden. Call me Ishmael...
by Tony Karon
The National
Nov 2 2008
United Arab Emirates
Desperately scrambling to reel in Barack Obama's lead last week,
John McCain urged undecided Americans to imagine their priorities in
a way that might make them more likely to choose him. "For weeks now,
the attention of our country has been focused on the serious financial
troubles we face," he began. "When the jobs and financial security
of our people seem at risk, it is hard to spare much thought even for
the great and abiding concerns of this nation's security... But these
dangers have not gone away while we turned our attention elsewhere."
Senator McCain's aversion to focusing on the economy is quite
understandable: it's an issue on which more American voters trust
Senator Obama to steer them through what they know will be a long and
vicious storm. So Mr McCain instead sought to persuade them that,
in fact, the economy will soon correct itself, and then the next
president will have to confront the key challenge of our times: "Is
[Barack Obama] a man who has what it takes to protect America from
Osama bin Laden?"
The suggestion that al Qa'eda poses more danger to the well-being of
ordinary Americans than a tanking economy that threatens the jobs and
homes of millions seems preposterous to any sober observer: al Qa'eda
is a small conspiratorial organisation that once, seven years ago,
managed to pull off a spectacular attack on US soil, and has over
the same period pulled off a few more such grisly stunts in London,
Madrid, Casablanca and Bali. It controls no territory and is incapable
of disrupting the defences of even the weakest states on the planet,
much less the most powerful. To suggest it poses a greater risk than
the most profound slump in three generations made a good Halloween
story, nothing more.
But if McCain was simply trying to scare people into voting for him,
he was inadvertently laying bare the fallacy at the heart of the Bush
administration's "War on Terror", which made the organising principle
of US foreign policy a campaign against a handful of extreme jihadists.
Terror - politically motivated violence against civilians - has
always been a tactic favoured by marginal groups, who are able to
amplify their importance through the publicity garnered by grotesque
acts of carnage. But in itself, terrorism is rarely able to transform
the balance of power in favour of the terrorists. Palestinian radical
groups used the tactics of terror very effectively in the early 1970s
to prevent their people joining the Armenians in the panoply of the
world's displaced and forgotten nations. But it was not until the
intifada that began in 1987, which made the occupation politically
untenable, that the PLO forced Israel to begin seeking a political
solution.
Unlike mass insurrection or insurgency, a campaign of terrorism
can be waged by a couple of dozen individual. Terrorism, after all,
is not warfare in any traditional sense; it does nothing to disrupt
the functioning of a state. It is simply a particularly brutal form
of marketing an idea. The power of the attacks of 9/11 was primarily
symbolic, making the whole world take notice - indeed, it is unlikely
that those who devised the plan believed the twin towers would fall;
the fact that they did was equivalent to windmills crumpling before
Don Quixote's charge.
Like Che Guevara on his doomed adventure in Bolivia, the leaders
of al Qa'eda hoped that by demonstrating that they could bloody the
"far enemy" on his own soil, the global ummah would turn a marginal
jihadist movement into an insurrectional challenge to US-aligned
regimes all over the Muslim world. Nothing like this happened, of
course, and even in the most vulnerable pro-Western Muslim polities,
the balance of power remained unchanged. Even Islamist insurgencies
fighting US allies in places such as Gaza and Lebanon viewed al Qa'eda
with scepticism.
But when the Bush administration responded by invading first
Afghanistan and then Iraq in the name of stamping out the threat
of terrorism, it turned the Muslim masses against the US far
more effectively than the 9/11 attacks had done, and brought on a
spectacular decline in US strategic influence. Pakistan's suggestion,
in the weeks after the attacks, that the US pursue a policy aimed
at separating the Taliban from al Qa'eda was swept aside and the US
plunged in to a war that is now proving unwinnable - and the original
Pakistani suggestion is becoming conventional wisdom.
In Iraq, it was only once the US decided to isolate the small bands of
al Qa'eda fighters by negotiating with (and even paying the salaries
of) many of the insurgents that had been killing American troops, that
they managed to turn things around. In Pakistan, a policy prioritising
military attacks on the communities hosting a handful of al Qa'eda
leaders has helped ignite an insurgency that has threatened the
viability of the Pakistani state.
In Somalia, the fact that a handful of al Qa'eda operatives were
sheltered by an element in the Islamist movement was enough for
Washington to back an Ethiopian invasion; but a political solution
that includes the Islamists will be the only way to restore stability
and end the piracy plaguing the Somali coastline.
Even domestic political liberty and the US constitution have suffered
egregious damage at the hands of the "war on terror", whose obsession
with al Qa'eda has become self-destructive to US global interests on
a scale commensurate with that wrought by Captain Ahab's pursuit of
Moby Dick.
To the extent that the next president has much time for anything
beyond extracting the economy from a very deep ditch, the overriding
priority will be cleaning up the mess created by President Bush's
obsession with Osama bin Laden. Call me Ishmael...