The Terrorist's Apprentice: Contextualizing "The Global War on Terror"
Mistakes were made in the war on terror, none of them new.
The Infernal Machine: A History
of Terrorism
By Matthew Carr
The New Press. 410 pages. $26.95.
The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror
By Stephen Holmes
Cambridge University Press. 367 pages. $30.
I don't often agree with Donald Rumsfeld. But the former secretary of defense got one thing right when he made a valiant effort two years ago to rebrand the Global War on Terror as the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. It didn't work, of course: "gsave" didn't have the right ring to it, and President Bush never appeared to buy into it anyway. Still, it was an indication that at least a few of the professional ostriches in the administration had begun to notice something important: that the war on terror isn't a war and it isn't directed against terrorism.
So what is it then? In the months immediately following 9/11, this was the kind of topic that got a lot of attention. Today, it's been squeezed out by the day-to-day minutiae of the Iraq War and the prospect of war with Iran. These are, God knows, urgent matters. But they've sucked the oxygen away from arguably more important issues, and that has allowed several long—established conservative assumptions about the war on terror—or whatever it is—to calcify into conventional wisdom, even among many liberals.
Two new books give us a chance to revisit those assumptions. The first, Matthew Carr's The Infernal Machine, is the American edition of Unknown Soldiers: How Terrorism Transformed the Modern World, published last year in Great Britain. Carr provides a guided tour of the past century of terrorism, starting with the assassination of Czar Alexander II by a pair of anarchist bomb-throwers in 1881 and culminating in the atrocities of 9/11. But this is no dispassionate work of history. Carr's goal is to demystify terrorism, removing it from the realm of incomprehensible and unprecedented insanity that it occupies in the popular media. He places terrorism squarely in its proper context as a long-standing and commonplace tactic of war, used by both insurgent groups and governments alike.
During the Battle of Algiers, the French army famously employed terror tactics every bit as promiscuously as the nationalist guerrillas it was fighting. The Israelis are reported to have approved the use of car bombs in 1980s Lebanon. And the United States betrayed no qualms over the tactics its mujahideen proxy fighters employed against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As Carr observes, "Even the most powerful nations will observe the rules of conventional war only as long as they have some chance of winning through conventional means." In none of these cases was terror itself the enemy. Terrorism was merely a tactic, used by both sides because it happened to be the most effective tool available. And though generals may be paid to devise ways to counter their enemies' tactics, countries don't go to war against tactics. They go to war against the people using them.
So why did the Bush administration decide to declare war on terrorism after 9/11? Partly because, as Carr documents, military overreaction is the historically most common response to terrorist threats: Doing something—anything—is usually the first order of business. It was also a convenient way to take any meaningful discussion of America's policy in the Middle East off the table. This is evident in the popular conservative trope "They hate us for our freedoms," a handy phrase that preempts any critical investigation of our actions abroad. After all, what's the point of self-reflection if the real cause of Muslim rage is the Bill of Rights? That's hardly a negotiable document. Recently, Dinesh D'Souza road-tested an even more malignant version of this idea—"They hate us for our immorality"—suggesting that the real enemy is social liberalism. For movement conservatives, it doesn't get much better than that.
such muscular myopia may be a thoroughly flawed strategy, but it does succeed at deflecting attention from the question of whether our problems are partly a result of our own actions and policies in the Middle East. As Stephen Holmes puts it in The Matador's Cape, "To recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and terrorism only a symptom, is to invite a political solution."
The Matador's Cape—the title is an allusion to Osama bin Laden's boast that the 9/11 attacks were designed to bait the United States into a berserk overreaction—is a collection of previously published essays repackaged into a semi-coherent, but often sharp, narrative of America's "reckless response" to 9/11. Holmes identifies several reasons, some prosaic, for the administration's decision to declare war on terrorism rather than on Islamic radicalism. A broader war was Dick Cheney's preferred justification for a massive expansion of executive power, one of his goals since he worked in the Ford administration three decades ago. For Rumsfeld, it was a way to have the Pentagon lead the response to 9/11 while providing a boost for his pet project of military transformation. For George W. Bush, it's harder to say. Perhaps he couldn't resist the call to become a "wartime president."
In any case, all three men also appear to have shared a debilitating Cold War belief that only states can truly cause serious damage. As Paul Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's No. 2 man, told terrorism czar Richard Clarke tersely in the spring of 2001, "You give bin Laden too much credit." Even after bin Laden's deadly power was later confirmed, the administration's major players never gave up their obsession with state-sponsored terrorism. The result was a war against Iraq instead of a war against Al Qaeda.
This has been disastrous for several reasons. First, as Holmes argues, a fight against Al Qaeda is eminently winnable. Not easy or short, but winnable. The war in Iraq, on the other hand, is not only beyond winnable but from the get-go had the profoundly ruinous side effect of alienating our natural allies in the battle against violent radicals. "Instead of driving fundamentalist and nationalist movements apart," Holmes points out, Bush "has driven them together. He has unwittingly channeled the powerful passions of frustrated nationalism into what would otherwise have remained a dangerous but uprooted and therefore manageable anti-American jihad." How's that for irony? George W. Bush, the master of domestic wedge politics, failed to grasp the possibility of exploiting wedges against our foreign enemies. Just as people with hammers view every problem as a nail—an image Holmes is fond of—the world's only superpower became fatally predisposed to viewing its overseas problems as military ones.
A military response to 9/11 would have made sense had it been directed narrowly at Al Qaeda and like-minded hardcore jihadists, who are motivated by a complex stew of religious fanaticism and rage that leaves no room for negotiation. But in the long run, jihadists can cause serious, long-lasting damage only if they have substantial popular support. Without it they wither and eventually die. Unfortunately, our blinkered response to 9/11, including large-scale warfare and support for dictators throughout the Middle East, has instead increased the popularity of the violent radicals and put us implicitly at war with an entire region, rather than with a small and—until recently—unloved band of Sunni extremists. If there's a lesson from the sorry mess Bush has made, this is it: The only way to beat Al Qaeda is to wage what you might call a global counterinsurgency campaign, separating the terrorists from the surrounding population and getting the broader Muslim world on our side.
This idea is hardly an original one. In fact, it's Counterterrorism 101. But even after five years of the administration's flailings, the mainstream media rarely engages with it. It probably doesn't seem "serious" enough. But original or not, if we're going to win this war it needs to be repeated until it finally sinks in. Holmes and Carr don't provide much specific guidance on how to get the war on terror back on track, but their criticisms do illuminate a way forward. This includes reforming the U.S. military so that it can fight counterinsurgencies and perform peacekeeping; renouncing the Bush doctrine of preventive war; reaffirming our commitment to multilateral institutions; taking nuclear nonproliferation seriously; once again acting as an honest broker in the Middle East peace process; and making aggressive use of public diplomacy and economic engagement to bring the Muslim world into the global community.
In the end, we won the Cold War because Eastern European countries wanted to join the West. We really did have a more successful, more tolerant, more liberal society than the Soviets, and ultimately that was what made the difference. Likewise, right after 9/11, when most residents of the Middle East were shocked and disgusted by Al Qaeda's attacks, it would have been possible to start securing their long-term support for a campaign against violent Islamic extremism. Instead, we chose a course that did just the opposite. But even after nearly six years of digging ourselves deeper into this hole, it's not too late to begin digging ourselves out. Here's hoping that our next president understands where to start.
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What the West could not accomplish in the Crusades- a cultural dominance of Muslim land was effectively achieved following WWI and completed by decolinialization after WWII. A 19th century western cultural and civic concept of the nation-state was imposed on a tribal-familial society that was more akin to a mafia arrangement than to a democratic European society. The collectivization of multiple tribes under the dictatorship of a dominant group favored by the colonialist group in power was done for the convenience of the West not the good of the people upon which it was subjected. The reaction among the disfavored tribes and families was almost immediate with the formation of terrorist groups, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt .
Any society has, at its core, a system to provide justice to resoluve disputes and security in other words a monopoly on the use of force to secure individuals' life and property. The Western imposition of the dictatorial nation-state left the dominated populations without the cultural customs that had provided some sense of both core systems. The intellectual reaction of people like Qtab, the ideological father of the Muslim Brotherhood, were to embrace Sharia Law and a clerical state in opposition to the Western system of law created by elected mortals- who had imposed the dictatorships upon their tribes, clans and families.
Muslim terrorism can be eliminated if the entire Arab-Persian-Pashtun et al. lands were deconstructed by plebescites covering the entire area from Baghdad to Morroco and Tehran to Kashmir. In this sense Bush has the right idea, that people every where desire democracy. He could start the process with a partitioning of Iraq.
The oppressed in Iraq and other countries will embrace democratic ideals at least once, if only to chose with whom they feel a shared community of security and justice. This would all but eliminate the sense of injustice and humiliation so often mentioned by jihadists. It does not mean they will embrace western values or that they will improve economically, but the allure of justice and security through a theocratic state will be obliterated as a viable option.
Inter-state terrorism can only exist in the space created by international law recognized by two states. The moment a terrorist group occupies territory it becomes vulnerable to attack and retaliation. The anonymity of the terrorist organization dissolves.
Terrorism has two fatal flaws. First, the use of terror most often is inflicted on the population that must allow the terrorists accommodation and support. Invariably that pond of accommodation is turned against the indiscriminate and hideous butchery inflicted on it in the name of the cause. Second,terrorism depends on the Western laws that regulate inter-state relations and a free press that panders to more to emotional themes than to reasoned analysis. Terrorism exists where western media's preference is for sensational gore and a predilection to exaggerated danger and engendered hand-wringing anxiety. The use of terrorist proxies on an international scale, such as Syria or Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza are much more likely to result in conventional warfare that on going terrorism. But terrorist organizations that hold territory must take on the obligations of government or perish.
A state that condones privatized terrorism is at risk only when the offended state is prepared to coerce the condoning state into compliance with international law. If the state condoning terrorist activity is unwilling to act, the offended state must assert a right to pursue the offenders with in the borders of the non responsive state. That is the basis for preemptive warfare and is the only option when international law is given no effect and a nation is threated by non-state private entities within its boundaries. States cannot be allowed to sit on their hands.
