[Dialogue] Don't Let the Neocons Call It a 'War on Terror'

Fri Jul 21 11:57:29 EST 2006

AlterNet

Don't Let the Neocons Call It a 'War on Terror'

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 21, 2006, Printed on July 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/39235/

There's never been a global war on terror. It's a sham, a ruse. The conflict
that's broken out between Israel and Hezbollah shows us, again, how
important it is to articulate that. It's a real war, and it has both neocons
and Islamic extremists praying that it will escalate into the global Clash
of Civilizations that they've long lusted after.

Bush and Congress gave Israel the green light to pummel Lebanon for a while
because "Israel is fighting a brave battle in a dangerous front in the War
on Terror." And what can we, as Americans, really say about that? After all,
we accepted the idea (some of us grudgingly) that there was a global "War on
Terror" ourselves -- why shouldn't Lebanon be the next front?

When the media and our political class accepted the war frame, the hawks got
a blank check. Everything that followed -- invasions, illegal surveillance
and prisoners held in limbo, are all expected during times of war. Once we
went to "war," resisting those policies became an uphill fight. War talk
justifies powerful states responding to terrorist or insurgent attacks with
disproportionate force. That makes the hawks feel macho and will likely
create a whole new generation of potentially violent radicals who hate our
guts.

We should have fought the "War on Terror" narrative from the beginning.
Calling it a "war" is a numerical error, not an ideological difference.
There are a few tens of thousands of potentially violent extremists
dispersed around the world. They're not gathered in large groups, and you
can't distinguish them from ordinary civilians. That makes it fundamentally
an intelligence and law enforcement problem (which may require some military
support).

But it goes further than that. There's no global war between East and West
because there are no discrete sides. First of all, there's no 'Us.' The
Western democracies agree that terrorism is a problem, but they are
perfectly divided about how to address it. The United States and Israel
stand alone in their "wars," the Russians have their "war" with the Chechens
and the rest of the world does what simple logic dictates: investigate
terror cells and arrest the participants. Sometimes security forces kill
them. They've had quite a bit of success.

What's more, we don't really care about Islamic extremism per se. We are no
more allied with the Russians in their war with Chechen separatists than we
have been with the Chinese as they've cracked down on Islamic groups in
Xinjiang. Where U.S. "interests" aren't involved, we're indifferent.

Much more important -- and so many Americans don't get this -- there's no
"them." The image of a well-organized global Islamic insurgency is a
fantasy. Al Qaeda was one of a dozen Islamic extremist groups that emerged
in the 1990s, and Bin Laden was one of a few dozen influential and
charismatic militant leaders. Individual groups were fighting separate,
distinctly domestic battles; Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya opposed the Egyptian
government, Hezbollah was formed to beat back the Israeli occupation of
Lebanon, the Group Islamique Armé rose up to topple Algeria's government,
and so on.

All of those conflicts had their own unique contexts and histories, and
almost all of those movements had legitimate gripes with some rather
unsavory governments. Most Americans couldn't tell you what the struggle
between the Philippine government and Abu Sayyaf is all about, and why
should they? That battle has little to do with us, as so many of them don't.
Some of these "terror groups," remember, were called "freedom fighters" when
they were pointed at the Soviets or their client states.

In that landscape, Al Qaeda was unique in one important way: Bin Laden, like
his neocon counterparts, saw the world gripped in an existential struggle
between East and West. He was jockeying for position with dozens of other
movements, none of which were based on a broad, global effort against the
United States and its allies. Bin Laden focused on US support for the Saudi
government, for Israel, for Egypt's repressive regime (a government that
imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of political Islamists) and he
preached that the United States was the head of the snake. First defeat
America, and then all those individual, national and very particular battles
could be won.

This was not an easy sell. Messing with the U.S., it was widely
acknowledged, was not a terribly smart course of action, and many militants
had a narrowly focused hatred of their own domestic ideological opponents.
It also didn't sit well with Bin Laden's hosts. As Jason Burke writes in his
excellent book,  <http://alternet.bookswelike.net/isbn/1850436665> Al Qaeda,
"it is important to recognize that [Islamist movements] in Yemen and
Afghanistan, and the regime in the Sudan, have roots in local contingencies
that pre-date Bin Laden." They used the sheik and allowed themselves to be
used by him, but their conflicts, too, were domestic in nature. In early
1996, the Sudanese government approached the United States and Saudi Arabia
and offered to turn Bin Laden over to their security services. They refused.
In May of that year, he returned to Afghanistan, where he had developed a
reputation fighting the Soviets.

Here we come to a crucial part of the story of the rise of international
Islamism -- a narrative the American media has been criminally complicit in
ignoring. In August of 1998, independent groups loosely affiliated with Al
Qaeda attacked U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Rather than
treating the attacks as a security problem that cried out for better
intelligence, Bill Clinton reacted by using the tools of war, launching over
a hundred cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan in Operation Shortsighted
Violence ("Infinite Reach"). The missiles were primarily for domestic
consumption -- to deflect attention from Monica's cum-stained dress and to
assuage the bloodthirsty right -- and had little effect on violent
extremists. But they did knock out Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant,
precipitating a disease epidemic that killed tens of thousands of people --
a story ignored by the Western press.

Meanwhile, the Taliban had grown weary of Bin Laden's shtick. They were sick
of his public attacks against the "crusaders and Zionists," and while the
Taliban's leaders were terribly provincial, they understood that the heat
Bin Laden was bringing down on them wasn't helping their cause. Remember,
this was a group that was negotiating with Texas oilmen from Unocal to
install a major pipeline in Afghanistan; they wanted foreign investment and
recognition.

In mid-1998, the Taliban, like the Sudanese before them, cut a deal to turn
Bin laden over to Saudi Arabia, where he would be tried for treason and in
all likelihood executed. All that the Taliban asked in return was for a
group of religious authorities loyal to the Saudi government to issue a
statement justifying the move under Islamic law -- a mere technicality.

In July of that year, the deal was confirmed and, in early September, two
planes landed in Kandahar carrying Prince Turki and a group of Saudi
commandos to collect Bin Laden. But the deal had run into a snag three weeks
earlier, when the United States had launched its cruise missiles. The Saudis
arrived only to be told the deal was off and to be dressed down by Taliban
leader Mullah Omar. The strikes had changed everything.

The missile attack was a disaster with far-reaching consequences. Those
Tomahawks validated all of Bin Laden's claims. The United States, it seemed,
really was unconcerned with the deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims.
Hundreds of extremists who had come to Afghanistan to train for their local
fights in Kashmir or the Philippines or wherever suddenly flocked to Al
Qaeda, convinced that Bin Laden's epic struggle against the West was their
own.

They didn't necessarily share his priorities, but our military response
showed he had gotten to us, and he became a hero. It was the beginning of a
trend that continues today: the United States, where political leaders
explain complex geopolitical issues in simple binaries
(freedom-loving/terror-loving) and are unable to differentiate between a war
and a law enforcement problem, stumbles blindly into a full-blown attack on
a sovereign country -- pressed ever forward by its psychotic and racist
right wing -- with disastrous and unintended consequences. Iraq wasn't the
first, and Bush didn't start it -- Clinton did.

9/11 was destined to happen one way or another, even if Bush had paid
attention to that famous briefing at his ranch in Crawford. That's because
the fuse that set off 9/11 was laid out decades ago in the Reagan era. His
administration joined the Saudi regime (and Pakistani intelligence) in
promoting an extremist form of Islamic fundamentalism to counter the Soviets
in Afghanistan and the Pan-Arabists in the Gulf -- and it was lit by
Clinton's fireworks display.

After 9/11, we could have knocked the hell out of Al Qaeda and fractured the
delicate coalition that Bin Laden had managed to cobble together after the
East Africa bombings. Instead, we launched a "war" on terror, and we again
proved to a receptive audience that we're the enemy they should focus on.
Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Gitmo -- these are recruiting posters for global Jihad.

We may yet end up with a unified opponent against whom we can fight a global
war. But if we do, it will be one of our own making. It'll be because we
didn't nip the war talk in the bud.

An earlier version of this article first appeared in The Mix. Read the
original here <http://alternet.org/blogs/themix/#39163> . 

Joshua Holland <mailto:%20joshua.holland at alternet.org>  is an AlterNet staff
writer. 

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