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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The Bush administration is good at bombing terrorists back to the Stone Age, but terrible at bringing Arabs and Muslims into the modern age.
Jan 9, 2004 | The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq has revived debates not heard since the end of the Cold War. America's leaders, and those Americans who support them, see the war on terror in general and the invasion of Iraq in particular as a necessary battle against evil, like the fight against Communism. Much of the rest of the world, and the American left, see Bush's crusade as simple-minded to the point of hysteria -- the same critique they leveled against Reagan-era anti-Communism.
In fact, neither side is right. These Cold War-era categories and battles are no longer relevant in addressing the issues posed by Islam, terrorism and the politics of the Middle East, and they obscure the real issues at stake. A further distraction are the passions, positive and negative, inspired by George W. Bush: Those who despise him are unable to accept that anything he does could be defensible, while his acolytes are equally myopic about the dangers and errors of his policies.
By insisting that the war on terror is a moral stand against evil, hawks elevate terrorism to a unique category that it doesn't deserve. They scare citizens into giving up freedoms -- undercutting America's credibility as the defender of freedom. They blur distinctions between different types of threats and risk demonizing Islam itself -- a dangerous development that is already sharply felt by people in the Middle East.
But leftists who rightly reject the vision of Islam as the enemy tend to dismiss its links to terrorism, underdevelopment and repression in the Middle East and outside it. And they are unable to understand how the invasion of Iraq -- despite the fact that it was sold under a false guise -- could and can move the region forward.
The Iraq invasion has a far more complex relation to the war on terror, and the battle to improve Arab and Muslim societies, than most partisans of either side are willing to admit. The invasion was justifiable, although extremely risky, because Iraq was a festering sore that was destabilizing the region and posed a definite threat to the West, though not an imminent one. The risk, of course, was that invading might result in unplanned consequences -- from mass anti-Americanism to Sunni rage, from the rise of Shiite fundamentalism to internecine strife, civil war and partition.
Many of those possible consequences are now threatening to become realities, thanks to the Bush administration's gross planning failures and bungling of the postwar period. The peculiarity of this historical moment is that the stakes are so high that if everything does in fact goes wrong, the invasion could turn out to have been a mistake. But it's too soon to tell.
Iraq under Saddam represented a major threat, but it is important to be clear about just what kind of threat. Saddam was a nasty dictator and a regional expansionist who might have launched more military campaigns against his neighbors if he had been allowed to. But it is becoming increasingly clear that he did not have any weapons of mass destruction, nor any ties to al-Qaida. He was a tin-pot dictator who did not pose a military threat to the West (in fact, the U.S. used him when it found it convenient to do so.) The real Iraq time bomb was not just Saddam's regime but the entire situation there, in particular the sanctions -- which were destructive and impoverishing, which generated Arab rage against the U.S. and could never have been ended without Saddam's departure.
It is commonly overlooked that during the entire decade of the Oslo peace process, the unresolved crisis in Iraq competed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the worst cause of tension between the Arab world and the West. On top of that, whereas the Palestinian leadership clearly made a choice to cooperate with the U.S., Saddam Hussein was a rallying point for defiance. Taken together, Iraq, sanctions, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia (the issue that set off Osama bin Laden) and more general Western encroachment upon traditional Middle Eastern societies gave rise in the 1990s to a new, internationally active, violent movement that was quite separate from the earlier internationally active Palestinian movements.
The left, afraid of passing judgments on other cultures, has erred by not recognizing that there is something in the Arab world that has made it turn to international terror, when other regions facing similar problems have not done so. Removing Saddam's regime, and putting pressure on other states in the region to reform, could be a way of forcing the Arab world to face up to its shortcomings. But by blurring the distinction between Iraq and al-Qaida and using crude but politically useful fear tactics to create an Arab-Muslim terrorist bogeyman, the Bush administration has gone too far in the other direction. Partly because of these ideological blinders, partly because it is not as firmly committed to liberty and justice as it claims, either at home or in the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has failed to take the necessary actions, both in post-invasion Iraq and in the region, to bring lasting positive changes to the region. And it has undercut America's ability to win the most crucial war of all: the war of ideas.
Instead of simultaneously fighting terrorism and concentrating on eliminating its root causes, Bush has only done the first. To whip up American support for his war on terror, he has played on Americans' fears, turning terrorism into an absolute moral evil and claiming that it poses as great a threat to the U.S. as the Cold War did. This is a mistake. First of all, terrorism strikes everybody, everywhere, not just the West and Westerners, even if they often seem to be the intended target. Second, terrorism simply doesn't pose the same threat as the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. Terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in rogue states are urgent security threats, but they cannot be compared to the apocalypse the world faced during the Cold War. Terrorism, however painful and terrifying it is, is ultimately insignificant. It will not bring down any Western government; indeed, it is not even doing that in less stable parts of the world. It is a containable problem, just as it was in the days of the Cold War. We should not now promote it to something grander.
The war on terror does indeed reflect a confrontation between the West and the Arab or Muslim world, but it bears no resemblance to the Cold War. There is no common enemy on the Muslim side, no Arab Warsaw Pact. There is no monolithic front against the West or anybody else, as indeed there is no unified attitude on this in the West. Nor is there a real ideological contest. Islam, despite its sometimes expansionist agenda (which it shares with many other religions), is no ideological rival to the Western way of life. It is true that many in the Arab and Muslim world fear being overwhelmed by Westernization, but many other regions share this concern, and have just as many other points of contention with the West.
Moreover, the international terrorist campaign the world is witnessing today is not particularly new. In the 1970s, an alliance of largely left-wing movements around the world, partly inspired and backed by the Soviets, also formed a huge network of interrelated terrorist cells. The international terrorist Carlos was the bogeyman then. Today's Afghanistan is yesteryear's Lebanon.
The idea that the current wave of terrorism is radically different from earlier forms, apocalyptic rather than political, is also misguided. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida and similar groups have very clear political goals, even if they have a religious background or justification -- and many people in the Middle East share those goals. The perpetrators of the attacks and their backers have very similar aims to some of the terrorists who operated in the 1970s. What indeed is the difference between groups such as Germany's Red Army Faction and al-Qaida? Is there a real difference in the Communist fight against capitalism and the fundamentalist fight against Western cultural and political dominance? And is al-Qaida's attempt to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East so different from the actions of smaller nationalist movements, such as the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA, who are trying to drive respectively Britain and Spain out of regions they claim?
Had it not been for the 9/11 attacks, it is doubtful al-Qaida and other fundamentalist groups would have been assigned a new category of terrorism all to themselves. And despite the horrific scale of those attacks, it was neither wise or constructive to do so. Elevating Islamist terror to a special category has had disastrous consequences both within America and abroad. Domestically, it has led to loss of liberty; internationally, it deepened the suspicions of Muslims and Arabs that the U.S. had no intention of dealing fairly with them.
Nor has it had a positive effect on our battle against terrorism. Years of experience have taught the West that the best way to fight terrorism is by using a law-and-order approach. Terrorists are criminals, to be hunted down and apprehended. (Afghanistan was a special case, a state whose ruling Taliban regime was virtually indistinguishable from an international terrorist organization. Invading Iraq was justifiable but not because of terrorism.) The very phrase "war on terror" is therefore dangerous, because it exaggerates and mischaracterizes the threat.
