We Don’t Need to Offer Therapy, but We Should Try to Understand
By Montag | Related entries in Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On TerrorismJuan Cole provides some insight on the London attackers that goes beyond the customary they hate our freedoms fare.
Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a “secret group” of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By Thursday afternoon, as the casualty toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was saying, “It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-related attack.” Although U.S. President George W. Bush maintains that al-Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies because of hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing of the sort. The attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of sacred revenge for British “massacres” in “Afghanistan and Iraq,” and a punishment of the United Kingdom for its “Zionism” (i.e., support of Israel). If they really are responsible, who is this group and what do they want?
And later on:
The communiqué on the London bombing is unusual in appealing both to the Muslim community and to the “community of Arabism.” “Urubah,” or Arabism, is a secular nationalist ideal. The diction suggests that the bombers are from a younger generation of activists who have not lived in non-Arab Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and think of Arabism and Islam as overlapping rather than alternatives to one another. The text makes relatively few references to religion, reading more as a statement of Muslim nationalism than of piety.
Salon.com “The time of revenge has come“
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July 8th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
I’m not inclined to take Cole’s word for it. He’s a smart guy about some aspects of Middle Eastern history, but he’s been dosed with “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” I had to stop reading him after he started denying he ever was in favor of an invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
I’ll wait to: 1. see if this claim of responsibility holds up as authentic, and 2. read it for myself, not just Juan Cole’s take on it. Supposedly Der Spiegel has published it, but I can’t find it on their online site, German or English.
Understand them, insofar as it helps us better to track them, defeat them, drain their support in money and men, and ultimately put them our of business, in whatever form of out-of-businessness suits the situation.
July 8th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
I agree. I want to understand their methods and stop them before they get started.
However, I will say that we shouldn’t be suprised when our methods to thwart terrorism in foreign lands breeds hatred of Democracy. A person who unjustly loses their whole family because of a “smart bomb” is not inclined to either forgive nor forget, and we need to make sure we consider that side as well.
I fear that the thousands of innocents we killed in Iraq could provide Al Qaeda a whole new batch of recruits for generations to come, and we haven’t even begun to feel the effects.
July 8th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
The Japanese were not very fond of democracy after being blown to smithereens by not-too-smart bombs in 1945, either. What would you have done differently then?
July 8th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
Or, to take a more pertinent example, the tens of thousands of French killed by Allied bombs during World War II. When you go to war in modern times, you better understand that it’s a process that breaks things and kills people. There are no more 18th century set-piece battlefields. The whole world’s a city now. And you can’t walk through war anymore like it’s a paved garden path. If that makes you swoon, don’t go to war.
Would we “make” more al Qaida recruits by retreating or by being ruthless in pursuit of victory? Apply our painfully acquired understanding of al Qaida to that question. Thank the gods that’s not the only two alternatives we face.
July 8th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
For what it’s worth, A href=”http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=8925″>al Jazeera thinks the “al Qaida in Europe” claim is bogus because a Quranic verse it quotes has errors.
July 8th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Respectfully, I think comparing WWII and our current War on Terrorism isn’t particularly valid. And I’m simply talking about fighting the war on the right fronts and making sure that whoever we’re targeting does have proveable ties with Al Qaeda. If we’re going to have a war on an ideology, we need to make sure it’s those who are furthering the ideology we’re targeting and not something ancilliary.
I mean, it’s still so hard to think that what we did in Iraq is wrong because the entire country is liberated. That is a great thing. But were there countries who did more to support Al Qaeda’s activities? Of course, and I’m not talking about Afghanistan.
I think Christopher Hitchens said it best in a recent column explaining why he was adamantly in favor of the war in Iraq. It didn’t necessarily have to do with Iraq’s terrorist ties. But once he had been to Iraq right after the Gulf War and made friends with some Iraqis, he couldn’t turn his back on his friends. So let’s just be straight about Iraq. It had everything to do with the fact that Saddam was an evil man and needed to be taken down.
But now will Iraq fall into a different set of problems now that we’ve attracted more terrorists to the region? Of course. War is messy and has consequences you can’t predict. I’m simply wondering how we could have better prevented these consequences.
In any event, these are all things I’m trying to resolve, and it’s never an easy process. Thankfully I have people like you to bounce ideas off of and I appreciate the responses.
July 8th, 2005 at 11:08 pm
I’d respectfully say that WWII had a great deal to do with a clash of ideologies. But I wasn’t comparing the wars as individual experiences, but the experience of civilian “collateral damage” (that dreadful term) in all wars. I’d even go so far as to say the average Iraqis in 2003 were a lot more eager to be rid of their tyrants than were the French of 1945, and I’ll gladly go dredge up the evidence someday if you think that’s absurd.
To fight al Qauida by only attacking it after it has raised an identifiable head is to fall into the endless and ultimately defeating problem of Herakles fighting the hydra. At some point you have to stop whacking at heads and start cauterizing the stumps before they regenerate (which means “pay more attention to Afghanistan”), but also to starve the body.
At some point the balance of the Iraqi people will have to stand up and want something more than “no Saddam, no Bush.” I think it’s been growing that way for some time now. For all our might, and all our blunders, the way out of where Iraq is now lies with its people. And that’s as it should be, frankly.
July 9th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
I guess I just didn’t see the parallel because nobody I can see is bent on world domination. However, I think a lot of countries around the world see the US as being bent on world domination with our “terror wars.” I don’t agree with this. In fact, i KNOW we aren’t, but that’s the world opinion right now. The “Global Test” if you will.
See, I guess we just aren’t going to agree where “the stump” is. I think it’s still in Afghanistan, but after we “cut off a few heads” we left for Iraq and left the stump to recoup and come back for another round.
And by the way, when I said proveable ties, I meant when we’re talking about regime change…because regime change is a BIG DEAL. The Taliban and Al Qaeda had extremely strong ties and that’s why it made sense for us to go in there and force the government out of power. But where are the ties between Osama and Saddam? Our justification can’t simply be “Because we think so.” No evidence has ever been clearly demonstrated to me that these two had the kinds of ties that the Taliban had.
And by the way, if you do have evidence that I haven’t seen please elaborate because I’m more than willing to hear it. In fact, I welcome evidence because I don’t want to keep thinking we went into a country without “just” provocation. Again, this brings into play what one defines as “just”, but for now I’d just like to know what you know.
July 9th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
“…al Jazeera thinks the ‘al Qaida in Europe’ claim is bogus because a Quranic verse it quotes has errors.”
I can’t say whether the statement from “al Qaida in Europe” is authentic, but it would seem from an article in the Washington Post the 7th that this could be the result of an “evolving Al Qaeda” different from the organization as directed by UBL.
“Understand them, insofar as it helps us better to track them, defeat them, drain their support in money and men, and ultimately put them our of business, in whatever form of out-of-businessness suits the situation.”
The biggest trick is understanding the impetus that drives people to join and carry out these desperate acts. Winning the war on the “hearts and minds” front, so to speak.
July 10th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Only enough evidence to say there was not no “direct operational” connection between them between Saddam and al Qaida, but there was plenty of willing involvement of Saddam in Mideast terrorism. That is, the 911 Commission report said they could find no evidence of such a connection. Some people would hold that “no evidence” is the same as “evidence of no.” I’m not that worried about that. It was not the case many people felt they had been sold by the U.S. government.
Just as there were not no WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, but at the same time there don’t seem to have been stockpiles of them or an advanced nuclear weapons program.
Zarqawi was there under Saddam’s rule. That’s intriguing. Abu Nidal found shelter there. Yassin? Qaida happened to find as its best ally the government of a failed nation with no money and no power and no technology. Lucky for us.
July 10th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
Amend that to read “there was not no connection, but there was no “direct operational” connection.” My bad. Too many complex sentences.
August 6th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Good job.