A War That Can
Never Be Won
By Jonathan Steele
The Guardian
23 November, 2003
The
bombast has increased with the bombs. We saw two disturbing escalations
this week. The explosions that devastated the British consulate and
the HSBC bank in Istanbul mark a significant widening in the choice
of targets by those Islamist radicals who use terror to express their
hatred of British and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The Blair/Bush
response reached an equally alarming new level of ferocity.
At their swaggering
joint press conference on Thursday, the two men repeatedly made the
risible claim that they could win their war on terror. The prime minister
was the worse. While Bush gave himself a global carte blanche to intervene
anywhere, by speaking of his "determination to fight and defeat
this evil, wherever it is found", Blair put the issue in terms
of a finite goal. He talked of defeating terrorism "utterly"
and "ridding our world of this evil once and for all".
The hyperbole of
the religious pulpit allows for all-embracing and eschatological language,
but these men are meant to be practical political leaders. When Blair,
in his opposition days, invented the phrase "tough on crime, tough
on the causes of crime", he knew that crime could never be totally
eliminated. The task is to reduce and restrain it by a variety of methods.
Violence and terrorism are no different. Like poverty, they will always
be with us. At best they can only be diminished and contained. Yet now,
with the arrogance of power, we have the Bush/Blair roadshow promising
in sub-Churchillian tones to vanquish terrorism as though it were a
clearly defined enemy like Nazi Germany.
Terrorism is a technique.
It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy
state. Our leaders' failure to understand that point emerged immediately
after September 11 2001 when they reacted to the attacks in New York
and Washington by confusing the hunt for the perpetrators with the Afghan
"state" that allegedly "harboured" them. The Taliban
ran avicious regime, but Afghanistan was a disastrously failed state
and its nominal leader, Mullah Omar, had no control over al-Qaida.
By the same token
the "war" on terror should have remained what it initially
was, a metaphor like the "war" on drugs. But instead of being
harmless linguistic exaggeration to describe a broad campaign encompassing
a range of political, economic and police counter-measures, it was narrowed
down to real war and nothing else. The slippery slope that began with
Afghanistan quickly led to the invasion of Iraq, a symbolic and political
enormity whose psychological impact Bush and Blair have not yet grasped.
When Ariel Sharon,
then a middle-aged general, wanted to send Israeli tanks into Cairo
in October 1973, it was the arch-realist Henry Kissinger who realised
how devastating the emotional effect would be in the Arab world, and
stopped him. For a new generation of Arabs, the sight of American tanks
in Baghdad is just as humiliating. Osama bin Laden's claim that having
US forces at airbases close to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia
is a desecration appealed only to a few Muslims, but the daily television
pictures of US troops in the heart of an Arab capital, and not just
patrolling but using lethal force to back up an administration of occupiers,
inflames a much larger audience.
Jack Straw argues
that terrorism preceded the war on Iraq and it is therefore wrong to
blame the US and Britain for increasing the danger. This is a non-sequitur,
which also flies in the face of the evidence, admitted by US officials
themselves, that non-Iraqi Arabs have been infiltrating Iraq to commit
acts of terror because of the US presence.
Sharon, similarly,
says suicide bombings in Israel started before he took office. Does
that mean he shares no blame? That is not the view of four former Israeli
intelligence chiefs, who argued last week that Sharon's exclusive reliance
on hardline responses has weakened Israel's security and increased the
number of attacks on Israelis.
Before the war on
Iraq several of Britain's intelligence experts, including senior officials,
warned that it would increase the risk of terrorism and make British
interests potential targets - a view shared by most critics of the war.
To suggest they were wrong runs against common sense.
Coming after the
war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq has made al-Qaida's grisly work
easier. Dispersed by American bombing from their remote mountain lairs,
they have shifted to the much easier terrain of an urban Arab environment
where they can be more readily hidden and helped. Resistance to US forces
in southern and eastern Afghanistan as well as terrorist attacks on
aid workers and other western soft targets are on the increase, but
they appear to come from Afghan supporters of the former Taliban as
well as other Pashtun radicals from Pakistan. Most Arabs who were in
Afghanistan have moved to Iraq. There they have been joined by new Arab
recruits, eager to add their energy to Iraq's local resistance.
In the long history
of terrorism, al-Qaida has provided two novelties. One is its global
reach, marked by willingness to strike targets in many countries. The
other is its use of suicide attacks as a weapon of first, rather than
last, resort. Under the broad heading of terrorism as a political and
military instrument, suicide bombing is a sub-category, a technique
within a technique.
In the post-colonial
world its first proponents had nothing to do with the anti-Islamic myth
that martyrs are motivated by the hope of being greeted by dozens of
virgins waiting in heaven. It began with Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka,
an act of martial self-sacrifice by angry women as well as men. When
it spread to Palestine over the past decade, it was an act of last-resort
desperation by frustrated people who saw no other way to counter Israel's
disparity of power, as Cherie Blair once publicly pointed out. Al-Qaida
has merely taken an old technique and made it the weapon of choice.
The shock this week
is that Bush and Blair not only still believe that war is the way to
deal with terrorists but that even when faced by the escalation of Istanbul
they think victory is possible. The real issue is how to control risk.
Anti-western extremism will never be eradicated, but it can be reduced
by a combination of measures, primarily political.
The first is an
early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and the withdrawal
of foreign forces. An arrangement whereby the new Iraqi government "requests"
US troops to stay on will convince few in the Middle East. Second is
firm and sustained pressure on Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians,
presumably on the lines of the recent accord worked out in Geneva by
Israeli and Palestinian dissidents.
There is no guaranteed
defence against a suicide attack on a soft target. "Hardening"
targets by turning every US or British building, at home or abroad,
into a fortress makes little sense. It is better to try to reduce the
motivations (hatred, revenge, or an overwhelming sense of injustice)
that make people turn themselves into bombs. That endeavour will also
never produce complete success. In Blair's misguided words, it cannot
be done "utterly" or "once and for all". But it
is the more productive way to go.