The number killed in Bush’s “War on Terrorism” is not known. We know the number of “allied” killed but we do not know the number of casualties among Afghans or Iraqis.
Bush’s war officially started when a fairly small group of individuals caused the deaths of around 3,000 people to promote their political ends. So far in reaction maybe 150-200,000 have been killed. But a smaller group of murderers killed a very few people and that led to the deaths of over 70 million.
Terrorism is not a new technique. As Ken Livingstone pointed out on Friday, its history goes back to at least the 19th century. The Cold War may have disguised a reality that terrorism is an integral part of city life. If so, maybe we should be finding better reactions that unleashing the Dogs of War.
Conan Doyle fans may recall that Sherlock Holmes had several encounters with shadowy “anarchist” organisations bent on destroying Victorian society. They have come under various guises to encompass their political or social aims. Anachists or the IRA, ETA, the Red Hand Gang, the Red Brigades, Bader Meinhoff and even the mafia in the USA were using the techniques of terror to simply get money.
For the most part the reaction has been to view these people as criminals. Churchill was criticed for over-reacting when he ordered naval guns to be used in the Seige of Sidney Street. The most extreme reaction so far was to a political murder. The killing of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarjevo by nationalists precipitated World War I and in turn that “unfinished business” re-erupted in 1939. The total killed in those two conflicts was over 70million.
Today the motives of the killers include a perverse interpretation of religion, seeking to punish those who insult their distortion of teachings by killing. That’s whether the reaction is against liberal interpretations of Islam like Bin Laden or his copycats or by the fundamentalist Christians in the USA who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors.
Let’s recognise that terrorism is not new, not confined to one religion, for a variety of motives and that its sole purpose is to get the survivors to change their behaviour or policies. There may be good reasons to change policies and this should be done if those are right, but not because of the terrorism. We must as a general rule not change our policies and not over-react. We have seen the result of over reaction in the past couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Counter-oppression is the aim of terrorists because it feeds the cause of the discontent they exploit. Those 70 millions died in wars that started with a gunshot in Sarajevo. Let’s not let Bush take us further along that road.
The amount of explosives in each of the London bombs was very small and indicates controls have been effective in limiting the impact. Point out that the way the population of the USA can be protected is by common sense, vigilence and staying calm and resolute not to be affected. Bush has broken Iraq and ways must be found to fix those wounds before the US disengages but point out the best way to protect American cities was not to send the huge numbers of police and firemen who are in the US reserve forces to foreign lands in pursuit of lies. Challenge the propagandists when they mealy mouth about “attacking freedom”. The truth will set you free.
I don’t think the Cold War disguised or obscured terrorism; it became the centerpiece of superpower relations in the form of Mutual Assured Destruction. Strategic nuclear weapons are, after all, weapons of terror directed at civilian populations.
The thing that has most disturbed me about the fight against terrorism, and not just in the recent GWOT, is that people talk as if there is a clear dividing line between terrorism and any other form of military action. The military itself, to its credit, has never made that distinction internally. They speak of assymetric or low-intensity warfare. The ultimate goal of all armed action is to break the will of the enemy to fight, not least because it is usually easier than breaking their ability to fight. Terrorism and guerilla warfare are often demanded by the principle of economy of force. Just look at Iraq: a fairly small, poorly-armed, ill-trained, unorganized and inexpensive hodge-podge of suicide bombers and ordinary guerillas have all but defeated the US military, where Saddam Hussein’s conventional army was rolled up by the US like a carpet. And we are slowly but surely losing the will to fight.
I guess what I find so offensive about this artificial distinction between one kind of armed action and another is the moralistic crap that seeps out of the mouths of leaders during times like these. Suicide bombers, they say, are craven cowards. It seems to me that it takes an awful lot of balls to knowingly go to one’s death. It certainly did for the Allied troops at Normandy, or the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad. Knowingly going to one’s death is part and parcel of war.
The 9/11 attack and the London Blitz were acts of terror, they say. And the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were… what?
There is not discrete division between the 101st Airborne and the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades. There is a continuum of violence. At the high end are the rich countries with their giant armies, and at the low end are small bands of men with salvaged AK’s and explosive vests. Both ends of the scale involve violence against civilians designed to secure capitulation. It’s worth noting that Americans practically invented guerilla warfare in our revolution.
Armed violence is ugly and horrible. It doesn’t matter whether you are fighting for freedom, democracy, God, the Supreme Leader, some ideology, revenge, or money. It may occasionally be necessary to use force to defend oneself, though probably a lot less often than civilian leaders, far from the front lines, would have us believe. In the end, whatever the cause and whatever the means, it all boils down to crushing, burning, fragmenting, and shredding human beings. There is no triumph in war; war itself represents a complete failure of countless people to comport themselves like human beings.
Cutting through the moralistic and jingoistic bullshit would go a long way towards getting a clear picture of the struggle in which we are presently engaged. And without that clear picture, we have little hope of bringing the struggle to an end.
Also, the trumped up claim that the Soviet Union was behind terrorism worldwide was one of the neocon rallying cries against the Soviets during the later stages of the cold war. While it may be difficult to identify deaths resulting from this, it clearly increased the danger of catastrophic conflict.
The way the West hides its own acts of terror (and historically has done for aeons) as collateral damage or by labelling civilians as suspected terrorists (with no evidence) is one of the biggest outrages in the world today and is also a major reason why so many non-westerners want to attack the west.
That’s whether the reaction is against liberal interpretations of Islam like Bin Laden or his copycats or by the fundamentalist Christians in the USA who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors.
Did you mean literal?
I shudder to see the words “liberal” and “Bin Laden” in the same sentence.
NO, Bin Laden promotes a extremely strict version of Islam which is considerably influenced by Arabic traditions that date back to before the time of the Prophet. His opposition to the Saudi royal family is to a large extent an outcome of the “holier than thou” atititude. It is also what gets him respect from younger muslims who have retreated into ill-informed interpretations of Islam, in part as a reaction to the economic and social deprivation they have experienced growing up.
I’ll give a very small example to illustrate this as it shows how working with the community changes actions. The muslim community I know best is in the East End and they mostly originate from Bangladesh. Most of the parents are first generation immigrants who worked in the merchant navy. They are the latest in a long line of migration into the UK that starts in this area round the old docks. In the very early days they suffered (and still do) racist attacks. Like the Hugenots, the Jews and the Afro-Carribeans they formed the latest underclass for the older groups to oppress.
For most council (social) housing was all the accommodation on offer and much of it was the run down estates from the 20s and 30s that were not bombed and redeveloped after WWII. The combination of the unpopularity of the housing with the older groups and wanting to be close to relatives or friends for support led to a situation where you could almost tell which village in Sylhet the family came from by the block they lived in here.
The families are deeply religious. Most of the children and virtually all the boys attend Koran classes after ordinary school every day. Part of the traditions is a very strict adherence to fasting during Ramadan and children will want to start as they move into their teens or even before. A misinterpretation had sprung up in Bangladesh that the requirement not to drink included not swallowing spittle. Consequently a lot of the children would spit it out which was obviously unhygenic in school. The problem was discussed with the local Imams who agreed that the practice did not appear in the Koran and spoke to clarify it during Friday prayers. A few of the kids wanted to carry on the practice so providing tissues and hygenic disposal were made available in school.
A simple measure but it shows that dialog, mutual respect and knowledge and you solve potential problems. Of course there are people who lack the basic goodwill to make accommodations for other people’s beliefs but that characteristic is not confined to Islam, as I said in my post the fundamentalist Christians are as bad. If anything the problem of these groups is even more intractable as Chrisianity has a far longer history of violent intolerance than Islam.
In terms of the current situation; if, instead of violence, you reach out to those ordinary (I was going to use “moderate” but that has connotations) people of goodwill and “win their hearts and minds” you cut off the popular base that terrorists require to blend into the background and get support for their endeavours.