And he also oughta know better.............FRegards
Posted on 01/21/2004 10:54:34 PM PST by Utah Girl
I have always admired Edward Luttwak, one of the clearest American thinkers in the strategy/security game, and I have nothing but contempt for the U.S. Homeland Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsabteilung, in the original German) and its ridiculous color-coded threat levels.
So I started reading a recent article by the former on the latter with genuine pleasure, anticipating that Luttwak was going to condemn Homeland Security for its habit of running up the levels from puce to magenta and back down to mauve, shredding Americans' nerves with warnings nobody can respond to in a useful way, for no better reason than to cover its own bureaucratic behind.
That's just what he did, and the article was rollicking along with me cheering Luttwak on every line of the way -- when his whole argument suddenly veered off into the ditch, rolled three times, and lay there bleeding.
What he said was: "The successive warnings of ill-defined threats that frighten many Americans are achieving the very aim of the terrorists. Terrorism cannot materially weaken the United States, so their entire purpose is precisely to terrorize, to make Americans unhappy, in the hope that this will induce them to accept terrorist demands."
If one of the most clever security analysts in the country has got no further than this in his thinking about what the terrorists want, then it's no surprise that 60 or 70 percent of Luttwak's fellow countrymen believe that Saddam Hussein sent the terrorists. He thinks that the terrorists are trying to make Americans unhappy in order to "induce them to accept terrorist demands"? What demands could the Islamist terrorists of al-Qaida possibly make that the United States could conceivably grant?
Fly them all to Havana? Convert to Islam? Put the money in unmarked notes in a brown paper bag and leave it behind the radiator? The whole notion that this is some sort of giant extortion operation is as naive (or as wilfully ignorant) as the Bush administration's pet explanation that the terrorists attack the U.S. because "they hate our freedoms." Unfortunately, the post-9-11 intellectual climate in the United States has prevented any serious discussion of the terrorists' goals and their strategies for achieving them.
In the post-9-11 chill, even conceding that the terrorist leaders are intelligent people with rational goals seemed somehow disloyal to America's dead. Instead, it was assumed that their fanaticism made them too blind or stupid for purposeful action at the strategic level. Even terrorist groups as marginal and self-deluded as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Weathermen had a more or less coherent analysis, political goals and some notion of how their attacks moved them toward those goals, but the public debate in the U.S. grants none of that to al-Qaida.
Yet the Islamist radicals have always been completely open about their goals. They want to take power in the Muslim countries (phase one of the project), and then unite the entire Muslim world in a final struggle to overthrow the power of the West (phase two). They are still stuck in phase one, with little to show for it despite 30 years of trying, so in the early 1990s Osama bin Laden and his colleagues switched from head-on assaults on the regimes in Muslim countries to direct attacks on Western targets. Yet their first-phase goal remains seizing power in the Muslim world, not some fantasy about "bringing the West to its knees."
Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about their strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then how does attacking the West help? Well, the U.S. in particular may be goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries -- and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes finally get off the ground.
Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was the principal motive for the 9-11 attack. They would add that by giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaida's attacks have paid off handsomely. U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power.
It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States. I know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point that al-Qaida wants Bush to win next November's presidential election and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for another four years, and will act to save Bush from defeat if necessary.
It probably would not do so unless Bush's number were slipping badly, for any terrorist attack on U.S. soil carries the risk of stimulating resentment against the current administration for failing to prevent it.
Certainly another attack on the scale of 9-11 would risk producing that result, even if al-Qaida had the resources for it. But a simple truck bomb in some U.S. city center a few months before the election, killing just a couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Bush's arms and turn a tight election around. Al-Qaida is clever enough for that.
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Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
"Seems to me that we were told that we wouldn't have had problems with the Middle East if we'd just pull out support of Israel."
Who's brainchild theory is this? If the dog wouldn't have stopped to crap he may have caught the rabbit!
Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was the principal motive for the 9-11 attack. They would add that by giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaida's attacks have paid off handsomely. U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power.
Actually her analisys was quite correct up to this point. But to think that the purpose of 9/11 was to goad us to come in and take their private nation state in Afghanistan and overthrow Saddam is absurd. After 8 years of Clinton, and 30 years of America's generally weak and incoherent response to Arab terrorism, I doubt in their wildest dreams they ever imagined we would do so. No, they believed they were safe to strike at us, and we were too effete and degenerate to wade in after them. They figured we would cut and run at the first US casualties, just like Lebanon and Somalia.
What she is attributing to them is the classic Marxist guerilla strategy where the insurgents strike at the government to provoke a harsh response against the people, which in turn drives the people towards the guerillas. But here statement that "U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power" is completely false. We are not rulers, nor are we unwelcome. We are liberators and protectors, and the vast majority of people in those countries are afraid we will leave, not anxious to drive us out. Her leftist roots are showing in her assumption that the locals must view us as oppressors.
And he also oughta know better.............FRegards
Al-Qaeda has brought abject humiliation to the region. The "Arab street" watches as the Taliban is annihilated and a non-Islamist regime takes over, the regions biggest and most powerful bully is summarily and publicly whipped, the families of martyrs see the senders of their sons scurry like rats to caves and spider holes, and the one who has been sending money to them, embarrassingly can't even martyr himself. The same Arab street seen ululating in celebration at the viewing of our dead and dying in NYC, once privately and now publicly caution restraint. They now find the Great Satan in their midst, this time with anger and a sense of resolve not seen before.
Humiliation.
Coming soon, capitulation.
I suspect it is not a coincidence that the Party's symbol is a jackass!
One need not guess what al-Qaeda has in mind, or, more importantly, project already-discredited leftist geopolitics onto their face. One need only listen to them, and although Dyer has quoted them he clearly believes they're after something else. Baffling. Their clear, stated intent behind WTC was twofold: (1) to destabilize Western governments ("bring them to their knees" is their locution, not Dyer's) and (2) unify and energize the Arab world under the command of Jihad, and not their current national governments. Neither has happened. What has happened is that the reins that internationalists such as Dyer perceived were controlling U.S. policy turned out to be imaginary, al-Qaeda has been delegitimized and militarily defeated, and the Arab world national governments have, each of them, formed a response to this ranging from Egyptian retrenchment to Saudi covert civil war to Libyan accommodation. Those who lagged, the Syrians and the Iranians, are in a state of hurried review at the moment.
What is truly jaw-dropping is Dyer's assertion that al-Qaeda approves of all of this and will take whatever actions it can to see that it continues. He is truly existing in an alternate reality here, one so divorced from the one we inhabit that I am not certain that meaningful communication between the two is possible. This weird little piece certainly isn't it.
Then, she also seems to be saying that AQ wants the US to expand its military takeovers to more Muslim countries so that they can defeat the West.
Sure, it all makes sense. About as much sense as: "She said: 'There is no reason And the truth is plain to see.' But I wandered through my playing cards And would not let her be One of sixteen vestal virgins Who were leaving for the coast And although my eyes were open They might just as well be closed And so it was that later As the miller told his tale That her face at first just ghostly Turned A Whiter Shade Of Pale."
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