WTC - From the Russian perspective

Strana.ru ^ | September 12, 2001 | Gleb Pavlovsky

[A. Pole]

The syntax is clearly Russian, but the text is worth reading.

Terrorists' aim is world war, political scientist

Prominent Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Fund for Effective Policies, holds that the terrorists have created a new world reality.

It turns out the world can now be constructed and not by great "architects" alone but just anyone who so wishes, he writes in an article published by the Russian information service Strana.Ru.

So far the description of the events is in the traditional terms: the usual set of terrorists and their long-known motives. Yet the query: "Whence the blow?" is lawful but is not the principal one. First, because terrorism is naturally prone to camouflage itself. Second, the scale of the terrorist attack proves that we undoubtedly are facing an immense conspiracy. Right now I would not assert categorically that the center of that conspiracy is outside of the United States. The possibility of its execution implies using numerous technical assets, involving a large number of people, training them for a long time and assuring a stupendous - given the high level of the U.S. secret services - synchronization of moves combining broad-scale employment of information technologies and a simultaneous closeness to the outside world.

The terrorists have planned for widening the zone of attrition. They are giving out false signals pointing to Palestine, Afghanistan, or someone else. The chaos is expected to expand. I am sure the terrorists have banked on the traditional U.S. demonstrative retribution, which the Americans used to resort to time and again. Currently the weak leader may yield to the temptation to demonstrate something. And this will broaden the zone of instability. If the Americans succumb to reports alleging Palestinian involvement in the terrorist attack and deliver a strike at Palestine, which will be gladly joined by several other participants, we will have a destabilization of the United States and a war in the Middle East. What has happened is just a trial of strength. More attempts are in the offing.

The world will become different. It is not that the terrorists have slaughtered a lot of people. They have created a new reality where what earlier was thought impossible is now possible. We saw people in different parts of the world - not only in the territory of the Palestinian Autonomy - applaud the happening. Many regard it as a symbolic event on the same scale as previously the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Subsequently anyone might give it a try. The rest is the matter of money and the will. The chief secret of the atomic bomb was that it could be created. If one may attack some key points in the modern superpower (and the main key point is not the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, it is the mass consciousness: the terrorist attack in New York is a pinpoint strike at the American self-consciousness and America's image in the world), it means that the world reality is becoming liable to be constructed in principle.

In the post-Yalta world, there were several attempts at making it accepted that history has ground to a stop. There were Fukuyama's "end of history" concept and the sole superpower concept, which mean nothing today. It has been revealed to us that the gigantic changes in the world order continue unabated. And no one knows where they will stop. There is no such thing as the world status quo. It has been symbolically abolished. Approximately in the same way as if a world war would have started. A gamble is coming under way for different types of the world, something that has real consequences. For example, it is a blow to the dollar at a time when the U.S. economy is not in the best of shapes, as was demonstrated by Dow-Jones, whose information center, incidentally, was in the collapsed World Trade Center.

Now we have come to see that the stability of the U.S. dominance was as seeming and transient as the stability of the Soviet stagnation period, which also appeared as a very firm and indestructible fortress. Today, the world is forced to become different. Sacrifices America made must not be in vain. We should draw a lesson from them. The security concept must be seriously revised. The past wars were wars of reciprocal propaganda and myths. Currently, however, the world information myth is being substituted for the propaganda one. But the information myth is not only global-scale but also vulnerable. You are able to impact on it even if you are not a superpower. Any strong system may expect this type of complex, combined, destabilizing strikes.

In the new world reality, Russia must not wage wars against imaginary adversaries or fear imaginary threats. To our regret we saw sufficiently early that terrorism was not what the West though it to be. But we continue to regard it as some local threat that can be removed with the help of military force. As a new state open to the world system, which means vulnerable and simultaneously weak militarily and institutionally, Russia may only get the better of those who operate against it. Our demerit is simultaneously our merit. We are not as coordinated a system, a technological structure, as the United States is. A strike delivered in one place will not go down all the systems. Our mass consciousness is sufficiently stable. It got over numerous strong manipulations. The first Chechen war, when a serious attempt was made to influence the mass consciousness by creating an image of bloody events, included. Movladi Udugov staged his productions for the entire Russian mass consciousness rather than Chechnya alone. And was successful enough too.

Now we can evaluate what the world stability is all about. It proved to be a coincidence out of our control. This brings up the question: What a system of joint control over world stability on the part of all players rather than one superpower should look like? In a sense, this horror stimulates the American consciousness to look for other variants of the world order for the entire world. I think, America is ready for the task.

But Russia must be on its guard. I suggest we fancy what would have been had we met this day in a state we were in before 1999. We would have been plain unprepared, a chop on the kitchen table. Today we can analyze new conditions of our security in a cool manner. It means much serious work, which the authorities will not be able to accomplish with the help of their own experts alone. Society cannot allow its security to depend on the competence of twenty official experts. It is necessary to increase the number of participants in the political process and the political debates. A bolder effort should be made to draw public forces into the real process of strengthening national security and providing for national interests.