- The following extract from an article on the Council
On Foreign Relations site is interesting...and revealing. The article,
written by Peter L. Bergen, is a review of several new books dealing with
current world geopolitics. The article itself is spread over on 5 successive
pages...the extract below is from pages 4 and page 5.
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- Illuminating indications of 'their' plans for the American
public are found in the last two paragraphs. The citation below clearly
points to the expected and planned acquiescence of the American public
to the draconian circumvention of civil liberties and essential nullification
of the US Constitution which began right after OKC and culminated with
the 'Anti-terror' legislation after the 911 attacks. Lest we forget, this
legislation was passed by Congress without having even been read. Says
Bergen:
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- "One question remains: When can victory be declared?
Mandelbaum's essay in (the book) How Did This Happen? provides a useful
standard. He compares terrorism to a disease that can never be entirely
eradicated but can nonetheless be managed. 'Victory,' he writes, 'will
have been achieved in the war against terrorism when the issue disappears
from the forefront of public attention and when the innovations of foreign
policy, law enforcement, and public safety established in the wake of September
11 are absorbed into the everyday fabric of American and international
life.'"
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- "...the *innovations* of foreign policy, law enforcement,
and public safety established in the wake of September 11 are *absorbed
into the everyday fabric* of American and international life.'"
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- Here are pages 4 and 5 of the Bergen article in full:
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- Picking Up the Pieces
- by Peter L. Bergen
- From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- continued...
-
- [There is a] single approach to the political ordering
of [Arab] society. In Oman, a sultan; in Yemen, a military "president";
in Saudi Arabia, a king and family with special Islamic custodial responsibilities;
in Jordan, a king of a simulated constitutional monarchy; in Egypt, a president
and a parliament only nominally connected to the original Western meaning
of these institutions. Beneath all these styles a single form is discernible.
Power is held by a strongman, surrounded by a praetorian guard. ... Those
close to political power gain; the weak are disregarded.
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- Hill is on a roll here, and it gets even better.
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- Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure.
Not one has proved able to provide its people with realistic hope for a
free and prosperous future. The regimes have found no way to respond to
their people's frustration other than a combination of internal oppression
and propaganda to generate rage against external enemies. Religiously inflamed
terrorists take root in such soil. Their threats to the regimes extort
facilities and subsidies that increase their strength and influence. The
result is a downward spiral of failure, fear and hatred.
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- And then comes Hill's masterstroke: his conclusion that
the deleterious impact of political disenfranchisement in the Arab world
has been amplified by "the deeply rooted conviction that virtually
every significant occurrence is caused by some external conspiracy. Every
societal shortcoming is attributed to a foreign plot." The best example
of this culture of conspiracy, of course, is the widely circulated -- and
widely believed -- story that the attacks on the World Trade Center were
the work of the Jews, as is demonstrated by the supposed fact that 4,000
Jews did not show up for work on the day of the attacks. Accordingly, the
lead hijacker's father -- an apparently sane Egyptian lawyer -- remains
convinced that the attacks were the work of the Mossad, Israel's security
service. And even the appearance of the bin Laden home video -- in which
Osama is seen chuckling over the hijackings -- has done nothing to dissuade
the undissuadable. After all, as a commentator on al Jazeera television
opined, the tape may have been a fake.
-
- Hill goes on to explain that "conspiracy theories
blight every society they touch. The people who hold them become impervious
to evidence and reason." Indeed, it was precisely this culture of
conspiracy that enabled bin Laden to convince a transnational coalition
of Arabs that, despite evidence to the contrary, the problems of their
home countries were the fault of the United States -- rather than of the
incompetence and corruption of their various domestic elites.
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- AGE OF EMPIRE?
-
- The Age of Terror also features an essay by the prolific
British historian Niall Ferguson, in which he takes issue with the notion
that the September attacks were the opening salvo of the much-ballyhooed
clash of civilizations. "One of the dangers of [this thesis],"
he argues, "is that it exaggerates the homogeneity of Islam as a world
religion." Ferguson is right. Furthermore, as bin Laden's various
statements make clear, the Saudi exile did indeed hope to provoke such
a clash between "believers" and "infidels." But this
project has turned out to be a spectacular failure. The streets of Karachi
and Cairo never filled up with hundreds of thousands of Osama's admirers.
Moreover, the United States has not engaged in a wide-ranging war against
Muslims. Instead, the U.S. campaign has essentially amounted to a police
action in Afghanistan -- one conducted largely by the Afghans themselves,
and with the goal of extirpating a group of Arab criminals.
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- Ferguson turns to the nineteenth-century British Empire
to find a more apposite historical model for today's crisis. He describes
the spectacular rise and fall of Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi, a messianic Sudanese
Islamic fundamentalist whose soldiers stormed Khartoum in 1885, killing
British General Charles Gordon along with the city's other defenders. This
attack, as Ferguson observes, was the "'September 11' of the era."
And the British Empire hardly collapsed as a result. Instead, the outraged
British responded decisively to al-Mahdi's provocation, and at the battle
of Omdurman in 1898, ten thousand of the rebels were wiped out by British
Maxim machine guns. Meanwhile, only a handful of British soldiers were
killed. Sound familiar?
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- Building on this parallel, Ferguson argues that the United
States should now take a forceful leadership role in the world -- a role
similar to that played by the British Empire -- in order to counter the
growing forces of disorder. He establishes a series of premises that show
why such leadership is now mandatory: the United States is vulnerable to
attack; weapons that can be used against Americans are becoming both cheaper
and more readily available; and the United Nations is "incapable of
coping with the challenge of global disorder." Furthermore, only the
United States can afford the costs of empire. Ferguson concludes with a
question: "Do the leaders of the one state with the economic resources
to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?" The answer
remains unclear, but one can only hope that isolationist views like those
of Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) on America's role in the world have begun
to fade into history.
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- So much, then, for the contours of the battle the United
States now finds itself in. One question remains: When can victory be declared?
Mandelbaum's essay in How Did This Happen? provides a useful standard.
He compares terrorism to a disease that can never be entirely eradicated
but can nonetheless be managed. "Victory," he writes, "will
have been achieved in the war against terrorism when the issue disappears
from the forefront of public attention and when the innovations of foreign
policy, law enforcement, and public safety established in the wake of September
11 are absorbed into the everyday fabric of American and international
life.
-
- Until then, the United States will remain engaged in
a strange kind of "war": one that is neither cold nor hot. And,
we should fear, a war in which civilian casualties will vastly exceed military
losses.
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- Read the complete article:
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- http://www.foreignaffairs.org/
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