Thursday, July 14, 2011

Michael Brenner: The immortality of the ‘War on Terror’

Alarabiya.net English

Another day, another terrorist act. This time, sickeningly enough, another assault on India’s financial capital, Mumbai.

They must be scrambling around in Washington to figure this one out, and what to do.

The United States is embarked on a hunt for the Holy Grail – a world free of any threat to America. It dooms us all to exertions with no avail that produce grievous harm for everyone.

Washington is in the process of reaffirming that the “enemy” is not only terrorists, and potential terrorists, but anyone who may abet or succor them. The violent actions thereby justified in fact ensure a constantly renewing crop of people who fit the last two categories.

One American claim against the Taliban is that some faction or other fostered the Times Square would-be bomber last year . They supposedly received this ex-IBM volunteer, gave him some rudimentary instruction and sent him back with a shopping list of ingredients for an explosive. His non-functioning concoction suggests that he did not read the “some assembly required” instructions. Yet, on the anniversary of that affair American officials and terrorism experts are spotlighting it again as evidence that the violent Islamist menace still looms over the country.

The prevailing mindset cannot accommodate the truth that when you have been killing people for eight and half years, it follows that the target may try and kill you – however half-hearted this attempt. That is human nature – as we demonstrated when we first went into Afghanistan. America’s warring across a large swath of the Islamic world has been conducted largely on the enemies’ terrain. This is not a rule that they have agreed to – whether the Taliban, Al Qaeda franchises or, of course, classic Al Qaeda itself which started it all on 9/11. Shock that large-scale violence could lead to violent acts on American soil is a sign of how dissociated from a complicated psycho-political reality the country can be. Doesn’t Scripture itself say something about reciprocated violence?

“Ordinary” Muslims originating from the places under attack by the United States can be expected to volunteer themselves for terrorist acts. Their numbers will be small and the consequences probably not of the first magnitude. The worst prospect is what similarly motivated British Muslims did in the London underground in 2005 – very nasty indeed. In fact on a par with routine occurrences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most feeble infringement of American territorial immunity sparks a mildly hysterical reaction. The spontaneous hysteria is intensified by politicians – including those in and around the White House – playing to the crowd.

Moreover, the crude logic that on whomever’s soil a would-be terrorist gets “training” is a legitimate target for American coercion and/or occupation points to a nightmare of endless interventions. The United States could wind up chasing Islamists across much of Africa, Asia – and Europe. Does it really want to find itself in 2020 launching strikes against militant Muslims in Mindanao - where America got its start in counter-insurgency 110 years ago? After only 15 years there, it did get control of “Moroland” - if that is any consolation.

(Professor Michael Brenner teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at: mbren@upitt.edu)

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