Losing the War
by Joe Sobran
(Expanded from SOBRAN'S, January 2003, page 1)
{{ Material dropped or altered solely for reasons of
space appears in double curly brackets. }}
On Thanksgiving Day, suicide bombers blew up an
Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, killing a dozen people. At
the same time, terrorists fired shoulder-borne anti-
aircraft missiles at an Israeli airliner taking off from
the nearby airport, narrowly missing it.
Al-Qaeda was suspected of being behind the
coordinated attacks, as well as an earlier bombing in
Bali that killed 200 tourists; but nobody can really
know. Terrorism is a game any number can play, and only
the players themselves know who they are. They may be
loosely related Islamic fanatics rather than a single
organization, more on the model of a Mafia than a state.
Militant Islamists are now known to be proliferating in
unlikely places, such as {{ South America's Triple
Border, }} the lawless area where Brazil, Argentina, and
Uruguay meet. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have
migrated there in recent years.
What seems most unlikely is that the terrorists in
Kenya had anything to do with Iraq -- the target of
President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism." Westerners
are only beginning to understand the turmoil in the
Muslim world, and Bush doesn't seem to grasp it at all.
Jonathan Raban, writing in the SEATTLE TIMES, reports
that the Islamists bitterly hate the Arab states Bush
persists in seeing as the problem; they dream of a huge
Muslim empire, a restored caliphate, without internal
borders, under Koranic law. They regard the Arab states
as artificial creations of Western imperalism (which they
are) and they consider their rulers "usurpers" who have
betrayed Islam. Raban notes that Osama bin Laden's
messages never refer to Saudi Arabia by name, since he
doesn't recognize it; in fact, few Arabs have any loyalty
to what the West thinks of as "Arab states."
This means that Bush is taking aim at the wrong
target. It may be deliberate on his part. Sensing that he
can't defeat al-Qaeda -- and can't even find it -- he may
have chosen a more palpable enemy who can easily be
scapegoated and defeated, one Arab villain serving his
purpose as well as another. That way he can claim to be
winning his war, thereby satisfying the public
expectation that he "do something about terrorism." And
forgetting his own words when he said that this is "a new
kind of war."
Since the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda has been strangely
quiet. If the Kenya attacks were its work, it's rather
surprising that it took so long to get around to using
cheap anti-aircraft missiles against passenger planes.
Even a few such operations could destroy the precarious
airline industry and make tourism virtually a thing of
the past.
{{ What gives? Has bin Laden run out of resources
already? That seems doubtful. Is he biding his time with
patient determination -- waiting, perhaps, for a real
Arab-American war to begin in Iraq, inflaming the whole
Muslim world and setting the stage for his next big
strike against the West?
{{ And what might such a strike be? It would
probably involve more than box-cutters. There are new
rumors that he has been buying small nuclear weapons from
former KGB men in Russia. A few of his "martyrs" in
London, Paris, or Washington could bring suicide bombing
to an unimaginable new level. }}
At first it seemed that a "war on terrorism" could
be neither won nor lost. Al-Qaeda and its allies could
never defeat the U.S. military in direct combat, but they
were too elusive and diffuse for the U.S. forces to
destroy. That assessment may prove too optimistic.
{{ If the Islamists can destroy one major Western
city, that will be that. The "war on terrorism" will be
lost. }}
Perhaps Bush should be preparing a contingency plan
for surrender -- but to whom? "To whom it may concern"?
Could we even be sure that a surrender, in the event,
say, of the destruction of Paris, would be accepted? Or
would the enemy take out a few more cities for good
measure? Bush clearly hasn't thought through such
possibilities. He has been madly confident of victory
from the start, with no conception of what defeat might
be like. He still thinks he is fighting his father's war.
{{ A decade ago, Francis Fukuyama announced "the end
of history." And a happy ending it was, with "democratic
capitalism" triumphant all over the world. What we may
face now is something like the literal end of modern
Western history. And it won't be happy. }}
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