By Rami G. Khouri
Saturday, October 01, 2005
LONDON: After a week in Geneva and London and many discussions with European, American and Arab political activists, business people, politicians, diplomats and academics, I sense that the United States and the United Kingdom may be finally, slowly, moving toward catching up with the rest of the world on the issue of terrorism and how to deal with it.
Ever since September 11, 2001, the Western world as a whole has allowed the United States to define and lead the global “war on terror”; this process has proven to be only partially effective, and deeply flawed in both its analysis and results, as the quagmire of Iraq reminds us daily.
The most obvious sign of the failure of the American-led global anti-terror war is the pervasive, frequently expressed, and growing sense of vulnerability that defines much of the West, especially the U.S. and U.K. The certainty that something equivalent to or bigger than September 11 is going to happen is matched by the almost total inability of the U.S. and U.K. political leaderships to comprehend the real nature, causes, and aims of the terror groups that target them, like Al-Qaeda. Consequently, the U.S. and U.K. counterterrorism strategies are failing across the board. Fear and ignorance together are a deadly combination.
The main mistake in the Anglo-American terrorism threat analysis is that it sees Al-Qaeda and Co. as representing those in the world “who seek to destroy our way of life, for various reasons,” as one foreign policy official here said privately earlier this week. He went on to say that part of the anti-terrorism response is an effort “to persuade such people that they are wrong about our way of life.”
Such an analysis of Al-Qaeda and others who target the West and Arab societies alike is diversionary, fanciful and grossly incomplete. Opposition to some Western values (materialism, sexual liberties, fragmentation of family ties, etc.) is common in the world, but is not the cause of the terror threat today. The cause comprises a much more complex series of forces that include defensive resistance to foreign troops in Islamic lands, rebellion against indigenous autocrats in the Arab-Asian region, fighting back against cultural and social alienation, resisting predatory foreign policies by Israel and Western powers, yearning to create an “authentic” Islamic society, and a few others. All these issues are certainly debatable – but they are very, very far from wanting to destroy the Western way of life.
The bombings in London on July 7 caused the British and other Europeans to wake up to the real nature of this problem, and to explore more deeply the causes that might lead British-born and – raised citizens of Asian ancestry to become suicidal terrorists. Wider issues of emigration, religion, culture and identity are now being discussed more seriously.
The British government is somewhat more realistic than the Americans in assessing the problem and the threat, with one official noting that “we need to get a lot more sophisticated about how we deal with terrorism in the United Kingdom” perpetrated by citizens of this country. London does not use the Bush terminology of a global war on terror, preferring to speak about a “battle for the hearts and minds” of Islamists and others who might threaten the U.K.
But the British, like the Americans, still refuse to make that final step into a more complete analytical framework that explores the full cycle of forces that result in the transformation of middle class citizens in England, Saudi Arabia or Egypt into mass murderers of the innocent in foreign lands. They refuse to consider how their own foreign policies contribute to the cycle of discontent that ultimately becomes marginalization, humiliation and dehumanization in the mind of a middle class young man who finally decides to resist this cycle with a single act of what he sees as self-affirmation, redemption and resistance.
It is more than merely interesting – it is strategically relevant, I would suggest – that young British Muslims here are making the same kinds of analyses and saying the same kinds of things that many of us in the Middle East have said for several decades.
“Disillusionment, disenfranchisement and disadvantage have been evident among the Muslim community in England for many years,” one articulate Muslim woman editor said in a discussion here this week, echoing the same things we in the Middle East have been saying since the 1970s. People who are mistreated by their own societies, and attacked, colonized, and manipulated by foreign armies will not forever take their abuse passively. Terrorism is one form of reaction; it is perverse and criminal, but not surprising or unexpected, and it emerges today from European societies as much as from the Middle East and Asia.
Slowly, it seems, more and more thoughtful people in the West are asking deeper and more useful questions about the terror threat and how to solve it, including some among the ideological skinheads whose peculiar intellectual hooliganism still defines much foreign policy-making in the U.K. and U.S. They are painstakingly moving towards a more comprehensive and accurate appreciation of the fact that religion, identity, socio-economic conditions, foreign policy, terrorism, and political governance systems are separate issues that impact on one another in subtle and changing ways, with the trigger for terrorism usually being a combination of humiliation and deep vulnerability in the face of foreign military and political power.
The last four years have been a costly learning experience, but if we learn from them we shall not have wasted the time or the lives lost in Middle Eastern and Western societies alike.
Rami Khoury writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
