INSIGHT Weekly commentary
August 18, 2006
"Not Getting It" -- The Link Between Iraq and Terror
It is now obvious that the Bush White House has their battle plan in place---not, mind you, a battle plan to combat terrorism effectively and prudently, but to keep political control in the United States by exploiting the fear of terrorism. This is not news, but the fresh, Rovean twists on this theme are worth exploring.
In statements from Dick Cheney, Republican presidential hopefuls, and the Fox News spinners, the message is this: the London bombing plot shows again that we're in a global war with "Islamofascism," and we must do everything to win. A strategy for victory includes "taking off the gloves" (unrestrained surveillance, detention, etc.) and winning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrats and other leftists "don't get it" and hence only the GOP can protect America.
I leave it to others to argue the points about surveillance and civil liberties, a complex topic, although the advocates of torture to obtain information on terror plots have clearly gone off the deep end. Torture simply does not work, and there's little or no evidence that it does. But the link to Iraq is something I've examined closely, and I can say with some confidence that the Karl Rove Talking Points Brigade has it exactly backwards.
Start with motivations of terrorists. What we know about the young men who planned and carried out the train bombings in Madrid and London, and those who are charged with the London airplane bombing plot, clearly reveals a pattern. They are not, primarily, religiously motivated. (The aspersive term of the month, Islamofascism, is hence misleading, although it does, interestingly, link up two right-wing movements.) They are alienated from "Western values" and mainstream society, and Islam provided them with an alternative moral universe, but "jihad" to these men has little substantive meaning. They are a group formed through kinship and friendship networks, not recruited through mosques or subversive organizations. There was no significant al Qaeda connection to the train bombers; the would-be plane bombers seem to have one, through the brother of one of the group.
Lots of people in this world are angry, alienated, and toying with vehement right-wing propaganda. In all of actual bomber cases, however, the trigger for violence was the Iraq war. The mayhem in Iraq, the scenes of carnage and chaos, is the spur to action. Now, to say this is not to endorse it, obviously. Those who oppose the war are generally those who oppose violence as an instrument of politics in all circumstances, and the political violence of terrorism is indisputably noxious.
In ongoing studies of political violence (see box below), scholars are discovering some counterintuitive characteristics of the politically violent that should inform our public debate. But they do not, because the pre-conceived and convenient notions of jihadis as "hating our freedom" or being religious zealots are prevalent and go unchallenged.
Six important things to know about "jihad"
From an MIT report, available on line Aug. 21. |
Whatever the general misconceptions about jihad, however, we must be clear about the link between terrorism and Iraq, and this relationship is plain: a growing number of violent men are stirred to action by their bitterness at seeing the bloody catastrophe that is the war in Iraq.
There is another link of course: the war is itself creating thousands of new jihadists. This fact---we know this from captured fighters, most of whom are new volunteers to violence---is of growing significance as the war itself grows more violent, stirs regional conflict, and becomes the central cause of global jihad. The Reagan Doctrine created the first great venue of global jihad, Afghanistan, one of whose results was 9/11. This new outgrowth of the same kind of thinking---that we can solve complex problems with brutal military force---has involved killing that is staggering in scale, touching virtually every Iraqi family. That young men then join insurgencies or jihad groups to defend their communities should come as no surprise.
It is safe to say that 30,000 (or many more) such men are now operating in Iraq, and when that civil war exhausts itself, as it might in another five years or so, there will be those tens of thousands (and more) possibly ready to roam the Earth.
Cheney repeatedly refers to Iraq as the central struggle in the war against Islamofascism, and he is right in one sense---the Iraq war he created with the giddy support of the Republican party and their media apparatchiks is indeed the breeding ground and the bully pulpit for a new generation of terrorists.
So this is "getting it": the war Cheney and Bush started immorally and pursue incompetently is sprouting terrorists in record numbers, intent on reversing the humiliation and destruction of American occupation, and likely to be so committed for years to come. That is the Republican national security legacy.
--- John Tirman
John Tirman has written widely on terrorism, the Middle East, and homeland security, including The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11 (The New Press, 2004); the forthcoming Terror, Insurgency, and the State (Penn Press, 2007); and Spoils of War (1997). See Books.
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