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Mr. Bush's Terror Gaffe
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President Bush said last week that he now has "some regrets" about his tough talk in his first term. He says that, in retrospect, urging Iraqi insurgents to "Bring it on" was a mistake. Likewise, his now says that saying that he wanted Osama bin Laden "Dead or alive", as though the Middle East was a Louis L'Amour novel, was a diplomatic gaffe.
For a president who seems genetically indisposed to admitting any mistakes, that may seem like progress. But the president still hasn't acknowledged the biggest, costliest and most dangerous gaffe of his first term: calling the war against Militant Islamic Fascists a "War on Terror". Until he does, the United States will continue to suffer a diminution of it's standing in the world, risks to it's vital interests, and, ultimately the defeat (and possible destruction) of our country.
There is, of course, the old saw that "one man's 'terrorist' is another man's 'freedom fighter'". More recently, and more frequently, commentators freely plagiarize former Senator Bob Kerry's statement during the 9/11 Commission hearings that "terror is a tactic, not an enemy". But very few have stated the inalterable conclusion of history; the ultimate, ugly, unvarnished truth that the United States must acknowledge if it ever hopes to win the current conflict: Terrorism works! And it's time for the president to acknowledge it.
For proof, President Bush should look at the list of recent Nobel Peace Prize winning "terrorists": Menachem Begin, who killed 91 men, women and children when he and his cohorts from Irgun blew up the King David Hotel and whose Irgun organization perpetrated the Deir Yassin massacre of roughly 100 unarmed Arab civilians in 1948; Yassir Arafat, whose acts of terrorism is too lengthy to even attempt to restate; Nelson Mandela, who was alleged to have approved the 1983 Church Street bombing that killed men, women and children and whose African National Congress engaged in "necklacings", whereby gasoline-soaked tires were set ablaze around victims' necks. All were "terrorists"; all became leaders; all won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Or, the president could consult earlier history; say, the Russian Revolution and it's presages. He might look, for example, at Alexander Ulyanov, who attempted to Assasinate Czar Alexander III in 1887 and who was executed for his crime. Thirty years later, Ulyanov's younger brother, Vladimir, would bring about "Ten Days That Shook the World"; the Russian Revolution of 1917, and order the execution of Alexander III's son, Czar Nicholas II, and his entire family. Today, Vladimir's remains sit ensconced in a glass sarcophagus behind Moscow's Kremlin Wall, less heroic than they were before the fall of the Soviet Union, but noteworthy nonetheless. The world, of course, knows Vladimir by his adopted name, Vladimir Lenin.
While history is replete with examples of "terrorists" who go on to be "statesmen", "heroes" and leaders -- people honored and praised by their governments and much of the world -- history is less kind to those that have attempted to thwart them by harsh measures, probably because such measures nearly always fail.
French General Jacques Massu, for example, is reviled even by the French for his use of torture and concentration camps to put down the rebellion in Algiers in 1957. His atrocious methods so hardened the will of the Algerian revolutionaries that President Charles de Gaulle soon sued for peace.
Likewise, the greatest failure of British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and the one that ultimately led to a peace accommodation with Irish Republican nationalists, was to send Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and thirteen others before a firing squad for their supposed role in the Easter Uprising of 1916. Had they been spared and imprisoned, the seizure of Dublin's General Post Office -- which met with scorn and indifference by most Irishmen -- would have passed into obscurity, as little remembered in Ireland as Patty Hearst's adventures with the SLA are noted here. Instead, Lloyd George had the conspirators charged with treason, had them shot, and instantly established 15 martyred heroes to Irish Nationalism for whom moving ballads of insurrection are sung to this very day.
Of course, not all terrorism succeeds. Peru's Shining Path, Spain's Basque Separatists, and Germany's Baader-Meinhoff Gang, and Puerto Rico's FALN have all waged warfare by terror, but have failed in their political objective of overthrowing the established order.
Likewise, brutal repress ions of counterinsurgency, or "terrorist", movements don't always fail. General Jacob Smith's mandate to his men ("I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me...Kill everyone over the age of ten.") during the Philippine Insurrection, and the resulting massacres in Samar and Balangiga, quelled the uprising, although it resulted in Smith's court martial.
But history generally shows that an insurgency movement that gains popular support among the indigenous population, is likely to succeed in it's rebellion, even though those supporters do not take up active armed insurrection. The support of the populace allows the insurgency to sustain prolonged guerrilla warfare; to gain recruits; and - as in South Vietnam - even to defeat the political desires of another large population that opposes them. The Russian Revolution; the Irish Rebellion, Chairman Mao's victory in China; Ho Chi Minh's victories in Vietnam over the French and then the Americans, the French loss in Algeria -- all these rebel victories came against larger, more powerful, better armed opponents because the insurgents enjoyed widespread support from the indigenous populations where they arose. Clearly, terrorism worked in all these instances; otherwise, we would not have had diplomatic relations with the countries terrorism created.
But successful insurgencies have an underlying message; a political currency that buys them support among the indigenous population. Indeed, in an insurgency movement, the successful battle for hearts and minds can often make the outcome of battles for territory and position irrelevant. Battles against the superior force don't need to be "won" by the insurgents; they need only to be waged - to break the will of the greater power; to sap his treasury; and, ultimately, to undermine the political support for the war the greater power is waging. General Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese Army that used it's guerrilla arm, the Viet Cong, successfully against the United States, once famously said as much. "You never defeated us on the battlefield, an American veteran officer visiting post-war Vietnam, told General Giap. Giap replied, "That may be so," said Giap. "But it is also irrelevant."
Carl von Clauswitz, the 18th Century military strategist, wrote that "Warfare is the continuation of politics by other means." But terrorism is the continuation of warfare by other means. Terrorism, like warfare, ultimately aims to achieve a political objective. One who wages "war" on terror -- without acknowledging it's underlying political purpose and objective - risks widening political support for the political objective the terrorists covet by inflicting brutal casualties among the civilians where terrorists hide. The "collateral damage" (that's Pentagon speak for dead noncombatants) that results when armies swarm on terrorist centers -- creates the martyrs, myths, and militarists that ultimately grow the insurgency and confound their opponents. Just ask the Israelis; or, better yet, the Palestinians.
Have no doubt about it: the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 had a more complex political objective; they didn't attack because they "hate our freedom". Until we learn what it is, and address it -- either to see that it is a legitimate gripe or something we can't abide -- then we risk the growth of the Iraq insurgency into a full-fledged revolutionary movement.
The president's gaffe was to declare to the world a plan to destroy the perpetrators of the 9/11 Attacks by attacking Iraq -- a Muslim nation that did not threaten us -- and calling that effort a part of the "War on Terror". If anything, President Bush's Iraq war has been an impetus to terror. The war has recruited militants from throughout the Middle East and, more importantly, incited hatred for America among the larger population of Muslims, many of whom were supportive of us in the days immediately following 9/11.
Until we address the political objectives of Al Qaeda, the War on Terror will sap our treasury; kill our soldiers; and weaken our standing in the world. It will cause us to wage a perpetual war for a peace that will not come for interests that are not ours and, in doing so, weaken American power just as the two World Wars ended British domination of it's empire and just as the Soviet Union's quagmire in Afghanistan hastened it's fall.
Terrorism works, indeed.
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