Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars

Global Uncertainties

This page intentionally left blank 65 The second cluster examines dimensions of the war on terror and begins with the answers participants in the 2004 Tufts symposium gave to the question, “What do we know about the war on terror?” Gwyn Prinz starts by defining terrorism. He distinguishes between “traditional” terrorists , such as the IRA, who have political demands that can be satisfied, and “unconditional terrorists,” such as Al Qaeda, who have no such specific demands. He believes that the Islamic fundamentalists, who divide the world into themselves and infidels, have hijacked what he calls the Islamic revolution. Containment is no longer possible. For the West, he believes, preemption is a necessity “because it is a fight to a finish.” Stanley Heginbotham, who distinguishes between a “global war on terror” and the war on Al Qaeda (a largely invisible decentralized structure), observes that the war in Iraq has strengthened Al Qaeda and expanded the boundaries of its activities. The war rhetoric itself discourages analytic approaches to the extent that suggesting that modifying the cultural, social, and political conditions can moderate the threat of terrorism is “easily seen as bordering on disloyal.” The war in Iraq, say John Cooley and Stephen Van Evera, was a mistake. It has broadened the base of support for Islamic fundamentalism, created problems for secular Muslim states, made democratization more problematic, and otherwise had unforeseen consequences that may radically alter the relationship between Western Europe and the Muslim world. Indeed, this is a political insurgency, a war of propaganda, not of military victories. Insurgencies organized as guerilla warfare are fought over decades, not weeks or months. They ebb and flow. They are wars of will, not wars of numbers. Wars of what Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist and activist, called maneuverability of position not on the field of battle but in the terrain of the mind. Jonathan Schell calls the “war on terror” a subterfuge for the Bush administration’s real agenda: establishing the United States as the global hegemon. The administration , he asserts, subsumed the issue of weapons of mass destruction with which the world has coexisted for more than fifty years, under the rubric of the war on terror. American foreign policy, he maintains, has undergone a fundamental and largely unchallenged change in focus: containment and deterrence, which sufficed during the Cold War, have been abandoned for preemption. In his view, the policy underwriting this change in direction, as set out in the administration’s national security document, The National Security Strategy of the United States, represents nothing less than an assertion of “an absolute, permanent, global dominance.” Imperial rule: endless imperial wars disguised as endless wars on terror. Drawing extensively on the research findings of Arab scholars, Chris Patten argues 66 GLOBAL UNCERTAINTIES that the Arab world is not angry at Americans but at American policies, that Arab countries aspire to values similar to those close to American hearts, albeit often much discarded in the policies American governments pursue. This contradiction between what the United States purports to stand for and how it behaves is cause for the damning reactions it invokes in large parts of the Muslim world and much of the non-Muslim world. Sam Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, he concludes, is at best a special case scenario of relations between the Muslim world and the Judeo/Christian West, an eventuality that depends on the triumph of the extremes. The Islamic world, Patten points out, embraces both Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam. The Judeo/Christian world embraces both Christian fundamentalism and political Christianity. An ascendant West, however, tends to analyze cleavages in the Muslim world in western terms and thus both misunderstands the nature of the cleavages and prescribes “solutions” that insult the Muslim and aggravate differences between the West and Islam. Patten sees a stand-off between Christianity and Islam emerging. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. In the latter part of the last century, the PentecostalCharismatic movement spread across the West, Africa, and Asia to over half a billion, making it the second largest expression of faith, second only to the Catholic Church. The statistical mean follower of Christianity today is under twenty, lives in Asia, and has a per capita income of less than six hundred dollars a year. The Muslim world is dispersed, not a monolith poised to launch a jihad against the advance...