Three Sides in Search of a Triangle: Singapore-America-India Relations

3. Terrorism

Terrorism 65 C H A P T E R III TERRORISM Three defining imperatives in r elations among the United States, Singapore, and India ar e suggested by this brief overview: meeting the thr eat of terr orism, managing the rise of China, and str engthening democracy internationally. The possibility of a triangular relationship forming among W ashington, Singapore, and New Delhi depends on the extent to which their inter ests converge over these key imperatives. It would be useful to analyse, ther efore, how each country views each imperative. As the analysis below will show, their interests converge most completely over the need to fight terror. There is only a partial congruence of interests over how to meet the rise of China, with India veering close to the sharper edges of the American view, from which Singapore’s stance varies. Str engthening the democratic peace is the weakest link, withAmerica’s and India’s approaches not really coinciding, but both diverging markedly from Singapore’s view. 66 Three Sides in Search of a Triangle We begin with the War on Terror, which unites the three countries most closely. AMERICA President George W. Bush’s immediate r eaction to 9/11 — “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while” — had observers fearing that the bornagain Christian would launch a punitive clash of civilizations against the global Muslim community that had produced the perpetrators of the enormity . For example, for Soheib Bensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, the use of the wor d “crusade” recalled military operations against the Muslim world by Christian knights who had made repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem over several hundred years.1 Fears of a clash erupting along religious lines, precisely what the instigators of the 9/1 1 calamity had hoped to provoke, grew as Taliban deputy leader Mohammed Hasan Akhund called on Afghans to prepare for jihad against America if its forces attacked Afghanistan,2 and a fax from Osama urged Muslims in Pakistan to “fight the American crusade”.3 The demography of Bush’s support base — which included evangelical Christians and Christian Zionists whose support for the state of Israel was “visceral” — and the appar ently pervasive and allegedly insidious influence of Neocons on policymaking in his Administration roused concerns on the Left4 over the war on terror being hijacked by religious considerations that would obscure the need to address terrorism’s material causes effectively.5 Years after 9/11, the War on Terror has not turned into a clash of religious civilizations (any more, though, than it has addr essed the material causes). One understated reason is the way in which American Terrorism 67 society handled the impact of 9/11. Politics took a turn to the right with the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001, which gave far -reaching powers to the Executive to handle suspected terrorist threats and was accused of curtailing civil liberties; indeed, more than 5,000 ArabAmericans were subjected to “aggressive questioning” immediately after the attacks.6 However, there was no pogrom of internment or deportation inflicted on Muslims in America. “In the wake of September 1 1, the government quite self-consciously avoided the kinds of harsh measur es common in pr evious wars. The exclusion and detention of American citizens of Japanese ancestry who r esided on the W est Coast in World War II is only the most infamous example”, Michael Chertoff argues. “During the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, the government responded to domestic violence with a panoply of extraordinary measures, including suppr ession of criticism; separate treatment of noncitizens; arrests and searches without warrants; and preventive detention.” Post-9/11, the government’s policy “was to seek to detain aliens only based upon evidence of a violation of criminal or immigration law that provided a basis to deny bail”.7 There was no attempt to discriminate againstAmericans on the basis of their ethnicity . Instead, soon after 9/11, Bush led an ecumenical service at the National Cathedral that included a spokesman for American Muslims, and a few days later , he visited a mosque in W ashington where he warned against Americans making thr eatening gestures towards Muslims.8 This said, theAdministration’s “hearts-and-minds” campaign, to convey to Muslims abr oad that the war was not on them but on terr orists, has been less successful. The cr eation of...