New 'winning strategy', same old war
By Ehsan Ahrari
While the "war on terror" inside the United States is being reduced to winning the hearts and minds of Americans to vote for the Republican Party in November's congressional elections, major issues are percolating - and they don't bode well for stability in West Asia.
On Tuesday the latest version of the strategy to fight terrorism was released, coinciding with President George W Bush's warning to Iran over its nuclear program.
The new strategy, featured in a report that was drafted in 2003 and updated this March, focuses more on decentralized networks of extremists than on al-Qaeda, and singles out Iran as a potential source of unconventional weapons for terrorist groups.
The report also acknowledges that while the United States succeeded in undermining global terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, the "enemy has adjusted to US defenses". "America is safer, but not yet safe," it warns.
Despite Bush's claim that Iraq had become the "central front" of the "war on terror", the report's emphasis is less on Iraq than on small terror groups "springing up around the world".
What it boils down to is that Washington needs fresh rhetoric to make Americans believe that their country is really "winning" the "war on terror".
The reader of the latest document clearly gets the message that it contains no new message. Why, then, issue another strategy? It is because the "war on terror" is being played to win electoral advantages. This was done in 2002 to win congressional elections, then in 2004 to help Bush win a second presidential term, and now it is being used as the US edges toward congressional elections again. And this time the stakes are high, as Republicans could lose both chambers of Congress.
In issuing the new strategy, Bush has drawn on analogies with World War II to urge people to heed his warnings and not repeat the mistake of not recognizing the dangerous development of events leading to the 1940s war. Bush compared Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin.
In major speeches on the "war on terror" trail, Bush has spoken of the "Shi'ite extremism" of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran and raised "the specter of an industrialized world subject to blackmail from nations awash in oil and nuclear weapons if the radicals achieve their aims".
Further, "The Shi'ite strain of Islamic radicalism is just as dangerous and just as hostile to America and just as determined to establish its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East." And Shi'ite extremists "have achieved something that al-Qaeda has so far failed to" - taking control of Iran in 1979. A neo-conservative revision of the history of the Islamic Revolution of Iran is being presented to the US electorate.
Bush also had his take on Iran's goals: "Like al-Qaeda and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims. They want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East. To achieve these aims, they are funding and arming terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which allow them to attack Israel and America by proxy."
Returning to the issue of the Iraq war, Bush argued, "If we retreat from Iraq, if we don't uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty, 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know why we did not act. I'm not going to allow this to happen, and no future American president can allow it either."
Major developments involving Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah have placed the US on the defensive.
In Iraq there is the rising specter of sectarian war, which has even contributed to the influential Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani withdrawing from the political arena. The latest US approach is to persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to abolish Shi'ite militias, which is easier said than done. No one wants to talk about the fact that, if the current rate of violence continues, Maliki may need those militias just to stay in power. But the "rational" approach is to demand that those militias be abolished, which is why the Americans are recommending it.
Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is in no mood to give up his crucial source of power by abolishing his militia, the Mehdi Army, and many see him as the "Nasrallah of Iraq", in reference to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon.
And talking of that. Washington neo-cons, both in and outside the US administration, were confident that the Israeli armed forces would annihilate Hezbollah, which did not happen. And now no one knows how to deal with the realities of power inside Lebanon, where Hezbollah no longer exists merely as a political party and as a fighting force. It has transcended that to become a bigger movement of which even Christian Lebanese are proud.
The release of the new strategy to fight terrorism coincides with the crisis over Iran, whose leaders Bush refers to as "tyrants", even though President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was duly elected.
The new hyperbole about al-Qaeda and Iran is aimed at catching the attention of Americans. But it is also possible that the US is getting increasingly frustrated with Iran, which refuses to halt its uranium-enrichment program, claiming it as a legitimate, peaceful right. Tehran's prestige is also high in much of the Islamic world.
The US appears not to be interested in rapprochement with Iran, which leaves the options of sanctions and, ultimately, military action. If the latter is the current thinking in Washington - and it seems to be, given the latest "war on terror" twist - then the US might be edging toward another war in West Asia.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com |
