theage.com.au
Make no mistake: This is World War III
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
JERUSALEM
Friday 14 September 2001
As I restlessly lay awake early yesterday, with CNN on my TV and
dawn breaking over the holy places of Jerusalem, my ear somehow
latched on to a statement made by the US Transportation Secretary,
Norman Mineta, about the new precautions that would be put in place at
US airports as a result of Tuesday's unspeakable terrorist attacks: There
will be no more curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a group
of terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee, also
watching CNN and laughing hysterically: "Hey boss, did you hear that?
We just blew up Wall Street and the Pentagon and their response is no
more curbside check-in?"
I don't mean to criticise Mineta. He is doing what he can. And I have
absolutely no doubt that the Bush team, when it identifies the
perpetrators, will make them pay dearly. Yet there was something so
absurdly futile and American about the curbside ban that I couldn't help
but wonder: Does my country really understand that this is World War
III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means
there is a long, long war ahead.
And this Third World War does not pit the US against another
superpower. It pits America - the world's only superpower and
quintessential symbol of liberal, free-market, Western values - against all
the super-empowered angry men and women out there.
Many of these super-empowered angry people hail from failing states in
the Muslim and Third World. They do not share Western values, they
resent America's influence over their lives, politics and children, not to
mention America's support for Israel, and they often blame America for
the failure of their societies to master modernity.
What makes them super-empowered, though, is their genius at using the
networked world, the Internet and the very high technology they hate, to
attack the US. Think about it: They turned the West's most advanced
civilian planes into human-directed, precision-guided cruise missiles - a
diabolical melding of their fanaticism and our technology. Jihad Online.
And think of what they hit: the World Trade Centre - the beacon of
American-led capitalism that both tempts and repels them, and the
Pentagon, the embodiment of American military superiority.
And think about what places in Israel the Palestinian suicide bombers
have targeted most. "They never hit synagogues or settlements or Israeli
religious zealots," said the Haaretz newspaper columnist Ari Shavit.
"They hit the Sbarro pizza parlor, the Netanya shopping mall. The
Dolphinarium disco. They hit the yuppie Israel, not the yeshiva Israel."
So what is required to fight a war against such people in such a world?
To start with, Americans will never be able to penetrate such small
groups, often based on family ties, who live in places such as Afghanistan,
Pakistan or Lebanon's wild Bekaa Valley. The only people who can
penetrate these shadowy and ever-mutating groups, and deter them, are
their own societies. And even they can't do it consistently. So give the
CIA a break.
Israeli officials will tell you that the only time they have had real quiet and
real control over the suicide bombers and radical Palestinian groups, such
as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is when Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian
Authority tracked them, jailed them or deterred them.
So then the question becomes: What does it take for the US to get the
societies that host terrorist groups to truly act against them?
First America has to prove that it is serious, and that it understands that
many of these terrorists hate its existence, not just its policies.
In June, I wrote a column about the fact that a few mobile phone threats
from Osama bin Laden had prompted President Bush to withdraw the
FBI from Yemen, a US Marines contingent from Jordan, and the US
Fifth Fleet from its home base in the Persian Gulf. This US retreat was
noticed all over the region, but it did not merit a headline in any major US
paper. That must have encouraged the terrorists. Forget about American
civilians, the US didn't even want to risk its soldiers to face their threats.
The people who planned Tuesday's bombings combined world-class evil
with world-class genius to devastating effect. And unless the US is ready
to put its best minds to work combating them - the World War III
Manhattan project - in an equally daring, unconventional and unremitting
fashion, the world is in trouble. Because while this may have been the first
major battle of World War III, it may be the last one that involves only
conventional, non-nuclear weapons.
Second, America has been allowing a double game to go on with its
Middle East allies for years, and that has to stop. A country such as Syria
has to decide: Does it want a Hezbollah embassy in Damascus or an
American one? If it wants a US embassy, then it cannot play host to a
rogue's gallery of terrorist groups.
Does that mean the US must ignore Palestinian concerns and Muslim
economic grievances? No. Many in this part of the world crave the best
of America, and America cannot forget that it is their ray of hope. But
apropos of the Palestinians, the US put on the table at Camp David a
plan that would have given Yasser Arafat much of what he now claims to
be fighting for. That US plan may not be sufficient for Palestinians, but to
say that the justifiable response to it is suicide terrorism is utterly sick.
Third, the US needs to have a serious and respectful dialogue with the
Muslim world and its political leaders about why many of its people are
falling behind. The fact is, no region in the world, including sub-Saharan
Africa, has fewer freely elected governments than the Arab-Muslim
world, which has none. Why? Egypt went through a whole period of
self-criticism after the 1967 war, which produced a stronger country.
Why is such self-criticism not tolerated today by any Arab leader?
Where are the Muslim leaders who will tell their sons to resist the Israelis
- but not to kill themselves or innocent non-combatants? No matter how
bad, your life is sacred. Surely Islam, a grand religion that never
perpetrated the sort of Holocaust against the Jews in its midst that
Europe did, is being distorted when it is treated as a guidebook for
suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim leader will say that?
These are some of the issues the US will have to address as it fights
World War III. It will be a long war against a brilliant and motivated foe.
When I remarked to an Israeli military official what an amazing
technological feat it was for the terrorists to hijack the planes and then fly
them directly into the most vulnerable spot in each building, he
pooh-poohed me.
"It's not that difficult to learn how to fly a plane once it's up in the air," he
said. "And remember, they never had to learn how to land."
No, they didn't. They only had to destroy. America, by contrast, has to
fight in a way that is effective without destroying the very open society it
is trying to protect. It has to fight hard and land safely. It has to fight the
terrorists as if there were no rules, and preserve its open society as if
there were no terrorists. It won't be easy. It will require America's best
strategists, most creative diplomats and bravest soldiers.
Two-time Pulitizer Prize-winner Thomas L. Friedman is the author
of From Beirut to Jerusalem, and the foreign affairs columnist for
The New York Times, where this article first appeared. |
