Bush is dangerous in his ignorance of what is really going on....and how he tells American about it...he is constantly shooting us in the foot with his ignorance and poor communications skills.... (being generous on the word POOR)
Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All?
Bush's lumping together of dissimilar militant groups is a dangerous mistake.
By Adam Shatz
"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar,"
President Bush argued, with seductive simplicity, in
Tuesday's press conference.
"The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside
bomb near Baghdad," he continued, "is serving the
same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on
trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in
Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the
throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen
the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241
Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade
Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in
the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless
horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and
women and children on Sept. 11, 2001."
Bush's argument boiled down to this: A terrorist is a
terrorist, whether he is a member of Al Qaeda,
Hezbollah, Hamas or of an Iraqi resistance organization
fighting American troops — and, whatever their differences, they are all inflamed
by the "same ideology of murder." Intended as an expression of "moral clarity,"
it's likely to convince many Americans. But does it hold up? Are such groups all
the same, and are they actually driven by an identical ideology?
Let's start by defining terrorism. It's a notoriously slippery concept: As the cliche
goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But the most widely
accepted and neutral definition is that it is violence against civilians to achieve
political aims.
Do all of Bush's examples pass the test? Certainly the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in Bali and Madrid, do. But what about the
bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 by Lebanese militants belonging to
Islamic Jihad (the precursor to Hezbollah), which Bush also referred to?
However appalling, this was directed at a military target in the midst of a civil war.
The Marines landed in Beirut as peacekeepers, but they came in the aftermath of
Israel's invasion and were perceived by the Shiite community as intervening on the
side of Israel and its Christian Falangist allies.
Likewise, however much one deplores the roadside bombings of American
soldiers by Iraqi fighters, such acts scarcely qualify as "terrorism." The aim is not
to kill American civilians but to target soldiers and thereby drive the American
army out of Iraq. Whether you support it or oppose it, it's not terrorism; it's
resistance to occupation.
As for the horrifying suicide attacks by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade on buses and in restaurants in Israel, they certainly qualify as
terrorism — i.e., violence against civilians to achieve political aims. But it is unfair
(and misleading) to say that these attacks are motivated by a diffuse "ideology of
murder." In fact, they're motivated by long-simmering nationalist rage against a
37-year-old occupation that shows few signs of abating; despite the similarity in
methods, they are distinct from Al Qaeda's attacks on trains and resorts. This
does not excuse such attacks, but it does distinguish them.
Unlike Al Qaeda, moreover, Palestinian militants are not at war with the U.S.
Hamas' arena of operations is limited, and so are its aims: Its struggle is with
Israel, not with the West.
Giandomenico Picco, the former U.N. diplomat who helped secure the release of
the Western hostages held by Shiite militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s,
believes it is important to draw a careful distinction between "tactical" and
"strategic" terrorism. Tactical terror, however murderous, is a means of pursuing
concrete territorial goals that — whether we agree with them or not — are at
least real goals. Strategic terror, by contrast, is an end in itself.
Many nationalist groups have used tactical terrorism, from Algeria's National
Liberation Front to South Africa's African National Congress to the Irish
Republican Army to the Irgun and Stern Gang in Palestine during the British
mandate period. Once they achieved independence, these groups generally
abandoned terrorism, and many former "terrorists" have become statesmen,
among them Nelson Mandela (the leader of a group long classified as a terrorist
organization by the U.S. State Department) and Menachem Begin (who, as the
leader of the Irgun militia, presided over the July 22, 1946, bombing of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 civilians).
Since the end of Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon four years ago,
Hezbollah has largely followed this pattern. The organization now has nine
deputies in the Lebanese parliament, where it has focused its efforts on improving
the lives of its Shiite constituents. Although the party continues to exchange fire
with Israeli soldiers on the border and to offer rhetorical and logistical support for
Palestinian militants, it has not been implicated in an attack on Western civilians in
more than a decade. The first Islamic cleric to denounce 9/11 was none other
than Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior Shiite
cleric who served as Hezbollah's spiritual guide at the time of the 1983 bombings.
Like most Shiites, he loathes the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, who in turn
revile the Shiites.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, has declared war on the United States and the West, and
its terrorism is strategic: not simply a means to an end but an end in itself. Its
ideology is fanatical, apocalyptic and expansionist, and its goal — the restoration
of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of "Crusaders and Zionists" — is a
recipe for endless war.
Far from being an expression of moral clarity, Bush's promiscuous definition of
terrorism blinds us to the distinctions among groups with very different and
often-clashing agendas and threatens to drag us into further unnecessary wars.
To insist upon these distinctions is not to excuse the murder of civilians, which
must be condemned, or to endorse the agenda of nationalist insurgencies that use
"tactical terror." Rather, it is to acknowledge that terror comes in different forms,
and that in order to combat it successfully, we need to know which kind we're
confronting.
Adam Shatz is literary editor of The Nation.
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