Although the article was written by Gwynne Dyer (not Dwyer)
about six months ago, the points it raised are as cogent as ever:-
What The Terrorists Want
By Gwynne Dyer
I have always admired Edward Luttwak, one of the clearest American
thinkers in the strategy/security game, and I have nothing but contempt for
the US Homeland Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsabteilung, in the
original German) and its ridiculous colour-coded threat levels. So I
started reading a recent article by the former on the latter with genuine
pleasure, anticipating that Luttwak was going to condemn Homeland Security
for its habit of running up the levels from puce to magenta and back down
to mauve, shredding Americans' nerves with warnings nobody can respond to
in a useful way, for no better reason than to cover its own bureaucratic
behind.
That's just what he did, and the article was rollicking along with
me cheering Luttwak on every line of the way -- when his whole argument
suddenly veered off into the ditch, rolled three times, and lay there
bleeding. What he said was: "The successive warnings of ill-defined
threats that frighten many Americans are achieving the very aim of the
terrorists. Terrorism cannot materially weaken the United States, so their
entire purpose is precisely to terrorize, to make Americans unhappy, IN THE
HOPE THAT THIS WILL INDUCE THEM TO ACCEPT TERRORIST DEMANDS." (My italics)
If one of the cleverest security analysts in the country has got no
further than this in his thinking about what the terrorists want, then it's
no surprise that sixty or seventy percent of Luttwak's fellow-countrymen
believe that Saddam Hussein sent the terrorists. He thinks that the
terrorists are trying to make Americans unhappy in order to "induce them to
accept terrorist demands"? What demands could the Islamist terrorists of
al-Qaeda possibly make that the United States could conceivably grant?
Fly them all to Havana? Convert to Islam? Put the money in
unmarked notes in a brown paper bag and leave it behind the radiator? The
whole notion that this is some sort of giant extortion operation is as
naive (or as wilfully ignorant) as the Bush administration's pet
explanation that the terrorists attack the US because "they hate our
freedoms." Unfortunately, the post-9/11 intellectual climate in the United
States has prevented any serious discussion of the terrorists' goals and
their strategies for achieving them.
In the post-9/11 chill, even conceding that the terrorist leaders
are intelligent people with rational goals seemed somehow disloyal to
America's dead. Instead, it was assumed that their fanaticism made them
too blind or stupid for purposeful action at the strategic level. Even
terrorist groups as marginal and self-deluded as the Baader-Meinhof Gang
and the Weathermen had a more or less coherent analysis, political goals,
and some notion of how their attacks moved them towards those goals, but
the public debate in the US grants none of that to al-Qaeda.
Yet the Islamist radicals have always been completely open about
their goals. They want to take power in the Muslim countries (phase one of
the project), and then unite the entire Muslim world in a final struggle to
overthrow the power of the West (phase two). They are still stuck in phase
one, with little to show for it despite thirty years of trying, so in the
early 1990s Osama bin Laden and his colleagues switched from head-on
assaults on the regimes in Muslim countries to direct attacks on Western
targets. Yet their first-phase goal remains seizing power in the Muslim
world, not some fantasy about 'bringing the West to its knees.'
Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about
their strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the
real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then
how does attacking the West help? Well, the US in particular may be goaded
into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries --
and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the
Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes
finally get off the ground.
Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that
that was the principal motive for the 9/11 attack. They would add that by
giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least
a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaeda's attacks have paid off
handsomely. US troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of over 50
million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are
turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that
is willing and able to defy American power.
It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United
States. I know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point
that al-Qaeda wants George W. Bush to win next November's presidential
election and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for
another four years, and will act to save Mr Bush from defeat if necessary.
It probably would not do so unless Mr Bush's number were slipping
badly, for any terrorist attack on US soil carries the risk of stimulating
resentment against the current administration for failing to prevent it.
Certainly another attack on the scale of 9/11 would risk producing that
result, even if al-Qaeda had the resources for it. But a simple truck bomb
in some US city centre a few months before the election, killing just a
couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Mr. Bush's arms and
turn a tight election around. Al-Qaeda is clever enough for that. |
