Gwynne Dyer thinks the war on terror could have been rendered unnecessary using diplomacy and good PR. See the second half of the following article:-
The International Terrorist Conspiracy
First published on 3 June 2006
By Gwynne Dyer
They arrested seventeen alleged Islamist terrorists in and around
Toronto on Saturday, most of them young and Canadian-born. They had bought
three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, and are accused of planning to bomb
targets in southern Ontario. Shock! Horror! How could this happen here?
Canada refused to take part in the US invasion of Iraq, so most
people assumed that it was therefore an unlikely target for terrorist
attacks. Relatively speaking, it probably still is -- but it does have
several thousand troops in Afghanistan, and the new government in Ottawa is
actively seeking closer ties to the Bush administration in Washington.
Enough, perhaps, to motivate a bunch of radicalised young Muslim-Canadians
who couldn't reach non-Canadian targets anyway.
Any terrorist attack on Canada is bound to be home-grown, because
there is no shadowy but powerful network of international Islamist
terrorists waging a war against the West. There are isolated small groups
of extremists who blow things up once in a while, and there are web-sites
and other media through which they can exchange ideas and techniques, but
there is no headquarters, no chain of command, no organisation that can be
defeated, dismantled and destroyed.
There have been Islamist terrorist groups in the Arab world for
decades, but there never was much of an international Islamist "terrorist
network." Even in al-Qaeda's heyday, before the US invasion of Afghanistan
effectively beheaded it in 2001, there were only a few hundred core
members.
According to US intelligence estimates, between 30,000 and 70,000
volunteers passed through al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan in
1996-2001, but their long-term impact on the world has been very small.
For most people who went to those camps, it was more a rite of passage than
the start of a lifelong career as a terrorist. The average annual number of
Islamist terrorist attacks in Arab and other Muslim countries has been no
greater in the past five years than in the previous ten or twenty.
The West has been even less affected. The 9/11 attacks on the
United States were a spectacularly successful fluke, killing almost three
thousand people, but there have been no further Islamist attacks in the US.
The two subsequent attacks that did occur in the West, in Madrid in 2004
and in London last year, cost the lives of 245 people. And those attacks
were both carried out by local people with no links to any "international
terrorist network."
The contrast between the received wisdom -- that the world, or at
least the West, is engaged in a titanic, unending struggle against a
terrorist organisation of global reach -- and the not very impressive
reality is so great that most people in the West believe the official
narrative rather than the evidence of their own eyes. There must be a major
terrorist threat; otherwise, the government is wrong or lying, the
intelligence agencies are wrong or self-serving, the media are fools or
cowards, and the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with fighting
terrorism.
There isn't a major terrorist threat; just a little one. The
massive over-reaction called "the war on terror" is due to the fact that
9/11 hit a very big and powerful country that had the military resources to
strike anywhere in the world, and strategic interests that might be
advanced by a war or two fought under the cover of a crusade against
terrorism. If 9/11 had happened in Canada, it would all have been very
different.
A kind of 9/11 did happen in Canada. The largest casualty toll of
any terrorist attack in the West before 2001 was the 329 people who were
killed in the terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182, en route from
Toronto to London, in 1985. Two hundred and eighty of the dead were
Canadian citizens. Since Canada has only one-tenth the population of the
United States, it was almost exactly the same proportionate loss that the
United States suffered in 9/11.
It was immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking
independence from India, but here's what Canada didn't do: it didn't send
troops into India to "stamp out the roots of the terrorism" and it didn't
declared a "global war on terror." Partly because it lacked the resources
for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been
stupid. Instead, it tightened up security at airports, and launched a
police investigation of the attack
The investigation was not very successful, and twenty-one years
later most of the culprits have still not been punished. But Sikh
terrorism eventually died down even though nobody invaded the Punjab, and
nobody else got hurt in Canada. Sometimes not doing much is the right thing
to do.
Not doing too much would have been the right response in 2001, too.
It was legal for Washington to invade Afghanistan after 9/11, and public
outrage in the US made it almost unavoidable politically, but it was bound
to end in tears. If the Afghan regime could have been forced to shut the
al-Qaeda camps down without an invasion, that would have been the wiser
course of action. The right goal was NOT to fall into Osama bin Laden's
trap, and NOT to act in ways that spread suspicion and hostility in Muslim
communities at home and abroad.
But it would probably still have been all right if they hadn't
invaded Iraq....
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