How do you win a "War On Terror"?

Ironicaly David Frum andRichard Pearle in the new book, "End of Evil, How To Win the War On Terror,said one of the things that the US should do is crack down on Saudi Arabia. Most likely he states much more than that. I will try to get that book from a local library and read it.

For the White House, a complete investigation into those who abetted Saddam's crimes against humanity would prove an embarrassing two-edged sword.

Sometimes democracy works. Though the wheels of accountability often grind slowly, they also can grind fine, if lubricated by the hard work of free-thinking citizens. The latest example: the release of official documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that detail how the U.S. government under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush nurtured and supported Saddam Hussein despite his repeated use of chemical weapons.

The work of the National Security Archive, a dogged organization fighting for government transparency, has cast light on the trove of documents that depict in damning detail how the United States, working with U.S. corporations including Bechtel, cynically and secretly allied itself with Saddam's dictatorship. The evidence undermines the unctuous moral superiority with which the current American president, media and public now judge Saddam, a monster the U.S. actively helped create.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush Administration cannot be won. (emphasis mine) On the contrary, it may bring about a permanent state of war. Terrorists will never disappear. They will continue to provide a pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy.

The terrorist threat must be seen in proper perspective. Terrorism is not new. It was an important factor in nineteenth-century Russia, and it had a great influence on the character of the czarist regime, enhancing the importance of secret police and justifying authoritarianism.

[..] Ilham [Aliev] already owes his father's advisers for getting him his job: It was they who oversaw the stacking of electoral committees with pro-government supporters, barred more than half the opposition candidates from registering for the presidential election, and excluded known opposition sympathisers from voter lists--all of which produced a result favoring the younger Aliev. Not surprisingly, Ilham has not fired any of his father's former cronies.

Nor does he seem in a hurry to stake out his own path. [..] Aliev shows no signs of battling the corruption that plagued the country during his father's tenure. Azerbaijan recently placed 95 out of 102 countries in Transparency International's annual corruption index. The problem is that once money leaves a government oil fund and enters the state budget, it falls into a black hole. [..]

Most dangerous, Aliev shows little interest in liberalizing the country's political system. When some 15,000 people turned out in Baku to protest Aliev's rigged election, they got not Georgia's "Rose Revolution" but an iron fist: Five thousand of them clashed with police, and the arrest of opposition supporters continued for weeks afterwards. Meanwhile, the main opposition party, Musavat, has been evicted from its offices, and dozens of government civil servants reportedly have been fired for opposing Aliev's election.

Unless Aliev begins to push for liberalization, a populace fed up with fake democracy could retreat into radicalism. "A feeling of alienation and abandonment is widespread now," says Anar Ahmadov, director of the Caucasus studies program at Khazar. That could simply encourage nationalism, of the kind that propelled the country toward war with Armenia. But it could also provoke religious fundamentalism. Though Azerbaijan remains a relatively moderate country, religious tension may be building--in the village of Nardaran, a school principal's refusal to let girls wear headscarves last year sparked a wave of protests. What's more, Iranian television has become popular in Baku, and locals have begun comparing Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan, where political repression contributed to the growth of a religious party, Hizb ut-Tahrir. Unless Aliev does something radical soon, Azerbaijan could be heading in that direction as well.

I am not underestimating the danger of political Islamist extremism. But its growing influence is the product of the utter popular frustration with the current closed, authoritarian systems in the first place - systems in which citizens have little say and which frustrate their every ambition. And it will continue to grow the longer the Arab countries wait with reforms. If the switch to democracy had been made twenty years ago, fundamentalism would never have become what it is now. As it is now, the risk has increased but trying to smother it any longer under the repressive lid of authoritarian "stability" will really make it explode. The longer they wait with democratic elections, the greater the chance that fundamentalists will win them. Yes, that's a gloomy outlook.

Oddly enough, the popularity of fundamentalism is an expression of democratic frustration. If a move is made now, the longing for democracy may still outweigh the penchant for the fundamentalists' anti-Westernism ... and the fifty-fifty balance between them [..] will still persuade some Islamists to accept a hybrid of the two sets of values for their government (as they did in Turkey). The longer we wait ... [..]

Karimov's Uzbek dictatorship [for example] is positively one of the most totalitarian and criminal of present-day Eurasia. Check any human rights report. He's far worse than most of your "glorified dictatorships" - he's the real thing. And for over ten years now he's managed to get away with it, abroad, by referring to some abstract Islamist danger. Well, back in 1990 the Muslim movement there was moderate, and had allied itself with pro-Western democrats. Then Karimov cracked down. Ever since, people have been imprisoned and tortured at random while Karimov's cronies rob the land. In the meantime, any oppositional pamphlet or muffled protest has been hit on as more evidence of the supposed "Islamist danger", though there is little sign of a wide-spread movement of anything like the extremism found further south. It's propping up people like Karimov that has gotten us in this ****, with people turning to fundamentalism as their last resort in anger and frustration, in the first place. [..]

[Democracy is] not the solution to all the world's problems ... but democracy is a system that promotes transparency in governance and thus in economy, corruption is on average lower in democracies, in democracies the leaders are slightly less likely to spend all their budget on arms and nepotism and thus slightly more likely to spend it on education and health care, which benefits the economy again, leading to ... well, et cetera - not mentioning freedom of media, human rights and all that.

[You write:] "In other places, like most nations in the Middle East, democracy would result in leadership that is more fundamentalist and anti-Western than the dictators they are replacing" - could well be - but propping up these dictators for longer still will definitely further boost fundamentalist and anti-Western trends - and imagine what will ensue once they are, after all, swept away ...

Egypt muzzles calls for democracy

By Glenn Frankel
washingtonpost.com

[..] In what was widely regarded as one of his most important speeches of 2003, President Bush proclaimed in November that it was time for the United States to support democracy in the Middle East. He said the establishment of a free Iraq would be "a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." And he called upon Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country and the second-biggest recipient of U.S. military and economic aid, to be in the vanguard.

[..] U.S. officials insist they are seeing slow but positive changes in human rights conditions here. But rights advocates, opposition politicians and analysts interviewed here paint a darker portrait: of an authoritarian government that tightens or loosens the screws of repression depending upon how it perceives threats, that is obsessed with its Islamic opposition and feels harassed by human rights activists, and that wields a powerful state security apparatus that operates under far-reaching emergency laws and often deals brutally with opponents.

And they contend that, contrary to Bush's pronouncements, U.S. aid -- nearly $2 billion per year over the past two decades -- has propped up an unpopular government, its army and police, and helped suppress democracy. [..]

As for the original question - how to win the war on terror, or more in generally, how to take the wind out of the sails of the extremists; my answers would focus on democratisation, transparency, socio-economic opportunities, fair deals. I mean, of course you need to deploy whatever means necessary to take out the terrorist leaders who are targeting your folk. That's one. But if you leave it at that, you're "mopping with the tap turned open", as we say. So: democratisation, transparency, socio-economic opportunities, fair deals. Stop propping up corrupt, ruthless dictatorships that foster a popular resentment and exasperation that will sooner or later translate into more footsoldiers for the fundamentalist leaders.

...

In a way the neo-cons are therefore to be praised for steering at something far beyond the mere pacification/stablisation of establishing a "friendly regime" in Iraq - to aspire to remake the country, so to say. Its just that the target they chose was highly odd: in a region awash with fundamentalist agitation, Saddam's Iraq was not among the places where the terrorists came from. [..]

One - fighting terrorism means hitting at the terrorists - focus on Al-Qaeda, dont let yourself be diverted into other tempting ME causes. "Osama" should have remained the prime target from day one.

Two - ... swamp the region with support and funding for good schools, independent media, community initiatives. Bypass the corrupt governments and boost a civil society that simultaneously provides an alternative to the fundamentalist networks and pressures those governments to reform.

Osama could be captured and/or killed tomorrow and new and perhaps worse Osamas would replace him immediately (perhaps this has already hapened).

The recipients of such aid must first feel that their survival is secured before they will risk investing their time, energy and other resources in improving their own lives. The terrified reaction of UN people to the terrorist bombing of their facility in Bagdag is both natural and very instructive. The terrorist threat has got to be at least reduced to the point where the people perceive that constructive efforts can proceed long enough to achieve success. For that reason, the US must first succeed in Iraq before it will be perceived as a credible force for good and can succeed elsewere.

In the summer of 2002, some nine months after September 11, majorities in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea, and Indonesia, to name a few countries, all held "favorable" views of America, according to a Pew Center survey. A year later support for America had fallen in nearly every single country for which the Pew Center provides data. The least bad news came from our firmest allies: favorable views of America fell from 75 percent to 70 percent in Britain, 72 percent to 63 percent in Canada, and 70 percent to 60 percent in Italy. Among our more skeptical allies, support tipped sharply negative: 63 percent to 43 percent in France, 61 percent to 36 percent in Russia, 53 percent to 46 percent in South Korea, 52 percent to 34 percent in Brazil. Favorable views positively vaporized in the Muslim world: from 61 percent to 15 percent in Indonesia, 30 percent to 15 percent in Turkey, and 25 percent to 1 percent in Jordan.

Defenders of the Bush administration point out that it isn't the president's job to please the French or Brazilians, but first and foremost to protect the United States. This is true as far as it goes, but it ignores one crucial insight: We are safer when fewer people hate us. Most obviously, there's the fact that fewer young Muslim men volunteer for suicide missions for the glory of killing a few Americans. But there's far more to it than that. Had we made fewer Turks hate us, the 4th Infantry division could have helped end the Iraq war even quicker and with less loss of life (American and Iraqi), rather than float uselessly in the Mediterranean. When Germany and France hate us less, their police kick down doors of suspected terrorists in Marseilles and Hamburg more enthusiastically. When Asians and other Europeans hate us less, they are more likely to donate to Iraq's reconstruction. And on and on.

True, the war in Iraq was going to anger those who oppose any American-led war under any circumstances. But the way the Bush administration prosecuted it angered many more still. Though the administration managed to infuriate the world repeatedly in its first several months in office, it got a blank slate after September 11--then proceeded, like a bankrupt man forgiven his debts, to go on yet another spree. Bush made clear he would topple Saddam Hussein under any circumstances, then chose belatedly to go to the United Nations and inflate the WMD threat. He tried to bludgeon rather than convince allies to join us. By the eve of war in March, America's poll ratings were even lower than the summer numbers cited above. George W. Bush had lost a p.r. battle to a murderous dictator.

Why the black & white, either/or thinking? If current socio-cultural-economic conditions potentially have new Osamas springing up all the time, isn't it both necessary, right now, to track down the current bunch of terrorist leaders and clamp down on them and infuse the area with the kind of investments that would help prevent their replacement with ever new successors?

Whats to stop the States from investing in a "Marshall Plan" for independent media, educational opportunities, civil society groups, etc, in countries around the region, while fighting the war in Iraq?

A model state on the Euphrates, even if it does materialise after, I'm sure, years of struggle ... may offer some help, in terms of showing what a feasible alternative would look like ... there must at least be a flanking strategy to that focused on Iraq - one looking a little bit beyond the immediate military victory over this year's Osama.

surely ... a similar investment in the very populations that are, right now, most preyed on by the fundamentalists?

There's no reason to say that, because we're fighting a war in Iraq right now, we can't really do anything much about investing in the prospects of an open society anywhere else - in fact, it would be really stupid, cause if you don't fund, foster and support the alternatives to fundamentalism and totalitarianism now in, say, Egypt or Jordan, you might one day have your model state on the Euphrates - surrounded by newly fundamentalist countries.