Empire Notes

Last Thursday’s attacks in Spain, in which 200 people were killed and nearly 1500 wounded, were likely carried out by al-Qaeda, not by the Basque separatist ETA. In any case, they make one thing very clear: terrorism cannot be fought by purely military means.

After the first Gulf War, and particularly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, U.S. military analysts concerned themselves extensively with the question of terrorism. An early conclusion was that it is precisely the extreme dominance of the U.S. military that makes potential opponents turn to what is sometimes called “asymmetric warfare” -- i.e., attacks in which the other side also has a chance of inflicting damage. For example, Presidential Decision Directive 62, issued in 1998, says, “America’s unrivaled military superiority means that potential enemies (whether nations or terrorist groups) that choose to attack us will be more likely to resort to terror instead of conventional military assault.”

The Bush administration’s response, involving a tremendous new wave of militarism, new weapons systems, and a newly aggressive posture in the world could not have done more to exacerbate the threat of terrorist attacks if it had been planned that way.

Worse, there has been a shift in the modality of attacks after 9/11. The 9/11 attacks and previous ones by al-Qaeda, like that on the U.S.S. Cole or those on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, were attacks on hard targets, requiring suicide bombers and, in the case of 9/11, a highly sophisticated operation. Furthermore, the targets were ones of obvious political significance; there was hardly a more potent symbol of American economic might and world domination than the World Trade Center. Contrary to popular depictions, at the time al-Qaeda was not simply ravening to kill any American anywhere.

That changed after the Afghanistan war, with a decision made by elders of Al-Qaeda in Thailand in January 2002 to turn more toward soft targets. The first major such attack was the November 2002 Bali nightclub bombing which killed nearly 200. The Madrid attack is just the most recent example of this evolving dynamic.

And thus we are led to the reductio ad absurdum -- more military prowess leads to more terrorist attacks, more defense of hard or politically significant targets leads to more indiscriminate attacks on soft targets, and it is simply impossible to defend all soft targets. Today the trains of Madrid. Tomorrow the New York subway?

The progression of events in Iraq under the occupation mirrors this logic.

Initially, one saw mainly attacks on the U.S. military. It quickly responded by increasing the level of alert, and so August of last year saw numerous terrorist attacks. The U.N. humanitarian headquarters was attacked and Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim was assassinated at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. These were still aimed at very specific persons or organizations and involved targets with some level of protection.

As Iraq began to fill up with concrete barricades and razor wire, the targets changed. Attackers who had earlier concentrated on the Iraqi police as collaborators with the occupation took to bombing lines of people waiting to interview for jobs as police. Cleaning women who worked on a CPA base were gunned down. Attacks against random targets of opportunity proliferated. The culmination was on Ashura, the holiest day of the year for the Shi’a  a dozen suicide bombers attacked processions in Baghdad and Kerbala (and tried to in Basra and Najaf), killing likely over 200 people.

In the unlikely event that al-Qaeda didn’t do this, whoever did it was inspired by al-Qaeda. The attack involves the same modus operandi, the same abandonment of any idea of winning support for body count as the sole criterion of effectiveness. If non-Islamist organizations come to adopt the same methods, the danger is only increased.

In fact, the dominant theme of the U.S. “war on terrorism” has also been abandonment of political effectiveness for body count. Just look at pronouncements by Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and others that the war on Afghanistan was and is a success because we have killed hundreds of Taliban in recent months. The military calculus implicit in such judgments simply doesn’t apply to the political situation that we have to deal with.

What is needed is a rational calculus, which allows us to judge how to genuinely weaken al-Qaeda, et al., instead of posturing and pretending that cruise missiles weaken them. Such considerations will immediately lead us to the conclusion that what is necessary is taking away the political ground on which they stand. That ground is not the virtually nihilistic domestic political programs of these groups. It is their opposition to U.S. imperial control of the Islamic world, a grievance that most Muslims share.

Some stab at dealing with these problems  in particular, the beginning of an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and to the U.S. occupation of Iraq  is necessary in order to create an environment in which other steps against al-Qaeda will genuinely weaken it. What’s relevant is not the political aspirations of Osama bin Laden, but rather the political grievances of the people of the Islamic, especially the Arab, world. The fact that the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the most “pro-American” regimes have the most anti-American populaces is clear evidence that the problem is not, as the neoconservatives would have us think, an absence of American influence and control but rather an excess.

No sensible person thinks that moves on these issues will dissuade al-Qaeda from its fight. The point is to isolate it so that international police actions are easier to set up and carry out, on the one hand, and so that they don’t lead to more proliferating terrorism on the other hand.

Spanish turned out in unexpectedly high numbers and, in a reversal of all recent poll results, voted Aznar’s party out of power on Sunday. Although al-Qaeda and the American right wing will see this as appeasement, it is to be hoped that it is rather a recognition that dealing with al-Qaeda-style terrorism requires rational measures.

At this point, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re whether you’re a dove or a hawk, left or right, concerned with the suffering of others or concerned merely with your own skin. Bush’s “war on terrorism” is a “cure” that increases the spread of the disease.