How’s
that for rich: Rumstud lecturing the world about discredited
theories.
Who
exactly is “clinging” to the discredited theory of a London-Iraq
link? The usual gang of Saddam Fan Clubbers and terrorist
fellow travelers: the American and British intelligence
establishments, the whack-jobs on the editorial boards of
four British dailies, a majority of the British public,
and batty UK think tanks like the Royal Institute for International
Affairs, Chatham House and the Economic and Social Research
Council.
Bin
Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is also clinging to this
discredited theory, just as he and all those Spaniards still
cling to the theory of a Madrid-Iraq link. In a video message
broadcast last Thursday, al-Zawahiri lectured, “To the British,
I am telling you that Blair brought you destruction in the
middle of London.” But what would he know?
If
the furious denials by American and British officials sound
a strange note, it’s not just because these same administrations
warned us in March 2003 to prepare for reprisal attacks.
It’s because all their grand rhetoric about sacrifice and
risk and hard choices so suddenly and conspicuously evaporated
into the London fog. If the removal of Saddam Hussein is
worth the lives and limbs of 10,000 coalition soldiers,
if it is worth upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead, then
surely it’s worth the lives of a few dozen British commuters.
Why not just claim the sacrifice, and justify it like all
the others?
In
denying that the 7/7 bombings had anything to do with Iraq,
Rumsfeld et. al. are counting not only on our inability
to connect two large dots, but on our collective amnesia
as well. Who can forget the fear of March 2003, when retaliatory
attacks were the talk of the town? In this newspaper’s archives
alone, you can find several articles from the period wrestling
with the subject. Michelangelo Signorile listened to Tom
Ridge’s warnings and wondered in outrage if Bush thought
New Yorkers were expendable. Ben Smith compared the ways
Washingtonians and New Yorkers were handling terror-anxiety
on the eve of war.
In
scrambling to deny a connection between Iraq and the London
attacks, the Blair government has lost its Bond cool, even
showing early signs of the kind of dementia usually associated
with this side of the pond. In a particularly striking instance
of grandpa forgetting why he’s standing in front of the
refrigerator, British foreign secretary Jack Straw actually
pointed to the recent bombings in Turkey as proof that Iraq
is a red herring.
“The
terrorists have struck across the world, in countries…which
had nothing whatever to do with the war in Iraq. They struck
this weekend in Turkey,” said Straw last month.
If
a few subway bombs have brought the British Foreign Office
down to this kind of analysis, we’re in more trouble than
we thought. The bombings in Turkey, as Straw should know,
were not Islamist suicide attacks. As was widely reported,
they were the work of radical Turkish Kurds (a splinter
group from the secular PKK) seeking an amnesty agreement
as part of their long-running secessionist war with Ankara,
a dormant conflict that was itself aggravated by the war
in Iraq.
But
Straw and his colleagues are more isolated than their arrogance
would indicate. Mostly it was reality-based voices that
arose from London’s July wreckage, including that of the
city’s popular mayor, Ken Livingstone, who rejected 10 Downing
Street’s abdication of all responsibility. With most of
the city at his back, he argued that careful consideration
of the effect British foreign policy has on domestic extremism
must play a role in any serious plan to mitigate terrorism.
The other prong in Livingstone’s anti-terror strategy is
maintaining a high level of public trust in the police,
particularly in Muslim communities, where cooperation is
crucial for intelligence gathering.
“The
London bombings demand clear thinking, not rhetoric,” wrote
Livingstone in the Guardian. “People’s lives depend
on the decisions made. These must be for every community
to aid the police in preventing attacks; to treat Britain’s
Muslim community with respect, both because it is right
and to shrink the pools terrorists operate in; and for Britain
to withdraw from Iraq.”
Livingstone
and the majority of Britons who agree with him aren’t naifs.
They don’t think withdrawal from Iraq is a cure-all, but
rather a cure-some. It’s been obvious from the start that
the invasion and subsequent occupation was fueling extremism
and creating suicide-bombers where there weren’t (m)any,
both in Iraq and in the capitals of western Europe. The
London and Madrid bombings simply illustrated this with
blood.
The
interplay between foreign occupation and suicide terror
is explored in a new book by University of Chicago professor
Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism
(Random House). It’s a book Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and George
Elmer Pataki might want to read before making any more starry-eyed
speeches in praise of the president’s leadership in the
war on terror. Local pols who never tire of reminding us
that NYC is in the cross-hairs should know something about
how those cross-hairs got there. Pape’s study is a good
place to start.
After
compiling and analyzing the world’s only comprehensive database
of suicide bombings between 1980 and 2004, Pape found that
millennial Islamic fundamentalism is the driving force behind
only a small fraction of suicide terrorist attacks. Overwhelmingly,
the prime motivator is “a clear strategic objective: to
compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from
the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”
“From
Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West
Bank,” finds Pape, “every major suicide-terrorist campaign
– over 95 percent of all incidents – has had as its central
objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw. Two-thirds
of all suicide terrorists are from the countries where the
United States has stationed heavy combat troops.”
Suicide
terrorism is a “demand-driven phenomenon,” Pape elaborates
in a recent interview. “It is driven by the presence of
foreign forces…The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide
terrorism and given it a new lease on life.”
If
Islamic fundamentalism and blind hatred of liberal western
societies were the pivotal factors, Pape argues, we would
be seeing waves of Al Qaeda suicide terrorists coming out
of Iran. But we aren’t. Ditto Sudan. Based on his research,
Pape agrees with the growing number of those who claim that
lowering our profile in the Middle East would immediately
and drastically reduce the related threats of suicide- and
mega-terrorism against the U.S. and its allies. This, incidentally,
is exactly what Al Qaeda has been saying clearly and repeatedly
for more than a decade, in appeals beamed straight into
our living rooms. We are free to ignore all of these messages,
of course, and go on pretending our actions have no bearing
on their actions. But that’s worse than counterproductive
– it’s cowardly. If we’re going to fight this war on terror
like fools, let’s at least do it honestly, and lose like
we really mean it.
