[Nasional-e] Even a bigger NATO won't stop terrorism

[Ambon]

Even a bigger NATO won't stop terrorism
William Pfaff IHT  Thursday, November 21, 2002


When fear breeds fear

PARIS NATO is supposed to be recast this week to meet the threat of
terrorism, but no one has yet offered a clear explanation of what NATO can
do to prevent attacks by Islamic militants determined to punish Westerners
for what history has done to the Muslim world.
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I do not say "history" to imply fatalism. The situation of the Islamic
states today has much to do with the world wars and Cold War, Zionism,
imperialism and U.S. and British oil politics. It has even more to do with
the Islamic peoples themselves: the failure of Mediterranean and Near
Eastern Islamic civilization to develop effective self-government to replace
the Ottoman Turkish system that collapsed in World War I.
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What happened after 1918 did not have to happen. Turkey was not annexed by a
European empire, as the Arab societies were. That fact has its political,
military and social explanations. But people are responsible for what
happens to them: The Turks produced one outcome; the Iraqis produced
another, with which they now have to live.
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The NATO debate has included warnings disconnected from real threats and
policy proposals irrelevant to their solution. America wants help in
carrying out a policy fatefully influenced by the notion that conquering
Iraq will permit Washington and Israel to take control of the Islamic Middle
East and its peoples - and that this will have a happy ending.
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Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany recently asked for someone to explain
to him how we got from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to war against Iraq.
The answer is in part the tyranny of means. If a government's largest and
most influential policy instrument is its armed forces, it turns to them in
an emergency. But armed forces can't solve the terrorist problem. What they
were able to do was overturn the Taliban government that harbored the
terrorists. They today offer to overturn Saddam Hussein.
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Doing these things provides a distraction from the failure to solve the
terrorist problem. It provides a virtual solution, so to speak. When the
followers of Osama bin Laden strike again, the Bush administration will
answer that it won a war against Afghanistan and expects soon to win one
against Iraq. The widows and orphans of the Sept. 11 victims will have to be
satisfied with that.
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A Middle East resident was recently quoted as saying to an American that
"it's not you that we are afraid of. It's your fear that frightens us."
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In recent weeks there has been a barrage of official warnings of impending
terrorist attacks in North America and Europe. These warnings reflect what
police and intelligence services have been discovering about the ambitions
of the members, followers or would-be emulators of the Al Qaeda conspiracy.
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Such threats are not connected with Iraq. The warnings, in the United States
at least, nonetheless coincided with the Bush administration's campaigns to
get congressional approval for an attack on Iraq and to win UN Security
Council approval for such an attack. It now has both.
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The cumulative warnings seem, though, to have given Americans an
unreasonable conviction that the United States now is in danger of an
attack, employing mass destruction weapons, either by Osama bin Laden or by
Saddam Hussein.
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There is, to the best of specialist opinion, no scenario by which the
American public is threatened by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of
Iraqi origin. The mechanical means are not there, even if such an attack
offered any rational advantage to Saddam.
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Western countries are undoubtedly threatened by possible new attacks by Al
Qaeda terrorists, but the risk to a given individual in any such attack is
much lower than the risks everybody runs in the course of everyday life.
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The implication of policy statements from Washington has been that terrorism
and Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction are linked, and that a
war against Iraq will somehow lift fear from America. This is not true. The
threat to the United States and its allies comes from an Islamic radicalism
that will be intensified by war with Iraq. It is necessary to understand
that "solving" Iraq is overwhelmingly likely to worsen the terrorist threat
to Western countries.
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