Greg Sheridan of The Australian gets it right with his op-ed piece Address the root causes of terrorism.
His main point: The real root cause of terrorism is the terrorist ideology itself, which although involves a belief in the supremity of Arab culture, has actually led to backward and impoverished Arab societies. Since the war in Iraq offers hope of breaking the “relentlessly destructive paradigm of modern Arab politics”, it really does confront the roots of terrorism.
Here is the full piece.
Australia is likely to be targetted by a terrorist bombing in one of its great cities, probably Sydney, between now and an election at the end of the year.
That is the sobering judgement of a friend of mine, a man with long experience in intelligence analysis who has worked for decades at the heart of Australian Government. His view is that we have long been an al-Qa’ida target but now the political dynamics since the bombing in Spain give the terrorists an extra motivation and increase the likelihood of attack.
Against this must be balanced the fact that our professional intelligence agencies have not changed their official threat level. Of course, no-one can know when, where or even why al-Qa’ida will strike. But we know this: the war on terror will last for decades and if the evidence of recent weeks is anything to go by it will divide us bitterly. It is partly because the nature of our terrorist opponents is so little understood that the Howard Government is right to commission a White Paper on the nature and genesis of al-Qa’ida and its affiliates.
The most common impulse is to demand that we address the “root causes” of terrorism, by which commentators most often mean poverty or Israel, two issues which have nothing at all to do with the genesis of al-Qa’ida. Sometimes when pundits talk of root causes they really have in mind just a banal list of disputes involving Muslims which must be solved if we are to show the terrorists that the West is not really anti-Islam.
The real root cause of terrorism is terrorist ideology.
Osama bin Laden’s initial complaint against the West was that US troops were present on Saudi soil, that the mere presence of infidels on the holiest Muslim ground was objectionable. The Iraq war facilitated the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia ñ they are no longer needed to protect the kingdom from Iraqi invasion.
For some time terrorists exploited the effects of the sanctions on Iraq under Saddam Hussein. These sanctions were necessary to prevent Saddam from using oil money to buy weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq war was waged partly so that sanctions, which hurt the Iraqi people but left Saddam in office, could be lifted.
But these are all really propaganda devices of al-Qa’ida, as is the Israeli/Palestinian dispute.
The works of the scholar of Arab history, Bernard Lewis, are most enlightening here. Lewis argues that the modern Arab attitude to the West, especially the attitude of extremists and militants, has developed over hundreds of years and is not dependent on a single cause or dispute. The paradox for Arab culture is that it believes itself to be culturally supreme but has produced societies which are impoverished and backward, despite their oil wealth.
In this sense, the war in Iraq really does confront the roots of terrorism because it offers some hope of breaking the relentlessly destructive paradigm of modern Arab politics. So far from being a distraction from the war on terror, as Mark Latham and former US National Security Council counter-terrorism coordinator, Dick Clarke, maintain, the effort in Iraq is the single most important effort to address terrorism’s “root causes”.
Last Saturday I wrote that I found Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, in which he accuses the Bush administration of neglecting terrorism before the 9/11 attacks because it was obsessed with Iraq, wholly unconvincing. This is in part because of two incidents, where I have personal knowledge, in which Clarke’s descriptions of events are so tendentious as to be completely misleading.
Moreover, Clarke’s central allegation ñ that the Bush team had well formed views on Iraq before they entered the White House ñ is a point without consequence. Anybody with any interest in foreign affairs had views on Iraq ñ it had been a big issue for 10 years. Bill Clinton, remember, made regime change in Iraq official US policy. What 9/11 did was change the level of threat Washington was willing to tolerate. It also made it determined to try to do something to change Arab political culture.
Incidentally, Clarke himself says that he believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The Bush administration was right to be deeply concerned about Iraq. Be that as it may, in acting in Iraq today we are making a critical contribution to the war on terror.
Terrific stuff.
