Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  But even on the Spanish side of the frontier, where there are deaths from terrorism every year, few people see it as a dominant factor in their lives. It’s just background noise, like the daily toll from traffic accidents.

  The French police now cooperate closely with their Spanish counterparts in trying to catch the ETA militants who shelter in the French Basque provinces, but even when they didn’t, nobody in Spain suggested invading France to stamp out the terrorist sanctuaries. Doing so would be grotesquely disproportionate, like invading Afghanistan to protect Americans from Arab terrorists.

  The ETA story, like that of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, teaches us three things. The first is that you don’t need a territorial “base” to carry out terrorist attacks; an isolated farmhouse or an anonymous city apartment will do. The second is that you should treat terrorism like any other crime: use the police to track the perpetrators down, and don’t inflate the whole problem enormously by getting the army involved. The third is that you must not expect a decisive victory. Eight years of the “war on terror” have created a huge military, corporate and bureaucratic lobby in the United States whose livelihood depends on a highly militarized approach to terrorism, so it will be a long time before a saner strategy prevails in Washington. Britain’s learning curve in Northern Ireland was thirty years long, and Russia has learned nothing yet in Chechnya. But people generally do the right thing in the end—after they have exhausted all the alternatives.

  There’s not really a lot more to be said about terrorism, but you cannot ignore the role of the media. Here’s a recent example of just how bad they can be.

  November 6, 2009

  MYSTERIOUS MOTIVES

  Earlier this year, the Pentagon committed fifty million dollars to a study investigating why the suicide rate in the military is rising: it used to be below the suicide rate in comparable civilian groups, but now it’s four times higher. Thirteen American soldiers were killed by a gunman at Fort Hood in Texas last Thursday, but since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, seventy-five others have died by their own hand at the same army base. Why?

  To most people, the answer is obvious. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been frustrating, exhausting and seemingly endless, and some people just can’t take it anymore. But the Pentagon is spending fifty million dollars to search for other possible causes, because it doesn’t like that answer.

  The U.S. military budget tops half a trillion dollars, so the military can splash out on diversionary studies that draw attention away from the main problems of combat fatigue and loss of faith in the mission. And we are seeing exactly the same pattern in the response to the killings at Fort Hood, although in this case the military are also getting the services of the U.S. media for free.

  Let’s see, now. A devout Muslim officer serving in the U.S. Army, born in the United States but of Palestinian ancestry, is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in the near future. He opens fire on his fellow soldiers, shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great). What can his motive have been? Hard to guess, isn’t it? Was he unhappy about his promotion prospects? Hmm.

  There is something comic in the contortions that the U.S. media engage in to avoid the obvious fact that, if the United States invades Muslim countries, some Muslim Americans are bound to think that America has declared war on Islam. It has not, but, from Pakistan to Somalia, the U.S. is killing Muslims in the name of a “war on terror.”

  Some of them are enemies of the U.S. government, and some of them are innocent civilians. Some of them are even “friendly-fire casualties” among soldiers collaborating with the United States, like the Afghan soldiers killed recently by a U.S. air strike. But every single day since 2003, U.S. soldiers have killed Muslims, and every day those deaths have been reported in the media.

  So is it possible that the shooter in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who was waiting to ship out to Afghanistan, did not want to take a personal part in that enterprise? Might he belong to that large majority of Muslims (though probably a minority among American Muslims) who, unable to discover any rational basis for U.S. strategy since 9/11, have drifted towards the conclusion that the United States is indeed waging a war on Islam?

  Perish the thought! Rather than entertain such a subversive idea, official spokespersons and media pundits in the United States have been trying to come up with some other motive for Major Hasan’s actions. Maybe he was a coward who couldn’t face the prospect of combat in Afghanistan. Maybe he was a nutcase whose actions had no meaning at all. Or maybe he was unhappy at the alleged abuse he had suffered because he was Muslim/Arab/Palestinian.

  After a few days, while the commentariat hesitated before competing narratives, the media are settling on the explanation that it was ethnic/racial/religious abuse that drove Nidal crazy. Bad people doing un-American things were ultimately responsible for the tragedy, and that’s the end of it.

  The one explanation that is excluded is that America’s wars in Muslim lands overseas are radicalizing Muslims at home. Never mind that the homegrown Muslim terrorists who attacked the London transport system in 2005, or the various Muslim plotters who have been caught in other Western countries before their plans came to fruition, have almost all blamed the Western invasions of Muslim countries for radicalizing them. Never mind, above all, that what really radicalized them was the fact that those invasions made no sense in terms of Western security. No Afghan has ever attacked the United States, although Arabs living in Afghanistan were involved in the planning of 9/11. There were no terrorists in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction, and no contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. So why did the U.S. invade those countries?

  The real reasons are panic and ignorance, reinforced by militaristic reflexes and laced with liberal amounts of racism. But people find it hard to believe that big, powerful governments like those of the United States, Britain and the other Western powers involved in these foolish adventures could really be so stupid, so the conspiracy theories proliferate.

  It is a testimony to the moderation and loyalty of Muslim communities in the West that so few of their members have succumbed to these conspiracy theories. It is evidence of the profound denial that still reigns in the majority community in the United States that the most obvious explanation for Major Nidal’s actions didn’t even make the media’s short list.

  I cannot know for sure what moved Major Nidal to do the terrible things he did: each individual is a mystery even to himself. But I do see the U.S. media careening all over the road to avoid the huge and obvious fact that obscures half the horizon. Time to grow up.

  20.

  THE OLD DOMINIONS

  It is a curious category, although fifty years ago it would have seemed more natural: these are the countries, heavily influenced but not entirely defined by immigration from Britain, that used to be known as the Dominions. The Big Three are Canada, South Africa and Australia, although New Zealand and even Newfoundland also used to get honourable mention on the war memorials.

  The links are fainter now, but they are still there. My mother, for example, a Newfoundlander of Irish origin, found it strange that two of her five children ended up married to South Africans—until I pointed out that it was all due to the British empire. In fact, there are people I love in all the “Dominions,” not to mention in Britain itself.

  But here’s a question. How come Canada didn’t send troops to Iraq and Australia did?

  February 12, 2006

  THE DEPUTY SHERIFF SPEAKS

  Some people are born with so great a talent for brazen effrontery that they have no choice but to become politicians. One such person is Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, who intervened in the U.S. presidential race this week to warn Americans not to vote for the Democrats in general, and Barack Obama in particular.

  Obama, declaring his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that U.S. troops should be out of Iraq by March 2008. John Howard, who faces an election campaign himself later t
his year, seized on these remarks to restate his own fervent support for the Bush administration strategy that created the Iraq quagmire in the first place.

  He said that Obama’s Iraq policy “will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists in Iraq to hang on and hope for an Obama victory.” (Even in his mangled syntax, he sounds much like President George W. Bush.)

  Thus far, however, Howard’s remarks remained within the bounds of normal political discourse. If some Australian voters believe that the invasion of 2003 did not already “completely destabilize and destroy Iraq and create chaos,” and that only a U.S. withdrawal would bring about that outcome, then they are free to vote for Howard, and he is free to solicit their votes. He even stands a decent chance of winning, since the average Australian knows no more about the realities of the Middle East than the average Iraqi knows about Australian politics.

  But then Howard continued: “If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.”

  Never mind the usual guff about “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” as if that particular strand of Arab radicalism dominated the resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq—indeed, as if the “terrorists in Iraq” were a cause rather than a consequence of the U.S.-U.K.-Australian invasion of the country. The point is that Howard was telling Americans how to vote, and foreign leaders are not supposed to do that.

  Nobody in the United States will lose much sleep over Howard’s intervention. Indeed, most Americans are probably unaware that Australia still has a token troop contingent in Iraq, and don’t even know John Howard’s name. The White House will certainly not rebuke him for urging Americans not to vote Democratic. Nonetheless, what is truly interesting is Obama’s response to Howard’s rant, and what it reveals about Australian defence policy. “I think it’s flattering that one of George Bush’s allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced,” Obama said. “I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed 1,400, so if he is to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.”

  Howard replied that the Australian deployment was a “very significant and appropriate contribution,” given the country’s small population. Really? The United States has about three hundred million people; Australia about twenty million, or one-fifteenth as many. So a “very significant and appropriate contribution” by Australia would be one-fifteenth of 140,000 troops or 12,100 Australian troops, not 1,400. It’s all gesture politics and political posturing—but then, so is Australian defence policy in general.

  The key turning point in modern Australian foreign policy was the realization, sometime in 1942 or 1943, that the British empire could no longer defend the country, and that the only big country that might be willing to assume that role was the U.S. So the question became, and has remained, how to guarantee that the United States will come to Australia’s aid in an emergency, even if America’s own vital interests are not directly involved.

  There is no good answer to this question, but it would obviously help if Australian troops show up to help whenever the United States gets involved in a war anywhere in Asia—and that includes the Middle East. However, this policy is too demeaning to national pride to explain clearly to Australians, so the various Australian military ventures abroad have to be explained in other terms—the “Communist threat” in Vietnam, the “terrorist threat” in Iraq. And the actual troop commitment is kept as small as possible, in order not to rouse public opinion against it.

  Australians have fortunately never had the occasion to find out whether volunteering to be America’s “deputy sheriff” in Asia would really produce the desired U.S. response if Australia’s own interests were threatened, but this notion remains at the heart of Australian defence policy. If the United States invaded Mars, Australia would send a battalion along to guard the supply depot.

  Australia is basically a huge island with easily controlled sea frontiers. Canada is a strategic island, in the sense that its frontiers are either with oceans or with the United States. Only South Africa has a direct land frontier with what we used to call the Third World, and it is an enormously attractive destination for impoverished would-be immigrants from the rest of the African continent. Yet it does not really make a serious effort to control its own frontiers.

  This may end in tears.

  May 20, 2008

  SOUTH AFRICA AND THE IMMIGRANTS

  It was looking ugly there for a few days, with mobs of South Africans in townships around Johannesburg randomly murdering several dozen “foreigners” (migrants from other African countries) and injuring several hundred. But now President Thabo Mbeki has acted decisively: he has announced the establishment of a panel of inquiry into the violence. That should fix it.

  Just in case he gets impatient while waiting for the panel’s report, however, I can tell him what it will say—or at least, what it should say. It should say that the root problem is his government’s “non-interventionist” policy on immigration: its refusal to control or even count the number of people arriving in South Africa from other African countries.

  The mere fact that the commonly used estimate is “three to five million” illegal immigrants says it all: the authorities really have no idea how many foreigners are in South Africa. Furthermore, the higher estimate is probably closer to the truth, for some four million people have left Zimbabwe alone to seek work abroad, and almost all of them have gone to South Africa.

  This “open borders” non-policy has worthy motives. Many of South Africa’s current leaders are men and women who spent decades in exile during the fight against apartheid, and the migrants come mostly from the countries that gave them shelter at that time. How can they turn away people from those countries—from Zimbabwe, above all—now that the shoe is on the other foot?

  Such openness is an honourable sentiment, but more easily experienced if, like South Africa’s current leaders, you lead a secure and comfortable life in one of the nicer northern suburbs of Johannesburg. If you happen to live in Alexandra township (not all that far from those pleasant suburbs) amidst garbage and violence and chronic poverty, and you don’t have a job, it’s a little harder to access such noble emotions—because one-tenth of the people in the country are illegal immigrants, and lots of them do have jobs.

  Miserable, underpaid jobs, for the most part, but in a country where the true unemployment rate is somewhere near half there are bound to be a great many people who resent foreigners getting any jobs at all. Especially because there is some truth in the complaint of poor and uneducated South Africans that the illegal immigrants get the unskilled jobs because employers can pay them less and they won’t dare complain.

  None of this justifies murder, but it does begin to explain it. Thabo Mbeki was incredibly foolish to assume that he could just let foreigners flood into the country and not expose them to a popular backlash. The South African media are filled with self-flagellating editorials that all basically ask: “What kind of people are we if we can behave like this?” The answer is: not saintly inhabitants of some imagined “rainbow nation” that has risen above the normal human plane, just ordinary people under pressure and behaving badly.

  Last week in Italy, other ordinary people threw Molotov cocktails into Gypsy camps and burned them down. Most of those people have jobs, live in comfortable surroundings, and eat quite well, and they still behaved badly. There are only about 150,000 Gypsies in Italy, half of whom are distant descendants of people who have been there since the fifteenth century. They are less than a quarter of 1 percent of the population, and yet 68 percent of Italians want them all expelled.

  The South African poor have been amazingly patient as year after year
has gone by—fourteen years now since the end of apartheid—and little has changed for the better in their lives. The black poor still loyally vote for the African National Congress (ANC), but their anger was going to burst out somewhere or other, sooner or later. By holding the door open to so many illegal immigrants, the government has guaranteed that they would be the primary target.

  Maybe this is some Machiavellian plan to divert popular anger from the government itself, but probably not. More likely, it’s just that the leaders don’t see what has been happening to ordinary people. How else could Thabo Mbeki go on defending Robert Mugabe, the destroyer of Zimbabwe, year after year, when Mugabe’s misdeeds were the main reason that this enormous wave of illegal immigrants struck South Africa?

  Justice Malala, whose column appears in the Times (the online version of South Africa’s Sunday Times), nailed it on Monday when he wrote: “[Our] people are behaving like barbarians because the ANC has failed—despite numerous warnings—to act on burning issues that are well known for having sparked similar eruptions across the globe …

  “The Mbeki government’s refusal to even acknowledge the crisis in Zimbabwe has resulted in as many as 3 million Zimbabweans walking the streets of South Africa …

  “Mbeki’s resolute refusal to address the crisis in Zimbabwe—and his friendship with President Robert Mugabe—has brought them here. His block-headedness is directly responsible for the eruption of xenophobia.”