Mark Steyn: We are a target regardless 13sep04
THE other day, Maureen Dowd, The New York Times's elderly schoolgirl op-ed queen, published a new collection. The jacket of Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk shows the eponymous Texan cowboy swaggering out from the White House, fingers hovering twitchily over his guns. That's how much of the West thinks of these past three years: It's Bushworld; the rest of us just live in it, involuntarily. The "so- called" war on terror is just a racket cooked up by George W. Bush's Halliburton cronies to boost their stock price and to enable Junior to work out some complicated psychological feelings re his daddy and the inconclusive ending to the first Gulf War. If Bush goes away, and his poodles Blair and Howard, all the bad stuff will go away, too. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have last week's bombing in Jakarta. Would that have happened without Bush – without Afghanistan and Iraq? No, says Ibrahim Dellal, acting vice-president of the Cyprus-Turkish mosque in Sunshine, Melbourne. It's all the result of Anglo-American-Australian aggression. "If you throw stones, they will be thrown back at you." Wrong. Last week's bombing would still have happened. Maybe not last week, maybe not in the run-up to an Australian election. But, with or without Bush, Australians would have opened their morning papers these past three years and found themselves staring at pictures of carnage and slaughter in Jakarta. Jemaah Islamiah and other al-Qa'ida affiliates were operating in Indonesia well before September 11. In December 2000, while Bill Clinton was president and Bush and Al Gore were dangling their chads, explosions in Jakarta and Manila killed three dozen people. A shaky post-Suharto almost-democracy in the world's most populous Muslim state is too juicy a plum for the Islamists to resist. In the general sense, they've devoted a lot of money and energy to radicalising South Asian Muslims and they're not going to quit now. And, in the specific, in the liberation of East Timor and the libertinism of Bali, the terrorists see an infidel annexation of part of the House of Islam. If Indonesia were to become a booming established pro-Western democracy, that's a huge setback. A good way to prevent it doing so is to bomb and kill at the points at which the Indonesian people interact with the infidels. In Turkey, they bomb British banks. In Tanzania, they bomb the US embassy. In Indonesia, the obvious Western targets are Australian. In every case, they kill the locals, and underline the point that having anything to do with the infidel world is highly injurious to one's health. All that Bush has done is provide a context. Before 9/11, an Australian embassy bombing would have been big locally, but in Paris and London and Washington it would have been one of those garbled international headlines you hear at the end of the news bulletin as you're sitting in traffic waiting for the Lite Rock Favourites Of The '80s to resume. Somebody bombed an embassy somewhere. Some terrorist group you've never heard of. The Jemal Tigers? Something like that. Oh, well. Lotta crazy people out there. 9/11 gave these events a unifying narrative. We understand now that Jakarta and Madrid and Istanbul and Beslan and lower Manhattan are all part of the same story. The terrorists act locally, and we think globally. It's not Bushworld, but binworld, a world in which whenever you hear some hitherto goofy can't-make-head-or-tail-of-it scenario chances are it turns out to be, yet again, the Islamist ideology promoted by Osama bin Laden co-opting whatever materials to hand – traditionally tolerant Muslims in Indonesia, a deranged host regime in Afghanistan, opportunist secular dictatorships in Iraq and Syria, rogue princes in the House of Saud, separatists in Chechnya, unassimilated Muslim immigrants in Europe, disaffected black Muslims in British and American jails – and, one day, Kim Jong-Il's nuclear bargain basement in North Korea. In other words, even if Bush and Howard go away, this stuff won't. But hang on, you say. What about the deputy Prime Minister and that headline in The Sydney Morning Herald's online edition yesterday? "Iraq Role Could Make Us A Target: Anderson." On closer inspection, Anderson isn't quite as excited as that headline writer. He concedes that "Australia is a target. We've been a target for a long time, but we are not exclusively [targeted] because we are members of the coalition, though it may be that those of us who have been particularly prepared to stand up [in Iraq] will be identified [as targets]." That's a statement of the obvious. Having toppled one member of the coalition of the willing, the Islamists would clearly like to do the same to the three prime ministers plus the Polish President thanked by Bush in his recent convention speech, pour encourager any others tempted to join the Texan posse. There are two ways you can do this: If you're a crime family facing a police chief determined to clean up the town, you can whack the chief. But that's hard to do with Western heads of government with big security details. So the easier and more effective route is to cause some massive bloodshed and thereby persuade the electorate to vote the quiet- lifers in, as the wretched Spaniards did. All that means is that the random acts of violence are not quite so randomly timed. "Bushworld" is real to this extent: If Bush goes, the international resolve to win the war against binworld goes with it. John Kerry, the quintessential quiet-lifer, has said he wants to fight it through "law enforcement" and multilateral institutions. The Anglosphere will be friends with Jacques Chirac again and, as in Sudan, the Security Council will agree on a very strong expression of deep regret after everyone's dead. But binworld will advance, mile by mile, month by month, through bombings, propaganda, appeasement by the likes of Gloria Arroyo, and furtive collaborations with elements of the Indonesian state. Living with terrorism means a slow remorseless surrender to it. Indonesia is going to be a terrorist battle front for the foreseeable future, and the interests of the leading regional Western power will be a prime target. It will be a lot easier for Australia to tackle as a local front in a global war than as a regional issue of no concern to the other big players. Ibrahim Dellal at his Melbourne mosque has got it wrong. Throughout the '90s, the Islamists threw stones at the West, and the West threw nothing back. And with each stoning, the enemy grew emboldened. So, if you want to live in Bushworld, go ahead. Natter on about Cheney and Halliburton and the Afghan pipeline and poodle Blair and lapdog Howard to your heart's content. Millions of gleeful fantasists gambol happily on the wilder shores of Bushworld. But JI and al-Qa'ida and Islamic Jihad don't. Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group and the Chicago Sun-Times. privacy terms © The Australian ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. 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