In the comic books, bad guys often team up to
fight the forces of good. The Masters of Evil
battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and
Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on Superman.
And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent
headlines with their hijacking and
hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form
a dynamic evil duo against the United States and
our allies. We're the friendly monsters -- a big,
hulking superpower with a heart of gold -- and
they're the aliens from Planet Amok.
In the comic-book imagination of some of our
leading pundits, the two headline threats against
U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up.
The intelligence world is abuzz with news that
radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the
pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given
this "bigger picture," Fred Iklé urges us simply
to "kill the pirates." Robert Kaplan waxes more
hypothetical. "The big danger in our day is that
piracy can potentially serve as a platform for
terrorists," he writes. "Using pirate techniques,
vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the
middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship
seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard."
Chaotic conditions in Somalia and other
countries, anti-state fervor, the mediating
influence of Islam, the lure of big bucks: these
factors are allegedly pushing the two groups of
evildoers into each other's arms. "Both crimes
involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves
from their nation-states and form
extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians;
both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as
the United Nations Convention on the High Seas
stipulates, 'for private ends,'" writes Douglas
Burgess in a New York Times op-ed urging a
prosecutorial coupling of terrorism and piracy.
We've been here before. Since 2001, in an effort
to provide a distinguished pedigree for the
Global War on Terror and prove the superiority of
war over diplomacy, conservative pundits and
historians have regularly tried to compare
al-Qaeda to the Barbary pirates of the 1800s.
They were wrong then. And with the current
conflating of terrorism and piracy, it's déjà vu all over again.
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21251>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/04/monsters-vs-aliens-why-terrorists-and.htm>monochrom
at 4/24/2009 05:29:00 PM
