Date: July 10, 2005 8:12:11 AM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] Disastrous Iraq adventure is a sideshow to the long haul war on terror
Disastrous Iraq adventure is a sideshow to the long haul war on terror
GERALD WARNER, Scotsman, UK
July 9, 2005 - WHEN more than 50 people are killed and 700 injured by
terrorist attacks on the London tube and bus system, it is time to take a
long, hard look at the war on terror. On that same day, 26 people were
killed by insurgents in Iraq; but to put things in a clearer perspective,
over the week to last Thursday, fatalities in Iraq totalled 132 people.
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, 1,942 coalition troops have been killed
and the US military alone has had 12,855 of its personnel wounded in action.
Iraqi police and military have suffered 2,526 fatalities; it is impossible
to calculate the number of civilians killed and injured. By any criteria,
this is carnage. So, is the coalition winning? Despite the spin from
optimistic American neo-cons, the facts speak for themselves. Last month, 83
coalition soldiers were killed; in June last year the figure was 50; in June
2003 it was only 36.
Casualties decrease when a war is being won: in Iraq, on the contrary, they
are increasing. The inference is obvious. There was a momentary surge of
triumphalism last February, after the elections; but the wholly predictable
incompetence of the new Iraqi government has ended that false dawn.
Meanwhile, the war is costing America treasure as well as blood. By the end
of this fiscal year (on September 30) it will have cost US taxpayers
$204.6bn. Worse still, there are signs of war weariness among the American
public, which President Bush's recent speech anxiously sought to address.
When Donald Rumsfeld redefines Vice-President Dick Cheney's "last throes" of
the insurgency to imply as much as 12 years' more conflict, and US
negotiators are said to be in discussions with "Sunni" spokesmen (coded
language for middlemen to the insurgents), we do not need to tap the
barometer to predict the weather. We have been here before. Geopolitical
events move faster now than at the time of Vietnam. This was Dubya's war and
he is a second-term President whose clock is running down. No successor,
Republican or Democrat, will want ownership of the Iraqi quagmire.
This adventure is a disaster that goes far beyond even the appalling loss of
life and civilised amenities. The catastrophic mistake of the Bush
administration was to allow the war on Iraq to supplant the war on terror.
They are two completely different entities.
For whatever motive - a commonly attributed one is his father's unfinished
business - Bush perversely selected one of the few governments in the Middle
East with no links to Islamic terrorism (Wahhabi extremists hated Saddam as
a secularist apostate) and invaded it. Previously there were no al-Qaeda
operatives in Iraq: now it is crawling with them. Nice one Dubya.
The real war on terror, which we are not so much losing as sitting out,
requires a totally different approach. The Americans have played into their
enemies' hands by even coining the phrase "war on terror". It has a
resonance within the Islamic world to which the automatic response is jihad:
the infidels have declared war on Islam, so the faithful will respond. What
we ought to be talking about is essentially a police operation. Our whole
rhetoric is wrong because we have no understanding of what is confronting
us.
Britain and Europe today are so secularised that we have lost even the
capacity to comprehend the religious mind. People motivated by their faith
are "nutters". Suicide bombers are routinely described as "cowardly". A
suicide bomber may be evil, deluded or demented, but one thing he is not is
a coward. Last Thursday, Tony Blair proclaimed that "our values will long
outlast theirs". Our values? Precisely what values in our crime-ridden,
uncivil, irreligious, drug-addicted and sex-obsessed society, where family
life is being eradicated with government help, was Blair invoking?
It is the West's declared objective of imposing its 'values' on Islamic
societies that has inspired resistance and helped recruit fighters. Fathers
in Islamic countries do not want their dutiful daughters, who marry as
virgins, turned into promiscuous, drunken, foul-mouthed, tattooed and
pierced ladettes. The images of our society on satellite television confirm
Muslims in their belief that it is better to die than to go down that road.
When Kabul fell, the idealistic hope of western commentators was that MTV
would anaesthetise youth until Starbucks came along to finish the job.
Our fundamental mistake is that we treat Muslims with imperialist contempt
in their countries, but with absurd deference in our own. We have no right
to decree that every country on earth shall live under parliamentary
democracy: what else is this but a new imperialism? What if people - even a
majority - prefer Sharia to Westminster? "Corrupt dictators" has become an
essential epithet. What about corrupt parliamentarians?
In former times, we were content to do business with the local mad Emir; now
we want to unseat him and leave chaos in his place. The new jihad was
provoked by Brezhnev, from the left, in Afghanistan, and by the Shah, from
the right, in Iran. It is time to let ill alone.
There should be a quid pro quo for our respecting the culture of Islamic
societies: the right to regain control of our own borders and security. That
means an end to political correctness and to officially tolerated illegal
immigration. The liberal claque may hold its peace for a few weeks after
last Thursday's atrocity, but it will not be long before we get complaints
that police questioning people of Middle Eastern appearance is
"discriminatory". Blair, meanwhile, will opportunistically try to exploit
the London murders to promote identity cards - useful only for identifying
bodies after the event, as Madrid proved.
Al-Qaeda is not a tightly knit group with a command structure, like the IRA,
but a movement, a trend, an idea. The last jihad in Europe - in Spain -
lasted for 800 years. We must end our delusions and dig in for a long haul.
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