Nonsense.world is the same as it always has been.full of evil, dangerous people trying to do harm. Bruce http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/L ayout/Article_PrintFriendly <http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/ Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1157147420582> &c=Article&cid=1157147420582
A darker world since 9/11 It stands to reason that 19 men cannot change history, but they did. (Sep 2, 2006) Five years and two U.S.-led wars later, the world created by the Sept. 11 hijackers is a darker place than almost anyone predicted at the start of the new century. Al-Qaeda itself may have been battered and dispersed, but the idea it stands for has spread its poison far and wide. The essence of that idea, so far as a coherent one can be distilled from the ferment of broadcasts and fatwas issued by Osama bin Laden and his disciples, is that Islam is everywhere under attack by the infidel and every Muslim has a duty to wage holy war, jihad, in its defence. The United States is deemed a special target for having trespassed on the Arab heartland. Intoxicated by their defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the jihadists are hungry to topple another superpower. This cause had deadly adherents before the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001. Bin Laden issued his Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders in 1998, the year al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa. But an honest tally of the record since Sept. 11 has to conclude that the number of jihadists and their sympathizers has probably multiplied many times since. It has multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way the United States responded. The first of the two wars George Bush launched looked initially like a success and compared with the second, it still is. Al-Qaeda operated openly in Afghanistan and enjoyed the protection of its noxious Taliban regime, which refused the U.S.'s request to hand bin Laden over. The U.S. invasion, one month after the United States had been attacked, therefore enjoyed broad international support. The fighting ended swiftly and the political aftermath went as well as could be expected in a polity as tangled as Afghanistan's. By 2004, a first ever free election had legitimized the presidency of Hamid Karzai. A ramshackle but representative parliament took office in 2005. The country is plagued by warlords and the opium trade and Taliban fighters are mounting a challenge in the south, but they do not yet look capable of dislodging the new government in Kabul. Even though bin Laden eluded the U.S.'s forces in Afghanistan, the invasion deprived al-Qaeda of a haven for planning and training. This achievement was cancelled out by the consequences of Bush's second war: the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There, three and a half years on, fighting and terrorism kill hundreds every month, providing the jihadists with both a banner around which to recruit and a live arena to sharpen their military skills. Had Iraq turned out better, fewer people would continue to complain that this war, unlike Afghanistan, was conceived in sin. Loathsome though he was, Saddam Hussein had no link to al-Qaeda or the Sept. 11 plot. Moreover, the pre-war claims of the United States and Britain that he had defied the Security Council by keeping his banned chemical and biological weapons, and continuing to seek nuclear ones, turned out to be false. In the battle for world opinion, this mistake, if such it was, had calamitous consequences. Opinion polls show that millions of Muslims now think the U.S.'s real aim in Iraq was to grab its oil, help Israel, or -- just as bin Laden said all along --wage war on Islam. On July 7 last year, four very ordinary British-born Muslims blew themselves up on the London underground, leaving behind martyrdom tapes making it clear in homely north of England accents that they saw "our people" as being at war with "your people." British police claimed last month to have thwarted a more elaborate plot, also by British Muslims, to destroy up to 10 transatlantic planes. In June police in Toronto arrested a dozen Canadian Muslims for planning attacks, including, it is said, a plan to seize and behead the prime minister. To many susceptible Muslims, the message that the faith is everywhere under attack is evidently compelling. Jihadists are skilled at weaving the "resistance" in Palestine, Lebanon, Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan into a single narrative of persecution by the infidel. Of the 15 million to 18 million Muslims who live in Europe (excluding Turkey), the percentage who sympathize with the bombers is small. But the hijackers proved in the United States, and the train bombers of March 2004 in Madrid, that small numbers of terrorists can produce devastating results and a few per cent of 15 million is still a big number. To the secular mind, the jihadists' notion that the faith is everywhere under attack looks absurd. How can conflicts as different as those in Palestine, the Caucasus, Kashmir and the Balkans, even East Timor, be interpreted as parts of a seamless conspiracy against Islam? In Kosovo, NATO intervened to protect Muslims from Christians, not the other way around. And yet a troubling recent development is the emergence in the United States of an equal and opposite distortion. This is the idea that it is the West and its values that are everywhere under attack and everywhere by the same seamless front of what Bush has taken to calling "Islamic fascism," as if this conflict is akin to the Second World War or the Cold War against communism. "We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the Third World War," Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said in July. Al-Qaeda did not invent terrorism. In its Bader-Meinhof or Shining Path or Irish or Basque or Palestinian guise, terrorism was the background noise of the second half of the 20th century. But Sept. 11 seemed to portend something new. There was something different in the sheer epic malevolence of the thing: more than 3,000 dead, with destruction sliding out of a clear blue sky, all captured on live TV. Most previous terror organizations had negotiable demands and, therefore, exercised a measure of restraint. Al-Qaeda's fantastic aims -- sweeping away regimes, reversing history and restoring the caliphate -- are married to an appetite for killing that knows no limits. It boasts openly that it is seeking nuclear weapons. Mass terrorism by Islamist extremists remains a danger. To say that the U.S.'s mistakes have increased the threat is not to say that the United States caused it. It is important to remember who attacked whom five years ago. Islam had its deadly and inchoate grievances before the Iraq war and before Sept. 11. The world must still strive to destroy al-Qaeda and, even more, the idea it represents. But it had better do so with cleverer means than those Bush has used so far. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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