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Published on Wednesday, October 31, 2001 in the Toronto Star
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Bush Team Has Lots to Learn
About World |
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by Richard Gwyn |
| THE WAY things are going, it's
looking less and less likely that Osama bin Laden is going to end up "dead
or alive" (the latter meaning his capture) — as President George W. Bush
once defined his war aim.
With the bombing part of the war now starting its fourth week, it's
looking more and more likely instead that bin Laden will end up as the
Middle East's equivalent of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Sooner or later, his luck will run out. A bomb will just happen to
hit the right cave.
Or special operations troops will spot him on the move — without
knowing that the figure scrambling over the rocks is in fact bin Laden —
and will bring him down by a single, night-vision, sniper shot.
Or some Afghan tribal chief will reckon that several million
dollars in a numbered account is worth the risk that he will be fingered
for the deed of betrayal.
Bin Laden will win, though, provided that he evades death or
capture long enough to become a myth. The kind of iconic figure, that's to
say, whom immense numbers of ordinary Arabs and Muslims, entirely aside
from actual fellow terrorists and extremists, will come to identify with
as a source of pride and of inspiration, a modern Saladin, a Bonnie Prince
Charlie escaping his overwhelming enemy because of his skill, because of
the loyalty of his supporters and, as will certainly become part of bin
Laden's legend, because Allah willed it.
The evidence that this is the way things may turn out — a war on
terrorism cannot produce any clearly defined victory, but this kind of a
result would palpably be a decisive defeat — can be found these days in
Washington even more readily than in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, there is a distinct note of doubt, of confusion, of
uncertainty from there. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said a couple of
days ago that bin Laden might not be caught at all, then hastily corrected
himself and said, of course, bin Laden would be snared. A senior Pentagon
officer, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, told journalists in a briefing
that the Taliban were proving to be "tough" opponents who were clinging
"doggedly" to power.
Of course, the Taliban are tough. They've been fighting for 20
years. They and their predecessors defeated a superpower, the Soviet
Union.
Equally, it always was possible that bin Laden would never be
killed — or, more exactly, that no proof would be available that this had
happened as the "bunker-buster" bomb that got him would leave no evidence
and his fellow terrorists would never admit he had been killed, but would
pretend they'd spirited him away to Chechnya or some other haven.
What's disconcerting isn't the difficulty of defeating the Taliban
and locating bin Laden — Afghanistan is the size of Ontario; the rock
caves go on for miles; the mujahideen are clever, tireless, patient
— but that the discovery of all of this should have come as a surprise in
Washington.
At the start, everyone from Bush down said this would be a war
unlike any other war.
Increasingly, it's becoming clear that while they knew this
intellectually, they didn't know it in their bones.
A greater familiarity with history would have helped. Except that
to most Americans, history is bunk.
But history is part of our present. Thus, the war in Northern
Ireland is apparently — that word apparently should be underlined — now
coming to an end with the IRA's agreement to decommission its weapons or,
at any rate, to sort of get rid of them.
To reach this achievement, when the sword, if not turned into
ploughshares, is, at least, being set aside for politics has taken 30
years. The terrorism against Israel has gone on longer. Terrorist wars are
still going on in Sri Lanka, in Colombia, in Spain's Basque country.
And, unlike in Afghanistan, none of these conflicts — that in
Palestine as a partial exception — is being conducted by an opponent who
is not only prepared to die for the cause but eager to do so.
That doesn't mean the war against the Taliban and bin Laden is
being lost. There is, though, precious little evidence that it's yet being
won. Indeed, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance seems to have actually
lost some ground since the conflict began.
It means, instead, that the much praised team around Bush has an
awful lot of learning ahead of them. And the key to that learning process
will be an understanding that they — and the rest of us — are going to
have an awful lot of time in which to learn about how to fight terrorism.
Richard Gwyn's column appears on Wednesday and Sunday in the Toronto Star. Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited ### |
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