In the wake of Mombasa, Foreign Affairs Editor Peter Beaumont argues that the atrocities will continue until the West finally grasps the fact that we are fighting a lethal idea rather than a tangible enemy
I think Bush already has the idea that we're fighting an idea, but he's also constrained by the realities of the Middle East. The financing — you can't run a war without financing — come from Soddy Arabia. The Soddies have spent the past 30 years preparing for this war, surrounding themselves with a protective cocoon that's built of threads made up of philanthropy, religious aura, propaganda, and political alliances. The one thing that would cause the "Arab street" to rise up against us. So he has to backtrack through that sequence — break up the alliances, counter the propaganda, somehow come up with a way to dispel the religious aura, and substitute American philanthropy and the dependence that goes with it for Soddy phlanthropy. Because of the nature of the conflict at this stage, he has to do all this without an open declaration of war.But al-Qaeda is less a hierarchical organisation out of James Bond led by a sinister mastermind, than a dynamic dialogue between like-minded radicals conducted via mosques, radical publications and the internet. A specific order is almost redundant as individual groups know exactly what must be done and when, adapting themselves to new security constraints and to new targets. That's partially correct, but only partially. In fact, the Islamist movement is in fact much closer to the Ernst Stavro Blofeld-Council of Boskone-Learned Elders of Islam model. Al-Qaeda's military chain of command is either gone or in sufficient tatters that it'll be years before it's able to reconstitute and the informal "Hey, let's blow up some infidels" model has to substitute. But since the head is cut off the beast, there's no strategic goal to the movement; everything is just tactics, which Pyrhhus can attest ain't everything.
And what appears to have been 'understood' before the attack on Mombasa was that it was the right time to polarise the war on terrorism. Just at the moment Bush and his allies had constructed a grudging consent from the Arab world for its tough line on Iraq, Jihad International brought in Israel. In his belligerent threat to hunt down the perpetrators of the Mombasa attacks, Israel's right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon has threatened to upset the delicate consensus between America and its allies on the issue of the war on terrorism, and on the Security Council over Iraq.
Israel's been a target from the first — they just went for the more obvious American targets and left the Hated Zionists™ for the Paleos to kill. Just as we realize now that the Islamists will fall without the backing of the Soddies, so the Islamists realize that if they take out the Americans, so too will Isreael fall.
What is more terrifying still is the notion among the West's political classes that it is an organisation, not an idea, that they are fighting. With each new arrest, each new targeted killing, we congratulate ourselves that we are winning - until the next atrocity takes place. All the while, we fail to tackle the ideas that replace each arrested or dead terrorist with a new recruit.
We're fighting not a single organization, but a network of like-minded organizations that are employing similar tactics and coordinating where needed. They're all working toward the same end: a Caliphate. Each no doubt intends to have its own Great Leader™ as the guy with the jewelled turban and the dancing girls, ordering people's head chopped off at will, but for now they're all on the same team. Much more importantly, we're also fighting the Learned Elders of Islam, a point that I'm sure Bush appreciates. The evidence isn't that well-hidden.
As the tens of millions dead in the last century demonstrated, ideas - no matter that they are venal ones like Nazism or Stalinism - can be as hard to kill as they are lethally and stupidly persistent. But in a war of ideas, to do nothing is the worst of all options.
At some points in the war, we'll be worried about ideas more than we are about explosives. When the war is someday winding down to a Western victory, we'll have to fight the squalling for mercy to the merciless, and I fear that's a fight we'll lose, which will plant the seeds for the next round against it. But at this point the explosives are the more tangible dangers, killing or capturing the chain of command of al-Qaeda — the main, but not the only driver in this — the more pressing necessity. During the Second World War we could have given a färt less about the Nazis' ideas; we were more concerned about their forces and their chain of command. Fighting Stalinism, because we had the luxury of not being involved in a shooting war with them most of the time, we were able to concentrate on the war of ideas — but we actually beat them by winning the war of financing. |