Terror and The War Of Ideas (washingtonpost.com)
“Most terror attacks over the past two years have been planned by groups like this one. They are inspired, not directed, by al Qaeda, and draw their support from various, mostly private sources. Tackling the threat they pose is the key to security in this age. ”
“Terrorism today doesn’t need government backing, because it is fueled by three broad forces: the openness of free societies, the easy access to technologies of violence and a radical, global ideology of hatred. It can be stopped only by responses at each level. ”
Bush and company still only see state sponsored terrorism. The reality is the mess in Iraq is only adding to the terror problem, by creating more potential terrorists, not solving it. The only course from here in Iraq is to turn it over to multinational control and then to the Iraqi people themselves, as soon as possible. The military actions taking place now are just making things worse. We’ll never get rid of all the potential “thugs” as long as we are an occupying force that they can paint as “the enemy”. But Bush needs enemies as much as they do, or he can’t paint himself as “a war president”.
“President Bush often speaks of a war against terror. And in a metaphoric sense he’s right. The magnitude and urgency of this struggle go far beyond mere law enforcement. But to speak of a war also distorts thinking by suggesting there is an easily identifiable enemy and an obvious means of attack. The vast bulk of anti-terror operations, in America, Europe or elsewhere, is aggressive deterrence and prevention at several levels done by police, intelligence agencies and other nonmilitary bureaucracies. ”
“For years Saudi Arabia and Pakistan funded radical Islamists as a way of gaining legitimacy. (In the Pakistani case, the government also trained Kashmiri terrorists.) But now Islamic terrorism has become a Frankenstein’s monster that has turned on the regimes that nurtured it. ”
“The Saudi and Pakistani cases show that once you foster radical ideologies, they become uncontrollable, even to the states that created them. That’s why the only way to combat this new global terror is to fight the ideology that fires it everywhere. So the war on terror is really a war of ideas. And I’m not sure we are winning it. ”
And we certainly aren’t going to win it by continuing to add fuel to the fire and acting exactly as these radical forces portray us to be.