Not a safer world?

[Dreamer128]

Three years after September 11 and the subsequent launch of the worldwide `War on Terror´, the world has become safer, US president George W Bush has claimed in his campaign for re-election.

This bold assertion may come as no surprise in a heated election battle, but it is true or merely a matter of wishful thinking?

Three years on, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has passed the symbolic threshold of 1000. The number of soldiers wounded or maimed for life is of course much higher, and conservative estimates put the death toll among Iraqis at least ten times higher.

For US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, the 1000 dead are part of the 1100-odd casualties the US Army has suffered in both Iraq and Afghanistan - in other words: they have fallen in the global War on Terror.

By heaping together the highly controversial war against Saddam with the fully justified chase after Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration has dissipated much of the sympathy it enjoyed immediately after September 11, including among the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world.

Conciliatory gesture

For a brief moment, widespread anti-American sentiment seemed to give way to a wave of shared grief and sympathy for the innocent victims. For his part, President Bush did the right thing by visiting an American mosque, and by making clear that he did not confuse Islam and the atrocities committed in its name by a bunch of extremists.

But three years later, that brief moment of rapprochement is all but forgotten. Anti-US sentiment is stronger than ever within the Muslim world, providing a fertile breeding ground for new recruits for the likes of Bin Laden. As a result - and notwithstanding President Bush's confident claims to the contrary - the world now seems less safe from terrorism than in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Turning point

Then, everybody accepted the right and even the duty of the Bush Administration to defend the American people against such horrendous attacks. The reason for the change from sympathy to scepticism to outright hostility lies of course in the Bush Administration's decision to equate settling old scores with Saddam Hussein with the global war on terror.

Terrorists are non-state actors, and while states may occasionally lend terrorists a helping hand when it suits their interests, there was no link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, as the 9/11 investigation has confirmed. Also, the Iraqi leader no longer had any weapons of mass destruction.

US credibility


Saddam of course was a bloody dictator and his demise can only be welcomed. But by waging a war for other reasons than the officially stated ones, the Bush Administration has gravely compromised US credibility, especially in the Muslim world. There, the invasion of Iraq is not seen as part of the war on terror, but as a thinly veiled attempt to establish US hegemony in a strategic, oil-rich region. There, the liberation of Iraq is now widely seen as occupation.

Ironically, the post-war chaos in Iraq has transformed this vast country into the biggest training ground for Islamic jihadists since Afghanistan under the Soviets, where Osama bin Laden learned the tricks of his bloody trade. US credibility has further suffered by Washington's embrace of every regime - from petty dictators in Central Asia to democratically elected leaders like Ariel Sharon of Israel – that justifies the repression of its own people or an occupied people in the name of the fight against terrorism.

Underlying issues

The War on Terror fails to address underlying issues. Equating the terrorism of a ranting Jihadist like Bin Laden with the despair-driven terrorism of Hamas - horrible as it is - represents the surest recipe for further terrorist disasters. The cruel repressive policies in Chechnya of another self-proclaimed ally in the war on terrorism, Russian President Vladimir Putin, have not helped prevent the abominable hostage taking and killing of countless children in Beslan.

Fighting terror without fuelling the flames seems a remote prospect. From Bali to Baghdad, from Ryadh to Kabul, from Casablanca to Madrid and from Beslan to Jakarta, this is hardly the safer world President Bush is boasting about.

(Source: Rnw.nl)

[Morgeruat]

Wow so many things wrong with that post... I just wish I had time to disect it and show it for the ignorant tripe it is.

[Dreamer128]

Perhaps. It is just one writers opinion, of course. Still, even Fox news itself (bit of an old article) will grant him that the war in Iraq isn't helping the image of the Bush administration in the various Muslim countries.

[Lucern]

The idea that the War on Terror, particularly in Iraq, is exacerbating the problem isn't exactly an obscure one. Right or wrong, it's pretty common. It'll take time to actually have evidence one way or the other. The fact that the US mainland hasn't been attacked since 9/11 isn't really evidence - it's more like a happy circumstance. Well, there was that shoe bomber's attempt, but that was soon after 9/11.

Though Iraqi Freedom seems to be making the opinion of US policy to drop, we can't know if that has anything to do with a possible upsurge of terrorism. We'd also have to measure it against domestic security policy to counteract that sort of thing like increased airline security and the random searching of crates on cargo ships.

But dismissing the ideas would foolish at this point from a social science hypothesis-testing standpoint, which is good to have because my more biased self is ready to place a bet on the outcome.