Three Cultures, Three Views of Terror

BOSTON -- My rather surrealistic trip from Beirut to London to Boston coincided with three rather sharply juxtaposed events in Lebanon, Great Britain and the United States.

In Lebanon, a chronically turbulent and mystifying political governance system remains stalled and immobilized, while masses of citizens are dissatisfied and worried. Meanwhile, the three top leaders of a north Lebanon-based Qaeda-style jihadist militant group (Fateh el-Islam) that fought the Lebanese army for over 100 days escaped the siege and the defeat of their followers. Mass political malaise and terrorism go hand-in-hand, in Lebanon and elsewhere.

In Great Britain, the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a report this week clarifying the global terror threat, stating that Al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself since September 11, 2001, and is able to carry out large-scale attacks against Western countries. It said that the American-led “global war on terror” is proving ineffective.

In the United States, following the Congressional hearings into the situation in Iraq, I encountered the fantasy world of the George W. Bush administration that keeps putting coins into a video game machine and blasting away at bad guys who seem to increase, rather than die away. But this is not a game: This is our world. The Bush administration’s central argument -- that it must fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq before the terrorists strike the US heartland -- has now moved from its initial political dishonesty and wasteful self-delusion to the criminal stage of being a real menace to global stability and security because of its proven capacity to promote, rather than deter, terror.

It is painful to watch otherwise intelligent and honorable American officials either acting as fools or taking us for fools, by continuing to claim that they wage a war in Iraq to fight terrorism, when the facts show two opposite trends: Existing terror groups and networks remain strong, and new terror recruits and organizations are coming to life, predominantly in response to American, Arab, and Israeli policies.

The main problem at hand is not just the capacity of Al-Qaeda to organize terror attacks, create loose global networks of militants, or inspire new recruits to the movement. The problem -- as the honest IISS report stated -- is that “Al-Qaeda’s ideology appears to have taken root to such a degree that it will require decades to eradicate.” It also points to a growing process of radicalization within Islamic countries, and among Islamic societies in Western countries, especially Muslims in Europe.

Growing communal radicalization and greater Qaeda-linked organizational capabilities feed off each other. They are also nourished by the policies of Arab, Asian, American, European, Russian, Israeli and some other governments around the world that drive ordinary and decent young men, and a few women, into the criminal world of terror.

More ominously, American, Israeli and Arab policies have spurred increasingly radical public opinion around the world, manifested in the steady growth of mainstream Islamist political parties such as Muslim Brotherhood groups, Hamas, Jamaa Islamiya, and others like them. Everywhere in the Middle East, and in many parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, hundreds of millions of disenchanted men and women are being steadily radicalized because they feel so politically abused and demeaned, by their own societies and by foreign powers alike. They find neither solace nor the promise of a decent life in either the policies of their governments or the projection of Western power around the world.

These are not Qaeda-linked terrorists, but they provide the mass base of disenchanted popular sentiment from which the Al-Qaedas of this world eventually recruit the mere hundreds of people they need to become foot soldiers, safe house keepers, scouts, drivers, financiers, technicians, web masters, and suicide bombers.

The United States and its allies have put into this battle the greatest combination of global military, economic and intelligence-gathering capabilities ever assembled in the history of the world -- and yet they are not succeeding, let alone winning. Why? Because the political, economic and military forces that foment discontent, degradation, and radicalism around the world are now, on balance, greater than the forces that promote stability, decorum and a decent daily life for ordinary men and women.

My journey this week from Lebanon to Great Britain and the United States has been a straight line through three political cultures that interact with terrorism in very different ways: Middle Eastern societies often breed radicalism and terror; Europeans incubate some terror but also increasingly analyze it more accurately; and, the United States, for the most part, refuses to acknowledge that terror is partly home-grown Arab-Asian deviance, and partly a response to American-Israeli foreign policies that wander comfortably among callousness, brutality, and criminality.

Not surprisingly, the terrorism problem persists, and the threat will continue to grow -- until we drop foolhardiness and reckless amateurism as guiding principles of many American, Arab and Israeli policies.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

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Released: 17 September 2007

Word Count: 800

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