On Thanksgiving Day, suicide bombers blew up an
Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, killing a dozen people. At the same time,
terrorists fired shoulder-borne anti-aircraft missiles at an Israeli
airliner taking off from the nearby airport, narrowly missing it.
Al-Qaeda was suspected
of being behind the coordinated attacks, as well as an earlier bombing in
Bali that killed 200 tourists; but nobody can really know. Terrorism is a
game any number can play, and only the players themselves know who they
are. They may be loosely related Islamic fanatics rather than a single
organization, more on the model of a Mafia than a state. Militant Islamists
are now known to be proliferating in unlikely places, such as
South America’s Triple Border, the lawless
area where Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay meet. Hundreds of thousands of
Arabs have migrated there in recent years.
What seems most
unlikely is that the terrorists in Kenya had anything to do with Iraq
— the target of President George W. Bush’s “war on
terrorism.” Westerners are only beginning to understand the turmoil
in the Muslim world, and Bush doesn’t seem to grasp it at all.
Jonathan Raban, writing in the
Seattle Times, reports that
the Islamists bitterly hate the Arab states Bush persists in seeing as the
problem; they dream of a huge Muslim empire, a restored caliphate,
without internal borders, under Koranic law. They regard the Arab states
as artificial creations of Western imperalism (which they are) and they
consider their rulers “usurpers” who have betrayed Islam.
Raban notes that Osama bin Laden’s messages never refer to Saudi
Arabia by name, since he doesn’t recognize it; in fact, few Arabs
have any loyalty to what the West thinks of as “Arab states.”
This means that Bush is
taking aim at the wrong target. It may be deliberate on his part. Sensing
that he can’t defeat al-Qaeda — and can’t even find it
— he may have chosen a more palpable enemy who can easily be
scapegoated and defeated, one Arab villain serving his purpose as well as
another. That way he can claim to be winning his war, thereby satisfying
the public expectation that he “do something about
terrorism.” And forgetting his own words when he said that this is
“a new kind of war.”
Since the 9/11 attacks,
al-Qaeda has been strangely quiet. If the Kenya attacks were its work,
it’s rather surprising that it took so long to get around to using
cheap anti-aircraft missiles against passenger planes. Even a few such
operations could destroy the precarious airline industry and make tourism
virtually a thing of the past.
What gives? Has bin Laden run out of
resources already? That seems doubtful. Is he biding his time with patient
determination — waiting, perhaps, for a real Arab-American war to
begin in Iraq, inflaming the whole Muslim world and setting the stage for
his next big strike against the West?
And what might such a
strike be? It would probably involve more than box-cutters. There are new
rumors that he has been buying small nuclear weapons from former KGB
men in Russia. A few of his “martyrs” in London, Paris, or
Washington could bring suicide bombing to an unimaginable new
level.
At first it seemed that a
“war on terrorism” could be neither won nor lost. Al-Qaeda
and its allies could never defeat the U.S. military in direct combat, but
they were too elusive and diffuse for the U.S. forces to destroy. That
assessment may prove too optimistic.
If
the Islamists can destroy one major Western city, that will be that. The
“war on terrorism” will be lost.
Perhaps Bush should be
preparing a contingency plan for surrender — but to whom?
“To whom it may concern”? Could we even be sure that a
surrender, in the event, say, of the destruction of Paris, would be
accepted? Or would the enemy take out a few more cities for good
measure? Bush clearly hasn’t thought through such possibilities. He
has been madly confident of victory from the start, with no conception of
what defeat might be like. He still thinks he is fighting his father’s
war.
A
decade ago, Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history.”
And a happy ending it was, with “democratic capitalism”
triumphant all over the world. What we may face now is something like
the literal end of modern Western history. And it won’t be
happy.
Joseph Sobran
