Paul Monk

“Bull’s-eye!” exclaimed a Cairo taxi-driver as he watched United Airlines Flight 175 spear into the mid-section of the World Trade Centre south tower and explode in a fire-ball. That exclamation, half a world away from New York geographically and a whole world away in feeling, gives us our best clue as to how this war of terror is likely to play out. This is not, as President Bush and many others want to believe, simply a war of good against evil. It is a war of power against resentment. It will have to be thought through and fought accordingly, or the effort to crush terrorism will merely breed it and cause chaos to proliferate like the plague. In the ten days that have elapsed since the World Trade Centre was destroyed and the Pentagon scarred, countless learned and thoughtful people have expressed opinions as to what it all portends, who the culprits are, what should now be done. This is simply my own effort to reckon with the situation. It takes the form of seven theses or propositions. Each is discrete, in that it can be contested on its own. Each is also a counsel of discretion, as against presumption and self-righteous anger in the wake of the catastrophe. First thesis: This is an act of war, not merely a nihilistic crime. Geoffrey Robertson has argued that the destruction of the World Trade Center “should be characterised and prosecuted as an international crime, not as a war.” I think his motives in saying this are admirable, but the available evidence suggests to me that the perpetrators of this deed intended it as an act of war. They are not finished with us yet, they have just begun. They are not accessible to a working system of justice and have many ways to elude attempts to bring them to justice. They will have to be fought and we would be foolish to assume that they have not long thought through the probable reaction to this devastating strike against the American heartland. Second thesis: This is the first serious blow in a long-planned war by an international coalition of Islamic militants against the West and its allies. While it is very important not to allow paranoia to take over in the wake of a shock of this kind, there seems to be sound evidence that the planning of this attack was orchestrated within a global organisation. The immediate suspect has been Osama bin Laden, who has very quickly assumed something of the status of the dark criminal genius in The Usual Suspects. His repeated denials that he is responsible may simply be lies, but we should take them as pointing indirectly to something intelligence professionals have suspected for some time. Just over five years ago, Mehdi Chamran, a senior Iranian intelligence figure, brought together a coalition of militant Islamist groups under the rubric Hizballah International. Its purpose was, in the words of Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, to carry jihad into “all continents and countries”. In mid-June 1996, there seems to have been a summit of Islamic militant groups in Tehran. It is said to have been attended by leading Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Kurdish and Gulf states activists. An agreement was supposedly reached there to pool financial resources and coordinate training, so as to make possible military inter-operability across at least thirty countries. According to Washington-based sources, Osama bin Laden, Imad Mughaniya of the Lebanese Hizballah and Ahmad Salah of the Egyptian Jihad were appointed at this summit as a coordinating committee under the chairmanship of Mehdi Chamran, to oversee a global strategy of Islamic war against both the infidel Western world and its allies in the Islamic world. According to the same sources, a further meeting took place in July 1996, on the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border, involving not only representatives from the aforementioned groups, but also from Algeria, along with “senior officers from the Iranian and Pakistani intelligence services.” In short, the probability is that this operation was the work of an international organisation with roots in many countries and branches inside the intelligence services of much of the Islamic world. It was conceived and carried out with consummate professionalism and the meticulous calculation of training, timing, targets and the physics of demolition. Scores of operatives were involved in preparations lasting months if not years and yet the plot did not leak. This was clearly not the work of inspired amateurs. It was, we should suspect, the work of Mehdi Chamran’s high command of the Islamic jihad. Third thesis: This blow was long premeditated and its perpetrators have thought ahead several moves. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, a number of people have stated that whoever did this has miscalculated, in that they may have believed they would demoralise and divide the United States and its allies, but they have instead brought them together as almost nothing else could have done. This may be true, but we would be unwise to assume so. The commitment of the jihad coalition to its goals may blind it to the real consequences of its own actions, but we would be prudent to assume that the stirring up of enormous anger was exactly what these people sought to achieve. We would do well to surmise that they sought to provoke a massive American response, which would, in turn, enable them to spark upheaval all over the Islamic world and topple pro-Western regimes from North Africa to the Indonesian archipelago. Fourth thesis: This is not the clash of civilisations, but a profound challenge to civilisation. In 1996, even as the Islamic militants convened under Mehdi Chamran, Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, created something of a sensation. This development will tempt many people to embrace his argument. Henry Kissinger was an enthusiastic reviewer of Huntington’s book when it came out, but he is correct in stating on this occasion that “America and its allies must take care not to present this.as a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. The battle is a against a radical minority that disgraces the humane aspects Islam has displayed in its great periods.” The challenge is to deepen our collective understanding of Islam as a civilisation and to extend the idea of civilisation itself. In 1996, at exactly the time that Mehdi Chamran and his allies were meeting to plot a global jihad, I visited Toledo during a stay in Spain and was deeply moved by the realisation that this city, which dates back to pre-Roman times, was at its peak during the centuries of Islamic civilisation. It was a city where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in peace and mutual toleration. It was not Islam, but Catholicism that brought intolerance and religious terror to Spain. This is the sort of thing of which we need to remind ourselves even as we watch people invoking Christian righteousness and just war. In the early 1990s, there was much talk of a new world order. The only form that new world order took was the military primacy of the United States and the economic liberalism known as the Washington consensus. The September 11 attack was manifestly directed at both these things. Simply responding in rage will not get to the root of the problem. We need to get beyond dismissing the enemies of the United States and globalised economic liberalism as irrational. Until we do so, even militarily effective action against them will serve only to deepen the feelings that have led to this pass and will fan the flames of the jihad. Fifth thesis: This is a spectacular case of what Chalmers Johnson last year called ‘blowback. Johnson argued that American arrogance and imperial presumption are generating ever more resentment around the world. Americans, he warned, should prepare themselves for a century of revolt and retribution, what he called ‘blowback’. I can well imagine that he is currently giving many talks enlarging on this theme. Certainly, it is something which Americans in particular and all those around the world who do not resent American primacy would do well to think much harder about than they have up til now. In a recent thoughtful reflection, the veteran American social historian Studs Terkel commented, “There is an article in the current edition of Harper’s magazine in which we are compared to the Romans. But they did not pretend to do good, they were just conquerors. We are always doing good, we are always innocent. But we are always the ones looked on badly. Why?” Alas, he is wrong on both counts. The Romans did, indeed, “pretend to do good” as they built their empire. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply ignorant of Roman history. And the United States is not as innocent as many of its citizens would like to believe. The Romans of the second and first centuries BCE, like the Athenians three centuries earlier, debated the rise of empire and were concerned with the very issues that Americans have been in the past hundred years – since the Spanish-American War. They were not mere conquerors, but saw themselves as making the world safe for the Roman way of life, extending order and civilisation into the barbarian world and replacing Asiatic decadence with Roman virtue. The parallels with the American sense of manifest destiny are actually quite striking and instructive. The American defeats of Germany and Japan and then of Soviet Communism have strong parallels with the expansion of Roman power. Those who wish to respond that the United States has been uniquely distinguished by the magnanimity of its victories would do well to remember that Rome saw itself, also, as terrible in war but magnanimous in victory. It was Vergil who wrote that it was the destiny of Rome “To hold dominion and seal peace with custom; Spare those who yield, the defiant utterly subdue.” This is very much the spirit of the Pax Americana. And ‘the defiant’ are all those who see fit to rebel against the imperial peace put in place over half a century and maintained with scores of military bases right around the globe. If this latest revolt against the Pax Americana is to be understood, it needs to be put in the deep context of the impact of the Pax Americana (and the Pax Britannica before it) on the Islamic world. It is a quaint and self-indulgent illusion to think that that impact has been a matter of Americans “always doing good” and “always being innocent”. Those who believe this have just been given what ought to be a very rude awakening. The Anglo-American imperial goal in the Islamic world has been one of dominating access to oil and playing the many tribes and factions of the Islamic world against one another. The uprising in Iran in 1977-79 should have led to deep learning, but it led only to more of the same. Those wishing to learn now should begin with James Bill’s lucid and deeply informed book The Eagle and the Lion. They should read with special attention the final chapter, The Politics of Foreign Policy Failure: A System of Reinforcing Errors. To broaden the understanding beyond the pivotal case of Iran, they might do well to read Paul Bracken’s provocative little book, Fire In the East, published in 1999. The message is this: Do not go about your work thinking that “we” always do good and “we” are always innocent. We, in fact, the citizens of the dominant Western civilisation, have established that dominance through a will to power every bit as relentless as that of the Romans. And there will be blowback. Sixth thesis: The attempt to root out and destroy the perpetrators could catalyse a wider disorder. US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has declared that the United States will root out and destroy international terrorism. Senator John McCain has vowed “We are coming. God may have mercy on you. We will not.” President Bush has declared that those who attacked the United States have always found that “they have chosen their own destruction.” The risk is that drastic measures will bring in their train more destabilisation, more resentment, more chaos and a swelling of the ranks of the jihad. Given the social conditions in wide parts of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, the use of US military forces in various parts of these regions could trigger a landslide into what Robert Kaplan has called ‘the coming anarchy’. Afghanistan is under the greatest threat, because it harbours Osama bin Laden. It is already in a horrifying state of political and economic degeneration, caused chiefly by the ruthless war by proxy between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s. Pakistan, which has been the ally of the Taliban from its inception, is being pressed very hard by the United States to provide base support for American military action against the Taliban, which in turn threatens war against Pakistan. Pakistan is far gone in economic degeneration and brewing social disorder itself and could erupt into chaotic conflict internally and with India. Think of the dire scenarios that could ensue. Consider, further, that – if my third thesis is correct – the Hizballah International has anticipated something along these very lines. Just as reformers in Iran try to moderate the more extreme elements of the Islamic blowback, Mehdi Chamran and his allies seek to drive things in the opposite direction. Their strategy is to draw the United States into ill-considered, multiple and unsustainable confrontations. If Che Guevara, in the 1960s, could vow to catalyse “one, two, many Vietnams”, then these people may well intend to produce “one, two, many Somalias”. Will the US send its forces into Iran? Into a disintegrating Pakistan? Into Iraq? Into Sudan? Where will lines be drawn? And when Henry Kissinger calls for military measures directed at the source, we would do well to remember his secret and utterly counter-productive bombing of Cambodia thirty years ago and what that catalysed. Seventh thesis: This war has begun with a deeply symbolic assault on America. It will be won, if it is won, by an even more powerful symbolic response and not by arms alone. By using civilian airliners in suicide assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the perpetrators have signified the deep roots of their motivation and the implacable nature of their intentions. It is conceivable that the united efforts of the United States and its many allies will find and destroy at least some of the perpetrators. It is even arguable that some such effort is imperative, lest they become too emboldened by this daring and stunning success. However, if the deeper question of what is ultimately at stake is not addressed with searing honesty, then the military and police effort will generate only frustration, anger and despair on a global scale. What is ultimately at stake is the very idea of a humane global civilisation. What is called for is a paradigm shift in our common appreciation of what such a world order requires of us individually and collectively. It must be a world order in which Western secularism, Christian, Muslim and Jewish monotheism, Confucian humanism, Hindu polytheism, Buddhist compassion and the countless other variations on the human search for meaning and dignity can find common cause. As human beings, not as true believers, we have a common future in the stewardship of this stunningly beautiful and utterly isolated oasis of life, this Earth. For as long as we do not see this, we will fail to comprehend how a Cairo taxi-driver could shout “Bull’s-eye!” at the sight of the World Trade Center being hit by a civilian airliner. If we do see it, then we shall be able to transcend our anger at what has just happened. We might then feel able to reach out to the disinherited and pathological people who greeted it with joy. Their joy, after all, is not so foreign to us as we tell ourselves in our current grief and rage. It was exactly such joy that the ancient Israelis expressed on the downfall of Babylon, or that Englishmen felt at the fire-bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945. So, let this catastrophe become not merely the catalyst for crying havoc and letting loose the dogs of war, but rather a defining moment in the twenty-first century enlargement of universal humanism.