thinkers in the strategy/security game, and I have nothing but contempt
for the US Homeland Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsabteilung, in
the original German) and its ridiculous colour-coded threat levels. So I
started reading a recent article by the former on the latter with
genuine pleasure, anticipating that Luttwak was going to condemn
Homeland Security for its habit of running up the levels from puce to
magenta and back down to mauve, shredding Americans' nerves with
warnings nobody can respond to in a useful way, for no better reason
than to cover its own bureaucratic behind.
That's just what he did, and the article was rollicking along with me
cheering Luttwak on every line of the way-when his whole argument
suddenly veered off into the ditch, rolled three times, and lay there
bleeding. What he said was: "The successive warnings of ill-defined
threats that frighten many Americans are achieving the very aim of the
terrorists. Terrorism cannot materially weaken the United States, so
their entire purpose is precisely to terrorise, to make Americans
unhappy, in the hope that this will induce them to accept terrorist
demands." (My italics).
If one of the cleverest security analysts in the country has got no
further than this in his thinking about what the terrorists want, then
it's no surprise that 60 or 70 per cent of Luttwak's fellow-countrymen
believe that Saddam Hussein sent the terrorists. He thinks that the
terrorists are trying to make Americans unhappy in order to "induce them
to accept terrorist demands"? What demands could the Islamist terrorists
of Al Qaeda possibly make that the United States could conceivably
grant?
Fly them all to Havana? Convert to Islam? Put the money in unmarked
notes in a brown paper bag and leave it behind the radiator? The whole
notion that this is some sort of giant extortion operation is as naive
(or as wilfully ignorant) as the Bush administration's pet explanation
that the terrorists attack the US because "they hate our freedoms."
Unfortunately, the post-9/11 intellectual climate in the United States
has prevented any serious discussion of the terrorists' goals and their
strategies for achieving them.
In the post-9/11 chill, even conceding that the terrorist leaders are
intelligent people with rational goals seemed somehow disloyal to
America's dead. Instead, it was assumed that their fanaticism made them
too blind or stupid for purposeful action at the strategic level. Even
terrorist groups as marginal and self-deluded as the Baader-Meinhof Gang
and the Weathermen had a more or less coherent analysis, political
goals, and some notion of how their attacks moved them towards those
goals, but the public debate in the US grants none of that to Al Qaeda.
Yet the Islamist radicals have always been completely open about their
goals. They want to take power in the Muslim countries (phase one of the
project), and then unite the entire Muslim world in a final struggle to
overthrow the power of the West (phase two). They are still stuck in
phase one, with little to show for it despite 30 years of trying, so in
the early 1990s Osama bin Laden and his colleagues switched from head-on
assaults on the regimes in Muslim countries to direct attacks on Western
targets. Yet their first-phase goal remains seizing power in the Muslim
world, not some fantasy about 'bringing the West to its knees.'
Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about their
strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the
real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power,
then how does attacking the West help? Well, the US in particular may be
goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim
countries-and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the
arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions
against local regimes finally get off the ground.
Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was
the principal motive for the 9/11 attack. They would add that by giving
the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a
flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, Al Qaeda's attacks have paid off
handsomely. US troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of over 50
million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere
are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim
world that is willing and able to defy American power.
It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States. I
know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point that Al
Qaeda wants George W Bush to win next November's presidential election
and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for another
four years, and will act to save Mr Bush from defeat if necessary.
It probably would not do so unless Mr Bush's numbers were slipping
badly, for any terrorist attack on US soil carries the risk of
stimulating resentment against the current administration for failing to
prevent it.
Certainly another attack on the scale of 9/11 would risk producing that
result, even if Al Qaeda had the resources for it. But a simple truck
bomb in some US city centre a few months before the election, killing
just a couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Mr.
Bush's arms and turn a tight election around. Al Qaeda is clever enough
for that.
-Gel
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