Rohan Pearce
Nine days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US President George Bush told a joint session of the US Congress: "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
Under the cover of waging a "war on terror" the US and allied governments have rolled back hard-won democratic rights, whipped up racist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment and invaded two countries — Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, in recent weeks the underlying premise of the "war on terror" has taken a number of blows.
Firstly, the March 11 bombings in Madrid has undermined the credibility of the claim that invading Iraq has helped prevent terrorism.
Secondly, former White House officials — Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neil, and former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke — have revealed how the US government cynically manipulated the 9/11 attacks to suit its foreign policy objectives.
The most dramatic impact of the Madrid bombings was in Spain itself, where 200 people paid the price for their government's support for the US-led invasion of Iraq; Spanish voters responded by throwing out the government that had made them part of a war that more than 90% of them had opposed.
After the Madrid attacks, the Australian government responded first with farcical denials that the Iraq war had increased the risk of terrorist attacks, then with a series of "counter-terrorism exercises" to test the nation's "readiness to deal with terrorist attacks".
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock claimed on March 26 that "we can be confident that our agencies are well-trained and ready to protect our country from a variety" of terrorist attacks.
Liberal-Labor debate
Beyond clashes on whether to continue participating in the occupation of Iraq, debate between corporate Australia's two major parties — the Liberals and the ALP — has focused on such "technical solutions" to the issue of terrorism.
On March 25, Labor leader Mark Latham argued in parliament that Prime Minister John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition government "has diverted effort and resources away from targeting the terrorists and put them into Iraq".
Latham went on to argue: "If [the government wants] to do something about al Qaeda other than issue slurs at the doorstops of Parliament House, what they should recognise is that diverting resources from the real task of attacking al Qaeda, the real task of targeting the terrorists, diverting resources into Iraq, has not produced the best result. If all the effort, time and resources that have gone into the war in Iraq went into targeting the terrorists, the world would be a safer place today."
Latham then attacked the Howard government for stationing only one soldier in Afghanistan: "On that real front line ... against terror in Afghanistan, they have actually got one person — a one-man war against terror. It is the misallocation of resources that this government should be ashamed of."
The ALP's "shadow minister for homeland security", Robert McClelland argued in a March 8 media statement that "when it comes to homeland security the Howard government is living in the past". McClelland argued for the creation of a "department of homeland security" that "will replace the current patch work of part-time ministers with a high-powered department answering to a cabinet level minister, with one job, defending the homeland security of Australia", as the way of preventing terrorist attacks.
Latham and McClelland were expressing the false view that somehow better "anti-terrorist" policing or refocusing the Australian military on the war in Afghanistan instead of the war in Iraq will end the risk of terrorist attacks.
In reality, short of fundamental social change on a global scale, the potential for terrorist attacks to occur cannot be eliminated. That's because such attacks, even on the scale of 9/11, are not only cheap and require only a relatively small group of people to carry out; they are born out of the anger at the blatant injustices inflicted on Third World peoples, particularly Muslim peoples, by the US and imperialist allies like Australia.
In the case of Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the risk of terrorist attacks doesn't come from some centralised global conspiracy, but disparate groups that sympathise with bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalist "al Qaeda ideology".
Although a direct product of US foreign policy, formed from the US-funded, CIA-armed, Arab anti-communists that fought the left-wing government of Afghanistan from 1979 until the early 1990s, al Qaeda doesn't represent an expression of mass resistance to Washington's imperialist policies in the Middle East.
Anti-imperialist rhetoric
While bin Laden emerged out of Saudi Arabia's reactionary Islamicist ruling elite his popularity is due to the resonance his post-1991, anti-US, anti-imperialist rhetoric finds among sections of the middle-class and the poor in many countries with significant Muslim populations. For example, bin Laden's declarations of solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle against Israeli colonialism, and his criticism of the inaction of corrupt and repressive pro-US Arab regimes, find a receptive audience in Middle Eastern countries.
Even the more serious foreign policy analysts in the US establishment recognise that al Qaeda members number only in the hundreds — far from the vast global network that it is often presented as.
Beyond bin Laden's militia in Afghanistan/Pakistan — which includes some of the mujaheddin veterans that trained and fought alongside him in the CIA-funded war against the Soviet-backed, Peoples Democratic Party government in Afghanistan — there are, however, numerous Islamicist opposition groups in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Pakistan and Uzbekistan that sympathise or identify with bin Laden's idea of a jihad against US domination of the Muslim world
The political targets of these terrorist groups share a common feature — the anti-democratic, corrupt Third World regimes that are backed by the US rulers and their First World allies.
Saad al Fagih, a London-based Saudi Arabian exile who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, explained to the US Public Broadcasting Service's Frontline program in September 2001: "One of the main factors for the emergence of the phenomena of bin Laden is the circumstances in Saudi Arabia; with the pathological rule of the royal family in a country like Saudi Arabia. But there's the other factor which is very important... [you're] creating the picture of America in the eyes of Muslims as [an] arrogant, hostile country to Muslim causes. Because of those two factors together, you would not be surprised to see a phenomena like bin Laden."
Later in the interview, Fagih argued that bin Laden was "a product of a new social structure; a new social feeling in the Muslim world". Elaborating, he said: "Where you have strong hostility not only against America, but also against many Arab and Muslim regimes who are allying to America... and that's why, if bin Laden was not there, you would have another bin Laden. You would have another name, with the same character, with the same role, of bin Laden. That's why we call it a phenomena, not a person."
Fagih dismissed the idea that the "bin Laden phenomenon" was merely a product of religious revival among Middle Eastern Muslims. He cited the US-enforced UN economic sanctions against Iraq (now ended, but which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five), US support for Israeli state terror against he Palestinians and the Pentagon's stationing of its troops in Saudi Arabia during and after the 1991 Gulf War as factors in the power of bin Laden's message.
White House propaganda
When used in White House propaganda, "terrorism" is reduced to little more than an epithet to describe any violent acts carried out by those opposed to the foreign policies of the US and its allies. However, terrorism is actually a particular kind of violence carried out by small groups or individuals.
As a strategy for political change, terrorism relies on scaring — terrorising — a nation's political elite into adopting different governmental policies. It is fundamentally an elitist strategy for political change — relying not on drawing masses of oppressed people into political struggle, but on the violent acts of self-appointed "saviours".
As the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky argued in a November 1911 article for the left-wing Austrian journal Der Kampf, neither the assassination of individual politicians nor other terrorist acts are effective strategies for combating social oppression.
Trotsky wrote: "The capitalist state does not rest upon ministers and cannot be destroyed together with them. The classes whom the state serves will always find new men — the mechanism remains intact and continues to function."
He explained that, instead of promoting mass involvement in struggle, terrorism "lowers the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to impotence, and directs their glances and hopes towards the great avenger and emancipator who will some day come and accomplish his mission".
The day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush declared in an address to the nation that "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world". The White House has repeated this argument ad nauseam ever since, trying to convince Americans and the rest of the world that the common thread that binds terrorist attacks in New York City, Bali and Madrid is the terrorists' opposition to "freedom".
In reality, bin Laden wants to free his native Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries from US political and economic domination so as to provide more opportunities for Muslim businessmen to exploit the natural resources and working people of their countries. He thinks that the best political system to achieve this is an "Islamic state" — a state that enforces Islamic religious laws on Arab working people.
To win mass sympathy for this objective he appeals to the justified resentment of Arab and other Third World Muslim working peoples at the injustices inflicted upon their nations by the US imperialist rulers — which is the result of US corporate capitalism drive to extract profit by exploiting natural resources and labour across the entire world.
In seeking to attain his political objectives, bin Lade employs the same methods — though on a much small scale — as the capitalist rulers of the United States. In August 1945, for example, the US rulers dropped a (nuclear) bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, deliberately and wantonly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to terrorise the Japanese political elite into changing their policies and giving in to Washington's political objectives.
In a May 1996 60 Minutes interview, the then US ambassador to the UN, Madeline Albright, calmly asserting that US political objectives were worth the deaths of half a million Iraq children. We should remember Albright's words when we hear the drumbeat about "terrorists" having "no regard for human life".
To the Bushes and Albrights of this world, such rhetoric is only an excuse to wantonly slaughter far larger numbers of civilians than have ever been killed by the Islamicist terrorists.
From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004.
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