Survival 49.1 by Dana Allin

Author:Dana Allin [Allin, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000673432
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Wrong war

The concept of a ‘global war on terror’ is, in this regard, highly problematic. It does not make sense to Europeans or, indeed, to most of the world. It has been tainted, in large part, by the war in Iraq - a fair enough result, since US policymakers justified the war very much on the basis of that template. Yet the problems with GWOT (the US government’s ungainly acronym for ‘global war on terrorism’) will exist even if Iraq itself becomes more peaceful and as controversy over the invasion continues to subside.

Beyond Iraq, the ‘war on terror’ is polarising rather than unifying for three broad reasons. First, the tactics that the United States has used have tended to accentuate the overweening aspects of US power and America’s perceived disregard for international law and global norms. The Bush administration’s argument that torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib was a matter of isolated behaviour by out-of-control enlisted personnel has failed to convince the global audience; and indeed, the Pentagon’s own investigating commission concluded that the abusive ‘interrogation techniques’ used at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere had ‘migrated’ after they were debated at the highest levels of the White House, Pentagon and State Department, and approved for use on terrorist suspects at Guantanamo.16

Secondly, whereas America’s terrorism problem is mainly external, for others it is very much internal, and it is a problem of infectious ideology rather than hardened enemies.17 It is not possible for America’s European allies to declare ‘war’ against a sizeable element in their own large Muslim minorities. In the wider Muslim world, authoritarian and quasi-democratic states must avoid alienating non-violent fundamentalist political constituencies.

Thirdly, terrorism is nowhere near the top of the list of concerns for most of the world. This is not a matter of blind complacency; other threats and worries do in fact loom larger. American solipsism on this score is, to be sure, understandable. The large loss of life and horrifically successful theatre of 11 September had a profound effect on American perceptions of the world. Americans intuited, correctly, that a line had been crossed by terrorists who now harboured genocidal - rather than more narrowly political - ambitions. If al-Qaeda or its imitators acquire and master the use of nuclear or biological weapons, then the ambition to kill not thousands, but hundreds of thousands or even millions, would be within their reach. Europeans would also be likely targets; and, of course, terrorist use of, say, engineered smallpox would blow back to kill millions of Muslims and others.

There is debate in the expert community about whether these nightmare scenarios are plausible. But plausible or not, they are simply overshadowed for much of humanity by more immediate threats. Terrorist-engineered smallpox might kill millions, but so could natural avian flu, which stands on humanity’s doorstep and is likely to race first through vulnerable societies in East and Southeast Asia. These societies lack the resources and infrastructure to contain the pandemic in its crucial early stages; if the rich West stepped

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