[A-List] In the shadow of coming war - iht.com December 23, 2002

["Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

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In the shadow of coming war
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, December 23, 2002

A dangerous season

PARIS Christmas arrives under the shadow of a war that both sides seem
determined to interpret as a war between civilizations, even though it is
not. It is only a war between governments and people.

It now seems that war between Iraq and a UN-mandated coalition is all but
inevitable, due to the conduct of the Iraqi government. Iraq would like this
interpreted as a war of aggression by the West against Islam, as many in the
Islamic world will do.

The war at best will do no more than decide who will be Saddam Hussein's
successor in ruling Iraq, and in allocating its oil. At worst, of course, it
may do a great deal of harm to both sides.

War is not a positive option, despite the pressure for war against Iraq that
has been exercised in Washington in the last year by a neoconservative
ideological faction convinced that a radiant future lies on the other side
of the battlefield.

No time is more dangerous than when intellectuals acquire the power to
impose their ideas on world affairs. "It is only those who have neither
fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud
for blood ... vengeance, desolation," as General William Tecumseh Sherman
said in 1879.

War in Iraq will do nothing to solve the challenge of terrorism. A report
just submitted to the UN Security Council says new volunteers have been
swelling the numbers of that loose network of activists who identify with Al
Qaeda and share its convictions.

This is not a traditional terrorist organization and does not function
according to the logic of such organizations as the IRA. It is more like a
missionary religious movement, or even a millenarian sect. Its dynamism is a
product of nationalism, as well as of religion. It considers itself at war
against the United States because its members are convinced that America has
allied itself with Israel to dominate the Arab world and capture its
resources.

Its war, however, unlike war in Iraq, offers no prospect of a military
victory. The essential damage that Al Qaeda can do to the United States has
already been done, by sowing an irrational fear among Americans - irrational
because of the actual material limit on what Al Qaeda's militants could do
to a society as huge, populous and well defended as the United States.

That fear has provoked the U.S. government into limiting civil liberties,
suspending the rule of law with respect to designated citizens, creating
courts of exception and special prisons, and inspiring the abdication by the
Senate of its constitutional war powers. Al Qaeda represents radical Islam.
Its own objective is to punish the United States and its allies so as to
force the West's military and political withdrawal from the Islamic world.
Radical Islam, a religious movement, aims to reform and "purify" Islam
itself.

The Bush administration's attack on Afghanistan, and a war against Iraq, can
do little to counter the latter movement, which promotes itself through
religious channels of influence throughout the Muslim world and in Europe,
the United States and non-Muslim Asia.

Its ambition to transform the Muslim world is a familiar one in the modern
history of non-Western societies reacting against the moral, cultural and
intellectual challenge of the West. Unable to deal with the West on its own
terms, radical Islam tries instead to revive a past when Islamic power was
great - supposedly because religion was pure and people then were obedient
and devout.

But you can't go back. And since, in the countries where the strict version
of Islamic law is already installed, society's practical problems are not
noticeably improved, the radical solution inevitably will lose its appeal.
One saw how grateful many people in Afghanistan were to get rid of the
Taliban, who earlier had promised a solution to their problems.

In Iran, where modern Islamic fundamentalism began, the power of the radical
clergy is already undermined by student and popular resistance to clerical
repression. An evolution is under way that will eventually return Iran to
the ranks of "normal" nations.

What people have to understand is that in matters like this we are dealing
with deep currents in history that have to work themselves out over many
years. Like the totalitarianisms of the last century, the political and
strategic manifestations of today's radicalisms may have to be contained.

War is the worst way to do it, since war damages everyone. But circumstances
dictate choices, and war it now looks to be in a new year that for many will
not be happy.

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