| |
Is Violence the Way to Combat Terrorism?
Posted 9-2-2004
You won't hear this from George Bush; he calls it a war, even though
his administration says the people we are holding at Guantanamo Bay are not
prisoners of war. And unfortunately, because of the confining nature of
political rhetoric, you won't hear it from John Kerry either. But to call
the challenges of combating international terrorism a "war" is both
misleading and creating expectations that a conclusion is possible in the
near future. If it is used in the context of the Thirty Years War, or the
Hundred Years War, or the War on Poverty, or the War on Drugs, I guess it is
a war. But as we see from
the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, there is no end in sight.
Resolving international
terrorism is a complex issue that cannot be fought simply with conventional
military means and will require much more activity that simply killing those
people deemed "terrorists". Of course, if John Kerry says it is a complex
issue, right-wingers who have a simple solution for everything will throttle
him. But, there is no simple solution because how the phenomenon has arisen
has many factors to it.
For discussion purposes, I
will limit the definition of terrorism to the Islamic terrorism since the
1967 Arab-Israeli War. Though there are many other instances of terrorism,
from Menachem Begin and his Israeli cohorts blowing up the King David Hotel
in 1948, to the Irish Republican Army, to the Red Brigade, to the
Baader-Meinhof Gang of the 1970s, there are, and have been, many other
"terrorists". But because the focus in our country since September 11, 2001
has been on terrorism from the Islamic world, let's look at where we are
headed.
Does anyone think we can
actually kill all the terrorists and is that our goal? If so, we are going
to be frustrated and disappointed because each day we occupy Iraq, and are
perceived to be siding with Israel, more young Islamic men become
"terrorists". As long as our "friend," the Saudi royal family, tries to
pacify Islamic society by funding Islamic schools throughout the Arab world,
more young Islamic men will grow up resentful and mistrustful of the West.
If we don't rethink and
change not only how we perceive the Islamic nations' political landscape,
but also take a more even-handed approach to resolving the Israel-Palestine
issue, we are doomed to repeating the scenario we have lived through the
last 37 years. Only, it will get more and more violent.
We need to better understand
the cultural differences between Western society and the Islamic world and
work harder to make all of Islam understand the West. If it won't work for
the current generation of adults here and there, we better make it a goal of
working with our children and theirs to break down barriers for future
generations. While the differences may manifest themselves through politics
and ultimately violence, the roots of the differences are cultural. People
are woefully ignorant of each other's culture, and there are vested
interests that feed that ignorance.
For too long, many Americans
have been consumed with life within our borders. September 11, 2001 changed
all that. For too long, internal economic and political differences within
Islamic culture have bred resentment. Not only have agitators been able to
direct it at the political leaders of Islamic nations, but they also have
been easily able to direct that resentment toward the USA because of our
association with their political leaders. Remember, there are no true
"democracies" anywhere in the Islamic world. So making repressive political
leaders and their American allies out to be the bad guys is easy.
We can keep buying the
superficial rhetoric of our political leaders and stay on this course. Or,
both political parties can quit pretending a violent, military solution is
going to bring us true security. We can allow the media to keep selling us
the idea that catching bogeymen like Saddam or Osama bin Laden is really
going to make a difference. Or, we can demand that a global dialogue begins
that breaks down the political, and, most importantly, the cultural
differences that have kept us at odds for so long. It has not just been the
last thirty or so years that these barriers have existed, but the thirteen
hundred years since Islam has emerged as a religion. We cannot undo the
past, but we can certainly take a wiser approach to the future. Don't we owe
that to the future generations that will inhabit this planet?
|
