Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'

"In
all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to
the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy
and war aims" -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday.

"The
White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program
in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to
parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000
more troops to Afghanistan" -- New York Times, December 4, 2009.

"In
the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly
opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen" -- New York Times, yesterday.

_______

Actually,
if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in
Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and
Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned
Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue
to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts
the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state
that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher"
than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim
countries we're not attacking or threatning than to count the ones we
are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing
super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy
to the concept of war."

In the wake of the latest
failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the
excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan
climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new
country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally
and strategically justified in bombing it some more. "Yemen" is
suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month
centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that
country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths --
but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get
Really Serious and Do More.

For all the endless,
exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as
usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from
a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself on one of our
airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and
Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to
Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo
from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions
with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens
is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is;
it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification.
Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is
that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course)
are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion.

Despite that taboo, evidence always ends up emerging on this question. As numerous reports have indicated,
the Al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has said that this
attempted attack is in "retaliation" for the multiple, recent missile
attacks on Yemen in which numerous innocent Muslim civilians were
killed, as well as for the U.S.'s multi-faceted support for the
not-exactly-democratic Yemeni government. That is similar to reports
that Nidal Hasan was motivated to attack Fort Hood because "he was
upset at the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." And one
finds this quote from an anonymous Yemeni official tacked on to the end
of this week's NYT article announcing the "widening terror war" in Yemen -- as though it's just an afterthought:

"The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary -- but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda."

As
always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest
attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and
self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether
justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim
world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again,
independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we
continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and
enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions
are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant
images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at
our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just
look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from
a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're
unleashing from a decade-long (and counting and increasing) multi-front
"war" in the Muslim war?

There very well may be some
small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism
that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no
matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of
recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In
other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we
do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even
further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs
on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want
to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so?
That question really answers itself.