Bush dooms his allies with a fake war

This editorial from a former British Cabinet member perfectly sums up the fallacies in the "Global War on Terror".
It simply is not a war in the conventional sense, but an aspiration. Much like the War On Drugs, there are no military forces or headquarters of the Drug Army, there are no salients, no bunkers to be stormed, no enemy territory. Goverments can be "with us", yet still host the nefarious Drug Army within their borders.

But you don't sell such abstract concepts to the American public. You need to portray it as a real war, like WW2, that we can "win". There is some fixed number of bad guys who are easily identified by black hats and twirling moustaches, and if we can kill them off then we have ourselves a "victory". You are either "with us" or "against us". The trouble is that most of these governments that fall in the "with us" column are unpopular at home, and going along with Bush is a good way to get shown the door in most democracies. For example, Britain, Poland, Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, Turkey, Pakistan, etc.

It's a bogus vision with the only benefit being a pat on the head from the Decider, who is hardly popular. He's promised big things and made a whole lot of optimistic speeches, but he's got nothing to show for it. No NATO memberships or EU memberships for his buddies, no big foreign aid packages, no big development programmes, no quick successes - just big bills and piles of corpses and the promise of more of the same. Oh, and an expansion of the "War" to Iran, let's not forget.

Meanwhile, China and Russia sit this one out and get stronger, while Bush bets the farm on a fake "War" waged with unbridled arrogance that drives our allies away from us and bankrupts us. Hooray!


editorial from The Japan Times

Friday, Jan. 4, 2008

Global 'war' waged in vain

By DAVID HOWELL

LONDON — The tragic killing of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan has sent a raft of shock-wave messages round the world. Most of these have been carefully and lengthily noted and analyzed — such as the concern that Pakistan, labeled a frontline state in the fight against terrorism, could now collapse into chaos, or that Islamic fanatics could take over in the vacuum left by her death and take control of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, or the broader point — made with chilling candor by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, a rival candidate in Pakistan's elections — that it is now "impossible to campaign."

But there is one deeper lesson so ugly, and so awkward, that it has scarcely been discussed at all, or even realized in some quarters: that Benazir Bhutto had become the candidate for election favored by the Washington administration and almost certainly became doomed the moment this became apparent.

This is another failure for the Bush presidency and for American diplomacy on a grand scale, and shows vividly how senior figures in Washington have simply not grasped how the world works.

Whereas once upon a time America was seen as an unquestionable force for good, and the blessing and backing of genial Uncle Sam was eagerly sought, today it is the opposite. Today, American backing is a liability for any political leader and America's once fine reputation lies in tatters.

If, in spite of this sad development, it was still possible for American firepower and sheer military and economic might to master events, deliver results and safeguard its proteges, then people would understandably just have to put up with American unpopularity while welcoming its secure embrace.

But asymmetric warfare has put paid to all that. The microchip, the communications revolution and the miniaturization of weaponry have leveled killing power in a terrifying way.

Having 13 carrier fleets and countless missiles and warheads no longer counts. Tiny gangs and groups, operating below the radar screen of normal warfare, can now sabotage or destroy with ease the most expensive and elaborate military hardware ever constructed; while determined bombers and suicide squads can penetrate the very heart of a society and paralyze it in a way that conventional weaponry can no longer do.

The American mistake goes back to the colossal erroneous assumption made after the 9/11 horror — namely that there was a "war" to be waged worldwide against terrorism and that various states would have to be either "for or against" this American-led crusade. Of course, there is no "war" in the conventional sense, and committing American backing to certain states as frontline allies merely guarantees that they will be destabilized.

The mistake is to believe that ideological Islamism, which has developed like a monstrous cancer out of the wise and balanced religious Islam of the past, can be beaten by Western power. It can't. As the late Benazir Bhutto shrewdly observed just before she died, fanatical and violent Islam "will have to play itself out."

What she probably meant was that the ideological and politicized versions of Islam being promoted by al-Qaida and others, and taught by ill-trained preachers in many mosques and cells in Western countries as well, will eventually show themselves as opposed to true Islamic values, and totally against the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet.

To bring that reversal about requires not declarations of war but the most subtle and patient respect for the true religion and its leaders. It is good news, for example, that Christian religious leaders in the Anglican and Catholic faiths are now meeting, on completely equal terms, with some of the most influential Muslim leaders. This is the way to the eventual marginalization of the fanatics. Patience is also needed to wait for the time when the inner groups of extremists turn against each other, as always happens in revolutionary movements.

Almost all leaders of al-Qaida will eventually meet violent deaths — probably at the hands not of the U.S. military but of rivals and former intimates. The central question of course is how long the world can wait for all this to happen.

In the 19th and 20th centuries there were agonizingly long periods of waiting while the worst and most lethal "isms" burned themselves out. Nazism lasted 15 years, other fascist doctrines longer, and hideous communism took 70 years to crumble into disaster.

In the faster-moving 21st century a guess would be that the crazed Islamic deviations now prevalent might blow themselves out in a decade. What is certain is that frontal American and Western attempts to wage "war" on the extremists, and to line up favorite leaders and states in this war, will actually prolong the struggle, weaken religious moderates and slow down the internal divisions in Islam.

That's one lesson Western strategists should learn out of respect for the brave lady who died in Rawalpindi so violently.
David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords (www.lordhowell.com).