WASHINGTON, D.C. — After last week’s terror attacks against resorts in the Egyptian Sinai Desert frequented by Israeli tourists, the Egyptian president repeated his call for an international conference to define terrorism and agree on an international strategy to fight it. While this may seem to be a slightly romantic idea, something clearly needs to be done to reverse the current global trajectory of terrorism, and, more importantly, the environment of anger, marginalization and humiliation from which terrorism emanates.
This is all the more evident when seen from the peculiar perspective of the United States, where the president’s claim that he is leading a long and hard global war against terror is deeply contradicted by the reality of a society that neither feels nor behaves like a country at war. Other than the heightened security checks at airports and government office complexes, there are few substantive signs in the United States of a serious attempt to understand and fight terrorism. There are, though, many symbolic gestures of patriotism and sincere flag-waving that reflect the depth of the anguish and shock that Americans suffered on September 11, 2001.
So American flags are everywhere to be seen –- on college and professional athletes’ uniforms, breakfast cereal boxes, cars, and office windows. Many nationally televised sports events now regularly show American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan watching the game from their foreign bases. Few here in the U.S. seem to notice that the intensity of the young American soldiers abroad cheering for their sports teams is much greater and more obvious than the intensity of the average American citizen’s support for the mission of the American soldiers abroad. This is because the soldiers abroad know much more about, and identify with, the televised sports clash taking place on the football or baseball field than the average American citizen knows about or identifies with the mission of the American soldiers in distant countries.
The disconnect is clear to visitors from abroad, but seems strangely unacknowledged within the U.S. The reason appears relatively obvious as well. In the three years and a month since the September 11 attacks, the United States still has not come up with a clear strategy to fight terror. It has launched what it calls a global “war against terror,” but it has done so without undertaking a thorough analysis of the nature, causes and goals of the terror that has targeted it since the early 1990s.
Therefore it is no surprise that instead of “draining the swamp” in the Middle East and South Asia that sends terrorists abroad, Washington’s strategy, including invading and occupying Iraq, seems to have had exactly the opposite effect: it has widened and deepened the swamp of aggrieved people in the Middle East and Asia, significantly increased anti-American sentiment throughout the entire world, and led to a geographical diffusion of terror groups and attacks.
The most dangerous development since the U.S. started to respond to the September 11 attack, by using its military forces around the world, has been the ensuing environments in both the U.S. and the Middle East that have become accustomed to brutal military and terror attacks as an everyday occurrence. Even so, I was surprised last week to read about foreigners who were kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq –- in a small paragraph buried deep inside a story on page 18 of the Washington Post. The barbaric beheading of foreigners in Iraq has become routine and even secondary news in the United States, just as these despicable acts have become ordinary fare in Arab news media.
Instead of the war on terror fighting the evildoers in their own environments, as President Bush likes to claim is happening, the “swamp” of twisted morality and vengeful militarism has migrated from the Middle East and Asia to the United States. So, American society does not blink an eye –- or it even waves the flag more proudly and innocently –- when American warplanes routinely bomb civilian neighborhoods in Iraqi cities, or the Israeli air force sends missiles smashing into civilian urban areas in Gaza. Killing innocent civilians on a large scale is no longer newsworthy, or, even worse, is seen as appropriate vengeance.
What started out a dozen years ago as a narrowly focused, occasional anti-American terror campaign by small numbers of Arab and Asian militants who were largely beyond the mainstream of their societies has become today a much wider, more violent, and almost daily global cycle of terror and anti-terror with wide public backing. As the expanding network of terrorists and the U.S. military throughout the world now battle one another, hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens in both societies calmly watch the slaughter on television, some cheering, some waving flags, most of them quietly acquiescing as silent secondary accomplices in the global cycle of terror and violence. Three years and a month after September 11, vast masses of Arabs, Americans and Asians wallow in the swamp of their mutual dehumanization, and their desensitization to reciprocal brutality and suffering.
A major reason for this is that we have not seriously attempted to define the root causes of the terror that dehumanizes us. Therefore policies by both the U.S. and Middle Eastern governments tend to aggravate the problem, rather than mitigate it, because they continue to fuel the underlying sentiments of victimization, humiliation and resentment that motivate terrorists in the first place.
President Mubarak’s call for an international conference on terrorism may or may not be the right approach. It is clear, though, that the world needs to explore a better means of responding to the scourge of terror than the current American-led war on terror.
Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 13 October 2004
Word Count: 942 words
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