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“War on Terror” Continues to Create Terrorists
By Ivan Eland
01/17/06 "II"-- -- The CIA’s recent botched attempt to kill al
Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman Zawahiri, in Pakistan illustrates
why the Bush administration’s overly aggressive “war on terror”
actually motivates terrorists to attack the United States.
Certainly, capturing or killing the brains behind al Qaeda is an
important goal. Unfortunately, in the U.S. method of
warfare—which unduly emphasizes attrition, heavy firepower and
sophisticated weaponry, even against guerrillas and
terrorists—the technology of killing has outstripped the quality
of human intelligence needed to hit the correct targets. The
CIA’s unmanned Predator drone fired missiles that killed many
Pakistani civilians, including women and children, but
apparently not Zawahiri.
Making things even worse, the killing of women and children
continues to spark public outrage all across Pakistan, leading
to mass protests in all of Pakistan’s major cities and the
trashing and burning of a U.S.-supported aid organization. Such
public ire will make it even less likely that the United States
will receive accurate future intelligence about where Zawahiri
and his boss, Osama bin Laden, are hiding, even though the
prices on their heads are substantial.
And to shore up the popularity of his war on terror at home,
which has been dragged down by an incongruous, unnecessary, now
unpopular war in Iraq, President Bush has combined these
reckless military actions with cowboy rhetoric, which only
further stoke the flames of anti-U.S. hatred among radical
Islamists. Bringing back the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric
used during the Cold War against the “godless Communists,” the
administration is now implying that those with “too much god of
an alien kind” are trying to build a worldwide empire that could
again threaten the United States. The president has cast the war
on Islamic terrorism as a contest between the men in white hats
who advocate freedom and those with black headgear who want to
create “a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to
Indonesia.”
Yet bringing back the caliphate—the political and spiritual
leader of Sunni Islam who ruled a united Islamic world—is a
long-term objective of even moderate Muslims. As a result, to
the Muslim world, the president’s war on terror looks much like
a war on Islam that threatens to make the clash of civilizations
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yet even the unlikely uniting of the Islamic world would not
necessarily create a severe threat to the United States. Arab
countries, only a subset of the Islamic world, have not even
been able to unite against Israel, their mortal enemy. It would
be even harder for the more geographically and ethnically
diverse global Islamic community to unite under one ruler. Even
if the entire Sunni Islamic world coalesced rapidly into one
empire, any threat to the United States—which would not be
inevitable—would be tempered by the fact that many of the
countries uniting are economic basket cases.
In addition to shoring up flagging public opinion at home, the
president’s talk of an Islamic empire is designed to mask the
real reasons that al Qaeda attacks the United States. The core
of al Qaeda’s gripe with the United States is its military
presence in the Persian Gulf to guard U.S. oil supplies and
support for corrupt Gulf leaders who sell that oil. In a recent
videotape, Zawahiri warned Americans: “…Your calamity will not
end, unless you leave our lands and stop stealing our resources
and stop supporting the bad rulers in our countries.”
But because the Gulf countries are heavily dependent on
petroleum sales for their revenues (oil deals make up between 65
percent and 90 percent of their export income, depending upon
the country), they have every incentive to sell oil to the world
market, regardless of whether the U.S. stations military forces
on their lands or props up their despotic rulers. In short, U.S.
forces are not needed to defend Persian Gulf oil. Even if they
were necessary, the job could be done with no permanent U.S.
military presence on Muslim lands. In Gulf War I, Persian Gulf
oil was successfully defended without a prior land presence in
the Gulf. Land forces were brought in only when a threat arose.
And since then, the threat to oil has decreased.
President Bush should ratchet down the war on terror to make it
more effective. The United States should improve human
intelligence and strike al Qaeda only when the information is
bulletproof. More importantly, to reduce terrorists’ motive for
attacking the United States in the first place, the
administration should quietly withdraw the unneeded land forces
from Persian Gulf countries and its support for their
authoritarian, venal rulers.
Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent
Institute, Director of the Institute’s
Center on Peace
& Liberty, and author of the books
The Empire Has No Clothes, and
Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.
Copyright 2006 The Independent Institute
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