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not by terrorists, but by politics

3/17/04

The terrorists have attacked again. Today is in Baghdad and a few days ago was in Madrid where more than 200 of innocent souls were lost and more than fifteen hundreds of people are injured. Terrorists do not value their own lives, let alone other people’s lives. All in their mind, as the facts suggest, is kill, kill and kill. They know how to destroy, but not how to build, humanity. When one knows that the bombs he or she will detonate will kill hundreds of innocent people and will wound a great number of people, it makes us to wonder what factors (ideology, beliefs, reward and etc.) that might have driven one to commit such atrocities. The same question had been asked two and a half years ago when 19 suicidal fanatical monsters destroyed the lives of thousand people. The time has passed, but the question is still largely unanswered.

All directions seem to indicate that an Al-Qaeda type of terrorist organization is the agent responsible for the atrocities in Madrid. More than a year ago, a domestic organization, widely believed to have links to international terrorist organizations, has been charged responsible for the bombings in Bali that had killed more than 200 people. From New York, Washington, Bali, Mombasa, Ankara to Madrid, more than four thousands of innocent people have been killed during the last three years. Why?

Every life is precious, but not for everyone’s belief, including that of the terrorists. Certainly, it takes more than hatred to instigate such killings. It must have a deeper root than hatred which might have involved a set of ideological conviction that not only justifies the killings but also rewards them handsomely.

"We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid, just two and a half years after the attacks on New York and Washington," says a video purportedly from an al Qaeda spokesman. "It's an answer to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies. This is like an answer to the crimes that you have caused in the world and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan and there will be more if God desires."

Here we go. Again and again, God has been inserted into the equation. The killings apparently are part of the God’s desire. But one wonders whether majority of religious followers believe such thing. God, if existed, should and must never be that of kind: a killing master or a Dracula.

Politics makes life difficult

It is reasonable to expect that rational human beings must unite to fight against terrorism. Unfortunately, the fight has entered the most confused era of our time.  Even the word terrorism itself is confusing for some people. And worse, politics and ideology have come into play, shaping people’s understanding about and standing on terrorism. Some view that terrorism does not exist. They define it as merely a form struggle. Well by using a simple logic, this means that it is acceptable to destroy innocent civilian lives to achieve one’s goals. After all, isn’t that a struggle an attempt to achieve a goal? Stretching this logic to daily lives, it is then justifiable to kill our neighbor in order to own his/her spouse or wealth. But, if this is not justifiable universally and if such act is well accepted as a crime, why some people view that terrorism is not a crime? For instance, Reuters, BBC and other media left-leaning media outlet have continuously avoided at using such terminology.

Why don’t you name it as it is?

We are living in a confusing and pathetic world where ideology and politics have blinded people from even to agree on a simple and very obvious fact that killing innocent people is a crime. Let’s ignore “experts’ definition” of terrorism since there is no need for experts to define for us a very obvious matter. In fact, they often bring confusion to a simple problem, making a clear-cut situation becomes so complex.

Terrorism is simply a deliberate act to destroy noncombatant targets (human beings and things) by subnational groups or clandestine agents for certain goals. When one blows a hotel (or a restaurant, a club, a bus, a train, a plane or any building) packed with innocent people that is terrorism. Whether it is motivated by political, economic or religious goals, it is neither a resistance nor a form of struggle. Defining it as a form of political struggle for instance will send a message that it is also acceptable to use violence and murder to any form of struggle. However, the Leftists or the Left, represented by the Liberals, Socialists and the like, have been hesitant to call terrorism as what it is. The Conservatives, Nationalists and the like have firmly called it terrorism. Somewhere in between there are those who cannot make up their mind. And still, some who are not ideologically, but religiously, driven people have called it as a noble form of resistance.

If indeed God loves to watch terrorism.

Idea is its root

The lack of consensus on the definition of terrorism is nothing compared to the misleading understanding about its root cause. The Leftists have been continuously preaching that terrorism is a result of economic depravity and injustice. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s begin by understanding what terrorism is all about. Terrorism is perhaps the world’s worst crime ever invented by human beings. So it is human’s invention, not God’s intention. It has no regard on human’s life, even on its own members because they are willing to kill their own members just as they are so eager to kill others. But violence and killings are just the final products of terrorism. The most vicious and dangerous product is actually the “power” behind the violence and the killings. This “power” gives inspiration to, supplies energy to and drives the motivation of terrorists to commit their cruel acts.

Imagine the following illustration. When someone decides to work hard or to study hard, there must be some “power” that drives him to do that. Spending more time at work, bringing more money home, consuming more goods and services, and getting better grades are all the final products.  The real power behind the final products is the idea that inspires and motivates one to work or study hard. And this is also true for terrorism. Thus to focus on the final products of terrorism – violence and killings – is to miss the fundamental reason underlying the products or the root cause of terrorism.

The word root, according to the Eleventh Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, means the essential core, something that is an origin of quality or condition. The Dictionary gives an example of the usage of root:  the love of money – the idea -- is the root of all evil – the outcomes.

On the other hand, poverty is neither an idea nor a motivation. It is a condition, a state of life. It can be measured from several angles -- for instance by income levels, literacy rates, infant mortality rates, or other gauges of personal welfare. For people who have studied Statistics, this looks like a familiar case study of a set of states of the world versus a final outcome. This is what motivates Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, joint with Jitka Maleckova, a Middle East specialist at Charles University in Prague, to conduct a statistical analysis that links poverty and terrorism. Studying specifically the terrorism in the Middle East, of 129 Hezbollah militants killed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, they found that they were more likely to be above the poverty line or to have secondary or higher education than the average person in Lebanon. 

The most interesting fact is their finding about the Palestine-Israel conflict. To see whether the poor and uneducated are particularly likely to support terrorist attacks against Israelis, Kruger and Maleckova analyzed opinion polls in Palestine. Their findings, contrary to the popular belief, do not support such a conclusion. And, when they looked at Jewish settlers who carried out attacks on Palestinians, those attackers were overwhelmingly well off. These findings are in line with past studies of terror.

As reported in Washington Post on May 21, 2002, an analysis of 350 terrorists identified in newspapers between 1966 and 1976, people who belonged to 18 groups such as Japan's Red Army and Turkey's People's Liberation Army, found that about two thirds had been to college. These facts blow apart the conception that poverty is the root cause of terrorism.

But perhaps the most damaging case to the belief that poverty is the root cause of terrorism is the facts that there are hardly any groups of people from the most impoverished and the most corrupt countries committing terrorism, let alone building an international terrorism and spreading the most lethal terrorism of all, suicide bombings.

Based on data from The Penn World Table for the year of 1998, all of the 15 poorest countries in the world, based on PPP-adjusted GDP per capita, are African countries (see Table 1).  And table 2 presents the 15 most corrupt countries in the world.

Table 1

15 poorest countries in the world

Source: Penn World Table

Table 2

15 most corrupt countries in the world

Source: German-based Transparency International

So what is the root cause of terrorism? As we have seen, terrorism is not a reaction to economic hopelessness but instead it is a violent expression of political dissent that tends to come from the upper or middle income and the better educated classes.

The very core reason of terrorism is the idea that it is permissible, justifiable, and it is not unlawful to hurt and kill people in order to realizing the ends. Embodied in this idea is the belief that human’s life is not the end, but it is a means to achieve domination or to achieve a grandeur yet groundless dream. Also, embodied in this idea is the belief that we are the victims and we are being oppressed.  The goal of terrorism is not to elevate the dignity of people, but to exploit the dignity of people in order to magnify their - terrorists’ -- existence.

As an idea, it is evident that terrorism cannot completely be eliminated, no matter how sophisticated the weapons of high precision are employed. But it can be reduced to such an extend that it is no longer appealing to the youth to commit terrorism and to believe in what terrorist groups are claiming to be true. This can be done not by eradicating poverty and by reducing corruption, but by inculcating values that value life infinitely precious and by stimulating people to think beyond their current situation, and by convincing them that their childhood dreams – to be good people – can really be realized if they themselves respect their dreams. Also, this can be stopped by dumping hateful ideas, not by pretending or proclaiming ourselves to be victims. 

Put it this way, the war on terror is really a war on ideas, not on conditions, because terrorism is rooted in idea, not in action. Action is just the fruit of the idea. The war is won not by how many terrorists are killed, but by how many terrorists and their supporters are coming to an understanding that life is much more precious than ambition, opposition, and death.

The politics of terrorism

Thus politics that keeps inculcating that terrorism is the results of economic hardship and injustice is actually a politics of terrorism. It is a politics of doom. Terrorism is a man-made killing idea and that idea must be killed using idea -- and power if necessary.

Does Appeasement Work?

Another misleading and dangerous conception is that terrorism can be contained. This is similar to the notion that if you don’t bother the terrorists, they will not hurt you. This is not only a delusion but a self-destructive attitude. Sooner or later, as long as the idea of killing non-combatants is a legitimate mode of struggle, the terrorists will attack and perhaps will wipe out those ‘who don’t bother them’. This is, to some extend, a view that most people in the world, especially the Europeans, hold dearly. The latest example is the horrible attack in Spain and its subsequent event: the triumph of the Socialists Party in the election which was lagging behind in the poll prior to the bombings.

Politics has often not only blurred a distinct case but made real difficult to distinguish the real friends from the real enemies. Some have viewed that the Socialists and the terrorists are on the same side, at least as far as the liberation of Iraq goes. The Socialists, under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, ran on a platform of withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq unless a UN-led force takes charge after June 30. As the last election in Germany has shown, any opposition to Bush’s policy is a popular and winning political move, and Zapatero understood it perfectly. CNN quotes the prime minister-elect as saying, "I think Spain's participation in the war has been a total error." Zapatero still vows to withdraw his country's 1,300 troops from Iraq on June 30, unless the U.N. takes military command. The Weekend Australian reports that some 1,000 antigovernment demonstrators gathered in Madrid Saturday "to blame [last] week's bombs in the capital on the government's unpopular decision to support the US war on Iraq." The Associated Press interviews Spanish voters and finds this sentiment was reflected at the ballot box:

Some voters were angry at outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, accusing him of making Spain a target for Islamic extremists because of his support for the Iraq war, despite the opposition of most Spaniards.

''I wasn't planning to vote, but I am here today because the Popular Party is responsible for murders here and in Iraq,'' said Ernesto Sanchez-Gey, 48, who voted in Barcelona. The terrorists have said the similar tone, “your participation in Iraq is punishable”. 

It is one thing to disagree with the war in Iraq, but it is quite another to stand the same side with terrorists. The Left are essentially view that terrorism can be contained. It took 9/11 to realize that the Clintonian approach, treating terrorism as an intelligent and a law enforcement matter which is also shared completely by John Kerry, the US presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, is a total failure.  And now the Spaniards have to pay the price for such approach.

The Los Angeles Times reports that one of the Moroccan suspects arrested after last week's bombings had long been a known al Qaeda associate: Spanish police searched the Madrid apartment of Jamal Zougam in August 2001, according to investigators. The search revealed that Zougam, 30, associated with key figures in a Madrid Al Qaeda cell whose alleged leader, Imad Eddin Barakat, was jailed three months later on suspicion of helping plot the attacks in the United States that year, according to Spanish court documents.

"A high-ranking Spanish investigator said Zougam had not been arrested during the 2001 crackdown because he was not implicated in specific crimes," the Times reports. Now, of course, he has been. The cost of waiting now stands at 201 lives.

And some of them even to suggest that they negotiation with terrorists is the best solution to terrorism. On what grounds? And on what concession? Imagine an individual who has murdered his neighbor’s husband, and now wants to kill the poor guy’s wife and children. The society, represented by the police, wants to negotiate with the murderer: no more killing and we will let you free or we will jail you minimally. Does it sound acceptable? Yes, if one thinks that it is legitimate to negotiate with killers.

Writing in Le Monde (in French), Sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa says Europeans have thought they would be spared because they haven't supported the Bush administration's policies.

"When the Americans declared war on terrorism, many of us thought they exaggerated. Many thought terrorism was not likely to occur on our premises, [inhabited by] peaceful and civilized Europeans who speak no evil of anybody, who dialogue, who are the first [to] send assistance and offer cooperation. We are pacifists, they are warmongers. . . . Don't we defend the Palestinians? Are we not pro-Arab and anti-Israeli?"

"Can we dialogue with those who desire only our death and nothing but our death?" Lamo asks. "Dialogue about what? The manner in which we will be assassinated?"   Source

The terrorists have taken comfort in politics. "Al-Qaeda or its affiliates have toppled a democratic government for the first time,'' Bloomberg News quoted Bernard Walschots, a Dutch economist, as saying, in a note to investors. "This may have dramatic implications for the Western democracies.''

When to use power?

It is clear that terrorism can neither be contained nor negotiated. In the short run, they must be conquered decisively with power and determination. The civilized world must never let terrorist groups to acquire more power and more lethal weapons of mass destruction. Their networks must be disrupted and their camps must be naturalized. For their long run defeat, terrorism must be combated with ideas. The Left have no idea on both. Their short run solution is a better law enforcement, but it has been proven to be a disaster. Their long term solution with economic improvement does not really touch the fundamental idea of terrorism. At least, the Conservatives, led by the Bush administration from the US are offering something to debate. “The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got,” said President Bush in his State of Union Address last January. For a long term solution, the Conservatives have offered that democracy which is centered on liberty, freedom and respect on differences is the best solution to combat the idea of terrorism. This is also a view held by Tony Blair from the United Kingdom, and Aznar from Spain. And thus, according to this camp, a war and a democratic Iraq are necessary and a democratic Iraq will be a model for other countries, where the idea of terrorism is flourishing, to follow.

So far, what we have seen is a constant harsh, if not out of mind, criticism from the Left of the idea of the Conservatives. Debates are of course welcomed because that’s something the terrorists never want and that’s differentiating factor separating between the civilized world and the terrorists. But the Left are not debating and are not offering legitimate and sound solutions. What the camp offers is appeasement.  It seems the Left are still operating using the paradigm of the Cold War where Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) had prevented a nuclear war – and thus saved the world from armageddon.

MAD is the doctrine of a situation in which any use of nuclear weapons by either of two opposing sides (the USSR and the US) would result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. The doctrine assumes that each side has enough weaponry to destroy the other side and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is that the battle would escalate to the point where each side brought about the other's total and assured destruction - and, potentially, those of allies as well.

The theory runs that no leader is insane enough to risk killing off most of his population for a military victory. But the terrorist groups do not care of a self-destruction or the killing of their own. In fact they also embrace it. The war on terror is not under MAD paradigm, but it is on We All Destroyed (WAD).

The stake is too costly. The world must unite against terrorism and ideally politics and ideology should be locked in the closet tightly while common sense and power must be the frontrunner choice of fighting tools. Alas, the former – politics and ideology, are dominating the public discourse on how to combat terrorism. As a result, while people are dying and while the terrorists continue to plan and carry out more dangerous attacks, one part of the world is busy arguing, and continue to proposing a defective solution and misleading diagnosis.

If only could we debate with terrorists.

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