Tag Archives: terrorism

Resisting the Drumbeat

23 Nov 2015 By in International Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I spent the week after the Paris attacks wondering, Why must the US response be military?  France is justified in avenging itself against ISIS, but the United States should be cautious in responding to this particular instance of violent jihad.

When have we heard more hysterical commentary than during this past week, a week of incomplete sentences and excited spluttering?  Ironically, only the President remained calm; only his remarks regarding ISIS’s threat to the US made sense; and, perhaps for that reason, the media and political establishment have excoriated him and deprecated the administration resoundingly.

Meanwhile, a perfect storm is picking up speed in Syria, where a civil war broke out four and a half years ago, in response to a citizens’ uprising against Bashar al-Assad during the multi-national Arab Spring.  I remember seeing an interview with some moderate rebels then: they were dismayed at the US’s failure to help them and predicted that disillusionment would encourage the growth of anti-Western extremism.  And so it has.

Since that ‘simpler’ time, Syria has become the theater where at least three wars are raging simultaneously.  First, there is the increasingly sectarian civil war aimed at deposing the intractable Assad.  Second, a war within a war is being waged, as the stateless guerrilla group ISIS attempts, in Syria and elsewhere, to establish a retrograde caliphate that it justifies in the name of Islamic purity.  Finally, the Syrian war is a proxy war, with numerous other powers overtly or covertly aiding the principal combatants, attempting to further their own interests by investing in the triumph of one or the other side.  The outside players include Iran, Russia, and the Lebanese-based group Hezbollah on the Syrian government’s side, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the US, the UK, and France on the opposition side.  (For more on the war’s history, see this BBC News summary; also this map of Middle-Eastern involvement at The Maghreb and Orient Courier.)

The opposition has the weaker hand, because its principal aim is to bring down the Assad regime; yet no one can imagine who could bring order to Syria if Assad were gone.  The so-called ‘moderate’ rebels fighting for democracy have long since been overwhelmed by militants from all over the world, and especially by Sunni forces fighting to bring down Assad’s Alawites and attain a theocratic victory.  Westerners who think this war is still primarily about democracy and self-determination have it wrong.  Re-establishing civil order will involve either the installation of a puppet government with a new strongman or a return to the status quo ante bellum.

Tactically, the conflict has morphed into a type of total war that is difficult to categorize, though, sadly, many of its most brutal elements (chemical warfare, the bombing of civilian populations) have occurred in modern wars before.  The tactics of the Islamic State (which of course is a fantastical misnomer, as the force does not constitute a state at all), however, are novel in that they combine Western-oriented terrorism with transnational guerrilla warfare aimed at further creating anarchy in and beyond the territory that ISIS is intent on overtaking.

The New York Times published an excellent graphic feature highlighting how ISIS’s terror activities complement their geographically focused war aims.  Precisely because ISIS is not a state, it wishes to promote anarchy as well as to break up the influence of the West and exorcise the Western narrative that has shaped and justified our involvement in the affairs of many Muslim-populated societies.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the pressure is on the Obama administration to step up the fight against ISIS in Syria, to send ground troops and commit more air and fire power to a multi-sided conflict already fraught with too many antagonistic parties.  The pressure is all the greater given that the presidential race is in full swing.  Republican candidates, eager to talk tough, are vying to out-do one another with fantastical visions of military aggression whose virtues are merely quantitative.

President Obama did a good job last week of reminding everyone that ISIS is not a state but a more amorphous and unconventional enemy.  At a press conference during the G20 summit in Turkey, the president astutely rejected the idea of being further drawn into a conventional war, reminding his listeners that conventional tactics will not work against this unconventional enemy.

We play into the ISIL narrative when we act as if they’re a state, and we use routine military tactics that are designed to fight a state that is attacking another state. That’s not what’s going on here.

These are killers with fantasies of glory who are very savvy when it comes to social media, and are able to infiltrate the minds of not just Iraqis or Syrians, but disaffected individuals around the world. And when they activate those individuals, those individuals can do a lot of damage. And so we have to take the approach of being rigorous on our counterterrorism efforts, and consistently improve and figure out how we can get more information, how we can infiltrate these networks, how we can reduce their operational space, even as we also try to shrink the amount of territory they control to defeat their narrative.

The gravest threat that ISIS poses to the US is the incitement of terror.  Here’s hoping that Americans can resist the drumbeat and refrain from over-reaching in the Middle East, instead choosing to devote themselves to the twin causes of domestic safety and peace.

The Paris Attacks

14 Nov 2015 By in International Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

The Paris attacks confirm that all Western civilization must act to repel the various threats to itself that radical terror poses.  I agree with Pope Francis’s perception that such global violence, deliberately targeting ordinary people and intending to undermine the peace and order of civil society, represents a third world war.  The values of toleration, openness, freedom, and mutual respect are the real targets of such bitter and retrograde attacks.

It is easy to imagine an end to ISIL, but more difficult to imagine assuaging the resentment and hatred of Western values that fuels all such violent extremist movements.  Such hatred is never-ending, and, given the accelerating pace of modernity and the West’s pervasive influence in far-flung lands, destined only to multiply.  Modernism and the universal creed of human rights pose a grave threat to tribal thinking and to some forms of religion and religious authority, outraging those who look to such certainties as a source of personal power and identity.

The doctrines of religious toleration and universal human rights, born out of the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago, remain radical, a centuries-old legacy that continues to transform human culture and behavior.  These values belong to no one country but are being embraced by growing numbers of peoples and societies around the globe, partly because they promise liberation from the narrow tribalism and sectarianism that has been a principal source of violence throughout human history.

Live and let live.  Viva la différence!  These mottoes are the very hallmark of a tolerant and inclusive culture that (it’s no accident) enjoys the blessings of peace and order while guaranteeing its members safety under the rule of law.  All that is under attack now.

The perpetrators of the Paris attacks wish to turn back the clock, to return all of us to a dark age where ruthlessness and rage would provide the sole organizing logic of human life.  Strangely, though, the battle is already up with them: their weapons and tactics betray their pathetic dependence on the West and on its cultural hegemony.  Their craven reliance on Western publicity and social media and their inability to live modestly and peacefully demonstrate the contradictions of their movement.  Their notion of godliness is one that the truly godly eschew.

Consign The Sociopath and Terrorist to Oblivion

25 Jun 2015 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I recoil at seeing photographs of the smirking white racist who gunned down nine African-Americans in a Charleston church last week.

His actions, like those of so many other mass-murderers and terrorists, were directed not just toward his victims but toward us, the public.  His actions were calculated to command our attention.  This low-life left a manifesto explaining the influential effect he hoped his actions would have.  His motive was to show up society.  When journalists give this despicable creature publicity, they fulfill his perverted and malevolent dream of glory.  They realize the image of what, without us, he could never be.  Perversely, they grant the craven narcissist celebrity.

Society and the media should shun and ostracize actors who terrorize and assail society.  Coverage of their actions should be bland: imageless, minimal, and uninteresting.  The pronouncements, images, and names of terrorists and sociopathic killers should be consigned to annihilation, as beneath our acceptance or recognition.  Let their names and deeds be publicly recalled only to the extent required in the justice system.  Cast them into an acid bath of oblivion, consign them to social death, silently and without a second thought.

The virtuous stance of the victims’ families is far more worthy of our consideration, far more sensational, and fuller of the power that inspires our awe.

The Era of the Dynamite Girl

18 Apr 2013 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Aftermath of bombing at the Chicago Federal Courthouse, 1918 (Courtesy of the National Archives via Flickr Commons)

The years after the end of WWI were turbulent ones in the United States.  A slump came with peace, as wartime demand for American agricultural and industrial output weakened, diminishing American opportunities.  The Russian Revolution of 1917, and the radical political ferment that contributed to it, had a profound effect on political activism in the States, as workers and intellectuals explored whether communist or socialist doctrines could be used to revolutionize a capitalist system that was generating unacceptably high levels of inequality and suffering.  The anarchist sentiment that had triggered the outbreak of WWI had never vanished, and it combined with other domestic conditions, including historically high rates of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, to make the years before 1920 ones of conflict and unease.

The threat of domestic violence, and the fear of such threats, was felt in many parts of the country.  These were the years of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare, as well as a deadly race riot in Chicago and the dubious prosecution and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in New England.

In Chicago, the year 1918 got underway with the arrest of a nineteen-year-old Italian-born radical named Gabriella Antolini, who was found carrying a satchel full of dynamite (36 pounds) along with a loaded pistol through Union Station.  The press immediately dubbed her ‘the Dynamite Girl.’  A professed follower of anarchist Luigi Galeani, Antolini served eighteen months in prison.  She was a sympathizer of the IWW, the radical labor union headed by Big Bill Haywood and headquartered in the city.  That summer, Chicago tried to stay steady amid a series of bombings and attempted bombings, typically connected with labor disputes, and some seemingly involving IWW members, known as Wobblies.

On September 4, 1918, a bomb exploded in the north lobby of Chicago’s Federal Building, killing four people.  According to later accounts, a man in a tan raincoat had been seen pacing around the building around 3:00pm with a cigar box with a string dangling from one side of it under his arm.  He was seen to drop the cigar box and kick it under a radiator near the Adams Street entrance before hurrying away.  According to Sean Deveney, writing on his website The Original Curse, the explosion was so powerful that it ripped open the Federal Building and threw from their seats employees at work inside the neighboring Marquette and Edison Buildings.  The buildings’ windows were shattered, shards of glass raining onto the streets.  Although many suspected a connection to the recently concluded trial and conviction of some 100 IWW officials, the perpetrator of the crime was never found.

Image: The wreckage of Chicago’s Federal Building, 1918, from this source.

%d bloggers like this: