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Today, I pass along a few wise words about terrorism from Danielle Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute. You’ve heard some of them before,
but since our leaders have no notion of how to fight terrorism, they are worth
repeating.
First, terrorism has been around for quite some time. When
it was directed against Israel, no one much cared. In fact, many serious
Western thinkers-- especially on the left-- tended to believe that the Israelis had brought it on themselves. Before BDS, leftists gave their seal of approval to
terrorism as a tactic. If they did not understand that Israel was merely a
proxy for Western civilization, they should now.
When terrorism was directed by Iran, no one much cared
either. After all, the ayatollahs took power in Iran with the blessing of Pres.
Jimmy Carter. In the Democratic playbook, if you can’t blame it on a
Republican, it’s not a problem. And yet, once the Iranians showed that
terrorism could work, other branches of Islam got into the business.
Pletka offered this truth:
The
truth is that Middle East rooted terrorism has been a growing scourge for
decades. Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, ISIS and the many other variants of these
Islamist extremists have been killing Americans, Europeans, and thousands and
thousands of Muslims for too long. It’s not just Syria that is a hotbed that
has catapulted the likes of ISIS to the fore; the Islamic Republic of Iran
employs terrorism every day as a regular tool of its foreign policy.
And we do not take it very seriously. Perhaps we have the
right emotional reaction and even the most poignant hashtags, but we are not
fighting it as well as we can or should. In fact, we and the rest of the West
has tolerated terrorism. In other parts of the world—think China—they do not
tolerate it and therefore have less of it:
And the
honest truth is that the United States has tolerated that terrorism, whether
directed against US troops in Beirut or in the seas off Yemen or on the ground
in Saudi Arabia or in Africa, South America, Europe, Asia or at home. We are
fighting, almost casually, three wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria without
any clear strategy and frankly, without any clear goal. “Degrade and destroy”
have become meaningless tropes trotted out when a bored reporter wonders why
we’re still there. But we are not degrading or destroying.
Why do the Islamists continue to practice terrorism?
Because, Pletka writes, it works. It garners attention for a failing
civilization and makes it a player on the world stage. Better ignominy than
anonymity:
Islamist
extremism and terrorism will continue to flourish for as long as it is an
effective tool, for as long as the price to those who practice that terror is
low. What price does Iran pay for Hezbollah? What price does Qatar pay for
supporting al Qaeda or its offshoots? Are drone strikes really an adequate
response?
What should our policy goal be? We need to increase the cost
of terrorism. We need to inflict some serious punishment on the sponsors of
terrorism. And that is not just al Qaeda and ISIS. It sounds strange to say so,
but we cannot continue to make deals and negotiate with the leading state sponsor
of terrorism, Iran, without telling the world that terrorism pays.
We need to show that terrorists are losers. Until we do so,
it will continue.
In Pletka’s words:
Rather,
we must recognize that we are in a broad, long and dangerous ideological and
physical war against a determined, serious, strategically minded enemy and act
accordingly. That means finding allies on the ground that wish to defend their
nation, their religion and their people as much as we wish to protect ours, and
seriously enlisting, training, funding, arming and empowering them to do battle
against the enemy. It means helping them as we have been in places like Iraq,
but more seriously, with more firepower and conviction and real military,
political and economic goals. Only when terrorists and their sponsors begin to
lose will the so-called lone wolves begin to think better of their choices.
“Join the losers” has never been a clarion call to fight.
4 comments:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/14/how-samuel-huntington-predicted-our-political-moment/
"against Israel?"
PM Begin was pretty clear when he claimed he "is the original terrorist."
The best "in the world."
Or were you unaware Israel houses the first, the original, and likely the best terrorists in the world?
Stuart; What should our policy goal be? We need to increase the cost of terrorism. We need to inflict some serious punishment on the sponsors of terrorism. And that is not just al Qaeda and ISIS. It sounds strange to say so, but we cannot continue to make deals and negotiate with the leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, without telling the world that terrorism pays.
I wonder who is a greater sponsor of terrorism, Iran or Saudi Arabia?
It also might be a good idea for the U.S. to stop selling our weapons to the middle east. Someone might start to think we're the sponsors of the terrorism.
Saudi Arabia is given a free pass because it has the oil, and we need a world with oil and oil sold in U.S. dollars.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/06/saudi_arabia_funds_and_exports_islamic_extremism_the_truth_behind_the_toxic_u_s_relationship_with_the_theocratic_nation/
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Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers in human history.
The counsel may sound simple and intuitive — that’s because it is. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally. This contradiction, although responsible for a lot of human suffering, is frequently ignored. Yet it recently plunged back into the limelight with the Saudi monarchy’s largest mass execution in decades.
...
Saudi Arabia is a theocratic absolute monarchy that governs based on an extreme interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law). It is so extreme, it has been widely compared to ISIS. Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud characterized Saudi Arabia in an op-ed in The New York Times as “an ISIS that has made it.”
“Black Daesh, white Daesh,” Daoud wrote, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia.”
“In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other,” Daoud continued. “This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.”
“In order to stop ISIS, you must first dry up this ideology at the source. Otherwise you are cutting the grass, but leaving the roots. You have to take out the roots,” he added.
In the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks, scholar Yousaf Butt stressed that “the fountainhead of Islamic extremism that promotes and legitimizes such violence lies with the fanatical ‘Wahhabi’ strain of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia.”
“If the world wants to tamp down and eliminate such violent extremism, it must confront this primary host and facilitator,” Butt warned.
In the past few decades, the Saudi regime has spent an estimated $100 billion exporting its extremist interpretation of Islam worldwide. It infuses its fundamentalist ideology in the ostensible charity work it performs, often targeting poor Muslim communities in countries like Pakistan or places like refugee camps, where uneducated, indigent, oppressed people are more susceptible to it.
Whether elements within Saudi Arabia support ISIS is contested. Even if Saudi Arabia does not directly support or fund ISIS, however, Saudi Arabia gives legitimacy to the extremist ideology ISIS preaches.
...
Of the 19 Sept. 11 attackers, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted 9/11 plotter, confessed in sworn testimony to U.S. authorities that members of the Saudi royal family funded al-Qaeda before the attacks. The Saudi government strongly denies this.
...
If it is truly interested in stopping terrorism, then, the U.S. and the rest of the West will heed Chomsky’s advice. The U.S. will realize that there really is an easy way to stop terrorism: It will stop participating in it, and end its alliance with Saudi Arabia.
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