After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama,
said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is
what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems
that something important is left out of the story. In the classical model
of terrorism, instilling fear (along with causing death and injury) is not
an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.
Terrorists don’t necessarily get a kick out creating carnage and fear (though
it is possible). Primarily they want the survivors’ fear converted into action
aimed at changing their government’s policy. Thus terrorism, if it is to have
any meaning, is a political, not a sadistic, act. In the
paradigmic case a weak nonstate group, unable to resist a state’s military or
to change its policy directly, terrorizes the civilian population of that state
in the hope it will demand a change in foreign or domestic policy. (Let’s leave
aside for this discussion that terrorism has been strategically
(re)defined by the United States and its allies such that it can apply only
to their adversaries, even when they attack military targets instead of
civilians.)
It’s not hard to fathom why officials and pundits do not acknowledge the full
story of terrorism: it would draw attention to what the U.S. government and
allied states have long been doing to people in the Muslim world. Nearly all
Americans seem to think it’s a sheer coincidence that terrorism is most likely
to be committed by people who profess some form of Islam and that the
U.S. military has for decades been bombing, droning, occupying, torturing, etc.
in multiple Islamic countries. Or perhaps they think U.S.-inflicted violence
is just a defensive response to earlier terrorism. (I might be giving people
too much credit by assuming they even know the U.S. government is doing any
of this.) When the U.S. military isn’t wreaking havoc directly, the U.S. government
is underwriting and arming tyrants like those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere.
And just to complete the picture, the U.S. government fully backs the Israeli
state, which has oppressed Palestinians and occupied their land for many decades.
All this is what Islamist
terrorists say they seek revenge for (more here),
and the U.S. government
acknowledges this. (That does not excuse violence against noncombatants,
of course.)
But telling the full story about the terrorists’ objectives might inadvertently
prompt a fresh look – maybe even a reevaluation – of America’s atrocious
foreign policy. The ruling elite and the military-industrial complex would
not want that.
Since questioning and changing U.S. foreign policy are out of the question,
the pundits and “terrorism experts” look for other ways to prevent terrorism.
Unsurprisingly, everything they come up with entails violations of our civil
liberties. Discussions about “profiling” are featured on cable news channels
almost regularly. Should we or should we not profile? Those few who say no are
accused of “political correctness,” the handy put-down for anyone who is leery
about violating privacy or gratuitously insulting whole classes of people.
But let’s think about profiling for a moment. As acknowledged, when one hears
about public, indiscriminate suicidal violence, such as occurred in Brussels,
it is reasonable to wonder if the perpetrators professed some “extreme” variant
of Islam. (That doesn’t mean another group, say, neo-Nazis and white nationalists,
couldn’t be the perps, as in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.)
But since Islamists come to mind first, that might give us a clue to how to
profile. As part of the profiling, why not look for links to countries
the U.S. government and its allies bomb, occupy, or otherwise abuse? The media
inform us that many of the terrorists in Europe first went to Syria to try to
overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. government wants overthrown),
but then came home angry after NATO countries started bombing the Islamic State
there and in Iraq, with the inevitable civilian casualties. In some cases Syrian
nationals sneaked into Europe through Turkey.
So the perpetrators of the next terrorist act are likely to be Islamists
with links to or sympathy for people terrorized by the United States and its
allies – namely, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and
Pakistan. But if that kind of profiling makes sense, wouldn’t it make even
more sense simply to stop inflicting violence on the Muslim world?
I guess that’s too simple for our experts.
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