[iwar] [fc:The.New.Cold.War]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-31 05:32:11
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Factoring.PC.Into.The.Warfare.Equation]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Uncle.Sam.And.Aunt.Samantha]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200110311332.f9VDWBX22124@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:32:11 -0800 (PST)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.New.Cold.War]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

National Review
November 5, 2001
The New Cold War
Familiar battle lines, unfortunately 
By David Pryce-Jones 
In front of our eyes, a new organizing principle is emerging in the world.
Islamic extremism is an ideological challenge, and states have to respond to
it accordingly. Another Cold War is taking shape. Its duration and scope are
uncertain. President Bush is already speaking of a year or two, but some
experts are forecasting as much as fifty years. The implications are global.
Once more, people will be deciding what exactly freedom means to them.
Communist and Islamic extremism both have militaristic and imperial aims,
directed to recruit where possible, and to attack elsewhere. Their claims to
be universal imply the actual destruction of all other values. Communism
turned out to be the Russian national interest in disguise. Soviet
grievances against the West were unreal, but the expression of them was
rational. In contrast, Islamic extremism has a restricted territorial base,
and by definition cannot appeal to non-Muslims. The phenomenon arises from
the complex interplay of an identity wounded by modernity, and the complete
political and social failures of Muslim states. The grievances here are
real, but their expression is irrational, even suicidal. Islamic extremism
is therefore a more unpredictable and elusive enemy. 
The failure of Muslim states seems to have taken the West by surprise.
Decolonization, it was assumed after the world war, was the prelude to
freedom. Emerging nationalist leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt were
said to be "officers in a hurry," a phrase hiding the reality that under the
khaki of their uniform were traditional tyrants intent on absolute rule.
Such as it was, their modernization was at the expense of traditional
Islamic identity. Fighting back, Muslims formed groups, some open, others
clandestine, and all violent. In every country they appeared at first as a
fringe minority, but dangerous to the state, therefore to be repressed. The
Ayatollah Khomeini revolution in Iran fanaticized this minority to believe
that power in other Muslim countries might be in their grasp.
A barbarous civil war between Islamic groups and the regimes in power has
already spread through much of the Muslim world. Offering more of an
identity than a program, Islamic extremists have been able to impose
themselves only in Iran and Afghanistan, though in Algeria and even Egypt it
has been--and still is--a close-run thing. During the past twenty years or
so, fugitives from Islamic groups have been settling abroad, partly to
escape the fearsome crackdowns in their homelands, and partly to pursue
their cause in the countries of the West, where they exploit the rule of law
and the structure of human rights that they have no intention of respecting
for others.
Nobody knows how many such refugee extremists there are. Estimates range
between 1,000 and 5,000. Organized to be self-contained, members of these
groups cover their tracks with skill, making use of safe houses and false
passports and identification papers. They appear to have acquired the
techniques indispensable to subversion, with systems of communication,
access to hidden funds, and the infiltration of "sleepers," or individuals
planted to stay inactive until the moment arrives for whatever operation is
planned for them. Communist cells throughout the West used to operate on
just such lines, and Islamic extremists have shown themselves every bit as
thorough and imaginative.
Most people in the West appreciated that the organizing principle of the
Cold War had its either-or logic: for or against democracy. The NATO
alliance was a symbol of the general will for self-defense, although in
practice its military capacities and political inspiration were almost
wholly American. Neither was the either-or logic absolute. Non-aligned
countries played one superpower against the other, bidding for aid and
weaponry in return for support. Following the example of Nasser, Arab
countries specialized in this dubious variant of blackmail and made the
Middle East an arena in which the Cold War was openly and regularly fought
out. In Europe, the flashpoint was Germany, which had the particular
misfortune to be divided between the two blocs, with the Berlin Wall to
prove it. Successive West German leaders devised the policy of Ostpolitik to
explore ways out of this predicament in the direction of neutrality and
unification.
The Left in general did not share the either-or logic of the Cold War.
"Better red than dead," was one of their slogans. A wide-ranging assortment
of pacifists and Communist sympathizers, professors and students,
Sixty-Eighters and Vietnam protesters, counter-cultural drop-outs,
clergymen, Quakers, playwrights and actresses, historians and commentators
in the mainstream press--revisionists one and all--liked to maintain that
America was a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. Hundreds of
thousands of West Germans could demonstrate against the stationing in their
country of the missiles that alone protected them. Defeatism appeared to
accompany democracy.
Under the immediate shock of the terror attacks, public opinion in the West
was unanimously in favor of striking back at the main culprit, Osama bin
Laden and his al-Qaeda group, to be followed by measures for the long-term
containment of Islamic extremism in all its forms. "Every nation has a
choice to make," President Bush declared as he laid the basis for the
world's new organizing principle. "In this conflict there is no neutral
ground." Osama bin Laden confirmed it: "These events have divided the world
into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels." 
China, Russia, and India are among countries with private agendas in
choosing to side against Islamic extremism. Muslim and Arab countries are in
the old non-aligned position of extracting maximum advantage in return for
any support they may give. Pakistan and Uzbekistan offer military facilities
conditionally. Confused as ever, unpopular, and breeding extremists through
its unjust handling of domestic affairs, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia
depends on the United States for its security--as West Germany once did--but
dares not come out openly and say so, for fear of offending Muslims. 
Israelis and Palestinians face each other across the new ideological divide
in a dilemma that bears comparison to Germany's in the Cold War. Here is a
continuous flashpoint. Israel must share territory with Palestinians, a
growing number of whom are proven Islamic terrorists, and who identify with
bin Laden's cause, as he identifies with theirs. Exploring terms of
compromise and neutrality in conditions of incompatibility, the Oslo peace
process is to the Middle East what Ostpolitik was to Germany and central
Europe. Proposals to separate the two peoples physically on the ground
spookily evoke the Berlin Wall.
The moment the new organizing principles emerged, the same Cold War
objectors of yesterday appeared as if they had been ready in the wings for a
reprise. That too is spooky. Without a hiccup, the professors and students,
actresses and clergymen, and all who used to hold that an aggressive United
States was responsible for starting and pursuing the Cold War against a
peace-loving Soviet Union, have adapted this self-accusation to present
circumstances. The Left is again collecting petitions against war,
mobilizing demonstrations in major cities, pleading that humanitarian
considerations ought to exclude any military measures--never mind the
victims of September 11--and calling for bin Laden to be brought before a
court, an Alice-in-Wonderland prospect. 
One egregious specimen typical among others in the media is an article in
the Washington Post by Robert Malley. A member of President Clinton's
National Security staff, Malley at present is a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations. Lately he published a lengthy and casuistical defense
of Yasser Arafat's no-saying at Camp David a year ago, and now he writes
that there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism. There are simply Muslims
who are angry at their own repressive regimes "and the American superpower
that backs them." Malley might have checked himself to consider that the
truly repressive regimes in the Muslim world are those of Saddam Hussein,
Sudan, the ayatollahs in Iran, Qaddafi in Libya, the Assad dynasty in Syria
. . . (and Malley's favorite Arafat is no liberal either). Far from backing
these tyrants, in reality America has expressed censure, imposed sanctions,
and sometimes taken outright military measures against them. Useful idiots
are evidently with us always. 
Bin Laden's declaration of war, broadcast on the Qatar-based television
network al-Jazeera, has been widely judged a propaganda triumph, while
faults of presentation are found with Bush. Articles suggest that in the
minds of some women the handsome and soft-spoken bin Laden is already in
their apartment. At this level Uncle Joe used to be admired for his
moustache. Other articles whimper that this is five minutes before bioterror
and apocalypse. "Better Islam than anthrax"--but it's not quite catchy
enough for a slogan. 
NATO declared that the attack on America constituted an attack on all its
members, but so far as is known, Britain is the only NATO country yet to
provide any material help. A typical French commentator is afraid that "the
blundering American giant may overreact." Germany's most prominent
television anchorman, Ulrich Wickert, writes that, while President Bush is
no murderer or terrorist, he and bin Laden have the same intolerant "thought
structures." Schoolteachers and lecturers in "peace studies" and of course
the novelist Gunter Grass are busy condemning American attacks on
Afghanistan, and accusing the United States of trying to remake the world to
suit itself. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi uttered the
self-evident truth that "we should be confident of the superiority of our
civilization, which . . . guarantees respect for human rights and religion.
This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries." European
leaders bludgeoned Berlusconi until he qualified what he had said and
half-apologized. 
The propaganda war matters because we are in for another long haul, in which
the black arts of secret services must play a major part. Intelligence is
the only effective method for eliminating terror networks like al-Qaeda
already established throughout the West. Intelligence involves the
underworld of double-agents, collaborators, and informers, and runs the
risks of entrapment, blackmail, bribery, and murder. In extensive police
work in a dozen countries, hundreds of Islamic extremists have already been
arrested. In the Cold War, the testimony of defectors and Soviet dissidents
steadily influenced public opinion. The courageous writers Kanan Makiya and
Fouad Ajami and others can do the same for fellow Muslims victimized by
those who claim to speak and act for them.
Much can go wrong. A military campaign in Afghanistan faces formidable
obstacles of terrain and climate. The Taliban may merge into an even more
brutal successor regime. Bin Laden may escape and live to fight another day.
Panicky pressure to establish a premature or badly defined Palestinian state
could well push Israel, Arafat, and the local Islamic extremists into a
three-cornered showdown with unforeseen consequences, perhaps even regional
war. Cowardly doublethink in Saudi Arabia or a coup by the mullahs in
Pakistan might force those countries into the sphere of Islamic extremism.
Unchecked, the misplaced defeatism of the Left is likely to demoralize
public opinion as it did before. 
Muslims have to define their identity for themselves; they alone can decide
what part Islam has to play in their lives. The political and social failure
of Muslim societies is not about to convert into success now or in the near
future; outsiders anyhow have no say in the matter. But not long ago, the
Free World created conditions in which people were able to liberate
themselves from Soviet tyranny, and it has the chance to do the same now for
those in the grip of another ideological tyranny.

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get your FREE VeriSign guide to security solutions for your web site: encrypting transactions, securing intranets, and more!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/UnN2wB/m5_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Factoring.PC.Into.The.Warfare.Equation]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Uncle.Sam.And.Aunt.Samantha]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:58 PST