A rchive Date
[ 24-10-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Terrorism ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
Reckless response to terror perilous
By Herman Goodden - London Free Press
October 24, 2002
Today there is a growing and increasingly vocal split among politicians and media commentators regarding the advisability of taking the American-led war against terrorism into Iraq. American leaders have repeatedly stated the aim of such action would be to bring about regime change in that beleaguered dictatorship.
The goal of such intervention would not only be the deposition of Saddam Hussein (a proven aggressor against neighbours such as Iran and Kuwait and a cold-blooded murderer of his own citizens), but it is also hoped by introducing democratic principles in Iraq, some of its almost equally benighted neighbours might also develop a taste for more humanitarian forms of government.
There are recent signs just the threat of American-led action is forcing Saddam to at least appear to change his tune, by agreeing to renewed UN weapons inspections, by holding that farce of a single-candidate election with 100-per-cent voter turnout and support for you-know-who and, most bizarre, by emptying his well-stocked prisons. Some optimists are hoping these initiatives are signs Saddam's stranglehold on Iraq is faltering and regime change may be effected from within before an American-led onslaught.
I found it pretty easy to brush off last month's 100-name petition by Canadian glitterati - everyone from Bruce Cockburn and Margaret Atwood to Buzz Hargrove and Robert Bateman - advising Canadian MPs they, the undersigned, regarded an American-led attack on Iraq as "unprovoked" and "immoral." With all due respect to this august assemblage of writers, painters and musicians whose work I admire (that's right, I don't have much use for Buzz), they are not the authorities whose insights I would most trust on matters military.
But columnist, filmmaker and military historian, Gwynne Dyer, is. So my certitudes have been thoroughly scrambled by a column of his in last Saturday's Free Press, "Panic: precisely what they want." Addressing himself in the main to the recent terrorist bombings in Bali, Dyer asserts that in the larger scheme of things (however much a 9/11 or Bali bombing might traumatize the West), terrorist attacks are strategically insignificant. They are the scattered assaults of geographically and politically unfocused renegade cells and in responding to them via military incursions into Afghanistan or Iraq, governments of the West are playing right into the terrorists' hands.
Dyer writes: "In the case of al-Qaida and its Islamist allies, the final objective is to destroy the existing ruling groups in Arab and some other Muslim countries and take their places . . .The whole point of this exercise, from lower Manhattan to Bali to wherever the next strike hits, is to get the West to stamp around the Muslim world as violently and clumsily as possible, hurting lots of innocent people in the process."
Most provocatively, Dyer argues the West needs to learn how to absorb our terrorist fatalities as dispassionately as we absorb traffic fatality figures. Just think of 9/11 and 2001 as a particularly bad year on the highways, because if you go down the road of trying to avenge your loss and settle the score and guarantee the safety of all your citizens until the end of time, you're only going to suck untold thousands more people into the insatiable maw of an unwinnable war.
As in Ireland or the Middle East and other unstable hotspots on the globe, North Americans are being told they too must learn to live with occasional acts of murderous violence in their cities and neighbourhoods. An interesting backdrop to this debate is the terrorist shooting gallery going on in the Washington D.C. area over the last few weeks. After a dozen civilians have been randomly picked off, we still don't have a clue if this sniper's motives are political or just wacky. But whichever they turn out to be, surely the appropriate counter force is the police, not the military.
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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