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April 6, 2004
EDITORIAL
Placating the Al Qaeda Beast
By Walter
Reich
There’s writing on the wall foretelling the next phase in
the world’s response to terrorism, and it’s in Spanish. “These
guys are killing us,” it says. “We’d better stop getting
them mad.” It’s a strategy that will work — but not for
long.
Three days after terrorists bombed 190 train commuters to death in Madrid
and wounded more than 1,500, on the day Spanish authorities reluctantly
admitted that Al Qaeda was a likely culprit, Spanish voters, in a dramatic
reversal of electoral expectations, ousted the party whose leader, José
María Aznar, was seen as having turned their country into Al Qaeda’s
target by supporting America’s war in Iraq.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Jettison the policies that Al Qaeda doesn’t
like and it’ll turn elsewhere.
In fact, it seems to make so much sense that the voters in the lands of
elsewhere — the other countries that have supported America in Iraq,
such as Great Britain, Poland and Italy — could well decide, in their
next elections, to also jettison the leaders who’ve supported the
American stance on Iraq.
A prod by Al Qaeda in any of these countries, in the form of a few bombings,
might well accomplish that. And even without such a prod, the mere threat
of such bombings — even the mere possibility — could be enough
to convince voters to turn the rascals endangering the country out of
office. The day after the Madrid bombings, newspapers carried maps of
Europe’s dense railroad grid, from Britain all the way to Moscow
and beyond. It takes little imagination to see how vulnerable the continent
is.
And it takes little imagination to envision more such attacks. They’re
really quite easy. If all Al Qaeda terrorists want to do is blow up backpacks
they’ve filled with dynamite and secreted on trains, and if all they
need to do to make them blow up is call the cell phones they’ve put
into them, the task isn’t hard at all. Nor are the many, many other
ways in which mass death can be accomplished in Europe and elsewhere.
But the sense that this strategy of placating Al Qaeda seems to make stops
there. Because Al Qaeda won’t stop there. Defeating America’s
military intervention in Iraq, and the support of that intervention by
others, is only the latest addition to Al Qaeda’s to-do list.
After all, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took place well before
America entered Iraq. The roster of countries supporting military action
in Afghanistan, which Al Qaeda also opposes, is far longer than the roster
supporting America in Iraq.
Moreover, before the West’s war on terrorism, Al Qaeda’s central
political focus was on the regimes it didn’t like in the Arab world,
such as Saudi Arabia’s, as well as on the West’s, and especially
America’s, support for those regimes. And then, partly to increase
its popularity among mainstream Arabs, it also emphasized America’s
support for Israel, which it said had to be destroyed.
But along the way it has also identified many other items on its long
to do list. Some are cultural, such as eradicating the poisonously corrupting
messages of sex and freethinking that Hollywood maliciously beams to the
Middle East from satellites, and reversing the humiliation of having become
a scientific backwater after centuries of invention and ascendancy.
And some to-do items are historical, such as reversing the Christian reconquest
of Spain, which was completed in 1492, seven centuries after Islam had
conquered the peninsula and called it al-Andalus. Which brings us back
to the decision by Spain’s voters to jettison the politicians, and
the policies, that make Al Qaeda mad.
To Al Qaeda, after all, Spain is the not yet restored al-Andalus. Whether
or not it supports America in Iraq, Europe’s profane culture of exposed
female flesh and secular ideas, broadcast into and defiling Muslim homes
and minds, continues. And the West itself will remain the enemy that stopped
the rightful advance of Islamic faith and civilization, that colonized
the Arab world, and that has subjugated and humiliated it culturally,
politically, militarily and economically ever since.
For some, Al Qaeda’s to-do list will be completed only when the infidels
convert. So in the short run, the decision by Spanish voters to placate
the Al Qaeda beast, or at least stop provoking it, makes sense —
as would the similar decisions that may well be made by voters in other
countries that have experienced, or that fear, Al Qaeda’s terror.
In the medium run, though, that beast will be emboldened by its stunning
power over democracy, obviously so vulnerable to simple acts of terror,
and will, with good justification, redouble its efforts.
The real problem will be in the long run, because the beast’s to-do
list is almost endless, and satisfying it isn’t compatible with national
survival.
In that long run, Spanish voters, and the voters after them who try to
shift the beast’s focus elsewhere, and who serve up whatever offering
it may want, will run out of elsewheres, will run out of offerings and
will understand that they have no choice but to do the hard thing and
defeat that beast before it utterly defeats them.
Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International
Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior, in GW’s Elliott School of International
Affairs and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the Columbian
College of Arts and Sciences. He also is a senior scholar at the Woodrow
Wilson Center and the former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Reprinted with permission. This editorial was originally published by
The New York Sun, March 18, 2004.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
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