Thinking about "blowback"

Longtime war correspondent Robert Fisk, who is also a longtime resident of Beirut, brings us a sobering thought in connection with developments in the Middle East: A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11 Independent 08/05/06. He writes:

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.

Fisk has been no favorite of Republican war fans these last few years. In fact, the blog term "fisking", in which an entire piece or speech by someone is analyzed almost line-by-line, came from war fans trying to cut down Fisk's reporting.

The term may have entered the language, but his reporting holds up far better than the whining of most of his war-loving critics. Fisk offers a perspective rarely seen in even many of our war reporters. He is familiar with the Middle East. He speaks Arabic. He covered the most important conflicts that have shaped the Middle East so much over the last three decades or so: the Lebanese civilian war and the first Israeli occupation; the long and bloody Iran-Iraq war from both sides (a war that included active American participation in hostilities at sea against Iran and in support of Iraq); the Gulf War of 1991; the first and second Palestinian intifadas; the Algerian civil war of the 1990s; the Afghanistan War; the Iraq War; and, now the current Israel-Lebanon War.

War correspondents are a kind of war lovers themselves. The adrenaline rush becomes addictive. But the best ones, like Fisk, also develop a perspective that stands outside of the claims of governments and the pretensions of the war planners and strategists. They understand that war involves not only the modern-day version of the heroic clashes between armies like the Greeks and the Trojans. Although, reading the Iliad with its minute description of heads crushed and brains splattered and sharp objects entering the human body, you have to wonder if Homer wasn't building on the material of experienced ancient war correspondents himself.


Wars also involve lots of useless death and suffering, destruction and stupidity. And wars are blunt instruments of policy - precision weapons or not - that can spin out of control. Our neoconservative Trotskyists who nurture grand fantasies about purging the Middle East of despotisms and the world of Evil by wars of liberation are operating from a made premise. Napoleon's conquering armies certainly planted the early seeds of democracy in the German kingdoms, principalities and duchies. But the largest early manifestation of that was the German use of the popular army, which the French levée en masse had shown to be so powerful, to expel the French occupiers from their lands. The Germans remember it as the Wars of Liberation.

At least the word "blowback" has become a reasonably familiar word in the American political vocabulary. Maybe someday, it will actually start to inform American foreign policy. Blowback is what Fisk is talking about above. And, no, recognizing that horrible events have causes is not the same as excusing the perpetrators. It's a matter of being sensible rather than blundering around like a Bush in a china shop.

And the neocon bloody fantasies about wars of liberation, of "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here", so far looks like it's resulted in throwing more fuel on the fire instead of putting out the fires or better preparing the fire departments.

Two of the leading American experts on terrorism, Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, published a book last year called The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right. They aren't trying to one-up the neocons and nationalists in their appeals to fear and advocacy of violence. They are trying to look realistically at the real risks we face. And I don't think they would argue with Fisk's foreboding. They write:

We are losing.

Four years and two wars after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse. Against our most dangerous foe, our strategic position is weakening. Inspired by Usama bin Laden's boldness and outraged by America's recent actions, more Muslims are sympathizing with the radical Islamists and joining their movement. Individuals who hitherto had no significant ties to radical organizations are enlisting themselves in the struggle and committing acts of violence, sometimes without any support from existing networks. In disparate places around the globe, from Indonesia to the Caucasus and from Pakistan to Western Europe, the jihadist ideology has become the banner under which an array of grievances is being expressed, and often that expression is violent. In many of these regions, local and global grievances are merging into a pervasive hatred of the United States, its allies, and the international order they uphold. Within parts of the Muslim world, social and religious inhibitions on violence are weakening, and the notion is gaining acceptance that an attack on infidels involving weapons of mass destruction would be justified. (my emphasis)

Yes, the Cheney-Bush administration is doing a heckuva job fighting the GWOT (global war on terror).

I realize that it's not nearly so titillating as the cable news fare of missing white girls and murder trials in Podunk, Iowa. But war with Iran and the next mass-destruction terrorist attack against the United States are concerns that enter more and more into my thinking about the country's foreign-policy priorities.

| +Save/Share | |