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A SENSE OF ASIA

World war on terror: Why U.S. must stay the course


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

August 18, 2005

It was always predictable it would be difficult to keep the civilized world’s nose to the grindstone in what President Bush warned would be a long struggle against terrorism. That is despite the demonstration in Madrid and London and Istanbul the terrorists have a worldwide target and are not limited to the U.S. and its overseas interests.

America’s difficulties in establishing a stable Iraq have made it easier to drag out the old bromides – from “your terrorist is my liberationist” to “searching for fundamental causes”. Old political ties and prejudices lead to excuses of why “militants” [as the BBC insists on calling them] violate the laws of human decency. And grievances are sought as rationalization for their motives despite all the evidence the leadership and much of the following of the barbarism is pathological, the product of privileged, deranged individuals, rather than social protest.

So after successful collaboration between Dublin and London to end terrorism in Northern Ireland, overcoming centuries of antagonism, now the Irish are wilting. They refuse to acknowledge the right of Colombia to incarcerate three Irish Republic Army “tourists” among drugtrafficking terrorists and malinger on their return to South America.

Djakarta has just reduced the sentences of convicted murderers of more than 200, mainly young Australian tourists, in the 2002 Bali bar bombing. Clearly the government is pandering to a portion of the Indonesian electorate manipulated by radical Islamicists.

The EU refuses to recognize the terrorist credentials of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah, obviously because their murderous activities are [for now] directed only toward the Israelis. So the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza could find the Europeans funding terrorists holed up in a Gaza sanctuary presented as humanitarianism for the Palestinians.

New Delhi ignores the South Indian logistics’ tail of the Sri Lankan Tamil separatists [whose origins it in fact once encouraged] because of its support among India’s own 63 million Tamils in its most populous state. The Sri Lankan foreign minister, an ethnic Tamil insisting on unity of the country, is murdered by those same terrorists while Norwegian do-gooders [over their depth as they were in Israel-Palestine] excuse the inventors of modern suicide bombing.

Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur deny the international connections of an Islamicists’ revolt in Thailand’s southern provinces which targets teachers and police in a classic murder campaign. That is an excuse to avoid the kind of international collaboration necessary to clip the wings of the international conspiracies.

Indonesia and Malaysia have refused U.S. offers of personnel and training for armed patrols in the Straits of Malacca, through which more than half of the world’s oil flows, despite repeated pirate attacks. Now, after months of negotiating, there are to be joint patrols [with Singapore] but probably not with adequate resources to prevent this essential world artery from being blocked by terrorists.

ABC telecasts an interview bought from a third party with the acknowledged leader of the Chechen terrorists, including the slaughter of children in a village school last year, further inhibiting cooperation between Washington and Moscow. The Arab networks continue to give sympathetic coverage to the murder of innocents in Iraq presented as a free press.

Washington refuses to return to Beijing several Uighurs captured fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, acknowledgment of the struggle of the indigenous people in Singkiang to resist the colonial oppression of the Han Chinese. But Uighurs have been associated with bombings in eastern Chinese cities as well as in their Central Asian homeland.

Foreign terrorists and their funds flow through Syria to the insurgency in Iraq but the U.S. temporizes because of occasional cooperation from Damascus intelligence, and the influence of Arab neighbors pleading its cause. Washington balances the problem of Iranian support of infiltration against the ties Iraqi Shias may invoke to get concessions from their coreligionists in Tehran.

Ankara is unhappy Washington is unwilling to expend forces to wipe out the remnants of the PKK anti-Turkish insurgency holed up in northern Iraq. But then the Turks romance Syria just as America’s relations with Damascus reach a new nadir, and their refusal to permit U.S. forces moving into northern Iraq from Turkish bases still rankles.

All of this against an increasingly clear historical picture the U.S. invited a continuing escalation of terrorism through excusing or failing to respond to escalating attacks over more than a decade. And finally when evidence came into American officials’ hands a domestic attack was contemplated, bureaucratic inertia and red tape ignored it.

All of this forms a backdrop for the continuing bloody saga in Iraq. There the Islamicists and Bathists terrorists are attempting to defeat Washington’s attempt to build representative government, a multicultural, multiethnic, stable, progressive entity in the middle of the Moslem world. It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of a defeat there if the American commitment wavers in the face of growing U.S. domestic criticism and doubts about sacrifices in a complicated struggle, no easier to evaluate than most warfare at any given moment.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

August 18, 2005

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