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A SENSE OF ASIA

Bush on getting the terror plague under control


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

September 2, 2004

When he recently stumbled into one of his famous malapropisms, President Bush handed his political opponents a tactical weapon, briefly, by putting into question if he saw a successful end to his war against terrorism. What he obviously meant was it would eventually come to as messy and an irrational end much as in the way it is now being waged ø no peace treaty signing ceremony on the deck of an aircraft carrier or in a railway car somewhere. The corollary may be we may not even know when the corner is turned [if you will pardon an expression now in ill repute in this highly political season] in a campaign to end it.

A look around Asia gave weight to BushÕs concept [if not his language]. As he was speaking, events demonstrated how nihilistic this whole infection in world society is. It is a non sequitur to keep looking for ways to inoculate rational societies intellectually against totally irrational acts, much less to eliminate them without recourse to force.

If there was any doubt about the total absence of anything but fury among the terrorists, it came with the kidnapping of the two French journalists in Iraq. ItÕs marvelous to see the talking heads, expert on terrorism, trying to make sense of what is senseless. For the hostage-taking placed the French government, so long courting favor among the Arabs and Moslems, into the same category as the hated ÒCrusaders and JewsÓ. It forced the French government-sponsored Islamic association into the most forthright denunciation of the jihadists so far among Moslems in the West. None of this benefited the terrorists. What it showed, once again, was the Islamicist terroristsÕ political agenda for the choplogic it is. As FranceÕs diplomatic establishment went into action around the world ø just as it had when it turned the UN debate over going to war in Iraq into a debacle for organized world society, it obscured a no less real tragedy. A dozen innocent Nepalese construction workers who had blundered into the Iraq scene were ruthlessly killed for apparently no reason but they were non-Moslem. [Even that may not be true.]

The all too common clichŽ of the critics of military action is to talk incessantly of curing social and political deficiencies of the world which, they say, give rise to terrorism. Just after 9/11 former Prime Minister Aznar of Spain, thinking of the Basque terrorists who have butchered civilians in his own country for three decades, and before the hideous attack on innocent Madrid railway commuters planned for at least two years, gave the answer to that argument: there is no cause, however valid its charge, that can justify these atrocities. Their very lack of intellectual justification by the terrorists only reinforces this moral verdict.

Yet the slaughter goes on. As this is written, terrorists ø presumably the lunatic fringe of the Chechen war against Moscow ø are threatening to kill Russian schoolchildren and their teachers. It follows a railway bombing in Moscow against civilians. That followed the loss of two Russian civilian airliners, apparently to explosive devices brought aboard by Òblack widowsÓ, relatives of Chechen terrorists or civilians killed in the never-ending war in the Caucuses who did not know or care about their victims.

A few days earlier two civilian buses were blown up by Palestinian terrorists in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba in retaliation, they said, for the killing of the leaders of their movement. A few days before, the leader of the opposition in Bangladesh narrowly escaped a political rally bombing leaving many dead and injured. And almost daily there are reports of civilians as well as Indian security forces killed in Kashmir. The new prime minister of Pakistan narrowly escaped assassination in mid-August, but his driver and bystanders were killed. An attack on a hospital in Karachi a few days later, apparently the work of one Islamic sect against another, resulted in innocents losing their lives. A suicide attack on a private U.S. security contractorsÕ quarters in Kabul a few days later killed more Afghan civilians than foreign combatants.

The complex backgrounds, political and logistically, for all these terrorist acts not only indicates the difficulty in combating them, but the likelihood that pacification in one part of the world will not be applicable elsewhere. Just as there will be no quick and easy solution to establishing representative government in Iraq, a determination of KashmirÕs identity, a secular-Islamic equation in Pakistan, the reestablishment of ethnic balance in Afghanistan, satisfaction of Chechen nationalism, a stable federalism in Spain, etc., there will be no one model fits all solutions to the terrorist infection wherever it springs up. ThatÕs why ÒvictoryÓ against terrorism may not only be slow in coming, as the President has warned since 9/11, but it may not be recognizable when it arrives.

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.

September 2, 2004

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