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A SENSE OF ASIA

Has Iraq fed international Islamicist terrorism?


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

July 21, 2005

A chicken and egg controversy has developed between Prime Minister Blair and his critics who opposed the Iraq war. They argue American and British intervention there has led to the bombing of London transport. The accusation flies in the face of claims by both President Bush and Blair the fight in Iraq is part of the larger “war on terrorism” inaugurated after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

Blair’s response, joined now by British Moslem community leaders, is, of course, no cause however moral justifies this kind of immoral horror. But Blair, too, concedes when he talks about getting at “root causes”. Pointedly, much to the Israelis’ chagrin, he left them out of his litany of worldwide terrorism. That, incidentally, came after Prime Minister Sharon issued orders his government not publicly draw attention in their commiseration with the British to the similarities of the London episode with what the Israelis have endured from Palestinian terrorists for more than three years [with a thousand victims].

So far at least there is no evidence for Blair’s critics’ claim “a channel” for repatriating terrorists raised up and trained for Iraq has developed back to Europe. If indeed, the four U.K. terrorists were suicide bombers – there is circumstantial evidence they might have been duped to be trapped by the exploding bombs – it has led to more fundamental sources of Islamicist pollution in Pakistan.

A Greek chorus has joined this debate: the British Labor Party leftwing always opposed to Blair’s domestic compromises with traditional Fabian Marxism, some of whose most vaunted members were friendly to Iraq’s Sadam and courted Moslem firebrand clerics. Those brilliant manipulators of English, the BBC, have been in and out of their self-obsessed argument [with Reuter’s, the British news agency] over whether the miscreants [as they would be called in the Subcontinent of their ethnic origins] were, indeed, only “militants” or “bombers”.

Blair’s critics, whatever their real intent — for we are presumably on the eve of a change in Labor leadership — ignore what happens in the real world. The evidence mounts daily – whether in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain – we are dealing with alienated Moslem immigrants to Europe, sometimes second or third generation. That they have not integrated into European values, cultural anthropologists will argue about for generations. But like their fellow terrorists where we have detailed evidence [a young female suicide candidate in Israel, for example, a tortured soul who had a traumatic burning accident which would have cost her life but for Israeli doctors whose hospital she then tried to bomb], the answer is not in their stars but in their psychopathology. And it is a part of phenomena – alas! – not all that uncommon in all societies whether the U.S. Manson killings or gang rape by tribals against a Pakistan female doctor in an otherwise sophisticated natural gas installation in Pakistan.

What makes it clear we are dealing with a worldwide phenomenon but inspired by local issues and conditions are developments, largely ignored by the media, just now at opposite ends of the “umma” [Moslem believers stretching across Afro-Asia and now Europe]. President Putin has just visited Dagestan on the Caspian Sea where he announced Russian military reinforcements to meet growing instability.

It was there the dreadful school kidnapping and carnage took place last year. Spreading from neighboring Chechnya where Moscow for more than a decade has tried to subdue a nationalist rebellion fallen more and more into the hands of Islamicist radicals, Putin has acknowledged a heightened threat. But given Russian military incompetence, corruption, and barbaric tactics, it bodes ill for anything but the expansion of what is, in truth this time, Moscow’s quagmire.

In Southern Thailand, where old regional agitation against Thai annexation of non-Buddhist, non-Thai speaking areas early in the last century, has been resurrected with Islamicist overtones, the situation is worsening. Bangkok has clamped martial law on the three Moslem-majority provinces after a mid-July raid on the city of Yala demonstrated a new rebel sophistication in the18-monthold insurgency. Although denied by both Thai and neighboring Malaysian officials [the cross-border Malaysian state has an Islamicist local government], it appears increasingly likely there are international connections.

That there is a general self-pitying commonality throughout the wretched Moslem world – based on legitimate and fanciful grievances, many dating back to European colonial pasts – is not to be denied. That Moslem extremists exploit this among young tortured souls is again undeniable. But equally clear is the particularism of local situations which feed into international terrorism.

Iraq, with all its horror, only becomes the more dramatic of the worldwide phenomena. Just as Osama Bin Laden was obsessed with his own native Saudi Arabian and Yemen problems long before he turned to the U.S., “Palestine” and other issues, so the European events have their own germination.

The debate will continue. But whatever its complexities, a U.S. victory in Iraq – the establishment of a viable and modernizing regime – is part of the solution rather than the cause of Islamicist nihilism.

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.

July 21, 2005

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