Terrorism, "Mass-Destruction Weapons," Bush, and Iraq

The Bush administration is presently manipulating, very deliberately, the fear to prepare the public for an attack on Iraq

The first thing to note about terrorists is that there aren't very many of them -- at most a few thousand active ones in a world of billions.In a certain sense, the few there are are quite successful,: with their small numbers they garner lots of attention to themselves through their violent acts, and even a little to their causes. But in those cases when they have had fairly clear aims, they have rarely succeeded.At most they succeed in terrifying, in disrupting, but not in getting what they supposedly want, be it independence for Basques or Tamils, the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish republic (nor the tighter integration of Northern Ireland into Britain, as Protestant terrorists wish) the incorporation of Kashmir into Pakistan, or the downfall of the State of Israel. Al Qaeda, if it wants a worldwide Islamic "fundamentalist" state, hasn?t done well either.

In the scale of destruction and the worldwide attention paid, none have equalled the World Trade Center attackers. The scale of the damage they did has led the US government in particular to begin to worry very publicly about ?Weapons of Mass Destruction? in the hands of al Qaeda. But before we begin to believe that al Qaeda is that formidable, it is worth recalling that the damage they did on Sept 11, 2001 was far larger than all their previous attacks; it was sophisticated to a degree but required the hijackers to be armed with nothing more advanced than box cutters.

Also we must realize that the destruction and death toll was so large in New York only because of a series of problems that could not have been foreseen by the terrorists. Despite the hopes of the terrorists to kill a large proportion of the over 20,000 people in the towers at the time of the attack, it is quite likely that the death toll would have been in the hundreds, not thousands, if the towers could have stood longer, if the water supply in high floors were not cut off, if New York Fire Department radios had worked better, and if the same fire department had been more thoroughly prepared for coping with large fires on high floors of skyscrapers. The buildings would have withstood the fire much better had the spray-on insulation on the steel beams and other metal supports not been knocked loose, either by the force of the planes hitting the towers or by the effect over time of the winds that caused the buildings to sway. Even the architects were surprised by the insulation problem; the terrorists could hardly have been as knowledgeable.

The point of all this is that though terror is certainly terrible and the death toll of September 11 was ferocious and horrendous, taking that event as the standard of what terrorists can do, especially once there is some heightened degree of alert against them, provides an altogether inappropriate level of fear. It is this fear that the Bush administration is presently manipulating, very deliberately, to prepare the public for an attack on Iraq that they intended to undertake well before September, 2001, and that bears no real relationship whatsoever to September 11. (The success they have had in this is not unconnected to the American public's internal focus, general lack of knowledge of the world- "where's Iraq?" - absence of memory for those under 40 or so of what a prolonged and messy war entails in loss of life, etc.)

As far as is known, only one terrorist group has ever attempted to use biological or chemical weapons, and that was Aum Shinrikyu, the Japanese cult even stranger than al Qaeda, but probably with a much higher level of technical training among its members. In its one successful attack, which immediately led to its downfall, it managed to kill nine people at a Tokyo subway station. This is not to say that some equally bizarre group will not arise some time, somewhere with similar intent and greater success, but it does suggest that these complicated and hard-to-use weapons are hardly a significant, worrisome danger right now. They are rather in the category of nightmares, if waking ones - ideas arising in our own minds that then frighten us out of our wits. In this case they are ideas that people who want us to be scared into some silly reaction try to inflict on us as real.

In that category, I would put last fall's anthrax attacks. Coming as they did in letters to politicians and news media that announced them as anthrax and warned that the recipients should take antibiotics, the lethal anthrax missives were probably not intended to kill as much as to frighten the world -- most likely with the (successful) aim of increasing funding levels for anti-terrorism efforts. If so, they didn't come from al Qaeda and its allies, but only took advantage of the September 11 attacks to heighten receptivity to their message. They were terrorist-like in that their aim was attention getting through generating fear, but that is a ploy very commonly used by political movements of all sorts. Certainly the Bush administration was adroit in using the attention thus focused on biological weapons to add to the public's fear about sophisticated scientific weapons that go beyond hijackings and chemical explosives, and that has helped generate their war drumbeats against Iraq now. The FBI has moved very slowly in fingering anyone as the likely anthrax attacker, which raises at least a hint of suspicion that it was in some sense an inside job, feeding on a paranoia that has been shared or deliberately cultivated by lots of members of Bush's national security circle.

This Bush circle is closely tied with the groups who did everything in their power to take down the Clinton administration, including impeachment over lie about sex, apparently because they were so angry at having lost the Presidency and the power they considered rightfully theirs in 1992. This crew is composed of people whose power base in the defense establishment and in traditional industries tied to energy production was threatened by the end of the Cold War, the rise of the so-called new economy, and the environmental movement, and perhaps also by movements against racism and sexism.

Despite the presence of Condoleeza Rice fully on their side in the administration, these are overwhelmingly white men and mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestants. One would have thought their days firmly in command were decidedly over, and they probably are, but that is just what makes these folks so determined and single-minded in restoring their former glory by virtually any means necessary. They are not unlike Communist Party apparachiks in various former Soviet republics or in China in this, and though far more successful, not utterly unlike Islamicist groups such as al Qaeda, who unwittingly handed them such excellent ammunition.

But the administration's strategy for holding on to and perhaps enlarging power has a basic weakness. The US, though now acting bully-like, to its vast discredit, remains by far the most powerful country in the world, compared to which the terrorists, and in fact the entire Arab world are gnat-like weaklings, whatever weapons they may try to use. But as in an odd sort of jiu jitsu, the strength of the reborn cold warriors now advocating hot war remains the perceived threat of al Qaeda and other Arabs. If Bush and company launch a successful war against Iraq, that may gain them momentary popularity, but it will also undercut their argument for continued paranoia as the basis for their rule. If, by some miscalculation, an Iraq war should prove overly costly or a quagmire, they will lose credibility and power even faster.

After all, Bush's popularity was sagging before 9/11/01. He immediately and deftly seized on the attack to raise his standing by announcing that the war against terrorism would henceforth be the focus of his administration. Yet, in the long run, that too has to be a lose-lose proposition: if further successful large-scale al Qaeda attacks occur, the administration will be discredited; if they don't occur, the administration fear-mongering will be. Either way, a power base resting on the flimsy reed of fearing terrorists who are far less powerful than the old Cold War enemy must crash.

The absence of a reasonable positive agenda will condemn Bush and the other troglodytes eventually, but certainly more quickly if a coherent opposition with a more vital agenda both forms and finds means of expressing that agenda in ways the distracted public can grasp and align with. That remains the real challenge for the anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-terrorist "left."