Just Fearful Enough

Profile of Jon Stewart

It's sort of this odd and I've always had this problem with the rationality of it. That the President says, "We are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. "And, so what I'm going to do is you know, Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children's children all suffer. So, what I'm gonna do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad."

So, there's a disconnect there between — you're telling me this is fight of our generation, and you're going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that's gonna do it. I'm sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can't, because he doesn't have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country's not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, and then the whole thing falls apart. So, they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we're doing and really examine how it is that they've been waging this.

And there was you know, this enormous amount of space and coverage to Virginia Tech, as there should have been. And I happened to catch, sort of a headline lower down, which was 200 people killed in four bomb attacks in Iraq. And I think my focus on what was happening here versus sort of this peripheral vision thing that caught my eye about, "Oh, right, there are lives--"

Know Fear

Irene Khan -- 2006 Sydney Peace Prize (mp3)

It’s December 2001. I am in a hot and dusty Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan. The Taleban have been defeated and there is jubilation among the Afghan refugees. Refugee women are climbing into the buses that will drive them home...These women understand only too well the real horror of war but they also know that peace is much more than merely an end to fighting. Sitting on the bus next to Zubaida I ask, “What will you do when you return home?” She does not hesitate for a second. Clutching her baby close, she looks me straight in the eye, and says “I want to go to school. Some day I will be a scientist.”

What an amazing answer! Here is this woman discreetly covered from head to foot in a blue burqah, but there is nothing hidden about her message. She is telling me that peace is not a matter of military victories; it is about equality, justice and freedom for women as well as men. It is about creating the possibility for every human being to reach their full potential. And it is about hope.

Fast forward two years to July 2003. I am in Kabul now but I can’t find Zubaida or, for that matter, any woman studying science. Instead I find a fortress town guarded by American troops: a country caught in the grip of warlords and drug barons, torn by insecurity, afflicted by extreme poverty. I sense the fear in women activists as they tell me of the abduction of young girls from homes and schools, and of rampant sexual violence.

Later I am taken to a prison in Kabul, crowded with women and girls accused of adultery, or of wanting to marry the man of their choice or of running away from brutal husbands.

I am telling you this story about Afghanistan because what I saw in Kabul is, in a microcosm, what I see happening across our world today; a world in which peace is being redefined, in the interests of the powerful and the privileged, at the expense of the poor and the marginalized.

A new agenda is in the making in which the rules are being rewritten for the greater security of a few, while the actual sources of insecurity that affect the lives of many more are ignored. The “war on terror” dominates while sexual terror is ignored, even though it affects millions of women and girls around the world, in bedrooms, on battlefields, and in workplaces.

How to Win Against Terrorists? Don't Fight a War

Fighting terrorism with justice "What is remarkable is how American policy-makers have refused to learn from the historical experiences of Great Britain, a country that faced terror threats for decades in Northern Ireland, from no surrender zealots motivated by religious and nationalist fervor. In the case of the IRA, several hundred terrorists were organized after 1978 into secret cells that could wage terror pretty much indefinitely. The IRA was embedded within a global terror network that included Marxist guerrillas in South America, ETA in Spain and foreign governments, such as Libya. Not so different from al Qaeda.

Even a passing familiarity with the history of Northern Ireland would provide us with pointers on how not to deal with Islamist terrorists. First, between 1761 and 1972 the British government passed 26 legislative acts containing features designed to combat Irish nationalists, including measures seen in the US Patriot Act such as detention without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus. In the 1970s, the war model led British security services to use harsh interrogation techniques such as hooding, subjecting suspects to loud noises, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing, slaps to the face and slow starvation of detainees. When this severe ill treatment eventually [as it always does] becomes public knowledge, it undermined the legitimacy of government counter-terror policies, and created new constituencies of sympathizers in Northern Ireland. Repressive British government policy in the 1970s-from massacre of 'Bloody Sunday' to the internment of terror suspects without trial and a 'shoot-to-kill' policy in the 1980s, opened up a wellspring of support for a militaristic and Marxist-inspired IRA, which may not have existed otherwise.

In the end, it was only in the 1980s, late 1980's, when the British government moved from a 'war on terror' model to a law enforcement model that it began to win the struggle against Irish nationalist terror groups."

A BBC article supports this: "...the most recent example happened in 1971, when the British Government introduced the internment of hundreds of republican suspects in an attempt to shut down the IRA. The tactic was abandoned four years later and is thought to have increased support for the IRA."

See previous post from 2002, "Using the American model to solve all acts of terrorism".

Irrationality

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism "...there have been 188 separate suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2001. Of these, 179, or 95%, were parts of organized, coherent campaigns, while only nine were isolated or random events. Seven separate disputes have led to suicide terrorist campaigns: the presence of American and French forces in Lebanon, Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza, the independence of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, the independence of the Kurdish region of Turkey, Russian occupation of Chechnya, Indian occupation of Kashmir, and the presence of American forces on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula."

"The bottom line is that the ferocious escalation of the pace of suicide terrorism that we have witnessed in the past several years cannot be considered irrational or even surprising. Rather, it is simply the result of the lesson that terrorists have quite reasonably learned from their experience of the previous two decades: Suicide terrorism pays."

"Perhaps most important, the close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements in the occupied regions should give pause to those who favor solutions that involve conquering countries in order to transform their political systems. Conquering countries may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but it is important to recognize that occupation of more countries may well increase the number of terrorists coming at us."