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Maybe We Should Stop Calling Them Terrorists
Young men, angry and lethal.
In my teen years at summer camp a few decades ago (ouch!), I befriended a teenage girl from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). We resolved to stay in touch and corresponded by mail for a couple of years. She sent me a letter in which she had drawn a map of Rhodesia. Outside the borders of her country, she wrote in every direction “terrorists here”. She also wrote it in a couple of regions inside the borders. Rhodesia at the time was going through a civil war and a ‘transition’ from white minority rule to black majority rule. (I know this description does not do justice to that conflict, but it is good enough for our purposes).
My friend was white. I was not very sophisticated in foreign issues, but it struck me as odd that she would refer to such a large movement of people as terrorists, regardless of their motivation. To me back then, terrorists were small groups like Baader-Meinhof or the Brigate Rosse carrying out small operations, like planting bombs in restaurants.
And it was doubly odd since majority rule sounded good to me, regardless of its color. Majority rule is what our own system of governance is about, isn’t it? Notwithstanding the Democrats’ effort to impose on us rule by minorities…
I have the same feeling today. It does not any longer seem right to refer to ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al-Nusra and other Als as “terrorists”. Of course, they sow terror, they kill innocent people, and they are evil and barbaric — just like terrorists. But they are more than that. They are a problem we cannot solve if we don’t learn to describe it correctly. The term “terrorist” now seems too short-hand and too simplistic for what these groups are. It may describe their actions, but it blocks out their identity and their drive.
All these groupings in the Middle East and North Africa are essentially angry young men led by angry middle-aged men. And they are angry because their lives have fallen behind while the rest of the world has moved on at accelerating speed. I am no expert on Islam, but I am an expert (granted, self-appointed) on human nature and I don’t think the average warrior in the desert of Syria/Iraq gives a hoot about religious purity, except for the cover it gives him to carry out his violent deeds.
Religion here is merely a conduit to channel one’s anger, just as communism was a conduit to channel one’s anger in Russia and China, and Nazism in Germany. Each gives the adherent a blank check for violence under the pretense that it is for a ‘good cause.” So communists and Nazis slaughtered millions and felt ok about it because it was allegedly for the betterment of the human race or the Germanic race. Some people raised their hand to point out that maybe killing tens of millions to help humanity was a bit of a contradiction, but they were bulldozed by the state machine and sent to Siberia to mull over their scruples until death.
So they are terrorists — but not only terrorists. More importantly, they are angry. And there are two ways to deal with an angry person racing towards you with a butcher knife. 1) Shoot them down before they reach you (this is what we have been doing through our drone and air strikes). 2) If it looks like the ranks of the angry are still swelling, try to neutralize their anger.
That is easier said than done. It took a massive war to “neutralize” the anger of Germans that started after World War I and grew and grew until World War II. So we can try to stamp out these armies in the Middle East and Central Asia. We did stamp them out during the Bush Presidency. But they grew back when we stopped shooting. As with a disease (and this is a disease) maybe it is because we have been treating symptoms instead of root causes.
In order to attack the root causes, we can try to understand and remove the sources of their anger. If this proves unsuccessful, we are going to have to gun them down with redoubled effort, because they mean business, just as communists and Nazis did.
Here is a short list of causes for their anger, in no particular order:
– No job. No skill to keep up with globalization.
– No girl. Self-explanatory.
– Unable to cope with Westernization of their culture.
– Loss of job and livelihood (for former Iraqi officers now leading ISIS).
– American support for Israel, Saudi monarchs, Egyptian rulers etc.
– Grievances over past actions by the West (in Iran and other places).
– Lack of a voice in governance of one’s ethnic group.
There may be others.
I may be too optimistic, but each of the above can be addressed constructively, when or if the shooting dies down. We need a global conference to redraw some borders, send a multinational force, and provide an economic reconstruction plan. On the economy, it begs the question of why the oil countries didn’t use some their wealth to educate their own people and their neighbors instead of buying sophisticated weapons and investing in London hotels and other Western assets?
Absent some fresh thinking, the angry will continue turning to terrorism — and the killing will go on.
Published in General
Is it worth exploring how we chose to go about eliminating the threat? In WWII we weren’t so much concerned with the repercussions, as we were with wiping out the threat. Since WWII we have fought political wars that are more concerned with the, “Perception” than the reality.
We don’t have many friends over there, and we are hated because of factors of our own, but also because it is part of a widespread cultural sense of honor to hate us. That can’t and won’t be fixed by attempting, “Nation Building” once again. Bush tried it, and he failed miserably.
Sometimes the answer is to contain a disease that we will never be rid of. In that I mean the evil that continues to flow out of a region of the world that we are not familiar with, or welcome in. We have interests there for a variety of reasons, so we have a vested interest in what happens in that region. But I think it’s naive to think that we have an answer to a problem that we don’t even understand.
What is understood is brute force. Like it or not, that’s what has dictated that region since the beginning. We may have to change our strategy on killing them, as opposed to what we call them. It may not be the most desirable solution, but it may be the best one.
I believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the suggestion was made to “Invade their countries, kill their leaders,and convert them to Christianity.”
Still sounds like a pretty good plan to me.
The solution is that there is no solution. Only damage control. If we were serious about how to handle the threat, at least to Americans, we would take the advice of people who do it everyday. That would be Israel. But we won’t because of politics.
In the Middle East, we are the same as Israel. They will always be the enemy, and so will we. It’s much more complicated than to just say “they hate us”. It’s cultural and it’s not something that can be “controlled”. So our options are to protect ourselves and be viewed as occupiers, or not to protect ourselves and be viewed as occupiers.
My personal view is that there IS a solution with a global conference with Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Arabs. Hard concessions and changes would have to be made. Not easy but doable, and better than the alternative.
Whether “terrorist” is appropriate or not, they are not in the large motivated by the factors you list. There are way too many well-raised well-off terrorists for your argument to be plausible.
The key is that their societies and religion are supremacist.
“Anger” of course is just a short term for the outward expression of cognitive dissonance, so you’re right in that limited sense. But their anger does not stem from those conventionally assumed reasons. They are angry because they are fed and are susceptible to the sense that they are superior. The world around them does not comport with that sense, so they feel anger.
I’m interested. How would that work?
Barbarians.
Unfortunately, this whole topic invites a cascade of category errors.
Just because these monsters in the middle east are homo sapiens doesn’t support the idea that they think like we (western civilized people) do. They are wired differently. Their so-called religion and familial education direct them into this barbaric behavior, and the only defense is to either contain them within an impenetrable giant prison-like geographic area, or kill them before they kill us.
The Germans don’t annoy us much anymore, and that is because they suffered consequences for their brand of barbarity. Those left in the ruins learned the lesson, and the next generation was civilized.
The Japanese were insanely patriotic and heroic, and barbarians. They too learned the lesson, in a hard way. We helped them fix their culture, and the next generation was civilized.
The Russians were ideological trolls, bent on barbarically sucking the blood and treasure from the civilized world. Too bad we restrained Patton. Eventually, we starved them out through economic and moral siege. They however did not learn the lesson, so that will be a task for a future generation of ours.
The Chinese are barbarians with a patina of civilizational artifices. We have so far decided to ignore them, at our peril.
End of Part I: see below for II.
Part II of Barbarians
The whole point of the Judeo-Christian western society and culture is to create civilization, and to eradicate barbarianism and replace it with personal liberty, rule of law, and comity. Whenever and wherever we have discounted or studiously ignored the threat of barbarians, there has been incredible damage to civilization.
Our ancient prescription to not kill indiscriminately does not apply to barbarians. Don’t be afraid to call them by the correct name. They are not hiding, and they are simple to identify on the field of righteous battle. Barbarians are terrorists, murderers, rapists, thieves, and don’t merit mercy or outreach.
Use Yugoslavia and Dayton conference as a template, even if this is more complicated. Redraw some borders, give more autonomy to groups that feel underrepresented, throw some cash in the right directions for reconstruction and an economic boost, extract promises for more liberalization and for sharing the (oil) wealth, send in a multinational force to calm things down until things improve a bit.
In Iraq, make every adult citizen a direct shareholder in the national oil company. Things could calm down quickly when everyone has a stake in calming down.
I completely agree, and our former opponents, you listed above, were not subjected to U.N. approval of our actions. We bombed them into submission. With the exception of the USSR. We just bankrupt them. So the idea that somehow we can take all that we’ve learned and throw it out the window in an effort to create a scenario, that doesn’t and will never, exist without destroying the enemy in a catastrophic fashion is just not going to work.
Ditto Tom Riehl #’s 37 & 38. Hard cold truth, and one I’m afraid we’re going to become well re-acquainted with in the coming decades.
Point being what? We invaded two countries and bombed a few others. Problem is now bigger. So now what? What is YOUR prescription, Tom Riehl, for solving this problem?
In theory of course. But it’s not economic. We send billions to the Middle East. Where does it go? We’ve spent an ungodly amount of money trying to prop up Palestine. What’s the result? Egypt has been a relative success, but it’s not because the situation on the ground has gotten better. It’s because the people in charge want to remain in charge and it’s in our best interest to leave them in charge. The same goes for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc….
All of these countries receive financial support from us and other countries. The truth is, that we would have to wipe out the region and start over to obtain any sort of stability that we would define as reasonable. The Brits had temporary stability, if you call it that, following WWI and WWII, but that was achieved by dominance not negotiations.
Marion, it depends on what you mean by solving the problem. Keep us safe? Easy; they threaten us or act out, we kill them, viciously and quickly. Cure their sick culture? Impossible; get real.
We didn’t exacerbate the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. Short term forays into their strongholds was step one; the next steps were never taken. Not my idea of wisdom. We’re still in Germany, Japan and Korea.
Therein in lies my question for you. Is failure of a half-assed, ill conceived strategy, that was even more poorly executed, an excuse for us to withdraw and sip tea in diplomatic salons while more Christians are murdered?
Going back to my prescription for “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”:
We did the “invade their countries” part, (at least a few of them).
We did the “kill their leaders” part (at least a few of them).
But we didn’t even attempt the “convert them” part – in fact we’ve gone out of our way to reinforce their islamism – Obama has even been apologizing for Christianity (e.g. his recent comments about not getting on our “high horse” because of the crusades).
And thus the whole effort was a complete waste.
It scares me to think that you really believe this would work.
The problem is that Islamism wasn’t formed by nationalists or revanchists – Osama bin Laden, the Blind Sheikh, Hassan al-Banna, Mohammed Morsi, Sayeed Qutb – all had either intimate knowledge of the west that disgusted them or grew up opposing modernizing forces in their own countries. I don’t think that the motivating force behind those men was jealousy of the west’s progress. Instead it seems to be a fundamental disgust with our attitudes towards social organization, gender, money, etc.
None of the people you cite are where Islamism comes from. They are riding the wave. And it is not jealousy. It is a dissonance about how the infidel can have it so good. They must have done something.
Marion,
You make the mistake that many Westerners make in discounting the power of religious ecstasy. People can’t really believe in all that silly business about stoning people and virgins…no, they’re violent sociopaths who use religion to justify their base impulses. This is nonsense. The great thing about evil people is that they are usually honest about what they believe.
The most obvious refutation of your thesis is the lack of violence from other oppressed groups in the Middle East. If all the bloodletting and beheading is merely a matter of lack of say in government or economic opportunity, then we would expect similar behaviors across the spectrum of religion. But we don’t. It is exclusively a problem with Islam in the Middle East. Can you name a single Coptic Christian terrorist? An Assyrian prayer group that beheads foreigners? Maybe some Chaldean churches that throw gays from church towers? None. Zero. They don’t exist. Why not?
That’s a good point. Broad social currents aren’t created solely by their leaders and philosophers. Primitive movements rise from primitive human nature, amid conditions that give it something to define itself against. People of all degrees of character are present all the time in a large enough population; movements tend to elevate the most extreme leaders that social conditions can support.
Somebody was going to burn the Reichstag, whether his name was Soros or Hitler or Marx. There are always enough sociopaths in circulation; which one acts at the cusp is close to random chance.
I will never stop calling them terrorists.
There are many millions of people on the planet with sad stories who don’t join Isis. But among people who DO join Isis are western men and women from wealthy backgrounds. Many have not even any family Islamic history at all, but are just western kids, pasty and white, brought up Christian or atheist. Some are even from cultures we assumed to be more close-knit and resistant to western guilt, such as Buddhist or Hindu. Many were doing well at school and were lined up for respectable jobs, or were already in them. Some had families.
….and yet they still join Isis.
It looks like there is a gangster cool about Isis, and an uncoolness about the post-modern west. I wonder to myself what the young western converts to Isis would be doing in previous eras, for example World War 1. Would they be the kind of kid rushing to the army enlistment office to prove their manhood? Would they be anti-“bourgeois” war socialists or deserters?
If it was as simple as not having a job and wanting to fight, then why not fight for our side?
My answer: Our whole generation was educated by school and culture to hate western civilization, and to change or destroy it. Some of us (like me) woke up to this bs and reject this education. Many accept it however, and they are doing their work now: either by bloodlessly dismantling western civ from within (eg the Indiana wedding cake episode), or by outright blowing it up and hacking it’s head off.
In summary, our own self-loathing made this problem.
I guess you are saying we should have kept a presence in Iraq. Point taken. It is true that ISIS emerged from Iraq, even though it manifested itself in Syria first.
But the notion (crazy and not doable) of converting them to Christianity does not scare you?
Agree that our own self-doubt is part of the problem. I think though that you are overstating the Western kid who joined ISIS. The white wealthy joiner must be an extreme rarity. Most of the European joiners have parents of Arab or muslim origin and live on the fringe of society: well-fed but with poor prospects.
If it could be done, my policy would work. Yours wouldn’t.
One might argue the persecution of the monophysites, and their rejection of the idea that Christ was two substances, left a fertile ground for the monotheistic Islam.
That could make it “all our fault”.
Other than that, Islam started as a religion by the sword, and has a long rich history of conquest, and persecution of other religions. Is has no tradition of secular rule different from theocratic rule. It has ever been the aggressor in conflict with the West.
Islamists are hacked off that we do soooooooooooooo much better at, you know, everything.
So the answer is gerrymandering and voluntary segregation, spending money on infrastructure, progressive redistribution of wealth, welfare state and a large police force that is unaccountable? You want to export the failed War on Poverty to the Middle East? I suppose they deserve it.
The Marie Harf Doctrine? We have no possible way of fixing the centuries-old cultural defects that created this mess. We haven’t worked hard enough to stamp out the spark of terrorism, so now we have to fight the raging fire of the muslim horde. All we have left is the Curtis Lemay Doctrine – “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”