President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have been careful to say that the war against terrorism is not a war against Islam. Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden seeks exactly such a conflict by invoking jihad, holy war. Andrew Walker writes about the danger of escalating the conflict to a crusading clash of civilizations.
WITHIN 24 HOURS of the attack on the twin towers of the Trade Centre in New York on September 11th, President George Bush went on record as saying that we are witnessing "the first war of the 21st century".This war talk echoed like a battle cry around America within days of the disaster and was almost immediately translated into action. On the populist front, young men eagerly came forward seeking to enlist in the struggle. Meanwhile the government called up thousands of reservists (an action we have not seen since the Gulf War).
A month has now passed since the outrage in Manhattan island and it is clear enough that this, the first "war" of the 21st century, while ostensibly a protracted and long drawn out struggle against international terrorism, is really a war against Muslim terrorists. This de facto reality has been accepted by America and her allies ever since the authorities identified some of the 19 hijackers of the four US civil airlines as members of the al-Qaida terrorist organisation under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden.
Now, with the almost continual bombing of an already embattled and poverty stricken Afghanistan, this first phase of the war is officially confined to two objectives: to search and capture Bin Laden, and topple the Taliban government. However, the present allied action, while arguably necessary, has opened up a Pandora's box.
THE FIRST ILL to escape is that the allies are prepared to take sides in internal civil wars if this means that the war against terrorism, in what we are promised will be a long campaign, can be won. So we find that we are now supporting, in their fight against the Taliban but also the southern tribes, the tribesmen of the Northern Alliance, who have an unsavoury record of opium production, drug-running, execution and terror.
Ironically, despite all the rhetoric of this offensive being the first war of the 21st century, choosing sides in somebody else's civil war is a reflection of the New Order thinking carried over from the 1990s. Post the Gulf War, it was thought legitimate to buck international law and interfere, ostensibly on moral grounds, in the affairs of sovereign states.
Former Yugoslavia most clearly comes to mind with the pussyfooting around in Bosnia while terror reigned, the "in your face" bombing, by contrast, of Serbia over the less clear-cut issue of Kosovo, and the ambiguous support for the democratically-elected government of Macedonia – where it seems that Nato still cannot quite make up its mind whether to treat the Albanian forces as freedom fighters or terrorists.
This brings us to the second and most alarming ill to escape Pandora's box. Bin Laden, clearly an evil genius, refuses to accept the badge of terrorist issued to him by the allies and insists instead that he is, in the tradition of the Mahdi, leading a holy war. The call to jihad may formally be rejected for the moment by the governments of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but these Arab nations are under internal threat from disaffected Muslims of an altogether more militaristic and desperate stripe.
Bin Laden's pre-recorded video anticipating the bombing of Afghanistan upped the stakes and argued that any attack on an Islamic country is a direct attack on all of Islam. As the call to rally round the totem of Islam rather than the flag of specific Islamic nations was broadcast throughout the Muslim world on satellite TV, we can be sure that those so disaffected – not to mention the dispossessed of Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine – heard (and may have heeded) the call.
IT TAKES TWO SIDES to engage in a holy war, and it will take more than a call from a troglodyte terrorist to lead to a clash of civilizations. But the West cannot afford to be complacent. One of the undercurrents swirling around in the emotional sea as we reel from the assault on not only America, but also our way of life, is a groundswell to launch a "crusade" against an Islamic culture seemingly inimical to Western democratic values.
To be sure, the jobbing phrase favoured by most Western journalists in describing the official enemy is "Islamic terrorists" – but often "Islamic fundamentalists" is a phrase not far behind. Such language has not encouraged Britain's Asian community, which has been receiving verbal and written abuse from the general public at an unprecedented level since the American tragedy. It seems, according to Asian News, that little distinction is being made between Muslim and fundamentalist, let alone, we might add, between immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Hindu India.
George Bush himself unguardedly used the word "crusade" in the emotional heat of the moment soon after the news of the terrorist strike. He has wisely not used it since. He even called the moderate Islamic scholar, Hamza Yusuf, to the White House where he was told in no uncertain terms that the original code name for the allied offensive, "Infinite Justice", was blasphemous to Muslims and sure to inflame them. Bush not only apologized for this faux pas, but the Pentagon changed the name of the operation to an altogether more typical America aphorism: "Enduring Freedom".
