PERSPECTIVE:

An Australian's View of the "War on Terror"

The problem is that the basis of Islamic terrorism is really yet to be identified in the public mind. What is it exactly? Do they ‘hate us because we are free’? Is that it? Do they envy our western lifestyle? Are they just poor, disaffected youth? Or is it a collection of reasons?

One feature, as Robert Pape points out in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, is that 95% of suicide bombers act in order to remove occupying foreign troops, religious ideology playing no part in their actions. Iraqi suicide bombers have arisen only following US occupation. We need to understand that we could cut terrorism down to size by staying away from where we don’t belong. Unfortunately, Western allies see getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan as just ‘giving in to the terrorists’.

So instead we mindlessly try to close every madrassa, video every subway and tag every citizen. It will cost gerzillions. And we won’t be any safer.

We’ll still have Fort Benning, Georgia. This used to be called the School of the Americas, but is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. It still teaches terrorism to soldiers from South American and Middle East countries favoured by the US--and, of course, there’s that nasty problem of ‘blowback’ that arises from time to time.

But if we stopped trying to breed our own terrorists while defeating the others we could establish a global mindset against terrorism. Terrorist sponsorship and training, like land mines and poison gas, needs to be universally denounced.

Finally, we could check the bank accounts of known terrorist financiers and confiscate their funds. This is the real way to defeat terrorism.

FBI translator Sibel Edmonds did this following 911. She found that drug money played a big part in 911 and that some of these funds found their way into the financing of the 2002 and 2004 US elections.

Of course, you won’t hear a squeak about Ms Edmonds except on the Internet. Everything about her has been classified Top Secret: even her place of birth, date of birth, mother tongue, languages spoken, university background, and previous employment. Congressmen have been ordered to remove any references to her from their websites.

Welcome to the war on terror.