Lost cause
New changes in the global legal landscape: 'terrorist' is no more someone else's 'freedom fighter'
September 18, 2006
iranian.com
PARIS -- These are very challenging times; global events have helped bring changes in the mindset of hardened left leaning ideologues in a manner one could not envision. The human sacrifices for good causes have been immense. In a key concession for perpetrators of war on terror, the 118-nation Non-aligned Movement (NAM) on Sunday articulated its full hostility to terrorism in all its shape and expression and agreed to combat the menace, including by prosecuting and extraditing its perpetrators.
In NAM guide to its communiqué one person's 'terrorist' was usually someone else's 'freedom fighter'. 'Terrorism', 'terrorist', 'militant', 'gunman', etc were all labels. In a recognition of universal threat of terrorism in a post 911 world it looks like NAM has finally decided to drop its reference to "one person's terrorist is usually someone else's freedom fighter" in its approach. This new declaration should bring reasonable change in the way deliberations are conducted in the General Assembly of the UN, where every strain of fanatic thought has found ample support from overall revolutionary schema that was so far prevalent within the mindset of NAM countries.
The changes on the global opinionated map of ideologies and new freedom of expression accorded to individuals have to be beyond doubt appreciated. In the words of Winston Churchill, we all owe our freedom to a few good men who lay their lives for the virtuous cause of universal freedom. I am not suggesting that this 'war' was worth the 30,000 plus lives lost, but it was great to see a human being and a sufferer telling his tormentor today, when the Kurdish witnesses were describing the atrocities against them. In a moment of defiance, a witness snapped: "Congratulations, Saddam. You are in a cage."
Gone are the days when the spirits of the founding fathers of the NAM who were five prominent world leaders: Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Nehru of India hang over NAM meetings. In a recognition of a new world and new threats, the movement that was seen become dominated by the Soviet Union has now shown great pragmatism and vision by distancing itself from radicalism and extremism purported by new ideological states as a brand of a new freedom fight.
NAM new documents dashed hopes of likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad who were present and radical factions within the present Palestinians and Syrians regimes. Such a distancing of NAMN countries from ideological confrontation would revolutionize the conduct of the UN General Assembly, a rubber-stamping body but in world of diplomacy reflective of the number game and hence so called conscience of mankind. The 91-page NAM final document expressed deep apprehension that the terrorist groups, including former Taliban, were regrouping in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. Equally of anxiety was that the efforts of international community to fight terrorism were being diluted by support, shield and haven that these forces of destabilisation continued to receive.
After months of negotiations behind the scenes, the two-day NAM summit adopted the Havana Declaration. The 'Final Document' in the early hours of the day urged countries to abstain from extending political, diplomatic, moral or material support to terrorism under the UN Charter and also asking them to fulfil global obligations that is not to give it any support. To balance the tilt, the document contains the customary harping of anti imperialistic stance. NAM meeting in Cuba, a seasoned anti-US promoter, also condemned unilateralism and attempts to exercise hegemonic dominion in international relations, a pet wording of Cuba for decades to attack US. It resolved to combat and censure the tagging of countries as "good or evil" based on one-sided and baseless criterion and the implementation of a policy of pre-emptive attack, including by nuclear weapons.
The debate between liberty and totalitarianism in a society is how to deal with terrorists. One can arrest and punish them before they do something wrong, or one can arrest and punish them after they have. While the latter alternative has its rewards, enlightened societies have traditionally elected the former path while tyrannical societies have chosen the latter. Present day terrorists are equipped with fifth generation technology and Stone Age minds to incur their wrath on innocent people. For, all civilian loss is collateral damage for a greater cause.
Living with optimism is an art. Type 'D' people just cannot do it. Many who see Y2K problems leading to planes dropping from air, or preparing for the end of the world as a result of ozone depletion, or worrying about the avian flu have one thing in common: doom and gloom is their indulged gift. Many just don't have it in them. Looking at the 'doom and gloom' being predicted in Iraq. I think many in the world are like an ostrich, burying their heads in the sand, as the problem grew and finally materialized into the calamity of 911. It is most poignant and distressing, but had it not been for such a gross and sickening human tragedy, most of us would have continued to look the other way benignly chatting about proportionate response or appeasement.
We live in a world of instant gratification. We perceive tragedies by numbers, the losses we don't know about are the losses we think we have not made. Similarly, terror plots that have not matured are considered too proletarian, primitive, igneous and unsophisticated. Imagine if the plot of 911 was discovered a day before. It may have created a lot of hullabaloo, but actions that have led to uprooting the evil would not have commenced. Many feel that the events of September 11th, 2001 were preventable as Operation Bojinka raised early warning flags on future terrorist attempts. The problem until 911 was that discovered attacks usually raised no alarms. Why can't we take lessons from past tragedies and realize that we need to continue the guard so that those bloody errors of judgment and blunders are not made. Peace is made with strength; you don't beg for peace!
On 4th February 1996, OBL was offered to Clinton by the Sudanese. On 6th February, according to Starr, he had that great rendezvous with Lewinski in the Oval office. Instead of concentrated efforts to recover OBL, the President was busy in his mind with something else and we men know what happens when minds are somewhere else. However, to be fair, he may have missed the chance in Feb. 1996 when Sudan offered to extradite bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia wanted nothing to do with the plan. And Bill Clinton had a good explanation for it: "At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew h e wanted to commit crimes against America ."
Definitely, if one looks closely, without death and calamity we humans do not seem to react much. Richard Clarke is on record saying that, "beginning in 1996, in his last four years in office, President Clinton gave about 40 speeches where he mentioned terrorism, five speeches that were devoted just to terrorism. He did a lot, but, frankly, if you look at the media play on those speeches, the media didn't pick up those speeches. When he made a speech on terrorism, it wasn't on the front page, it wasn't on CNN." We definitely need to depoliticize this war on terror; otherwise it will have a very negative impact on preparedness of USA .
On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda bombed US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya . On August 20, 1998, Clinton authorized US missile strikes on al Qaeda camp that killed 20-30 al Qaeda members; bin Laden had suddenly left the camp an hour earlier. The problem of his past and weak moral character resonated dearly when most of the media CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported the missile strike; however, each network speculated on whether it was a "Wag the Dog" scenario to draw attention away from Lewinsky situation. Republican Senator Dan Coats was quoted as saying that, "I think we fear that we may have a President that is desperately seeking to hold onto his job." How can a President effectively wage a war on a hidden enemy and the enemy within if his actions are questioned each time and attributed to political survival?
Although Bush does not face problems on the morality front, his straightforward approach in handling vandals the way they ought to be handled is questioned. His strength in taking a bold decision is watered down by his inability as an intellectual President and being labelled a dimwit. That is a shame. An intellectual rarely has the guts to take valiant decisions, and this war is certainly about such decisions. Today, Ramzi kind of people cannot keep trying to perfect their art of terror; in the preceding paragraph from 1993 to the time of his arrest, he kept trying to perfect it. 911 was the culmination of the Philippines plot, but no one really paid attention to the fact that planes could be used as missiles so boarding security measures remained very soft. Oplan Bojinka was prevented on January 6 and 7, 1995, but some lessons learned were apparently used by the planners of the September 11 attacks. Oplan Bojinka was a planned large-scale attack on airliners in 1995. When Ramzi was brought to the World Trade Center as an arrested convict, he was helicoptered into Manhattan, and he threatened that one day he would get WTC down; they did not know at what stage intelligence should be good enough to intervene.
The ' Philippines plot and huge catch' was clear indication that planes could be used as weapons, but what was done? Nothing! Ramzi was one of the planners of the first World Trade Center attack and a number of other attacks, including Operation Bojinka. Soon after the 1993 attack, the FBI, on April 21, 1993 made him the 436th person added to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Yousef rented a Ryder van and on February 26, 1993, loaded it with explosives. Four cardboard boxes were packed into the back of the van, each containing a mixture of paper bags, newspapers, urea and nitric acid. Next to them were placed three red metal cylinders of compressed hydrogen, and four large containers of nitro-glycerine were loaded into the centre of the van, with Atlas Rockmaster blasting caps connected to each.
In 1994 Yousef reportedly travelled to South-East Asia and attempted to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok with a device similar to the one he used in New York. En route to delivering the device the truck carrying the bomb collided with a motorcyclist, causing either Yousef or a co-conspirator to flee immediately, leaving the bomb behind. In December 1994, Yousef boarded a Philippine Airlines Flight 434 in Manila headed to Cebu; he pretended to be an Italian man named Armaldo Forlani. Midway through the flight "he disappeared into the toilet, took off his shoes to get the batteries and assembled his bomb which he tucked into the life vest under his seat. The plane flew on to Cebu where Yousef got off before the final leg of the flight to Tokyo, Japan . Haruki Ikegami, a 24-year-old businessman, took Yousef's old seat. Two hours later, the device exploded, killing Ikegami. The blast blew a hole in the floor and severed the cables that controlled the plane's flaps. The jet's steering was crippled but the captain made an emergency landing in southern Japan, saving 272 passengers and 20 crew. Using the same design as the bombs intended for Bojinka, Yousef planned to conceal the devices inside toy cars and plant them on United and Northwest flights out of Bangkok . Yousef monitored the effects of his "test", then increased the amount of explosives in his devices and began preparing at least a dozen bombs. But just before Bojinka Plot was due to be launched, a fire started in Yousef's Manila flat and police uncovered his plot.
NYT ran an article implying that the London plot was too imbecilic and quite in infancy and a lot is made out of it. The political points that NYT makes can be discounted by one plain fact: the bottles of explosives, like nitro-glycerin, that were to be utilized by the London bombers were from the plot that Ramzi and Khalid Shiekh had written back in 1995 in Philippines on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 that nearly went down. One thing the mass tragedy of 911 has made us realize is to avoid the utilization of previous perfected techniques. Now lessons learnt from Oplan Bojinka, prevented on January 6 and 7, 1995, are being employed by the anti-terror forces. In pre-911 scenario, it was the terrorists who had the upper hand when they used the lessons for the September 11 attacks.
The ability to stop the London bombers in their tracks is the biggest success of the war on terror. The small bottles supposing to contain contact lenses liquid were used in 434's attack to smuggle the explosive aboard; knowing the fact well, the London bombers were checked mated. When is the right moment to grab the culprits? Should one let them have the run till they perfect the job? The other problem is that the terrorists' plots and tragedies that have been avoided since 911, as a result of global crackdown, are not quantifiable. Some are kept secret so as to keep the possibility open for future catches; others, when caught in the stage of preparation, are ridiculed as blown out of proportion. Terrorism and the present war against it is a thankless job. I find it difficult to digest when people make excuses for the valiant Nasarullah, even he acknowledged that he screwed up big time otherwise 'The Economist' had delivered the war to him on a platter.
The tragedy is that any 'curtailment of rights' without a huge toll on human life would not have been politically sellable. The increased security would not have seen the light of the day even if the plot was discovered in infancy! Should we only open our eyes when the biggest of tragedies strike? Otherwise we would go into a Rip van winkle sleep led by pied pipers. Human rights compromises and the huge funding required to raise the security to the levels as it is now would just not be politically marketable. Today, 5 years plus since 911, it is sad to see that many do not appreciate how much of the future attacks on innocents have been avoided. In Iraq, the way innocent civilians are being killed everyday to establish the reign of terror is mind- boggling. Give them a free hand, walk away from them and they will drown Iraq in its own blood.
The destruction of hinterland of terrorist nests and orphaned headquarters of terrorist networks are considered no big achievements. I wrote nearly four years ago that the biggest benefit of this whole exercise is that war has moved to areas where it belongs – the areas that were hosts to thousands of these deranged people. The ruthless mutilation of their own kin highlights the politics of corpses they enjoy. Policy of 'Containment' of their eagerness to annihilate in the name of Allah is the prime stratagem in this war of terror. Sown within the radical leadership are seeds of implosion and self-destruction; they are rendered futile due to the hypocrisy of slogans that masquerades egocentricity and narcissism of purpose. Their double-faced strategy de-legitimizes even the valid concerns they raise.
All the moral equivalence drawn for causes of this terror cells are pitiable pretexts. The list of demands since the last few decades has kept changing. OBL's initial objective was the destruction of the House of Saud. Once he was cold-shouldered on this demand by the Americans, they become his number one enemies. Demand for Palestinian freedom was an afterthought, to expand recognition on the Arab street and discover a new cause. This is the most abused slogan that attracts a lot of sympathy. No one really wants them to be free, but as an issue, this has been kept alive for the last 60 years by all totalitarians and tyrants. From 1979 to 1990, he had a unique distinction and a distinguished career as a collaborator of the US to dismantle their arch nemesis, USSR, as Palestinians continued to live under the worst occupation and conditions when he was the ally of US and fighting the bigger evil; Palestinians then did not even have the self-governance they have now. After the Afghan Jihad, he should realize that if he had a dream to free Saudia from Sauds, US had a dream to wipe USSR out through proxies like him; he was a tool of a superpower objective. His successful Jihad in Afghanistan was fuelled by these very 'infidels' for their own objectives and they achieved their intentions without any fail. He ended up living in a deep cave with huge prize money on his head like Saddam. Those with better firepower and better instruments of strategy made him a declared criminal that he can't walk gratis even in his own land.
 The changing goalposts of demands can be seen in Iraq and Lebanon. In Iraq , if they fail to find the infidels they go through their own ranks in wrath. Sunni (Zarqawi) mission against Shiite (Sadr) is an example of how radicals race to the bottom to annihilate and rear war of terror that consumes an Iraqi against an Iraqi. In Lebanon (Nasarullah) Shiites waged a war against 'infidel Jews' to secure freedom for Sunnis (Hamas) in Palestine. Was it really about Palestinian freedom or about his master's wellbeing in Tehran? Today, Lebanon debacle is an abandoned page, the reason being that the Sunni hinterland saw through the machinations of Iranian masters in the battleground of Southern Lebanon. The clash of civilizations that everyone was worried about did not materialize because the disunity amongst the clans and sectarian violence ensured self- crippling more than achievement of any respecting sovereignty or self-determination. The Shiite and the people of Lebanon are the biggest victims and no one is held accusable for war without a purpose or goal. When vandals run statecraft, this is the end result; national cause gets murky and is wiped out.
One of the reasons for 'action now' is that these very open-minded people who worry about human rights would have no qualms in nuking any country if any of these wicked elements escape the present security network and does something as criminal as 911 again. It is my conviction that the non-interventionist and peaceniks would be in the forefront to destroy any nation that inadvertently facilitates the design of such an act. An unwilling nation taken hostage by vandals can easily be deemed a collaborator if the regime of surveillance is lax. Lebanon is the most recent example, this nation taken over by 'militias' who engaged in a war that destroyed Lebanon. To expose the plots, and expunge militia's powers some civil liberties are definitely compromised. These hidden enemies already enjoy a big advantage of working within enlightened societies and plan their cold-blooded deeds that tolerant social order offers them.
We should understand that massive Afghan retribution was supported across the board by all strains of the society; a whole nation was punished for misdeeds of a few. That blueprint is going to repeat if we do not take action now. To fight a war against a veiled adversary is not like eating ice lollies. We should not let millions die for the sake of a few thousand criminals who are bent in taking on the entire civilized world. We cannot let a handful of people take a nations hostage and put them on a collision course with other much powerful nations.
One cannot remain circumspect about issues all the time and be unprepared for sacrifices. What is the purpose of running a huge defence budget if it is not going to be used for defence? It is easy to refuse the idea of sacrifices or call it an out-of-proportion response, but how and where do we put an end to disasters? War with undeclared combatants who are one day your neighbours and next day blow themselves up need new refined approach. NAM statement is a great beginning of changing mindsets. Comment
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