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Bush's Alarmism Gives Islamic Rebels What They Most Want William Pfaff International Herald Tribune PARIS The United States has its work cut out for it, if President George W. Bush's State of the Union assurances concerning the war on terrorism are to be believed. . Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the "axis of evil," are either to have their governments replaced or be deprived of their ability to construct weapons of mass destruction. (White House officials add that there are no immediate plans for military action.) The surviving Al Qaeda camps "in at least a dozen countries" are to be destroyed, and "tens of thousands" of potential terrorists neutralized. By implication, other Islamic fundamentalist groups that have been in contact with Al Qaeda, including elements of the secessionist movement active in the southern Philippines since the 19th century, are to be suppressed. The war on terrorism has only started, according to Mr. Bush. The peril it confronts "draws closer and closer." "The world's most dangerous regimes" will not be allowed "to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," he says. He repeats that permanent mobilization of the American nation is required, as well as greatly increased military spending. The alarmist language of Mr. Bush's address and its identification of the enemy in metaphysical, rather than political, terms (the enemy is "evil," not a band of terrorists, or several foreign governments) were consistent with all that the White House already has said about the terrorist threat. Once again, though, the president has persisted in giving the Islamists what they presumably most want: admission of American vulnerability and recognition of themselves as America's greatest challenge. He did so despite the fact that Al Qaeda is much less well financed and less powerful than, say, organized crime or international drug cartels. Paul Schroeder, a University of Illinois historian, writing about Sept. 11 in the current issue of a conservative Washington quarterly, The National Interest, says, "by endlessly rehearsing the magnitude of the loss, labeling it a national tragedy, disaster and even catastrophe, by hyperventilating in denouncing the action and demanding vengeance, and by panicking at the fear of still more attacks," Americans "have encouraged the terrorists to believe that the United States really can be badly hurt by actions like these." And such a belief, of course, is not in the least true. The Sept. 11 attacks took many lives but did no serious objective damage to the United States, as a nation. Al Qaeda, moreover, is surely shaken and dispersed by the raids and bombing attacks on its leadership in Afghanistan, the Taliban defeat and by the mobilization of police and intelligence services nearly everywhere to penetrate and neutralize its networks. The American public nonetheless seems to accept the White House assessment of terrorist power and the rogue nation threat. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released just before the State of the Union address indicated that 64 percent of the public thinks that most of the military action in the war against terrorism is yet to come. Thus, Mr. Bush's call for sustained mobilization and his administration's demand for new military spending finds a receptive audience. Yet there was never much anxiety in the United States about future events, or fear of enemy attack, during the Cold War, or during the Korean or Vietnam wars, and certainly not during World War II. There is something fake, or faintly Orwellian, in Washington's insistence that the threat is immense, that mobilization must be permanent, that the military budget be vastly increased, that civil liberties be restricted and that critics be chided as unpatriotic. There is something wrong here. The threat and the reaction don't match. The greed and corruption that went into the Enron affair is a bigger threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden will ever be, and I would think most Americans, in their hearts, know it. Los Angeles Times Syndicate. |