British Foreign Secretary Says War on Terror Wrong
A very important op-ed from David Miliband – well worth reading the whole thing here. The money quote for me:
The idea of a “war on terror” gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.
The Obama administration has a great opportunity to use a number of different strategies to undercut terror groups across the globe. To do so they need to take the case specific approach Milliband recommends.
No related posts.
I would add that as we in the West think about and respond to the various terror groups Milliband mentions, we may feel understandably threatened by all of them in varying degrees. That is not least because simply by use of terrorist tactics, all these groups reject the principles of law and morality on which our civilization is premised. But the dangerous consequence of feeling universally threatened is of course to feel universally victimized. I wonder whether some of the extremes of the war on terror have been due to a collective Western “persecution complex” we’ve developed in the past decade, which may have blinded us to the subtleties and complexities of the real threat.
Comment on January 15, 2009 @ 7:56 am
[...] Purohit at Across the Aisle alerts us to an op-ed in The Guardian by British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband saying the War on [...]
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