Common Sense On Terrorism

Click here for an article entited "Thirty-five Years of Terrorism," by Mark Sumner at Daily Kos.

There's been an explosion of terrorist events by followers of "radical Islam" -- to use the easily understood shorthand term the Obama administration (for good reason) doesn't like -- since Dubya's disastrous invasions of Afghanistan (which I supported) and Iraq (which I vehemently opposed) utterly destabilized the region.

[Terrorist organizations] are groups that each grew in the face of war. In fact, it’s not hard to associate each of the major terrorist groups with a specific conflict. Islamic Jihad grew from groups involved the Lebanese Civil War during the 1980s, al-Qaida and the Taliban from groups fighting the Soviet invasion (with subsequent U.S. support) in Afghanistan, and of course ISIS ISIL Daesh is an amalgam of groups that resulted from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Each group is a specific assembly of militia forces that attracts attention for a period, before the world moves on to being sure that the group resulting from the next conflict is the real problem.

Says Sumner: "None of them is the second coming of the Nazis." Although fearmongering politicians present these rag-tag groups as en existential threat to Western civilization, they are not:

No matter how convenient that analogy is for either war-hawks or fear-peddlers, none of these groups is a threat to the existence or governance of any state, except possibly those destabilized nations in which their main force is located. They are not equipped with massive armies or power air forces.

In fact, the destabilization of the Middle East, which was a goal of both East and West throughout the 20th century, is the reason these groups have a place in which to grow. The Taliban was able to acquire Afghanistan in the dust following the Soviet retreat. Daesh has a handful of towns along a couple of hundred miles of highway only because both Syria and Iraq are so dysfunctional. To a large extent these groups aren’t that different from the people they replaced. Local warlords and regional strongmen. That’s the Middle East as we made it.

Daesh, which so many are trying to build into a horrible threat, has not even managed to topple Bashar al-Assad even though he was half-toppled before they made themselves known. Their threat to the government of the United States, or to any stable nation, is essentially nil. Their control is a lot less than total. Their funding wouldn’t pay the bills in Davenport, IA. Even if you take the higher estimates, the number of fighters they can field is about one tenth the size of the Iraqi Army (a real army, with real tanks, etc) in 2003. It’s about 1/40th the size of the Iraqi Army when it was crushed in the first Gulf War.

What Deash does itself is not a threat. What we do… that’s a different story.

They cannot cause us serious harm. We, however, can indeed cause serious harm to ourselves and our societies if we lash out violently out of irrational fear.

Sumner points out that in looking at the last 35 years of terrorism, 9/11 stands alone: "Of everything that happened over this period, this is the one act that defined how we think of terrorism … but at the same time, it’s utterly unique. Unique in the extent of it’s planning, the true international funding, and certainly unique in the scale of the destruction it brought."

He points out that since 1981, and including 9/11, just under 16,000 deaths have been caused by Islamic terrorists. Now, while 16,000 is, sadly, a large number,"if every death from terrorism that occurred worldwide over the last 35 years had actually taken place in the United States, you would still have a better chance of being shot accidentally by a friend or relative than you would of being killed in a terrorist attack. You’d also stand a much better chance of being killed by the police over that period."

The real measure of a terrorist act isn’t in the damage it does to individuals, but in the reaction it generates from groups, from nations, from the whole world.

Which is exactly why terrorists do it. Terrorism works. It generates terror. It provokes a level of response hugely disproportional to the effort it requires (especially when you can count on a good percentage of politicians to run on a platform of fear, fear, fear). It elevates the status of those at its center from unknown thugs into household names. And when it happens somewhere that has deep meaning to many people—like Paris—that anger is magnified.

Which leads to the real threat from terrorism.

Sumner points out other, far more serious occurrences in terms of loss of life: a million people killed in Rwanda in 1994 over a few weeks; civil wars killing millions more; 110,000 deaths documented in Iraq, but best estimates of the actual total range upward from 650,000 (not to mention 4,279 combat deaths of U.S. military personnel; Mexican drug dealers have killed nearly 50,000 people in only their worst three years.

There are a lot of pundits claiming that Daesh is different from—and greater than—the threat from al-Qaida or previous groups for one big reason: Daesh has territory. They have that “Islamic state” where people can visit, learn to be evil, then be sent forth to spread disaster.

Only … we’ve seen that film before. It was called the Taliban. The Taliban not only held territory, they held much more territory, with many times the population of the towns held by Daesh. They did it openly, as the more-or-less recognized government of Afghanistan for five years. They were the caliphate before the caliphate was cool.

ISIS/ISIL/Daesh nominally controls these areas, but they have to remain in the shadows; the moment they emerge into daylight, they will be destroyed. But the conflict and hatred will remain. The only long-term solution is to bring stable government to these troubled areas, government supported by the people, government that can enforce the rule of law. That's a solution that can only be postponed and delayed by rash, violent behavior on our part today as a result of irrational fear.

They are not supermen; hey are common thugs. They are not defenders of the Muslim faith! They practice a terrible perversion of a legitimate faith held by 1.5 billion people across the planet.