New 'winning strategy', same old
war By Ehsan Ahrari
While the "war on terror" inside the
United States is being reduced to winning the
hearts and minds of Americans to vote for the
Republican Party in November's congressional
elections, major issues are percolating - and they
don't bode well for stability in West Asia.
On Tuesday the latest version of the
strategy to fight terrorism was released,
coinciding with President George W Bush's warning
to Iran over its nuclear program.
The new
strategy, featured in a report that was drafted in 2003
and
updated this March, focuses more on decentralized
networks of extremists than on al-Qaeda, and
singles out Iran as a potential source of
unconventional weapons for terrorist groups.
The report also acknowledges that while
the United States succeeded in undermining global
terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the US, the "enemy has adjusted to US defenses".
"America is safer, but not yet safe," it warns.
Despite Bush's claim that Iraq had become
the "central front" of the "war on terror", the
report's emphasis is less on Iraq than on small
terror groups "springing up around the world".
What it boils down to is that Washington
needs fresh rhetoric to make Americans believe
that their country is really "winning" the "war on
terror".
The reader of the latest document
clearly gets the message that it contains no new
message. Why, then, issue another strategy? It is
because the "war on terror" is being played to win
electoral advantages. This was done in 2002 to win
congressional elections, then in 2004 to help Bush
win a second presidential term, and now it is
being used as the US edges toward congressional
elections again. And this time the stakes are
high, as Republicans could lose both chambers of
Congress.
In issuing the new strategy,
Bush has drawn on analogies with World War II to
urge people to heed his warnings and not repeat
the mistake of not recognizing the dangerous
development of events leading to the 1940s war.
Bush compared Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and
Vladimir Lenin.
In major speeches on the
"war on terror" trail, Bush has spoken of the
"Shi'ite extremism" of Hezbollah in Lebanon and
Iran and raised "the specter of an industrialized
world subject to blackmail from nations awash in
oil and nuclear weapons if the radicals achieve
their aims".
Further, "The Shi'ite strain
of Islamic radicalism is just as dangerous and
just as hostile to America and just as determined
to establish its brand of hegemony across the
broader Middle East." And Shi'ite extremists "have
achieved something that al-Qaeda has so far failed
to" - taking control of Iran in 1979. A
neo-conservative revision of the history of the
Islamic Revolution of Iran is being presented to
the US electorate.
Bush also had his take
on Iran's goals: "Like al-Qaeda and the Sunni
extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims.
They want to drive America out of the region, to
destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle
East. To achieve these aims, they are funding and
arming terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which
allow them to attack Israel and America by proxy."
Returning to the issue of the Iraq war,
Bush argued, "If we retreat from Iraq, if we don't
uphold our duty to support those who are desirous
to live in liberty, 50 years from now history will
look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and
demand to know why we did not act. I'm not going
to allow this to happen, and no future American
president can allow it either."
Major
developments involving Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah
have placed the US on the defensive.
In
Iraq there is the rising specter of sectarian war,
which has even contributed to the influential
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani withdrawing from
the political arena. The latest US approach is to
persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to abolish
Shi'ite militias, which is easier said than done.
No one wants to talk about the fact that, if the
current rate of violence continues, Maliki may
need those militias just to stay in power. But the
"rational" approach is to demand that those
militias be abolished, which is why the Americans
are recommending it.
Shi'ite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr is in no mood to give up his
crucial source of power by abolishing his militia,
the Mehdi Army, and many see him as the "Nasrallah
of Iraq", in reference to Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah in Lebanon.
And talking of that.
Washington neo-cons, both in and outside the US
administration, were confident that the Israeli
armed forces would annihilate Hezbollah, which did
not happen. And now no one knows how to deal with
the realities of power inside Lebanon, where
Hezbollah no longer exists merely as a political
party and as a fighting force. It has transcended
that to become a bigger movement of which even
Christian Lebanese are proud.
The release
of the new strategy to fight terrorism coincides
with the crisis over Iran, whose leaders Bush
refers to as "tyrants", even though President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad was duly elected.
The
new hyperbole about al-Qaeda and Iran is aimed at
catching the attention of Americans. But it is
also possible that the US is getting increasingly
frustrated with Iran, which refuses to halt its
uranium-enrichment program, claiming it as a
legitimate, peaceful right. Tehran's prestige is
also high in much of the Islamic world.
The US appears not to be interested in
rapprochement with Iran, which leaves the options
of sanctions and, ultimately, military action. If
the latter is the current thinking in Washington -
and it seems to be, given the latest "war on
terror" twist - then the US might be edging toward
another war in West Asia.
Ehsan
Ahrari is the CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an
Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He
can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear
regularly in Asia Times Online. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
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