Newsletter April, 04

Table of Contents:

[Jihadists or Islamic Fundamentalists?] [The Return of Ideological Warfare] [Cause and Effect Terrorism Follies] [On Being Lucky] [Reviewing Cold Terror] [Grand Strategy and the US Election] [Voices of Freedom]

Jihadists or Islamic Fundamentalists?

It useful to know what to call one’s foe. Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the rise of Hezbollah, the nation states of the Western World have been repeatedly attacked by young Muslims, mostly (but not always) from Middle Eastern countries.

These attackers have normally used the techniques of terrorism to advance an agenda of Islamic renewal throughout the Muslim World; to defeat or reverse Western influences there; to topple existing governments which do not embrace a return to what the attackers insist are traditional forms for Muslim societies; and to advance a general war against all of the non-Muslim world.

Westerners have struggled to find familiar terms to describe these attackers, and for a long time embraced the term ‘Muslim Fundamentalists’. However, it has been frequently pointed out by many Muslims that most of the faithful are ‘Fundamentalists’ by Western terms and the main ‘liberal’ Muslim sect, the Ismailis, are sometimes regarded as heretical by many other Muslims.

In the Arab countries of the Middle East, the supporters of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc, are sometimes referred to as ‘Islamists’, in that they use the Muslim faith as a political creed. Yet, Islam is inherently political already and much of the current crisis results from the inability of Muslim societies to adapt to new political forms in the modern world.

Perhaps we should use another word — the supporters of these hostile groups insist that they are engaged in a ‘Jihad’, a holy war, against the rest of the World. So be it, let’s call them Jihadists.

If the 20^th Century had a consistent theme running through it’s history, it would be one of ideological conflict between and within nations over the best course for human society to take. Over the last decade, with the challenge thrown at us by the Soviet Union finally collapsing, so many people thought that the issue had been settled. Not so.

We are engaged in an ideological war again, but seem so dismayed by its unexpected return that many of us have forgotten the habits and reflexes that let us survive the last one. The intention of this article is to review some of the characteristics and responses necessary in waging ideological warfare.

There are two fronts to any ideological war — the external front of military competition and conventional measures of strength, which consists of formal warfare between states, and the internal front of ideas, deception, subversion and other measures short of war itself.

In the current war of the Jihadists against all of Western Civilization, there have been few opportunities for direct military competition — not that this has made the fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq any less significant to those who are there. There have also been no real networks of state-sponsored organizations engaged in working the internal front inside our societies, and this has made recognition of the threat much more difficult.

In the War against the distillation of Fascism, Militarism and Nazism that confronted the Western Democracies in the 1930s and ‘40s, the ability of racialist/militarist doctrines to compete for allegiances inside the Western democracies was limited, and the resulting ideological clash was fought with conventional and — eventually — concluded with nuclear weapons. Over fifty million people died in that war and a conflagration on this scale could always happen again.

The next conflict, that of the Soviets against the West, fortunately did not result in a general war — although there were many ‘proxy’ and peripheral conflicts between 1945 and 1991. The main sphere of conflict was on the internal/domestic front, particularly as the Soviets had a three-echelon structure with which to engage in internal ideological warfare within the Western World. This structure consisted of organizations and messages created directly by the Soviet Union itself; the messages which arose out of NGOs, official bodies and within domestic organizations (like the Western Communist Parties) which were heavily influenced or directed by the Soviets while maintaining an artificial veneer of independence; and lastly by ignorant sympathizers within the West.

It was not long ago that messages directly from Soviet press organs such as Pravda, controlled groups like the World Peace Council, and members of Western communist parties within numerous ‘peace’ groups could largely direct an enormous public fear of nuclear armaments into supporting Soviet foreign and defence policies, while handicapping NATO’s responses to the real Soviet military threat that existed at the time. Our defences on the internal front were weak, and they required constant reminders about just what messages were coming from whom, and what the messengers were really like.

The chief aim and tactic of Soviet ideological warfare against the West during the Cold War was to undermine the psychological trinity of beliefs that were necessary to sustain our societies in those years. This trinity was outlined in our April 2003 newsletter in an article taken from a presentation by Maurice Tugwell (see ‘The Psychological Aspect of the War on Terror’; Mackenzie Newsletter #52, page 10-12). In short, every society engaged in a conflict needs to believe three messages: We’re the good guys; they’re the bad guys; and we will win. In ideological warfare one must meddle with the identical beliefs of one’s opponents, and the Soviets were getting pretty good at this in the years before they collapsed. Now the Jihadists are attempting the same.

The Jihadists have no great structure with centralized control behind it with which to wage ideological warfare inside Western societies. Rather, what they do have are two loose networks that roughly approximate the old Soviet echelons. In place of the centralized primary echelon of the old USSR, they have a network of Wahhabi Jihadists who share a common ideology, common experiences, and who reinforce their ideological precepts with each other in their own internal communications. Their orthodoxy is rigidly self-enforced, in the manner that True Believers of many stripes have always managed to accomplish.

Outside the networks of al Qaeda activists, there is the wider second echelon of Islamic apologists and activists who may not (consciously, anyway) share the Jihadists’ goals and aspirations. Yet there is within Islam an ideal of ‘brotherhood’ that, while seldom realized when Muslims are left alone, functions perfectly well when any outsiders are engaged in a conflict with some part of the Islamic world. If asked to sympathize with the US or some Western European nation over the idea (if not the reality) of the community of believers, it is not possible for many Muslims to support the West. However, for various reasons — some of which represent entirely honest impulses — they are making attempts here in the West to undermine our psychological trinity.

The third echelon of the ideological offensive against the West consists of the same third component that was present in the last years of the Cold War — indeed; some of the very same people have appeared in this role in both campaigns. This component consists of those within our societies who either refuse to see or believe in the good we represent, or whose self-destructive components of their own inner natures lead them to desire the destruction of our own society. In place of the informed criticism that is necessary for healthy debate, there is only automatic negativism. They are those who, if responding to a toast of ‘My Country, right or wrong’ will invariably reply ‘My country is always wrong’.

Well trained soldiers know how to carry on when the plan falls apart. The Soviets could not, and did not, minutely control every aspect of their campaigns against the West — they expected the second echelon to run itself, following broad themes outlined from the USSR, and knew that the third echelon, while usually predictable, would automatically bristle against any attempt to directly control it. The Jihadists do not seem to have any real organization to match the old Soviet propaganda organs, and rely entirely on autonomous networks of self-motivated activists for all three echelons.

The main goal of ideological warfare is to sap the vitality of the "Trinity" outlined above inside the targeted community. In undertaking this, the echelons seek to instill doubt where there is confidence; mislead and misdirect; redefine meanings; and deny the validity of any accomplishment.

Typical messages might include arguments for Moral Equivalence. This is used to imply that both parties are ‘equal’ insofar as sordid behaviors and ambitions go. The Soviets, for example, stressed that employment was a human right, so that when criticized for Gulags or the psychiatric abuse of dissidents, they might point to strikes (forbidden in the USSR) and unemployment as Western ‘human rights abuses’. Another argument about the Soviet military buildup of the 1970s was to point out that both the USSR and the US had nuclear weapons, and that therefore both were equally reprehensible; indeed, the US was held to be worse, because they actually had used the bomb.

Muslims who support the idea that Iran, Pakistan and, even Saddam’s Iraq, should be allowed to have nuclear weapons have embraced these old arguments. Additionally, Jihadists and Islamists alike believe that Islam is a perfect society, whereas the Western World is invariably flawed and imperfect. Ergo, who are we to criticize them?

This last part is true enough in some ways, although we are less flawed and imperfect than most other societies. One can also recall the widow of the late Ahmad Said Khadr, who defended the enlistment of her sons as Jihadists as being preferable to having them being exposed to "drinking and homosexuality" if they stayed in Canada (although using our medical system seems fine to her). Somehow, being a Shaheed would not strike most people as a morally superior being to a gay alcoholic. The latter is largely harmless to everyone but himself and many have contributed far more to the arts of civilization than any suicide bomber ever will.

Another favorite argument is that old "You provocative, me reactive" ploy. In the early 1980s as NATO responded to the Soviet buildup begun in the 1970s, every new deployment of some American or Allied weapons system was held to be a dangerous and destabilizing new element; while the latest Soviet/Warsaw Pact deployment was presented as being only a just and measured response.

This argument is also well known to terrorists of all stripes and Jihadists employ it too. Hamas, for example has denounced the deaths of three of its leaders in recent months as provocative outrages which must be avenged, while their own actions are invariably held to be the due and proper reaction to the numerous indignities inflicted by Israel, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. For Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda is merely reacting to a thousand years of Western outrages, and so all of their actions are just. Admittedly, only the Western left is likely to believe this, but that can be enough sometimes.

Another common tactic is to Redefine Terminology. It was hard to do this in the arms-laden lexicography of the Cold War, but the Soviets certainly entertained very different definitions of ‘détente’, ‘peace’, and ‘arms control’ than the West usually did. Entering the current fray are groups like "Muslims Against Terrorism"; which at first seems welcome because they are prepared to criticize the 9/11 attacks. However, the group defines terrorism as any use of force, and that therefore, the liberation of Afghanistan or the incarceration of al Qaeda members by the US in Cuba are also forms of terrorism and thus equally reprehensible.

Then there is the old Promise of Peace ploy, which almost invariably snags the interest of Westerners. While al Qaeda itself has seldom offered the prospect that peace is possible (only recently offering Europe a ‘Ceasefire’ if they pull out of the Middle East — an offer which the French and Germans took the lead in dismissing without discussion), other elements of the Jihadist construct can raise the issue.

The promise of peace is normally embraced by Western liberals because of their reflexive belief that all intelligent people are rational in the same way. The Soviets made full use of this promise, and added arms control and disarmament to the bag of potential rewards for cooperation. Naturally, every move by the belligerent is for ‘peace’ while every initiative in response is a danger to ‘progress’ toward it.

The nature of the Jihadists makes negotiation almost impossible to open and certainly impossible to respect. Nation states cannot be expected to bargain with non-state actors, and certainly not with those who employ terrorism. However, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has seen some use of this ploy. Hamas and the Jihadists have always been almost entirely outside the peace process, and the process has been derailed by Yasser Arafat anyway. Nevertheless, the deaths of the three Hamas leaders were immediately described as being a ‘blow’ to the already moribund negotiations — an argument soon echoed by the chancelleries of many Western nations that should know better.

What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable. This aspect of ideological warfare also leaves Western liberals vulnerable to exploitation by playing on the notion that mutual understanding and tolerance can relieve tensions. In the Cold War, as in the war against the Nazis, most of us understood the enemy all too well. However, the Soviets were always happy to encourage the third echelon, the independent activists from within the Western World, to claim that all would be well once we got to know each other.

The plea for "understanding" from an ideological opponent is usually one-sided. In short, the Soviets expected that understanding them would mean forgiving them, and therefore that we would budge on key issues. One might remember the claim that the Soviets needed higher military levels than the Western World because they still felt uncomfortable and exposed from their losses in the Second World War. Our response that the Second World War taught us to be uneasy about promises from dictatorships with large standing armies was always dismissed out of hand by Moscow… and our internal third echelon.

This approach of you-should-tolerate-us-though-we-don’t-need-to-tolerate-you is very much evident among the second echelon in the current conflict. We are expected to understand the perspectives of the Jihadists, while seeing no corresponding move to understand ours.

A last theme in this form of struggle is the proposition that Self-Defence is Immoral. This argument is normally advanced only by the third echelon within liberal democratic societies. During WW II and the Cold War, our opponents knew better than to directly suggest this theme to Western audiences, and certainly neither the Nazis nor the Soviets tolerated an independent domestic peace movement. However, Western pacifists were free to advance the notion that arming ourselves and standing up to aggression was somehow wrong, and that the lamb must lie down with the lion.

In this current conflict, the third echelon of the Jihadist threat is busy undermining some of our defensive measures, usually from behind a screen of concern for our immigration policies, human rights, and due judicial process. While defending these practices is vital, we need some means of identifying and removing the Jihadists among us — obstructing this process does us no good.

It has been the Western World’s fate to always be lodged in ideological conflict with totalitarians and ‘True Believers’. This makes it difficult for us to respond in kind to our opponents’ populations. The Soviets used to jam broadcasts from Voice of America and Western media outlets; and sought to license every photocopier and computer in the country. The Chinese and Cubans still attempt these things.

Today’s Jihadists are easier to reach, but they’ve shown they can be very selective in what they listen to and are self-policing in terms of their ideology. We will not be able to influence the first echelon of ideological warriors; as true believers they are deaf to reason.

Dealing with the second and third echelons will be more problematical — they live among us and take full advantage of our openness and news media. To inoculate our public against their communications, it will be necessary for all of us to take a remedial course in dealing with the enemy’s misinformation and ideological warfare. But we need show no tolerance for their messages and should display only scorn for their messengers.

Cause and Effect Terrorism Follies

By now, the Spanish reaction to the Madrid railway bombing and the Palestinian fury over the killing of Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin are old news. Even so, there is one point that begs for comment.

It is human nature to confuse cause and effect. James George Frazer’s classic study on myth, The Golden Bough, points out that many of our superstitions rest on the assumption that there is a deliberate purpose behind every event, and then wondering how one can turn cause and effect to one’s own advantage. Natural phenomenon such as lighting was held to be an instrument of divine wrath; or a community that had just seen their crops flooded might decide that this was a punishment for letting witches be concealed among them. Once the floodwaters ebbed, it would be time to burn some old women at the stake to make sure it never happened again. Likewise, one thinks of primitive societies that were said to pitch virgins into volcanoes to prevent eruptions (there is no evidence that any human society ever did such a thing, though at least three were known to pitch bound maidens into rivers).

In the past, when the Huns, then the Mongols and then the Turks started ravaging their ways into Europe, there were religious leaders who declared that the barbarian’s pillaging was God’s just and righteous punishment for our evil ways and lack of faith. So, plainly, if we all became more devout, the barbarians would leave us alone… (It is somehow reassuring to note that the modern liberal has his antecedents). Even nowadays one might still hear an opinion that a woman who got raped by a criminal might have ‘deserved’ it for dressing provocatively.

Cause and effect get confused all the time when dealing with terrorism.

Terrorists do what they do because of a combination of the internal psychological terrain of the terrorists themselves, and the influence of whatever ideology they adopted that allowed them to commit violence. Terrorists commit violence because they want to: Because the terrorists themselves are the wrathful, the sullen, and the flawed, looking for dramatic purpose and a heroic self-identity. What they actually believe doesn’t matter much except that it shapes the style and direction of the violence they employ.

Most terrorists and ideological bully boys don’t really care that much about the cause per se; a point amply demonstrated by the Nazis and the Communists in Germany before Hitler seized power. Much of the violence between the two groups was based on the fact that they were earnestly recruiting the same sort of people. Twelve years ago in Toronto, the Anarchists of Anti-Racist Action and the White Supremacists in the Heritage Front were similarly competing for disaffected street kids in the city.

Israel has suffered the murderous attentions of terrorist groups motivated by Neo Nazism, Militant nationalism, various brands of Marxism and Socialism, and by Islamic Fundamentalism. The United States has been plagued by an equal variety of terrorists. Evidently, what was important to the terrorist was the attack, rather than the cause used to justify it.

The inevitable conclusion must be that seeking a political answer to the terrorists’ internal psychological motivations is always a vain pursuit that will miss the problem entirely.

This spring, as Spain buried 202 dead commuters in Madrid, the opinion was that the attack was a deliberate attempt to turn the Spanish election and weaken their position as an American ally in the war on terror. This is untrue. For a start, it takes a while to plan and execute terrorist attacks and Spain is a parliamentary monarchy with an unfixed election cycle much like Canada or Britain. It would be very difficult to plan an attack as complex as the Madrid bombings to coincide with an unscheduled election. But Jihadists can read newspapers and those countries with regular election schedules can probably expect major attacks to coincide with them.

However, before the spectacular political fallout of the Madrid attack the real motivation for the outrage was quite simple: Spain is a prosperous and free Western country and, as Osama Bin Laden has mentioned in earlier writings and interviews, is ‘guilty’ of ridding itself of Muslim rule over 500 years ago. Every other excuse after that is just so much window dressing.

The Palestinian Jihadist group Hamas is spitting fury over the death of three of its leaders. Now, of course, Hamas and other Palestinian groups are vowing to revenge these deaths with even more attacks on Israel. Does this mean anything? Hamas already has a long history of going after Israeli targets whenever and wherever they can. They are going to get worse? How?

Ordinarily, terrorist groups know no limitations on their behavior other than what they choose to accept for themselves — in accordance with whatever ideology they adopted and within the constrains of the ways and means available to them. However, as limitations on their violence are self-selected, they can be changed anytime the terrorists care to do so.

If Hamas members start blowing up more Jewish cultural centres and synagogues overseas, they might use the death of Sheik Yassin and other Hamas leaders as an ‘excuse’ in another tedious self-justification for their outrages. However, even if these men were still alive and free, Hamas could well have undertaken the same new aggressive posture anyway, for any number of reasons. Instead, what is more likely right now is that the new leadership of the group will be too busy preventing their own martyrdoms to send out any children wrapped up in explosive vest packs.

One of the fundamental truths in fighting terrorism is that, invariably, it is the terrorist who has freedom of action (until finally cornered) and it is the terrorist who controls the initiative. These are the main advantages in his ‘asymmetrical’ war against whomever he is attacking. Trying to guess what might mollify him in the future is like burning witches or sacrificing virgins to volcanoes — a wasteful and useless exercise in futility.

There is an aphorism that is frightening, for all that it is true: For the US Secret Service, a would-be Presidential assassin only has to be lucky once in a while, but the Presidential security detail has to be lucky all the time. The same is true for the terrorist who seeks to launch a really vicious attack — in order to kill people by the thousands (or tens of thousands): He only has to be lucky once while the security forces of the Free World need to be lucky all the time.

The US Secret Service, like most professionals in the military and security services, are used to making their luck stretch as far as competence and professionalism can take them. Luck is something you have to make for yourself, but even manufactured luck can only stretch so far. Canada has been very lucky in the long months since 9-11, but it won’t last forever.

Al Qaeda is looking for weaknesses and, of all the countries that Osama bin Laden has threatened in the months since 9/11, Canada is the only nation on which they have yet to attempt an attack. What style of attack might materialize here is anyone’s guess, but we should be able to make some estimates from attacks attempted elsewhere in the past few months.

On April 17^th, Jordan announced that Palestinians associated with al Qaeda had been arrested while driving three vehicles into Amman. The vehicles contained enough of the primary materials for making a massive chemical bomb that could have killed "20,000 people and contaminated a large area". The area planned for the release of the weapon, once it was assembled, included the offices of the Jordanian Prime Minister, the General Intelligence Department and the US Embassy. Incidentally, the Jordanian police pointed out that the vehicles had come from Syria.

At the end of January in Baghdad, US troops found a three-kilogram block of cyanide salt in a safe-house belonging to Abu Musah Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda poison specialist who acted as a go-between for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cyanide salts are extremely toxic and form the basis for a number of startlingly poisonous weapons.

On March 30^th, British police scooped up ten suspected members of al Qaeda in London (and the RCMP arrested Mohammad Momin Khawaja, 29, in Ottawa in connection with the case). The group had acquired half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer --the base for a number of improvised explosives — and had been looking for means to use it in some crowded area of London. They were also discussing trying to find stocks of osmium tetroxide as an additional casualty-causing agent. Osmium tetroxide is not volatile enough to evaporate when in an explosion, and wouldn’t be noticed for hours after an attack — until rescue workers and survivors started going blind and coughing up their lungs.

The recent release of "do-it-yourself" Jihadist training materials by al Qaeda is already having some effects. At the end of March, German police arrested an armed man who was about to enter a discotheque in the city of Frankfurt with a gun and two improvised bombs. Interestingly, he was one of the many European converts to Islam that al Qaeda has placed a high emphasis on recruiting in the last two years. In late March, another do-it-yourself attempt came apart in Milan; when an Islamic militant wired up seventy propane tanks in his car for an attempted suicide bombing — but the improvised device prematurely detonated on a highway, only incinerating the driver.

On April 5^th, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, French police, in a series of dawn raids, scooped up 13 suspected members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (an al Qaeda subset) including one terrorist about to flee the country. The French cells of the group were wanted in connection with the deadly terrorist attacks in Casablanca in May of 2003. The cell was planning further attacks in Paris.

Last January, French police also scooped up an al Qaeda cell in their search for Menad Benchellali’s stores of biological weapons. An al Qaeda chemical weapons expert, Benchellali had stored botulin and ricin toxins at his home, although no traces have been found so far. The French and British are nervous after finding that ricin had been produced by al Qaeda members in England last year, but have no idea where the stocks produced in a raided improvised lab have disappeared to.

The Italians are also nervous again after finding another videotaped threat against Rome inside an al Qaeda safehouse in Cremona early this April. The tape was from Sheikh Abu Qatadah Al Falastini, a Jordanian and suspected Al-Qaeda member who was being held in prison in Britain. It said : "The person who will destroy Rome is already preparing his swords. Rome will not be conquered by words but by force and weapons … Rome is the cross and the West is the cross. And the people of Rome are the patrons of the cross. Muslims' target is the West." The Vatican and Rome were already heavily guarded last Christmas in response to a planned suicide attack, and heightened security was in place again for Easter. The Pope was also targeted in 1996 for death in al Qaeda’s aborted "Operation Mojimbo".

Added to these are dozens of other reports of reconnaissance trips, of the training of Jihadist recruits inside Europe and North America, and attempts to acquire explosives and toxins. These reports come in a constant stream, and seldom go further than the police and security forces, but these are enough to keep many police and security analysts awake at nights. After all, what should one make of reports of a man videotaping an oil refinery at night outside a major North American city, or of a man found measuring the precise coordinates of important buildings with a GPS set?

Our turn to have an al Qaeda attack attempted either inside Canada or against Canadian citizens overseas is coming… when or how is anyone’s guess. The only sure thing is that it is coming. If this attack fails, then another one will come again later. Al Qaeda only has to be lucky once, and we have to be lucky all the time.

Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World. By Stewart Bell; John Wiley and Sons, Toronto, 2004.

Book reviews are not supposed to be effusive or enthusiastic, but some books deserve such treatment. There are many skilled reporters and journalists in Canada, many of whom are well known to the Institute and much admired here. However, when it comes to terrorism, our most earnest respect goes to Stewart Bell of the National Post and Kim Bolan of the Vancouver Sun. Most veteran writers and editorialists in the business get some snarled abuse from time to time, but very few have endured as much as Bell and Bolan have for their work on terrorists inside Canada.

Bolan’s book on the Babbar Khalsa and the militant Sikhs is currently a work in progress, as she must wait for the outcome of the Air India Trial before she can finish her manuscript — and the Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart eagerly await her work as well. This left Stewart Bell as first off the starters block with a comprehensive survey of terrorism inside Canada.

Cold Terror reviews some aspects of the many overseas terrorists here, and the role that Canada has played in supporting international terrorism. Bell, who picked up the mantle as the most severe critic of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam from the Institute, and who carried the infamous Khadr family to our collective attention, has followed up on his excellent series of articles in the National Post with even more detailed work on who these people are and what they are doing here.

His explorations carried him from sleeping under shellfire in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, to being a nervous bystander on the edge of a Palestinian lynch mob, and into the beaten zone of an al Qaeda mortar barrage. What is more disturbing is that his investigations also brought him to corner stores, strip malls, and quiet suburbs across Canada. These are all connected, often in an immediate manner.

Canadians are on both sides of international terrorism nowadays, as victims and as perpetrators. Both categories are growing but this is also because we have allowed Canada to become a facilitator of terrorism.

Bell has long had an acquisitive instinct for data and information, and has amassed an impressive collection of documents and transcripts, but his reputation has also invited the occasional brown envelope over the transom from admirers inside Canada’s security services. This is largely because Bell has been merciless in fingering the suspects who have facilitated terrorism in Canada — our own political leaders, through laziness and willful political blindness. It was Bell who first carried the story about Paul Martin’s gala dinner with the Tamil Tigers in Toronto, and Bell who first pointed out that Jean Chretien helped spring Pere Khadr from durance vile in Pakistan. Bell’s j’accuse is even more clearly enunciated in this book.

It is the duty of every reviewer to find something to criticize in a book. Bell does not footnote his remarks, and the index seems a little slender. With this obligation discharged, one can only urge all of you to acquire your own copies and press more on your friends.

Military officers have a saying: "Amateurs talk about strategy, dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics." This is quite true.

Jean Chrétien’s proposed UN mission to the Eastern Congo back in the mid-1990s provided one example of the differences between amateurs, dilettantes and professionals. After the UN bungled the mission in Rwanda (by not letting the seasoned soldiers on the ground off the leash to prevent the massacre of 800,000 people), millions of Hutus fled the outraged Tutsis and went into eastern Zaire. These refugees had to live in appalling circumstances, and were surrounded by many tribal enemies in an area where no law ruled — this helped trigger the ongoing war in the region that has cost about a million deaths a year since.

Many of the Hutu refugees are now dead — disease, starvation or violence claimed most of them -- but for a brief while the TV news crews of the world were paying some attention to their plight. Chrétien caught one broadcast about the misery of the situation and immediately decided that nothing would do but a humanitarian intervention (e.g. aid-giving backed up by military force), a mission which Canada could lead.

After his amateurish decision, the dilettantes of our Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and politicized officers of National Defence Headquarters started to discuss the means by which this decision could be implemented within a UN framework. (Ahem, as a note of clarification, it should be mentioned that our diplomats are not trained in military logistics, nor should they be, and most of them are entirely professional in their respective spheres). It took the more professional officers of NDHQ (and in other militaries who received Canada’s invitation to join in) to pour cold water in the entire situation.

The military professionals pointed out that, despite the obvious humanitarian benefits of such a mission, with no railroads, paved highways, seaports, or even modern airports within 1,000 km of the region, there was no way either adequate relief supplies or a military force to ensure their delivery could get there. Great idea, couldn’t be done.

Where trifling details like logistics do not get in the way, it is easy for anyone to formulate a grand strategy — which is why politicians and other amateurs get involved in it all the time. While, as in all things, the devil is in the details, there are a couple of other simple military truths (taught to all young officers and learned the hard way by most NCOs) that politicians should remember.

Although it is easy to create a grand strategy to deal with a problem, the important thing is to stick to it. Changing a strategy is worse than not having one at all, because every time the direction changes — all the time, money and effort invested in the previous approach is wasted. The second point is even more important: Always remember what the aim was in the first place. Activities are not as important in themselves as are the goals these activities are meant to reach. There are hundreds of historical examples (in almost all spheres of human activity) to learn from, but modern decision-makers seldom read much history anyway.

After finally being confronted with the enormity of the threat from radical Islam, President George W. Bush appears to have conceived of a grand strategy to help prevent more attacks like those of 9-11. This is evidently in a two tier approach — first to help the passive defences of US and allied societies with a massive shakeup in domestic intelligence gathering and security preparations. Secondly, if the Islamic world was generating ideological terrorism, then it would be time to nudge this backward part of the world into growing in a different direction.

Like all grand strategies, the overall plan is simple but the devils in the details are particularly vexing. The creation of a Department of Homeland Security is causing the greatest reorganization of American government since the Second World War; meaning that it is expensive and a long way from being fully effective. Also, defensive measures are passive, and can never guarantee full protection.

The liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq were also daring policy decisions and necessary — but neither country is likely to become a prosperous civil society anytime soon. The US hope that these transformations might eventually change the entire Muslim world for the better may be wishful thinking, but the alternatives would be much worse. Ideologies either have to be seen by those subjected to their rule to be less competitive in providing for their wants, or else ideologies have to be bloodily hammered into extinction. The first approach worked to end the Cold War, the second was necessary to get rid of Nazism.

Both grand strategies have been undertaken and are well advanced so far; but America’s weakness in grand strategy is that its moods and leadership change so frequently. Bush’s likeliest Democratic rival has sworn to weaken the defensive strategy and abandon the second one altogether. If this happens, the main expenses of both strategies will have accrued with little sign of the expected benefits. Thus both plans will have become costly failures, and — Iraq particularly — another irritant that Jihadists will cite as a further excuse for terrorism in the future.

Still, Americans (and others) cannot be blamed for thinking Iraq is a failure. In the last few weeks all hell has seemingly broken loose there. The nest of Wahhabi Jihadists in Falluja managed to perpetuate and spread their revolt, despite taking enormous casualties from US troops.

It is usual in counter-insurgency campaigns for the guerrillas to lose six or seven dead for every fatality they inflict on highly trained and professional opponents. Few come as professional as the US Marines — who seem to be killing ten for one. But every Marine comes from far away and is expensively trained, while their opponents can easily draft more replacements.

Elsewhere in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdist ‘Army’ has also taken a similar bashing, but has evaded defeat by refusing to acknowledge it. Moreover, guerrilla movements with an outside sanctuary are difficult to defeat, and Sadr’s Shi’ite cadres are backed by Iranian money, arms and guidance.

As an aside, it is a pathetic comment on Western news media that nobody bothered to look up the term ‘Mahdi’, which is available in most decent dictionaries. The Mahdi is the predicted spiritual and temporal leader who will unite Islam and lead it to world conquest, thus creating the conditions necessary for Allah to end the World. Sadr is the equivalent of a White Supremacist declaring that he was the Messiah -- a telling indicator about his mental state — and the real reason why most Iraqi Shi’ia have no interest in joining his call to arms.

The survival of both groups has encouraged every little armed band of would-be Jihadists inside Iraq to start shooting at aid workers, kidnapping foreigners where possible, and issuing impossible demands.

Besides showings its paw inside Iraq, Iran is also disdaining all international attempts to curb its burgeoning nuclear weapons program. It will soon be a fully armed nuclear power, unless stern concerted action is taken against it — and there are no signs of that coming. Even Bush doesn’t seem confident enough to launch a pre-emptive strike, despite the fact that Iran’s long involvement in sponsorship of terror makes it a likely donor for the first use of a nuclear weapon by a terrorist group.

But Iran’s backing of al-Sadr is itself a sign that the American strategy in Iraq could be successful — the last thing Iran’s despotic theocrats can tolerate is both a healthier more vibrant Iraq on their frontier, and one that presents a positive example to the unhappy Iranians who are longing for a change in government themselves.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda has also been getting cocky. While their core elements have rebuilt themselves, Osama bin Laden seems reluctant to expose them to possible US action. Instead, they appear to be increasing their operational pace by recruiting new autonomous groups in Europe and encouraging lone individuals to join the Jihad by releasing a flood of ‘How to’ instructions over the internet. The 1971 publication of The Anarchist Cookbook has led to no end of mischief over the years; the release of the al Qaeda Jihad manual will be much worse.

One unexpressed aspect of the American experiment with Iraq (and in Afghanistan) is the hope that the feared "clash of civilizations" between the Jihadists and the Western World could be abated or averted.

If Jihadist terrorism escalates and worsens, one has to wonder what the Western World can do — we can’t ignore it, can’t tolerate it, and our responses so far have been less than adequate. Instead, we will have to stop playing with half measures and look to draconian responses in order to survive, a situation we last endured in the Second World War. This war has so far only killed people by the hundreds at a go, soon it could start killing people in the hundreds of thousands.

However, there is the chance that the grand experiment in Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan) to remake the Middle East could work after all. If it does work, Arab/Muslim governments will be forced by internal pressures to change their ways, so that prosperity and individual freedoms will improve; and Islamic peoples might see that there is a better way than merely enduring nothing but anarchy between variations of secular dictatorship or Islamist rule.

The cost of failing to see the Iraqi Experiment through will be monstrous. The cost in human life can easily go from the thousands into the tens of millions in coming decades if we fail to put the Jihadists out of circulation. America’s voters should think very carefully in the coming months — they will be voting for much more than they think. Keeping Bush in power and endorsing his grand strategy might be the only way to avoid decades of truly savage war.

"Nothing is more dangerous in war time than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feelings one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature."

-- Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, 30^th September, 1941.

"He enjoys prophesying the imminent fall of the capitalist system and is determined to play a part, any part, in its burial, except that of mute."

>-- Harold Macmillan, on the British socialist Aneurin Bevan.

"The military value of a partisan’s work is not measured by the amount of property destroyed, or by the number of men killed or captured, but by the number he keeps watching."

-- John Singleton Mosby, War Reminiscences, 1887.

A warning to Osama Bin Laden, reminding him that older books than the Quran have lots to say about righteous wrath…

-- Psalms, 21.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca