A Bad Month in the War of Civilizations

by John Thompson

04/19/04

April is normally a cruel month, and this certainly holds true for Anno Domini 2004.

For the US and the Coalition in Iraq, all hell has broken loose. The conglomeration of former Baathist militia and 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, and 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 pasting, 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 for the end of the World. Sadr was the equivalent of a White Supremacist declaring that he was the Antichrist, a telling remark about his mental state.

The survival of both groups has encouraged every little armed band of would-be Jihadists inside Iraq to start shooting at aid workers, kidnapping any 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.

It looks as if the Iraqi experiment in establishing a quasi-liberal-democratic government in an Arab country is going to fail.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda has been getting cocky too. While their core elements have rebuilt themselves, Osama bin Laden seems reluctant to expose them to possible US action. Instead, they seem 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 1970 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.

In this last week, Osama bin Laden felt cocky enough to attempt part of al Qaeda’s first goal, getting the Western World out of the Muslim World. He offered a ‘ceasefire’ to the nations of Western Europe, exempting them from future terrorist attacks provided that they pull out their militaries and citizens out of the Middle East. Fortunately, France and Germany have had ample experience with terrorism and know full well the worth of a terrorist’s promises — not much. The offer was rejected, but let’s see what happens after a few more Madrid-style attacks.

What does all this mean? Iraq will be more expensive and a positive outcome is much less likely; Iran is becoming more aggressive and may soon have nuclear weapons (if they don’t already), and Jihadist terrorism is going to become more common without endangering al Qaeda’s core assets.

One unconscious aspect of the American experiment with Iraq (and in Afghanistan) is the hope that the feared "clash of civilizations" between the Jihadists of the Muslim World and the Western World could be abated or averted. This looks much less likely now. Instead, look for more attacks, including ones with weapons of mass destruction throughout the Western World.

As 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 will start killing people in the hundreds of thousands.

The shoots and buds of this April will be ghastly when they ripen into full bloom.

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