Possible scenarios for the post-September 11th world. The roots of terrorism and the struggle against it, which proceeds also from a new approach to politics

BY MAURIZIO CRIPPA

The English call it “war fog.” This is the dust raised by bombs, which makes it impossible to see the outlines of things. The great crash on September 11th was so devastating, humanly devastating, that it is as though the terrible cloud over Manhattan has not yet totally dissipated. It is as though that tragic darkening of humanity–the dead, and the destruction of a free and advanced nation’s proudest symbols–made it impossible to start to live again (how many journalists, how many friends keep telling us that “life is no longer the same”?). Then, to the war fog of New York has been added the fog of Afghanistan, and we do not know yet if this will be all. It is getting more and more difficult to see clearly. Holy war? Just war? War of civilization? Inevitable war? Useful? Dangerous? Damaging? They say that the truth is always the first victim of war. At the very least, it becomes difficult to discern.
The gravity of what happened is so great as to justify America’s reaction. More than a month later, at the concert for New York at Madison Square Garden, the emotion and pride, the anger, but also the hatred were palpable. Patriotism and military force are unanimously indicated as the only antidote to terrorism. And never before as now has the recourse to force to restore justice and safety appeared legitimate. Conversely, we could debate the reasons of those who would like to respond to the terrorists by setting off a war of civilization. In this difficult atmosphere, from the very beginning the attitude of George W. Bush has thus appeared wise and well-balanced, as he distinguished between the thirst for justice and lust for revenge, between terrorists who have to be fought and religions and peoples who must be respected.
It has to be said that the war is creating some confusion also within the Church. More than once the Pope has intervened to express solidarity for the victims and the hope that “the ways of justice and peace may prevail.” And Archbishop Jean Louis Tauran, the “foreign minister” of the Holy See, declared, “We recognize that Operation Enduring Freedom is a response to terrorist aggression against innocent civilians. The United States government, just as any other, has the right to legitimate defense, because it has the mission to guarantee the safety of its citizens.” Should we be surprised? At the same time, speaking in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN, Msgr Renato Martino, underlined the Vatican’s concerns: “Acts of revenge do not cure hatred,” he said. “Every serious campaign against terrorism has to deal with the social, economic, and political conditions that hatch the emergence of terrorism.” Can there be any doubt? The Church has always recognized the right and duty of states to legitimate defense, just as she has always favored the paths of dialogue and peace. And yet there are those in the Catholic world who have tried to interpret the Pope’s position as insipid irenics. Or, conversely, to pass it off as an implicit blessing on the cannons and the Holy War. This is a position that is even more astounding if we consider that as recently as September 30th, John Paul II reiterated that “Jews, Christians, and Muslims adore God as One. The three religions therefore have a vocation to unity and peace.” In a word, this is no time for Crusades.

Jihad and thereabouts
This does not mean that terrorism born of religious fundamentalism is not a grave peril. Even before the six thousand people died at the World Trade Center, it had claimed still more victims in less free and progressive countries: one hundred thousand in Algeria (almost all Muslims), many thousands (very often Christians) in Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Can Islamic terrorism be uprooted? Maybe so, and it is not just a matter of getting rid of Osama Bin Laden, but of scorching the earth around it and of drying up as much as possible the sources that feed it. Or maybe not: if we start from the premise that every Muslim is potentially a terrorist willing to die in the name of the Jihad, the holy war, in the end they will win. It’s a question of numbers.
Fundamentalism is the culture medium of terrorism. In the last twenty years, from Khomeini onwards, it has exploited the growing exasperation of the popular masses of the Islamic countries, always teetering between the Third and the First Worlds. But to think that it embodies aspirations to social justice is misleading. The current terrorism expresses merely a total rejection of the West and a hatred that is the child of the Islamic world’s identity crisis. It must be admitted that it has found fertile ground, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Afghanistan of the 1980s. An entire generation of Mujahiddin flowed into Afghanistan from all the Arab countries to fight against the Soviet invasion in 1979. Here, a newly constituted “international group of young warriors of Allah” first began to prove itself. Among them was a certain Bin Laden. And the United States was among those financing them. Today’s terrorism is born also out of concrete historical causes, not just doctrinal aberrations. And so we can try to fight it and isolate it, with politics as well.

The political problem
This was the suggestion launched several weeks ago by an authoritative journalist, Giuliano Ferrara, who is an open supporter of the war. He wrote in the Italian daily newspaper Il Foglio: “It is not the sociology of civilizations or of religions that can explain what is happening. All you have to do is train a simple political eye on things. The world has to be governed, and governed by a force, alliance, or network capable of being a deterrence to unsustainable wars.” In other words, Ferrara maintains, if someone felt authorized to do such grave terrorist acts, it is because after the collapse of the Soviet Union there is lacking an “active collaboration to limit the tendency towards war, to make it a ‘cold’ one.” The current war, in a word, is also the pursuit of (bad) politics by other means. Terrorism invades the space that political chaos allows it to occupy.
The list of previous damages–recent errors and long-standing ones–to be repaired is long, and quite instructive. We can start right with Afghanistan in the 1990s, when Washington shut its eyes to the rise of the Taliban, and also to what was happening in Pakistan, a faithful Anglo-American ally. Pakistan was undermined by fundamentalism, which fanned the embers of its atavic war with India, and was turning into a dangerous atomic power. At the time, no one intervened, and now it is not easy to find a remedy. Thus, we are paying today for the mismanagement of the Gulf War. Osama Bin Laden has repeated more than once that he became a terrorist because of that war, when the “infidels” profaned the soil of Saudi Arabia, custodian of the holy places of Islam. This statement may seem excessive to us, but for the Arabs it is dramatically true. Could things have been handled better? Maybe so. Just as they could have been handled better with Iraq. It is hypocritical to continue to wave about the threat of Saddam Hussein (which is a very real one) after having pardoned him and left him in place eleven years ago.

The errors of Lawrence of Arabia
In Bin Laden’s famous television proclamation, there is an interesting passage that many have missed, which is when the terrorist said, “For eighty years the Islamic nation has been subjected to wrongs and humiliations.” The date corresponds more or less to the unfortunate “restructuring” of the Near and Middle East as far as India enacted by the British Empire, which comprised the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the constitution of Saudi Arabia and other improbable “cushion-states,” the non-birth of a Kurdish state, and later the birth of an Indian-Islamic state, which is Pakistan. This arrangement opened the path for intra-Islamic enmities that are devastating still today. As we can see, the legacy of history is a very heavy one. And we certainly do not want to lay all the blame at the door of the former British Empire. The fact is that today, more than ever, it is clear that it is impossible to think about a framework of peace with the Islamic world without excising deeply at least some of these infected tumors.

Islam, but which one
And then, there are different kinds of Islam, at least on a political level. There is Wahabita Islam, which is that of Bin Laden and the Saudis. It is an intransigent religious Puritanism. This is why, for example, Arabia, although it is considered the Americans’ best ally, is at the same time the country that is most hostile toward Christians, as well as the reasonably overt financier of the groups devoted to the penetration of Islam into Africa and Europe. In contrast, the secular and “Socialist-leaning” Islam common to countries like Syria and Iraq (considered great enemies of the United States) is more tolerant with other religions, Christians first of all. This should suffice to show that the equation between the interests of the West and the interests of the Church is not always an exact one. If the United States really wants to contain fundamentalism, its leaders have to rethink their entire system of alliances, forcing more than one sheik to change his policies.
We must also watch out not to expose “moderate” countries like Egypt to the risk of fundamentalist contagion. And too, with countries traditionally considered enemies, like Libya, Syria, or Iran, it will be necessary in the end to sign some political “IOUs.” The Israeli-Palestinian question is so complex that it is impossible even to touch on it in passing. It is equally clear that every road to peace in the entire region runs through Jerusalem.

A new Yalta?
These are just some of the problems on the table. Will it be possible to solve them? Here we are right back at the beginning–at the necessity, that is, for a strong world power capable of governing arms (and making them cease firing). Observers from all over the world agree in maintaining that a first result of the war could be precisely a new pact of power between Washington and Moscow, or even between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. The newspapers recently saluted the meeting in Shanghai between Bush, Vladimir Putin, and Jang Zemin as “a new Yalta,” a new pact to divide up the areas of influence in the world. It may be exaggerated and premature, but undoubtedly two things have happened: China has been transformed from a great enemy into a possible ally for Bush. And above all, Russia has come back to being the United States’ alter ego on the world stage, in the name of a new balance of power. In short, what died in the collapse of the Soviet Union might be reborn now from the blood of the Twin Towers and Kabul.
Can this new world order really be born? The unknowns are many. But if one thing is sure, it is that the imperial iron pacts are not enough by themselves. During the Cold War, the United Nations played an important role as a “compensation chamber” for grave conflicts. Afterwards, many critics, especially American, chose to celebrate the end of the UN’s usefulness, claiming even that it was damaging in a world that was by now falling into the ranks of one sole chain of command. Recent facts have shown that this is not the case, even if it must be admitted that, since September 11th, the UN has been conspicuous mainly by its absence and its lack of specific gravity. But today, no one can fail to notice the importance of a super-national body, reformed as one will, but capable of contributing to the maintenance of peace.