While adjectives like "short", "precise" and "quick" sound great while describing coming conflicts, once they start, wars rarely oblige speechwriters. They are always long, dirty and dragging. "The war on terror" is not any different. That is why US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld moved, just a few hours after the airstrikes began, to lower expectations for a quick military victory.
In the month since the attacks on America, there has been a unity of purpose in the anger felt by all countries around the world. No one was ever in any doubt that the terrorists responsible for the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon should be hunted down and brought to justice, just as no one doubted that those who butchered 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica should answer for their crimes.
Now that unity of purpose and support will be qualified by the degree to which the damage inflicted in Afghanistan harms the innocent. First reports from Pentagon sources are speaking of a considerable degree of accuracy and success. But such assertions should be treated with caution. NATO was hugely confident that their air attacks in Kosovo were destroying the majority of the Serb armor. In the event, it turned out that only a handful of tanks were actually hit. Pilots had been duped into bombing dummy vehicles or the evidence of their onboard cameras was completely misinterpreted.
The United States and its allies are aware that the demonstrations and protests in Muslim countries, organized by forces determined to see the military action against the Taleban and Bin Laden as an attack on Islam, carries a danger far more serious than the consequences factored in their strategies.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have gone out of their way to try to emphasize that their quarrel is not with Islam. They have condemned bigoted attacks, after Sept. 11, on Muslims in their own countries. They may think they have made their case well enough. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that remain to be convinced.
Washington’s continued support for Israeli aggression against the Palestinians represents for many a double-standard that seriously undermines its case against Bin Laden and the Taleban. The state of Israel came into being as a result of a terror campaign against both the British administrators of Palestine and the indigenous Arab population. The Arab village of Deir Yassin was wiped out by the terrorists of Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who later became Israel’s prime minister. US money armed Irgun’s killers when they blew up the King David hotel in 1946, slaying 91 British officers.
After Sept. 11, the United States probably accumulated more support and sympathy worldwide than it has ever enjoyed before. But those sentiments do not represent an open checkbook of endorsement, which the United States can cash at will. International sympathy, particularly sympathy in the Arab world, is finite. Unless Washington can do a better job of proving that the violent retribution on which it is now embarked is against all forms of terrorism, Israel’s included, its support will disappear with the rapidity of morning dew and the world will become an even darker place than it seems now.
