The Poison Among Us
The world has become a global village--this time, though, of terrorism. It is a lethal cocktail of globalized ideologies, worldwide instantaneous communications, porous borders, and radical extremists that have wiped out the line between foreign and domestic threats.
Our leaders face an extraordinary challenge. They must make all of us understand the uniqueness of this struggle: a better word than war, which implies dealing with states and soldiers in uniform, when what we are up against are stealth and treachery. This is not the all-engulfing conflict of the two world wars. It will be marked by unpredictable pauses between attacks, sometimes from an "enemy within," who will try to find ways to exploit the very freedoms and openness that keep a civil, democratic society together.
It is hard for a peace-seeking people to understand how someone, as we have just seen in London, who has been given the many benefits of his adopted society--refuge, education, and welfare--can not only hate the benefactor but express that hatred in the murder of as many innocent human beings as possible. Our culture of life is now in competition with a culture of heedless death that eviscerates the fundamental security concept of deterrence.
In our open society, there is no way that governments can meet their most basic obligations to guarantee everyone's security. We cannot possibly police all the vulnerable pores in our highly mobile, free-market society, but we will somehow have to fashion new security checks and protections consistent with our democratic way of life.
The difficulty will be compounded if local terrorist cells end up with nonconventional weapons, which has already happened twice--once in Birmingham, England, when a group was found to possess the lethal poison ricin, then a year ago in Jordan, when a terrorist group allied to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a leading al Qaeda figure, was barely foiled in efforts to carry out a cyanide attack on government intelligence headquarters.
A more distressing possibility is that our cities may soon be transformed by a stream of bombings disrupting everyday life--a bomb on a bus or train, in a pizza parlor, a school, a shopping mall, a disco, a church. Our Islamifascist enemies have no scruples.
But what, exactly, is their political goal? A "holy war" to establish a divine realm of the faithful seems to be at the core of their identity. But are there other objectives? Are we dealing with al Qaeda alone or with other Islamist terrorist networks? Does al Qaeda have an orderly chain of command? What's behind the strange titles they give to their organizations, not to speak of the names they give to the deluded young men who carry out their terrible missions of death? How do we separate those Muslims who have been so radicalized in the West that they are ready to destroy the societies that nurtured them?
Paying the price. Still, some progress has been made. The bombings in London and Egypt have stimulated a global alliance of political leaders. Europe, finally, seems to have seen the face of terror for what it is, as Americans did on 9/11. London has paid a fearsome price for its long tolerance of preachers who spew Islamic hate, inspiring jihadists around the globe, in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. But the betrayals by the British citizens behind the recent London bombings have also brought a dramatic leap in support for Tony Blair and punctured the apologists for extremism.
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