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The ‘war on terror’ has won
George Bush’s brand of “war on terror” has spread internationally as a favourite tool to cover up of war crimes.
US President George W Bush delivers
remarks on the global war on terror in Cleveland, Ohio three years after
the invasion of Iraq [Reuters/Jim Young] By Charles Davis Charles Davis
is a writer currently based in Los Angeles. There’s a playbook for
committing atrocities and being absolved of them. It wasn’t written by
George W Bush, now a retired painter of dogs in the US state of Texas,
but it was popularised and legitimised by his administration at the dawn
of the 21st century. And the world today, with its multiple bloody wars
on terror fought by allies and foes of Washington alike, sometimes
begrudgingly together, reflects this bequeathment. Terrorism is a useful
foe. Wars against it need not be declared, and combatants need not be
defined. Traditional warfare, with a uniformed opponent, brings with it
the not always avoidable bureaucracy of international law; lawyers
saying you can’t shoot this or that. No conflict is outside the law, at
least on paper.
However, an amorphous tactic can’t file a
petition at The Hague, and when every power of note is on the same page
with respect to the need to kill shadowy non-state actors,
extrajudicially, it’s smart statecraft to adopt the rubric of the war on
terror, with modern flourishes.UPFRONT: Reality Check: The failure of
the ‘war on terror’ (2:10)”Fake news”.
That’s the new line in 2017, deployed by
Nobel laureate and leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi on September 6 to
characterise reports of mass murder against the Rohingya people, a
mostly Muslim ethnic minority considered unworthy of legal rights by her
government. Nearly a quarter-million people have fled largely Buddhist
Myanmar in the last year, over half in the last two weeks following a
crackdown by security forces engaged in a claimed war against Islamic
terror.
Thousands have been killed, with refugees
and journalists on the ground reporting horrific scenes: mobs and
Myanmar’s armed forces burning down Rohingya villages, those who aren’t
killed driven away by the tens of thousands to Bangladesh, another
country whose government doesn’t want them, and only then if they can
get by the landmines placed along the border by the military that’s
exterminating them.
These accounts are widespread, but those
who wish to defend the perpetrators of such acts are savvy: they don’t
defend them, but rather dwell on the typos they find in a war crimes
indictment. That means reserving the thrust of one’s anger for those who
circulate misinformation, a problem during any conflict – apologists
for the Khmer Rouge, some still active today, indicted the mainstream
narrative about mass death in revolutionary Cambodia by noting The
Washington Post’s publication of fake photos – but one made all the
easier in an unverifiable age of instantaneity.
Aung San Suu Kyi blamed “terrorists” for
sharing those photos today. It’s “simply the tip of the iceberg of
misinformation,” she said in a Facebook post, “with the aim of promoting
the interests of terrorists,” an unsurprising goal for misinforming
terrorists. The dull math of a war on a terror (them vs us = whose side
are you on?) does not allow for much artistic freelancing, so redundancy
may be excused.
Russian state media, representing a
government that sells arms to Myanmar, appears to just be repeating
stock footage. According to Sputnik and RT, George Soros, the
billionaire financier, is the wealthy Jew behind this new war,
apparently in search of another bloody pipeline – mirroring the
conspiratorial explanation for revolution-turned-war in Syria. On Global
Research, a pro-Russia Infowars for a conspiracy-mongering left, one
may read that “Saudi jihadists” are behind the crisis.
There’s always a fight over what
constitutes terrorism and who is a terrorist, but by framing their
internal conflicts as a war on terror, one makes a familiar appeal to a
built-in audience.Bush, likewise, blamed everything but his own actions
for the insurgency in Iraq. “No act of ours invited the rage of the
killers,” he told the National Endowment for Democracy in 2005. Rather,
“Islamic radicalism,” he said during the height of attacks on US troops,
is enabled by “allies of convenience like Syria and Iran that share the
goal of hurting America,” and “use terrorist propaganda” to magnify the
impact of their support.
In that, Bush wasn’t all wrong: Syria did
indeed facilitate the transit of jihadists to Iraq. That led the Bush
administration to send terror suspects to Damascus, where they were
dutifully tortured, even as the US president admonished the regime of
Bashar al-Assad. Iran, too, aided Iraqi insurgents, but neither
government created the insurgency: the 2003 invasion and subsequent
occupation did that. Now, today, both Tehran and Damascus echo the war
on terror rhetoric of old, blaming the insurgency in Syria on outside
actors – in the case of Iran, actors other than themselves – while
denying any agency or cause to those fighting them.
Part of it is there are only so many forms
that apologism for war crimes can take; the practice necessitates
imitation and repetition. A cartoon that originates in Israel, depicting
an Israeli soldier protecting a mother while an armed Palestinian hides
behind one, has been repurposed by those who preach resistance to
Israeli aggression, shared by partisans of Syria’s Assad as well as
Egypt’s Sisi, both of whom are waging self-styled wars on terror in need
of excuses for civilian deaths. On Twitter, where hearts and minds are
now won, a similar cartoon has been rolled out by supporters of
Myanmar’s genocidal military.EMPIRE: 9/12 and the ‘war on terror’
(47:14)These supporters are echoing governments whose intent is not just
to justify, to their own choir, but to attract new and more powerful
support – from other states. Assad, for example, has made resistance to
US imperialism key to his brand, blaming it for the insurgency that
developed after he tried to bomb and torture his way out of reform. But
asked about his own support for the “so-called American war on
terrorism” under Bush, when “Syria used to help the CIA in the rendition
programme and interrogating and torturing people,” he didn’t even
challenge the terminology.
Syria, he said, has long called for
“international cooperation to fight terrorism,” he said. “That’s why
we’ve always been ready to help and cooperate with any country that
wants to fight terrorism. And for that reason, we helped the Americans,
and we are always ready to join any country which is sincere about
fighting terrorism.”
There’s always a fight over what
constitutes terrorism and who is a terrorist, but by framing their
internal conflicts as a war on terror, one makes a familiar appeal to a
built-in audience. Mentioning “Islamists” and its variants triggers a
Pavlovian alt-morality: the mass murder happens in the context of a
recognisable, civilisational struggle, enabling greater acceptance of
casualty counts while increasing the chance of killing, cooperatively,
alongside the globe’s leading powers. When the US government finally
made good on a threat to bomb Syria, those bombs fell on just about
everyone but the regime and its allies, friendly fire and a bruised
runway aside.
As US President Donald Trump, asked about
the Assad regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons, explained at a
September 7 press conference, “We have very little to do with Syria,
other than killing ISIS.” While the regime is responsible for the
majority of civilian dead, “What we do is kill ISIS,” which, of course,
means killing more civilians still.
A war on extremism can’t be won on
propaganda and military might alone – an insurgency, defeated, is often
resurrected, more extremely, when the grievances it exploits aren’t
remedied. But the war on terror logic and rhetoric spreads with the
imprimatur of the US and its official enemies, confusing those whose
politics are based on reflexive and binary opposition to one or the
other. It spreads in part because states that commit acts of state
terrorism can exploit an international system which values the sovereign
right of states to terrorise much more than people and their rights.
Every terroriser with a seat at the UN has
learned the tune, and the wars keep humming along. Bush’s regime change
in Iraq gave rise to the forces and political dynamics that would make
stability and a regime’s preservation the overriding concern of left,
right and centre. As hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and
thousands more living through war crimes can attest, from Yemen to Syria
and Iraq to Myanmar, the “war on terror” has won.
Charles Davis is a writer currently based in Los Angeles.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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MORE FROM AL JAZEERACOMMENT:
The article was written with the subject
under consideration with very eloquent ideas and thinking, but alas
AUTHOR was afraid to draw the conclusion be writing a few words, if the
terrorist movement is at all a want of the civilized world of to day.,
And if the people who started such an obnoxious trend of human killing
the author was so much drifted to the terrorists successes that he
forgot to mention its most adverse side of impact on Humanity.
I would have believed his gamesmanship in
writing article of such sensitive subjects with an impartial mind and
thinking, not to highlight directly or indirectly a uncouth inhuman who
produced the Israel terrorism back to the front line under cover.
Can the author say he does not know who
all are the mother of Al Qaeda, and ISIS. I can vow he knows. Then why
he did not mention there names and who all were involved.
The author of the article just wanted to
mention the name of the ISIS or the word Muslim terrorist but he did not
have the taste to mention about Israel’s PM the worst terrorist a
genocide criminal and a world reputed assassin terrorist, the defense
minister is a US listed terrorist so IS almost all are terrorists
LEADERS OF ISRAEL.
Israel is the mother of the ISIS , and
also along with it famous friend under the sanction of UK and French
CREATED isis IN THE NAME AND STYLE isis TO SMEAR THE NAME OF Muslims OF
THE WORLD.. now I keep an open challenge to ALL TO deny the mentioned
fact.
The author should not be given a cover to
write such one SIDED article to motivate THE PEOPLE OFF THE real intent
of the culprits and apportion the blame to large segment of people who
are innocent.
Just tink , how would the innocents be
hurt. This would be breeding contempt and hate at heart of heart against
the people of another segments of the world population just because
using the word Muslim as it would for no fault of any writer mentions
terrorist Christians and Jews killed thousands of Muslims or their
Christian innocent Christian and Jew brothers.
The article’s subject matter is definitely very good but very sensitive should have been handled with care and caution. T
The Israel’s want such article to high
light the Muslim’s bad name to hide their inhuman acts of terrorism within
and outside around the world including encouraging North Korea with
their audacious criminal activities. .
George Bush’s brand of “war on terror” has spread internationally as a favourite tool to cover up of war crimes.
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