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COMMENTARY
September 3, 2003
Mindsets at work
Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. The first was when they blew up the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad killing among others their intended target the Brazilian diplomat Vieira de Mello; the second was the bombing at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf killing the moderate ayatollah Agha Hakim. The third yesterday was outside the Baghdad Police Academy. These in addition to numerous painful pinpricks including American and British soldiers when they are found isolated. Of the three big vehicular bombings the last was actually the boldest on the part of the terrorists. The first two targets were picked because they were not defended. Both the U.N. and the Shia clerics refused direct U.S. protection and ignored U.S. security suggestions. The U.N. went so far as keeping Saddamite guards on their payroll who could act as a fifth column within the compound. The Shia were not so reckless as that but the mosque-organized security detail was no match for cars packed with explosives. Whereas the police academy was though an obvious target for those opposed to the reconstruction and democratisation of Iraq more likely to be competently defended. By no coincidence the attack was more timid. A single packed vehicle was wheeled into the parking lot too far from the building to do catastrophic damage then set off by remote control. To get even that far they may have used a Ba'athist infiltrator. Readers in the West have usually no idea of the mindset of our enemy and are protected from finding out by the scruples of politically-correct journalists editors and producers. We both over- and under-estimate the enemy depending on breaking news. By Western standards the Muslim "holy warrior" is a coward looking only for the sucker punch and refusing to offer battle when his enemy is even slightly prepared. By his own of course he is not. The terrorists will attack civilians religious and other innocents and bystanders for the very reason they are unprotected. But the idea is not mere tactical surprise. He wins through fear not force of arms. He is not afraid of death as we would more likely be. He is instead by our standards almost morbidly afraid of failure. He wishes all observers to believe he is invincible and will avoid doing what might show he is not. Directly attacked himself he melts away. While the Ba'athist "dead-enders" in Iraq begin as secular fanatics; and Al Qaeda Hezbollah Hamas etc. are religious fanatics; there is no difference between them in practice and less and less in theory. That they are in full co-operation is obvious both in their selection of symbolic targets and their common tactics. It would now appear from available information that the U.N. hit was performed by Saddamites on an Al Qaeda target (the Brazilian diplomat was the man who negotiated the recovery of "Christian" East Timor from "Islamic" Indonesia). Whereas the Najaf hit was performed by imported Wahabi terrorists but on a traditional target of Saddam Hussein's. My own "flypaper" thesis -- currently ridiculed on liberal websites in the United States -- assumed this would happen and is proved by it. Iraq has indeed become the flypaper for Wahabi-sponsored terrorists in the region. It is a rare thing when the enemy can be persuaded to behave as we would wish him to behave -- to go where we are most ready to collect him -- but the U.S. presence in Iraq has proved irresistible. This does not mean that they all go there. It does mean that wherever they are -- and many remain under cover in North America -- their own morale depends on driving the U.S. out of Iraq and destroying the emerging Iraqi government. As ditto in Afghanistan the previous Wahabi setback. To their mindset domestic American targets are not the focus just now. They think of those as too well protected as being too far behind the front line. It is striking that no major terrorist hit seems even to have been attempted in the U.S. itself since 9/11 despite what I take to be the bureaucratic incompetence of U.S. "homeland security" which will not even use racial profiling or suspend such civil liberties as are normally suspended in wartime when lives are at risk by the tens of thousands. Note well: this is the one advantage we have with an enemy inspired by religious and ideological fantasies if as the Pentagon has tried we make a good effort to understand how he ticks. His behaviour will be "rational" according to premises quite different from our own. He is obsessed with symbolic rather than with strategic targets. He will go where the symbolic action is. But having arrived his other principle kicks in which is to hunt exclusively for defenceless targets. Need I add that all this could change tomorrow morning if Islamists are persuaded that the Bush administration is vulnerable to a cut-and-run impulse in U.S. domestic opinion. They work from an acute sense of irresolution in their enemy and are held back as much invisibly by the public resolution of President Bush as visibly by specific security measures. The enemy does not think like us. But that doesn't mean he couldn't defeat us -- by understanding our cowardice better than we understand his. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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