I have often quoted Robert Dreyfuss and I've found his work in his columns, blogging and his book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005) to be some of the most helpful material in understanding Islamic politics and extremists groups and the effects of American policies on them.
But I've always thought he was being excessively optimistic about the overall nature of the terrorist threat to Americans and the US. I still think that, actually. But I'm beginning to wonder. In There Is No War On Terror TomPaine.com 09/13/06, he lays out 10 points he considers key about the Cheney-Bush administration's so-called Global War on Terrorism, with explanations for each of them. His 10 points are:
I. The threat of terrorism is wildly exaggerated.
II. Al-Qaida barely exists at all as a threat.
III. There is no Terrorist International.
IV. Iraq will not, and could not, fall to al-Qaida.
V. The Taliban is not al-Qaida.
VI. Neither Iran nor Syria sponsor anti-U.S. terrorism.
VII. It is not a “war.”
VIII. There were never any al-Qaida sleeper cells in the United States.
IX. Vulnerabilities are not threats.
X. No one is in charge.
He also has an article with closely-related material in the current Rolling Stone: The Phony War by Robert Dreyfusss; 09/11/06 (09/21/06 issue). Also available at Truthout.org.
This article gives a more nuanced picture of his understanding of the terrorist threat to the US, which is thinks is significant but not the monstrous existential threat that the Cheney-Bush team paints. He writes:
Terrorism is not an enemy, but a method. As such, it can never be defeated - only contained and reduced. ...
In the short term, the cops and spies can continue to do their best to watch for terrorist threats as they emerge, and occasionally, as in London, they will succeed. But they are the first to admit that stopping a plot before it can unfold involves, more than anything, plain dumb luck. In the end, the advantage is with the conspirators. "Stopping a terrorist plot before it happens is rare," says Pillar, the government's former chief Middle East analyst. "It's tremendously satisfying, but rare. It's a mistake to think we can improve our intelligence specifically to come up with that sort of prevention."
Rather than waging a global war, experts say, the United States needs to work closely with foreign intelligence services that know the lay of the land in their own countries to take down terrorists one by one. "Progress is measured one terrorist at a time, one cell at a time," says [Paul] Pillar. "We will be attacked. But there's a chance that we will be attacked less often, and less lethally." As unsatisfying as it sounds, that approach suggests a definition of "victory" in battling terrorism: The best we can do is to reduce the threat of terrorism to that of an ugly nuisance.
In the longer term, with each passing day, the heavy-handed U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israel-Palestine conflict is producing new terrorists. By his very policies, President Bush is spreading the virus, not quarantining it. The war in Iraq has radicalized Muslims all over the world, and it has allowed them to portray the invasion of Iraq as an attack on Islam. "The president says Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, but Iraq has turned out to be the central front because we've made it so," says Wilkerson. "Osama bin Laden is probably chuckling in his cave. We gave it to him on a platter, with a knife and fork."
That, in the end, is the most important lesson of all to be learned from the campaign against terrorism. The hatred inflamed by the Bush administration cannot be fixed by cops, spies or soldiers. It can be fixed only by a more unified and coordinated stance toward the rest of the world - one that creates allies rather than inspiring hatred. (my emphasis)
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