Assigning Blame for Failure
A new U.S. State Department report on terrorism has revealed some interesting statistics. The report indicates that over 14,000 terrorist attacks have taken place around the world in the year 2006 alone. Which represents an almost 30% rise in such attacks over the previous year. The numbers cited by the State Department were obtained through an instrument of study compiled by the National Counter-terrorism Center, the U.S. government's library on international terrorism.The reality of terrorism attacks throughout much of the world as disparate groups seek to use any means at their disposal, however violent and destructive to advance their agenda leading to separation, sovereignty, suzerainty and empire building has focused attention on the need to contain these groups, to battle and defuse them, to break their resolve, to delimit their operations, to destabilize their organizational abilities, to restrain and hinder; above all, to ensure that all these ferocious clashes take place on their turf, denying them the opportunity to broach ours and wreak havoc within our democratic territories.
Hence the swiftly-identified need to assemble a coalition of forces capable of invading those geographies where the establishment of terrorist groups has been effected, along with corrupt governments which gave them safe passage. This led to allied military strikes, invasions and occupations which, reasonably enough, were considered the means by which to embattle and de-venom the attackers. The international agreements, creation and expansion of anti-terrorism organizations, the economic development programmes and heightened surveillance that followed the initial invasions were to have led to a solution to terrorism by ousting its proponents and creating an atmosphere for economic stability.
Didn't work and don't we know it. The plans and machinations of the allied democracies were met with a still-determined and growing terrorist component; here, there and everywhere. The terrorists learned to use modern technology in communication and public relations, they found ready suppliers of munitions and cash from disaffected states furious at the invasion of their near-territory and the destabilization of the geography that threatened their own. Mobility of terror groups between borders was facilitated by sympathetic regimes angered at the incursion of Western powers.
The determination of the combined forces of the West to bring freedom, democracy, economic success and trading interests into play in the occupied countries to ensure that past dictatorships, theocratic rule, feudal underpinnings would no longer serve to cause unrest in the population leading to dissatisfaction and ultimately attacks against public order and security came to nothing. It just hadn't occurred, evidently, that freedom and democracy could not be imposed overnight on a social and political system, a traditional culture and a religion of complete lifestyle not prepared to have their values overturned in one fell swoop.
There are those who now assert that it is democracy itself that is at fault, that the freedoms espoused by democratic governance invite the growth of dissatisfaction and insurrection. Social democracies go out of their way in the goodness of their collective hearts to be super tolerant of social customs and values at odds with their own and brought along with hordes of new immigrants, many of whom are simply unprepared to accept the values and freedoms offered to them in their new countries of choice. And who bring along with them the baggage of their deserted countries which had failed them but which they recall with fond longing.
That old human nature again; never satisfied, always longing for what it remembers was the best of times and yearning for what in truth equalled the worst of times. In point of fact, it would seem that the threats of instability and terror that were to have been averted by taking overt, direct pre-emptive action have been invited in the back door in any event, by an sympathetic, social-minded, freedom-loving democratic ideal which hesitates to see anything suspicious in people practising their old religions, cultural underpinnings, value systems, even when they run directly counter to that of the newly-adopted country's.
Signs seem to point in the direction that the more liberal the state is, the more inviting it appears to be of terrorist activity. Whereas dictatorships have no scruples in putting down dissent understanding the reality of the enablement of the exponential growth of dissent in a kindly atmosphere of live-and-let-live. In countries whose traditions are rigidly theocratic, dictatorial, totalitarian, it would appear that dissent is firmly under control. Democratization with its accompanying social niceties and egalitarian mindset appears to invite dissatisfaction particularly from those elements of the population whose past experience and cultural history never permitted free and easy living.
Some populations, through long cultural/social/traditional habitude embrace the discipline of dictatorship or rigid theocratic rule; the population needs the 'strong man' to lead. The passionate avowal of purpose to bring democracy and freedom everywhere seems doomed to failure. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the government of the United States has allocated over $700 billion to fighting global terrorism. Thus far it has proven insufficient to the task at hand, as terror networks continue to grow and thrive, threaten and prey.
We read the instructions on the wipe-out-terrorism kit all wrong.
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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