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SWJED
08-09-2006, 01:37 AM
Posted today by wretchard at the Belmont Club - The Sling and the Stone (http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/08/sling-and-stone.html).


Mark Steyn observed on a radio interview that what distinguished modern terrorism from the classic nationalist liberation struggles of the post-colonial period was not means but ends. Whereas the old liberation struggles sought to establish states in order to create their own society, radical Islamism takes over states to make them platforms for undertakings which transcends statehood. Radical Islam's ambitions are nothing so small as a state. They are after bigger game: a global caliphate or something like it. Osama Bin Laden was not interested in Afghanistan, nor Arafat in Palestine, nor was Nasrallah overly concerned about Lebanon -- these puny states were uninteresting except as launching pads for larger ambitions. Nor should we think they are overreaching. Matthew Stannard at the San Francisco Chronicle quotes a number of reputable military analysts who think that Hezbollah has just shown that terrorism can not only take on decrepit, failing states but even a powerful and modern one like Israel...

These analysts do not mean to suggest that Hezbollah is tactically defeating the IDF, but defeating it strategically. It is gaining its political goals. And one of the most powerful weapons in the non-state arsenal are the cultural institutions of the states themselves: their mass media and international organizations of states like the United Nations...

It's interesting to compare the political impact of the international reportage of civilian casualties in Lebanon with the nullity caused by similar events in Darfur. The Strategy Page reports that villages, refugee camps, and humanitarian organizations have been attacked and relief supplies plundered yet in such a pervasive and creeping way that news organizations have largely missed it...

Modern terrorism is able to exploit not only the spotlights but the shadows of the Western media. And it is largely invulnerable to armies. Not that a UN force of 24,000 or 240,000 would make any difference to Darfur. If the San Francisco Chronicle's thesis has any validity then modern terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Fatah or Hamas are resistant to the armies of nations in very fundamental ways. And to the clownish parody of a modern army which any UN force represents terrorism will be most resistant of all...

...A non-state (Hezbollah) at war with a foreign state (Israel) has voted to deploy the forces of a nominal state (Lebanon) to police itself, while taking orders from two foreign states (Syria and Iran) for the purpose of preventing more civilian casualties in a conflict it began until the forces of international states can interpose themselves between the forces of a foreign state (Israel) they have sworn to destroy and themselves (Hezbollah) under terms which in any case they have no intentions of respecting. To international diplomats that makes sense. In contrast, when "in Texas, Bush said any cease-fire must prevent Hezbollah from strengthening its grip in southern Lebanon, asserting 'it's time to address root causes of problems,'" his remarks are dismissed as the ignorant ramblings of an unsophisticated simpleton. But maybe it is really the diplomats who are lost, prisoners of their own paradigm, unable to make the mental shift necessary to defeat non-state enemies except of a very limited and friendless kind...

...the single greatest weakness of Western culture: its ability to draw a moral equivalence between anything and everything; between a terrorist camp with explosives and machineguns and a summer camp in North Dakota. It is really an inability to see anything in due proportion. Kofi Annan's assertion of "disproportionate response" by Israel against Hezbollah really makes no sense in world where an equivalence operator can be inserted between any two operands of whatever value. And the consequence of the fallen calculus of international relations is the tactical and strategic equivalence between a democratic state and terrorist non-state; the parity between barbarism and civilization.