Fortress Europe Getting Militarized

When I revisited Rome in 2006, I was disappointed to find that once wide open St. Peter's Square could only be accessed through metal detectors, at least during the pope's general weekly audience. I could not imagine it would become worse. But it has. The video news packages I have worked on this week about security measures in Rome, Paris, Brussels and other European cities all show the same scenes of heavily armed police and soldiers, patrolling major streets and landmarks. 

Apart from the quality of the picture and different uniforms, one could be watching footage from World War Two Europe. Officials in Brussels are shutting down schools, public transport and some businesses due to "serious and imminent" threat of terrorist attacks in more than one place.

Soldiers and police squads are combing Belgium's capital for suspects, lurking behind every corner. Officials are warning citizens to avoid crowds while promising to defeat terror. France has intensified its bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria as did Russia. Hillary Clinton said the United States must lead the fight against ISIS - "not to contain it, but defeat it." In this country as elsewhere politicians want to close the doors to Syrian migrants as a way of protecting the country from terrorist attacks.

About a year or so ago, I took an online course on terrorism offered by the University of Leiden. One of the things I remember best from that course is a plethora of facts and findings showing the disconnect between politicians and scientists regarding terrorism. For example, according to the scientifically collected data, more people have been killed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East by terrorist groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabab and Boko Haram than in the combined attacks in Europe and the United States since September 11, 2001. One could add that more people in the United States are murdered each year in mass killings or "ordinary" homicides than have ever been killed by terrorists.  

Yet, as the Dutch academics pointed out, more money has been invested in the ramped up security, including new agencies in the developed countries than in those most hurt by terrorism. The Leiden scholars also pointed out that these efforts have not made the world a safer place. They suggested that the money would be better spent on financing centers to research terrorism, especially in parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa,  the Middle East and other regions most endangered by violent groups. But most helpful of all, the online course suggested, would be for politicians to consult with scientists on the matter. ( I am not so sure when I see how some of our politicians reject scientific findings on climate change).

From what I can tell, this is not just the view of a bunch of liberal European scholars. Rosa Brooks, law professor at Georgetown University here in Washington, wrote in an article for Foreign Policy: "If we want to reduce the long-term risk of terrorism — and reduce its ability to twist Western societies into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves — we need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as ongoing problem to be managed, rather than “defeated.” "

Years ago, I interviewed Mark Juergensmeyer, the author of what is now a standard textbook on the subject, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. He noted an increase of violent terrorist attacks since the 1990s and said they are committed by people who see the world as being in some sort of "cosmic war." During the Cold War, he said, the world was divided into the communist East and non-communist West, with the Third World balancing in between. But after its end, "the rise of geopolitics and of a global economic system, although in some way unites everybody, it also disrupts traditional societies and gives a sense of uncertainty to people who feel that they are not a part of the new world."

According to Juergensmeyer, those who feel disenfranchised, especially  younger people, commit acts of violence or join terrorist groups whose leaders employ religious images of the divine struggle against evil in the service of their worldly political battles. The barbaric acts that seem senseless to most of the world, are what he calls "performance violence," designed to engage the world in the war, quite unlike the kind of terrorism associated with left-wing Marxist movements that was more strategic and had a more practical goal.

According to that analogy, a world leader who declares war against terror, would appear to be falling into the terrorists' trap. Many Europeans seem to think so. A German friend e-mailed me, "It's crazy. Total overreaction - like after 9/11. I thought the Europeans wouldn't do such a thing but apparently yes. And Hollande - like Bush - is of course internally weak and unpopular and now tries to exploit it to boost his image and electoral chances. It's terrible."

Pope Francis has refused to succumb to the terrorist strategy. In his address to the faithful on Sunday he stressed that the doors to the church will not be closed under any circumstances.

Ordinary citizens also have displayed more sang-froid after the Paris attacks than their leaders. Many said they were concerned, but won't allow fear to control their lives, and a video of a Parisian father telling his son "they might have guns, but we have flowers" went viral online. 

Of course, no political leader can ignore the terror threat, and short-term security measures are in order.  In the long term, I am inclined to believe in my grandmother's maxim "better to prevent than to cure " (a disease). 

What have we done all these years to predict, let alone prevent, the march of al-Baghdadi's forces from Syria into Iraq early last year? The sweeping victories by well armed and well trained fighters were a huge surprise to the general public who had never heard of ISIS. But sociologists, scholars, authors, even film makers have been giving us hints for years - decades - of what the future may bring. I mentioned Kureishi's movie "My Son, the Fanatic" in one of my previous blogs. 

Why is it that political leaders cannot read the writing on the wall when a lot of ordinary citizens can? Politicians react and over-react to compensate for the lack of timely action at a great cost to their nations, and it's just what the terrorists want. ISIS is now a household name in every corner of the world, partly due to their own propaganda, and partly due to the attention they are getting from the media and the political leaderships.

As Brooks and others point out, the best way to reduce the benefits terrorists reap from the world's attention is to stop overreacting. History shows that terrorism cannot be defeated by arms, and that safety measures work only until attackers figure out a way to circumvent them.  Even if you destroy one terrorist group, another one will crop up. But a lot can be done to prevent any new wave of violence by foreseeing it.  Closer cooperation between scholars and politicians might help produce a more successful final outcome in the so-called war on terror.

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Furter reading:
An academic study from 2004
http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/WyattBrownNY04meeting.pdf  

Recent article from The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/16/paris-attacks-isis-strategy-chaos/?printpage=true

Pope: World War III Fought With Crimes, Massacres, Destruction

During a visit Saturday to Italy's memorial honoring 100,000 soldiers killed in World War I, Pope Francis said that the current spate of crimes, massacres and destruction around the world could be considered a "piecemeal" World War III.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made a similar statement in 2006.  

Pope Francis, Redipuglia Cemetery, Italy

"We’re in the early stages of what I would describe as the third World War," Gingrich said in an interview to NBC's Meet the Press, as he called on U.S. Congress to pass a law that would enable the United States to use all its resources to fight terrorism. His remarks elicited mixed reactions.

Dennis Showalter, professor of history at the Colorado College in Denver, said current ideological and armed conflicts, as well as terrorist attacks worldwide, constitute a major global crisis equivalent to a world war.

“One never wishes to overuse this world-war trope, but certainly we are dealing with a comprehensive crisis with a global dimension," said Showalter. "Its scope far exceeds the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the question of Muslim acculturation in Europe. I think it’s comprehensive and I think it’s something that has deep historical roots.”

Showalter said that global war on terror actually has more characteristics of a world war than the first two world wars, which he likens to civil wars.

“Both World War I and World War II were essentially civil wars within Western civilization; World War I obviously. I mean, this was a case of states in societies with a very broad spectrum of common values, tearing each other apart.”

According to Showalter, one important characteristic of a world war is that it has an ideological dimension. He noted, for example, that the Nazis, the Communists, the Christian Democrats and others all fought for their worldviews. In that respect, he said, World War II was more of a global conflict than World War I.

“And I would say that the key to a true world war is global, universal involvement. And that involves communications technology. It involves transport technology and it involves what our French friends call mentalité. And I think in that context, this thing we are in now is at least as much of a global war as World War II.” 

Michael Ledeen, author of the book, The War Against the Terror Masters, defined the campaign against global terrorism as World War IV.  

“I call it [World War] Four because we had the two hot world wars and than we had the Cold War, which was also a world war. So that would be World War III for me. And this is the fourth [world war] because our Western civilization is under attack from violent jihadists all over the world: from South America to Asia, Indonesia and, of course, Western Europe and the Middle East, and the United States. So you can’t get much more global than that.”

But some scholars have rejected comparisons between world wars and war on terror. Alex Roland, a professor of military history at Duke University in North Carolina, said the two world wars were exceptional events, peculiar to the first half of the 20th century. One of their characteristics was the ability to determine the future of nations.

“Nazi Germany and the imperial Japan –- that is, Japan under the absolute control of the emperor -- their future was at stake and they both disappeared in the same way, for example, that in World War I, (Ottoman) Turkey disappeared," said Roland.

"So the fate of nations was at stake. It’s not at stake now in the so-called war on terrorism. This is just the most recent in a whole series of terroristic campaigns that have been made against advanced industrialized states in the 19th and 20th centuries and it is not to dismiss them as unimportant. Each one has been significant in its own way, but they don’t come any place near being world war.”

Roland said another characteristic of world wars is the unprecedented number of casualties – tens of millions of people. The Cold War, he says, was actually waged to prevent another world war.

“And the Cold War never resulted in a direct major exchange of weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union, but rather a whole series of proxy wars among their satellite states. But even those wars didn’t add up to anything like the scale of the world wars.”

Roland said a world conflict of that scale is not likely to happen in any foreseeable future. He notes that Americans often use the word “war” as a way to emphasize the gravity of an issue.

“We’ve had a war on cancer. We’ve had a war on poverty. It is part of the rhetoric of the United States in the 20th century to declare war on things. Franklin Roosevelt back in the depression, even before World War II, declared war on the depression and used explicitly military combatant language to indicate the height of the priority that he was giving to this as a national issue. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. But it’s all rhetoric.”

Meanwhile, Islamic State insurgents have taken large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria as they seek to carve their own state. The fate of at least two nations depends on whether they succeed in keeping the occupied territories or not.

Russia's annexation of Crimea and its involvement in eastern Ukraine has de facto changed Ukraine's border, and its continued involvement in eastern Ukraine may affect the country's ultimate fate. 

The death toll and destruction these and other conflicts are leaving in their wake, and the massive displacements of local populations bring to mind world war disasters. New conflicts cropping up while the old ones have not been solved do make the whole world seem to be at war.
 
Scholars and political analysts may not have a unified definition for the current conflicts in the world, but at least as far as terrorism, all agree it is a serious threat to humanity that must be defeated.