Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts

Saturday, January 2, 2016

China's Vulnerable Muslim Minority

Islamist terrorism is surging in many places worldwide, despite bombing raids and efforts to influence moderate Muslim communities. In its latest tactics extremist group Islamic State is using foreign recruits to stage attacks wherever they are instead of joining the fight in Syria.  The recruits are increasingly disgruntled young men from Muslim minorities, such as Russia's Chechens and China's Uighurs.  Several Uighurs have been arrested in Indonesia on terrorism charges in the past year,  one just a day before Christmas. Extremists may not be the only ones exploiting Muslim discontent, according to reports claiming that Turkey is transporting Uighurs  from Southeast Asia to Syria to fight  against the Assad regime. I paid close attention to China's Uighurs during the 2009 riot in Xinjiang and am posting here my report from that time for those interested in the origins of Uighur discontent.



Washington,  2 July 2009

In the 6th century, Uighur-Turkic prince Aprin Chor Tigin wrote the following verse:

I desperately long for my woman.
With her lovely eyebrows, she is the fairest of all. 
yearn to be with her again.
Immersed in deepest thought, I miss her.
I burn with the desire to kiss her.

Prince Tigin lived and loved in Central Asia, a region where more than eight million Uighurs still make their home. In his time Uighurs shared their kingdom with other Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Southern Siberia. But they were far more advanced than most because they lived along the Silk Road, which served as a major route of commercial, cultural and religious exchange throughout history.

At the turn of the 20th century, scientific and archaeological expeditions to East Turkistan led to the discovery of numerous Uighur cave temples, monastery ruins, wall paintings, miniatures, statues, valuable manuscripts, documents and books.

German explorer Albert von Lecoq said the medieval "Uighur language and script contributed to the enrichment of civilizations of the other peoples in Central Asia. Compared to the Europeans of that time, the Uighurs were far more advanced. Documents discovered in Eastern Turkistan prove that a Uighur farmer could write down a contract, using legal terminology. How many European farmers could have done that at that period?"


When the Uighurs embraced Islam in the 10th century, they started to build mosques, religious schools and libraries. Remnants of the medieval Islamic architecture can still be found in cities such as Kashgar, Urumqi, Turpan and Gaochang.

In recent years, Uighurs have become better known as China's separatists, often labeled as terrorists. Even before this year’s riots in Xinjiang, the Chinese government had blamed various Uighur groups for 200 violent attacks in the past decade, including more than 160 deaths. Bejing says Uighur separatists are part of a network of international Islamic terrorism with funding from the Middle East, training in Pakistan and getting combat experience in Chechnya and Afghanistan. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, the United Nations added many separatist groups to its lists of terrorist organizations. Among them was the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, or ETIM. The US also has labeled this mostly Uighur group as terrorist.

But Xinjiang separatists say China is using the international anti-terrorist campaign to justify its long-standing repression of non-Chinese minorities. Washington-based Uighur-American attorney and activist Nury Turkel said the Chinese government has consistently enforced cultural assimilation of Turkic people with the majority Han Chinese culture. “They are using all the possible tactics, such as banning the Uighur language, banning the Uighur names -- they come up with a Chinese version of the Uighur names -- encouraging the Chinese people to marry the local people,” he said. But he said the Uighurs have never been religious extremists and that most of them do not practice Islam.



Uighur boys in Kashgar, Xinjiang

Several human rights groups have condemned China's crackdown on Uighurs. In a recent statement, Amnesty International said the ethnic identity of Uighurs in western China is being systematically eroded. Earlier reports have said the crackdown on suspected terrorists includes restrictions on religious freedom, closure of mosques and mandatory "political education" of academics, key personnel in the media and arts, and Islamic clergy.

But some analysts warn that even though the Uighurs' connection to international terrorism may be minimal, it has to be watched. Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and one of the authors of a new study on China's Uighur Autonomous Region, said examples of Russia, Sri Lanka, Serbia and other countries with large ethnic minorities show that frustrated independence movements may resort to terrorist acts.

He said religion plays an increasing role in supporting these movements. "There is militant Judaism, even militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka. So we are witnessing the phenomenon of religion coming in and bolstering, if you will, ethnic minority. So political Islam is involved here. How much will political Islam become a dominant force in the Uighur struggle? Today it has been a lesser force, but I would bet that if the rest of the Muslim world is any indicator, Islam will be growing in its role in China, supporting and cheering this nationalist struggle," said Fuller.

China has made efforts to develop Xinjiang, fueling funds into industrialization, education and employment, but Uighurs say the Han Chinese have benefited the most from it. Frederick Starr, founder and chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington, said China’s economic success will not necessarily improve the Uighurs' lot. He said some political change is essential to avoid violence. According to Starr, China is more likely to avoid conflict by allowing greater local initiative, communal self-government at various levels, and some expression of oppositional sentiment by Turkic and Uighur and Muslim people within the system.


The northwestern province is predominantly agricultural and pastoral, but it is also rich in mineral resources and energy. The oil fields in the far north are among the largest in China. The region has extensive deposits of coal, silver, copper and lead. It is clear that people who have called this land home for thousands of years must have more say in how these resources are to be used. 

Monday, November 23, 2015

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.

*********************************************************************************
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

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Education Against Extremism

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said that the military campaign to stop the Islamic State group has killed more than 10,000 of its fighters in less than a year. The announcement came at the same time as the news that IS had made advances in Iraq and Syria. A general conclusion is that the group is not deterred by fear of death, but no one is quite sure what drives these people to commit mayhem in order to create a world they want to live in. Hence the difficulty in finding out the right antidote.

Last month, the Oxford University announced that Louise Richardson had been nominated to become the next director and vice chancellor of the university, starting in January 2016. She would be the first woman vice chancellor of the university since the post was created in 1230. The Irish born professor is a specialist in counter-terrorism. According to her, terror groups are characterized by a "highly oversimplified view of the world" and the most effective "antidote" to violent extremism is education.




Speaking at a recent British Council conference in London, Professor Richardson said that "radical ideas belong in a university" and should be debated and challenged. She argued that education challenges the "black and white" views of extremists, undermining "simplification and certitude." Bill Rammell, vice chancellor of Bedfordshire University and former universities minister, who also spoke on the panel, warned that it would be "counter productive" to block open campus debate about radical ideas, because that would "feed the narrative of victimhood."

Certainly, such intellectual debates could help prevent radicalization of university students, especially those who are interested in developing their minds toward creating a better world. But for those already in IS ranks it's far too late.

One of the earliest proverbs I learned growing up in Croatia was (loosely translated) "from the cradle to the grave, the best is the learning age." It could mean that the nicest part of life is when you are a student, or that you should spend your life time studying.


In many European countries Philosophy is an obligatory high school subject, and inevitably a core subject at any humanity college. I majored in Linguistics at the School for Philosophy of the Zagreb University - clearly a Philosophy course was obligatory.  Discussions we practiced in these courses were later applied in the courses of Literature, Sociology, Political Sciences and others. Philosophy taught us how to think, analyze and explain the complexities of life around us.  It was one of my favorite subjects.

But most people have a limit beyond which they don't want to study. It often happens when a person graduates and begins to work. Building a career, making money, creating a family and other preoccupations take precedence over in-depth studies, discussions and debate. The conversations begin to center on things like mortgages, interest rates, electronic gadgets, quality of beer and house pets.  That would be an acceptable learning experience - it was for me - if another one followed. But that is usually where it stops. True, there are political and other discussions here and there, but their depth often depends on where you live and work.

Even if we do engage in lofty discussions, most of us become "set in our ways" as we grow older  and we have less tolerance for those whose values differ from ours.  Often, we have no patience to hear out the other side.  When I visit my "intellectual" friends in Zagreb, the discussions center around the best local dentists, the "in" fashion brands, family issues and gossip. The political discussion is reduced to general statements like "our political leaders are incapable" or "corrupt," or both, and "the country is on the edge of the abyss."  Even though the statements are true, one rarely gets an elaboration on the topic, and almost never a suggestion as to what should be done to change that. My French teacher says it's the same in France, so it's not just a local phenomenon.  It may be a little different in Washington's "elevated" circles, but don't count on a philosophical discussion in every bar in the city.

What a surprise and pleasure therefore it was the French movie La sapienza I happened to see this weekend.  Seemingly about Italian baroque architecture, it is a meditation on life and a reminder not to allow one's intellect to sink into the darkness of mediocrity, but constantly strive for light.  In La sapienza, film director Eugène Green offers an allegorical tale of a successful Swiss-born architect Alexandre Schmidt who professes adherence to French secularism, but has clearly lost passion for his own ideas. He decides to travel from France to Italy to resume research for a book on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. 




Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome
On the shores of Lake Maggiore, he and his wife Aliénor encounter an Italian brother and sister in their late teens. The boy Goffredo wants to be an architect and so he accompanies Schmidt on a two-week trip looking at Borromini's buildings. 

Unlike Schmidt, Goffredo believes in spirituality. A model town he has constructed is centered around a temple for all religions. When asked what about people who have no religion, he says even they can feel the "presence" in the temple. And how does the architect achieve this ? “Through light,” he says.

Schmidt told Goffredo of the fierce rivalry between Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The former's work is mystical and the latter's highly rational. “I am Bernini,” says Schmidt who is obviously attracted to Borromini’s mysticism. Telling the story of the two architects to the younger man, rekindles his own passion that has been smothered by disappointments in his adult life and the contemporary materialism of his world.

The purpose of architecture is to create spaces where people can find light and love, concludes Schmidt at the end of the trip as he embraces his wife for what seems like the fist time after many years.

As I write this, it occurs to me that tomorrow is another day at work, another day in the box
with no light or love, a place where no radical thought will ever come up for discussion, and a place where passion for one's own ideas is systematically smothered.

In La sapienza, the renowned architect explains to the young Italian that a Turin chapel housing the famous shroud was attacked by an arsonist because "people want to destroy what they fear." Islamic State destroys ancient monuments. One may wonder what they fear since obviously it is not death.  Could it be their own mediocrity - the inability to create something that can be admired and serve as inspiration for generations to come?  It is preferable to be feared than to be ignored.


If, as Professor Richardson said, terror groups are characterized by a "highly oversimplified view of the world," the question one might ask is why they don't keep it to themselves and let others keep theirs.  Why is any individual thought or trait within a group strictly forbidden? Why does Boco Haram discourage education?  Even thought the translation of the name would suggest that only Western education is banned, to my knowledge Boko Haram does not allow any teaching except selected parts of Quran.  So my guess is people in these groups use violence to prevent others to think and learn.  Anything beyond blind obedience could lead to questioning the "wisdom" of the leadership and prove it wanting. 

It would be wrong to assume that members of radical groups lack intelligence.  If Islamic State was made up of stupid people it would not have recruited so many people and made such impressive territorial advances.  But the group's vision of the world has no future because it lacks an essential component: the understanding of an individual's need to seek enlightenment.




The West is not free of people with oversimplified views of the world either, in fact they dominate in many areas.  They may not take up weapons and shoot like Islamic State, but they fight in other ways to subdue those who don't agree with them.  At work, it's the lowest-level supervisors who impose rules made up by the higher management, and penalize any challenge to their authority.  In the U.S. health care system, it's the doctors who refuse to see a patient as an individual, but run everyone through the same set of rushed procedures.  In the financial world, it's the bankers keeping clients hostage through loans.  In the government, it's those pushing for huge military budgets at the expense of education. In the economy, it's the producers and consumers of the tons of cheap and tasteless goods, including food, movies and music.  None of them understand the long -term consequences of shoving their rules and procedures down everyone's throat.  The only way to escape people with oversimplified views of the world is hiding away on Aldous Huxley's Island.  


All over the world architects, real and figurative, do build spaces to be filled with light and love,  but the light is often blocked by people with oversimplified views.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

International Money Laundering Perpetuates Global Poverty

Britain's HSBC is facing charges of fraud and money laundering from authorities in Belgium, who accuse the Swiss arm of Britain’s biggest bank of having helped wealthy customers evade tax. The Belgian authorities said Monday that “The Swiss bank is suspected of having knowingly eased and promoted fiscal fraud by making offshore companies available to certain privileged clients. ”

Earlier this year U.S. authorities said they had broken a crime ring that laundered tens of millions of dollars from drug cartels through businesses in Los Angeles, California. Authorities suspect that drug cartels were funneling their profits through the companies in an international laundering scheme.  Those might have included ransom payment made to release a U.S. citizen tortured by a drug cartel in Mexico.

Also this year, U.S. officials accused the British bank Standard Chartered of illegally laundering $250 billion in financial transactions with Iran during the past decade, allegedly filtering money through its New York branch in about 60,000 transactions with Iranian financial institutions. 

Illegal money transactions have come to plague the free market system because western laws passed since the 1960s have created a financial structure that facilitates the circulation of illegal money, wrote former businessman Raymond Baker, in his book Capitalism’s Achilles Heel.  
Raymond Baker
"This structure consists of tax havens, off-shore secrecy jurisdictions, disguised corporations where no one knows who owns the business; flee clauses that enable the trustee who is the nominal head of the disguised corporation to shift that disguised corporation to a different secrecy jurisdiction if anyone comes knocking on the door trying to find out who owns it; shell banks, anonymous trust - fake foundations where you can donate money to the foundation and then benefit yourself out of the foundation; false documentation, mispricing and a whole host of loopholes that facilitate the movement of money out of the dirty money structure into western coffers, ” Baker told an audience in Washington D.C.

Kannan Srinivasan, a researcher at Melbourne's Monash Asia Institute, said the easiest way to conceal unlawful funds is to move them across international borders. The absence of coordinated international legal and law enforcement efforts makes this possible.

“When money comes out of any country, one does not go very deeply into the origin of that money. Therefore, it takes on this new character of being a variety of international money and can sometimes come back into the very country from which it has exited because it is presumed to be a sort of international investment.” 

Srinivasan said many banks, including those in the United States and Switzerland, accept large deposits of money from overseas, typically without checking their origin. "For example," he said, "a person making money by running a prostitution ring in the United States could not by law deposit that money in an American bank. But if dirty money is earned outside the United States, it can be deposited in U.S. banks."

Drug dealers, racketeers, terrorists and other criminals have to conceal the sources of the money they earn through their illegal activities. So they usually have other legitimate businesses, such as shops, garages and restaurants, through which they channel their illicit incomes.  But money laundering takes various forms and is not confined to criminal and terrorist circles.

“Dirty money comes in three forms: corrupt, criminal and commercial," said Baker.  "The corrupt component is the proceeds of bribery and theft by foreign government officials. The criminal component is the drug and the racketeering and the terrorist money that sloshes around the globe in the billions of dollars. The commercial component has the characteristic of being almost always tax evading,” he said.

But many people are not aware of the devastating effect illegal money transactions have had on them and the rest of the world.

Baker estimated that some $ 11 trillion of dirty money were hidden away in tax havens around the world.  In addition, about $1 trillion in illicit funds crossed international borders every year, half of it originating in poor countries who receive aid. According to Baker, this makes eradicating global poverty a near impossible task.

“Consider the impact of this money. First, it eviscerates foreign aid.  Foreign aid has been running at about $50 billion a year, and higher in recent years. Match that against the $500 billion of dirty money that comes illicitly out of developing and transitional economies.”

Corrupt leaders in developing countries often use huge portions of aid money to enrich themselves and bribe those who help them in the endeavor.  Terrorism also is financed by dirty money and as we can see in the case of ISIS, there is no shortage of it.

Baker said that al-Qaeda had accumulated an estimated $300 million through the dirty money structure in the decade prior to September 11 attacks. "It’s the way that Saddam Hussein re-armed after the Persian Gulf War, buying munitions that were later killing Americans in Iraq. It’s the way that Abdul Quadeer Khan in Pakistan operated his nuclear network, buying and selling nuclear materials around the world," he said. 

Branko Milanovic, a senior scholar at the City University of New York, said international monetary laws should be tougher and more coordinated.
Branko Milanovic

“When you have people who are mutually benefiting from a relationship that is somewhere in a gray area, and which may be illegal in one country and quasi-legal or legal in another country, it is very difficult to actually go after them,” said Milanovic. "And having laws in place is not enough," he warned, "because even those already on the books are not properly enforced." 


Milanovic said the main reason is that most of the victims of money laundering are poor and powerless people in developing countries.

“It’s almost impossible for poor people to organize themselves and to fight back. They have no political power, they have no economic power and they have no access to the media.”

Perhaps more importantly, noted Milanovic,"the poor in developing countries often are unaware they have been harmed by money laundering."  
  
Huge amounts of international aid attract the vultures who siphon off large portions of it and often send it back to where it came from, using illegal channels.  Meanwhile, millions of destitute people die every year from preventable poverty-related causes.  

The corruption of international capitalism has prevented the spread of global prosperity, with those most hurt by it unable to prevent it.  Experts agree that new laws will hardly change a thing.  But governments can and should do more to educate the public and establish mechanisms to enforce the existing laws.  No amount of aid will erase poverty until the illegal flow of money out of poor countries is stopped.

*****
And on a lighter note:

http://www.tickld.com/x/capitalism-explained-this-is-so-accurate-it-hurts

Saturday, September 13, 2014

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.

Friday, August 29, 2014

21st Century Trends: Who Knew?

At the turn of the century pundits offered a plethora of predictions of what the new era would bring. Few have foreseen the Arab Spring and its reverberation throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Russia was considered too impotent to pose a threat to anyone.

At the close of the 20th century, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War sparked hopes that we were entering a new era of peace and prosperity. Instead, we saw the September 11, London and Madrid bombings, violent sectarian and ethnic clashes and a growing rich-poor gap.

Lack of freedom, terror, civil strife, poverty, environmental disasters and deadly disease outbreaks are among the common problems in the world today. Almost all of Africa is affected and also large parts of Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central America and now Ukraine.

Ten years ago, military geostrategist Thomas Barnett and author of The Pentagon's New Map said these problems beset mostly countries where globalization has not taken hold.

“If you are looking at violence in the global system, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in those parts of the world, regions and countries that are not integrating their national economies with the global economy, either because they live in an authoritarian state, or because they are isolationist, or because they suffer endemic poverty, or they are dependent on export of a single raw material, and that leads to poverty or mal-distribution of wealth - commonly.”

Barnett said that leaving these "non-integrating" parts of the world “alone,” as some people suggest, would only make their problems worse and the world less secure because of the terrorism they breed.

“We need to stop terrorist activities, illegal movement of arms, or money, or people, the smuggling of people, copyright infringement -–those kinds of things. And the reason why you need to keep a lid on those sort of bad flows is that there are positive flows that do have to occur.”


Some of these positive flows according to Barnett were legal migrations of people from overpopulated areas to under-populated ones, the flow of oil out of the Middle East and direct foreign investment from Europe and the United States in developing Asia. He said many of these flows were hindered by terrorism. Therefore, he predicted, this century could see more U-S military interventions like the one in Iraq.

Ten years later, Washington-based analysts Peter Eltsov says Barnett's observations were mostly right, but that he failed to acknowledge that socioeconomic and cultural configurations of these troubled societies make it very difficult for their people to embrace free markets, democracy, multiculturalism and other developments that can help make a country rich and prosperous. Military interventions like the one in Iraq cannot change that.


Peter Eltsov
At the start of the Iraq War, many analysts pondered the effects of the U.S. display of military power on the rest of the world. California-based business consultant and author Larraine Segil, saw the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a major milestone, which would shape the coming decade in the Middle East.

“I think that what has happened in Iraq is an enormous and substantial change in the balance of power in the Middle East because it has suddenly become clear that there is somebody in the White House who is prepared to take action to follow words. ”

Eltsov says Segil was right in that the war in Iraq upset the balance of powers in the region. But, he notes, neither she nor anyone else foresaw the advent of the Arab Spring, the emergence of ISIS as the most powerful terrorist organization, and the unprecedented growth of extremist violence so soon after that war.

Segil acknowledged that military force is not an answer to every problem. She said that in addition to U.S. military force, another powerful new trend was shaping the world in this century: a rise of various formal and informal alliances across national borders.

Such alliances, according to her, have a great potential to improve life in the third world. For example, she said, African leaders could reduce famine and disease in their countries if they allowed private groups in their countries to connect with similar organizations in other parts of the world. China's economy has boomed, according to Segil, in large part thanks to business alliances with Taiwan, the United States, Germany, Africa and Latin America.

Ann Florini, professor of public policy in the School of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University and a Brookings Institution fellow, agreed. She added that a wide range of transnational issues, from terrorism to environmental disasters to the global economy can be managed more effectively by non-governmental institutions, citizens movements and private corporations than by large international organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“The inter-governmental institutions that have the most influence right now in the world are the IMF, the World Bank, the World trade Organization, the UN Security Council, " said Florini.  "In all of those except the World Trade Organization, the rules are explicitly set up so that a handful of rich-country governments dominate.”

“The biggest problem is that most of the world’s population has been completely left out of global economic integration.  The overwhelming share of global trade and financial flows were among North America, Western Europe, Japan and some other parts of Asia. "

Florini said interests of poor southern countries have long been neglected. "There has been almost no foreign direct investment in Africa, while Latin America and parts of Asia have received much less than their fair share in proportion to their populations."

But she said, “NGO-s, particularly in northern countries, have had in some cases a very significant influence on global rules. They have had campaigns on poor-country debt. They have had campaigns on land mines. In those kinds of campaigns they’ve shown that they can have a significant influence in getting governments to consider a broader public interest."

Florini said that U.S. military prowess in Iraq alarmed many people around the world, and it also showed that most economic, environmental, social, health and other global problems cannot be solved by force.

Eltsov says her assessment of the global trends seems to have been the most accurate. "The interests of poor southern countries are still being neglected, and globalization has not been helpful to many impoverished economies throughout the world." Furthermore, he says, "the invasion of Iraq created a dangerous precedent:  Russian President Vladimir Putin used it as a justification of his own actions in Georgia and Ukraine. One cannot help but agree that force does not solve most global problems."

Eltsov says it was naïve for anyone to assume that the fall of the Berlin Wall would have signified the spread of free markets, democracy, peace and prosperity in the whole world. And as for the end of the Cold War, " it was significant mostly for the USSR, USA, and Europe - not as much for the rest of the world."

"As we witness today, nationalism and fundamentalism are on the rise in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, the Middle East and East Asia, raising questions about the viability of democratic values in significant parts of the world. Likewise, the economic crisis of 2008 raised questions about the viability and universality of market economy," says Eltsov.