Blowback to homegrown terrorism
by digby
So James Clapper changed his story once again and says he didn’t lie to congress, that it was a “mistake”, which is crap.(He was informed of the exact wording of the question before the hearing.) But whatever. We can twist ourselves up into a pretzel over whether he deserves to be sanctioned and he never will be so that’s that.
He appeared today at an intelligence summit in Washington sponsored by two major industry groups. And he’s described as being depressed and down, presumably because he feels unfairly maligned. But he is also upset that the government has been forced to be accountable to the public, apparently believing that we’re all in danger because of it. I thought this was particularly interesting:
In a question and answer session afterward, Clapper said the disruption of a plot to behead people by supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group in Australia underscored the threat posed by homegrown sympathizers of the group, which he said is adept at motivating and recruiting followers.
From what we know of this plot (at least what the Australian government has told us) is a scary prospect. Now, whether it was a bunch of yahoos just jumping on the bandwagon is unknown and since we’ve seen a lot of allegedly scary homegrown plots revealed to be less than what they initially appeared. And yes, there have been a couple here in the states that were deadly, like Ft Hood and the Boston Marathon bombings. And that raises the question Robert Wright raises in this interesting piece:
The perpetrators of these attacks weren’t people who had been lured abroad by Jihadists, given terrorism training, and dispatched to America with a mission. They were people who, while in America, got alienated, got inspired by Jihadist propaganda, and, if any expert instruction was necessary (like how to make the bomb the marathon bombers used), got it via the internet. Apparently the kind of terrorism that’s hardest to fight is the kind that ferments at home.
And what makes it ferment? In both the Boston Marathon and the Fort Hood cases, the attackers seem to have been driven by the perception that the US is at war with Islam, as evinced (in their minds) by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, if homegrown terrorism is fostered by the perception that the US is at war with Islam, what should we do to counter that perception? Here’s what I don’t recommend: Declare war on an entity that calls itself the Islamic State, enmeshing yourself in combat that will last for years.
Obviously, this entity doesn’t deserve to be called the Islamic State, because its values don’t align with the values of the great majority of the world’s Muslims. But the relatively small number of Muslims who are vulnerable to the appeal of terrorism will consider a war against this “Islamic State” a war against Islam.
The problem of terrorism is complicated, and so is the problem of ISIS. I’m not saying that our thinking about how to respond to ISIS should begin and end with the question of whether declaring war on it will foster homegrown terrorism. But, given that, since 9/11, homegrown terrorism is the only kind of Islamic terrorism that has shown much in the way of an ability to actually kill people in the United States, it would be nice if the debate over how to handle ISIS at least included some discussion of the question.
You’d think so. But instead we have leaders beating their chests about “destroying ISIL” and hand-wringing from the nation’s spooks over the fact that they have to be even the slightest bit restrained when one of the major factors driving this phenomenon is that we keep waging war on Muslims. Maybe we could try not doing that.
Wright concludes his article with this:
Again, I’m not saying that the prospect of homegrown terrorism, or even of blowback in general, is by itself a killer argument against Obama’s de facto declaration of war (though I do think that, all told, the declaration was a mistake). I’m mainly just saying that America’s national security discourse is in need of repair. When we face a crucial foreign policy decision, we fail to factor in glaringly obvious considerations.
In this case, we were too busy reacting to actually think. Once we saw a couple of gruesome videos that seem to have been designed to freak us out, we obligingly freaked out. And virtually nobody of stature said, “Wait, let’s not get emotional; let’s think this through carefully.” Certainly not Secretary of State John Kerry, who said that ISIS, manifesting “sheer evil” was a “cancer” that must be stopped. (Dubious metaphor; with cancer, the medicine doesn’t risk making the cancer itself stronger, the way Kerry’s prescription for fighting ISIS does.) And certainly not Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who said ISIS poses “an imminent threat to every interest we have.” Every single interest!
A central lesson of the disastrous Iraq War is that one job of a post-9/11 president is to calm fears, not feed them. Some of us voted for Barack Obama thinking he would do that, and help restore reason to foreign policy discourse. For a while it looked like we were right. Now it looks like we weren’t.
Sigh …
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