16 DECEMBER 2006 Le Monde diplomatique

Intensify the witch-hunt

BY DAVID KEEN

ISRAEL’s attacks on Lebanon, the

United States’ pre-emptive strikes on Iraq (and perhaps Iran), use of torture

and imprisonment without trial — all tactics in the war on terror — have been

counterproductive. They fuelled anger and multiplied the enemy. Such anger will only

be increased by the estimate of 655,000 deaths in Iraq since the US-led invasion,

recently calculated by a team from Johns Hopkins university and published in the

British medical journal The Lancet (1). For every Taliban killed in Afghanistan, several

more are radicalised by civilian casualties caused by western troops; the flow of Taliban

across the border from Pakistan has not been effectively stemmed.

Perhaps making us safer is not the real aim. Winning the war may not be the point. Mili

tarily counterproductive tactics have been the norm in many developing countries; wide

spread attacks on civilians tended to attract support for the enemy. In Sudan, government

backed raids on civilians (today in the west, in the past in the south) stimulated support for

rebel groups. They were also lucrative. In the south, the lure of oil has been a key motive in

the creation of famine. During civil wars in Cambodia and Sierra

Leone in the 1990s, military factions sold arms to their opponents while avoiding mili

tary confrontation, since this kind of collusion off ered the prospect of prolonging confl icts

that legitimised the presence of government soldiers in resource-rich areas. In the Demo

cratic Republic of Congo, Rwandan troops tended to avoid confrontation with their

enemy (interahamwe fi ghters responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide) to concentrate

on extracting valuable minerals. We know that militarily counterproductive

tactics in civil wars may also bring political benefi ts: the continued existence of a reviled

enemy — Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, inte

rahamwe militia or Chechen terrorist/rebel — may help to justify the suppression of

democratic freedoms and free speech. President Putin has tightened his control of NGOs

in Russia in the name of defeating terrorism and subversion. Maintaining the enemy can

be even more useful than defeating it. In the global war on terror, too, making

money has been a key aim. US interest in Afghanistan is inseparable from the oil and

gas fi elds of the Caspian, just as US interest in Iraq is linked to the oil. Beyond that, fresh

legitimacy has to be found for the vast US military-industrial infrastructure that burgeoned

during the cold war (another profi table war in which the enemy was rarely directly engaged).

The demon-du-jour has been redefi ned as fundamentalism, rogue states, drugs, narco

terrorists, al-Qaida, Hizbullah. The terrorist remains elusive but the targets for retaliation

— Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Lebanon, Iran — are readily found on a map.

As Hannah Arendt understood in relation to 1920s Germany, when a military reversal

(defeat in the fi rst world war) is combined

David Keen is reader in complex emergencies at the London School of Economics and author of ‘Endless War?’ (Pluto, 2006) and ‘Confl ict and Collusion in Sierra Leone’ (James Currey/ Palgrave, 2005). This article was written for ‘Le Monde diplomatique’s’ English language edition

TOMAS MUNITA/AP

Home: an Afghan refugee and his grandchild, returned from Pakistan, outside their improvised hut in Kabul, Afghanistan

with serious social and economic uncertainty, the search for a clearly identifi able enemy may

become intense. The point is not to be right but to be certain, however fl imsy the evidence.

The lack of evidence linking Saddam and 9/11 is seen as an irrelevance.

Through actions that provoke the enemy, both sides may prove themselves “right”. When Algeria fought for independence from France, Frantz Fanon advocated the use of

terror to provoke the enemy and bring out its oppressive nature. Today’s terrorists have

turned the US into something that resembles their own propaganda: the indiscriminate

nature of the US war on terror (targeting Iraq after 9/11) creates the impression that victims

are targeted just because they are Arab or Muslim. Anger at the indiscriminate response

is exacerbated in the West by such events as a police raid on a house in Forest Gate, London,

in June 2006. A Muslim man was shot in the shoulder. No terrorism charges were brought.

If terrorists can seek to nurture the enemy’s brutality, the same may apply to counter

terrorists. Those waging a counterproductive war on terror stand to gain the perverse satis

faction of confi rming that the enemy was just as dangerous, brutal, indiscriminate and per

vasive as they imagined. The imprecision of retribution may be func

tional, as in the ancient witch-hunt. There need be no logical connection between the

crime and the chosen victim. The focus is frequently on the evil intentions of the victim,

which (as with Saddam Hussein) are presumed to be harmful.

It is the weakness of the victim (the lack of weapons of mass destruction, the military

vulnerability of Lebanon) that attracts the persecutor. The victim may be forcibly invited

to collude. Witch-hunts were legitimised by the witch’s confession; Saddam was invited

to confess to WMD he did not actually possess: torture and confession may legitimise

arbitrary detentions. Those who challenge the morality or effi cacy of the witch-hunt may be

labelled as witches, or now as anti-American. Punishment may be taken as evidence of

guilt. (Arendt observed of the Holocaust: “Common sense reacted to the horrors of

Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘What crime must these people

have committed that such things were done to them’.”) Many Americans, deferential to

their president, took the targeting of Iraq as evidence that it must be linked to 9/11. On the

eve of the war, a poll suggested that 72% of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam

Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Failure brings hidden benefi ts and the per

sistence of enemies. But an obvious defeat can still humiliate. President George Bush’s close

adviser, Karl Rove, proclaimed in the run-up to attacking Iraq: “Everything will be meas

ured by results. The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may

not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated.” It follows that defeat or quag

mire in Iraq threatens the legitimacy of the war on terror.

One trick is to maintain an appearance of winning through the creation of a new

theatre of operations. As the then Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said at a meet

ing of the US National Security Council on 25 September 2001, “Look, as part of the war

on terrorism, should we be getting something going in another area, other than Afghanistan,

so that success or failure and progress isn’t measured just by Afghanistan?” (2).

Of the 19 hijackers of 9/11, 15 were Saudis, but oil prevented retaliation against Saudi

Arabia. Instead, the enemy shifted constantly: from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban to Iraq

to Iran to Hizbullah and back to the resurgent Taliban. When each persecution compounds

the underlying danger, democratic politicians may respond with totalitarian logic. “The evil

has not yet been eliminated. But do not question the witch-hunt; intensify it!”

That brings us to Iran. A recent Time magazine report highlighted reasons why the US

might be expected to “reap a whirlwind” from attacking Iran: the likelihood that Iran would

retaliate by fomenting terrorism, inciting Hizbullah, creating mayhem in Afghanistan

and Iraq, and blocking oil from movement through the Persian Gulf. The feature added

fatalistically: “From the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the

military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown — over its suspected quest

for nuclear weapons, its threats against Israel and its bid for dominance of the world’s rich

est oil region — may be impossible to avoid” (3). The message is that no one wants war, but

it is coming anyway. We are invited to re-experience the sense of ominous inevitability that

preceded the attack on Iraq. Are we really so in love with destruction,

so fond of our favourite nightmares that we cannot hold back from actions that we know

will be self-defeating? ORIGINAL TEXT IN ENGLISH

(1) Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, The

Lancet , London, 21 October 2006. (2) Bob Woodward, Bush at War , Simon and Schuster, 2002. (3) Michael Duff y, “What would war look like”, Time , Amsterdam, 17 September 2006.

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