The Liberal Patriot

Another Skunk at the Garden Party: Britain's RIIA Report on Iraq

Leigh Saavedra - July 26, 2005

It's almost tempting to breathe a sigh of relief.

Raw, heads-in-the-sand stupidity is not limited to

those who prop up the Bush agenda here in the land of

polarized red and blue.

Last week the RIIA (Royal Institute of International

Affairs) issued a report suggesting that Britain's

backing for the war in Iraq had raised the dangers of

a terrorist attack.  The RIIA is a respected

organization, but its conclusion that the UK's

involvement in Iraq has resulted in boosting

recruitment and fund-raising for al Qaeda was received

angrily.

While interior minister Charles Clarke and opposition

party leaders mulled over further anti-terrorism

legislation to follow the London bombings, the RIIA

report sat, apparently minimalized and unstudied.

From what this reader deduced, wagonloads of words

were shuttled from room to room, from official to

official, all dealing with how to fight the

terrorists, without ever weighing in the root causes

of terrorism.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman was quick enough

with requisite words ("We all have to recognize where

this perversion of Islam comes from"), but the RIIA

report, getting TO these root causes, seems to have

been the skunk at the unhappy garden party.

The unwanted report read clearly that Britain had

created problems by playing "pillion passenger" to

Washington.  Security experts Frank Gregory and Paul

Wilkinson warned that "The UK is at particular risk

because it is the closest ally of the United States."

If it went in one ear and out the other, the road most

traveled by reports citing rising terrorism as a

result of Anglo-American occupation, it stuck long

enough for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to rebuff the

report with familiar words:  "The time for excuses for

terrorism is over."

For inexplicable reasons, the West is peopled by an

inordinate number of strategists who cannot seem to

see the difference between "making excuses" and

"seeking causes."  I'm reminded of the little girl who

sticks her tongue out at her classmates and tells them

their shoes are ugly, then goes home wailing that they

don't like her to a mother whose comfort we've all

heard:  "They're just jealous of you, Honey."

Right.  A little like telling a glassy-eyed audience

that terrorists are attacking us because they hate our

freedoms.

Causes are a bit more complicated than those

manufactured by the benefactors of the current war,

and yet they are not unfathomable.  Terrorism, NEVER

to be defended from the horror that it is, arises out

of helplessness.

Men have fought since they had nothing but stones to

throw at each other.  It may be hormonal.  But even

when stones were state of the art, there were reasons.

 There was a difference, whether it was over a source

of water or a more comfy cave.  There were reasons,

and each side fought with what it had available, be it

dirt, sticks, stones, then in time, bronze, gunpowder,

AK-47s, or bombs.  If one side is underarmed, it must

face either immediate defeat or use another tactic.

The terrorism that dominates the world today is

"Muslim Terrorism," a movement that has little or

nothing to do with traditional Islam.  It is, instead,

a result of the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in

1928, a trend in the Islamic reform movement that

attributed the difficulties in Islamic society to a

deviation from the ideals and practices of early

Islam.  The Muslim Brotherhood was created as a direct

result of the British occupation of Egypt.

With the formation of the state of Israel in

Palestine, the Brotherhood grew, seeing Palestine now

occupied by non-Islamic peoples.

Foreign occupation seems to always have been the root

of the terrorism that grew from the early Muslim

Brotherhood.  The South Lebanon Shiite groups, Amal

and Hizbullah, evolved into "terrorists" as a result

of the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of South

Lebanon.

The very radical Muslim terrorism of Khomeini's

Revolutionary Guard developed in response to the 1953

CIA coup that overthrew the last freely elected

parliament in Iran.

Hamas is another case of terrorism resulting from

occupation.  Hamas is the Palestinian Muslim

Brotherhood, and it turned to terrorism after being

rendered helpless to fight the Israeli military

occupation of Gaza.

Leading up to even more current difficulties, the

Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the

1980s generated the radical Muslim terrorism that then

unleashed itself into precisely what we are seeing

today. A chronology of that development leaves

Washington with egg on its face.  While terrorism was

growing in response to Soviet occupation during the

Reagan years, the CIA secretly sent billions of

dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in a

US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union.

What resulted was Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  While

bin Laden's big gripe later was the stationing of U.S.

forces on holy soil in Saudi Arabia, it was the Soviet

occupation that gave birth to the people who would

later aim their stolen weapons at the Twin Towers of

New York.

People don't like for their homelands to be occupied.

Generally, under occupations, the natives feel pretty

helpless.  Throw in a few atrocities, a byproduct

usually found in invasions and occupations, and it

gets uglier at an exponential rate.  A boy sees his

family blown to pieces by "Shock and Awe," and there

it is: you have a terrorist before he's even trained.

Well into the occupation, he may be willing to take a

dozen people down with him.

It's there between Israel and Gaza, between Russia and

Chechnya, between India and the Kashmiri Muslims.

There are those in the White House who like to soothe

us by telling us that "we" are winning.  Iraq is on

the road to democracy.  They repeat over and over

their one point to support that: Elections were held

last January.

Since those elections on January 30, terrorist attacks

in Iraq have more than doubled.  Futher, terrorist

attacks around the world TRIPLED in 2004, from 175 in

2003 to 655 in 2004 (Christian Science Monitor,

04-29-05).  In Iraq itself, 2004 saw nine times the

number of attacks as in 2003.  These numbers do not

include attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. State Department has not released figures on

the number of terrorist attacks and information on

whether they are increasing.  According to Jonathan

Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers, the clamp-down came

when the government's top terrorism center concluded

that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in

any year since it had begun tracking them.  Former

senior counterterroism official Larry Johnson has said

that the State Department balks at releasing the data

because "It might lead to the public perception that

America is losing the global war on terror."

Really.

In mid-April the White House decided to withhold all

terrorist attack statistics.  When the figures were

eliminated from the Counterterrorism blog, Democratic

Congressman Henry Waxman angrily responded:

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of

terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable

that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any

of the key data - from the public. The Bush

administration should stop playing politics with this

critical report."

Shortly thereafter, the BBC reported that it was more

difficult for the U.S. to keep this data from the

public due to Congressman Henry Waxman's having

released the figures.

What matters in all the squabbling about whether to

release the figures or the methodology for

calculations is that terrorism has increased

noticeably since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  What

matters is that the piles of dead bodies and severed

limbs and the overflowing prisons have not curbed

terrorism in any way whatsoever.

To angrily ignore reports such as the RIIA Report is

indirectly creating greater threats of terrorism than

ever.  American novelist Alexander Jablokov has

written, "The road to truth is long, and lined the

entire way with annoying bastards."  If Jablokov is

correct, we might wonder if the future victims of

growing terrorism have even a faint shot at making it

through.

_______________________

Formerly writing as Lisa Walsh Thomas, Leigh Saavedra's most recent book:

THE GIRL WITH YELLOW FLOWERS IN HER HAIR, a collection

of dissident essays, is available through

http://www.whatIdidinthewar.com.  Leigh welcomes

comments at saavedra1979@yahoo.com.

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