How to Fight Terrorism Peacefully
by Tibor R. Machan
It isn’t often that I will relinquish my chance of sounding off on a vital topic to someone else but this time I find it just the thing to do. My friend Alex Alexiev, who is now vice president at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D. C., has been promoting an idea related to the effort to repel terrorism that simply hasn’t received the attention that it deserves.
In a paper, titled "America’s Iran Crucible: Beyond Yapping Dogs and Superpowers Made of Straw," Dr. Alexiev outlines a strategy for undermining terrorism by means that should appeal to all those who find direct military action premature and perhaps even unjustified. Let me quote some crucial passages from this very provocative document, one that sadly the American government hasn’t been paying attention to, despite its declared purpose of dealing effectively with terrorism. In the section of the paper titled "The Political Warfare Option," Alexiev makes the following observations:
"The greatest promise for regime change in a democratic direction lies in a well-designed campaign of political warfare toward that end. The nearly complete absence of willingness on the part of the U.S. administration to engage in a systematic political warfare effort is our greatest policy failure to date in Iran and, indeed, in the war on terror as a whole. In fact, the very term political warfare has disappeared from our lexicon, except when used to describe campaigns against domestic political opponents.
"Yet, political warfare is and has always been an indispensable instrument of national power in times of serious international conflict and the United States has traditionally engaged in it, more often than not with considerable success, as in the Cold War. It is of particular relevance in conflicts of ideological nature like the current one that cannot be won by military means alone. Instead, what we claim to be doing or are at least interested in doing is something called "public diplomacy" an ill-conceived and futile exercise in political correctness unlikely to provide any meaningful contributions to U.S. foreignpolitical desiderata.4
"Unlike public diplomacy, which seems to pursue the objective of convincing our enemies that we are decent and well-meaning people or provide answers to questions such as "why they hate us," political warfare is about identifying an enemy’s internal weaknesses, analyzing them carefully and developing an integrated strategy to exploit them through the various instruments at the nation’s disposal. It is a strategy that holds especial promise in dealing with opponents that run politically oppressive and economically failing regimes that lack legitimacy and the support of large parts of the population. In Iran’s case, the regime’s vulnerabilities are numerous and glaring. It is a country where a significant segment of society has no illusion as to the reactionary nature of the regime and would support the democratization of the country.
It is also a country with a large, well-educated and, for the most part, democratically-oriented diaspora in the West which could serve as the catalyst in a democratization effor t. Given these existing conditions, in order to be effective, a political warfare campaign would have to be in sync with the quintessential interests and aspirations of the Iranians themselves and help them understand that while the mullah regime presents a problem for the West it presents an existential threat to the socio-economic future and the physical security of its people. A sophisticated political warfare campaign would necessitate a detailed study of the regime vulnerabilities and formulating a set of key messages to be delivered with the appropriate instruments. This is clearly beyond the scope of this essay, but the few examples below should provide a sample of what possibilities exist...."
Alexiev does not totally dismiss the usefulness of military preparedness vis-à-vis Iranian fanaticism and President Ahmadinejad’s "recent calls for the annihilation of Israel." He does, however, indict both America’s and Europe’s failure to seriously to consider the political warfare option, including the largely private option of divesting in corporations that do business with terrorist countries.
It is interesting to note, by the way, that although intellectuals and others on the American Left were passionately urging universities and other organizations to divest in companies that used to do business with rogue regimes such as South Africa, the divestiture option vis-à-vis terrorist countries appears these days not to appeal much to Leftists.
Exactly why this is so is open to speculation but one possibility is the politically correct mentality of multiculturalism. South Africa quite rightly didn’t receive a pass on the grounds that, well, it just had a different culture from ours. But it appears that Iran and other countries that support terror do. So much for either consistency or wisdom from those quarters.
Discuss this Article (14 messages)
|
