The Purpose of Terrorism is to Terrorize

As the late Molly Ivins might have said, the Bush administration with its focus on military action has "brought a knife to a gunfight" when it comes to the war on terror. The whole approach of the Administration and the neo-conservative ideologues that have been driving the "war on terror" demonstrates that they don't understand the fundamental nature of terrorism.

Vladimir Lenin once famously said that "the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize." Although terrorism employs violent means, and often uses military weaponry to execute attacks and massacres - the objective of a terrorist act isn't military victory. In fact, military forces are almost never the target of terrorist attacks. The objective of a terrorist attack is political reaction. The strategy behind such attacks is for them to be the catalyst, direct or indirect, for political change that weakens the enemy.

In classic political/strategic theory, the purpose of terrorism is to create a political psychology of fear and anger that persuades a government to undertake repressive and violent activities against its own populace, gradually losing their support, and eventually causing its own demise. Like a mite irritating a scorpion enough to persuade it to sting itself to death - the real weapon of terrorists isn't their bombs and guns - it is the the reactions they provoke. The harsher, more violent, brutal, and unreasonable those reactions are - the more successful the terrorist campaign becomes.

In essence terrorism is a form of political/military ju-jitsu - using a larger and more powerful opponent's strengths to weaken and defeat them. It allows a small group of ruthless individuals to disrupt and potentially destabilize a much more powerful state or society. History shows that despite the distaste and moral outrage that "civilized" society has always voiced for such tactics - they can be quite effective.

It is fashionable in many circles to claim that terrorists have never successfully achieved the overthrow of a state. While it is technically true, it is also fundamentally false. The terrorists themselves never overthrew a state, but the movements they spawned have overthrown numerous states -from Czarist russia to Eire, to the colonial wars of independence to governments too numerous to mention in modern times. Terrorism is an extremely effective form of armed propaganda -which is why it remains so popular.

When terrorists decide to attack a government, the first objective they have is to alienate the public from their government or leadership. By blowing up bombs and killing innocent victims, they want to create an impression that the government is incompetent and impotent to protect its citizens.

As angry demand for action mounts -and the government begins to employ ever more violent, illegal, and repressive counter measures, terrorists try and position themselves in the public mind as Davids against the Goliath of the government. They often adopt the mantle of representing the "true values" of "democracy and justice" as the government moves to more undemocratic and repressive measures. At some point, if the campaign is successful, the military overreactions of the regime will actually rise to a level where they cause more physical harm and suffering than the terrorist bombings and activities.

At this point, insurgent groups and guerrilla bands will start to form to protect the people from their own military and police, and the conflict will spread and transform into a guerilla conflict between military forces. As the war widens, other political actors may become involved. Eventually, the outcome at this stage is usually revolution and the destruction of the government or protracted civil war.

A government facing the threat of terrorist attack has two broad approaches it can take to combat and counter a concerted terrorist campaign.

It can respond to such attacks with overwhelming military force, seeking to wipe out the terrorists and their supporters with even more coordinated firepower and violent action than the terrorists themselves are using. To do so, it will have to abandon normal peacetime limitations on the use of force and legal restrictions on the activities of troops. The theory behind this approach is that through overwhelming military response they can cripple the terrorists infrastructure and "shock and awe" the terrorists and their supporters into abandoning their campaign. The problem with this approach, which the Bush administration and the Pentagon have adopted in the "war on terror," is that it doesn't work and it's a very bad anti-terrorist strategy.

It doesn't work because in the first place a well organized terror campaign doesn't have the kind of infrastructure that is particularly vulnerable to military attack. What structures there are - bomb factories, money and arms caches, and propaganda cells are small in size, scattered, and tucked away in the midst of the civilian population. In the second place, the terrorists themselves are hidden in the civilian population - so even if terrorists can be identified and found, any large scale military style attack is almost assured of killing or wounding more civilians than terrorists.

The late sales guru Joe Girard wrote that every person a salesperson talks to is directly connected to 250 other people - who will hear favorable or unfavorable reports depending upon how the salesperson does their job. Joe developed this theory based upon statistics he gathered about attendance at funerals - how many people were close enough to the deceased to take the trouble to attend their funeral. I use this example to illustrate the fundamental point that every civilian killed, wounded, left homeless, humiliated, or otherwise treated badly by military troops is connected to a large network of family and friends in the civilian population whose support a government must have and retain to defeat the terrorists.

To use a real world example, if a government surrounds and attacks a terrorist headquarters with troops, tanks and helicopters and kills all of the thirty terrorists stationed there, while they may claim a military victory it is almost certain that they have suffered a political defeat. In basic terms, they will have only won a victory if they managed to conduct the military operation without killing, wounding, or damaging the property of any civilian in the neighborhood - which given the firepower of military forces is highly unlikely to say the least. Every civilian they accidentally kill or wound in the process,: every home, apartment or vehicle they destroy or damage: results in the disaffection of the victims friends and family. So, if they killed a half dozen civilians, wounded another dozen, and destroyed two small apartment blocks that housed ten families - not an unreasonable amount of "collateral damage" for taking out a heavily armed terrorist headquarters - they will have created a level of disaffection in about 10,000 people if Joe was right. This is what explains the polls that show that 75% of Iraqis now want US troops to leave -even though most of those respondents were supportive and grateful shortly after those same troops overthrew Sadaam Hussein.

To be continued in post 2

Illegal immigration - who are the real criminals?

In a desperate bid to retain control of Congress, last summer the Republicans decided to play the race card and make illegal immigration one of their top issues. For months the right wing lunatic fringe, led by poster child Tom Tancredo, had been whipping up hysteria about the issue. Convoys of gun toting xenophobes and racists calling themselves "minutemen" rushed to the Arizona border to posture, menace unarmed civilians, and drink beer. The whole idea was to persuade middle America that brown skinned illegals were to blame for their increasingly difficult economic lot in life -and to appeal to that ingrained xenophobia and propensity for paranoia that has played so well for the neo-cons since Reagan. Unfortunately for Rove and his colleagues, while most Americans ARE concerned about the stagnation of their wages and declining standard of living - they are also smart enough to recognize that illegal immigrants are not engaged in a vast conspiracy to ruin the American economy as the rhetoric suggests.

The Democratic response was to mobilize large numbers of the hispanic community, including large numbers of illegals, and claim that illegal immigration wasn't a problem but rather a benefit to America. By pointing out the inherent racism of the Republican rhetoric, they cynically hoped to score big popularity points in the hispanic community - a key battleground demographic in a lot of purple states. To an extent, it worked. They gained significantly in popularity with hispanic voters. However, with typical Democratic shortsightedness, they did so at the expense of credibility with middle America.

Middle America understands that, rhetoric aside, illegal immigration IS a serious problem for the American worker. While the rhetoric about their drain on social services is largely fictitious, we all know that illegal immigrants do take American jobs, and that they drive down wages in the industries in which they work. The truth is that, coming from countries where the cost of living is a small fraction of what is typical in the US, these workers can afford to work for wages so low that American's can't afford to take them. By sharing costs, and keeping living expenses to a minimum, illegal workers can send dollars back to countries where such currency is able to purchase a much higher standard of living than they would be able to earn working on their own local economy. American workers can't do this - they have rent and utility payments due in dollars at American rates.

At the same time, while we resent the unfair competition that these illegal workers represent, most of us respect the courage, work ethic, and devotion to family that drives someone to risk death or deportation to find work that will provide a better life for their children and families. We understand that the vast majority of these folks aren't robbers, or drug dealers, or murderers. They are normal folks who have strong moral and family values -and make good neighbors and friends. These aren't bad people - but by the nature of who they are and what they are doing - they ARE taking the food off of the tables of American workers.

So if the illegal immigrants aren't the economic terrorists and social parasites that the right wing is claiming, and they aren't the saintly victims of unreasonable prejudice that the left is claiming - who are the bad guys? The answer is simple - the corporations and business owners who are hiring illegals.

Business owners and corporations are almost the exclusive beneficiaries from illegal immigration. Businesses are able to hire illegals for a fraction of the wages that an American would require to live a reasonable lower middle class life. Because of this unfair competition in the labor market, they have been able to lower wages in industries that used to provide respectable working class jobs only a few decades ago. Illegal immigrants do take jobs that many Americans would want. The current classic example is construction. The work crews at most of the construction sites in the Southwest have an inordinately large percentage of illegal immigrants. This isn't by accident. Such workers are willing to take jobs for $8 or $10 per hour that five years ago were paying $10 to $12 per hour and providing good jobs for young Americans just out of high school. Moreover, these workers are at the mercy of their employers. If they complain about unfair treatment, non-existent benefits, safety violations, or illegal activities - they can not only be fired, they can be deported. It's a win/win for business owners - who get to exploit the illegal immigrants, gain a workforce that is almost entirely at their mercy, and keep the extra money they gain by doing so for themselves.

Unfortunately, this exploitation not only hurts the illegal immigrants that have to suffer it, it hurts American workers. As an example, they keep wages so low in the service industries that many Americans simply can't afford to do such work. In many places, it is possible for both parents in a family of four to work full time in such jobs and have the family still not rise above the federal poverty level guidelines.

Business interests claim that illegals take jobs that American's won't do. That's a lie. They take jobs that American's won't do FOR THE STARVATION WAGES BEING OFFERED. Place an advertisement for hotel housekeepers for $15 per hour instead of $6.50 per hour and see how many qualified applicants you'll get. Last year, Senator John McCain met with union representatives to discuss the issue of illegal immigration and told the audience that Americans wouldn't do stoop labor if it paid $50 per hour. He was drowned out by a chorus from the audience who said that they would. The truth of the matter is that there is no job being done by illegal immigrants that American workers wouldn't do if the pay were good enough. If the US labor market was truly a fair and competitive market, businesses would be forced to pay such higher wages. It is only because of the distortion of having a large supply of illegal labor willing to work for noncompetitive wages that they are able to keep wages so low.

So if the bad guys of the illegal immigration issue are clearly the business owners and corporations that hire illegals, and illegal immigration is clearly hurting American workers, why aren't they a prominent part of the debate? Why aren't the Republicans screaming for criminal punishment for those that hire illegals? The reason is simple - the businesses and corporations that hire illegals are also political contributors.

Last month immigration officials raided Swift meat processing plants in a number of states. They found that the number of illegal workers at some plants constituted more than 80% of the workforce. Thousands of workers were detained and are currently being processed for deportation. Local workers in many of these areas had long alleged a clear corporate bias for illegal workers -and had complained to immigration officials and politicians with no result. Yet despite this consistent pattern of hiring large numbers of illegal immigrants visible at plants across a number of states - no corporate officer at Swift has reportedly been detained or threatened with prosecution. Does anyone really doubt that the hiring of illegal immigrants on this scale was done without corporate knowledge and complicity? It was clearly in the Swift company's interest to hire illegals over regular American workers, and they clearly profited by doing so. Yet the only ones who are likely to pay are the workers who got caught, and perhaps a few shift foremen. The corporate officers who benefited from the violations of the law will go off Scot free -and hire more illegals as soon as they feel they can safely do so.

If we want to solve the illegal immigration problem, the only way to do so is to focus our efforts on the businesses and corporations that hire illegal immigrants and create the demand for illegal workers. If the jobs aren't available, illegal immigrants won't come. To do this, we need for existing laws to be enforced, additional laws that make it a criminal offence to hire illegals, regulations that allow a pattern of paying excessively low wages to constitute evidence of an intent to hire illegal aliens and grounds for investigation, and an immigration service that takes its focus away from rounding up illegals at the border to rounding up corporate executives and business owners. When we see border patrol agents at golf courses leading construction company owners and meat processing company executives off in handcuffs, we will know that we are finally getting a handle on illegal immigration.

If the Democratic party wants to really help American workers and take this issue away from the Republicans, that is where their focus needs to be. The real criminals of the illegal immigration issue are the business owners and corporate managers that hire illegal immigrants -and that's where the focus of new legislation and new initiatives needs to be. Not on building fences, making it easier for businesses to use guest worker visas to keep wages artificially low, or punishing the victims. However, I bet that's exactly what we will wind up doing.

The Road out of Iraq Leads Through New York

The Road Out of Iraq Leads Through New York

By David Gowdey

The farcical notion that a military escalation will result in positive change in Iraq is just the latest example of the neo-conservative disconnect from reality that has made this Administration such a foreign policy disaster. Like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, the Administration is doing its best to evade the obvious in Iraq. What's obvious to the rest of the world, and to the majority of the American public, is that a wrongheaded strategy and four years of mismanagement has made "victory" in Iraq impossible. The problems in Iraq can not be solved with military force because they are political problems that require a political solution. Ultimately, the road out of Iraq is going to lead through New York, and the sooner we get on that road the better.

From the beginning, the Administration and the conservative establishment has wrongly viewed the situation in Iraq, and the larger "war on terror" as military confrontations with political aspects rather than what they truly are - political confrontations with military aspects. As a result, in their over-reliance on military force, and their failure to implement serious, successful efforts at economic reconstruction and political reconciliation, the Administration has squandered whatever goodwill the US may have earned from deposing Saddam Hussein. The US not only created the conditions for the current Iraqi civil war to take place, it has become a de facto party to it.

In choosing to invade Iraq in the first place, the Administration and its neo-conservative policy architects made the fundamental mistake of believing that serious political and economic issues can be solved primarily through the application of military force. Modern history teaches us that this is rarely the case, and the past three years have shown us that it is certainly not the case in Iraq.

The question we are faced with now is not how to "win" in Iraq, because victory has been made impossible. It's how to get out in a way that doesn't leave Iraq a festering wound on the international body politic, breeding international terrorism; and how to minimize the considerable damage to perceptions of America and American power that the Iraq war is causing. The longer we wait, the more difficult that objective will be to achieve.

Major General Richard Dannatt, Chief of Staff of the British Army, recently summarized the dilemma that our past policies have created. In a newspaper interview with the Daily Mail he correctly stated that the presence of British troops in Southern Iraq exacerbated the security situation. This is true for American troops as well -we have become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The political aspects of the Iraq war have been consistently botched by the Bush Administration. In their actions and comments since the invasion in 2003, the Administration has consistently sent a clear message that they intend for American troops to stay in Iraq, and for America to influence Iraqi politics and oil production, for a long time to come. The huge new American Embassy, with its facilities for thousands of American personnel, is a visible example of this intent. This message was singularly unsuited to a country that lived for centuries under Ottoman and British colonial occupation, and its implications have not been lost on the Iraqis.. Even those Iraqis who hated Saddam have little desire to live under long term American occupation and influence. As a result the most important war we are now waging in Iraq isn't against international terrorism as the Administration believes and claims, it is against Iraqi patriotism and self determination. That is a war that the US ideologically should not be fighting, and in the long run, one that we can not win.

At the same time, a US policy that focused on sectarian politics and bolstered Shiite power to counter Sunni support for the insurgency, strengthened the sectarian divisions within the country and broke down the social order. As a result, US military forces are now fighting a guerrilla war in the midst of the Iraqi civilian population engaged in their own civil war. Moreover, our support of a blatantly partisan government so closely linked to Shiite militias has destroyed any vestige of credibility the US may have had left with the Sunni population. We have, in essence, become a party to the Iraqi civil war-supporting a government of dubious legitimacy, most of whose members do not like us and will not support us when the war is finished.

The only way for the US to get out of Iraq without leaving the country an utterly failed state and a breeding ground for international terrorism is for there to be a political reconciliation between the warring sides in the Iraqi civil war. This would isolate the relatively minor Al Quaeda contingent, and make their defeat or containment an achievable objective. This is still possible, as long as a negotiated US withdrawal is one of the elements of any agreement. However, the longer sectarian violence continues in Iraq, and the more entrenched the sectarian hatreds become, the less possible such a political reconciliation becomes. This is why any new US policy for Iraq needs to urgently focus on the creation of a political reconciliation process that will put an end to the Iraqi civil war.

Regional efforts to create such a political process, which are currently generating much discussion, are unlikely to succeed. Both Syria and Iran see some current advantage to having the US stuck in an Iraqi quagmire. Having the US military bogged down in Iraq, and US diplomatic influence crippled by the continuing war, makes it easier for Syria to pursue their own agenda in Lebanon, and for Iran to pursue its nuclear weapons program. It is unlikely that either of these countries, despite their public pronouncements, will be reliable partners in any attempt to find a political solution to the problems in Iraq.

The truth is that the future of post-Saddam Iraq is up to the Iraqis, not the Americans. Whether Iraq becomes an Islamic fundamentalist state, whether it descends into civil war, or splits into three, the outcome is no longer in our hands-if it ever was. Only the Iraqi people can make those decisions, and we need to turn the decisions back over to them. This needs to be the focus of the new American policy. We need to be looking at a political offensive in Iraq, not a military "surge."

However, it's important we recognize that the price that we will have to pay to put Iraq back together is going to have to be the complete departure of American troops and the American military presence from Iraq. We will not be able to maintain permanent military bases or an embassy presence of thousands of personnel as the Administration desires. That will be the inevitable price for Sunni and insurgent participation in the process. It is best that we negotiate this now, while we still can make some political capital out of such a withdrawal. The longer we wait, the less likely the chance for a reasonable withdrawal.

Ultimately, the only way achieve an Iraqi political reconciliation is going to be through a truly impartial national political process, starting from ground zero, that includes all sectors of Iraqi society. We are going to have to go back to the political drawing board - and all of the political structures established under American influence, such as the new constitution and the government will have to be reaffirmed or discarded by the Iraqi voters in this new process. Moreover, because Americans are now seen by so many Iraqis as imperialist aggressors, we can have no part in such a political process. US participation or overt influence would reduce the credibility of the process to zero. The only international body that has both the diplomatic skill and resources to hold successful reconciliation talks, and the manpower and experience to oversee impartial national elections of the size that would be needed in Iraq, is the United Nations. This is why, ultimately, the best road out of Iraq leads through New York. Whether we're wise enough to take it remains to be seen.