More terrorist attacks likely
THE TRAVEL BAN on refugees and visitors from seven Muslim countries entering the US makes a terrorist attack on Americans more rather than less likely. One of the main purposes of Al-Qaeda and IS is to provoke an overreaction directed against Muslim communities and states. Such communal punishments increase sympathy for Salafi-jihadi movements among the 1.6 billion Muslims who make up a quarter of the world’s population.
The Trump administration claims that it is following lessons learned from 9/11 and destruction of the Twin Towers. But it has learned the wrong lesson: the great success of Mohammed Atta and his 18 hijackers was not on the day that they and 3,000 others died, but when President George W. Bush responded by leading the US into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are still going on.
Al-Qaeda and its clones had been a small organisation with perhaps a thousand militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But thanks to Bush’s calamitous decisions, it now has tens of thousands of fighters, billions of dollars and cells in dozens of countries. Few wars have failed so demonstrably or so badly as “the war on terror”. IS and Al-Qaeda activists are supposed to be inspired by a demonic variant of Islam – and this is how Trump has described their motivation – but in practice it was the excesses of the counter-terrorism apparatus such as torture and rendition, which acted as the recruiting sergeant for the Salafijihadi movements.
The Trump administration is now sending a message to Al-Qaeda and IS that Washington is easily provoked into mindless and counter-productive repression. Those affected so far are limited in number and about the last people likely to be engaged in terrorist plots. But the political impact is immense. Salafi-jihadi leaders may be monsters of cruelty and bigotry, but they are not stupid. They will see that if Trump, unprovoked by any terrorist outrage, will act with such self-defeating vigour, then a few bombs or shootings directed at US targets will lead to more scatter-gun persecution of Muslims.
The ban may in part be a high profile way of assuring Trump voters that his pledges will be fulfilled. But demagogues tend to become the creatures of their own rhetoric and Trump’s words and actions will be presented as a sectarian declaration of war by many Muslims. IS will also see that by pressing their attacks they will deepen divisions within American society.
Bush targeted Saddam Hussein and Iraq in response to 9/11, though it was self-evident that the Iraqi leader and his regime had no connection with it. It was notorious that 15 out of 19 of the hijackers were Saudis, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the money for the operation came from Saudi donors, but Saudi Arabia was given a free pass.
Though 9/11 is cited as an explanation for Trump’s executive order, none of the countries whose citizens were involved (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Lebanon) are facing any restrictions. The people who are being refused entry come from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia. Since the main targets of AlQaeda and IS are Shia Muslims, Iran is the last place which is likely to be their base.
Since IS’s great victories in 2014 when it captured Mosul and conquered a vast area in Iraq and Syria, it has been beaten back by a myriad of enemies. Though it is fighting back hard, its eventual defeat has seemed inevitable, but with Trump fuelling the sectarian war between Muslims and non-Muslims which IS and Al-Qaeda always wanted to wage, their prospects look brighter today than they have for a long time. – The Independent