The War: US=Britain 1940?

Annie

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http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110007009
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Shoring Up the Western Front
Is Old Europe finally learning that it must join the global war on terror?

BY PETE DU PONT
Monday, July 25, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Nov. 9, 1989 and Sept. 11, 2001 each changed the modern world. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of 75 years of communism, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks the beginning of what may be a similar period of global Islamic terrorism.

But not all of Western civilization wants to fight this not so cold war. Turkey, fearing attacks by Muslim insurgents, ended its anti-terrorism efforts in 2003. Spain followed suit after the 2004 Madrid bombings. Then Hungary and the Netherlands also all but capitulated, even without any dramatic, world-attention grabbing, attacks on their soil. Now Italy says it will withdraw its forces from Iraq by year end.

Old Europe may be falling apart before our eyes. This is a suggested by the opposition of Western Europeans to the American military action in Iraq as well as the defeat of the European Union Constitution in France and Holland last spring and the economic decline of European socialist economies. In any case, Old Europe has neither the political will nor the economic strength to combat terrorism. Without the United States, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq would be terrorist-controlled nations. Once again it will be up to America to defeat an assault on Western civilization, just as it was left to the United States to rescue Europe against Nazism and then against the global assualt of communism...

...The good news is we will likely have more international allies in the future. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said after the July 7th London terrorist attack that "What we are confronting here is an evil ideology . . . a battle not just about their terrorist methods, but their views. Not just about their barbaric acts, but their barbaric ideas." After the attack that came the following week, England will be making the case more aggressively.

Old Europe may currently be opposed to both democratic capitalism and a war against terrorism, but that could now change as people begin to see that controlled economies and socialist policies actually make it more difficult to fight off the terrorists who are attacking not just the United States, but them as well. Thus Angela Merkel, a free market Thatcherite and potential American anti-terrorism ally, may well defeat Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party in Germany's September elections. It is too soon to say that continental Europe has abandoned its pro-Saddam/anti-American foreign policies and socialist economic policies, but there is movement in that direction.

And that will help the world fight the global war against Islamic terrorism. The war will be long--a 50 year religious war says the father of Mohamed Atta, the terrorist who flew the first plan into the World Trade Center--and for some time America may have to fight on nearly alone. But terrorism is slowly changing European thinking, and that will help Americans and the people of the world win an essential victory in advancing the freedom that will insure a better future for people of every nation.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

From a NYT op-ed, now paid subscription only. I disagree with the 'cause' Professor Pape arrives at, but not his analysis or the 'proof' of the documents found laying out Al Queda strategy:

EDITORIAL DESK | July 9, 2005, Saturday

Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs

By ROBERT A. PAPE (NYT) Op-Ed 889 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 13 , Column 1

While we don't yet know who organized the terrorist attacks in London on Thursday, it seems likely that they were the latest in a series of bombings, most of them suicide attacks, over the past several years by Al Qaeda and its supporters. Although many Americans had hoped that Al Qaeda has been badly weakened by American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, the facts indicate otherwise. Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people - more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined.

To make sense of this campaign, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who killed themselves between 1995 and 2004 in carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden's network. I was able to collect the names, nationalities and detailed demographic information on 67 of these bombers, data that provides insight into the underlying causes of Al Qaeda's suicide terrorism and how the group's strategy has evolved since 2001.

Most important, the figures show that Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.

As the chart on bottom shows, the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries in which the United States has stationed combat troops since 1990. Of the other suicide terrorists, most came from America's closest allies in the Muslim world - Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco - rather than from those the State Department considers "state sponsors of terrorism" like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq. Afghanistan produced Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the American-led invasion of the country in 2001. The clear implication is that if Al Qaeda was no longer able to draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is a heavy American combat presence, it might well collapse.

As the top chart shows, what is common among the attacks is not their location but the identity of the victims killed. Since 2002, the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama bin Laden has cited as supporting the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is good evidence that this shift in Al Qaeda's scheme was the product of deliberate choice. In December 2003, the Norwegian intelligence service found a lengthy Qaeda planning document on a radical Islamic Web site that described a coherent strategy for compelling the United States and its allies to leave Iraq. It made clear that more spectacular attacks against the United States like those of 9/11 would be insufficient, and that it would be more effective to attack America's European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear.

In particular, the document weighed the advantages of attacking Britain, Poland and Spain, and concluded that Spain in particular, because of the high level of domestic opposition to the Iraq war, was the most vulnerable.

"It is necessary to make utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain in March next year," the document stated. "We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program."

That prediction, of course, proved murderously prescient. Yet it was only one step in the plan: "Lastly, we emphasize that a withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence, a pressure that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly."

No matter who took the bombs onto those buses and subways in London, the attacks are clearly of a piece with Al Qaeda's post-9/11 strategy. And while we don't know if the claim of responsibility from a group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe was legitimate, an understanding of Al Qaeda's strategic logic may help explain why that message included a threat of further attacks against Italy and Denmark, both of which contributed troops in Iraq.

The bottom line, then, is that the terrorists have not been fundamentally weakened but have changed course and achieved significant success. The London attacks will only encourage Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the belief that they will succeed in their ultimate aim: causing America and its allies to withdraw forces from the Muslim world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/opinion/09pape.html
 

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