BEIJING - "When shall we stop pretending we are not at war?" "Smart enemy gets you where you think you are safe."
The recent movie Pearl Harbor, already a blockbuster, has President Franklin D Roosvelt and a bright naval intelligence officer utter these two crucial lines before the attack that in many respects resembles Tuesday's attack against New York and Washington. The comparison comes easily, perhaps also because the two surprise attacks occurred exactly 60 years apart, after one full Chinese calendar cycle, and in the same year of the Chinese horoscope - the tricky Year of the Metal Snake.
The differences, as amply noted in the past days, are huge. Then there was a clear enemy, and a clear conflict; the US just didn't want to go to war. Now there is no clear enemy, and also no war. The situation is confused at the moment: the US administration is clear that there will be retaliation, the culprits will be punished, but so far nobody has come up with the proof of who "they" are.
There is a good possibility that it was the notorious Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, hidden in Afghanistan, who masterminded the attacks. His group has not been infiltrated and has proven so far very difficult to track down, because of its tightly-knit organization. If it wasn't him, things are even worse because we are facing a threat from a shadow.
However, one thing is clear - the direction from which the attack came: the Middle East and the seemingly desperate cause of the Palestinians confronting Israel. They are the ones who took to the streets after the attack and rejoiced. Moreover, they are the only ones with the kind of ax to grind that could motivate this kind of attack.
This is at the same time good and bad for the US. It is good because in 10 years as only surviving superpower it made only one big enemy, whose hand can be recognized behind whatever scene. It is bad because it points at a failure of American foreign policy - it did not manage to broker an acceptable compromise between Israel and the Palestinians. So the civil war in the Middle East dragged the US once more in a local confrontation, despite all US efforts to extricate itself from it.
From another point of view, the present attack stems from the very success of the Gulf War in 1991. The Gulf War in fact managed to de-link the Palestinian cause from that of all the Arab states. After the war it appears unthinkable that any Arab state would take up the cudgels for the Palestinians.
Furthermore, the present Iraqi political isolation has created a cordon of countries afraid of the destabilizing waves that could swamp the region if Iraq were to become either stronger or weaker. The main concern of, say, Syria or Iran, which in the past were at the forefront of support for the Palestinian cause, is not the civil war in the Israeli-occupied territories, but the fate of Iraq, which has stabilized in a seemingly unstable predicament, between life and death. Iraq could trigger strong instability in the region, rekindling the simmering Kurd issue and the many regional animosities. The conflict in the occupied territories has no massive impact on the region, and in fact it coincides with the rebirth of Lebanon as a regional trade outpost.
The Gulf War successfully minimized the impact of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world, to the point of destroying the fantasy of Arab unity. But from the perspective of traditional Chinese political thinking, this has created a very tricky situation. The Palestinian nation has been cornered. It has no real bargaining chips with Israel, as it can no longer appeal to Arab solidarity, its strength for decades, and if it feels wronged by the Israelis it can only endure it or resort to very extreme measures, like suicide attacks. And when not even suicide attacks against Israel work, it can only try to put pressure on the one who has been for decades Israel's patron, the US.
There must have been huge motivation to drive so many people to suicide attacks in the US, which must also have involved American citizens, and possibly even second and third generation Americans. Some of them must have been highly educated and sophisticated enough to be pilots. In a way we can see from this attack that the level of desperation crossed social barriers that usually first bring the most indigent and desperate to be willing to give up their life for a cause. It created new kamikazes among people who might have made a living without really giving a damn about the poor Palestinians whose houses were bulldozed by the Israeli army.
The desperation of this attack imposes a multi-faceted strategy, as its consequences are multi-pronged. It is impossible to wage a traditional war against this people, as they are already willing to give up their life, and they are a small group hidden in the very fabric of American society. It is impossible to launch a witch-hunt against shadows without creating new enemies among moderate Palestinians or Muslims who had been unwilling to support terrorism. US efforts should rather be aimed at restricting the fallout from the attacks and, while hunting down the culprits, avoiding new attacks.
This brings us to what might be the core issue. It is clear that the reasoning behind building a multi-billion National Missile Defense (NMD) system against possible terrorist attacks from "rogue states" has been shattered. The impact of a missile attack, with a conventional payload, on New York would have been far, far smaller than Tuesdays attacks. And the possibility of a nuclear attack from a "rogue state" is very remote, as the US is effectively checking the spread of nuclear technology to those states. Many countries lukewarm or outright against NMD have been quick to point this out. (2001-09-13 Asia Times)
