Terror Tweets

Somehow, without any U.S. troops being deployed or thousands of civilians dying as collateral damage, both Iran and Syria seem to have given in to international diplomatic pressure. Iran’s new regime, after being democratically elected to succeed that of the highly questionable Ahmadinejad, has lived up to its more moderate rhetoric by entering into high-level talks over its place in the international community as well as the state of its nuclear program. Meanwhile Syria has succumbed to the Russian plan of placing its chemical weapons stockpile under international control – a far cleaner option than the vague, limited strikes suggested by the Obama administration.

What is notable about both these developments is that the U.S. has not been the key actor. The world can sort itself out without America. This is not a blemish on our only super-power; it can be a good thing for Kerry and co.: reduced dependency could bring about more reasoned and less gung-ho approaches. Instead of being the world’s policemen they can be great mediators.

The Syrian crisis has just proven to be a propaganda disaster compared to what Putin achieved. He has managed to make Russia seem like the most rational and obedient members of the international community – especially with his crude but cool piece in the New York Times only days before the new plan came about. Thus it seems as if other nations are not inherently antagonistic to Western intentions.

The danger lies in those groups that have no ties to their populous: despotic governments and nefarious terrorist groups. To focus on these new belligerents we cannot use means of traditional warfare. The war on terror should have been a war against non-state actors, but that never came about because the great and glorious President Bush decided that there was an “axis” of evil states and not a collection of malicious ideas. When these states are in danger of committing great horrors then state-on-state war may be acceptable (such as would have occurred had Assad not opened talks last week). But in order to fight other antagonistic groups different methods are needed.

Al-Shabbab, for example, the latest Al-Qaeda off-shoot to commit a major atrocity, killed dozens at the Westgate mall in Nairobi during a horrific three-day siege. Scarily, several of the militants are said to have had U.S. citizenship and one of them, known colloquially as the “white widow” (her husband blew himself up during the 7/7 attacks in London), is thought to be the orchestrator and is British. The ideas of these toxic groups are not contained by borders and nor are there actions or their goals. They are embracing the ever hyped ‘social media’ and although that could very well be a ploy to distract analysts and intelligence officers, the very sight of a tweet from Al-Shabbab with “#westgate” is chilling in a whole new way.

It reminds me especially of the Woolwich attack this summer when two men ambushed a soldier in broad daylight on a street in South London and chopped him up with a meat cleaver. One of them then walked confidently up to the then-arriving news cameras (who got there quicker than police) and proceeded to explain their rationale to the shocked public. Michael Adebolajo, who was raised in a Christian Nigerian home in England, killed a British soldier on a London street under the pretext that “Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers” and he would thusly “never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.” It is the toxic appropriation of another culture - if it deserves that name - against his own and then the harrowing defense of his actions that makes this modern version of terrorism so horrifying. This highlights another issue that is being hinted at through the Kenyan tragedy: seemingly perfectly rational human beings (Adebolajo was supposedly radicalized at a London university) are subscribing to militant Islamic rhetoric without any real ties, blood or otherwise to the original cause. It is terrifying to think that an ideology that makes murder intelligibly acceptable is being preferred over all of our ever-so-great bastions of peace, democracy and whatever. The recent use of modern technologies only further proves that these ideas are not limited to the backwards and ill connected.

On one level we must make our own culture appealing again, and fighting fire with fire as we have done in the last decade is probably not the best way to do so. Then again, the dangers of transnational, transcultural terrorism are not solely going to be eradicated by ideological warfare. Just last week 80 people died in a church in Pakistan after bombings by the Pakistani Taliban, independent of the aforementioned infractions.  However, that should surely be the first step, to keep people on “our side” from slipping over to “theirs.” We inhabit a world where our enemies may not take the form of entire states, just as we do not represent in ourselves the UK or the US. Instead we are fighting against ideas and, far more dangerously, people who will die for those ideals, no matter how flawed or vicious they may be.