Osama Bin Laden, Geoff Barker and Paul Dibb: some thoughts around the US presidential election- foreign policy commentary by Tony Kevin, 1 November 2004 (2150 words).

What an interesting news weekend it has been. There was my friend Malcolm Mackerras, making brave predictions today of a pendulum-based win for Kerry: I hope he is right, though my gut feeling tells me otherwise. Then there was the remarkable Friday piece, "Can we avoid war with Islam", by Geoffrey Barker and Paul Dibb in the Australian Financial Review (29 October, News, page 81). Finally, the latest Bin Laden videotape and the many commentaries thereto: far and away the best in my view is by Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian, today 1 November – not yet on line as far as I can see.

Out of all this I am moved to say a few things:

The Bin Laden message – as it was rendered into English in a fairly complete version by Al Jazeera – needs to be read in full by anyone with a serious interest in the world. It is currently available on most Australian media websites, eg

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/13/1037080777633.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1231288.htm

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/30/1099028262036.html

Most commentaries on it have either been angry rants, or speculations about what effect it may have on the US election. Rothwell’s piece is different: he identifies key stylistic features of the statement, and discusses what might have been its intended impact on wider Western and Islamic audiences around the world. Because it is now going around the world, and it will be seen on videocassettes and DVDs and discussed around the world, for a long time. It is going to have major long-term political impact, so we had better think about what it says.

To me, four things leap out in the message, which I simply paraphrase in my own words here:

1. Bin Laden asserts Al Qaeda responsibility for September 11 2001.
2. He says it was punitive retaliation for comparable or greater "American-Israeli" mass killings of civilians in the Middle East over many years, in particular in Lebanon in 1982 when, as he sees it, the US Sixth Fleet massively bombed [shelled] Lebanese cities, causing huge civilian death and destruction, in support of Israeli military operations in Lebanon.
3. He offers a deal to the American people: he says future September 11 type attacks on US soil can be avoided if the US stops attacking people in the Middle East. He denies Al Qaeda is attacking Western values: he claims it is simply defending Islamic values in their own region. He notes that Western countries that do not attack the Middle East, e.g., Sweden, are not being attacked by Al Qaeda.
4. He mocks Bush personally for an incompetent presidential command response to September 11.

There is nothing here that has not been said already, in different words, by many ideologically diverse commentators – some very eminent ones - in the West. I won’t even bother to list them. A lot of this thinking is already publicly familiar, from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. What makes it interesting and historically important is that it comes now from Osama Bin Laden.

As Rothwell notes, it is very different from previous Bin Laden statements. It is a conditionally conciliatory statement – a conditional olive branch - though it will not be seen as such, at least in the short term, in the West.

Predictably, it is already being derided by some commentators who are claim, for example, that it shows that Bin Laden’s real military power is failing and that he is trying to reassert his supremacy. But surely that is not the point. We have known for a long time that Al Qaeda is essentially a motivating ideology: the military/political agencies that draw on it for inspiration in different countries may be more or less independent of Bin Laden.

Bin Laden was not so inept as to express a preference for Kerry over Bush but his mockery of Bush sends its own message. Did he expect that in the short term the message would help Bush and hinder Kerry (as some US polls suggest it has, in the key mostly mid-western states that will decide the election )? Perhaps so – there is a theory that Bin Laden prefers to confront the inept and globally polarising Christian fundamentalist Bush, rather than the smoother, more professional world coalition-builder Kerry.

Or maybe Bin Laden thought his message might at the last minute help Kerry? We just cannot know.

It is unfortunate for Geoff Barker and Paul Dibb that their strange piece appeared in the Financial Review just at the time of Bin Laden’s message, because I surmise it was writtten well before knowledge of that development. It is well below their usual analytical standard, and this saddens me because these are rightly influential strategic writers in Australia.

With respect to Geoff and Paul – I have known them both professionally for years – I will try to point out why.

The whole article proceeds from the prejudiced Bernard Lewis - Samuel Huntington view of Islam. This view might go down well these days in Australian defence colleges and high-priced security industry symposiums, but serious scholars and foreign policy practitioners in the West would reject it as fundamentalist and polarising.

For a better view of the challenges facing Western diplomacy in the Arab and Islamic world, recall the statement put out in April 2004 by 52 retired British diplomats (coordinated by Sir Oliver Miles). Here is the text from a Chinese website:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-04/29/content_327275.htm

It might be useful for readers to click onto that document and read it now, before proceeding further.

The B/D essay suffers fatally from the failure to "mirror-image": to try to imagine the world as the protagonist sees it, which is the first rule for useful diplomacy. To put it another way, the article is replete with language exhibiting the most appalling double standards, as applied to what "we" do and what "they" do. Here are a few examples:

"The frequency and savagery of terrorist attacks raises the inevitable question of whether Islam is sliding into a war with the West."

"But moderate Muslims the world over must root out the terrorists in their midst and not passively acquiesce in what is being done in their name. The alternative is a bloody slide into a new religious war …"

"But the extreme Islamist terrorists that we face are not interested in negotiation or in settlement of territorial disputes. Their aim is no less than the destruction of the West and the creation of an Islamic caliphate centred on the Middle East and to include South-East Asia. The all-out war that extreme Islamist elements are waging on the West knows no limits of civilised behaviour: there are no rules of war here and no concept of international justice."

"While it is obvious that all Muslims are not terrorists, it is sadly apparent that these days all terrorists happen to be Muslims, as The Economist has remarked. If we are to avoid a disastrous and full-blown war between Islam and the West, each side will have to make some radical changes. Muslims everywhere will have to raise their voices against Islamic fanatics. And they will have to stop blaming their predicament on the West for everything. Otherwise, as The Economist again argues, their faith will be hijacked and turned into a cult-like vehicle for a clash of civilisations."

In fairness to B/D, they do offer one weak attempt at "balance" at the end of their extended jeremiad:

"As for us in the West, we need to recognise that Israel's record in the West Bank is not pretty, nor is Russia's in Chechnya, nor for that matter America's actions in Iraq not to mention Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison. It is a dismal thought that, having avoided nuclear holocaust in the Cold War, we are standing on the precipice of entering a global conflict that in a different way may involve the use of nuclear weapons. This must not end up becoming a war between Islamic fanatics and Christian fundamentalists. Because if it does, a dark future awaits the world."

B/D don’t seem to have any understanding that for Middle Eastern Muslims (and Arab Christians, and Muslims elsewhere e.g. in Indonesia), the history of "American-Israeli" human rights atrocities against civilians in the Middle East is long and unending. Iconic names like the Shatila massacre in southern Lebanon, the Jenin massacre, the recent series of major punitive Israeli actions in Gaza – and in Iraq, massive US attacks on civilians in cities like Fallujah and Najaf - speak of mechanised impersonal mass killings of huge numbers of innocent civilians and wholesale destruction of their homes. To Middle Eastern people, this unending chain of attacks on them events is entirely morally comparable to September 11. So the reports of people celebrating the news of September 11 does not make them monsters - just ordinary humans. From their point of view, they are living through a huge, brutal and intensifying Western armed invasion of their homelands. For them, September 11 was a rare example of the tables being turned.

To recognise this reality is not to condone it, and I do not. But it does show up how foolish is the sermonising directed at Muslims in the B/D essay. Muslim people will not condemn their own fighters, in what they see as a world of persecution and hypocrisy.

Just to give a little more perspective, consider this commentary by Noel Turnbull in www.crikey.com.au today. The mortality figures he cites come from research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland:

"A key part of this argument is Saddam’s record. According to the most conservative estimate some 280,000 Iraqis were killed in 24 years of Saddam’s regime. This does not include the many dead while he was acting as a US-funded and armed surrogate in the war against Iran. Now, according to an equally conservative estimate about to be published by Nature, some 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion. In other words the "coalition of the willing" has managed to kill, in a bit over a year, about a third of the number of Iraqis Saddam managed to kill over a quarter of a century. A new, bigger, offensive is being planned at present [TK - Fallujah] so a simple extrapolation suggests that the coalition forces may well end up surpassing Saddam in the total number of deaths before they are forced to declare victory and withdraw in defeat."

The real problem I have with the B/D essay is that it helps provide intellectual justification for predicted possible Western-Islamic religious wars that B/D piously claim they want to prevent. This sort of writing is actually inflammatory. (I won’t even go into their "analysis" of the backwardness of the Islamic world: it is just Bernard Lewis revisited.)

I don’t know the answer to the present agony of the Middle East, but I suspect the 52 British diplomats (see above) provide some useful practical advice. I do know that sermonising at Muslims that they need to behave in more civilised ways is not a useful way to go. Rabin had ideas on how to get to peace in the Middle East, but he is dead – he was not murdered by Muslims.

The road to peace in the Middle East – as in Ireland, Cyprus, Kashmir and other trouble-spots around the world – is not found by demonisation and name-calling, but by patient diplomacy based on mutual respect and a sense of the dignity and value of all human life – qualities clearly lacking in US and Israeli diplomacy at present.

I am not suggesting Bin Laden should be anyone’s negotiating partner at this point. But vilifying and threatening Muslim or Arab behaviour and views, while in effect shrugging off as unimportant what has been and is being done to Muslim people by American and Israeli military power in Iraq and around Israel, is not useful either.

And what does this discussion have to do with the US election? Simply this: if Bush is re-elected, the sorts of ideas expounded by B/D will become even more mainstream in US and Australian political elites than they are already – some would argue that they are in command here already.

In that case, we can forget about the brave new world of independent Australian regional diplomacy that commentators like Rowan Callick (see his good piece in AFR, 1 November) , and Geoff Barker himself, are now confidently predicting. Both Indonesia and China will rightly despise Australia for its failure to see the depth and complexity of the world, and its insensitivity to Muslim positions..

At this point, we need more intelligence (brain-power) and long-term vision in those of us in Australia whose profession it is to write about the world; not borrowed, re-cycled Huntingtonism or Bernard Lewis-ism.

Tony Kevin, Canberra 1 November 2004