One would think that the so-called “Global War on
Terror”, which has been given fresh impetus by the Paris attacks, must be going
swimmingly. What else could explain the great enthusiasm with which it is
pursued? It may be recalled that it started in earnest after the WTC attack –
also a declaration of war, as it was put at the time.
As is often the case when
Islamist fundamentalists strike, the actual attackers immolated themselves on occasion
of the attack itself, making it impossible to exact retribution. Except by
proxy, that is. This was playing right into the hands of those who had planned
the attacks. It seems to us that they have ultimately succeeded beyond their
wildest dreams. Not to put too fine a point to it, our wise political leaders
have evidently been outfoxed by a bunch of turbaned cave dwellers and goat
buggerers in the Hindu Kush….
Putin is merely acting in
line with old KGB traditions though. Here is an excerpt from a 20 year
old newspaper report on how the KGB treated
Islamist kidnappers aligned with Hezbollah who had taken Soviet diplomats
hostage in Lebanon and had made the mistake of killing one of them:
“The incident began when four
Soviet diplomats were kidnapped last September by Muslim extremists who
demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian
militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city
of Tripoli. The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their
attacks, and the body of one of the Soviet diplomats, Arkady Katkov, was found
a few days later in a field in Beirut.
The KGB then apparently kidnapped and
killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shi’ite Hezbollah (Party of God)
group, a radical, pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various
terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.
Parts of the man’s body, the paper said,
were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other
relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not
immediately released. They were quickly freed.
The newspaper quoted
“observers in Jerusalem” as saying: “This is the way the Soviets operate. They
do things – they don’t talk. And this is the language Hezbollah
understands.”………………
It seems it is high time for a strategic
rethink in the GWoT, but powerful forces are arrayed against it. Apart from the
fact that a truly huge racket is at stake, the situation is also reminiscent of
the proverbial guy with the hammer – everything looks like a nail to him. So we
should reasonably expect more of the same, only in even grander style (as the
so-called “surge” has shown, any successes tend not only to be temporary, but
have a habit to soon give way to even greater disasters).
