Ramblings 

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld covers Washington, D.C.

The War on Terror Is Far from Over and Should Be the Focus of Attention

      The massacre at an Indonesian nightclub on the island of Bali in October, apparently the work of al Qaeda and its local allies, makes it clear that the war against terrorism is far from over.

      Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, states:

Even as we have had impressive successes in Afghanistan, we cannot declare victory against al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden continues to elude our forces; al Qaeda operatives have been held in the shootings in October of two U.S. Marines in Yemen; the FBI continues to round up alleged conspirators in New York, Oregon and Michigan.

      U.S. intelligence officials say that al Qaeda operatives who found refuge in Pakistan are now regrouping and coming back into Afghanistan, less than a year after a successful American military campaign forced them to flee their onetime sanctuary by the thousands. The movement back into Afghanistan is still relatively small and involves al Qaeda members traveling in small groups, officials say. Most of the thousands who escaped Afghanistan are not seeking return. Instead, they remain scattered throughout South Asia and the Middle East, creating a terrorist diaspora that is now of deep concern to American counterterrorism officials.

      Still, U.S. officials say the world’s largest concentration of al Qaeda operatives is now in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the recent influx into Afghanistan is creating new dangers. Al Qaeda members are believed to have launched a series of small attacks against American forces and may have been behind the attempted assassination of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the car bombing in Kabul in September. The return of some al Qaeda operatives thus represents a serious threat to the American-backed Karzai government, which has been unable to gain effective control of the Afghan countryside.

      A senior U.S. official said in September that,

A few months ago, I would have said that the new center of gravity of al Qaeda was in Pakistan. Today, I don’t think you can say that. I think you can see concentrations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

      While American military power smashes al Qaeda’s training camps and terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan, al Qaeda has quickly adapted and is in the process of transforming itself into a more mobile, flexible and elusive force than before.

      Even before the attack in Bali, the presence of al Qaeda in South Asia was of growing concern. One U.S. diplomat pointed out that, “There’s been a sea change. Al Qaeda in Indonesia is no longer a matter of speculation.”

      The U.S. presented the Indonesian government with the results of the interrogation of an al Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, who was picked up in Jarkarta in June and turned over to the U.S. In September, he told his interrogators that Abu Bakar Bashir, the leader of a group called Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Community), had provided money, explosives and men for several terrorist acts, including a plan to blow up the American embassies in Jakarta and in Malaysia, according to intelligence sources.

      Islamic Community has a history going back decades, when it began advocating an Islamic state in Indonesia. A few years ago, it linked up with al Qaeda. “There was a convergence of interests,” says one intelligence source. The local group wanted the training and expertise al Qaeda could offer to help it press for an Islamic state; al Qaeda wanted links to the community and money for its attacks on the U.S.

      In the Philippines, the group formed an alliance with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and with Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group that has kidnapped scores of Filipinos and foreigners over the past three years and killed three of its U.S. captives. Early in October, a bomb killed one American soldier and wounded another in the southern Philippines, just days after Muslim terrorists renewed threats against U.S. interests. A senior Philippine intelligence official says that,

Jemaah Islamiyah should be declared by the Indonesian government to be a terrorist organization and Mr. Bashir should be arrested. The activities of people identified with him are jeopardizing the peace of the region. Why is he still out there?

      Finally, after the Bali attack, the Indonesian government may be forced finally to take strong action against the group. Labeling Islamic Community “terrorist” could, however, cause serious problems for President Megawati Sukarnoputri. The group has a large following—Vice President Hamzah Haz recently had Bashir to dinner and called him a Muslim brother—and the campaign against terrorism is seen by many in Indonesia as a campaign against Islam.

      Mr. Faruq told his CIA interrogators that when he arrived in Indonesia in 1998, having been sent by a top aide to Osama bin Laden, he linked up with Agus Dwikarna, an Indonesian businessman and member of Jemaah Islamiyah. He helped Dwikarna set up an organization, Laskar Jundullah, which carried out attacks on Christians in Sulawesi, intelligence officials said.

      Al Qaeda encouraged Bashir’s goal of trying to set off a religious war in Indonesia, Faruq told the CIA. A Bashir lieutenant obtained the explosives that were to be used in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, according to Faruq. Bashir also dispatched another member of the Islamic Community to bomb the American embassy in Malaysia, an attack that had been intended for the September 11 anniversary, according to Faruq.

      In mid-September, Singapore issued a detailed report on the activities of Islamic Community members there, 19 of whom were arrested in August. The government said the group was plotting to overthrow the government of Malaysia and Singapore in order to form Islamic states. The Singapore cell was also plotting to blow up the airport, a U.S. Navy ship and a bar frequented by American servicemen, the government said.

      According to Singapore, Islamic extremist groups with roots in at least five Southeast Asian countries have forged a coalition seeking to transform their separate local struggles into a campaign to establish a single regional Islamic state. The alliance, formed over the last three years, is the handiwork of Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian militant considered by regional intelligence agencies to be one of al Qaeda’s chief operatives in the area.

      At the same time that Isamuddin was plotting against targets in Singapore, he had bolder objectives in mind. According to officials, Isamuddin was seeking to coordinate the activities of his Jemaah Islamiah network with Muslim radicals in Thailand and Muslim separatists in the southern Philippines in a regional alliance called Rabitatul Mujaheddin.

      Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry reported:

The objective was to unify the Islamic militant groups in the region, with the ultimate goal of realizing an Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and [southern Philippine island of] Mindanao, following which Singapore and Brunei would eventually be absorbed.  

      Beyond South Asia, U.S. officials report that the al Qaeda network appears weakened but still capable of carrying out attacks. At the present time, law enforcement officials report that al Qaeda members are trying to hack into American computers that control water, electrical and communication facilities, including 911 networks, in at least 30 municipalities. They believe the group is gathering data for a future cyber-terrorist attack. European officials report that in Britain, Germany and Spain, al Qaeda recruiters are combing mosques for disenchanted Americans who might be eager to become suicide bombers.

      More than one year into the war on terrorism, U.S. intelligence officials note that al Qaeda still operates terror cells in as many as 65 countries. Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks, remains an al Qaeda stronghold. Since June, nearly 80 percent of the hits on a secretive al Qaeda web site have originated from e-mail addresses in Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda uses the site to deliver sermons against the West and encrypted messages to its operatives. 

      “For every terrorist plot we discover and every terrorist cell we disrupt, there are dozens of others in the works,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee in July.

      At least four al Qaeda cells are operating in the U.S., possibly in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Seattle, FBI officials say. Mosques in nine U.S. cities are under surveillance for possible links to those cells and it is reported that the use of female recruits for the first time represents an attempt to foil U.S. law enforcement authorities who have developed a profile of al Qaeda members as young Muslim men.

      Of 33 top al Qaeda leaders, the whereabouts of 21 are unknown, 6 have been killed and 6 have been captured. Most U.S. officials believe Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan’s northern tribal areas. Other officials say bin Laden must have been killed last year at Tora Bora during a U.S.-led bombardment of the area in December.

      Some experts believe that al Qaeda is less of a threat today than in the past. “The war on terror and the damage done to al Qaeda has at least blunted the threat,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist specialist at the Rand Corporation. “And that’s a significant achievement.”

      Others believe al Qaeda has mutated into a form that is no less deadly and even more difficult to combat. One counter-terrorism investigator says:

We are confronted with cells that are all over the place, developing in a very horizontal structure without any evident big center of coordination. Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us.

      This may be overstating the case. But it is true that al Qaeda has become so diffuse that it is almost impossible to track, with the whole world now its field of operations. In mid-October, CIA Director George Tenet told Congress that al Qaeda “is in an execution phase,” preparing to strike at the U.S. both at home and abroad.

      With at least two thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership—and untold numbers of foot soldiers—still out there, it is clear that the war on terrorism is far from over and that this should be the nation’s number one priority.

Heaven on Earth: Examining the Rise and fall of Socialism

      In the century following its birth in the French Revolution, socialism was  preached by writers and organizers until it became the fastest growing idea in Europe. Later, Lenin showed that it be could spread better by the sword than by the word, and soon it spanned the globe.

      The search for the socialist ideal took the movement in many different directions: revolution, communes, social democracy, Communism, fascism and Third World zealotry. In the end, none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of abundance and equality, nor did they create the “New Man” their theory promised.

      After two hundred years, socialism finally imploded in the 1990s—not only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites but in the West as well, as once-socialist parties, such as the British Labor Party, abandoned their commitment to end the free enterprise system and now embraced it.

      In Heaven On Earth (Encounter Books), Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, traces the history of socialism and the men and women who promoted it, among them Gracchus Babeuf, whose “Conspiracy of Equals” was the first to try to outlaw private property; Robert Owen, who hoped to plant a model socialist utopia in the U.S.; Friedrich Engels, who created the cult of Karl Marx and “scientific” socialism; and Benito Mussolini, self-proclaimed socialist heretic and inventor of fascism.

      Muravchik notes that,

At some point in the late 1970s, socialism reached its apogee, with Communist, social-democratic or Third World socialist regimes governing most of the world. There were, however, two chinks in the socialist armor. One was its dismal economic performance: much of socialism’s appeal sprang from the wish to ameliorate want and deprivation, yet in practice it often made things worse. The other was its utter failure to gain a foothold in America, the world’s most influential nation, where—to add insult to injury—the leading antisocialist force seemed to be none other than the working class, personified by labor leaders like Samuel Gompers and George Meany. As America’s continued economic success mocked socialism’s failures, various Third World nations began to rethink their economic direction. Astoundingly, so did the two Communist giants, China and the USSR, which, under the stewardship of restless reformers Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev, embarked on uncharted courses away from socialism. It remained only for the social democratic branch of the socialist family to beat a retreat in order for the reversal to be complete. And in 1997, Tony Blair resuscitated Clement Attlee’s moribund party by campaigning with the slogan “Labour is the party of business.”

      The goal of socialism, Muravchik writes, was “a surfeit of material goods and brotherly harmony among people, but its ultimate reward would be the transformation of humans, if not into gods, then into supermen able to transcend the pains and limits of life as it had been known.”

      Even in its early days, many questioned socialism’s assessment of man and society. Robert Dale Owen, the son of utopian socialist Robert Owen, who established the New Harmony commune in Indiana in 1825, attempted to understand the reasons for its collapse. The “most potent factor,” he concluded, was that

All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle, must work their own downfall, for by this unjust plan of remuneration they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members—who find their services reaped by the indigent—and retain only the improvident, unskilled, and vicious members.

       The question Robert Dale Owen asked was: Is socialism suited to men as they were? Tailoring institutions to human nature, Muravchik points out, was the guiding motif of America’s founders. In The Federalist Papers, Madison observed that government was necessary because men were not angels and that controls on government were necessary because those who governed were not angels.

      “Had Madison commented on socialism,” Muravchik writes,

. . . he might have come up with an analogous paradox: if men were angels then an economy might succeed without selfish incentives, but if men were angels it would not matter whether the economy succeeded since they would have nonmaterial needs. Men, alas, are not angels and it was socialism’s unique departure to attempt their uplift through an economic rather than a spiritual system.

      In the hands of Marx and Engels, the socialist idea of “class” became a weapon to challenge those who disagreed, not a description of men and women who were actually workers or capitalists. Muravchik notes that,

There was . . . something curious about their notion of class. Marx and Engles were journalists, the former the son of a high-ranking lawyer, and the latter of an entrepreneur. Both received financial support from their well-heeled families. . . . They maintained an unembarrassed . . . awareness of their class status, glaringly apparent in their derision of their working class comrades as “jackasses” and “ignorant curs.”. . . These terms—proletarian and bourgeois—did not signify anything about the class status of those to whom they were applied, but rather about their ideas. In the program of “class struggle” that Marx and Engels imprinted upon the socialist movement, therefore, the idea of struggle was a lot clearer than the idea of class. . . . Marx and Engles extolled violence, regarding it as not merely a means to power but also an exercise for heightening the sensibilities of the proletarians.

      In the case of Mussolini, socialism was tied to nationalism to create fascism:

Mussolini undertook to “fascistize” society, speaking often of his aim to create a “new Italian”—socialism’s “new man” with a nationalist twist. Toward this end, he created a Fascist children’s organization, the Opera Nazionale Balilla, along the lines of the Soviet Komsomol. Participation was mandatory up to the age of fifteen: and the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Youth Organization . . . were banned. He put forth the motto: “Everything inside the state; nothing outside the state.” And he coined the term “totalitarian state” to express his ideal.

      France was home to the greatest number of fascist groups, of which the original, Charles Maurras’s Action Francaise, antedated Italian fascism by more than a decade. Muravchik points to the fact that,

Maurras was a monarchist and clericalist. His demons were Jews, Protestants, foreigners, Freemasons—and especially democracy. But not socialism! On the contrary, he once said: “A socialism liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand.

      That fascism was a variety of socialism has often been ignored. The British journalist George Slocombe, who interviewed Mussolini at the 1922 Cannes Conference, reported that, “Lenin was the only contemporary for whom he would express respect.” Meanwhile, Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin commented that in their methods of combat, the fascists

. . . more than any other party, have adopted and applied . . . the experiences of the Russian Revolution.

A leading Italian fascist theoretician, Ugo Spirito, speculated on the likely “synthesis” of the two systems.

Muravchik shows in detail how Communist, fascist and social democratic regimes have done great harm to those who have lived under their rule. Under Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao we have witnessed mass murder. Under the various Third World socialist regimes we have seen economic regression and dictatorship. Even those social democratic regimes in the West, while maintaining democracy, have presided over economic stagnation.

      Of particular interest is the manner in which so many in the West embraced all of these forms of socialism. In the case of Mussolini, writes Muravchik,

Not only did underlings and other ambitious Italians fall over each other in flattering the Duce, but many foreign visitors joined the comedy. Much as famous Western intellectuals believed they had seen a future that works’ in Soviet Russia, so such eminent figures as Winston Churchill and Mahatma Ghandi waxed lyrical on what they encountered in fascist Italy. And just as one U.S. ambassador to Moscow babbled inanely about the “Soviet Robin Hood (Stalin),” so the American ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, heaped praise on its dictator: “In our time it may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to those of Mussolini.

      In the case of Nazism, Muravchik argues that,

What distinguished Nazism from traditional forms of socialism was its febrile nationalism, although not its virulence against despised peoples. Marx . . . looked forward to the “annihilation” of “reactionary races.” The examples he gave were “Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum.”. . . Goebbels . . . wrote in 1926, “We look towards Russia, because Russia is that country most likely to take the road to socialism with us: because Russia is an ally nature has given us against the devilish contamination and corruption of the West.” Soon after taking power, Hitler declared May Day, the traditional socialist holiday, a national holiday, and the regime propounded the slogan “Equality of all racial Germans.”

      The embrace of socialism was widespread throughout Western intellectual circles. In 1936, for example, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the leading literary couple of the British Labor Party, wrote a two-volume paean to the USSR, where, they said, “the interests and desires of all the different sections of the population will be fulfilled . . . to a degree never yet attained in any other community.”

      Muravchik asks:

How could an idea that so consistently showed itself to be incongruent with human nature have spread faster and further than any other belief system ever devised? And how did an idea calling upon so many humane sentiments lend its name to the cruelest regimes in human history?

Reading Heaven On Earth is at least a beginning to finding the answer to such questions. The 21st century, hopefully, will see the advance of freedom, democracy and free markets. If so, the world may have learned from socialism’s failure. Joshua Muravchik, however, may be too optimistic in his belief that socialism is now dead. Man, history shows us, rarely learns from history. Perhaps the lesson of socialism’s failure is so graphic that it cannot be mistaken. If this turns out to be the case, future generations will benefit from the horrors committed in the name of this ideological formula for disaster.    Ω