verging_on_random

Comes the caliphate

February 24, 2007 on 11:07 pm | In Uncategorized |

Isn’t that a great word? ‘Caliphate’. Nothing’s as useful to scare the littlies as a big word they never heard before. It’s pretty innocuous though; my old Macquarie Dictionary defines it as ‘the rank, jurisdiction or government of a caliph’. So it’s a system of government, like a monarchy is government by a monarch.

Anyway Dick Cheney wants us all to be very worried because:

Their ultimate aim, and one they boldly proclaim, is to establish a caliphate covering a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia. And it wouldn’t stop there.

I’m guessing the last bit about it not stopping at Indonesia was thrown in for the benefit of any Australians who were thinking ’so?’ Oh the ‘they’ in ‘their ultimate aim’ are ‘the terrorists’, as if you hadn’t already guessed. No Dick didn’t get down to saying which terrorists, that’s probably classified info. The fact that most of the violence in Iraq is Muslim v Muslim makes me wonder how ‘the terrorists’ can have this grand plan to set up a caliphate covering half the world when they can’t even agree on who should run Baghdad but Dick obviously knows better.

The trouble is … and I know I shouldn’t question the VP of the USA … but I have this nagging doubt. I keep asking myself if we really need to be working ourselves up into a panic because a comparative handful of freaks in the Middle East have an ‘ultimate aim’ that they keep talking about. I mean ‘want to’ isn’t the same as ‘have the means to’. Brendan Nelson was ranting yesterday about how the terrorist threat is every bit as serious as the one Australia faced in 1942 but he didn’t convince me somehow. All he made me think was how glad I was that I never consulted him while he was a GP in Killara.

Anyway there’s a bunch of boring experts on terrorism meeting in Europe right now. They’re not politicians like Dick and Brendan so they don’t have the knack of explaining things as colourfully as them. They’re just diplomats and intelligence chiefs and police officers from different countries whose profession it is to combat terrorism. They had some interesting things to say at a conference:

The international terrorist threat is increasing as more recruits become radicalised, even though police and intelligence agencies are getting better at disrupting militant plots.

Well that’s kind of bad news/good news. No doubt the increasing number of radical recruits has been caused by the Iraq invasion and occupation, as predicted by the US National Intelligence Estimates. Later on:

Busso von Alvensleben, counter-terrorism commissioner at Germany’s Foreign Ministry, said it had become harder for groups to mount massive attacks.

Which has to be good news, n’est ce pas? The rest of the conference was apparently a similar mixture of cautious optimism mixed with substantial concerns about future terrorist acts:

Among other concerns raised at the three-day conference: the likelihood of terrorists gaining increased access to short and medium-range missiles in coming years, or attempting an attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.

“Terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction in the future is a near to absolute certainty,” said Greg Austin, analyst at the EastWest Institute.

Experts concurred that the risk of cyber-terrorism, possibly involving attacks on systems controlling critical infrastructure like power grids, is increasing because of societies’ growing reliance on computer networks and the Internet.

“The current risk of large-scale harm from cyberterror is low but increasing dramatically,” said Ahmet Oren, chairman of Turkish media group Ihlas Holding.

Philippine counter-terrorism ambassador Benjamin Defensor struck a rare note of optimism, saying Southeast Asian militant groups like Jemaah Islamiah were on the retreat as governments pursued them both by force and by reaching out to communities to undermine their hardline message.

“The leadership of these organisations are slowly being neutralised or eradicated, so slowly the support is eroding,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “They’re losing right now in Southeast Asia.”

So at the worst, we can expect more widespread attacks in future, perhaps involving much more dangerous weapons and/or interruptions to essential services or communications. If that happens it will be a nightmare for the people affected, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not in the same category as a serious war like the one that’s been raging in Iraq for nearly four years.

The thing I don’t see is this: even if the worst predictions from the professionals’ conference come true, how is that going to lead to this new caliphate that Dick’s so worried about? Does he think one by one the people from Spain to Jakarta are going to scream out “OMG the power’s off again … terrorists we surrender, set up your regime now”? I mean I just don’t see any connection between what the terrorists say is their ‘ultimate aim’ and what they are capable of doing in practice.

All sorts of religious leaders have ambitious aims. I suspect the pope’s ultimate aim is to convert the whole world to Roman Catholicism but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen. For the VP of the USA to go round spreading this alarmist bullshit just makes him look silly … perhaps explaining why the half-hearted applause at the end of his speech was plainly (and deservedly) insulting.