Wednesday 7 March 2007

Work in progress... 'The War on Terror and the Fire Paradox'

I am currently working on a lengthy paper on the 'fire paradox' and the 'war on terror'.

Excerpts (not yet edited; may sound choppy):
Current United States policy on managing terrorism and insurgency is a fire paradox of sorts. Why many current counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency, policies only make it all worse: the US Global War on Terror and the proliferation of the radical, fundamentalist Islamic ideology in a terrorist insurgency.

Whether fighting the foreign occupiers in Iraq, fighting the 'western menace' from within its own borders, or rallying on some other jihadist front, there is a new kind of terrorism and no one seems to know what to define it as. Call it an insurgency against the West, call it a rebellious movement, call it pure terrorism, call it a fundamentalist wave in the Muslim world...
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They fear the west; westerners fear them. The middlemen? The governments of the West, namely of the US, and the extremist Islamic groups.
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From the White House press briefings to the Mujahideen spin machine, there’s one thing both sides have in common, besides exploiting their own people’s fears and insecurities and irrationality: propaganda.
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It all ties into politics and public perception. This kind of terrorism cannot exist without a great deal of public support, and its roots tie deeply into societal conditions and political relations.
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One underlying cause for the terrorism/counterterrorism culture is the public’s obsession with terrorism.
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After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks (9/11), Americans defied the terrorists, at least in the way the government wanted, by showing their patriotism and continuing their American way of life. After all, the terrorists attacked because they were angry at the US`s freedom, right?

Yet as soon as the Bush White House noted how easily people could be controlled and manipulated for political capital, the guise of a war on terror was put up. There’s no vast conspiracy, but the Bush administration did use 9/11 as an excuse for its many following endeavors in fronts in its global war on terrorism (GWOT).

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