The Clash Thesis: A Failing Ideology?

[Larkspur]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0823-08.htm

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The Clash thesis and the associated war on terrorism carry little or no credibility outside the United States. This was first demonstrated in massive world wide protests against the planned US invasion of Iraq. Outside of the United States and Israel, the overwhelming majority of world opinion regarded this war to be illegal and immoral. Now, more than a year after a failed occupation of Iraq; after the revelations of systematic torture by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay; after the erosion of liberties inside the United States; after the establishment of an American Gulag whose geographic expanse exceeds anything established by the Soviet Union; American prestige in the world has sunk to the lowest point in its history. In a poll conducted by the European Union in October 2003, 53 percent of EU citizens marked the United States as the second greatest threat to world peace. It's chief ally, Israel, bagged the first prize. <4>

The bogey of America's 'global' and 'unending war' on terrorism will soon face another test. While the United States and its neocolonial allies have incarcerated thousands in Gulags spread across the world - without charges and without recourse to law - the 'war against terrorism' has produced very few convictions for terrorist crimes against the United States. If the al-Qaida is indeed a formidable adversary, with a global reach, and with sleeper cells in the United States itself, trained in the manufacture and use of WMDs, its failure to launch even a single operation against the United States since September 11, 2001, poses a problem for the credibility of the 'war against terrorism.'

It is of course all too easy for the United States to take credit for this failure. 'Look how good we have been against this formidable foe. Our intelligence failed utterly before 9-11, but we have since fixed all the problems.' Alternatively, they might argue that they are fighting these terrorists in Baghdad and Najaf instead of Boston and New York. But this rhetoric will wear out over time.

If indeed al-Qaida fails to launch another attack against American interests, on American soil or elsewhere, Americans too will begin to ask: Did the United States overreact. Worse, they might question if this war was a phony, a cover to curtail liberties, to launch preventive wars, to line the pockets of corporate executives with tens of billions stolen from American tax-payers. Have so many Americans died in vain - for a phony war? Have Americans died for Israel - to fulfill its strategic objective of balkanizing, pulverizing the larger Arab states? Once Americans begin to ask these questions, the consequences could be unpredictable for Israel and for the exercise of American power in the world.
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[MikeG]

1. "Police and thieves in the streets..."

"Scaring the people with their guns and ammunition"