digrar
03-19-2004, 03:36 AM
Found this in the Australian Media.
Curiosity won't kill these cats
Comment by Greg Sheridan
March 18, 2004
A STRANGE thing happened to me on Radio National the other night. (What's so strange about that, you might ask.) Sandy McCutcheon, on Australia Talks Back, asked me whether the Madrid bombings showed that Spain had paid a terrible price for going to war in Iraq.
Hang on, I replied. Spain didn't go to war in Iraq. It decided not to contribute to the war, which involved US, UK, Australian and Polish troops. It supported the war politically, but sent troops, as did dozens of other countries, only in the peacekeeping phase afterwards.
How ridiculous, replied McCutcheon. Nobody says that.
Now, on Radio National you never expect reality to play a very prominent part and this is not just another lament about the ABC's pervasive left-wing bias or even its lack of editorial standards.
The incident is revealing in a different way, and that is the stunning lack of curiosity by most Australian liberal commentators about the motivations and ideology of al-Qaeda, and the conviction that everything that happens in the war on terror could have been avoided if only we had behaved differently.
The purest expression of this view is evident on the Lateline program on ABC television where Tony Jones nightly coos and bills over left-wing commentators, even giving a respectful hearing to the odious John Pilger so he can argue that Australian soldiers are a legitimate target for murder by the Iraqi "resistance", while Jones mocks, talks over or just spits venom at most people on the other side of the argument.
While all the perfidies of George W. Bush, all the wickedness of John Howard, all the agonies of the fallen angel Tony Blair are nightly excoriated on Lateline, can you remember the last time the program took a look at what motivates al-Qaeda?
The debate this week over whether having, unlike Spain, gone to war in Iraq makes us a greater target for terrorist attack has had one missing ingredient - the terrorists.
There is a kind of moral and political narcissism in most liberal commentators in which they, much more than Bush or Howard, dehumanise the terrorists by in effect denying that the terrorists possess the agency of moral choice. Or that they make their own strategic decisions based on a wide-ranging ideology, an ideology that is not going to be affected in the slightest degree by any possible action we take.
If only we have the approval of the UN, al-Qaeda won't attack us, this thinking sometimes goes. But al-Qaeda bombs the UN itself. Well, then, if only we opposed US foreign policy, specifically the war in Iraq. But al-Qaeda and its affiliates attack Indonesia, which opposed the war, and Turkey, which refused to let US troops enter Iraq from its soil.
The failure to look seriously at al-Qaeda and what motivates it leads to a repeated analytical failure. Surely al-Qaeda and its affiliates are one of the most extraordinary and important fanatical movements in recent history. Yet our intellectual class is almost entirely uninterested in them. A paradox, no?
In 50 pages of unrelieved tedium by Robert Manne on the Howard years, in the book of the same name, there is one sentence on the Bali bombing, in which 88 Australians were killed, and not a single sentence about who al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah are and what motivates them.
"Our intellectuals should realise it is possible that a thing can be true even if Howard says it is true."
The absolute lack of curiosity by Manne, and similar intellectuals, about this subject, even as they affect to survey the whole political scene, reflects more than their abiding provincialism. It speaks to a self-obsession that is intellectually crippling. Our intellectuals should realise it is possible that a thing can be true even if Howard says it is true.
ASIO boss Dennis Richardson said yesterday that "it is essential to grasp its (al-Qaeda's) core ideology, its inner driving force, which constitutes a positive world view which cannot be explained away as a reaction to the sins of others".
Everyone now repeats the mantra that being an ally of the US increases our risk of becoming a terrorist target. Yet al-Qaeda attacks so many nations that are not allies of the US. Who can possibly say with authority what increases the risk? As usual, the most sensible comment comes from NSW Premier Bob Carr, who points out that to know whether Iraq was a factor in the attack on Spain you'd have to have a listening device in every al-Qaeda cave.
Consider this. If there were indeed a single military action involving Australia that would have distressed al-Qa'ida (as of course it was meant to do), that would have been the war in Afghanistan because that war destroyed al-Qa'ida's close ally, the Taliban government.
So the Afghanistan operation thus made us a more likely terror target. But hang on, is that really a sound net assessment? Because the Afghanistan operation also destroyed all the terrorist training camps that were crucial in passing on the ideological indoctrination and technological know-how of terrorism. Many of the Jemaah Islamiah terrorists of Indonesia are veterans of these camps. So eliminating these camps surely decreased the risks of terrorism hitting Australia. So what is the net result?
Alexander Downer has correctly pointed out that al-Qaeda ideology seeks the creation of Taliban-style regimes all over the Islamic world. It also seeks to return to Islamic rule all lands that were ever under Islamic rule, such as southern Spain. It also seeks, incidentally, the destruction of Western democratic societies.
That is why Blair has said that in the war on terror we confront an enemy prepared to wage war without limits on the basis of an ideology of religious hatred.
Any Western politician who uses the bombings in Spain to argue that we should renege on our commitment to the war on terror gives the terrorists a tremendous incentive to bomb again.
The Australian
Curiosity won't kill these cats
Comment by Greg Sheridan
March 18, 2004
A STRANGE thing happened to me on Radio National the other night. (What's so strange about that, you might ask.) Sandy McCutcheon, on Australia Talks Back, asked me whether the Madrid bombings showed that Spain had paid a terrible price for going to war in Iraq.
Hang on, I replied. Spain didn't go to war in Iraq. It decided not to contribute to the war, which involved US, UK, Australian and Polish troops. It supported the war politically, but sent troops, as did dozens of other countries, only in the peacekeeping phase afterwards.
How ridiculous, replied McCutcheon. Nobody says that.
Now, on Radio National you never expect reality to play a very prominent part and this is not just another lament about the ABC's pervasive left-wing bias or even its lack of editorial standards.
The incident is revealing in a different way, and that is the stunning lack of curiosity by most Australian liberal commentators about the motivations and ideology of al-Qaeda, and the conviction that everything that happens in the war on terror could have been avoided if only we had behaved differently.
The purest expression of this view is evident on the Lateline program on ABC television where Tony Jones nightly coos and bills over left-wing commentators, even giving a respectful hearing to the odious John Pilger so he can argue that Australian soldiers are a legitimate target for murder by the Iraqi "resistance", while Jones mocks, talks over or just spits venom at most people on the other side of the argument.
While all the perfidies of George W. Bush, all the wickedness of John Howard, all the agonies of the fallen angel Tony Blair are nightly excoriated on Lateline, can you remember the last time the program took a look at what motivates al-Qaeda?
The debate this week over whether having, unlike Spain, gone to war in Iraq makes us a greater target for terrorist attack has had one missing ingredient - the terrorists.
There is a kind of moral and political narcissism in most liberal commentators in which they, much more than Bush or Howard, dehumanise the terrorists by in effect denying that the terrorists possess the agency of moral choice. Or that they make their own strategic decisions based on a wide-ranging ideology, an ideology that is not going to be affected in the slightest degree by any possible action we take.
If only we have the approval of the UN, al-Qaeda won't attack us, this thinking sometimes goes. But al-Qaeda bombs the UN itself. Well, then, if only we opposed US foreign policy, specifically the war in Iraq. But al-Qaeda and its affiliates attack Indonesia, which opposed the war, and Turkey, which refused to let US troops enter Iraq from its soil.
The failure to look seriously at al-Qaeda and what motivates it leads to a repeated analytical failure. Surely al-Qaeda and its affiliates are one of the most extraordinary and important fanatical movements in recent history. Yet our intellectual class is almost entirely uninterested in them. A paradox, no?
In 50 pages of unrelieved tedium by Robert Manne on the Howard years, in the book of the same name, there is one sentence on the Bali bombing, in which 88 Australians were killed, and not a single sentence about who al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah are and what motivates them.
"Our intellectuals should realise it is possible that a thing can be true even if Howard says it is true."
The absolute lack of curiosity by Manne, and similar intellectuals, about this subject, even as they affect to survey the whole political scene, reflects more than their abiding provincialism. It speaks to a self-obsession that is intellectually crippling. Our intellectuals should realise it is possible that a thing can be true even if Howard says it is true.
ASIO boss Dennis Richardson said yesterday that "it is essential to grasp its (al-Qaeda's) core ideology, its inner driving force, which constitutes a positive world view which cannot be explained away as a reaction to the sins of others".
Everyone now repeats the mantra that being an ally of the US increases our risk of becoming a terrorist target. Yet al-Qaeda attacks so many nations that are not allies of the US. Who can possibly say with authority what increases the risk? As usual, the most sensible comment comes from NSW Premier Bob Carr, who points out that to know whether Iraq was a factor in the attack on Spain you'd have to have a listening device in every al-Qaeda cave.
Consider this. If there were indeed a single military action involving Australia that would have distressed al-Qa'ida (as of course it was meant to do), that would have been the war in Afghanistan because that war destroyed al-Qa'ida's close ally, the Taliban government.
So the Afghanistan operation thus made us a more likely terror target. But hang on, is that really a sound net assessment? Because the Afghanistan operation also destroyed all the terrorist training camps that were crucial in passing on the ideological indoctrination and technological know-how of terrorism. Many of the Jemaah Islamiah terrorists of Indonesia are veterans of these camps. So eliminating these camps surely decreased the risks of terrorism hitting Australia. So what is the net result?
Alexander Downer has correctly pointed out that al-Qaeda ideology seeks the creation of Taliban-style regimes all over the Islamic world. It also seeks to return to Islamic rule all lands that were ever under Islamic rule, such as southern Spain. It also seeks, incidentally, the destruction of Western democratic societies.
That is why Blair has said that in the war on terror we confront an enemy prepared to wage war without limits on the basis of an ideology of religious hatred.
Any Western politician who uses the bombings in Spain to argue that we should renege on our commitment to the war on terror gives the terrorists a tremendous incentive to bomb again.
The Australian