STRATFOR: Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 15, 2004

STRATFOR ^ | July 15, 2004

[Axion]

The Philippine government has announced that it will withdraw its troops from Iraq -- a response to Iraqi guerrillas' demands in exchange for the life of a Filipino truck driver who is being held hostage. Even though this has no material effect on the war, the withdrawal obviously is a blow to the United States. It is the first time an ally has shifted its Iraq policy -- however slightly -- in response to demands by guerrillas holding hostages. The United States sees it as a capitulation, and it is. It is mitigated by the fact that the Filipinos are moving up their already scheduled departure only by a month, but that is, in the end, nothing more than that. Manila's decision hurts the United States badly by revealing a weakness in the American alliance system.

This needs to be considered in the context of the approaching end of al Qaeda's self-declared moratorium on operations in Europe. After the Madrid bombing in March, al Qaeda announced a three-month moratorium on attacks against Europeans that would be made permanent if European countries withdrew their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. That hasn't happened, and the "truce" ends July 15. The Dutch have already publicly declared an alert against al Qaeda attacks, and the rest of Europe is tense as well.

The attacks against American targets have not taken place in the context of any platform for negotiation; al Qaeda has simply attacked. In the current phase, al Qaeda and its jihadist allies in Iraq have adopted a new technique: trying to use threats to split the American alliance. They had excellent results in Spain in the wake of the Madrid bombing. They have now had a smaller but not insignificant success with the Philippines. Their strategy is not working spectacularly well, but it is working. That would lead us to conclude that al Qaeda will continue to use leverage against U.S. allies in an effort to isolate -- or at least complicate -- American diplomacy.

In order for this strategy to work, al Qaeda must show that it is serious. In Iraq, it was the beheadings of hostages from countries that wouldn't shift their position -- like Bulgaria -- that helped to drive the Philippines' decision. We would guess that Manila's move will make it easier, psychologically, for other countries to capitulate when their nationals are at risk. The pressure to save the hostages, measured against the value of their forces in Iraq to themselves or even the Americans, will make it easier to give in once a precedent has been set.

If al Qaeda is watching Iraq -- and you can be absolutely certain they are -- they are applying this logic on the geopolitical level. With their success in Spain before them and the end of the moratorium in sight, they are obviously going to be thinking about other operations that might serve to pry other countries out of their alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Creating a sense of isolation for the United States from its allies is an obvious and rational strategic goal.

It follows from this that al Qaeda should be preparing to stage some sharp attacks in Europe, followed by another offer of a cease-fire in return for the withdrawal of forces. Carried out in countries where support for the war is minimal and need for American support limited, the strategy might yield some harvest.

The problem we are having should be getting obvious. There are so many places where it makes sense for al Qaeda to attack, that we might as well say that al Qaeda could attack anywhere for an enormous range of reasons. In fact, we will say that. There is a great case for attacking the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and so on. In fact, the better approach is to find a place where al Qaeda and its allies wouldn't want to attack. There are precious few.

As we go through the summer, with nerves taut and security services everywhere on alert to the point of exhaustion, it strikes us -- and this is just a thought, not an analysis -- that attacks are almost superfluous. Al Qaeda has everyone running around in circles while barely lifting a finger. Obviously, they must at some point hit somewhere, in order to maintain the self-generated pressure, but there are days when you wonder whether inaction doesn't rattle everyone almost as much as action.

Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

[nathanbedford]

Let's draw back and gain some perspective.

Yes, it is profoundly serious that terrorists have demonstrated that they can effect policy change in two nations with these acts. In both cases the nations involved, Spain and The Phillipenes have decided their interest lay contrary to ours. More accurately, the politicians in these countries have concluded that their own interests lay in abandoning the USA.

The perspective we need is to see two truths: 1. These politicians could only have made these calculations because no WMDs were found - and that was a fluke. 2. That fluke of history is being exploited by two groups on parallel tracks, Al Quaida and THE LEFT - but those tracks must eventually separate.

Ultimately, the terrorist can maintain his credibilty only by striking and as soon as he strikes the tracks begin to divide. We must not make the mistake of assuming that the terrorists' goal is terror itself. They want to change policy. When the terrorist seek to change policy which is unique to America, such as our support of Israel, the tracks remain parallel and Europe can be peeled away from America. But when the policy is universally held, such as the universal need for oil, even appeasement cannot serve our allies' interests. They do not need Israel to survive but they must have oil and that only flows around the world because of American might.

So which policies do terrorists want to change? Let skip over for now the question of which terrorists we are talking about and whether terrorists are a monolithic bunch. If the terrorists goals are merely to change American policy in support of Israel, they can divide us from Europe and most of the world easily, If they go a step further, if they want us to abandon our presence anywhere in a Muslim land, they will still have some success as long as the world does not see our presence there as indespensible to their access to oil. If they take another jump, if they want to dictate policy to non-Muslim lands containing a Muslim minority, such as France, the tracks clearly divide. If they go yet a bridge farther, if they want to convert the entire world by the sword, they will have the whole world arrayed against them.

At some point in this progression even the world’s Universal Left must recognize that their goals, so far in so many ways congruent with the terrorists’, ultimately are incompatible. For now the left wants to blind Samson and even kill America as America. It wants a different power structure around the world with American under firm control. It wants the destruction of the nuclear family and Judeo-Christian religion which supports it. It wants the end of nationalism and the birth of world government. America stands in the way of virtually every goal to which the Left aspires. Conveniently for the left, the Islamists, for different reasons ultimately incompatible with the Left’s values, also see America as the principal obstacle to their goals. There can be no peace between a world view on the left which wants to destroy the family because it is an impediment to social control and a word view which wants to exault the man as monarch in the family, between a philosophy which wants to eradicate religion because it resists social control and a religion which IS social control.

So our perspective should be to cleve the Left from The Terrorists. We should set Muslim against terrorist, the only way to win this war. We should recognize that we are also at war with the left, which must be waged but which should remain undeclared.

Eventually, the terrorists will overreach.