Will war against Iraq defeat terrorism?

Date: 03/04/03

By David Cronin

The conflict has illustrated the widening divisions over how to deal with politically motivated violence.

THIS is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism," British Prime Minister Tony Blair mused after the 11 September 2001 atrocities. "It is a battle between the free and democratic world and terrorism."

No other Western leader would have dared disagree with the British premier's sound bite as bodies were still being taken from the rubble of the Twin Towers. Some 18 months later, though, the war in Iraq has exposed deep divisions both within Europe and between countries on either side of the Atlantic on how politically motivated violence should be tackled.

Maybe it is ironic that Blair has been so quick to agree with George W. Bush that Baghdad should be attacked as part of his war against terrorism. For the prime minister has previously proven that guns can be silenced through very different means.

For example, he helped broker the Belfast Agreement, signed on Good Friday 1998, which was supposed to usher in a new era of peace in Northern Ireland. While it hasn't entirely purged Ulster of bloodshed, the relative calm now witnessed in that turbulent part of the EU is a testament to what can be achieved when bombs and bullets are overtaken by dialogue and diplomacy.

His stance on Iraq notwithstanding, Blair arguably embodies some of the perceptions that EU politicians have about the most effective ways of tackling terrorism; perceptions which aren't shared by their American counterparts.

"Zapping people in Yemen with drones, as the Americans have done, is not enough," says Steven Everts from London-based think-thank the Centre for European Reform (CER). "The broader political context in which terrorists thrive has to be taken into account. It's not just enough to kill the crocodile, you have to drain the swamp.

"Europeans have taken a slightly more sophisticated view than you had in the US after 11 September. And many Europeans are very sceptical about seeing Iraq as part of the war against terrorism. If anything most Europeans argue that it [the current war] increases the threat of a terrorist attack."

Analysts say that a major factor which may explain the opposing views of terrorism is that paramilitary groups in Europe have never attempted anything as devastating - in quantitative terms - as 11 September. Indeed, the 3,000 lives lost in Manhattan that day is roughly the same number as those claimed by violence during three decades of the Irish 'Troubles'.

"For us 9/11 was a real shock," said Annette Heuser, Brussels-based director of the Bertelsmann Foundation. "But it didn't take place on our continent. We haven't been confronted with that kind of terrorism. It's true that Spain and Northern Ireland have been confronted with terrorism, but it was on a different level.

"For the Americans, this whole thing changed their mindset completely. It had such a strong impact even on the more liberal people in politics, that they said 'this is a real threat and we have to fight against it'."

Robin Cook, who recently stepped down as leader of Britain's House of Commons in protest at his government's Iraq policy, said that to win the war on terrorism, it is also necessary to win the war on poverty.

The argument has resonated in Brussels. Last week Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, lamented how the €70 billion which George W. Bush wants the US Congress to release to his war-chest is some €20 billion more than the rich world gives to poor countries each year.

"Innocent Iraqis shouldn't become casualties of the war against terrorism," says Jo Leadbeater, the EU spokeswoman for relief agency Oxfam. "That defeats the whole purpose. There are links between terrorism and poverty, disempowerment and suffering throughout the world. We can't just invest in military capability and build walls ever higher. While everyone is united in the campaign against terrorism, for us there has to be an anchoring of poverty within that - or it's never going to be sustainable."

From the Palestinian territories to Chechnya or Somalia, there is ample evidence of terrorist godfathers using the sense of alienation felt by impoverished young men for recruiting volunteers.

However, Annette Heuser believes the connections between fundamentalism and disadvantage should not be overestimated. Pointing out that some of the 11 September hijackers were polyglots who'd studied engineering in Germany, she adds: "In some of the top universities in Cairo, there are strong student groups with an Islamist agenda. These are the elite in Cairo, they're highly educated. Osama bin Laden and others don't hire their people from unemployed poor neighbourhoods in Cairo."

Heuser contends that the EU would be more effective in thwarting terrorism if there was greater coordination among the various planks of its actions in the wider world - particularly foreign and security policy and development aid. She feels that the granting of aid to poor countries should be more closely linked to their introduction of democratic reforms.

"It makes no sense to talk about a real capability of the EU to fight against terrorism," she says. "The EU has no real capabilities as a nation-state like the US or maybe the Brits with MI6 [the intelligence service] to fight terrorism on a practical basis. So the EU has to fight terrorism at a second level and maybe this is a more coherent and concrete way of dealing with it."

Her foundation is arguing that democratic reform throughout the Middle East would act as a bulwark against fundamentalism. "We have to find a strategy against terrorism which is based on transformation," she adds. "The problem is that we have not been able to find a way to combine the three pillars of the EU's external policy - development, external affairs and common foreign and security policy - in a coherent way."

Referring to an ongoing debate in the future of Europe Convention, she argues that matters would improve if the Union had a single foreign minister, so that the various strands of its external activities can be woven together. "We have to think beyond the traditional border lines that exist between the pillars, especially here in Brussels," she explains.

One tangible result of 11 September is that it has accelerated work on legal and police cooperation between the EU and US.

In the immediate wake of the atrocities, an emergency clause was invoked to allow Europol, the EU's police agency, to transfer data about those suspected of having a role in the planning or execution of terrorist attacks to American authorities. But a fully operational agreement was only signed between the Union and Washington on data transfer in December 2002.

This has generated protests from civil liberties campaigners, who have complained that data protection standards in the US are less robust than those in Europe. However, a spokesman for Europol said that national data protection commissioners from every EU state had vetted the accord before it came into effect and concluded that the assurances offered by the Americans were adequate.

A similar debate has also erupted over the deal, which came into effect this month, requiring airlines to hand over details of passengers taking transatlantic flights to federal authorities in Washington.

The next big step envisaged in this field is an agreement allowing the extradition of suspects from the Union to the US. Greece has set itself the target of finalising work on this dossier by the time its EU presidency ends in late June.

Diplomats are trying to remove some of the last remaining obstacles to the deal; a debate on this is foreseen at the meeting of EU justice ministers on 8 May. Work has been partly held up by French concerns over a possible scenario where a suspect could be sought both by the US and by police in an EU country.

Amnesty International has urged the ministers not to sign anything which does not explicitly forbid the execution of a suspect sent from Europe to America. The human rights group feels that pressure on member states to reach a compromise might lead to a situation where the provisions on preventing use of the death penalty might not be as watertight as it wants.

More generally, the head of Amnesty's Brussels office feels there is less focus on human rights issues by the Union now because the fight against terrorism has been dominated by security matters. "What we've seen since 11 September is this creeping process, where the orientation is more guided to the overriding notion of security," says Dick Oosting.

He argues this has been manifest in the Union's foreign policy; alleging that the EU has tempered its criticisms of repression in China, Russia and Algeria because they are deemed important members of the 'international coalition against terrorism' formed after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Without doubt, the Iraq war represents the most decisive phase yet in the fight against terrorism. The fact that it is a 'pre-emptive' war raises numerous questions. The Bush administration has attacked Iraq over what is at most circumstantial evidence of relations between Baghdad and the al-Qaeda network in a bid to prevent Saddam Hussein from unleashing his fury against American cities. Countless commentators have remarked there is no cast-iron proof that Iraq presents a direct threat of the nature President Bush has speculated about.

Could the US then be setting an extremely dangerous precedent? There have already been reports that political figures in India are asking why they should not have the 'right' to launch a 'pre-emptive' strike against Pakistan due to accusations it is sponsoring terrorism over the disputed province of Kashmir. Both countries are nuclear powers.

In a new study on the Middle East, Michael Emerson and Nathalie Tocci, from the Centre for European Policy Studies, analyse whether the current military action fulfils the criteria that have developed over the centuries for a war to be considered just. They write: "Pre-emptive action against an enemy nation may be justified as a kind of self-defence against aggression but only if the enemy has manifest intentions to aggress, has mobilised its forces with that aim and any postponement of the use of force would be likely to have irreversible negative consequences on the possibility of a country to defend itself against subsequent attack."

The authors do not agree that the war meets those conditions. They also try to bury the myth that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda are two sides of the same coin. "As a secularist leader, he [Saddam] is in categorical opposition to radical Islamic fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden or the late Ayatollah Khomeini," they stress. "By transferring weapons to fanatical Islamic groups he would lose control over their use, possibly even against his own regime."

Major feature. The conflict in Iraq has illustrated the widening divisions over how to deal with politically motivated violence.