Wizblog

Kamm on Terrorism

One of the humbling things about the blogosphere for a nascent blogger and amateur writer like me is that it is painfully easy to find others who are expressing what I think and feel much more eloquently and clearly than I could.

Once I get past that insecurity thing though, it's therapeutic to link to those writers, and then sit back with a certain element of satisfaction that I have identified, and brought to the attention of what few readers of this blog there may be, the words of my ideological soulmates. In this, the umpteenth occurence of this phenomenon today, I give you Oliver Kamm. Responding to Paul Keetch's suggestion that the Baghdad bombing and other "resistance" attacks on Iraqi infrastructure demonstrate "an urgent need for coalition forces to set up an Iraqi backed administration that has the support and respect of all groups in Iraq", Kamm says:

...when you obfuscate the nature of suicide-terrorism you also misperceive the solutions to it: hence Keetch's massive non sequitur. There is indeed an urgent need for a competent Iraqi-backed administration, but the notion that it would have 'the support and respect of all groups in Iraq' is fanciful. Seventeen civilians lie dead because a stable and popular administration is the last thing desired by a coalition of Islamist and Baathist terrorists, some of them foreign but nonetheless 'in Iraq'.

Typically the BBC accompanies its report with this sentiment from one its readers:

"The attacks won't stop until a stable and popular government is in place."

The attacks won't stop then either; they'll intensify, because legitimate civil authority is the opposite of what fascist terror gangs, theocratic and secular, aim for. It's a recurrent lesson that liberals have to learn - and the party known paradoxically as 'Liberal' in British politics, but not representing anything recognisable as liberalism, is nowhere near imbibing it - that there is no political or economic solution to terrorism, only a military one. Terrorists kill not because they're goaded into it by any sins of ours, but because their ideology is founded on the exercise of arbitrary authority and systematic violence. As the historian and former (Irish) Labour politician Conor Cruise O'Brien has long maintained, no political solution to terrorism is attainable, for there are no concessions that a democracy could make that even in principle would satisfy the demands of those ideologically opposed to liberal political rights and the rule of law.

Add to the list of liberals who don't "get it" the names of John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, who took the occasion of the Baghdad bombing to bemoan the lack of "an adequate plan" (Kerry), and "postwar progress and stability" (Lieberman). In fact, as Kamm illustrates, and as Ralph Peters posits, the bombing shows not only the desperation of the resistance in the face of coalition progress, but that what is being resisted is not U.S. "occupation", but Iraqi self-government.