[Kabar-indonesia] NYT: Does Calling It Jihad Make It So? [+Mercenary Jackpot]

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also: Mercenary Jackpot

The New York Times
Sunday, August 13, 2006

Does Calling It Jihad Make It So?

By DAVID E. SANGER

SOON after the British police announced last week that
they had broken up a plot to blow up aircraft across
the Atlantic, President Bush declared the affair “a
stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic
fascists.”

British officials, on the other hand, referred to the
men in custody as “main players,” and declined to
discuss either their motives or ideology so that they
would not jeopardize “criminal proceedings.”

The difference in these initial public
characterizations was revealing: The American
president summoned up language reaffirming that the
United States is locked in a global war in which its
enemies are bound together by a common ideology, and a
common hatred of democracy. For the moment, the
British carefully stuck to the toned-down language of
law enforcement.

A critical debate in America today — among political
candidates and among national security experts — is
whether five years of war declarations and war-making
have helped to make the United States more secure. Or,
even in the absence of a major attack on American soil
since 9/11, has this strategy created greater danger
by providing terror groups with exactly what they
crave: the sense that they are a unified army of
jihadists? And has the strategy radicalized large
swaths of the Muslim world in ways that were not
imaginable as recently as 2003?

For the White House, the bomb plot last week was
Exhibit A in defense of the war strategy: the plotters
would go after Americans, war or no war in Iraq. But
critics argue that merging the global war on terror
and Iraq was creating new jihadists, from Indonesia to
Walthamstow, the East London area where much of the
plot was hatched.

Few questioned whether the war-on-terror strategy made
sense right after 9/11. The war in Afghanistan greatly
degraded Al Qaeda’s organizational ability, although
there were indications last week that the terror
network had links to the homegrown suspects in the
London plot.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney derided
what they saw as the law enforcement approach of the
Clinton years. As Mr. Cheney told visiting diplomats
recently, “There was a war on in the 1990’s, but we
didn’t know it.”

He routinely recites a history of terror plots against
Americans over the past two decades, from the
destruction of a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 to
the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 — all of which,
he said, were treated like police investigations,
emboldening the plotters of 9/11.

“You’ll see case after case of terrorists hitting
America or American targets — and America failing to
hit back hard enough,” Mr. Cheney said in a recent
speech.

The test of American willpower, Mr. Cheney and Mr.
Bush have insisted, is in Baghdad, which explains why
they stick to the language that it is the “central
front” in the war on terrorism and domino that America
cannot let fall. Defeat there, they warn, would give
the jihadists a victory and empower them to move on to
the next country — maybe Pakistan, maybe Saudi Arabia,
maybe Lebanon.

The question is whether that approach — and the
language that goes with it — creates a trap for the
administration.

“I think that what is happening is that everything is
getting magnified,” said Stephen Cohen, a Mideast
scholar at the Israel Policy Forum. “Just like every
small crisis around the world was part of the cold
war, every one is now part of the struggle between
militant Islam and the United States. And that makes
individual conflicts harder to solve,” and an
inspiration for jihad.

Mr. Cohen cited the American approach to the
Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. If that conflict were once
again regarded as just another chapter in a
long-running regional dispute, the stakes would be
lower in Washington, making it easier for the United
States to play a more traditional peace-making role.

The administration response is that it describes the
world the way it is — rather than ducking the
realities of the Mideast.

Although she worries that the language of “Islamic
fascism” risks alienating Muslim communities, Farhana
Ali, a political analyst at the RAND Corporation,
said: “I don’t blame the administration for treating
this as a war, because it is one in many ways. It’s a
political war.”

She points to the video released last month, exactly a
year after the London subway bombings. In it, one
plotter who died in the attacks, seeming to speak from
the grave, warned that the explosions were just the
beginning of bigger attacks.

Daniel Benjamin, author of “The Next Attack,’’ a book
about the future of terrorism, said: “The tube bombers
in Britain were clearly motivated in large measure by
Iraq. They were obsessed about it. ‘’

Washington has tried, at times, to soften its message.
Mr. Bush has launched diplomatic efforts to convince
the Muslim world that the battle is with terrorists,
not with “a great religion.” The administration
provided aid to the tsunami victims in Indonesia,
partly also to remind the world’s largest Muslim
nation that American goals go beyond counterinsurgency
operations.

But those military operations are what most of the
world watches each night. A mystery of the London plot
is whether Al Qaeda incited it — as its surviving
leadership seeks to prove it can still pack a punch —
and whether the suspects were prompted by televised
military imagery.

Jon B. Wolfsthal, of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, said on Friday: “If I could ask
one question as an interrogator to the guys they just
arrested, I’d want to find out who they were and what
they were thinking about this kind of attack before
Iraq, or after. I’d want to know whether they have
longstanding anger at the U.S., or are we adding fuel
to the fire, and making new extremists. I don’t mean
that Iraq was right or wrong, but every action has
consequences.”

In the current issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows
argues that the imagery of the “long war” — one that
has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict —
is self-defeating. “An open-ended war is an open-ended
invitation to defeat,” he wrote. “Sometime there will
be more bombings, shootings, poisonings and other
disruptions in the United States.” Some will be the
work of Islamic extremists, some not. He added: “If
they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy
‘victories,’ not misfortunes of the sort that great
nations suffer.”

For Mr. Bush, however, dropping the talk of a “long
war” would be to send a message that America can go
back to sleep. Thus, each terrorist attack or threat
is woven into the bigger picture of a global struggle.

It helps explain the recent redeployment of American
troops to the streets of Baghdad: to pull out early
would be a return to the failed approach of the
1990’s. It would be another Somalia, another Beirut.
The problem is whether staying may give the jihadists
something else: A narrative of never-ending conflict,
in a war to be fought in Baghdad, in Lebanon and in
economy class over the wing of a 747.

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The Nation [US]
August 28, 2006 issue

Mercenary Jackpot

by JEREMY SCAHILL

While the Bush Administration calls for the immediate
disbanding of what it has labeled "private" and
"illegal" militias in Lebanon and Iraq, it is pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into its own global
private mercenary army tasked with protecting US
officials and institutions overseas. The secretive
program, which spans at least twenty-seven countries,
has been an incredible jackpot for one heavily
Republican-connected firm in particular: Blackwater
USA. Government records recently obtained by The
Nation reveal that the Bush Administration has paid
Blackwater more than $320 million since June 2004 to
provide "diplomatic security" services globally. The
massive contract is the largest known to have been
awarded to Blackwater to date and reveals how the
Administration has elevated a once-fledgling security
firm into a major profiteer in the "war on terror."

Blackwater's highly lucrative "diplomatic security"
contract was officially awarded under the State
Department's little-known Worldwide Personal
Protective Service (WPPS) program, described in State
Department documents as a government initiative to
protect US officials as well as "certain foreign
government high level officials whenever the need
arises."

A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of
Blackwater's WPPS contract proposal, obtained by The
Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its
overhead and its total costs, which would result "not
only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of
profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit
to profit." The audit also found that the company
tried to inflate its profits by representing different
Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies.

The WPPS contract awarded in 2004 was divided among a
handful of companies, among them DynCorp and Triple
Canopy. Blackwater was originally slated to be paid
$229.5 million for five years, according to a State
Department contract list. Yet as of June 30, just two
years into the program, it had been paid a total of
$321,715,794. When confronted with this apparent $100
million discrepancy, the State Department could not
readily explain it. Blackwater's two years of WPPS
earnings exceed many estimates of the company's total
government contracts, which the Virginian-Pilot
recently put at $290 million combined since 2000. Six
years ago the government paid Blackwater less than
$250,000.

"This underscores the need for Congress to exercise
real oversight on the runaway use of secret companies
that have strong connections to the Bush
Administration, for clandestine services all over the
world," says Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a
leading Congressional critic of private military
companies.

"This whole business of security is just insidious,"
says former Assistant Defense Secretary Philip Coyle,
who worked at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001. "The
costs keep going up, and there is no end in sight to
what you can spend. What happens is you keep raising
the threat levels to require more actions and more
contracts to overcome these imaginary threats. It's an
endless spiral."

In soliciting bids for the 2004 global contract, the
State Department cited a need born of "the continual
turmoil in the Mid East, and the post-war
stabilization efforts by the United States Government
in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq." It said the
government "is unable to provide protective services
on a long-term basis from its pool of special agents,
thus, outside contractual support is required." Coyle,
now with the Center for Defense Information, believes
the privatization of security duties historically
fulfilled by US Marines and other active-duty military
is directly related to the Iraq occupation. "Obviously
the military could do it, but indeed the
Administration is looking for places to get more
troops for Iraq," Coyle says.

While the WPPS program and the broader use of private
security contractors is not new, it has escalated
dramatically under the Bush Administration. According
to the most recent Government Accountability Office
report, some 48,000 private soldiers, working for 181
private military firms, are deployed in Iraq alone.
Blackwater, now one of the most prominent and
successful companies providing soldiers in Iraq, was
relatively unknown until March 31, 2004, when four of
its contractors were ambushed and killed in Falluja
[see Scahill, "Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater," May
8]. In the days and weeks that followed, company
executives hired ultra-connected lobbyists and were
welcomed by powerful government officials as heroes,
allowing the firm to solidify its role in the Bush
Administration's foreign policy apparatus.

Since 2003 Blackwater has held the high-profile job of
guarding senior US officials in Iraq, including all
three occupation-era ambassadors. The vaunted WPPS
contract was awarded at the end of Paul Bremer's
tenure in Baghdad. Blackwater, which did not respond
to repeated requests for comment, refuses to divulge
where its forces are deployed under the program. WPPS
documents say contractors may be dispatched almost
anywhere, including on US soil. The State Department
says explicitly that there is a "long-term" need for
these "protective services." Schakowsky says she will
request a formal explanation from the department of
the WPPS contract: "We need to know why the Bush
Administration keeps writing blank checks to
Blackwater and others, while it keeps Congress and the
American people in the dark." 

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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