BODYGUARD OF LIES:

AFTER MADRID (David Remnick, 2004-03-22, The New Yorker)

In recent years, Osama bin Laden has concealed his person from spies and Predator drones but has hidden his intentions and his sense of historical mission in plain sight. The recent bombings in Madrid are linked not only to the goals of undermining and unnerving states where secular pluralism reigns but also, by way of a kind of magical realism, to ancient resentments and fantasies, to bin Laden’s desire, expressed in videotaped speeches and declarations, that his followers reverse what Al Qaeda’s ideologist Ayman al-Zawahiri once called “the tragedy of Al-Andalus.” In the United States, “The Moor’s Last Sigh” is a novel by Salman Rushdie; for radical Islamists it is the memory of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelling Muslims from the Iberian peninsula and of King Boabdil fleeing Granada in tears while his mother says, “Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.” That event, five centuries past, resonates in the fundamentalist imagination like the defeat of the Muslim armies in Vienna in 1683 and the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. [...]

The problem of modern terror--terror that combines an apocalyptic ideology and a yearning for destruction--demands honesty with ourselves about the nature of the threat and honesty in politics. Capturing the top leaders of Al Qaeda is a necessity, but terror is not a threat that will end with decapitation. Nor will it end with the ordinary politics of negotiation and concession. The rebel cells of Madrid will not disperse with the pullout of Spanish troops from Iraq any more than the cells in this country dispersed with the American pullout of troops from Saudi Arabia. The old models do not apply. Groups like eta and the I.R.A. have committed acts of repugnant violence, but their aims have always been regional, limited in scope. The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Their sense of difference is encapsulated in the declaration of an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman: “You love life, and we love death.” Transnational terror cannot be combatted in an atmosphere of international distrust. At the very least, the terrorists have proved themselves to be as good as their word. Governments that hope to resist them must be, too.

Why? If this is a war that has to be fought and in which nothing we can do, short of killing them, is going to affect the Islamicists, and if the Europeans will only participate if they are lied to, then why not lie to them? If the choice really was between the truth or Saddam's downfall, who would choose truth?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2004 9:19 AM