THE WAR WE ARE LOSING
July 25, 2005

            Paris, France. The recent terrorist attacks in London have achieved their objective: to create fear.  It is difficult to get on a metro train or bus in any European country without thinking that the terrorists may have beaten us to it.  The success of the terrorists lies in making us feel that we—you and I—could be the next victims of an attack.

            After the first attacks in London, I returned to this French capital by underground train.  I had never seen so many police officers and soldiers waiting before the immigration and customs checkpoints.  The French assume, somewhat rightly, that Muslim terrorists prefer to kill citizens of Britain rather than France.  After all, England has sent soldiers to Iraq, while France has not.  But nobody feels safe these days, particularly due to the open verbal aggression of tiny groups of militant fundamentalists who have infiltrated the peaceful European Muslim community. 

            Nearly 20 million Muslims have made their home in this part of the world. That is to say that nowadays, Europe without Muslims would be inconceivable.  They make up the largest minority group in Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Holland and it is estimated that due to their high birth rates, their population will double by 2025.  In France, one out of every 10 inhabitants is Muslim.  The five million Muslims in France make up Europe’s largest Islamic community.

            Against this backdrop it was more than simple coincidence—and a journalistic cliché—that the taxi driver who took me to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris at the end of my trip was a man named Mohamed. Taxi drivers are usually a reporter’s first and last contact with a country, and since the work in the streets, they say things that one never hears in official government buildings.

            Mohamed was no exception. Of Palestinian origin, Mohamed had lived in Michigan for a few years before emigrating to France, where he and his family felt less discrimination.  When he learned I had just returned from a brief visit to London, after the bombings, and that I was a journalist living in the United States, the roles reversed and he began to ask me a million questions.  “Why is the United States in Iraq?  Do they talk about the dead Iraqi civilians and children over there?  Is President George Bush’s administration doing anything to promote a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”

            “We are tired of the violence,” he said in conclusion, “the killing in Iraq pains us just as much as the killing in London.”  And then he posed his last question: “How long will this go on?”  “At least until 2008,” I dared to suggest.  “I suppose the Arab world’s most radical elements will never make peace with President Bush or his allies.” And then we both fell silent.

            The suspicion that we will have at least three more years of terrorist violence is paralyzing.  But the attack on the train stations in Madrid 16 months ago, and the two that recently occurred in the British capital only two weeks apart, suggest that we are losing the war on terror.

            The most worrisome part of this tendency is that there seems to be a never ending stream of young people who are willing to commit suicide in a terrorist attack, in London as well as in Iraq.  It is very hard for me to understand what would make a young man of 18 or 20 decide to take his own life, and take many others with him, just to send a political message.

The hatred these suicidal youths feel for anything that smacks of the western world must be immense.  The case of the first bombings in London on Thursday July 7 still has me perplexed.  The fact that 22 percent of Muslim youths in England are unemployed—more than double the national average—does not explain their behavior.  Neither does the discrimination they suffer or their Pakistani origin.  It is impossible to try to understand the mental labyrinth of a suicide terrorist.  But perhaps what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan is forcing us to take that fatal step.

“Unless British foreign policy is changed and they withdraw forces from Iraq,” militant cleric Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad told The New York Times newspaper, “I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot of attacks.” And in spite of Sheik Omar’s extremism and verbal virulence, his predictions may yet come true. 

The death of Iraqi civilians has, without a doubt, united the most disparate radical Muslim groups in a common hatred. According to the Iraq Body Count organization, from March, 2003, when the war began, to today, 25,881 Iraqi civilians (non-combatants) may have been killed.  That is to say, almost 24 thousand more than the number of American soldiers killed during the same period.  And it may be that these suicide attacks are a cruel and sick method of payback, in the minds of the terrorists, for the civilian deaths and military occupation in Iraq.

But we can be sure that the violence, both inside and outside Iraq, is going to continue.  Bush and Blair have yet to set a withdrawal date for the soldiers in Iraq, the terrorists—as the second attacks in London showed—are out of control and, in reality, there is not a lot that can be done when a young person is willing to become a martyr and commit suicide in the midst of innocent people.

Every time a civilian is killed in a terrorist attack in any part of the world, we lose more ground in the war on terror. And that’s why it is a war we’re not winning.