Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Embedded in all of this, of course, is the problem of terrorism, which is a real problem -- if it was misconceived by the Bush administration, that's another question. You point out in the book very effectively that there was a misunderstanding of modern terrorism, transnational terrorism, that can be dissociated from any state sponsor and for which it's very difficult to find the leadership, and so on. With this new consensus, do you envision a better understanding of terrorism by the American political system, and then a calling into play of the other instruments of power that you're so familiar with -- diplomacy, the battle over ideas, and so on and so forth, and not just a reliance on the military power?
I think probably not. It seems to me that this new consensus is very state focused. It's focused very much on democratizing other states and assuming that that's going to take care of, or at least address, the terrorist problem. I think that's a very arguable, debatable proposition. For example, if you unleash democratization in Saudi Arabia, what would you actually come up with there? Would it be a liberal pro-Western market democracy or would it be something, in fact, very much worse, more adverse for the United States?
This thinking still does remain very much, rather oddly, in the traditional state-on-state concept of international relations. And [with] terrorism, I think, we've really got to get away from that. We've got to see that this as a much more complex challenge for all of us, that something like al Qaeda is a franchise, it's diffused around the world, it can operate with very little money, it can operate with very little leadership structures, and if we continue to think of it in a body-count way, you know, we've killed three people here, five people there, we've hit their head of planning, as though al Qaeda was an IBM which had an organizational structure which you could take down somehow ...
Corporate headquarters.
Corporate headquarters, exactly. It really doesn't at all have that. So, that's going to require a total re-thinking of this idea that somehow American ideals and power are the way to confront this. This is going to need a much more long-term and subtle interface with the country's concern, and more gradualist as well.
Where will that insight come from? I'm bothered by the notion that one doesn't see how we as a country will come to that realization. Will the initiative come from the Europeans with regard to these insights?
The initiatives are going to probably come from the domestic circumstances themselves of these countries. If one, for example, looks at encouraging developments between Palestine and Israel, what was the key catalyst of that was clearly the death of Yassar Arafat. The administration's ability to take advantage of those developments is going to be absolutely key here. If they can do that -- and there're some signs that that is happening, that they are beginning to see that these are developments they can piggyback off of and advance American [interests] -- if that happens, then the prospects for addressing the problem are considerably enhanced.
So, the understanding of terrorism may come as we resolve some of the situations where the terrorists are emerging from?
I think so, yes. It seems to me that obviously the Arab/Israel dispute is not the full explanation of terrorism. Clearly it's not. Osama bin Laden himself was motivated much more by developments inside Saudi Arabia rather than Arab/Israel. But clearly that's also a very major part of that. The United States over the past five years -- certainly the first Bush administration did tilt -- neglected this problem with tremendous disadvantage to the United States in terms of encouragement of international fermentation of anti-American feeling. That was a bad mistake and it was mainly predicated on the personality of Yassar Arafat, who became a persona non grata in Washington. Now that that situation has evolved in a positive direction, if the administration continues to be as actively engaged in it as it is, and there are going to be some difficult moments ahead, I think that's going to go a long way towards assuaging one of the breeding grounds of international terrorism.
Now we look elsewhere. Saudi Arabia is the absolute key here. Saudis are, on the one hand, aware that they need to move in the direction of taking the lid off the so-called pressure cooker, that is, the Saudi repressed political system today, but they're also tremendously concerned about importing trained insurgents from Iraq. They see that the Iraq experience is giving Saudis a sort of free education in how to run insurgent governments. So once again, we're talking about an approach to that problem which is subtle, long-term, multifaceted, rather than the bludgeon -- and there are still some neo-conservatives around who say that what we should do is try to support the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia to break away from Saudi Arabia and let the kingdom disintegrate into pieces and see what happens.
And these are Shia sections?
Precisely, yes, and the oil fields. And if you say to yourself, is that a sensible policy, the answer is a resounding no.
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