Chasing phantoms
Bin Laden is gone, his terror franchise is manageable, but the professional fear mongers are already conjuring new devils – By Hans Leyendecker
A specter has been haunting the world: the specter of globally-networked Islamist terrorism. It appeared in various guises and forms and seemed to be omnipresent.
Because ghosts are also given names to better distinguish them from each other, this one was called al Qaeda. Some just called it Osama bin Laden. That sounded even more dangerous.
The world has experienced many religious fanatics and dangerous political criminals but no other absolutist dreamer sparked as much paranoia as the mass murderer of September 11. Well-founded concern about his alleged plans often turned into hysterical catastrophe-mongering.
It is not long ago that some experts were talking up bin Laden’s band of murderers as a “third totalitarian challenge,” meaning almost as bad as Communism and Nazism. That was a crazy exaggeration and one that trivialized Hitler and Stalin. Bin Laden may have been many things but he was no Hitler revenant.
And then two bullets laid the phantom to rest. Even ghosts are mortal, it seems. Now the professional fear industry, which includes intelligence agencies and politicians but also academics and publishers, is warning against giving the all-clear. Lone attackers, bin Laden avengers, preservers of the al Qaeda myth may be abroad.
Yes, someone is always on the prowl. The security industry has its own concerned lobby, which is also perfectly capable of spreading fear. It needs the eternal devil so as to be able to fight him with everything an apparatus has at its disposal.
The guardians of our safety have the quality of never feeling completely safe. Somewhere, there is always a piece missing of the safeguards against an imaginary or a real enemy. This requires tougher laws, more personnel, greater powers to be able to save the world tomorrow and the day after. Security apparatuses consider themselves to be the great rock of civilization – the last bastion on the road to apocalypse.
Societies almost always develop a feeling of living in a final age, an era in which survival is at stake. They need the concept of a total, absolute danger to see themselves as the most threatened society of all time. It is only through contemplation of the apocalypse that salvation and savior become so important.
The war on terror needed saviors and the Western intelligence services were there to offer their wares, especially the many US agencies. Have they really saved the world from the worst?
Mainly, they have saved themselves. After the end of the Cold War they plodded along with no clear remit or recognition. They were often badly informed, with no idea what was going on where. Then the terrible images of mass murder on Sept. 11, 2001 drew a whole society into their orbit and held them there.
The very people who had first underestimated the danger promptly received powerful support to be able to combat the great threat. The fight against the Islamist specter has so far cost many hundreds of billions of dollars. Two wars were waged, in which an estimated 150,000 people died. Was the threat really so great?
Let there be no misunderstanding: The murderers have often struck cruelly. The Germans are lucky: Thanks to the professionalism of the security agencies and the police there have been no major attacks. But it is also true that compared with the usual risks of everyday life the danger from terrorism is minimal. There are far greater threats in life. Beyond that, many assessments by so-called terrorism experts, on which the fear of the great threat rested, were inexact, exaggerated, wrong.
For years, the terror hunters were convinced that bin Laden and his closest followers had gone to ground in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, concerned solely with staying alive. This circumstance explained, they said, why he could no longer direct any operations. He lived cut off from the world and was seriously ill. All the while, the man was living with his wife and children in a Pakistani garrison town. He wasn’t even sick. He had computers, he had television and, as the intelligence agencies now claim to know, he even gave his people tips for attacks. But they did not always follow his orders, we are told – all with no guarantee, as always.
This allegedly omnipotent creature, who was also just a human being, had allegedly built up a global franchise system. His terror cells were supposed to be multiplying around the world like a cancer. Now it turns out that the franchise operation was quite modest after all, with only a few subsidiaries.
The Maghreb branch in North Africa is little more than a bunch of thieves. In Iraq and in Somalia they’re more concerned with local issues, and whenever bin Laden demanded that it was time for another spectacular in the US, the regional leaders are said to have dismissed him.
For a while now, the Yemen group has been considered the really new, really big, really international danger. If the propaganda is to be believed, al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula is certainly a pretty big deal and they have also tried to export terror to other countries – with only moderate success.
A dead bin Laden, it was said before he met his end, would be more dangerous than a living one. Stubborn Muslims would celebrate him as a martyr, and in the end Caliphates would arise. But bin Laden’s ideas and methods have ceased to be popular in the Islamic world. Even organizations whose ideology once inspired al Qaeda welcomed his end. “With the death of bin Laden, one of the reasons for violence in the world has been removed,” a spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said.
Many of the assessments that the public was fed by the intelligence services and were considered safe findings, have been vastly exaggerated. Paranoid assumptions and Jihadist fantasies of omnipotence were taken at face value. We can only speculate on the reasons.
It is perhaps noteworthy that the many experts on Islamist threats of all kind were able to minutely describe the networks of terrorists in Arab countries down to the last cell but, amazingly, failed to notice anything about the democracy movements in these countries. The dictators known as allies in the West because they were against al Qaeda are suddenly called dictators by everyone. Some of them were driven out or apprehended by genuine revolutionaries. It is they who have driven out these devils. Maybe we should support them for a change.
– This article first appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on May 14.