BF2S Forums Two interesting transcripts

http://abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1375254.htm wrote:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1375254.htm

Broadcast: 23/05/2005

Terrorism is the weapon of the weak: Dyer
Reporter: Kerry O'Brien


KERRY O'BRIEN: Americans who coped with the shock and pain of the September 11 attack might not easily embrace the proposition that, in the overall history of war, modern terrorism is merely "the weapon of the weak". That it can make a splash, but fundamentally remains weak. That is the view of Canadian war historian Gwynne Dyer, who 20 years ago wrote a book and seven-part BBC television series on the nature of war through the ages. He's here for Sydney Writers' Week to promote his revised edition. Dyer observes that after the end of the Cold War, we're enjoying what might prove to be an Indian summer. That total war is only sleeping. He says the more civilised we've become, the more deadly we are at killing. I spoke with Gwynne Dyer earlier today.

Gwynne Dyer, is there anything in human behaviour since Neanderthal man that gives you cause for hope that we have it in us to avoid war, to actually manage a lasting peace?

GWYNNE DYER, AUTHOR: Well, one of the things that's become clear over the last 20 years, the anthropologists have finally come clean, we've always fought wars, we fought wars before we were civilised, we fought wars before we were human, any primate who's a predator has fought wars, I mean Jane Goodall and so on finding out about the chimpanzees of Tanzania. So we inherited war and it's, if not in the genes, so deep in the culture that you're not going to dig it out easily.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, it would seem that the more civilised we've become, the deadlier we've become.

GWYNNE DYER: History is mostly the history of winners, and societies that were good at war didn't lose too many people, and so war is certainly not regarded as a problem until you hit the 19th Century. But you start feeding in the new technologies, the new industry, the new wealth, and the weapons become so efficient at killing that suddenly the same old behaviour becomes completely counter productive. I mean 55 million people were killed in the Second World War. You're dropping nuclear weapons on cities by then. You gotta stop this now.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You talk about three things which present the greatest threat to global peace. The first is population growth in the environment, and the environment. Can you elaborate on that briefly?

GWYNNE DYER: The big population growth's over - we went from 1 billion to 6 billion in the last 200 years - we're never gonna double the population again even, but we are now industrialising and raising the consumption and living standards of at least half of those 6 billion, so the pressure will continue to mount. We're probably putting about 60 times the pressure on the environment we did in 1800, and it's starting to show in all sorts of ways.

KERRY O'BRIEN: The second risk that you see relates to new world powers emerging to change the global balance, which has led to war in the past. China, I guess, is an obvious example.

GWYNNE DYER: China and India is coming too. The traditional pattern, if you think about Germany at the end of the 19th Century or the French coming out of the woodwork in the early 18th Century, is that the new great power has got to fight its way into the system, push aside the old great powers who resist demotion. Now, the British actually managed not to have that kind of war with the Americans, when the baton passed the last time. It would be really nice if the Americans could avoid having a war with the Chinese this time. And it's really not necessary, because in fact, China's not going to be a superpower that ever puts America or indeed India in the shade. What you're heading for is a multi-powered world of sort of three really great powers by the middle of this century - India, China and America. So there's no one power you must fear. Everybody else has got to shuffle over a bit and make room, and the system will be got in place, the United Nations, the Security Council, current state of international laws is actually well designed to let this happen without the kind of cataclysm we had with Germany in the 20th Century. But, you know, you do have to accept, if you're America, that you're gonna lose your sole superpower status and that's something they're having a bit of trouble with.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You don't mention terrorism in your major risks to global peace. Why not?

GWYNNE DYER: Well, because it isn't. I mean, terrorism is in fact the weapon of the weak. And although they can make a splash, they remain weak. I mean, states are infinitely more powerful actors than terrorists. If you think about, you know, let's take Al Qaeda if it still really exists. It's more an idea and a network than an organisation. What does it really have at its disposal? It's probably got somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 activists. That's compared to 1.4 million people in the US armed forces and 52,000 people in the Australian armed forces, and a Government with, you know, a billion dollars a day, $10 billion a day of income to play with. They're minor actors. They can make a splash. Make a headline. But the only real strategy that any terrorist group's got is prod the opponent in exactly the right place where he's very vulnerable and will overreact, and trick him into striking back massively in ways that played into your hands. All terrorism is a kind of political jujitsu. They don't have the ability to harm us, though they can trick us into doing things that will harm us.^{Too true. Stop getting so worked up.}

KERRY O'BRIEN: You mean on a big scale?

GWYNNE DYER: Yes.

KERRY O'BRIEN: On September 11 and the threat of Al Qaeda, you say on the one hand that Osama bin Laden has had a victory of sorts over America in what has played out since, but you don't give him much hope of achieving his ultimate goal?

GWYNNE DYER: Well I mean, in the sense, the kind of terrorist strategy I was just talking about, Osama bin Laden has actually suckered the United States into invading two Muslim countries in the last three and a half years. American troops, and Australian troops to some extent, are now occupying countries with 50 million very unhappy Muslims in them, and the images that are coming out of places like Abu Ghraib are radicalising other Muslims, pushing them into the arms of the extremists, which was the point of the whole operation.^{Again, too true. Overreaction becoming detrimental.}

KERRY O'BRIEN: You really think that's what Osama bin Laden was after?

GWYNNE DYER: Well, I mean, he is part of a movement that's spent the last 30 years trying to overthrow secular Arab governments and come to power, and they couldn't get the mobs out in the streets so they never won in any Arab country. Deadlock, stalemate, let's break it, sucker the Americans into invading. The point is, it's a standard terrorist tactic. It's not Osama bin Laden being original. It's in the manual, you know, page 42. So, yeah, I do believe that, and he's had limited success in the sense that Americans are now deeply mired in occupying Muslim countries but even now Arabs aren't fools, most of them aren't going to go out and die in the street to bring him to power.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You're critical of the expression "war on terror". Why?

GWYNNE DYER: Because it's a simile - it's actually modelled directly on war on crime. The thing about wars on crime is (a) we don't use armoured brigades and (b) we don't expect them to end with all the criminals coming out with their hands up and then there's no more crime. It's a statistical operation to get the crime rate down. Wars on terror also should not be fought by armies because terrorists are not an army, they're civilians. There was one exception in Afghanistan where they had a government behind them so you had to deal with that, but apart from that they live in houses and apartment buildings among other civilians. What on earth is the use of tanks in combating this? It requires police force, intelligence gathering, security measures, rather like a war on crime does, but it's not a war. It's only a metaphor.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You've said, thankfully with an optimistic note, we've come to a point now where you regard the glass as more than half full.

GWYNNE DYER: Yes.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But when you stack up all the statistics you talk about in the book - the growth of the population, the increased strain on the planet between countries for resources, nuclear weapons - how confident do you feel for your children and your children's children?

GWYNNE DYER: Well, I wouldn't bet the house that we're gonna get through the next generation or so with no cataclysm. But, you know, we are going into a crunch. We all know we're going into a crunch. I think the major issues will be the political fallout of environmental crises, but they're coming and you don't know what order they're coming in. We're gonna have to get through that. We're much likelier to get through without a calamity if we have the multilateral system. I can't call the odds on this. I know if we don't have the multilateral system, you might as well cut your throat now because if we go into that with the old kind of confrontational alliance-based system at some point we fall off the ladder and everything goes. It's not the end of problems. It's certainly not the end of history. But a world that is largely democratic with a functioning multilateral system and a commitment to collaboration, not confrontation, has a reasonable chance of getting through the next 50 years without losing large chunks of humanity. Which is probably what's at stake.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Gwynne Dyer, thanks very much for talking with us.

GWYNNE DYER: Thank you very much, Kerry.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1974003.htm wrote:

Former CIA chief analyses global terrorism

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 09/07/2007

Transcript
ALI MOORE: Earlier this evening, Federal Police were granted the right to hold Gold Coast doctor Mohammed Haneef for a further 48 hours, and they can question him for a further 12 hours.

Dr Haneef was detained at Brisbane Airport last week trying to leave the country, following the failed bomb attempts in the UK.

At the same time, authorities are firming up links between those being held in the UK over the failed attacks and Al Qaeda, with security officials claiming at least one of the suspects was in contact with Al Qaeda members in Iraq.

More details of Al Qaeda's role are expected to emerge in coming days.

Watching these events closely has been 22-year CIA veteran Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden Tracking Unit. While in the CIA, he authored two books anonymously, that were highly critical of how the West has fought the war on terror. Michael Scheuer is now an intelligence analyst and is in Australia for a major security conference.

I spoke to him earlier in our Sydney studio.

Eight suspects now detained after the events of the past week, including Dr Mohammed Haneef in Australia, and now apparent links between at least one of those detained in the UK and senior members of Al Qaeda. Were the failed bombings the work of Al Qaeda?

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER HEAD OF CIA BIN LADEN UNIT: I think indirectly, they were. Al Qaeda's goal has always been in the first instance to inspire other Muslims to join the jihad. Bin Laden has been very clear that they are a vanguard group, they cannot do it by themselves, they need to inspire others to take action of their own.

And so I think what we're seeing, not only in England and other places, is the sufficiency of that inspiration.

ALI MOORE: When you say 'indirectly', this was not a planted terrorist cell, these were self radicalised, so to speak?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: It seems that way at this point. Frankly the quality of the operation was such that it doesn't look like an operation conducted by the main group of Al Qaeda, but certainly it could well have been, the people could have been trained, some money could have been exchanged, some kind of training via the Internet. There's a wide variety of assistance Al Qaeda can provide beyond military.

ALI MOORE: So you would suggest it was too amateurish to be a fully operational Al Qaeda?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I think that's right. I think it was too amateurish and perhaps not an important enough target. But still nonetheless, the only part that failed were the detonations, the British Security Service which is an excellent service, got beat flat out.

ALI MOORE: What about the link with Australia? And that's a link which our Federal Police Commissioner is now saying is becoming more concrete. Do you think that was sheer coincidence, or is there some logic to it?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well bin Laden has spoken on two occasions and I think more directly to the Australian people saying, "This is none of your business, Afghanistan and Iraq, why are you becoming involved? You are eventually going to earn what the Americans have been earning." So I don't think it's a surprise to anyone in Australia that you're seeing at least an indication of Al Qaeda's activity here.

ALI MOORE: You're saying direct payment for our involvement in Iraq and indeed Afghanistan?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Yes, for both of them. They've been very clear. Both bin Laden and al Zawahiri have been clear in saying, "This is none of your business, this is not your fight, why are you involved in it?"

ALI MOORE: In that context does it surprise you we've not had more activity on our soil and indeed these links may turn out to be nothing?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I think these links may turn out to be nothing, but eventually it's going to come here just as it's come around the world in every other country. We still make the mistake of believing these people are motivated by our society, the way we live, by freedom and liberty and it's really got nothing to do with that at all. It has everything to do with the offence they take at the policies of the United States and its allies in the Muslim world.

ALI MOORE: You were not surprised by the link with Australia. Were you surprised by the fact it involved doctors? There seemed to be quite a bit of consternation that this was a group of professionals, but in fact you have long argued it's not the lunatic fringe?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: No. One of the great mistakes we make is our leaders continually tell the voters that these people are poor and illiterate and not healthy and have no prospects. Al Qaeda in its appeal is overwhelmingly middle class and upper middle class and educated people are the people, they're looking for the best and the brightest in the Islamic world.

ALI MOORE: So when you see groups like this, potentially inspired by Al Qaeda, not necessarily formally trained by, is it a new breed of terrorist cell? Does it mean a new threat? Because, of course, if these groups are not organised there's no structure to dismantle?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Right. What we're really seeing is a new tier of threats. We have Al Qaeda, which remains fully capable of attacking the United States, of waging two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we have this tier of people that are springing up. You previously had a couple of cells here in Australia that were taken down, I believe. Britain has had a problem, Germany has had a problem. We've had a couple of cells in the United States. One in Toronto in Canada. And the common denominator always is inspiration, not control by Al Qaeda.

ALI MOORE: We've also seen today in Australia that the Government's reissued its travel warning to Indonesia. There's no specific information, but plenty of chatter about possible activity. Does that make sense to you? Does that seem timely?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well, the attacks in Indonesia have been about on a yearly basis. We're a little bit overdue for an attack in Indonesia. So it may well be that something's brewing.

ALI MOORE: Australia is also fast-tracking a more sophisticated system for background checks for people coming to this country. Given that certainly the group we're looking at from the events of the past week were clean skins, so to speak, none was notified to the security authorities, will a more sophisticated system of background checking make any difference?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Yes, if you establish better border controls and if you establish background checks you at least have a handle on who's in your country. The big problem for America is that its domestic security has not improved since 9/11. Our borders are wide open. You want to close the borders not for racial or discriminatory reasons but simply to give law enforcement a chance to find out who's in the country.

ALI MOORE: If the inspiration for these people is Al Qaeda, and if the cause for concern is the policies in places like Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, if we look at Iraq specifically, how does that war end? Does it end?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I personally think that that war is lost at the moment. I don't think we can win that war. We have never had enough troops in Iraq to control the country or the borders of Iraq. My own view is that we're not serious about the war and we should probably pull out before we lose any more people. It's not that we can't win, it's that we won't.^{Something no one in US politics (Dem and Repub) seeems to get...}

ALI MOORE: So with sufficient fire power you could argue, we could win?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: We are an irresistible force if we choose to be, but our politicians apply force very daintily because they're afraid of Amnesty International and they are afraid of international opinion and they're afraid of...

ALI MOORE: Indeed internal politics in the US.

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Indeed internal politics.

ALI MOORE: What happens if after a presidential election you have a Democrat and a Democrat controlled Congress?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: You know, I don't think that much will change, really. They may pull out of Iraq, but American politicians across board from left to right are interventionists. They think America needs to be involved anywhere, and the policies at issue here, support for Israel's dependence on foreign oil and support for Arab despots and tyrannies, it's a shared policy in both American parties. So I don't expect there would be a great change.^{As I was saying.}

ALI MOORE: But you believe the best course of action now is to pull out?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Yes, simply because it's a waste of men and women who are in our services. It's a waste of treasure, because we don't intend to win. We can't hold and pacify a place as big as California with 160,000 people it. It can't be done. ^{Which is why I now support a pullout.}

ALI MOORE: Does that mean Al Qaeda wins?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: No, it means the Iraqi insurgency wins. I think that our administration has made way too much of the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda is involved in some of the insurgent activities against us, but for Iraq, Al Qaeda's value is continuous territory to the Arabian peninsula, and to Turkey to project power into places they haven't been before - Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel.

ALI MOORE: So, in fact, when for example today our Foreign Minister said people need to understand that it's Al Qaeda above all which has been fomenting sectarian violence or conflict in Iraq, that's not right?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: That's certainly an argument that's used by politicians across the West, but Al Qaeda's own doctrine has a very structured way of proceeding. Their first goal is to drive the Americans out of the Middle East, to get to the second goal, which is to destroy the Saudi Government, the Egyptian Government, the Israelis. And only the third goal is to settle scores with the Shia. I think perhaps leaders in the West overstate Al Qaeda's desire for Shia-Sunni violence at this stage of the game, because Al Qaeda has always believed that the one thing that could derail their program is to have a civil war between Sunnis and Shias at this point in time.

ALI MOORE: As long as the West stays in there, it can't win, if it pulls out it loses as well, and all the while it's fodder for radicalisation?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: It's very much the case. Iraq broke our back on counter-terrorism, because it made bin Laden from a man and a group into a philosophy and a movement, and there's kind of no turning back now. We've broken down the dam and now we're going to have to cope with the results. Iraq is just a disaster from that perspective.

ALI MOORE: Michael Scheuer, many thanks for joining us.

MICHEAL SCHEUER: Thank you very much.