[BRIGADE] PJB: Will the Terrorists Succeed Again?
Published: Tue, 12/02/08
By Patrick J. Buchanan
December 02, 2008
Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the
June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in
Sarajevo.
Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had
failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet
away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the
archduke and his wife.
Tactically, that act of terror eliminated the reformist Ferdinand,
who meant to address the grievances of his Slav subjects by
granting them greater autonomy and equality with Austrians and
Hungarians inside the empire.
Strategically, the assassination succeeded beyond the wildest
dreams of its Black Hand plotters.
Hard-liners in Austria demanded an ultimatum to Serbia. When her
demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war. Czar Nicholas
mobilized in support of Russia's little Slav brothers. The Kaiser
ordered mobilization. When the French refused to declare
neutrality, Germany declared war. In hours, the British Cabinet had
reversed itself to back war with Germany on behalf of Belgium and
France.
Princip had lit the fuse that set off in six weeks the greatest war
in history. While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any
other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a
Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians,
Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Hungarians. The Habsburg
Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished.
Last week's Mumbai massacre seems a similar triumph of terror.
Tactically, by sending a platoon of suicide warriors into India's
financial capital, terrorizing a train station, two five-star
hotels and a Jewish center, and killing nearly 200 in over 60
hours, the plotters assured themselves of round-the-clock worldwide
television coverage.
In so riveting the world's attention for four days, this terrorist
atrocity was a success.
And by using Pakistanis to perpetrate the massacres and Karachi as
port of embarkation, the plotters focused India's rage exactly
where they want it, against Pakistan. By this slaughter in India's
commercial capital, the Islamists have destroyed the detente
Pakistan was seeking with India and pushed both toward war. Out to
murder moderation and stoke militancy, the terrorists succeeded.
Years ago, this writer observed:
"Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics,
dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as
Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other
means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means."
Yet terrorism -- the killing of innocents for political ends -- can
only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have
scripted for them in their bloody drama. What, then, may we surmise
are the tactical and strategic goals of the terror masters of Mumbai?
To humiliate, wound and outrage India in her pride as a great new
democratic and economic power in Asia. To imperil Mumbai's future
as a safe and secure financial capital in which to live, work and
invest. To awe the world and inspire Islam's young by their
audacity. To attain immortality.
But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani
government.
Pakistan's offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and
the border region, battling al-Qaida and the Taliban, withdrawing
from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where
170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.
President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush
Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: "Even if there's
just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if
it is a certainty." For war in the subcontinent between India and
Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists
across what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "Global Balkans."
War would pit two nuclear powers against each other for the first
time since the Sino-Soviet border clash of 1969. It would spawn
bloodshed between Muslim and Hindu in India. It would see the
collapse of Pakistan, its possible dissolution and a military
dictator in a nation already divided against itself over whether to
continue resisting al-Qaida and the Taliban, or cut ties to the
unpopular Americans.
Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9-11, America lashed out,
first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaida source of the conspiracy,
then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did
the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.
For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the
Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that
are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.
India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.
But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.
Should it come, they win -- and enter history as revolutionary
terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9-11.
SOURCE:
http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/12/pjb-will-the-terrorists-succeed-aga
in/