Ideological Battle is the Key: Support Mainstream Islam, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Ideological Battle is the Key: Support Mainstream Islam

The Threat Is Common

6 Feb 2009, 0000 hrs IST,

Brahma Chellaney

The asymmetric weapon of terrorism is a lethal one. Dealing with such unconventional warfare remains a central theme in international discourse, as at Israel's Herzliya Conference involving participants from the highest levels of government, business and academia. But the blunt truth is that the war on terror stood derailed long before Obama took office. The US occupation of Iraq proved so divisive in international relations that it fractured the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror. Guantanamo, CIA's secret overseas prisons and the torture of detainees, including through water-boarding, came to symbolise the excesses of the war on terror.

The abrupt end of the war on terror thus means little. With Iraq and Afghanistan searing his presidency, Bush himself had given up the pretence of waging a global war on terror a war he had once equated with the Cold War struggle against communism. In fact, ever since Bush declared his war on terror, the scourge of transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in the world. The war's only outcome has been that it enabled the Bush administration to set up new US military arrangements extending from the Caspian Sea basin to South East Asia.

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