| 1. THE JAKARTA EMBASSY BOMBING |
| Many warnings were given by the US and Australian governments in the days before this event that the US had received intelligence indicating that terrorists, presumably Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorists, were planning bomb attacks against Western interests, probably hotels, in the lead up to the Indonesian presidential election run off on 20th September. So the disaster that happened outside the gates of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta came as no real surprise. | |
| A few quick comments:
This attack will do more damage to Indonesia than to Australia. It will damage Indonesia politically and economically through lower foreign investment and tourism.
The major targets of JI terrorists in Indonesia are:
- The secular Indonesian polity and government which they seek to subvert and destroy in the interests of establishing an Islamic state under strict Sharia law. The destruction of the current democratisation process is an immediate objective. In the recent past, JI has have made at least two assassination attempts against President Megawati Sukarnoputri whom they condemn as both a secularist and a female national leader. Had they succeeded, that would have elevated into the presidency Vice President Hamzah Haz, who is at least an Islamist sympathiser and certainly a public defender of JI spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir.
- Foreign infidels, in this instance, Australians. However, if past JI practice is any guide, the Australian Embassy might have been just one of a number of possible targets on a final list including hotels and banks where other nationalities might have been involved. A few years ago, JI attacked the Philippine Embassy.
| |
| Especially targeted? | Are Australians being especially targeted in Indonesia? Perhaps, although many different nationalities were killed in Bali. But if so, it could be because Osama bin Laden declared shortly after 9/11 three years ago, that Australia was a particular target because it had driven Indonesia out of East Timor which he fantastically described as sacred Muslim land. Iraq might have intensified Islamist feelings about Australia, but, then, the invasion came after the Bali bombings. Iraq, Palestine, East Timor, Andalusia and other issues or events are used by Islamists around the world as immediate recruiting and motivational tools. If they didn't exist, they'd find substitutes. Australia might also be a particular target in Indonesia simply because it is the nearest and largest Western nation to Indonesia. | |
| It is not true, as former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Mr. Richard Woolcott recently claimed, that the Australian government's policies in Iraq have led to "an increasing number of people supporting Islamic extremism, including in our own region" The Age, Melbourne 10/09/2004). One of the most talked about aspects of this year's elections in Malaysia and Indonesia is how far the vote for radical Islamic, and even moderate Islamic, parties has declined. It is surprising that Mr. Woolcott, a regular visitor to Indonesia, has not noticed this phenomenon. | |
| The War against radical Islamist terrorism in Indonesia is a part of a global war. It cannot be separated from that global struggle and treated as a regional war, as some leaders of the Australian Labor Party, including Mark Latham, seem to think it can. Consider just two points: First, substantial sums of money and other assistance flow regularly, and often clandestinely, from the Middle East and elsewhere to Islamist terrorist organisations and Islamic NGOs in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Secondly, the two al Qa'ida suicide bombers who assassinated the Afghan opposition leader Ahmad Shah Massoud a few days before September 11 were on their way to Indonesia when Osama bin Laden personally ordered them to be diverted to the Massoud mission. Of this matter, we asked (in APR46) the following questions two years ago (a month before Bali): Who could they have been planning to connect up with in Indonesia and for what purpose? Who were they exactly? | |
| 4. THE AUSTRALIAN ELECTIONS - 9th October 2004 |
| Australian prime minister Mr. John Howard is running for a fourth consecutive term for himself and his Liberal/National Party coalition. The major opposition is the Australian Labor Party (ALP) led by its new and relatively inexperienced leader, Mr. Mark Latham. Most polls have the Coalition narrowly in front and significantly so in some of the key marginal seats where the government is likely to be decided. However, most observers expect a close contest. Mr Howard has the advantage of experience, incumbency and rat cunning. On the other hand, longevity in office could mean that the electorate is tiring of him and that they perceive him tiring in the job. If so, the ALP might have pulled off a winning trick nine months ago when it opted for a generational leadership change by voting into its leadership the smooth, right wing Mr. Latham, 20 years younger than Mr. Howard. However, Mr. Latham is yet to land a significant policy blow against the Coalition, the economy is performing extremely well, Australians are enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before in a land of milk and honey, and many people, especially in the marginal electorates, are uneasy with Mr. Latham's past anti-Americanism and the extreme left, trade union elements in his party. Then there is the terrorist threat which might enhance the appeal of Mr. Howard's experience in office and his solid pro-Americanism. Better the devil you know. | |
| Fortress Australia | As for us, looking at the contest from a strategic and Asia-Pacific perspective, we find pros and cons in both parties. Generally speaking, there is a lack of knowledge and interest in Asia Pacific affairs in both parties and we fail to see in either of them at present any visionary or imaginative strategic approach to the region. However, one of the things that concerns us in this regard are suggestions that Mr. Latham and his shadow defence minister, Mr. Kim Beazley, have retreated to a "fortress Australia" mentality or continental mindset focusing on the defence of the mainland and security in Australia's immediate region. It is said they would scrap the proposed LHD "mega-carriers" and instead boost the army by at least one new brigade. There's nothing visionary in that - and nothing new in it as far as Mr. Beazley in concerned. In our view, Australia needs both the carriers and the new brigades and, indeed, much more if it is to be truly serious about pursuing its long term strategic interests in the greater Asia Pacific region. The Liberals, it should be said, are generally no better in this area. | |
| 5. BERNARD LEWIS ON WHY WE ARE A TARGET |
| Because of the Jakarta embassy bombing and the continuing discussions as to why we are a target of both global and regional radical Islamist terrorism, we thought it might be useful to see what a world renowned authority on Islam like Bernard Lewis has had to say on the subject. | |
| Lewis, a noted Arabist and Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritis at Princeton University, is the author of more than two dozen books including The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and more recently, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002) and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2003). Last month, his latest work appeared, From Babel to Dragomas: Interpreting the Middle East. Lewis is no arm-chair specialist. He knows the turf and is regarded widely as dispassionate in his discourse. | |
| In this new book, Lewis describes America as "targeted by a history of hatred." His theme is that for many centuries Muslims believed that Islam was "the greatest civilisation on earth – the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavour". Then all this changed. Muslim lands were invaded and dominated by Christian powers. | |
| Frustration and anger | Lewis says, "The resulting frustration and anger at what seemed to them a reversal of both natural and divine law had been growing for centuries, and have reached a climax in our own time. These feelings find expression in many places where Muslims and non-Muslims meet and clash - in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Israel and Palestine, Sudan, Kashmir, and the Philippines, among others. | |
| "The prime target of the resulting anger is, inevitably, the United States, now the unchallenged, if not unquestioned leader of what we like to call the free world and what others variously define as the West, Christendom and the world of the unbelievers." | |
| Osama bin Laden, Lewis asserts, believes that it was they (the Muslim warriors) who brought about the "defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union" owing to "the holy war... they fought in Afghanistan". | |
| In short, they had "dealt with one of the infidel superpowers... the more ruthless, the more dangerous of the two. Ergo, dealing with the soft and pampered United States would, so it seemed, be a much easier task." | |
| Contempt | Lewis tries to explain what he calls the "basic contempt" in which the Islamic militants hold Americans and other Westerners. | |
| "The basic reason for this contempt is what they perceive as the rampant immorality and degeneracy of the American way - contemptible but also dangerous, because of its corrupting influence on Muslim societies." | |
| "Another aspect of this contempt," Lewis says, "is expressed again and again in the comments of Bin Laden and others like him. The refrain is always the same. Because of their depraved and self-indulgent way of life, Americans have become soft and cannot take casualties. And then they repeat the same litany - Vietnam, the Marines in Beirut, Somalia. Hit them and they will run. More recent attacks confirmed this judgement in their eyes - the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993, with six killed and more than a thousand injured; the attack on the American liaison mission in Riyadh in November 1995, with seven Americans killed; the attack on the military living quarters in Khobar in Saudi Arabia in June 1996, with 19 American soldiers killed and many more wounded; the embassies in East Africa in 1998; the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, with 17 sailors killed - all these brought only angry but empty words and, at most, a few misdirected missiles. | |
| "The conclusion Bin Laden drew was that the United States had become feeble and frightened and incapable of responding. The crimes of Sept. 11 were the result of this perception and were intended to be the opening salvo of a large campaign to force Americans and their allies out of Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world, to overthrow the corrupt tyrants America, and to prepare the ground for the final world struggle." | |
| Lewis concludes: "The immediate and effective response against their bases in Afghanistan must have come as a serious shock to the terrorist organizations and compelled some revision of their earlier assessment of American weakness and demoralization." | |
| Iraq | And we might make a similar comment about the invasion of Iraq, which, as we have argued before, must be seen in the strategic context of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East generally. Shortly after 9/11 it was rightly feared in many circles that Osama bin Laden's immediate political objective was the overthrow of the House of Saud and its replacement with a totalitarian Wahhabi government controlled by himself. He hoped to exploit the presence a US forces based on sacred Saudi soil to inspire the necessary uprising. | |
| Those US forces were there to protect the House of Saud against Saddam Hussein whom the House of Saud believed threatened them with among other things weapons of mass destruction. The Saudis believed that Saddam had ambitions of taking control of the Arabian Peninsula and its oil supplies, thereby making himself the dominant player on the world scene. Like Osama, Saddam had often spoken of the need to destroy the US and the West. So if the US forces were to be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia in order to pre-empt Osama bin Laden, Saddam would also have to go. And so it came to pass . . . | |
| As we have said before, we, the West, are at war against a totalitarian radical Islamist revolutionary guerrilla movement currently employing, among other things, terrorism on a global battlefield and whose stated fanatical, non-negotiable objective is the destruction of Western civilisation and the conquest of the world for Allah and radical Islamism. | |
