The Bonfire of Illusions

The drama in which Barack Obama is struggling – the unsuccessful attempt to take down a civilian airplane over Detroit, which lies heavy on the president, just as it did on Bush – can be summed up with two simple questions: Can you fight, in a clean way, a war which is intrinsically dirty and led by fanatics with TNT hidden in their underwear? Is there a proportionate answer to the asymmetry that lies between the greatest military power in history and the deadly weakness of groups of fanatics capable of little, but ready to do anything?

There is hope that there could be an “Obama’s way” for the war that began on September 11, 2001. The anti-West, disguised by holy war fanaticism declared in the face of the world, is shrinking daily before the practical and moral asymmetry between the two sides at war. Between Bush and Obama, between the twin towers and the almost-tragedy in Detroit, we witnessed the defeat of two illusions. First was Bush’s illusion. In the forced regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan and in his iron fist solution that would cut the evil at the root, he indicated his doctrine, which was concisely stated as “whoever isn’t with us, is against us.” It was an apparently new doctrine that saw the complicity of governments and failed states as the source of terrorism, without recognizing the spontaneous, uncontrollable and widespread nature of the evil.

Obama’s illusion was expressed in his memorable speech in Cairo, when the president tried to distinguish between the Islamic world, respectable and honorable even in its radical differences, and the demented fringes of the violent “jihad,” which an open hand toward the “umma,” the global community of Muslims, could have isolated and progressively drained.

However, both doctrines are guilty of one lethal naivety: ignoring that terrorism is, by definition, a non-structured, shapeless, fluid and indefinable act that doesn’t need masses, military stations, regular structures, headquarters or great means to produce its poisoned fruits. It is immune to the attacks of missiles and the observations of satellites. This wicked Nigerian guy – born in a very good family, and not down a poor street, like the many killers who debunk the myth of the “poor of the world”, mad at us who are rich – proved it with the amateurism and ineptitude of his actions, to the benefit of 300 passengers.

When Obama reassures America, as he did last night, that he’s keeping every element that is planning and programming an act of violence under pressure, and that he’s using every means possible to dismantle and dismember the terrorist organizations, he makes a wish, not a battle plan, just like Bush who, on the ruins of the World Trade Center, promised he would chase and punish the authors of the slaughter wherever they were. Hundreds, if not thousands of terrorists have been killed or caught since then, between triumphal announcements of defeated “number twos” (and still never “number ones”) and announcements of an al-Qaida on its knees, on the run, in chaos. Clouds of rockets, of alleged intelligent bombs, of UAVs, have attacked villages and meetings of “extremists” in Pakistan, Afghanistan and now in Yemen, inevitably killing lots of innocents along with the culprit, because in dirty wars the enemy doesn’t wear uniforms, flashes or signs. And then, all it takes is a young guy who creeps into the very wide stitches of airport security, especially in Africa, where he came from, to bring the match back to the initial quadrant.

The answer to the question that will torment our times is not creating illusions or hopes, not thinking there can be a working doctrine with a neo-conservative cloak that can destroy the kitchen to eliminate the cockroaches, or a scalpel that, one by one, can remove the lesions where they appear time after time. Strength is, at the same time, necessary and insufficient, and the road of the “clash of civilizations” was rightly abandoned by Obama; not to dignify the dementia of a few people with the goal of a global armageddon and not to risk, as the president said, giving up what we are in order to fight those who have resolved to upset our way of life, our way of being and living. The failed attempt on Christmas day proves only what by now should be clear: that nobody has the right and successful answer, but that the surely wrong answer is to surrender to what the terrorists want, killing few people to scare everybody.