PRESIDENT Trump was not as crass as his predecessor George W. Bush who after US-led forces had overthrown Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, triumphantly pronounced the fatally-flawed words “Mission Accomplished”. But there was nevertheless a sense of “Job done” when Trump welcomed the seizure of the last bit of territory held by Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS).
Long opposed to US involvement in the Middle East, it is clear the president is under the grievous misapprehension that by empowering the Zionist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, he can largely end American involvement in the Middle East and rely on Israel as a US proxy. The glaring failings in this US isolationism are obviously lost on Trump. Nor does his understanding of the nature of the international terror threat seem particularly perceptive.
More thoughtful heads believe the hidden leaders of Daesh (the so-called IS) have proclaimed : “The terror state is dead. Long live the state of terror”. And so it is proving. There is now little doubt Daesh terrorists were behind Sunday’s wicked carnage in Sri Lanka. But this month the covert killers also demonstrated that even if their fake state is no more, their capacity to kill and maim remains. In just two days last week, more than 60 men, the majority of them in areas controlled by Syria’s Assad regime, were killed by terrorists.
The capacity of Daesh, Al-Qaeda and its satraps around the world to cause death and destruction should not be underestimated. It is certain that as their men retreated before the international coalition forces in Iraq and Syria, terror leaders organized the concealment of substantial quantities of weapons and ammunition together with other supplies. These caches will be used to replenish terror gangs. Their discovery should be a priority for the security forces. But the terrorists will certainly have done more to ensure the continuation of their bloody campaigns. They will have left behind “sleepers” and secret cells of killers that can be reactivated for specific outrages.
It was perhaps significant that the majority to the Daesh terrorists killed or captured in the final months before its pseudo-state collapsed were foreign fighters from around the world. These were people who were never going to blend into local society and remain undetected. In terms of the blasphemous views of the Daesh leadership, these dupes were expendable. And besides, if they were not shot down, their arrest and detention would clearly pose political problems for their home governments, even if they stripped these murdering thugs of their citizenship.
In his chilling “Revolutionary Catechism” Nechaev, one of the earliest Russian revolutionaries coined the statement “the means justify the end”. No emotion, scruple or sense of decency must be allowed to stand in the way of acts of violence designed to destroy civilized society. Daesh is guided by the same profound immorality. And it welcomes the reaction of bigoted fools like the white New Zealand mosque attack terrorist. It wants to foster Islamophobia and provoke suspicion and repression of all Muslims, so it can claim insidiously that it alone is protecting the Muslim Ummah. This siren call is contemptible. All decent Muslims must be prepared to root out the terrorist canker. The wise and measured reaction of Sri Lanka’s Muslim community leaders to Sunday’s horror is one example of how this battle can be won.
