Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Creating Terrorists with Grudges

Here is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security adviser. Quoting Arnold Toynbee, he accuses the Bush administration of “suicidal statecraft … the ultimate cause of imperial collapse.”¹⁴

What the man doesn't seem to realize is that “suicidal statecraft” is just what the situation calls for. And Bush is perfectly up to the task. The great Anglo‐Saxon empire has reached its “sell by” date. But while its homeland citizens groan under the burden of debt, many of its military and political leaders still talk tough.

“You got terrorists with a grudge against the United States?” asked the commander‐in‐chief. Well, “bring ‘em on.” He might as well have put a gun to his head. Now, with the curiosity of a reporter watching a hanging, we wait to see if he pulls the trigger, for Iraq is full of potential terrorists with grudges. Had the Anglo‐Americans bothered to look before they leaped, they would have seen a country that is a mix of tribes, clans, families, and religious groups—all of whom take it as an inherited obligation to avenge any wrong done to any of their own group by any member of any other group going back five generations. We cannot kill terrorists as fast as the State Department can create them, say some.

Patrick Cockburn, writing in the Independent, reminds us of the insights of a British civil servant, Arnold Wilson, in 1919, two years after the British took Baghdad from the Turks: “Wilson … warned that the creation of a new state ...