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OPINION: Drawing the Wrong Lessons From the Horrors of Bali
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Patrick Seale, a veteran Middle East analyst, wrote this commentary for the Daily Star

In a recent article in the Jakarta Post, a highly respected Indonesian analyst, Jusuf Wanandi, a founder of the Jakarta Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned that unless the US is more even-handed toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, moderate Muslim leaders in Southeast Asia will find it difficult to counter the influence of Muslim radicals on domestic public opinion. “Every day,” he wrote, “they see Muslims being oppressed, defeated, humiliated.” If America were to attack Iraq, “real hatred” could result.

The car-bomb attack which devastated a crowded Bali nightclub last weekend, causing hundreds of dead and wounded, will have terrible consequences. Apart from shattering the already fragile Indonesian economy, it has aroused acute political paranoia in a great arc of countries, from Thailand to the Philippines and Australia.

It follows closely on the killing of a US Marine in Kuwait and a suicide attack by a small boat packed with explosives against a French supertanker, the Limburg, off the coast of Yemen, two years after a similar attack on a US warship, the USS Cole, in Aden Harbor. There have also been other smaller assaults on American and Western targets in Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

Islamic militants have gone to war against the West in many parts of the world. It is not clear whether these are isolated operations -- individual expressions of fury -- or a coordinated campaign, masterminded by Al-Qaeda or some similar organization, as the US administration wants us to think.

What is clear is that the violent epidemic of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world has now spread to East and Southeast Asia, with grave consequences for US allies such as Australia, Britain and France, whose citizens were among the victims in Bali.

The United States and much of the West failed to draw any lesson from Sept. 11. Now they are in danger of repeating and compounding their mistakes as they confront the expanding danger of Islamic militancy.

After Sept. 11 the US was guilty of a double error ­ an error in its analysis of the terrorist threat and in the nature of its response. Washington adamantly refused to recognize that the attack was a reaction to its Middle East policies, and particularly to its blind support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Although the link is obvious to any independent observer, it was vehemently denied in Washington, and continues to be so.
(More: DailyStar.com.lb News Source)
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Dan