Despite spirited protests against the slaughter of 23 people at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia, the likely collapse of tourism in the country, following the murder of so many foreigners (the 20 tourists among the dead included five Japanese, four Italians, two Colombians, two Spaniards and citizens from Australia, Britain, France and Poland), is a chilling reminder of how abruptly a single act of terror can strike at the heart of a modern economy.
Some protestors in the anti-terror demonstrations – the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack – wore buttons that read “Je Suis Tunisien, Je Suis Charlie” linking the attack to the rampage in Paris. The connection between the two events goes a long way to explaining why the West continues to struggle in its response to the repeated provocations of radical Islamism.
For many years one of the key strategies for recruiters of would-be jihadists has been to highlight the West’s relative indifference to the fate of non-Westerners. Evidence of this alleged callousness was never hard to find. In 1996, for example, when US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by a 60 Minutes interviewer whether her country’s sanctions on Iraq were worth the reported deaths of up to 500,000 Iraqi children, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” With remarks like this, and just a smattering of knowledge about the mistreatment and murder of so many civilians who resisted Middle Eastern tyrants who protected Western interests, it is not hard to see how a recruiter could spin a convincing narrative of treachery and indifference.
Today, even after the political landscape of the Middle East and North Africa has been altered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the upheaval of the Arab Spring, the old narratives retain much of their force. The incursions of the Islamic State into Iraq, for example, owe a great deal of their success to the despair of tribal elders in the Sunni Triangle at ever receiving adequate protection from their religious and political rivals in Baghdad. In Iraq, Washington and its allies repeatedly chose to ignore signs – such as the 2013 mass killing of protesters in Hawija – that the Al-Maliki government was settling scores instead of trying to hold the country together.
With the rise of the Islamic State and the increasing number of reports that thousands of Westerners have joined its forces, it has become imperative that the West confront this narrative directly. Nowhere are the shortcomings of the current strategy more obvious than in the nightmare scenario in Syria. When the uprising against President Assad began four years ago, there were no jihadist groups in the country. But as the West failed to intervene in the increasingly brutal crackdown on the resistance to Assad, it has effectively ceded the territory to groups who were prepared to do so. Today, the Islamic state controls up to a third of Syria and Iraq, and could make further gains despite the West’s bombing campaign.
In a trenchant Op-Ed for the Guardian, the foreign affairs analyst Natalie Nougayrède observes that “The west started a bombing campaign after its citizens were beheaded last year in Iraq. Yet the west failed to do anything decisive after 200,000 people were killed in Syria. If you dwell on this fact, it is hardly surprising that many young Muslims – wherever they are – are likely to conclude that western policies are racist.”
One need not question the wisdom of military action against the Islamic State to grasp the force of Nougayrède’s point. Ours has become an age in which nihilist terror attacks like the one in Tunisia are easily planned and executed. Since it will never be possible to capture or kill every militant who threatens Western interests, there is an urgent need to alter the simplistic narratives of terrorism. This could be done by better engagement with the large immigrant groups that have so often been marginalized in Western countries, but it will also require a principled refusal to remain on the sidelines of further state-driven massacres, particularly the bloodbath that continues to unfold in Syria.
