Tactics of Terror

Well, it's starting to look like Al-Zarqawi wasn't the one behind the Nicholas Berg execution at all. Instead, we're looking at Saddam's fedayeen, under the direction of one of Saddam's relations.

Now, I'm not qualified to tease apart all the distinctions between Islamism, ethno-centrism, and plain-old nationalism at play in the Iraqi theater. But it seems obvious to me that one salutary benefit of the Berg killing from an enemey belligerent nationalist perspective is that it serves to unmoor sympathetic Iraqis from the American occupation. Specifically, if you were a reasonable and moderate Iraqi, the knowledge that the Berg execution has become the defining symbol of your people in American eyes could give you reasonable cause to despair of ever creating a favorable impression among Americans in general towards your country.

A small minority of Americans hate all Arabs, as Arabs and are perfectly willing to believe that Iraqis are animals. Undoubtedly, a small minority of Iraqis hate all Americans without qualifications or reservations. But a nationalist conflict doesn't need to prey upon the parochial bigotry of one side against the other. Appealing to hatred has a critical limitation. So, to make a bigoted appeal to reason you need to convince moderates that the bigotry of the other side is too widespread and intractable to make peace a possibility.

To that extent, the killers of Nicholas Berg - and the execution's coincident timing with the Abu Ghraib prison disclosures - have probably been wildly successful. It's hard to imagine a constructive dialog taking place across the burning bridge of inflammatory symbols that these atrocities have created...

A side note on the insurgency - the immediate assumption that the killing was perpetrated by Al-Qaeda-type-motivations seems to have been proven wrong. What I would hope is that the growing indistinguishability of the ideological underpinning of various "terrorist-type" assaults might cause Americans to reconsider the efficacy of our present "War on Terror." It's often been said that "terrorism is a tactic." This seems like it should be self-evidently true. The fact that it's a tactic being picked up by an ever-widening group of America's ideological opponents should give us pause. Tactics generally gain favorability because they work which would indicate that the spreading prevalence of these tactics indicate that we are rewarding the perpetrators of symbolic attacks... how else to account for the growing incidence of "terrorist-type" attacks?