Analysis
Ewen MacAskill
U nited States President George W Bush, who referred initially to the war on terrorism as a “crusade”, would do well to learn from the actions of the Arab warrior, Saladin, rather than the Christian crusaders.
In 1099, when the Christian crusaders took Jerusalem, they slaughtered every Muslim and Jew men, women and children beginning in the afternoon and carrying on through the night. When Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 he spared everyone and the next day allowed followers of each religion to worship at their holy places within the city.
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair need to lean more towards Saladin-like restraint than the bloody retribution of the crusaders. They need to defeat Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network but spare the people of Afghanistan as much as possible and resist the calls to take the fight to neighbouring countries.
Bush and Blair set an overly ambitious objective after September 11: nothing less than a world-wide war to eliminate terrorism. Since then they have heard the advice of their foreign policy advisers and some of their soldiers, who have told them such a goal is not achievable.
The advice from Britain to the US is to try to limit military action to within Afghanistan and to minimise civilian casualties as much as possible. Firing off cruise missiles will not achieve much, other than increase the risk of hitting the innocent.
The main action will involve US and British special forces. It will require weeks and months sitting in hiding, gathering intelligence, even if an early strike of some sort has to be made against the Bin Laden network to satisfy the desire in the US for action.
The US and Britain can claim to have backing from the United Nations for their fight against Bin Laden’s network. But there is no such backing from the UN for attacks on the Taliban. A Taliban force facing US firepower on open ground would be slaughtered. Few would miss them, but the sight of those bodies might raise questions about the legitimacy of the action.
If harbouring terrorist or guerrilla organisations is a crime, then the list to be dealt with is long, beginning with Pakistan for backing two terror groups in Kashmir. Having destroyed the Taliban in Afghanistan, the logic of the US position would be to try to solve the problem next door Kashmir and then the next one. But Bush and Blair cannot act as the world’s policemen in the whole of the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, never mind dealing with terrorist groups in Africa or Asia.
The maxim hopefully governing the actions of Bush and Blair over the coming days should be: does this make matters better or worse?
The crusaders’ massacre made things worse. Stephen Runciman, in a three-part history of the crusades, concluded that relations between Christianity and Islam suffered for centuries afterwards: “It was this bloodthirsty proof of Christian fanaticism that recreated the fanaticism of Islam.”