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Paranoia Wars

Written by William Pfaff

Tuesday, 23 October 2007

The dictionary defines paranoia as "a "chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness, sometimes with hallucinations." Forty years ago, in a much quoted magazine article, the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote about the “paranoid style” of American domestic politics, a judgement on the 1950s experience in the U.S. of congressional, electoral and press preoccupation with domestic Communist “subversion.” This represented a psychological displacement onto internal American politics of the perfectly real external threat of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact armies, then under the postwar control of Moscow. There was nothing paranoid about fear of the Soviet threat in Europe.

But inside the United States, aside from a handful of Soviet spies, most already identified (largely thanks to the so-called Verona radio intercepts), virtually the only Communists left were aging and disheartened veterans of the Spanish War and the Popular Front.

Today the displacement is reversed. The fear created by the 9/11 attacks has been externalized into paranoid fantasy about foreign enemies.

The United States and some of its allies are fighting two wars against Islamic fundamentalist and integrist movements, construed in American ideological and governmental circles as threats to the integrity and domestic security of the western world.

The first of these wars, in Iraq, has killed tens, scores, possibly more than a hundred thousand, people by now, nearly all of them Iraqis, and the war remains without resolution. The American president, and nearly all the candidates to succeed him in the White House, are committed to continuing this war indefinitely because they say it is connected with American domestic security. The president has repeatedly said that the U.S. must fight in Iraq so as to prevent terrorist attack inside the United States, without providing a clear explanation of why this is so.

The second war, in Afghanistan, is now being escalated, with new American and NATO forces being sent to that remote country because this war too is held to affect their “homeland” security (an Orwellian term), although how and why also remains without convincing explanation.

Although war at present is waged only in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is held to be actually a global affair, the threat an amalgam of free-floating ideologies and political initiatives identified as Terror or Terrorism (a palpable Evil, according to George W. Bush in 2001) and more recently described by Norman Podhoretz, a progenitor of neo-conservatism, as “Islamofascism.” Podhoretz says the war against it is World War IV, meaning that there is much more to come.

The term is a paranoid coinage meaning nothing, fascism being a European phenomenon of the early and mid-twentieth century, atheist, nationalist, and racist in ideology, and having nothing to do with Arabs, the Middle East, or the Islamic religion.

The term is meant to diabolize a set of traumatic and violent reactions in Islamic countries to the failure of political, cultural and theological modernization inside that society. These are defensive ripostes to the Islamic cultural crisis, and to the political, economic and military presence of western nations, above all the United States, inside the Islamic countries.

Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, has been the most dramatic of these reactions, although the mass popular phenomenon of integrist religious revival among the 40-million-strong Pathan ethnic group that dominates Pakistan’s north-west frontier territories and most of Afghanistan, the Taliban or ‘Students of Religion,’ may be much more important in the long term. It increasingly is taking on the character of a nationalist affirmation by the Pathans.

Meanwhile, after maximum expansion of its existing base in Afghanistan, the United States is building a second major permanent base for its war against the Taliban, already engaging 25 thousand Americans and a similar number of NATO troops, with more on the way.

The Pathans’ ability to defend their territorial and cultural integrity, which they have successfully done since the age of Alexander the Great, is now to be tested by military policies conceived in the ambient paranoia of Washington and Brussels -- which may be interpreted as those hallucinations against which the dictionary definition of paranoia warns.

The Pathans have no geographical, political, economic, or religious connection with the West. Their only offenses are that before 2001 they allowed al Qaeda to exist inside Afghanistan, which they ruled, and which they are now trying to reclaim, and that their strict and oppressive religious practices offend westerners.

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