The New War Between Islamic Terrorists and the West

Summary of Rolf Ekés's article in RSAWSPJ no 6 2001.

After the Second World War there have been two processes of fundamental and historic importance that have left their mark on international co-existence: the Cold War and decolonization. On the one hand we can distinguish a fierce rivalry for supremacy between the two superpowers, two economic systems, two different standards of value; on the other we have the birth of a large number of new, mostly weak autonomous states.

For the past decade, crises in international politics have emanated more from tension and friction within different national and ethnic groups than from conflicts between states.

The acts of terror triggered off through the attack of 11th September meant a further step away from conflicts having their roots in a clash of interests between states.

This new kind of terrorism has no political aims and objectives. What it is all about is to wage war against the West and its values. It is primarily not a war between Islam and Jewish Christendom, even though the terrorists themselves take their inspiration from fundamentalist elements in Islam. What they fight against is such threats from the West against Islamic fundamentalism as liberalism, freedom of speech, religious tolerance and equality of opportunity between women and men.

The war now unleashed through the terror attacks, and which has no easily defined enemy state or actual battlefield, is like a kind of phoney war. Terrorists have great mobility and their network is a multinational one. What is needed to outwit these terrorists, apart from physical and mental stamina, is the ability to think faster and better than potential terrorist adversaries. Terrorism is an absolute evil and deserves to be condemned utterly in what-ever form it takes. A political strategy, without in any way offering an excuse for its existence, must be found to counter the emergence of terrorism.

International terrorism in Iraq has, in strategic terms, little in common with terrorism as practised by al-Qaeda terrorists, but this in no way rules out a possible tactical alliance in the Persian Gulf between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

This article is Ambassador Rolf Ekéus's inaugural lecture presented to the Security Policy Section of The Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences on 13th November 2001.