If anything has become clear early in 2010, it’s that the deadly logic of the “war on terror” continues, even though the new U.S. administration doesn’t use that phrase anymore.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, the continuities with the Bush administration in this area are causing disappointment and, increasingly, alarm. After the president’s bellicose response to the failed Dec. 25 attempt on a Detroit-bound airplane, Konrad Yakabuski noted in the Globe and Mail that ‘Obama at war risks outdoing Bush’: “Barack Obama, who banned the very use of the term ‘war on terror’ in his administration, now finds himself forced to prove he can wage it as ruthlessly as the predecessor whose legacy he so sought to undo.”

With new (and/or expanding) fronts looming in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, opponents of endless war should be more assertive than ever with one aspect of our message: It’s the foreign policy, stupid. Oscar Reyes, writing in Red Pepper a few years ago, made this point in a thoughtful essay, and it’s well worth repeating.

When it comes to understanding the world today, history and politics matter, but they have to fight an uphill battle for media space with hysteria, fear-mongering and plain old macho posturing.

The weekend Vancouver Sun has a sober, historically informative explanation of war and terrorism written by international affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe. He’s writing about Chechnya, and it’s hard to imagine the paper running anything similarly forthright about Afghanistan. But the analogies with NATO’s quagmire — the warlords, the collective punishment, the corruption — and the wider U.S. policy in the whole region nearly jump off the page.

“There are times and places when rebellion can be judged justifiable and even the radicalization of a community by Islamic extremism entirely understandable.

That is the case of Russia’s seven southern provinces in the region called the North Caucasus, where Moscow has attempted to deal with the restive Muslim populations by handing over control to bought-and-paid-for gangster clan leaders.

One result of this institutionalized thuggery is the systematic, imagination-taxing abuse of the more than six million people who live in this region.

There is an ongoing murderous campaign of abductions, police death squad killings, torture, the razing of villages in reprisal for rebel attacks, and the holding hostage of the families of people suspected of involvement in the insurrection…

The responses from the local insurgents have been an increasingly violent and intense campaign of bombings, assassinations and guerrilla assaults against the so-called authorities.

Provincial governors have been assassinated or badly wounded in the attempt.

Officials responsible for security forces are a prized target of the insurgents and the police forces are culled by the day.

Throughout the region there are calamitous economic problems, deadly clan and ethnic feuds, gross unemployment — it’s 80 per cent in Dagestan — and rampant corruption that is exceptional even by the heady standards of Russia.

Since the only response from the authorities has been repression and Moscow-sanctioned death squads, it is hardly surprising that many people have turned to armed resistance.”


Derrick O'Keefe

Derrick O'Keefe

Derrick O'Keefe is a writer in Vancouver, B.C. He served as rabble.ca's editor from 2012 to 2013 and from 2008 to 2009.