With the declaration of the War on Terror by the Bush Administration , ably followed by the likes of Sharon and Putin getting in on the act , the author considers who are terrorists , who are political parties using arms to get an equal seat at the negotiating table , who is a genuine terrorist for the sake of terror , is there such a thing as a State terrorist , and more importantly , who has the right to decide.
The first stop on the journey quickly dispel any false notion that only Muslims are terrorists.As he relates his experiences with groups in Sri Lanka (from the Ceylonese community ), Ireland and South Africa ( all examples of former terrorists who now participate in democratically elected governing cabinets).He also shows examples of "terrorists" groups in Algeria;Palestine; Kashmir and Chechnya who are fighting imposed governments that were put in place by outsiders when these groups won resounding democratic elections.
Examples of how the Worlds largest superpower sets the criterion is given in page 92 " The United States spends more today on its military than the rest of the World combined , and when a nation has by far the most powerful army in the World, it tends to see problems through a military lens.An old seer once said that if all you have in your toolbox are hammers , then every problem looks like a nail."
All the Book is not about the Bush administration , In discussing the Balkans Conflict under Clinton , when Terrorists and Men of Peace mutated back and forth according to Western Interests in firstly enacted the "Spanish Civil War" solution of arms embargo giving one side exclusive military superiority , coupled with turning a blind eye so that time allied with realities on the ground could "solve" the issue we had first the Bosnian Muslims under siege in Sarajevo for almost two years , with the UN Peacekeepers disarming the defenders of cities in Bosnia on the pretext of enforcing the arms embargo and then completely failing to defend them from the harms of the militias armed by Milosevic ( at the time the only hope for peace in the region according to Western Governments).In time the Serbs made less gains , and had the embarrassing habit of committing massacres in full glare of the TV cameras , coupled with the Bosnians slowly making gains we had another change of the political wind and Milosevic became the terrorist.His mistake seems to have been to take his militias from the Bosnian front and deploy them in the Kosovo region.As Rees explains on page 151 " the Kosovo involvement by the US appears to have been triggered by fears of the "key" Macedonia".This was because Macedonians straddles the territory of Greece , a member of NATO, and a conflict there could have had region wide repercussions that drag external powers into the mix.
The video below is from a documentary of the same name made about the themes of the Book for Al-Jazeera.
You can get the whole series covering many conflicts from Ireland to Colombia by clicking on this sentence.
On the case of Afghanistan Rees goes back to the original sin for which many locals and British and NATO troops as well as large parts of the Population and Army of Pakistan are paying with the needless spilling of blood today , as we see on page 212 " Afghan border was drawn up in 1893" (The Durand Line drawn up by Sir Mortimer Durand) " and effectively cut the Pashtun population in two."
The final conclusion of the Book is for most of the issues cited are terrorism today we cannot have military solutions ,at the end of the day , just like in Ireland, we can only have political solutions through negotiations between representative recognised parties.Ultimately Rees "concludes that before the 'war on terror' can have its Armistice Day, the West will have to negotiate with those it considers terrorists."
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