There is no simple solution to global democracy threat

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Everything else this week has been eclipsed by the gut-wrenching events – the kind of carnage that is incomprehensible until it happens.

And then it happens. And we learn we are living in a world that has new, and terrible, realities.

Back in the 1980s, the IRA embarked on a bombing campaign that took its lead by the Tet offensive in Vietnam in the late 1960s when the North Vietnamese troops launched coordinated attacks on over 100 cities controlled by the South Vietnam government and by the US.

Part of the rationale behind it was that the scale of the damage and intensity of it would strike terror into the hearts of the enemy.

The IRA bombing campaign, using arms and military materiel imported from Libya, employed the same thinking – a campaign that would have a chilling effect, diminish the appetite of the British public for continuing the defence of that six-county part of the realm.

Of course, IRA bombing campaigns did result in hundreds of civilian casualties over the years: the so-called ‘collateral damage’ of strikes on strategic targets (not always military, or command and control).

When innocent people who had no skin in the game died or were maimed, that more or less shredded whatever fig leaf of justification there may have been.

At the same time, there is no evidence at all to support any theory that the IRA specifically targeted civilians – it consistently phoned in warnings, not always in good time.

As against that it is clear that as the campaign wore on and the “spectaculars” became bigger, a certain indifference grew to the fate of civilians.

The kind of asymmetric wars that have grown up since the western invasions of Middle East countries began over 20 years have introduced a new dimension of horror to terrorism.

What happened in New York in 2011 or Madrid in 2004 or London in 2005 were of a different order. Targets were chosen for symbolic purposes but they all shared similar traits in that they had no military connection, were completely civilian.

Part of the plan was that people would die, civilians far at a remove from the wars that were raging. And part of the plan too was to inflict as much horror and damage on the civilian population as was possible.

They didn’t care. They were ready to die themselves and bring as many as the infidels with them. Of course, given the multi-ethnic nature of modern cities, Muslims were among the casualties in all three of the above atrocities.

The coordinated attacks on Paris last Friday followed a similar pattern. There were suicide bombers outside the Stade de France – where the France-Germany friendly was being played – and all of the terrorists wore suicide belts.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.