007 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 007

Air Date: May 31, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Program Disclaimer

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Bob Metz:
Good morning London! It’s Thursday, May 31st. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing, just right.

Good morning everyone! Everything will be alright, and this is the place you can come to be centered on the right. This is Just Right on CHRW. 519-661-3600 is the number that you can call if you want to join us, and we have a very special show for you today. Today’s show is going to be all on pretty much one single theme and subject. I have a special guest in studio here with me today, and I’d like to welcome, on behalf of Just Right and CHRW, our guest John Thompson, who is president of the Mackenzie Institute, came down from Toronto, and he is an expert and consultant on issues of terrorism, organized crime, political extremism, propaganda, conflict, and basically organized violence and instability all around the world. He’s a consultant to many think tanks and governments. John, thanks very much for joining us today.

John Thompson:
Thanks for the invite, Bob.

Bob Metz:
John, I have to tell you, I feel maybe like most Canadians in one way. When we read about the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, it’s very confusing to a lot of people, and we sort of have bits and pieces of the information. I’ve read a lot of your newsletters, and as I go through them and see all the names and the terrorist groups and the networks and the connections, my eyes start to glaze over after a while because it’s so hard to keep track of it all. But I can sort of see the big picture.

Just wondering what your reaction is to something I brought up on the show last week. I think we had an article here in the Free Press that talks about Canadians getting tired of the war, and that so many of them think that it’s a mistake being over there. We should be pulling our troops back and that they talk about if there’s any more casualties continuing—and we just had some again, I believe today; we’re up to 56 dead.

And 55% of the people polled in this poll said Canada should get out if casualties continue, and a lot of them believe that this country will be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks if we were to stay over there. What’s your overall take on that attitude?

John Thompson:
I guess there’s three points that I wish people understood more clearly. First of all, we’re fighting actually a global movement. There’s trouble in Indonesia, in the Philippines, and you just roll across the planet through Thailand, parts of India, Afghanistan and Iraq—everyone knows about—much of the Middle East, but also issues in Somalia and Darfur, and keep rolling west through Nigeria, the terrorism threat in Western Europe, North America and Australia, right across the planet. And where everybody is up against one single phenomenon, the international Jihad movement, whether it’s a Wahhabi, Salafist, Deobandist and Shiite, Khomeinist influences, but they themselves regard themselves as a single movement. They have a common ideology, common sources of money, common sources of training, and they have a common view of what victory is. And this is a world war.

Make no mistake.

Bob Metz:
I was going to ask you that because that’s what I’m looking at right here from one of your newsletters, the Mackenzie Institute newsletter, which by the way, if you want to visit the Mackenzie Institute site, it’s at www.mackenzieinstitute.com.

That’s M-A-C-K-E-N-Z-I-E institute.com. And that’s exactly what you said here. The first thing that caught my attention, you are calling this a world war.

And I guess you’re frustrated with the idea that too many people tend to view the fighting in Iraq as being totally separate from what’s going on in Afghanistan as separate from what’s going on in Africa as separate.

John Thompson:
Actually, this is not my opinion. This is the Jihad movement’s own opinion. And you find them actually talking about shifting resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. And for example, some of the so-called Taliban that our troops killed last year had come from Algeria, from Yemen, from Egypt, and from Indonesia. And veterans of the Chechen wars in southern Russia. They weren’t local Afghans. They weren’t Pashtun from Afghanistan or Pakistan. They were imported from a considerable distance.

Bob Metz:
Who’s controlling the whole thing? Am I looking at it wrong? You say here that they’re all connected. You say they’re not proceeding from one grand design and according to a big plan, but the network’s effect is identical. Isn’t there someone controlling this? A lot of people think Saudi Arabia is really behind the whole thing.

John Thompson:
No. This time there’s no—it would be easy if there was a Hitler or a Stalin or someone to look at and say, okay, this is the person behind this all. The ideological fathers of the Jihad movement are largely dead, died 30 or 40 years ago, 50 years ago. This is a movement that’s been brewing for decades. And that’s why it’s also going to last for decades.

So there’s no pulling out tomorrow or next week or even in 2010 or anything like that?

There are studies of immigrant Muslims inside the Western world. And we’ve already seen this. They try to recruit the second generation kids, sometimes very successfully, and try to induce them to commit acts of terrorism inside Western Europe and North America. That’s part of it. Again, it’s a global struggle.

Bob Metz:
The average rational person looks at this and they go, why? Why are they doing all this? What’s the purpose of all this? They can’t see a win-win situation out of any of this. What’s the purpose of terrorism? You say instability is the goal, but what’s the ultimate goal of instability, if you know what I’m asking?

John Thompson:
When you’re dealing with a terrorist, usually there’s a parallel thought process. There’s always the ideological goal, the grand plan, which is actually unimportant. In a lot of groups, it’s always been stick with us and when we win, everything will be better.

The grass will be greener, the sky will be bluer, and children will be healthier, and all will be well. In the Jihad movement, there is the idea that they can bring around the triumphalism of their extreme version of Islam. And also don’t forget that they’ve been working on Islam for the last 40 years. A lot of the diversity, a lot of the tolerance, and some of the better features of Islam that developed over centuries are also targeted by the Jihad movement quite successfully sometimes. But the other side of it is the terrorist is someone who at an intellectual, subconscious level needs to destroy, needs to wreck, needs to hurt. So they say they’re doing things for an ideological purpose, but at the same time, they want to see buildings collapse, they want to see cities on fire, they want to see panicked people screaming in front of television cameras.

Bob Metz:
And that gets them what? It gets them attention, I know that, but it’s also personally satisfying to them. I remember shortly after 9-11, Bill Clinton was being interviewed, I think on CNN. And he made a comment that was un-Clinton-like to me, but he said that terrorism never works in the long run.

It’s always a losing proposition. That was his take, because once it’s there, the rest of society ends up at some point doing something about it. Do you see that happening here? Have we been asleep at the wheel for the last 34 years?

John Thompson:
We were used to a very different kind of terrorism back during the Cold War, warfare by proxy. We’re also used to the terrorism we experienced in the 1970s with Marxist orientation. There were limitations to it.

There were things that Marxists would not do that Jihadists so happily do. The typical terrorist attack in the 1970s actually may not kill anyone. It was often throwing an improvised Molotov cocktail or a pipe bomb against an empty office window in the middle of the night.

Bob Metz:
Send a message kind of thing.

John Thompson:
And it was all part of the guerrilla theater and the whole language about terrorism and our reactions to it from the 1970s. And we’re now very different from the situation now. We’re confronting something that’s very different and far more lethal and far more sinister.

And of course, not just the Jihad movement. There’s been other manifestations of terrorism in the last 20 years that have been far deadlier than anything we’d seen before. The classic examples: Aum Shinrikyo, a weird apocalyptic religious cult. They’re the people who tried to light off biological weapons inside Tokyo and then finally put nerve gas in a very clumsy and badly delivered attack on the Tokyo subways.

Bob Metz:
When I look at this, you suggest that… Okay, so there’s a lot of fronts going on here. In your July 06 newsletter, you mentioned that wars of this type have to be fought on multiple fronts simultaneously, that we can’t treat each arena as a separate case. Is there any other place we should be that we’re not now?

John Thompson:
There’s limitations of what can and can’t be done, of course.

Bob Metz:
Limitations aside, where might we be looking? Because that might be the Jihad movement of the future, if you know what I’m saying.

John Thompson:
Somalia, but again, the way Somalia was conducted at least six months ago by the Americans and the Ethiopians was quite straightforward and actually worked. The Ethiopian army swept in when the Islamic Courts Union took over Somalia. Then the Ethiopian army acted as a game drive and there were American aircraft in there that did a lot of execution on the Jihadists. But again, the Jihadists then submerged, they went down in their cellars, now they’re popping up in Mogadishu and preventing any new society from reforming. And of course, in Somalia, this is a place that really needs help as much as Afghanistan does.

It’s almost as torn apart. In other places, for example, the Philippines. That’s the Philippine army. That’s their ticket.

They do get a lot of support from the Americans and some from the Australians, but that’s their business. And again, they have to do the whole multiple series of approaches. But other problems, unsolvable. Iraq is a mess. It is a real snake pit right now and I don’t know what the solution is.

Bob Metz:
I’d like to get into that particular one a little bit more. 519-661-3600, if you want to call in and join the conversation or ask some questions. John, you suggest that there’s three ways the war could go.

A jihadist victory, the destruction of fundamentalist Islam, or the world muddles through somehow, which you seem to think is the most likely scenario. But again, that third one looks very dangerous in a lot of ways because it doesn’t end anything. It just could get worse rather than better, couldn’t it?

John Thompson:
There are no good choices. The worst of all choices is letting fundamentalist Islam win. If you look at the whole experience of the 20th century, we’ve got all that knowledge about what happens when totalitarians win when they run societies.

Because we saw what the Nazis did and we saw what the Soviets were doing in the Soviet Union. If the jihadists win, in the Middle East alone, there’ll be tens of millions of deaths. Plus, they won’t stop. They’ll keep pushing. So it’ll be conflict after conflict after conflict. The second one is, there is a point where democratic societies, and we’ve seen this before the Second World War, will do anything to avoid a major conflict.

And then there’s the point where suddenly our society gets too alarmed, too irritated, or too exasperated. And we’re fighting an ideological opponent. Remember, in 1940, we were fighting Nazism and fascism and all the rest of it. We were fighting an ideological opponent. And of the people who were alive in 1940, two and a half percent of them were dead five years later. If we have the same sort of open conflict against jihadist ideology now, the same casualty figures in proportion would yield 180 million dead. So this is a place we’d like to avoid going to. That’s why the soft option—we muddle through and hope somehow that ordinary Muslims take their religion back from the jihadists. That still might have these regional wars that could kill hundreds of thousands or millions.

Bob Metz:
Well, listen, 519-661-3600, if you want to join us, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Audio Clip – Omid Djalili (Comedy Routine):
Because some of you don’t know, I am in fact the only Iranian comedian in the world, as we said. I’m glad you’re laughing, because most people associate the Middle East with oil and phlegm and halitosis.

I know, I know, I’m joking, I’m joking, we’re running out of oil. And you know, some people…

This is the Taliban, you know. I have to say, the Taliban, this is why we’re having problems. The Taliban were trying to make their religion quite cool and accessible.

They said, long beards, women can’t speak. They’re like, ooh, rock and roll, you see. They’re trying to put the fun back into fundamentalism, if you can see it that way. It’s only a shame they forgot the mental in fundamentalism. It’s quiet, shut up! I don’t care for your clapping.

Audio Clip – Jim David (Comedy Routine):
We haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction yet, but don’t worry, we’ll put them there. Last week George Bush outlined his plan for post-war Iraq, then he colored it.

Bob Metz:
Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right with Bob Metz on CHRW 94.9 FM. You can call in 519-661-3600 if you want to join the conversation. John, those clips back there, people are always saying that everything we’re doing in the Middle East is about oil. Does oil even play a role, or would we even be there if there wasn’t oil?

John Thompson:
No, not really. There’s still…

Bob Metz:
Not really, it’s not about oil, or not really we wouldn’t be there.

John Thompson:
We’d still perhaps be there, and there are 240 million people there. It’s hard to ignore them. This is the place where Africa, Asia and Europe all meet. This is the strategic crossroads of the world. Even if the oil wasn’t there, the world would be involved just like they were before. Remember, in the 19th century, one of the big strategic assets of the world was the Suez Canal, right through Egypt. It’s always been at the heart of the world. Another thing about oil is that, for example, in the United States, if it was fundamentally about oil, they would have left Saddam Hussein alone. The oil would have kept flowing, no problem.

Bob Metz:
That brings up an interesting point too. I was reading in one of your publications that another general view people have of the United States is that it’s this imperialistic power, and I recall reading in one of your newsletters you were almost laughing at that because you were saying the U.S. just doesn’t have what it takes to be an imperialist power. Unlike, I think you said England and…

John Thompson:
France. The history of that too. The U.S. is just lousy at being an imperialistic power. It’s not in the history of the country.

Bob Metz:
The Americans… if you go to Washington and take a look around, you become aware of two things. One, this is an imperial city. It’s filled with monuments. But also, the Americans are an unfinished revolution. And what’s more, they’re an unfinished revolution working over the ideology of 200 years ago. In some ways, the rest of the world is in its post-modernist muck. The Americans are still dealing with the Enlightenment.

But like revolutionaries, one of the things about the Americans they keep trying to do all the time is to clone themselves. There’s a great history, Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot. Good book, can’t recommend it enough. About the Americans’ attempts in small wars.

The wars that are part and parcel of what’s normally considered imperialism, the classic model. And one of the things is the Americans just go to strange places and they don’t get it. You’ve got the U.S. Navy in the 1820s down in the South Pacific going to an island of basically stone-age Pacific Islanders and trying to say, okay, you need a president, you need a Congress, and trying to clone the United States in this little island. And when the Americans try to clone their institutions in other countries, it doesn’t work. You see it with Iraq. The U.S. has a military that’s really good, superb military. But they can’t really clone it in other countries.

Bob Metz:
This reminds me of a phenomenon I pointed to a couple of weeks ago. Not to do with terrorism, but I was talking about the protection that perhaps the republican United States has offered to us. Both systems can be compatible with individual rights and freedoms, but they’re neither a guarantee. That seems to go deeper into the culture, doesn’t it? It’s almost as if there has to be some very deep thing within people, regardless of the system that they’re in, that motivates the way they behave under that system. Am I making a point here or am I way off base?

John Thompson:
In the British system, it’s all based on custom and tradition.

Bob Metz:
That’s what I’m saying. You go back far enough, but those traditions had their causes too.

John Thompson:
They did, but also in our post-modernist age, we tend to put those of small value, and so we keep eroding some of the foundations of these freedoms in Britain or in Canada. Where in the United States, everything is bounded and balanced by law. And the Americans feud about this all the time, but one of the things about Americans is that, by and large, they’re inherently law abiding, and they will argue about process till the cows come home, and the rest of the world has got bored and given up.

And there are also law breakers if they really disagree with a law.

Usually it’s on the side more of justice, I would think, in most cases. But there is that whole civic culture that runs through the Americans, and that’s also one of the factors that inhibits the Americans from really being truly revolutionary or truly imperial.

And again, you look at other things. The British influence in Iraq is quite strong. They were only there for about 20 years, and they cloned some of their institutions, and the echo of them is still in Iraq. The Americans have tried to say, now we’re occupying Iraq, now we’re going to teach you how to set things up our way. And they failed right across the board every time. They just don’t know how to do that.

Bob Metz:
That’s interesting because you outline basically four main reasons, or four main causes of the things that have gone wrong in Iraq. Firstly, they did not notice that the entrenched tribalism in the Arab world is just not going to go away just because you occupy it and set up institutions. The other one was the Shia majority ruling over the Sunni minority.

They’ve got the determination of a lot of the terrorists to keep the sectarian violence going and just keep everything destabilized. An interesting one that you put too: the blanket debaathification. When I saw that, I couldn’t resist saying it’s like throwing the baby out with the debaathification. But basically they gutted all of Iraq’s institutions, purging all their police and stuff, which maybe you’re saying that was a tragic error.

John Thompson:
When a country is being run by an ideology, a lot of people subscribe to the form of the ideology so they can get a job in the civil service. And so if you look at Italy particularly, but also Germany right after World War II or Japan, there were a lot of people who were involved in the former government who were kept in place and the denazification or de-fascistification could follow slowly. Or the only thing stable in Eastern Europe after the fall of Soviet Union was again the apparatus of the former Communist Party staying in place.

That’s the post office, that’s the police, that’s all the little things that you need to be the anchor for a whole society. And the Americans should learn from that. It doesn’t mean you have a smooth, perfect transition by any means, but coming in and firing everybody was an absolutely profound mistake. One of the things they did again with a lot of the army and a lot of the police.

Bob Metz:
Do they realize that’s a mistake?

John Thompson:
They do now. And they acknowledge that. Can they undo it in any way?

It’s a little too late. The baby got thrown out with the debaathification waters.

Bob Metz:
You keep referring to ideologies. Does not the other side see the West as an ideology? The Western ideology—you hear the term. Is that not really maybe too neutral a word to use? Because isn’t every country run by some kind of ideology?

John Thompson:
They’re driven by an ideology. An ideology is often a substitute for rational thought. Nobody is free of it.

Any ideology is a set of ideas, whether good or bad.

But by and large, at least the ideal in a Western society is that there’s an affiliation for the idea of a civic society, a respect for the rule of law, and the habit of plurality in our processes.

Bob Metz:
We’ll come back to this after this. We’ve got to take a break right now, folks. If you want to call in 519-661-3600 and we’ll be right back after this.

Audio Clip – Star Trek: The Next Generation (Episode: “The High Ground”):
How can you have such a casual attitude toward killing?

I take my killing very seriously, doctor. You are an idealist.

I live in an ideal culture. There’s no need for your kind of violence. We’ve proven that.

Your origins on Earth are from the American continent, aren’t they? North America. Yes, I’ve read your history books. This is a war for independence, and I am no different than your own George Washington.

Washington was a military general, not a terrorist.

The difference between generals and terrorists, doctor, is only the difference between winners and losers. You win, you’re called a general. You lose.

You are killing innocent people. Can’t you see the immorality of what you’re doing? Or have you killed so much you’ve become blind to it?

Audio Clip – Unknown Speaker (Possibly from Interview or Commentary):
Some people say that Christianity should respond aggressively, being the fight to the enemy. That fundamentalist Christianity is the answer to fundamentalist Islam.

John Thompson (Response to Clip):
Not in my opinion. In my view, what the West has is freedom, and that is the only way to fight all fundamentalists—with the fundamental belief that life is an end in itself, that it’s sacred, and that the freedom of the individual goes above anything that any God can say.

Bob Metz:
Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz, and you can call in 519-661-3600. John, what do you think about that comment we just heard? Is freedom the answer? It sounds very simplistic on the surface—just give them freedom and everything will be okay. Although I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, how is that actually to be implemented?

John Thompson:
I think an even better answer is Walid Phares’ book. Walid Phares is a Lebanese Muslim who’s brilliant, academic. And he’s written a couple of books. Because he is part of Arab culture, and he understands the thinking of Arab elites. And the idea of Western-style freedom and Western advantages for ordinary people terrifies them. And remember that one of the challenges of the 20th century for the Arab world…

Bob Metz:
Isn’t that an admission of failure in a certain way? That what you believe in would not be accepted if people were freely allowed to accept it?

John Thompson:
It is. Do they care? Obviously they don’t care about that.

If you look at the history of the Arab Middle East in the 20th century, suddenly you have the old order vanishing. The end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed. And the realization they’ve got to modernize, got to keep up with the rest of the world. And they’ve adopted every model they can. They’ve flirted with communism, with national socialism, with militarism, with everything else, now with fundamentalism.

And none of it’s worked. But because part of the problem, as Phares points out, is that the Arab elites don’t want to adopt some of the standards of the Western world. They don’t actually like the idea of individual freedom, of real political plurality.

Bob Metz:
And yet they can look at the West and see the tremendous economic success we have, the tremendous personal freedom, a greater degree of happiness in the West, in the sense of the pursuit of happiness, the individual autonomy. They don’t see these things as advantages when they compare them to the way they’re living?

John Thompson:
It depends on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a member of the Saudi royal family or someone else who’s the upper edge of society, yes, they have those material advantages and they can fly to Europe and do all the good things. But the man on the street, or the woman on the street more particularly, doesn’t have these advantages. And the leadership of these societies spend a lot of time trying to convince them that these things are disadvantages. They are to power.

And you do have this restlessness in their societies. And you’ve had 80 years now of pointing in different directions and saying, well, we can’t have this. The whole Danish cartoon controversy was one of these cases where you basically whipped up anger on the street to divert attention.

Bob Metz:
Speaking of just that Danish cartoon thing, I got your newsletter here and you actually reprinted some of these cartoons. All of them. Now, interesting. I was watching a show on TV—could have been The Agenda with Steve Paikin—and they had Richard Dawkins on. And he made a comment that no one challenged. They had people representing all religions and non-faith as well. He said that the cartoons that we saw in the West as being the cause of this whole cartoon jihad were not the same ones that were being shown to the people in the Mideast. Is that true?

John Thompson:
The portfolio of the cartoons was enlarged considerably with some very crude drawings that would not appear in any regular newspaper anywhere in the western world. One of my favorites was a photograph of a French farmer who just won a hog-calling contest in France. And he had a little plastic set of pig ears and a plastic pig nose on him. But he was a bearded middle-aged man. And this photograph was clipped, added to the portfolio that was used to whip up the cartoon controversy and to say that this was a representation of Muhammad with pig ears and pig nose.

Bob Metz:
So even that was a bit of a scam.

You’re listening to CHRW 94.9 where our guest today is John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, experts on terrorism, organized crime, and basically nasty things that go on in the world in an organized way. Let’s take another angle on this now. Both George Bush in the States and Stephen Harper in Canada are suffering a little bit politically from their stands on the war. Do you think this is going to be hurtful to the Republicans or the Conservatives here?

And would the Democrats in the States or the Liberals here really be doing anything different if they were in power? Just in your opinion—or do we have a choice?

John Thompson:
We don’t, really. Ultimately we don’t have a choice. It is going to have to be fought somewhere. And remember that it was actually the Liberals that committed 2,500 Canadian troops to Kandahar in the first place, to the danger zone. It was the Liberals that committed Canadian troops to Afghanistan right in the aftermath of 2001 anyway.

And again, Americans—I can’t really see how things would be different. Saddam Hussein was a thorn in the side not just of George Bush Sr., also Clinton. Remember, Clinton had ordered numerous airstrikes against Iraq on four or five different occasions. And it was pretty well the top of his list. And again, right after 9-11, it was going to have to be something done. The invasion of Afghanistan and its liberation from Taliban was necessary. But what Saddam Hussein was and what he represented with the intelligence that was understood at the time was someone that was going to have to be dealt with at one point or another.

Bob Metz:
Christopher Hitchens did a better defense of…

John Thompson:
You look at Christopher Hitchens’ 10 points about the successes of the invasion of Iraq and what was accomplished.

Bob Metz:
One of those reasons he gave—and I read your coverage of that—which seemed self-evident but I never thought about it before: at least by going to Iraq, we knew for sure that they didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction, other than basing it on some kind of say-so of some mad dictator that you couldn’t really trust.

Was the whole thing a setup? I remember the night of the invasion of Iraq when Hussein gave his speech. He basically almost gave a sketch outline of everything that’s happened since then.

He says, yeah, come on in, take us over and then we’ll start pecking at you like little fleas and gnats and just drive you crazy, which has almost been the strategy up until now. Either he understood the nature of his country and the way things were going to go. Was it a mistake to execute him? Was he even a factor by the time they invaded?

John Thompson:
The execution of Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi mistake. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, plus hundreds of thousands of Iranians. He was a monster to a lot of Iraqis and you could see that in the unfortunate circumstances of his execution—that rejoicing and singing, there were a lot of Iraqis who were very happy that he was dead. Saddam Hussein had also engineered Iraq. He stashed arms everywhere.

There are arms dumps in Iraq the size of Manhattan Island. And he set the Baath guerrillas up to be the poison pill. But they were dealt with fairly quickly.

They are still around, but they’re a fraction of what they used to be. The real problem was actually from Iraq’s neighbors, especially the Saudi Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. And remember, three times in the last 200 years, Saudi Arabia and Wahhabis have gone into Iraq. And this is the third time right now to kill large numbers of Shiites, especially the idea that Shiites are apostates. And twice before, they’d gone into Iraq in the 1810s and the 1920s.

Sort of like 1950s Klansmen in Alabama to make sure they keep the Shiites in what they think their place should be. And the idea that suddenly the Shiites in Iraq would be able to have political power and rule over Sunnis to the Wahhabis was impossible. So they came in and they attacked American troops, but attacking American troops was pretty hazardous.

They were losing at one point in 2003-2004, 27 for every American they killed. So that’s when they started going to the traditional thing of massacring Shiite civilians, putting out car bombs outside Shiite mosques and everything else. And of course, you do that enough and then the other side starts to respond. And then of course, Iran has also been pumping in arms and advisors to the Shiites because Iran wants Iraq permanently destabilized. So you’ve got this fragmented society with two groups of people pumping in fuel and oxygen into the maelstrom.

Bob Metz:
Iraq is… I remember talking when I was on Left, Right and Center with Jim Chapman way back when the war just first got started. When you look at a map at the strategic layout with Western troops in Afghanistan, Western troops in Iraq, you can see almost where the target is heading towards Iran.

It’s almost like playing chess. Do you think that’s the long-term goal that’s been in their mind all the time, that Iraq was just not taking the king down yet, but taking the queen down first and positioning themselves for what they think is an inevitability? Or am I reading too much into that strategy?

John Thompson:
I think you’re reading too much into it.

Nobody is that smart.

Bob Metz:
Okay, we’ll be back right after these messages.

Audio Clip – Star Trek: The Next Generation (Episode: “The High Ground”):
You have made a grave miscalculation.

Oh? You have assaulted a Federation starship, killed and wounded several members of her crew, kidnapped two of her officers, and you don’t expect a response. On the contrary, I’m counting on it. You want Federation involvement.

Captain, the Federation has a lot to admire, but there’s a hint of moral cowardice in your dealings with non-aligned planets.

You accuse us of cowardice while you plant bombs in shadows.

I am fighting the only war that I can against an intractable enemy. Now I’m fighting a big war against a more powerful adversary. Can’t you see how that helps me?

He’s added another chair to the negotiating table.

You added the chair, Captain. I am simply forcing you to sit in it.

Audio Clip – Omid Djalili (Comedy Routine):
And why is it every time when the media there’s a problem with Muslims, we always go to Muslim nutcase with a hook in the media. Muslim nutcase with a hook, how do you think?

They’re all going, Allah! Allah! Allah! These people, they are martyrs. Osama bin Laden lives in the hearts of every Muslim everywhere. Death to America, death to Canada, death to your city. Death to everyone, you bastards. Death to everyone. Thank you.

There’s the voice of the Middle East. It’s a bit like Al Jazeera saying to get a balanced view of the West, we now go to Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dragon, how do you think this affects Westerners? Well, we believe in death to all darkies and Arabs and Jews all over the place. We believe in establishing a white supremacist state in the middle of Egypt with its headquarters in Arkansas. With the Lord on my side, the Lord and me by my side. Thank you. There’s the voice of the Christian West.

Bob Metz:
Welcome back to Just Right with Bob Metz. Our guest today is John Thompson, President of the Mackenzie Institute. You can call in at 519-661-3600. John, what do you think about that? I noticed you’re laughing at that. You think there’s an issue there with the media the way they polarize the issue? But do you think the comedian there, Omid Djalili, has a point?

John Thompson:
I’ve seen it working here in Canada.

The press goes out, we’ve got to find ourselves a Sunni Imam. I know several. One guy I like is a retired heart surgeon, erudite, sophisticated, wonderful fellow.

And others again have no interest in Wahhabis, but no, they have to go over to the Salah mosque and they find a guy with a long Wahhabi beard and a Wahhabi little hat on. And again, somebody who is up to no good and interviewing him.

Bob Metz:
So often when I’m watching news on the Middle East, I feel like I’m being set up, like the whole thing’s being staged just for the cameras.

And if the cameras weren’t there, a lot of that wouldn’t be going on. Because PR—that’s part of terrorism, isn’t it, spreading fear through the message.

John Thompson:
It’s also the interest—the terrorist is the violent political extremist. And he’s also got an interest in polarizing society. And usually behind every terrorist is the propagandist. You look back at the Nazis—for Goering there was Goebbels.

If you look at the extremists, they’ve managed to win maybe the support of about 10% of the Muslim community globally. Most Muslims are sitting back.

They don’t like them. But it’s the problem you find in other societies—I’ve written comparisons to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia in the time of the Bolshevik Revolution—that the extremist minority with the agenda that’s prepared to act violently when necessary and is organized for propaganda can control larger numbers of people unless that larger number decides to assert themselves. We could still head off all sorts of unpleasantness if the Saudis were leaned on and told, you stop spending money on the Wahhabi Da’wa.

Stop it now. And you actually find the Europeans are starting to move towards this way right now. They just keep wrapping the knuckles of the extremists whenever they pop up. And let the rest of Islam—40 years ago, particularly before the Wahhabi Da’wa with oil money started to get to work on it—was pretty diverse, and that diversity is endangered. There were 70 different ethno-cultural groups around the world that are inherently Muslim. And 40 years ago, a Bosnian Muslim would consider a plate of pork chops and a glass of cherry brandy to be a great dinner. And if his daughter married a Christian or Jew, he didn’t mind—he’d probably married one. Or you go to Nigeria where a Yoruba Muslim would put on occasionally an animal mask to dance in some of his grandfather’s ghost alongside his equally notional Christian neighbor.

Bob Metz:
What’s the ideological attraction of having become so hard-lined over time and less rational in a way?

John Thompson:
This is a hard one to explain, but…

Bob Metz:
Isn’t it just political or is it deeper than that?

John Thompson:
It’s a little deeper than that. There’s resentment. And part of the resentment is if you want to look at the big picture, it’s the failure of the Muslim world to adapt, to match the rest of the world. And the driving engine has also been the Wahhabis from the Saudi Peninsula. And they look back at history, because basically from where they came from it’s where Muhammad came from in the first place.

So there’s always been a fair amount of chauvinism. They were the real Muslims. And you find this in a room full of Muslims—with the Africans and with the Malaysians and with the Central Asians. The guy from Saudi Arabia is going to be patronizing everybody else, because as far as he’s concerned, he’s the real Muslim. And there’s a sense that their revolution has failed and they resent it. And that the world is ganging up on them and they can’t adapt to it.

Bob Metz:
This brings me back to something that’s bothered me since 9-11. You heard the clip before the break—which actually, folks, that was from Star Trek, the episode called The High Ground.

It’s an absolutely phenomenal episode. It was banned in Britain when it was first aired because they thought it was about the IRA, which it could have been. It’s very generic. But what I caught in that episode that applied so strongly to 9-11—and I felt that ever since 9-11—9-11 was in a way an invitation to retaliate, to put that third seat at the negotiating table, because I couldn’t believe that anybody would think that that would go unaddressed. It wasn’t just, we’ll do it and nothing will happen. Obviously something had to happen. Am I thinking even possibly right? Because isn’t there something to be gained by some party over there because of the states?

John Thompson:
I think you might find that with a terrorist movement that’s pretty disciplined, like a hierarchical terrorist movement with a formal political structure attached to it, like the IRA and Sinn Féin.

Bob Metz:
But in the sense we’re looking at Muslims fighting Muslims, right?

John Thompson:
With 9-11, you’re looking more of that visceral urge to strike out, to tear down. What the World Trade Center represented to bin Laden was American/Western wealth and power and influence. New York as the financial center of the world that he disliked.

Bob Metz:
Are you saying it’s just symbolic? Did they do all that just for symbolism?

John Thompson:
And of course they did get a plan to kill large numbers of people.

Bob Metz:
That was the goal, and that was it, because they didn’t offer us any do this or we won’t do that.

John Thompson:
Logically, look at what they lost as a result. They were training thousands of cadres a year in Afghanistan. They lost their training bases. They could move money around almost openly, now they can’t.

Bob Metz:
Time is running out. Still a question I wanted to get back to you on, going back a little further in history. We’re in Afghanistan today. The Russians were there at one time. There’s a belief when I talk to people that what are we doing there? The Russians lost.

How are we going to win? And I remember you putting a spin on it that Russia wasn’t really losing.

John Thompson:
When the Russians were there, Afghanistan has actually always been historically easy to conquer. There’s no incentive to stay there because the place is poor. And the Russians—what they had was their system collapsed behind them. That’s why they left, because of everything else they were doing in the Cold War.

Militarily, they were able to go anywhere they wanted to. Also, the big difference is the Russians were fighting to subdue Afghanistan. The people who direct Canada’s operations in Afghanistan are Afghans. We’re working all the time with the Afghan government, with the Afghan police and military, protecting Afghan teachers.

Bob Metz:
Are things going better in Afghanistan, as far as the war is concerned, than in Iraq?

John Thompson:
It’s a three steps forward, two steps backward process. But things do keep improving as long as we keep a focus on what we’re doing. And we get smart about the aid we’re delivering. That’s a key part of it too.

Bob Metz:
Fascinating. John, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is a subject we could probably talk about for days on end and still not only scratch the surface. I’m still confused about all the names and groups involved in this.

Very confusing and otherwise depressing situation if you really look at it that way. But I want to thank you for joining us today, and hopefully we can have you back sometime again in the future to keep us updated on what is happening in the world.

John Thompson:
Love to come back.

Bob Metz:
Thank you, folks, for joining us today. You’ve been listening to Just Right with Bob Metz and my guest John Thompson today. Tune in again next week on Just Right, when we will continue our journey in the right direction. Until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, and think right. We’ll see you next week.

Audio Clip – Glen Foster (Comedy Routine):
That’s who should be involved in the war on terror, the mob. Because the mob does not screw around. And not only that, war is not good for the mob. It’s bad for business. It costs money. The borders are closed, so it’s hard to smuggle drugs and guns.

It’s hard to launder money because the FBI is watching all the electronic transactions. Basic economics. People don’t leave the house. They can’t be robbed. Junkies aren’t making their connections. Hos ain’t hoeing. My God, the whole black market is so fragile.