Bali - Ralph Peters on

Bali - Ralph Peters on why the Bali attack was a sign of terrorist desperation:

The good news is that the terrorists have bitten the hand that tolerated them, even if it didn't quite feed them. Insecure and wary, President Megawati Sukarnoputri has been timid in facing up to Indonesia's terrorist problem, and many Indonesians have been in denial. There has been no end of halfhearted claims that there was no real threat from Islamic extremists in Indonesia, that al Qaeda had no presence, and that Jakarta could mind its own affairs, thank you.
The paradox is that Indonesia really has not had--and still does not have--a major terrorist problem on the scale of many other Muslim countries. The Bali bombings were acts of frustration and desperation, not of strength. This largest of Muslim nations has a population overwhelmingly at peace with its various laissez-faire versions of Islam. A relatively small percentage of Indonesians support Islamic extremism even passively, a situation chronically disheartening to the fanatics.

Indonesia is a country of 210 million with a 90% Muslim majority that produces good beer and likes to party (most young Indonesians tend to hear only the first three letters of the word "fundamentalism"). Nubile Western pop singers are markedly more popular than Osama bin Laden, and the only anti-Americanism I encountered personally was so superficial it couldn't survive a handshake.

But these are the very qualities hateful to the fundamentalist extremists, and the Megawati government's passivity has encouraged them to believe that they could act with impunity. Now the terrorists have overreached, as their comrades did in New York and Washington. The crimes they committed on Bali were so ferocious that they cannot be denied or explained away. More importantly, they were a severe embarrassment for the government and the country. And public shame is anathema in Indonesian society. The attacks hit wallets, too, which is a far worse idea in corrupt states than in more orderly ones.

The attacks were against a wide variety of "sins" - Austrialian support of intervening in Iraq plus their presence in Afghanistan, Australian suppression of the Moslem genocide of Christians in East Timor, Bali's Hindu majority, and the "decadence" of the Kuta economy, which is sort of the Ibiza of the southwest Pacific.

Of course, hitting a lot of enemies makes a lot of enemies very angry. And the Australian SAS is every bit as nasty an enemy as our Delta Force...

Posted by Mitch at October 15, 2002 07:35 AM