Fundamentals of Disorder

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 | by Susan L.M. Huck

Counterterrorist Morgan Norval examines the history and methods of Muslim militants and the threat they pose to a modern world now set adrift from the former imperial policing.

In the panorama of history, when empires were in their prime, they took on the task of keeping order over large areas of the globe. But the 20th century has seen the end of the empire, beginning in the middle of World War I and culminating in the 1990s. Now there is no one to keep the structure of the world steady, with such consequences as NATO turning the full resources of the West against a petty tyrant in the Balkans.

It is not surprising, then, that the new disorder creepeth in.

Morgan Norval calls attention to the drift. He is a former Marine, now affiliated with the Washington-based International Association of Counterterrorism and Security Professionals. His study of these matters has been conducted primarily in Africa. His Triumph of Disorder: Islamic Fundamentalism and the New Face of War (Sligo Press, 324 pp) will be an eye-opener to Americans who tend to overlook news from little-known parts of the world and who thus remain blissfully unaware of the increasingly fictional nature of the world political map.

Dozens of African "nations" were little more than colonial boundaries drawn on a map at some remote conference in Europe. As a result, Americans have been dispatched to conduct "nation-building" in Somalia and cleanup-after-genocide in Rwanda while dozens more such "nations" disintegrate. Decades of civil war and anarchy have ravaged huge areas, often leaving behind perhaps one functioning international airport and a ramshackle capital with "officials" subsisting on graft and foreign aid. The "imperial policing" once quite efficiently performed by European colonial powers now awaits the hand of the New World Order.

Dissolution is not, of course, confined to Africa. Sri Lanka is torn by a sophisticated ethnic insurrection, vast Indonesia is in danger of breakup, and the government of Colombia, with a certain forced cheer, has ceded a very large chunk of territory to armed and well-funded narcoterrorists. Americans, meanwhile, have been drawn increasingly into "imperial policing" in the Balkans as Yugoslavia splintered into its ethnic former components.

The political map no longer is what it seems. The particular object of Norval's attention is "militant Islam." About 1 billion Muslims are spread the long way around the world from California to the Philippines. Muslims are an ever-increasing minority in the United States and much more so in the nations of the European union.

Islam as a fighting faith burst from Arabia about 630 A.D.. Within 100 years, Muslim armies had conquered the Middle East and North Africa and penetrated into France in the west and Central Asia in the east. The southern borders of Europe remained contested throughout the Middle Ages, and Turkish Muslim forces reached Vienna in 1529. A revival of that spirit among today's Muslims already has created problems and can create a great many more.

Norval offers a close look at "Islam's Foreign Legion" and the major existing Islamic militant organizations already in action. Those groups are fighting Muslim governments in Algeria and Egypt, mobilizing against host governments in Europe, contesting portions of the Philippines and fighting obvious foes such as Israel and Israel's giant ally, the Great Satan itself, the United States.

And yet, covert American support for the successful Afghan resistance to Soviet invasion drew Muslim militants by the thousands into Afghanistan, where they received valuable training and combat experience. These "Afghan vets" Norval notes, are prized by militant organizations.

Norval looks at Iran as the prime nexus of state-sponsored Islamic "terrorism," with the Sudan presumably serving as a secondary support base for North Africa. He devotes a chapter to the almost unseen but very ugly struggle in the southern Sudan, where civil war is accompanied by a resurgence of slavery.

Not to overlook lesser elements, the author discusses "mafias, drug lords and street gangs." He cites the work of such military writers as retired Army Col. Ralph Peters, who painstakingly has assessed the potential of these "warriors." In Liberia, for example, the "nation" fell to the depredations of gangs of feral children -- teens and subteens seemingly familiar with few concepts beyond loot, burn, rape, kill. Yet tribal warfare (yes, assuredly, even in Europe), local warlordism, criminal gangs, ragtag "liberation armies" and their so-called "death-squad" opponents become more prominent as central governments weaken.

As in days of the Pax Romana, imperial policing may seem to require armies to match the barbarians atrocity for atrocity. The ugliness of this suggests the nature of the new era into which we appear to be moving. In sum, Morgan Norval sketches out a global pattern of disorder, some of which could be coming to a neighborhood near you.