The Bush Administration Makes New Enemies Daily By Ivan Eland Price of Liberty

August 14, 2006

In the frenzy surrounding the exposed plot to simultaneously blow up ten airliners flying from Britain to the United States, one line of inquiry being pursued by investigators should make the Bush administration very nervous. British and Pakistani law enforcement officials are examining whether the British plotters of Pakistani descent received money from an Islamic charity, Jamaat ud Dawa. The charity has been used as a front for a militant group fighting for the separation of the Muslim province of Kashmir from the predominantly Hindu India. The most important element in the whole investigation is that Jamaat ud Dawa was recently labeled a terrorist organization by the Bush administration. Could this labeling have motivated the plot in the first place?

Jamaat ud Dawa has no direct association with al Qaeda and focuses its efforts on ousting the army of a non-Muslim state (India) from Muslim lands (Kashmir)—the key issue that enrages and motivates the most Islamic jihadist attacks. In fact, jihadist groups battled the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the French and Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, the Russians in Chechnya, the Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Americans in Afghanistan and now Iraq. In spite of this, the United States seems to have gone out of its way to pick a fight with the Jamaat ud Dawa.

And the group has apparently noticed. The organization’s website shows a photo of Mohammed Saeed, the group’s leader, protesting the Bush administration’s designation of Jamaat ud Dawa as a terrorist organization in May of this year. If the group was involved in the bomb plot, occurring three months later, it appears to be no coincidence.

Jamaat ud Dawa is the perfect example of the type of local and regional insurgent group the United States government continues to add to the U.S. terrorism list in the name of the “global war on terror.” Yet, because these groups don’t start out with an anti–U.S. focus, the U.S. government is endangering its own citizens by making new enemies needlessly. The United States cannot and should not—for the security of its own people—help every government put down threats from local insurgents and terrorists.

India and Pakistan do need to solve the Kashmir problem, and the United States might even be able to help mediate a settlement, since it now has a loose alliance with both nations. But labeling Kashmiri groups as “terrorists” does nothing for any future U.S. role as an honest broker in the dispute.

Similarly, slavish support for Israel’s “over-the-top” response in Lebanon to Hezbollah’s attack on Israeli military targets could provoke Hezbollah to again attack U.S. targets. The group virtually ended its strikes against U.S. targets when the United States withdrew its forces from Lebanon in the early 1980s. Hezbollah, as it has proven before, is a formidable foe, but its main target is Israel. Why did the Bush administration needlessly shake the Hezbollah hornet’s nest by stalling the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon so that Israel could have more time to futilely attack Hezbollah’s and Lebanon’s infrastructure?

No conflict in the world is apparently too unimportant or irrelevant to “U.S. security” for the world’s superpower to refrain from intervening. The first responsibility of any government is to try to make its people genuinely secure, not to perpetuate empire. Empire does not generate security, but rather undermines it. The bomb plot should be a wake-up call to the Bush administration to disengage from needless meddling in other countries’ wars and conflicts.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais and a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Alexander Tabarrok is research director at The Independent Institute, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, editor of the Independent Institute books, Entrepreneurial Economics, The Voluntary City (with D. Beito and P. Gordon), and Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a Senior Fellow and director of The Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. He is the author of Liberty for Latin America.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of Against Leviathan and Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. Click here for a bio on Dr. Higgs, the noted economist and historian.

William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Atlantic University.

David T. Beito is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and co-editor of the book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society.

William Marina and David T. Beito belong to "Liberty and Power," a group blog at the History News Network.

For further articles and studies, see the Center on Peace & Liberty and OnPower.org.

Nicolas Heidorn is a public policy intern at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

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