Europe Hopes Obama Shifts on 'Terror'

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Europe Hopes Obama Shifts on 'Terror'

By Don Ediger
January 26, 2009

President Barack Obama can make great strides in combating al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups if he abandons George W. Bush's heated rhetoric and unrealistic view of how terrorism is structured, says Rik Coolsaet, a top European expert on terrorism.


Coolsaet, director of the Security and Global Governance Department at the Royal Institute of International Relations in Brussels, said in an interview that the U.S. and Europe are already working behind the scenes on new ways to reduce terrorist threats, in part by steering away from Bush’s approach.

Europe, which has long experience with terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Basque separatists in Spain and France, believes it has a more realistic approach to the problem and never bought into Bush's vision that al-Qaeda, aided by rogue states, represented a new era of global terrorism.

"The comparative absence of terrorism on American soil, together with the dramatic nature of 9/11" go a long way in explaining why some Americans have exaggerated the threat, said Coolsaet, who is a member of the European Commission's Expert Group on Violent Radicalization. The low-profile group advises the commission on policy issues.

President Bush often employed alarmist rhetoric, such as warning of “a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.”

But Coolsaet said today's terrorists are nearly always a patchwork of "self-radicalizing local groups with international contacts" but without a global command structure. "Today it's a bottom-up structure with groups of friends, and sometimes families, who become radicalized and then search for a larger, international network," he said.

Coolsaet said the threat of terrorism can even be exacerbated through exaggeration. Overreaction, like the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, can stimulate terrorism instead of reducing it, he said.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/012609a.html