III - Terrorism

Summary

Three defining imperatives in relations among the United States, Singapore, and India are suggested by this brief overview: meeting the threat of terrorism, managing the rise of China, and strengthening democracy internationally. The possibility of a triangular relationship forming among Washington, Singapore, and New Delhi depends on the extent to which their interests converge over these key imperatives. It would be useful to analyse, therefore,how each country views each imperative. As the analysis below will show, their interests converge most completely over the need to fight terror. There is only a partial congruence of interests over how to meet the rise of China, with India veering close to the sharper edges of the American view, from which Singapore's stance varies. Strengthening the democratic peace is the weakest link, with America's and India's approaches not really coinciding, but both diverging markedly from Singapore's view.

We begin with the War on Terror, which unites the three countries most closely.

AMERICA

President George W. Bush's immediate reaction to 9/11 — “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while” — had observers fearing that the bornagain Christian would launch a punitive clash of civilizations against the global Muslim community that had produced the perpetrators of the enormity. For example, for Soheib Bensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, the use of the word “crusade” recalled military operations against the Muslim world by Christian knights who had made repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem over several hundred years. Fears of a clash erupting along religious lines, precisely what the instigators of the 9/11 calamity had hoped to provoke, grew as Taliban deputy leader Mohammed Hasan Akhund called on Afghans to prepare for jihad against America if its forces attacked Afghanistan, and a fax from Osama urged Muslims in Pakistan to “fight the American crusade”. The demography of Bush's support base — which included evangelical Christians and Christian Zionists whose support for the state of Israel was “visceral” — and the apparently pervasive and allegedly insidious influence of Neocons on policymaking in his Administration roused concerns on the Left over the war on terror being hijacked by religious considerations that would obscure the need to address terrorism's material causes effectively.