'ISLAMO-FASCISM' – THE SHAPE OF FUTURE CONFLICT?

Christopher Michaelsen

'Islamist Terrorism is one of our biggest security threats.'

HARDLY. The notion that Islamist terrorism constitutes one of the biggest security threats to Australia has been advanced by various Australian governments in the post-9/11 era. We have been told to prepare for a decades-long fight against ruthless, invisible enemies who hate our way of life and seek to destroy our society. As then Prime Minister John Howard said, '[T]hat attack of eleventh of September was as much an attack on Australia as it was on America. It not only killed Australians in the World Trade Centre, but it also assaulted the very values on which this nation is built.' These and other views have been repeatedly advanced by Australian leaders. They can also be found in various policy documents such as the two counter-terrorism White Papers of 2004 and 2010 as well as in several reports to Parliament by Australia's domestic security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). As of June 2013, the government's official threat level in Australia remained at 'medium' – a terrorist attack could well occur.

In light of heavily publicised campaigns to promote public awareness on terrorism and national security, it is perhaps not surprising that Australians indeed believed that a terrorist attack in Australia was only a matter of time. According to an opinion poll published by the Sydney Morning Herald in late April 2004, 68 per cent expected that terrorists would strike Australia before too long. In late 2007, 66 per cent were 'concerned' that a 'major terrorist attack on Australian soil' was going to take place in the 'near future'. Figures from opinion polls conducted on behalf of the Lowy Institute for International Policy tell a similar story. In 2006, 73 per cent of respondents considered 'international terrorism' a 'critical' threat. In the 2008 poll, this number was slightly down, at 66 per cent. At the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011, 60 per cent of Australians considered the ability of terrorists to launch a major attack against Australians as 'the same' as at the time of the 2002 Bali bombings, with another 19 per cent saying it was now 'greater'.

So, are those public sentiments justified? How real and dangerous is the threat of terrorism in Australia? How has it been portrayed by the Australian government? Who is actually threatening us? And what is actually being threatened?

The terrorism rhetoric of the Australian government

When four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and into a remote field in Pennsylvania on the morning of 11 September 2001, most Australians were about to go to bed or asleep already. Not so their Prime Minister, John Howard, who had flown into Washington on 8 September 2001 for an extensive working visit that included the first face-to-face meetings with President George W. Bush and key members of his administration. Three days later, however, Howard found himself at the epicentre of the emotional firestorm that engulfed the United States in the aftermath of the unprecedented terrorist attacks. Howard's presence in Washington and his first-hand experience of the surreal and dramatic events that unfolded on 9/11 not only forged his close personal relationship with President Bush but also had a lasting impact on his approach to the challenges associated with the evaluation of the threat of international terrorism back home.

On 11 September 2001, Howard was scheduled to open a business forum at the US Chamber of Commerce to build momentum for a free-trade agreement between Australia and the United States. The Prime Minister was in his hotel room preparing for an informal press conference with Australian journalists before his departure to the business forum when his press secretary, Tony O'Leary, knocked on the door and informed him that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, Howard's personal protection details from the Australian Federal Police and the US Secret Service decided that there was an urgent need to get the Prime Minister somewhere safer. Howard and his staff were rushed to the Australian Embassy, nine blocks away, where they spent the rest of the day in the second sub-basement, a windowless maintenance area below street level with a makeshift kitchen, dusty tables and broken chairs. Having witnessed the Pentagon burning a few hundred metres away and having watched the World Trade Center's twin towers collapse live on television, Howard experienced the events of 9/11 in a direct way that no other foreign leader did.

After consulting with Australian officials assembled in the Embassy's sub-basement and with key Cabinet members in Canberra in the middle of the night, the Prime Minister personally drafted a short letter to President Bush expressing horror at the loss of life and pledging 'Australia's resolute solidarity with the American people at this most tragic time'. Two days later, the Prime Minister returned to Canberra and invoked Article IV of the ANZUS Pact, the first Australian prime minister to do so since the treaty was concluded in 1951. At a press conference on 14 September 2001 he declared it was the 'unanimous view' of the Cabinet that Australia stood ready to 'cooperate within the limits of its capability concerning any response that the United States may regard as necessary in consultation with her allies'. The Prime Minister made clear, moreover, that 'at no stage should any Australian regard this as something that is just confined to the United States. It is an attack upon the way of life we hold dear in common with the Americans.'

In the following years, the Australian government's description of the threat of terrorism perfectly replicated the narrative offered by the Bush administration in Washington. The replications not only contained the same metaphors and analogies but, at times, the very same wording President Bush used in his speeches following the 9/11 attacks. From the first, the President had made it clear that the United States had been attacked for its virtuous qualities rather than its policy choices. According to the President, the reasons for the assault were to be found in the identity and nature of the...