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Thursday, September 16, 2004
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GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT ISLAMIST TERRORISM
I'm about to do something that no Western government has bothered to do. I'm going to tell you why fundamentalist Muslims hate the West generally, and the United States specifically. This is shocking, I know. But when 3,000 Americans are killed on a single morning in New York City, Washington DC and Shanksville, Pennsylvania; When 200 Australians are killed in one night in Bali, Indonesia; When several hundred Turks are killed in the space of a week on attacks on their homeland, the truth becomes somewhat important.
And the truth is this: they do not "hate us for our freedom." Sure, that sounds impressive when the President of the United States or the junior Senator from Massachusetts says it on television, it makes for a pithy soundbite on CNN and it certainly pumps up the troops. It's a nice simple statement. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the statement is what makes it stupid. And if there's one thing that the War on Terror cannot afford it's sloganeering and stupidity.
This is not to say that people like Ayman al-Zawahiri are thrilled with Western freedom. I seriously doubt that they stay awake at night wondering what Britney Spears will wear in her next video. But they are not all that interested in establishing the Islamic Republic of Rhode Island, as Western politicians would have you believe.
If there is one thing that is universally true in any political system, but particularly in a democracy, it is that the political class relies on the general population being just as ignorant as humanly possible. Conservative commentator Christopher Buckley made what I felt to be a fascinating argument last night on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews. Buckley said that instead of all the myriad of new cabinet level departments currently being proposed, they start with the most important one, a Secretary of History. Buckley reasoned that if there were such a government officer, the President could turn to him while deliberating on, say invading Iraq and ask, "What do you think will happen if we do this?" Buckley's idea may be the single smartest proposal to enhance the foreign policy establishment since the creation of NATO.
Politicians do not generally promote any knowledge of history because they tend to be unschooled in it themselves. But when it comes to foreign policy, history may be the single most important tool that the West has, particularly when dealing with the Middle East. If anyone in the political class had any understanding of the history of the last 60 years, so many of our current foreign challenges would be different, if not avoided altogether. If policymakers looked to history to guide their decisions in that period, there almost certainly would have been no War on Terror and there definitely not have been any need to make war in Iraq. I'm not arguing that this can be changed now, but understanding the enemy is the first, and most important, step in defeating him.
To suggest that people will strap explosives to themselves or fly jetliners into skyscrapers because they don't like a culture is probably the single most dangerously stupid thing I've ever heard. That people of almost every political persuasion has suggested it over the years has already gotten any number of people killed. Joseph Lieberman and William Bennett are not fond of Hollywood either, but neither has detonated a bomb on Sunset Boulevard or launched mortars at Universal studios. Unfortunately, it's much easier to say "they hate our freedom" and, sadder still, average people are more likely to understand it.
The War on Terror, I would suggest, didn't begin in 2001. Nor did it begin in 1983 or even 1972. It began over 2,000 years ago. That's roughly how long foreigners have been pillaging the Middle East for very little reason at all. Terrorism is the highly delayed reaction to the actions of history's imperial powers.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. A foreign nation of great military power establishes a colony in a faraway land. The residents of said colony feel that they are being denied basic rights and freedoms by the colonial power. They then resist that power, but given the military differential, the colonized resort to unconventional tactics. Haughty rhetoric is employed to convince the populace of the rightness of the resistance and a lengthy "war of liberation" is fought.
Some on the left and right might believe that I just described the current Iraqi insurgency or the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. I didn't. What I just described was the American Revolution. The United States was founded in the idea of opposing foreign dominance of people who could better govern themselves. They backed this up by giving their blood in two World Wars abroad and 600,000 lives in a civil war at home to support this idea.
Up until the end of the Second World War, American policymakers were well acquainted with history, not only theirs, but that of the world. In regards to the Middle East in particular, American policy was dictated by that history. It was a dictum of American foreign policy that the peoples of the world should be free to govern themselves in the manner that they chose.
During the deliberations over the Treaty of Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson argued vehemently against the expansion of European influence in the Middle East. When offered colonies of its own there, the United States refused, arguing that it would not be a party to denying the people of the region the freedom it fought to restore in Europe. While the American stand did not carry the day, the Muslim inhabitants did take note of it, and appreciated the United States for decades thereafter as a beacon of hope. The Treaty of Versailles established new, unnatural, nation states (including Iraq) and Britain and France governed them through proxy, puppet monarchies as the US reverted to its traditional, isolationist foreign policy.
There was no Versailles-style conference at the end of World War 2. Instead, the policy calculus was determined by Cold War politics. The status quo prevailed, with the notable exception of India and Pakistan, which achieved their independence from the British Crown in 1948.
Between 1953 and 1979, all but two (Jordan and Saudi Arabia) of the major puppet monarchies were toppled by domestic forces. Instead of foreign inspired monarchies, 100 million Muslims were now governed by military juntas that gave their populations no greater freedoms than their royal predecessors, and in most instances, actually fewer. But, using the Cold War calculus of the day -which dictated that these governments could only be replaced with Communist ones- the Western democracies supported some of the most brutal governments on Earth. In one instance, a democratically elected government in Iran, the first in the region's history, was overthrown by the United States and United Kingdom.
Throughout the 1950's, 60's and 70's, the authoritarian governments of the region consolidated their power by crushing any dissent. The dissenters of that region tended to be secular or moderately religious. In the 50's and 60's particularly, there was no fundamentalist opposition. However, by the end of the 1970's, they were the only opposition left. And the Islamists had seen how they were oppressed with the complicity, and sometimes even the active encouragement, of the Western democracies, led by the United States.
As education is not a high priority in poverty stricken tyrannies, Western support of their oppressors was seen by the Muslims of the region as being so that they could take the only natural resource that they had, their oil. That this is not completely accurate is immaterial. It is the impression of a brutalized and poorly educated people that the West has done absolutely nothing to dispel.
If it is true that there could have been a democratic revolution in the Middle East in the 1950's or '60's, it became clear that that dream had died by the late '70's. As the Iranian Revolution of 1979 demonstrated, it was now either authoritarianism or Islamic fundamentalism.
The same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States used neighboring Pakistan as a conduit to deliver military aid to rebel forces. Using Pakistan was a horrible miscalculation. Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence funded only the most extreme Wahabbist forces of the Mujahadeen. They did this for two reasons. Firstly, Pakistan feared that a stable Afghanistan would fall into the Indian or Iraninan orbit. Secondly, they hoped that the highly trained "Afghan Arabs" could used at a later date to oppose Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir territory. It is very likely that the majority of the Afghan Arabs knew nothing of the involvement of the United States in their "glorious jihad."
Following the withrawl of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the Arabs returned to their homelands to find their native governments just as oppressive and even more corrupt than they had been when they departed for the jihad. They had also noticed that the United States, fearful of Iranian influence, actually had increased its support of these regimes, particularly those in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The logic of the Islamists was simple, they had humiliated one super power who terrorized a Muslim land, why couldn't they do so to another? It's important to note that the first bombing of the World Trade Center came only slightly more than three years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Islamists used the occupation of Afghanistan as their reason for jihad against the Soviets. They cited American support for Israel in "oppressing Palestine" as the cause of the current jihad. Muslims are almost united in the belief that the establishment of Israel is a religious insult. While the US presents itself as an "honest broker", the Islamists also see that the last American president to pressure Israel to do anything that it was not already inclined to do was the first Bush administration. That the current Bush administration refuses to deal officially with the Palestinian Authority only furthers that perception
Again, it matters not if the perception is reality or not, it only matters that that perception is so strongly held and that the United States has done little, if anything, to dispel it.
Prior to 1991, the United States was seen as complicit in the region's repression. When American forces stayed in Saudi Arabia for 12 years to fight a war with Iraq that lasted for four weeks, they were seen as beginning an occupation of Islam's holiest lands. The United Nations sanctions against Iraq, were seen as starving innocent Muslims while allowing the secular regime of Saddam Hussien to stay in power and crush their co-religionists. Again, the perception is far more important than the reality.
One would think that the second invasion of Iraq would ease that perception. Unfortunately, the poor planning for the war's aftermath destroyed any progress that could have been made. All that the Islamists saw was a foreign occupation of a Muslim land, something they had seen dating back to the Roman Empire. The fundamentalists never saw the Romans, British or French as "liberators" or "greeted them with roses", why would they see the Americans any differently? That the Americans were seen as tolerating widespread looting in the days following the fall of Saddam, and that so many more innocent Iraqis were killed in the insurgency than Americans only futhered this perception.
The public statements of the Bush administration may have actually made matters worse. At the beginning of the insurgency, the administration stated that their policy was to actively draw terrorists into Iraq, as it is better to fight them there than in New York City. Even moderates in the region have seen how many Iraqis have been killed as a result of this strategy, and are morally outraged. The moderates interpret American policy as seeing the loss of innocent Muslim life as more acceptable than the loss of American life. This only serves to further the cause of groups like al-Qaeda in the Arab world.
And there's the horrifying prospect that things could get yet worse. If Iraq degenerates into civil war, the Kurdish population will declare a sovereign state that would include parts of Syria, Iran and Turkey. Not only would that draw those nations into the conflict, it could potentially radicalize the Turkish population against the United States and deepen European opposition to American policy. A wider war in Iraq would probably draw NATO forces out of Bosnia and Kosovo and lead to the immediate resumption of Serbian genocide against that region's Muslims.In adition to everything else, the West would be seen as abandoning European Muslims to their slaughter.
This is where demographics becomes incredibly important. Just as the Hispanic birthrate is outstripping that of whites in the United States, the Muslim birthrate is exploding even faster in Europe. Given current population projections, both France and Germany will be majority Muslim countries within 50 years. Just as Hispanics are more likely to be economically deprived and poorly educated in the US, so are Muslims in Europe. And as has been clearly demonstrated in the Middle East, the poorer and more uneducated someone is, the more likely they are to support a radical agenda based on religious misinterepations of holy texts.
There is the very real possibility that, unless the Muslim perceptions of the West are addressed, there could be several radical states with nuclear weapons. Among those states could be France, which have had them since the 50's, and Germany, which could acquire them within a year.
There are several misperceptions regarding the War on Terror. Liberals believe that it is a war for law enforcement and intelligence. Conservatives believe that it is a military war. I would contend that it is primarily a war of ideas. A war of ideas is not unique to the West. The Cold War was primarily a war of ideas as well. The Soviet block was not defeated primarily by the military might of the West. In fact, the West was militarily inferior and that's why the nuclear arms race happened. The Western democracies won the Cold War through the power of their ideas. The people of Eastern Europe knew that the West was not at war with them, but with their system of government. In nations such as Poland, the United States actually is seen as a liberator.
Unless the War on Terror is fought on an ideological front and the perceptions of the Muslim world are addressed, it is a war that is doomed to expand into the heart of Europe and ultimately be lost. No democracy can survive significant segments of its population being at war with the very concept of democratic government. And unless and until the Western democracies cease to be seen as anti-Muslim, that is precisely what will happen in the decades to come.
There is probably much in this argument that will anger both liberals and conservatives. For those who are angered, I ask that you consider one fact. That while both liberals and conservatives are known to shade the facts on occasion, history and demographics ARE the facts. Empty platitudes without concrete action will only serve to broaden the base of our enemies and those attitudes cannot be destroyed through military force alone. If they could, most of the world would still be under Communist domination. Many observers have stated that there are no similarities between the Cold War and the War on Terror, but in the broadest strategic sense, they couldn't be more similar.
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