In his videotaped speech broadcast October 7, the day that U.S.-British air strikes in Afghanistan commenced, Osama bin Laden sought to cloak his terror campaign against America in the mantle of the Palestinian cause – the newest item on bin Laden’s agenda of grievances with modern civilization and its advocates in the Middle East. That videotape and other recent Al Qaeda statements justified attacks on America as responses to the presence of Jewish “infidels” on Muslim land.
But there is far less in this Palestinian linkage than meets the eye. In seeking to under-stand the motivations and objectives of Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of the atrocities of September 11, it is important to look beyond the statements of Al Qaeda and its apologists across the Arab and Muslim worlds, who only lately advance an anti-Israel rationale for anti-American barbarism. In the days immediately following the September 11 attacks, what was particularly striking was the relatively small proportion of Arab reaction – especially from non-Palestinians – that cited Israel in explaining hatred of the United States and justifying terror.
The head of the official state-controlled Syrian writers union, for example, mentioned four issues equally in explaining why he hated American policy: Korea, Vietnam, sanctions on Libya, and the Palestinian issue. Bin Laden himself has a long list of complaints, including Bos-nia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia and Kashmir. Equally frequent are condemnations of the United States for supporting existing Arab re-gimes. In bin Laden’s case, American help for his native Saudi Arabia is a major factor in his hatred. Aside from specific places, Arab critics of the United States – and sympathizers with bin Laden – also mention such broad questions as American cultural influence and political power in general.
In a September 18 article in The Christian Science Monitor, Professor Fawaz A. Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College wrote:
“For many Arabs, regardless of their politics, the U.S. has replaced colonial Europe as the embodiment of evil. In their eyes, the U.S. is the source of the ills and misfortunes that befell their world in the second part of the past century. Today, to be politically conscious in the Arab world is to be highly suspicious of America, its policies, and its motives. Radical Islamists blame the U.S. for their defeat at the hands of the pro-U.S. Arab regimes. They claim that the West, par-ticularly the U.S., tipped the balance of power in favor of secular regimes by pro-viding them with decisive political and logistical support.”
Gerges’ article was astutely titled, “The tragedy of Arab American relations.” Yet the problem he identified is no less a tragedy for the Arab world in and of itself.
Useful Tool for Authoritarian Regimes
This is true because part of the deep-seated animus toward America is both based on and reinforced by an antagonism to democracy, modernization, Western culture, and values such as tolerance and free expression. Anti-Americanism is a tool used by regimes and by authoritarian revolutionary movements to justify their misrule, power and ambitions. When the Syrian gov-ernment, for example, wanted to discredit civil society and democracy, it denounced them as a Western import.
Hatred of America thus justifies a great deal that is bad in the Arab world and help keeps it politically dominated by dictatorships, socially unfree and economically underdeveloped. It keeps the public debate tied to misrepresentation and demagogic means of expression.
There is another factor that is equally damaging in this process: blaming national short comings on America means that the Arab debate does not deal with the internal problems and weaknesses that are the real and main cause of these countries’ problems. It justifies the view that the only barrier to complete success, prosperity and justice for the Arab (and Islamic) world is the United States.
Instead of dealing with privatization, women’s equality, democracy, civil society, freedom of speech, due process of law, and 20 other issues the Arab world needs to address, attention can be focused on – or rather, diverted to – the conjuring of American conspiracy. Fixing blame for the Arab world’s problems on Israel’s existence is a regional staple. But no matter how emo-tional is the charge against Israel, its salience is truly overwhelming only for the Palestinians. The advantage of anti-Americanism is that there is something to everyone’s advantage in this ar-gument. Bin Laden has grasped this point well. He can appeal to people anywhere in the Islamic world by finding an issue that strikes an emotional chord with them. A recruiting film he had made and distributed widely expresses the principal themes.
The film builds on three points. First, it shows scenes of Muslims suffering in many countries. Second, it shows Arab leaders in friendly meetings with American counterparts. Fi-nally, it shows terrorist attacks on American targets, including the U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole, attacked by suicide bombers at port in Yemen.
This is his message: Muslims are under attack everywhere and Arab states do nothing. The aggressor is a Western conspiracy of Christians and Jews to destroy Islam, with Israel just one manifestation of this conspiracy. Only terrorism led by bin Laden allows Arabs and Muslims to fight back and win. Although he doesn’t use the phrase, bin Laden – like the Iranian leaders – argues that America is the “Great Satan” that must be destroyed. Once America is driven out of the Middle East and decisively weakened, Israel’s elimination would be a footnote in that great counter-Crusade. It is little remarked in the West that bin Laden’s revolution is only the latest manifestation in a very common Arab political pattern. A movement or ideology is seen as the savior that will solve the Arabs’ problems, defeat their enemies, and usher in a new age when the Arabs (or Mus-lims) are powerful, happy and rich, restored to their rightful, leading place in the world.
There have been many secular-oriented versions of this pattern: Nasserism, the Ba’th party, Marxism, Palestinian and other revolutionary groups – and others, down to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Each has failed or been defeated by external forces.
Revolutionary Hope
Partly as a result of this disappointment, a range of Islamist versions have arisen. These include the Iranian revolution, followed by two dozen revolutionary groups in different countries – including Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and among the Palestinians – each with its own doctrines and strategies. While Iran’s Islamist regime has survived (and even it is increasingly unpopular at home and unable to expand the revolution abroad), all these other movements have failed.
Now bin Laden arises as the new “green hope” (green being Islam’s symbolic color), after the failure of so many “red hopes” (the left) and “red-white-and-black hopes” (the favorite color scheme of Arab states’ flags). The fact that he arose in the Arab world’s most marginal cultural-intellectual areas (Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) is an indication of the spiritual exhaustion and ideological bankruptcy of the heartland. It is in the interest of many people, both in the Arab world and in the West, to portray bin Laden as the leader of a small sect, a sort of James Bond-type villain using his wealth in a bid to rule the world. The truth, though, is that whether or not he has enjoyed any state sponsorship in launching his attack, bin Laden also has wide support – just as Saddam Hussein did during his different but parallel bid to lead the region a decade ago.
Scanning the Internet in a two-week period after the September 11 attacks, a researcher had no difficulty amassing some 300 pages of material from almost every Arab country, Iran, and Pakistan – public speeches, articles, email messages on Islamist Internet lists – justifying the at-tacks. Often, there was a division of labor in which an official message of condolence and sorrow has been sent to the United States in English for public relations purposes, while the opposite standpoint reigned for media outlets in Arabic, Persian, or other languages. With a few exceptions – Palestinian outpourings of joy before Yasir Arafat ordered them repressed and the journalists filming them threatened – the Western media focused on the former messages and ignored the latter expressions, which have far more impact on local public opinion.
Aside from all the obvious reasons for this dichotomy, there has been one – perhaps the most important of all – that has not been understood. The September 11 attacks came at a time when the Arab world and Iran were searching for a new direction. It was not just the failure of the Arab-Israel peace process, ultimately sabotaged by Arafat and the Syrians, but a much wider issue at stake.
The Danger of Peace
Briefly, the Arab rulers – as well as many of the intellectuals and much of the public – had decided that the road to peace and moderation seemingly opened after Saddam Hussein’s de-feat and other events in the early 1990s posed unacceptable dangers. It was precisely the ap-proach of peace – the apparent imminence of peace – that made the dilemma clear.
If, indeed, there would be peace with Israel and acceptance of a leading U.S. role, virtually every regime would be in serious trouble. What excuse would they have for continued dictatorship? What rationale would they have for high military spending? How could they continue to stem the tide of demands for better living standards, more democracy, social change and eco-nomic reform? Without the specter of conflict, would it also be harder to stem globalization with its implied Westernization and challenges to tradition? Thus, the principal threat to the existing order – an order with so many shortcomings that it itself is the main barrier to progress for the Arab and Iranian peoples – was not the continuation of conflict but the lack of conflict. The solution was not peace but the stirring up of hysteria against enemies. One on-the-ground example: the lynch-mob atmosphere against Israel at the Durban UN conference in late August and early September, which turned a meeting against racism into one promoting racism.
Enter bin Laden and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, the attack on the Pentagon, and the crash of the fourth hijacked plane in Pennsylvania.
After so many defeats – the 1967 war, the 1982 war, the failure of Islamist revolutions, the failure of Arab unification, the economic morass, the Russian military victory in Chechnya, the growing penetration of Western culture, and the rest of this long list – killing more than 5,000 Americans seemed a victory to be cherished.
Few will join bin Laden and not many will explicitly endorse him or his specific methods. But the basic ideas he has propounded now seem to be the new tidal wave that will lead the Arabs and Muslims to victory without compromise. Of course, it will fail like its predecessors, and the waters will turn red with the blood of innocents killed as a result of the preference of extremism over moderation, of violence over peacemaking.
It should be noted that progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process has nothing much to do with all of this. Indeed, progress – though in itself extremely unlikely – would more than likely feed the fires of anger. For no matter how many concessions Israel might give, at some point an agreement would require Arab compromises, too. And this is precisely what is seen as treasonous in the current context.
Moreover, if Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon was interpreted as a great victory for a violent Islamist strategy (and it has been celebrated as such by Hizbollah and its sympathizers), Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza under pressure would be the clearest possible signal that the way of the extremists is the best and only way to succeed.
False Roots of the Problem
For weeks, there have been voices in the West – often responding directly to the Arab world and Iran – suggesting that Israel had it in its power (by abandoning its defensive posture and yielding to Palestinian demands) to tone down Arab and Muslim hostility toward America; advocates of this viewpoint characterized it as “dealing with the roots of the problem.” One pos-sible manifestation of this phenomenon was the October 1 leak that the Bush Administration had put on hold after September 11, but hoped to revive, plans for a major speech on Middle East peacemaking, in which it would have embraced the goal of negotiated Palestinian statehood; the leak coincided with vigorous Arab lobbying that portrayed the attacks on America as the conse-quence, in part, of a frozen peace process.
Perhaps the accounts of a potential shift in U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were overblown; conceptual support for a Palestinian state, achieved through negotiations, is nothing new. But Israelis were caught off guard by the leaked stories. They reacted with concern to these and other State Department statements that, in the most benign interpretation, were intended to placate Arab governments and public opinion without the United States actually doing anything. (What American officials really fear and seek to avert in the current high Israeli-Palestinian tension – Israel moving to destroy the Palestinian Authority and drive Arafat away – is not going to be Israel’s strategy anyway. At the same time, Washington knows there is no possibility of a long-term agreement at present and shows no sign of being inclined to invest much effort in pressuring Israel or brokering a peace treaty where Clinton failed.)
It is within this context, and amidst multiple terror attacks on Israelis, that Prime Minister Sharon made his controversial remarks in early October warning that Israel would not allow its security to be sacrificed, in the manner of Czechoslovakia in 1938, to appease Arab states in the name of anti-terror coalition-building.
The analogy was flawed: Israel is capable of defending itself, Czechoslovakia was not; Israel’s neighbors are hostile to varying degrees, but are not Nazis. And the implication, from Washington’s perspective, that the United States might sell out Israel to placate the Arab world appeared not only to be unseemly criticism of a notably friendly President but dismissive of a deeply established bilateral alliance with broad public and institutional support. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister’s comment captured the bitterness of a country appalled at the weight Washington and other capitals appeared to accord expressions of sympathy and support from countries long in the business of hosting and exploiting terror. And it captured a well-grounded Jewish anxiety, earned over centuries, that in times of peril and panic significant segments of society are prepared to throw the Jews to the wolves in the belief that the beasts will then leave everyone else alone.
But it is increasingly clear that Islamist terrorism, despite Al Qaeda’s latest propaganda efforts, has broader and darker ambitions. Its target is America and all it represents: secularism, tolerance, openness, democracy, freedom. Its complaints cynically misrepresent America – a country that risked its soldiers’ lives to protect Muslims in Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Kuwait. Obviously, it is not easy for the United States to build a coalition with partners who are systematically exploiting anti-Americanism, promoting (even if they don’t practice) violence and militancy, and in some cases sponsoring terrorism themselves. At best, they will give limited cooperation in exchange for constraining American action and demanding concessions on other issues. Already, President Hosni Mubarak, arguably America’s best friend among Arab leaders, has warned against using violence to stop bin Laden and advocated an international conference rather than an effective international campaign against terrorism.
What the United States and Great Britain have assembled cannot truly be characterized as a coalition against terrorism; at best, it is a loose association of those who say they are against bin Laden, including such staunch allies as Canada, Australia, Germany, and a range of other states offering greater or lesser assistance to the cause. It remains to be seen how willing these coalition partners will be not only to persist in the pursuit of the Al Qaeda leader and his shad-owy network over a period of months or years, but to widen the objectives of the U.S.-led war beyond that network to the entire, multinational culture of Islamist terror.
While the war is still young, it is useful to look ahead to the conditions that will allow for its successful conclusion. The best recent lesson may lie in the Gulf War – when the U.S.-led coalition succeeded in its primary objective of expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, but failed in leaving Saddam in power, a menace to the region and the world.That failure to follow through sustained a threat that has plagued America and imperiled Middle East stability for the last decade. President Bush has made it clear he does not intend to repeat that mistake. It will require considerable fortitude to resist the coalition pressures – as well as possible domestic political pressures – that are sure to be exerted to narrow the mission of the war on terrorism.
But a narrow war will be a lost opportunity, guaranteeing further conflict and loss in the future. America and its allies, as the President has observed, are in for a long, difficult struggle.
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