Modern forms of media and communications are vital to the spread of Muslim fundamentalist ideas. The Iranian revolution was the first electronically driven revolution in history, and it was made possible by the cassette, the means by which Khomeini’s incendiary sermons were heard throughout the country. Al Jazeera uses the latest techniques of TV sensationalism to publicize the cause of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Bin Laden could never have functioned so effectively out of Afghanistan without an operating network of satellite phones. Al Qaeda communicates with its followers—and with the world—by videotapes and Web sites.
The 9/11 attacks themselves showed all the hallmarks of modernity: not simply the use of the paraphernalia of modern technology to blow up the symbols of American modernity, but the entire stage management of 9/11, a special kind of “reality show” using martyrdom as a form of advertising and real people in the explosion scenes. It was TV that gave 9/11 its emotional impact. In the same manner, the beheadings of Americans and American “collaborators” in Iraq are routinely videotaped and broadcast over the Internet: such propaganda is vital to the grisly enterprise. Without media, these forms of terrorism would be much less terrifying.
Not only do Islamic radicals like science and technology—if only to further their purposes—they are also supporters of commerce and capitalism. Historically, of the three Mediterranean religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Islam is the most favorable to trade. The Prophet Muhammad was, after all, a trader. Although Islam, like Christianity, condemns usury, unlike Christianity it has always looked favorably on profit and commercial activity. Islamic fundamentalists are generally procapitalist, and some have adopted the very latest business models. The 9/11 Commission Report terms Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a “terrorist entrepreneur” and the French scholar Gilles Kepel describes Al Qaeda as a kind of terrorist “franchise” that does not orchestrate attacks so much as fund “start-up” groups whose business plans it finds promising.17
Finally, many Muslim radicals and fundamentalists have become supporters of democracy. To be sure, bin Laden and Al Qaeda are outspoken critics of democracy. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s former head of operations in Iraq, frequently railed against “this evil principle of democracy.” The main reason he opposed Iraqi democracy was that his group, the Sunnis, are in the minority. (For the same reason, the Iraqi Shia, led by the ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, have become avid proponents of democracy. They are the majority group, and they realize that democracy means that they win.) Just as predictable, the ruling mullahs of Iran, who don’t wish to risk their power in free elections, reject the idea.
But as Noah Feldman writes, the major organizations of radical Islam are “the loudest voices calling for greater democracy…in nearly every Muslim country.” Once again, this is not because Islamic radicals have been reading John Stuart Mill or the Federalist Papers. Rather, Islamic radicals support democracy as a means to gain political power. In the early 1990s in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) enjoyed stunning electoral success, routing the National Liberation Front (FLN) that had led the fight for the country’s independence. One of the group’s leaders, Abbasi Madani, made it clear that his support for democracy was tactical. “Yes, the way is the elections. There is no other way at the present moment. All other ways have been obstructed by Allah.”18 So alarming was the prospect of this fundamentalist group taking power that the ruling party nullified the election result, plunging the country into civil war.
Islamic radicals could hardly have missed the significance of their recent successes in Egypt and the Palestinian territories. In Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary election, the Muslim Brotherhood won five times as many seats as it previously held, making itself the leading opposition to the Mubarak regime. No wonder that Mohammed Mahdi Akef, head of the group, speaks favorably about democracy. As he said recently, “The ballot box has the final say. We don’t believe in any other means of taking power.” In the 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas routed the candidates of the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party. Sheikh Nayef Rajoub says that Hamas has learned that the way to take over the government is to play “the democracy game.”19 All of this places the Bush administration in an awkward situation.
Are Bush and his conservative allies sincere in calling for democracy in the Muslim world? Consider the risk they are taking. Quite possibly free elections would result in every pro-American ruler, including all America’s major allies (Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, King Abdullah in Jordan, and the royal family in Saudi Arabia), being ejected from power. Fareed Zakaria writes, “Across the Arab world elections held tomorrow would probably bring to power regimes that are more intolerant, reactionary, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic, than the dictatorships currently in place.”20
Imagine a free election six months from now in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family is voted out. Islamic radicals of the bin Laden stripe are elected by an overwhelming margin. They are now in control of Islam’s holy sites, as well as the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Backed by the Saudi people, they announce their willingness to use their newfound power to wage more effective jihad against the United States. Would the United States be willing to live with this outcome? Of course not. Nor should it. So for the United States to let the Saudi people decide on their rulers is to risk an outcome that could be, from the American point of view, catastrophic. For this reason, I think it is highly doubtful that either President Bush or his conservative supporters would hazard a Saudi election that might bring Islamic radicals and Al Qaeda supporters to power. Contrary to President Bush’s naïve assertion, America’s ideals and its interests are not identical.
It’s time for Bush and the conservatives to rethink 9/11.
TWO
Reluctant Warriors
9/11 and the Liberal Paradox
LET US TURN now to the liberal and left-wing understanding of 9/11. If the Bush administration’s conservatism is characterized by a relentless “war against terrorism,” the left’s position is characterized by an equally determined “war against the war against terrorism.” The goal of left-wing agitation is to convince the Democratic Party as a whole to oppose the war. It is also to sway public opinion against the Bush administration so that the conduct of the war itself becomes untenable. The left has made substantial progress on both fronts.
Unified liberal opposition to the war against terrorism has emerged gradually since 9/11, gaining momentum with each passing year. A few days after 9/11, Congress voted pretty much unanimously to give President Bush the authority to use military force to respond to the terrorist attack. Only a minority of liberals—and very few Democrats in Congress—opposed the American invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban. Many more liberals opposed the invasion of Iraq, although a few supported it. Democrats in the House and Senate were divided over the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution. Most Democrats voted against it, but the margins were fairly close. Over time, however, the current of liberal opposition has grown stronger and more confident. Now there is a virtual liberal consensus, encompassing most congressional Democrats and the Democratic leadership, against Bush’s war on terrorism. Explaining this process in a recent interview, liberal senator Barbara Boxer explained, “We were so hit by 9/11…that we didn’t get our legs back. It took a while. But now the Democratic Party is back.”1
As we have seen, conservatives frequently characterize liberal opposition to American foreign policy, and in particular to the war against terrorism, as uninformed, weak, and anti-American. I believe it is none of those things. From the last chapter it should be clear that conservatives are not particularly knowledgeable about the nature, the goals, or the strategy of the enemy. Liberals are at least as well informed as conservatives on these subjects. The charge of timidity or weakness is equally misplaced. It assumes that liberals and leftists want to fight this war but simply lack the courage. This assumption is wrong. Liberals and leftists have loudly insisted that they are against the main thrust of Bush’s war. Most liberals agree wi
th John Kerry’s position, articulated during the 2004 presidential campaign, that the Iraq war is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Conservatives can hardly be surprised that liberals are timid about fighting a war that most of them don’t want to fight in the first place.
Indeed liberal resolve is largely invested in opposing the war. Conservatives who persist in thinking that liberals are weaklings who lack political backbone should consider the tenacity that liberals show in fighting conservatism. Look at the implacable determination that liberals showed in keeping Robert Bork off the Supreme Court. Try outlawing abortion and see if the liberals react weakly or timidly! Liberals are not bashful in fighting for causes in which they believe.
Nor is the campaign against the war on terrorism a form of anti-Americanism. Liberals are understandably outraged when conservatives make this charge. “Liberals like me love America,” says liberal radio host Al Franken. “We just love America in a different way.” Michael Moore fumes, “I am the most patriotic American. I’m the person who…believes in the actual real principles of this country.”2 Putting aside for a moment what these “actual real principles” might be, I think that Franken and Moore are sincere. They aren’t against America, they are simply against the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Opposing a president’s foreign policy—or even American foreign policy in general—doesn’t make you anti-American.
Liberals aren’t anti-American for fighting against conservative foreign policy any more than conservatives are anti-American for fighting against liberal social policy. Robert Bork thinks America is “slouching towards Gomorrah,” but this view doesn’t make him anti-American. Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan thinks America has become a “cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for.”3 He may be wrong, but his patriotism is not in doubt. The right-wing accusation of anti-Americanism is invalid because it confuses liberal opposition to specific government policies and specific features of America with opposition to the country.
True, liberals sometimes sound anti-American because they use a generalized America-bashing rhetoric that you won’t hear on the right. One liberal professor, Robert Jensen, said on the day after 9/11, “We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.” Even after the collapse of the World Trade Center, a prominent liberal columinist, Katha Pollitt, refused to let her daughter fly the American flag outside their New York apartment window. Her reason? “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”4 Don’t these sentiments qualify as anti-American? Actually, no. What liberals are condemning is conservative values and the way that they have traditionally been marshaled to advance goals that liberals abhor. When liberals speak loosely and condemn “America” they always intend their condemnation to apply to conservative America. They are not condemning the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the slave rebel Nat Turner, the suffragette movement, the New Deal, the welfare state, rallies against the Vietnam War, the Stonewall riots, the “nuclear freeze” movement, the sexual revolution, separation of church and state, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, or the Massachusetts high court’s decision to legalize homosexual marriage.
Comedian Janeane Garofalo recently said, “When I see the American flag, I go: Oh, my God, you’re insulting me. When I see a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’ that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.” Behind Garofalo’s over-the-top rhetoric there is a serious point. Liberals may reject one America, but they support the other America. This other America represents the “American way” that TV producer Norman Lear had in mind when he founded the activist group People for the American Way. This other America represents what Michael Moore considers “the actual real principles” of the country.
Let us now turn to the liberal understanding of the war against terrorism as it has developed since 9/11. My purpose here is not to rehearse every argument, canvass every recommendation. Rather, it is to capture the general contours of liberal thought. I recognize, of course, that liberalism is a spectrum. There is a fairly wide range from moderate Democrats to the far left. Here I focus not on elected officials but on scholars and writers because they tend to provide the clearest, most coherent expression of the liberal mind. My goal is to convey the views of the liberal mainstream, while also taking note of what influential figures on the left flank have to say.
America’s history of oppression is partly to blame. In the liberal view, 9/11 was a tragic but understandable response to a long history of Western—and specifically American—conquest and oppression. In a November 2001 speech at Georgetown University, former president Bill Clinton traced the roots of 9/11 to “the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem…and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim.” Clinton added, “That story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.” Clinton also invoked America’s history of owning slaves and dispossessing native Indians to make the point that America has terrorized others in the past and therefore should not be surprised when it is terrorized in return.5
As the slogan has it, what goes around comes around. The official liberal term for this is “blowback,” which refers to the hot fumes of rage that America’s policies produce in the non-Western world. Left-wing icon Noam Chomsky writes, “During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, and in the past half-century particularly, extended its force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.” In Chomsky’s view, “the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state” and 9/11 was simply a form of payback. “For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way.”6
Chomsky is a somewhat extreme example, but what one detects in his analysis is a certain relish in 9/11, the satisfaction of witnessing a kind of rough justice. We can detect a similar sense of vindication in the analysis of author and activist Arundhati Roy: “The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card…signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars: the millions killed in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, the thousands killed when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Panama at the hands of dictators whom the American government supported…and supplied with arms.”7
They hate us because of the destructive effects of current American foreign policy. Quite apart from what America has done in the past, many liberals argue that America’s policies today are increasing the volume of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and thus making 9/11 attacks more likely. “The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific U.S. government policies and actions,” Michael Scheuer writes. The same note is struck by Richard Falk, a professor of international law. “Why do they hate us?” Falk asks. He proceeds to inform us that Muslim animus is directed against “the U.S. government, its policies and ties with oppressive forces in the region, its decade-long sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people, its refusal to normalize relations with Iran, and above all, its underwriting of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and support for Israeli brutality directed against the Palestinians.”8
The “oppressive forces” that Falk refers to are the undemocratic regimes that America supports in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In the liberal view, Muslims suffer under these despotic regimes and the radical Muslims are able to increase their popular support by positioning themselves against these tyrannical rulers and their American backers. Many liberals note that America has long been allied with tyrants. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, A
merica supported Somoza in Nicaragua, the shah of Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, and many other vicious and unsavory characters. Liberals blame the United States for orchestrating the 1953 coup that led to the restoration of the shah of Iran and the overthrow of the country’s elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. No wonder, liberals note, that the Iranian people are furious with America and supported the Khomeini revolution. For liberals these are the fruits of an unprincipled, shortsighted American foreign policy that never seems to learn from its mistakes.
Bush’s war against terrorism is a pretext for American imperialism. As liberals see it, the war in Afghanistan was one thing. That came right after 9/11, and was perhaps necessary to get rid of the Taliban-sponsored terrorist camps. But then Bush announced his intention to use force to remove Saddam Hussein as dictator of Iraq. Although Bush’s stated reason was to eliminate the threat of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, from the beginning many on the left found this more of a pretext for the war. As critics see it, reversing a long history of deterrence and defensive war, Bush proposed a preemptive attack on Iraq even though Iraq had not attacked the United States. Acutely conscious of this, the Bush administration whipped up the emotions of 9/11 in order to build American public support for the war, insinuating a connection between Iraq and 9/11, although there was never any connection at all. As Senator Ted Kennedy put it, the Iraq issue from the beginning “distracted us from the real threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”9
The Enemy At Home Page 6
