1. The Myth of the Post-9/11 World
2. The Myth of the Unprovoked Attack
3. The Appeal of Radical Islam
4. U.S. Intervention in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
5. U.S. Intervention in Iraq
6. Worlds in Collision
7. Stationing of U.S. Troops in Arabia
8. Real Motives of Religion and Autonomy
9. Physical Causes of the 9/11 Attacks
10. Suicide Bombings
11. Punishment of Foreign Terrorists
12. Eschewing the Rule of Law
13. We Are Not at War
Post-9/11 World
Since September 11, 2001, nearly all discussion of foreign affairs or domestic security in the United States has been predicated on the myth that the world is substantially more dangerous now than it was before 2001. This rhetoric, completely at odds with measurable facts, is symptomatic of an amnesiac society that has already forgotten the far more destructive conflicts of earlier eras. Sober reflection reveals that, objectively, the world’s security situation has not changed much since September 11, 2001, as the geopolitical balance of power and the material bases of the global economy remain largely unchanged. Islamic terrorist groups, which have existed for decades, have not suddenly acquired any military capabilities that remotely compare with even the weakest of nations, much less the United States. It is precisely this technological impotence that forces terrorists to attack soft
civilian targets. Many other nations had suffered terrorist attacks for decades before 2001, but no one ever claimed that the world was fundamentally changed on that account. When the cocoon of American insularity was punctured by a single successful attack on U.S. soil, apocalyptic hysteria overtook public discourse and a new war
without end was declared, in order to justify the continued projection of the U.S. military juggernaut, which now lacked a Communist bogeyman to justify its quarter-trillion dollar budget.
Objectively, the success of a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil did not constitute even a minor shift in the global strategic balance, so it is foolish to make the grandiose claim that the world’s security situation was fundamentally changed by that event. Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s reaction to the September 11 attacks has had serious repercussions, generating increasing tension with the Islamic world, driving Afghanistan and Iraq to the brink of anarchy, thereby partially fulfilling the war hawks’ own prophecies of doom. The U.S. government’s misdirected belligerence abroad has been matched by similar excesses at home, where domestic security and surveillance measures have fostered the paranoid culture that is characteristic of police states. Despite the fact that the espionage and sabotage capabilities of Islamic terrorists are vastly inferior to those of the Soviet Union, the American public has countenanced the growth of an intrusive surveillance apparatus with powers beyond those held even at the height of the Cold War. The world itself has not changed, but the American perception of the world has changed considerably, viewing it as a far more dangerous place. In the cruelest of ironies, this perception has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, generating precisely the sort of violence and death that was feared.
This climate of paranoia reaches the height of absurdity when it is rhetorically portrayed as a struggle for survival. The United States, which spends more on its military than Europe, Russia, and China combined, is supposed to be threatened in its very survival by a ragtag group of guerrillas. By contrast, the nations of Europe and the Middle East that are much more directly and regularly threatened by Islamic terrorism have not resorted to a similar expansion of government police power. Either these nations are cavalierly unconcerned with their own survival, or the United States is seriously overreacting.
Even the less introspective members of the Bush administration recognized that the post-9/11 world
is more a matter of changed perception than changed reality. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the decision to invade Iraq by arguing that, although no dramatic new evidence was discovered of Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, We acted because we saw the [old] evidence in a
completely new light – through the prism of our experiences
with September 11.
Rumsfeld tacitly admitted that a radically different meaning was assigned to the exact same facts on account of a change in perspective effected by the September 11 attacks.
The post-9/11 psyche did not arise out of nowhere, but amplified existing xenophobic and belligerent attitudes that seemed to be vindicated by the terrorist attacks. The insulation of the American public from the neoimperialist policies of its government over the last half century has facilitated the popular belief that the U.S. is a purely benevolent influence in the world, so any attack on the U.S. seems to be utterly unprovoked. This false assumption has impeded any serious analysis of the motivations of Middle Eastern extremism, save evil for evil’s sake. Believing that our government’s actions do not provoke terrorism, the public gives its support to nearly carte blanche escalation of all security measures, and the conduct of an increasingly belligerent foreign policy. After all, the rationale goes, they will attack us even if we are peaceful, so it is better to bring the battle to them. This belief that terrorism is without rational motivation results in a crudely bludgeoned response that unwittingly generates the escalation of conflict it is supposed to prevent.
In this climate of fear, the alternatives to irrational escalation are easily caricatured as cowardly or defeatist, and many proponents of the new American police state have used this tactic to keep opponents on the defensive. There are many Americans who disagree with the standard narrative of post-9/11 neoconservative rhetoric, yet they must circumscribe their criticisms with genuflections to articles of civic faith, such as the benevolence of American power abroad and the basic moral innocence of the American nation. We shall contrast this dominant paradigm with historical and physical facts, critique the assumptions that led to faulty interpretations of the terrorist attacks, and examine what lessons we failed to learn as a result.
Most Americans, long accustomed to security and insularity, were completely unprepared for the events of September 11, 2001. The shock did not come merely from the magnitude of the human and material losses, but from the manner in which these came about. Had thousands been killed by a natural disaster, this might heighten our general fear of mortality, but it would hardly rattle our faith in the domestic security apparatus. Had the attackers been domestic criminals with no discernible political or religious agenda, we might have avoided the discourse of terrorism, and could remain secure in our position of relative isolation from the rest of the world. Fortune was not so kind, however, and Americans witnessed their sense of security punctured simultaneously from within and from without.
For a brief moment, the sense of deep vulnerability that followed the attacks brought to this nation the humility that comes with weakness. Shortly after the 2000 presidential election recount had humbled our pride in our political institutions, the myth of American exceptionalism took another body blow as the nation endured the sort of terrorist attack that supposedly only happened in less developed countries. Four different airliners had been successfully hijacked on the same day, exposing astonishing ineptitude in domestic airline security, and one of these successfully struck the Pentagon, headquarters of the world’s most vaunted military force, without a shot fired in response. Even for a people accustomed to patriotic hubris, it was difficult not to be humble on that day. Instead of boasting of their strength, Americans turned to churches in droves, and consoled each other in their grief.
It is natural to seek to understand why a tragedy occurred, even when it is a natural disaster or physical accident that has no obvious intelligent purpose. There is nothing wrong with this desire, but it carries the dangerous temptation to invent reasons if we cannot discern any, to make sense of what seems senselessly cruel. In the case of the September 11 attacks, which were carefully planned by men with a definite political and social agenda, we might dispassionately identify several clear physical and political causes for the operation. Accepting these reasons, however, would require us to challenge some cherished assumptions about the United States’ political role in the world. September 11 represented an important crossroads in American history, and a potential for a real cultural shift to a new sort of patriotism that abandoned blind acceptance of the imperium and sought to bring real accountability to the government in foreign affairs.
Unfortunately, this opportunity was irrevocably squandered, and instead the old belligerent form of patriotism reared its head, declaring the attacks to have been completely unprovoked, or just as absurdly, that they were motivated by a hatred of freedom. This perception of a totally irrational enemy, as we have noted, justifies a completely unrestrained response. The rhetoric of an unprovoked attack stokes anger in place of grief, and it had been used to great success by President Roosevelt in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which he had provoked as a deliberate policy to bring the U.S. into the Second World War. Once the war mentality is adopted, the next logical step is to entrust war powers to the government. Instead of holding the government accountable for the September 11 attacks, the anxious citizenry bestowed upon it unquestioning support and expansive powers that would have been the envy of many monarchs.
One may object to this analysis with copious evidence that Islamic terrorists are in fact every bit as murderous as they are portrayed. Such a line of argument ignores the distinction between understanding an action and justifying it, so that any attempt to understand the reasons for terrorism is confused with sympathy for terrorism or naivety. Our response to this argument is to explicitly show the palpable political and physical causes of the attacks, demonstrating the falsity of the neoconservative myth of the unprovoked attack. Only after this myth is toppled do we have any chance of understanding the why
of the attacks and giving this tragedy a deeper meaning than the null answer of evil for evil’s sake. If we are simply fighting evildoers
or terror,
then we are doomed to war without end, as such primordial forces have always existed and will continue to exist. However, if there are real political reasons that the U.S., rather than other equally democratic nations, was attacked, then there is a real chance of a well-directed solution appropriate to the cause.
What, then, were the real causes of the September 11 attacks? This question can be addressed on several levels. First, we may consider the actual motivations of the perpetrators themselves. The al-Qaeda leadership has some narrow, anachronistic ambitions that include a restoration of Islamic theocracy and perhaps even the caliphate, but these goals have little serious advocacy among most Muslims. Al-Qaeda’s recruits come from a broad cross-section of Muslim society, and they are attracted to the organization by concern over issues that resonate deeply throughout the Muslim world. In a 1997 interview, Osama bin Laden explicitly declared his reasons for jihad against the United States government, three of which have had broad resonance among Arabs and other Muslims:
Nowhere is there any mention of hatred of democracy or liberty. While it is true that Islamic nationalists have little love of democracy, they would gather few recruits if their only motivation was to attack democracies. If that was their primary motivation, it would have been far easier to attack targets in weaker nations like Canada or Switzerland. Americans may believe that their nation was specially targeted because it is the most free, democratic nation on earth, but there is no reason why an Islamic terrorist should share this American nationalist assumption, and not see all democracies as equally odious.
In all three of these highly topical Arab issues, the United States government is the principal irritant. Bin Laden also held the American people responsible for these grievances to the extent that they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes.
Americans are not hated for being American, but because of their support for specific policies of their government. Other radical Muslim groups make similar appeals to these issues. Even if Bin Laden and other leaders were secretly driven by other, hidden motives, it is their publicly declared agenda that has enabled them to consistently attract numerous recruits. These issues resonate with millions of Muslims, not just extremists, which is why so many erroneously regard Bin Laden as a hero, and entire tribes and villages will give shelter to al-Qaeda operatives. We cannot and should not placate fanatical terrorists, but it is possible to reach many of the non-extremist Muslims who provide indirect support for al-Qaeda. We would therefore do well to stop ignoring these issues, and face them squarely one by one.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has been the most persistent obstacle to peace in the Middle East since World War II. The role of Arab terrorist groups in this conflict is well known, but the aggressive posture of the Israeli government has played a larger role in this instability than is generally recognized in the U.S., where Israel is portrayed as merely defending itself from murderous Muslim fanatics. Since its creation, the modern state of Israel has repeatedly violated international resolutions against military conquest and ethnic expulsions conducted in the name of security
, which is a fig-leaf defense for the displacement and disenfranchisement of a poorly armed people unfortunate enough to live on land belonging to ancient Israel. Israeli counter-terrorism
measures often involve systematic destruction of civilian lives and property, from firing on unarmed crowds to dynamiting houses and uprooting fruit trees. These are not security measures by any just standard, but are based on the racist logic of collective punishment for individual acts of terrorism.
Both Arabs and Jews have fiercely orthodox or ultranationalist factions who call for the total expulsion of the other race from Palestine, and the extremists on each side justify each other’s existence, promoting a radicalization of the conflict far beyond what most Arabs and Jews would prefer. The crisis would be solvable if the logic of extremism could be neutralized by support of moderate solutions from both sides, as is evidenced by the fact that Jews and Arabs have lived together peacefully and successfully in previous centuries. Currently, however, Israel is ruled by a party of militarists that rose to power through overt terrorism against the Arabs and British in the 1940s, and seeks to unilaterally dominate the land of Palestine as the patrimony of the Jews, disregarding any conflicting Arab claims to that land. The Palestinian Arabs are increasingly led by terrorist organizations, since only these are willing to stand firm on the claim of the right of return of refugees and the restoration of occupied lands. Israel’s unwillingness to regard the Arabs as equals in their claim to disputed lands, and Jerusalem in particular, radicalizes the opposition, in turn vindicating Israeli militarism. Clearly, any attempt at a solution to the Arab-Israeli problem must break this vicious cycle of radicalization.
The United States was not despised by the Arab world until it became involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The U.S. has been extremely pro-Israeli, almost
Zionist, in its handling of the dispute, granting Israel an especially favored nation status that is far beyond what a nation its size would normally merit. The U.S. grants $3 billion a year in foreign aid to Israel, more than double what it gives to all of impoverished sub-Saharan Africa and east Asia combined, and nearly
triple what it gives to all of Latin America. Israel is armed by the U.S., and permitted to maintain a strategic nuclear weapons program, while the Americans aggressively oppose attempts by other Middle Eastern states to develop similar weapons. The Arab populace perceives that the U.S. supports Israel in order to keep the Arab world subdued, and in fact the explicit aim of the Eisenhower administration’s two pillars
policy was to project U.S. influence in the region by supporting Israel and Iran, while opposing Egyptian and Syrian attempts at pan-Arab hegemony. Support of Israel makes sense from a neoimperialist perspective, but only at the expense of aggravating the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Contrary to what this one-sided support of Israel might indicate to many Arabs, the U.S. is not ideologically anti-Arab, for the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid is Egypt, which ceased to be a Soviet client by the 1980s, and now receives over $2 billion in U.S. aid each year. U.S. strategy in the Middle East is not racially motivated, but pragmatic. The U.S. sustains relationships with select client states to promote general stability in the region (except for small-scale conflict in Palestine, as noted), and to prevent any single Arab nation from controlling the region’s oil.
Israel is no longer threatened by Egypt, and is militarily superior to any nation in the region, so its paranoia about its survival is scarcely justified by physical facts. Arabs recognize that Israel gives the United States a strategic foothold in the Middle East, and helps prevent the emergence of an independent Arab regional power. U.S. strategic planners would agree with this assessment, only they regard this as a good thing whereas many Arabs consider it a policy of aggression and imperialism. Arabs see their international voice silenced by U.S. vetoes of resolutions condemning or even criticizing Israeli actions. In the UN General Assembly, the U.S. has several times sided with Israel (often as the sole abstention) in otherwise unanimous resolutions, such as the 152-1 vote demanding that Israel rescind its unilateral claim to Jerusalem as its capital. This is not problematic to the average American, who can more readily believe that his country is right and the rest of the world is wrong than that the American imperium is concerned more with projecting power than upholding justice.
This improbable belief is reinforced by popular mistrust or contempt of the United Nations, which is really just xenophobia in another guise, since the UN is no greater than the sum of its member states. Complaints that the UN is weak, ineffective, or corrupt really amount to assertions that foreigners are weak, ineffective, or corrupt.
The strongly pro-Israeli bias of the U.S. has serious ramifications, as it makes the U.S. totally incapable of brokering an acceptable peace agreement. In 2000, the Clinton administration supported a peace agreement that would have given Israel control of security and transit within the West Bank, and eliminate the refugees’ right of return, a right recognized by every nation in the world except the United States and Israel. Yasser Arafat naturally rejected the offer, after which the Israelis withdrew even the modest concessions of this agreement.
Toward the year’s end, Ariel Sharon made a provocative appearance at the Temple Mount claiming all of Jerusalem for the Jews. A popular uprising of the Arabs ensued, with far less regard for innocent civilian life than the intifada of 1987. Sharon benefited from the turmoil he created by being elected prime minister, and he responded ruthlessly, using counter-terrorism as an excuse to destroy the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, reducing it to virtual anarchy. It was in this enraged, uncompromising atmosphere that al-Qaeda was able to appeal to many Arabs.
Radical Islamic groups had little difficulty recruiting Arabs who were willing to fight Israel through terrorist attacks that targeted Israelis or their American benefactors. Experience has proven that fervent identification with the Palestinian cause is enough to make many devout Muslims willing to die. If attacks on American targets, such as those of 9/11, were intended to discourage U.S. support of Israel, this was a serious miscalculation, as the U.S. has become more unwaveringly supportive of Israeli military actions. From this analysis, we do not conclude that the 9/11 attacks were justified, or even particularly intelligent responses to the Palestinian situation, but we have come a long way from seeing the attacks as unprovoked. If you walk into a dangerous neighborhood and behave offensively, you can expect to be brutally assaulted. Although such a response is unjust, it is not unprovoked, and a wise person would avoid such a situation in the first place.
There are further obstacles to acceptance of the Arab-Israeli issue as a motive for terrorism, not least of which is the naïve belief that the U.S. government’s foreign policy is generally motivated by fairness or altruism. Somehow this implausible myth is able to coexist with the widely accepted view that politicians are corrupt and selfish on domestic issues. While Americans practically expect politicians to cheat their fellow citizens, it is somehow unthinkable that they would act unjustly in dealing with foreigners. This peculiar deference to authority on foreign policy matters becomes most apparent in times of military conflict, when the president’s motives initially receive only muted critiques from the Congress and the mainstream media. By declaring war, a president temporarily enjoys a quasi-monarchical status, so that criticism of his person becomes unpatriotic, as he has become the personification of the corps politique. The cynical reality of U.S.-Israeli relations does not mesh well with this idealization of American foreign policy.
U.S. policy in the Middle East has been classic realpolitik, played according to principles more familiar to European imperialists than to the moral idealism proposed by American neoconservative apologists. The U.S. needs Israel (and Egypt) strategically in order to dominate the region and to prevent a hostile power from limiting its access to the economic resources of that part of the world, mainly petroleum. Consequently, the U.S. gives exorbitant amounts of aid to Israel instead of helping needy, but strategically useless, African nations. Aid to Israel is designed not to give that country military parity, which would suffice for defense, but instead overwhelming dominance in the region. Israel enjoys such an enormous technological advantage over her neighbors with her elite air force, navy, and nuclear weapons, that for Israelis to portray themselves as embattled defenders under siege says more about the Israeli psyche than it does about strategic reality. Damascus, to say nothing of the West Bank, is far more physically threatened by Israel than Tel Aviv is by the Palestinians.
Israelis may be favored over Arabs by the American public because they speak English and often have family ties to the U.S., but mild social resentment toward the Jews prevents the general population from being nearly as pro-Israeli as the government. Most U.S. news media are generally pro-Israeli, though not to the satisfaction of Zionist organizations. Israeli attacks are usually described by U.S. news sources as retaliatory,
while no such qualification applies to Palestinian acts of violence. This characterization supports the myth that Israel, the invader and occupier of the West Bank, is fighting a purely defensive war. Immersed in pro-Israel propaganda, many Americans perceive Europe and the UN as inexplicably anti-Israeli, since their rebukes and condemnations of Israeli actions cannot be reconciled with the American media’s one-sided view that Israel is merely defending itself.
While the U.S. government is only indirectly responsible for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, it has directly attacked, isolated, and finally invaded Iraq, with ruinous humanitarian consequences that have evoked the ire of the entire Arab world. The history of U.S. intervention in Iraq completely demolishes the myth of a morally idealistic foreign policy in the Middle East, and belies many of the official rationales for the invasion of Iraq.
Throughout the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was a client of the U.S. government, which supported him in a brutal war against the Iranians, providing material resources and military intelligence. The U.S. exported arms to Iraq and shared satellite information to help Hussein select his targets, while allowing private American companies to supply the raw materials for his chemical weapons programs. Hussein considered the Kurds and Shiites to be in collusion with Iran, so he committed brutal acts of reprisal against them. It is in the context of this eight-year war that most of Hussein’s war crimes were committed, including the use of chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds. When the Kurds were gassed in 1988, the Reagan administration issued a terse statement of disapproval, but did not withdraw its support of Iraq against Iran. Fearful that Iran would dominate the region, the political realists
in the Reagan administration played one power against the other, so neither would dominate, giving U.S. interests free rein. As Henry Kissinger cynically remarked, Too bad they both can’t lose… I hope they all just kill each other.
These facts are in stark contrast with the hypocritical affectation of sympathy for Hussein’s victims expressed fifteen years later by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who were complicit in the support of Hussein’s regime back in the 1980s. If they were really concerned that Saddam gassed his own people, the appropriate time for outrage would have been in 1988, not 2003. Rumsfeld was a special envoy sent to Iraq to normalize relations in 1984, in preparation for massive arms shipments and supplies of chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. had removed Iraq from the list of states that sponsor terrorism in 1982, yet the bulk of Saddam’s crimes against humanity were committed during that decade. Ironically, all this occurred on the watch of Ronald Reagan, who is regarded as a demigod by self-styled warriors against terrorism. Most Americans have some awareness of the facts of U.S. government collusion with the Iraqi dictator, but this has done little to shake the nationalist faith in the basic moral rectitude of American foreign policy; such is the power of political propaganda in this country.
The primary reason that the U.S. takes any strategic interest in the Middle East is petroleum. In decades past, the U.S. has tolerated diverse forms of government and religion among its allies in the region, and most Americans tend toward indifference or ignorance of Arab culture. We can deduce, therefore, that U.S. interests
in the region are not social or cultural, but purely economic, and the only economic value the area has to offer the West in abundance is petroleum. This is the only benefit that would be worth the billions the U.S. has invested in the region annually, and the U.S. clearly intends to receive some benefit, since it is not acting altruistically (unless our government just really likes Egyptians and Israelis more than sub-Saharan Africans). Dependent on foreign oil for more than half of its consumption, the U.S. needs to ensure that Middle Eastern oil keeps flowing freely and inexpensively to the West, and that no nation threatens the stability of the region. As Kissinger candidly remarked, Oil is too valuable a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
Saddam Hussein threatened business as usual by emerging from the Iran-Iraq conflict with a powerful military and growing economy that could become a regional power. The first step for Iraq would be to acquire some deep water ports. Iraq’s borders were drawn by the British after World War I, and the country was practically landlocked as a deliberate measure by the British to ensure they controlled the export of oil through Kuwait. Even after its independence from Britain in 1961, Kuwait remained closely aligned with British and American businesses, so it continued to serve its original function. After the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam demanded that Kuwait concede a waterway to Iraq in compensation for saving
it from Iran at great cost of life, with the alternative being that Saddam would enforce Iraq’s supposed historic claim to Kuwait, based on the divisions of the Ottoman Empire. To circumvent the threat of a new regional power, the U.S. baited its long-term client into invading Kuwait. On July 25, 1990, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Hussein:
We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
Since Iraq had claimed Kuwait since its independence in the 1960s, this instruction was seen by Saddam as a green light for his invasion, which took place within weeks.
President George H.W. Bush, who had been vice president of the administration that armed Hussein and facilitated his crimes, now shamelessly invoked these same crimes to rally American support for war in a part of the world with which few were familiar. Officially, the purpose of the Gulf War was to liberate Kuwait, though this nation had been invaded with American acquiescence. In reality, the Gulf War served as an occasion to pummel the Iraqi military and isolate the regime through economic sanctions, crushing its aspirations to regional supremacy. In this way, Kissinger’s wish would come true, as both Iraq and Iran would be defeated. Saddam did not expect retaliation for his invasion, having no desire to fight the U.S. After a month of air strikes, Saddam became intensely fearful that the Americans would invade Iraq and depose him, so he ordered the withdrawal of troops from Kuwait before the ground invasion began.
President Bush was not willing to risk the much greater casualties of a prolonged ground conflict, nor did he want to inherit a nation-building project, so he declined to invade Iraq. Instead, U.S. objectives were achieved by stationing troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and establishing no-fly zones
in northern and southern Iraq, thereby encouraging Kurdish and Shiite rebels to resist the regime.
Iraq would be further weakened by economic sanctions applied by the UN in response to Iraq’s attempt to acquire territory by conquest and its pursuit of non-conventional weapons in violation of non-proliferation agreements. The conditions for lifting the sanctions included granting UN weapons inspectors full access to all sites, in order to insure that Iraq had destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and no longer possessed missiles with a range of greater than 150 km. Inspectors demanded access to presidential palaces, which Saddam refused, as he suspected the inspectors of espionage. It later turned out that the American UN inspectors were in fact spying on behalf of the CIA, and that all WMD stockpiles had been destroyed by the early nineties.
Arab outrage against the U.S. over Iraq may be largely attributed to the intense suffering of the Iraqi people under the economic sanctions imposed in the 1990s, when the country was still recovering from two wars. Hussein’s socialist regime had never overseen prosperity, but the economy had been functional and relatively modern in some respects, even after the devastating war with Iran in the eighties. Like most Middle Eastern nations, Iraq has been extremely dependent on imports of finished goods, making any trade embargo a recipe for disaster. Damage from the Gulf War was modest in comparison with the carnage of the eighties, but the following decade of sanctions witnessed a dramatic plummeting of living conditions that was clearly a result of the sanctions. The Iraqi government’s military spending certainly did not alleviate the situation, but even a government budget of zero would not have saved Iraqi’s from poverty, since money is useless without goods to buy. The sanctions were initiated by the UN shortly after the Gulf War, forbidding all trade with Iraq. Two years later, a limited amount of oil could be sold in exchange for food and medicine, but trading for basic necessities is clearly insufficient to keep a modern import-dependent economy viable.
The United States was the leading buyer of Iraqi oil under the oil-for-food program, not counting illegal deals made by American companies. Neoconservatives tried to make political hay out of the UN oil-for-food scandal where French and Russian companies were involved, yet they remained tactfully silent about the level of American involvement. All Western nations profited from the oil-for-food program, either directly or indirectly through lower global oil prices.
Increasingly isolated from global opinion as years passed, the U.S. and Britain had to threaten Security Council vetoes in order to keep the sanctions in place. The intent of continuing the sanctions was clearly to cripple the Iraqi economy, for one could have kept Iraqi oil off the market while still allowing the importation of consumer goods. The Bush and Clinton administrations claimed their intent was to punish Saddam, but any intelligent person must know that those in power are the last to starve. The only plausible rational motive for the Iraq sanctions was the cynical hope that economic desperation would drive the populace to despise their ruler and dethrone him. Any way you look at it, the suffering of the Iraqi people was a tool for the advancement of Western strategic interests.
This is what the bulk of the Arab world concluded, including moderate, secular observers. Need we add that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, including political exile groups, opposed the sanctions that were supposed to benefit them? The Iraq issue was sensationalized in the Middle East, but this overexposure guaranteed that Arabs were much better informed about the facts and issues than most Westerners, who received a largely sterilized view of the consequences of the sanctions.
Since the sanctions were an extension of an unresolved war, criticism of the sanctions in the U.S. opened one to the same charges of anti-Americanism as would criticizing a war. American political leaders downplayed, ignored, or even ridiculed reports of Iraqi suffering. In 1999, UNICEF estimated the excess deaths of children under five was about 500,000. Official Clintonite responses usually involved challenging the accuracy of these estimates, or blaming the death toll entirely
on Hussein. In a 1996 television interview, Secretary of State Albright once departed from this tactic, and instead explicitly stated that the deaths of a half a million children were the result of a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price was worth it.
This comment sparked a torrent of outrage in the Arab world, but the mainstream American media was largely silent. This media self-censorship enabled most Americans to sustain the myth that U.S. policies were not the cause of a humanitarian crisis, even though the Secretary of State had
acknowledged as much.
Albright believed the calculated infliction of suffering upon Iraqis was the morally correct choice, in view of the long-term good of containing Hussein. This justification presumes that Americans somehow have the authority to make grand moral calculations and decisions for other peoples. A similar assumption would prevail in rationalizing the invasion of Iraq. Albright’s comment probably would not have rattled too many consciences even if it were widely publicized, since many Americans share the unconscious assumption that they have the right to make moral calculations for the supposed benefit of other nations, even against their will. Consciously, most Americans uphold the right of self-determination and reject imperialism, but their actions and attitudes toward foreign nations often betray a set of values inconsistent with a belief in self-determination.
The virtual blackout of serious dissent in the U.S. mainstream media amplified the informational gap between Americans and Arabs. Each group was exposed to different sets of facts, and thus their views of the same issues became more radically estranged. In the Arab world, the opposing sin of excessive, exaggerated, and sensationalist coverage was widely committed, inflaming public opinion to a rage far beyond what a more realistic assessment of the situation would have warranted. Even the callous Albright was no mass murderer. She certainly had an arrogant conviction in her authority to make life-or-death decisions for others, but nonetheless believed she acted in a way that was best for all. In both the Arab and American worlds, the Iraq embargo was presented in a way that effectively allowed a narrow range of opinion. The Americans became indifferent, while the Arabs grew furious.
September 11 caused these worldviews to collide, and Americans were completely at a loss to understand why many Arabs celebrated the destruction as a just retribution. The Arab world had been inflamed by a demonization of the U.S. government, while Americans had been insulated by an opposing myth of absolute innocence. Americans believed the attacks were unprovoked because all knowledge of the U.S. government’s provocative policies in the Middle East had been distorted, denied or ignored. The public happily accepted these distortions since they reinforced the naïve assumptions they maintained about their nation’s role in the world.
We focus on American myths since we are primarily concerned with the changes in the American political climate after September 11, but the Arab world, as we have noted, also held warped views of critical points of conflict like Palestine and Iraq. It is no coincidence that most of the celebrations of the attacks took place among militant Palestinian and Lebanese nationalists, as well as in Iraq. These exaggerated and truly unjustified responses puzzled Americans, who generally assumed that these revelers simply lacked human sentiment. This may be partially true, but the unfortunate consequence of this sort of behavior is that it further alienated Americans from the idea that there might be any sort of intelligible cause for anti-American sentiment. Having received a sterilized view of atrocities suffered by Arabs, Americans had no reference point to which they could attach the anti-American rage that seemed to appear from nowhere. In the insular world of someone who worries about other countries only when his government decides to bomb them, all had been as peaceful as the skies of New York on the morning of September 11, until that peace was shattered by foreign invaders. In reality, all was not peaceful before September 11, as much of the Arab world had been suffering tremendous hardships as the direct or indirect result of poorly conceived American policies that were at best inept and at worst amoral.
In the view of many Arabs, these policies were part of a deliberate attempt to subdue the Arab world, exploit its resources, and even replace Islam with Christianity. This last misreading of the secular West’s intentions seems to be genuinely held by Bin Laden himself. Al-Qaeda exploited the prevailing myths current in the Arab world to attract recruits. Americans are rightly repulsed by these extreme views, but unfortunately tend to recoil into a contrary set of comforting myths.
An inquiry into the facts of U.S. policies in the Middle East can help us see that the 9/11 attacks were not without cause, but were intended to discourage destructive meddling in the Arab world and to retaliate against perceived injustices. Of course, this retaliation was misdirected, as it targeted innocent civilians, and even if it had not, its ethical justification would remain dubious or non-existent. Once more, we are not justifying the attacks, but attempting to understand their cause.
The second Bush administration refused to acknowledge that the Iraqi sanctions were a reasonable cause of Arab hostility, and instead exploited the popular view that anyone who celebrated the attacks, such as Saddam Hussein and Palestinian radicals, must have somehow been involved. Had the government fully recognized that the Iraqi sanctions were a contributing factor to the incendiary Middle East situation, it might never have invaded and occupied Iraq. The invasion and occupation created a far greater humanitarian crisis than what had existed under the sanctions. Poverty, insecurity, chaos and suffering caused more than a few to yearn for the Baathist regime, which at least was a functional government. The overt military occupation of Iraq made American acceptance of full responsibility unavoidable, which only exacerbated the already inflammatory situation in Iraq.
At times, President Bush spoke of terrorists as though they were a species that could be killed to extinction, rather than people who hold a set of beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are not so easily exterminated. The execution of every terrorist is an impossible task, if a terrorist is anyone who is violently outraged by U.S. actions in the Middle East. You would have to kill an idea, not just people. A stubborn unwillingness to engage other ideas enabled the Bush administration to ludicrously characterize all Iraqi insurgents as terrorists, as if Iraqis could have no legitimate reason to resist foreign occupation. Fighting ideas with guns, the war on terror
suffers from the same intrinsic limitations as the war on drugs,
and can hardly expect better results.
The last of Bin Laden’s professed motives, the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, ranks a distant third in terms of its resonance among Arabs. Small numbers of foreign troops have existed in Arabia long before the Gulf War, and the expanded U.S. forces arrived there by invitation of the Saudi government, not by force. Any issue of Islamic purity violated by the presence of these troops would be of concern only to the most doctrinally rigorous Muslims. For most Muslims, it suffices that infidels do not occupy the Hijaz, the land of the Prophet in western Arabia. Precisely for this reason, Riyadh was selected as the capital of Saudi Arabia over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Foreigners must be present in the capital in order to do business with the government, and small military details are required to protect their embassies. Bin Laden’s obstinacy on the issue of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which have finally been withdrawn at the behest of the Saudi government, indicates that he is hostile to even the most innocuous form of U.S. intervention in the Arab world. He differs from the Muslim mainstream in his insistence that the Arab world be kept completely pure from non-Muslims. This is a departure from Muslim orthodoxy and an idiosyncrasy of his cult.
Extremists like Bin Laden are hostile to any non-Muslim power interfering in the Muslim world. Under normal circumstances, this radicalism would have little resonance among moderate Muslims, but Bin Laden is able to present his views in the context of deeply harmful foreign interventions in Iraq and Palestine, issues that do have broad appeal. His organization has also staged attacks against the Russians, who are responsible for invasions of Afghanistan and Chechnya. No one argues that Bin Laden hates the Russians because of their freedom. Clearly, the common denominator among al-Qaeda’s foreign enemies is not democracy, but a policy of military intervention in Muslim politics. Most Americans have willfully evaded this obvious conclusion in favor of the more ego-gratifying notion that we are targeted because we are the freest country in the world, as if terrorists shared our perception of our greatness.
Another strange canard often heard is that Muslim extremists strike out of envy of American prosperity. In fact, the 9/11 attackers were predominantly from wealthy Saudi Arabia, and much of al-Qaeda’s leadership was independently wealthy, having no need to envy the material wealth of the U.S. Fanatical Muslims do not promise their followers a utopia of material wealth on earth, but a land of Islamic purity free from foreign influence. The belief that Muslim extremists envy our prosperity is more appropriate to the Cold War, for the Communists did indeed promise a material utopia, and always sought to outproduce the West economically. Liberal commentators who propose that increased prosperity will alleviate the terrorist problem misunderstand Islamicism and Arab nationalism. A Wahhabist Muslim like Bin Laden wants nothing the West has to offer. Other Arab nationalists might desire prosperity, but even then, not at the expense of autonomy.
A wiser approach to the terrorist problem would respect the territorial integrity of Muslim states. This could be achieved by procuring government cooperation through economic incentive, or more intelligent defensive security measures. Hardline cases like Afghanistan would still harbor terrorists, but these would be impotent without operatives in countries with friendly or cooperative governments. Blinded by a thirst for vengeance against the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, Bush struck and missed there, when energies would have been better spent using friendly governments, especially the Saudis, to arrest operatives and cut their funding. The real work of preventing terrorism is much more mundane than spectacular invasions, but it is more effective and less inflammatory. This is why we do not call in the military to hunt even the most dangerous criminals.
Territorial integrity is extremely important to the Arab peoples, who have not been
known to suffer foreign occupation gladly. Bin Laden’s appeal to the issue of U.S. troops in Arabia is better understood in the context of Arab nationalism than Islam. In fact, in every case of suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004, the bombers were protesting foreign occupation, whether it be in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, or Chechnya. Suicide bombers in the Middle East have included militant Muslims, secular Arabs, and even Marxist atheists. Their common denominator was the fact of direct occupation of land, and in every case that foreign occupation has ended, suicide bombing ceased. Prior to 2003, there had been no suicide bombings in Iraq, but they have become commonplace since the American occupation. The Bush administration’s claim that Iraq is central to the war on terror
is a boast of its profound ignorance of the causes of suicide bombing. The foreign occupation of Arab nations is absolutely the worst way to fight terrorism, and the best way to promote it.
We have examined some of the basic causes of the 9/11 attacks in terms of political motivations, but the mechanical causes or means of the terrorists should also be considered. The attacks were remarkably low-tech, using only box-cutters as weapons and exploiting gaping holes in airline security. We can identify at least three physical factors that made the attacks possible:
All three of these problems could be resolved by relatively simple measures, rendering many of the heightened security procedures at airports completely unnecessary.
The post-9/11 hysteria of doomsday scenarios involving weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) has little substantive connection with the low-tech al-Qaeda terrorists. Construction and deployment of WMDs requires a large infrastructure and manpower that only a state or a large company can provide. There is no indication that al-Qaeda has anything but rudimentary intelligence of WMDs.
Al-Qaeda terrorists have a very weak understanding of the scientific basis of nuclear weaponry, as evidenced by their use of an internet spoof article on how to build an atomic bomb, which was recovered in Afghanistan. The basic design of an atomic bomb is freely available on the internet, but this is useless without the myriad technical details and engineering challenges involved in implementing this design. Even if terrorists had a detailed blueprint of an atomic bomb, they would still require sophisticated machining ability, electronics, and large-scale industrial production that only a state could finance to produce even one bomb. Even with the resources of a state, it can take years of research and billions of dollars to produce weapons-grade fissionable material and implement it in a usable weapon, as evidenced in the case of North Korea. Once produced, a nuclear weapon requires costly, sophisticated maintenance to prevent degradation. Since terrorists will never be able to produce their own nuclear weapons, it suffices to monitor the nuclear programs of states.
Al-Qaeda’s ability to produce chemical or biological weapons is limited to small-scale threats. Any knowledgeable, determined individual can produce biological or chemical weapons, but not with the necessary quantity or means of deployment to cause large-scale havoc. Mustard gas, sarin, and other toxic agents can be produced in small quantities, but industrial-scale production is required for any significant acts of terrorism. This is why terrorists with these capabilities still find it much more effective to use bullets and explosives. Even when a biological weapon as lethal as anthrax is obtained, it is difficult to deploy in a manner that will kill more than a few individuals, as evidenced by the anthrax mail scare of 2001.
In sum, terrorists lack the infrastructure and manpower to develop and effectively deploy WMDs. Unless they could procure a portable WMD from a state that possesses them, they pose no WMD threat. Of course, the world would be endangered if governments gave out WMDs to any private organization, terrorist or otherwise. Fortunately, even governments hostile to the West possess enough self-interest to never contemplate giving out their hard-won WMDs to organizations like al-Qaeda, which is a loose cannon that could easily turn against its benefactor. Al-Qaeda has relied heavily on Saudi government funding, yet it did not hesitate to strike in Riyadh. If Saddam Hussein had possessed WMDs, he would have been a fool to give these weapons to a militant Islamic sect that could easily turn against his secular regime, which they had repeatedly denounced.
This discussion of farfetched doomsday scenarios shows what an irrational link there is between the 9/11 attacks and the campaign against state-owned WMDs. Since the standard neoconservative interpretation of 9/11 fails to provide any reason for the attacks, we are left only with inchoate fear. WMDs have nothing in common with the 9/11 attacks except that they both represent seemingly impossible disasters. Since the impossible happened in one instance, we fear it may happen in the other. Our failure to recognize the mundane nature of the physical factors that made the September 11 attacks possible results in a fear that disaster may strike if we do
not take paranoid precautions. President Bush facilitated this mentality by
blurring distinctions between different types of threats, so there was only
one amorphous set of evildoers
that could appear in any form at any time. Thus the response to 9/11 has been to take precautions against any
conceivable threat, however remote, resulting in an impractical allocation of physical and psychological resources, and needlessly curtailing civil liberties.
All of this overreaction comes from a set of attacks that, technologically speaking, could have been perpetrated thirty years earlier. They could have been prevented were it not for some glaring loopholes in airport security that had been a staple of comic routines for years. Compared with other countries, security on U.S. domestic flights was ridiculously lax, allowing passengers to carry knives and other dangerous objects on board, when there is no reason these could not have been packed in checked luggage. As if to compensate for past stupidity, the government has overreacted by forbidding all sorts of innocuous objects and using more invasive screening measures. Other countries have largely kept an even keel throughout, prohibiting only genuinely dangerous objects such as knives. Not having suffered the trauma of 9/11, they do not resort to hysterical reaction.
Another easily preventable security problem was the complete ease of access to the pilots’ cabin. This feature is shared by practically all airliners, but this posed a special security threat on U.S. domestic flights, where passengers were allowed to carry knives. Even taxicab drivers have more physical protection than airline pilots, though the latter can be responsible for hundreds of lives on a single trip. It would seem wise, not only as an anti-criminal measure, but as a safety precaution against passengers who wander or become agitated, to offer some minimal barrier between passengers and pilots, such as a closed door. If the pilots were secure from low-tech assaults, there would be less need for paranoia about sharp objects, and passengers would not have to be subjected to invasive and degrading screening procedures. This would be far more labor- and cost-effective than our meticulous screening for sharp objects, which is susceptible to human error. The current system of preemptive screening gives a strong appearance of security, by providing a physical presence, but it may actually be less secure than a system that simply rendered low-tech attacks impotent. There would still need to be screening for firearms or explosives, but this has been in existence even before 9/11. We will examine the threat of suicide bombing at a later point.
Even if reasonable measures were effected against these security problems, hijackings would still occur on rare occasions, particularly in countries with less effective implementation of security measures. Contingency plans are needed to minimize the damage of a successful hijacking. The uniquely catastrophic consequences of the 9/11 hijackings were made possible by the suicidal nature of the mission, which was without precedent in commercial airplane hijackings. Private planes have been deliberately crashed by their pilots on many occasions, and military history has the precedent of the Japanese kamikaze, but no one expected commercial jets to be deliberately crashed into buildings, posing a unique security issue.
The crews and passengers on the hijacked airplanes certainly had no expectation of a suicide mission, and the hijackers were careful not to give any indication of their true intent, since that would result in the failure of their mission (as was the case on one of the four planes). After 9/11, this critical element of surprise has been lost once and for all. This fact alone makes it virtually impossible for this type of attack to be successfully repeated. At worst, a hijacker might crash the plane, killing those aboard and some bystanders on the ground, but no larger scale disasters are feasible by this means. Compared to other causes of plane crashes, suicidal hijackings are statistically insignificant (9/11 being the only instance), especially when reasonable security measures are employed.
The physical vulnerabilities exposed on September 11 created a sense of loss of control, and this feeling was magnified by the myths that the attacks were without cause and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. At times, we have attempted to regain control of our security with fascistic rigor, taking extreme measures to protect ourselves from every conceivable disaster, instead of accepting that misfortunes will happen, while focusing on the more likely and preventable security failures. Taking simpler, more intelligently targeted precautionary measures requires an analysis of what went wrong, which can be an uncomfortable exercise. It forces us to take partial responsibility for the disaster and acknowledge that we could have averted it had we behaved more competently, without necessarily becoming a police state. An analysis of political causes has made clear why the United States, and not other equally free, democratic, good and wholesome nations, became a target of choice for certain terrorist groups. An analysis of mechanical causes makes clear why we were physically vulnerable. To commit a crime, a criminal requires not only intent, but also the means to enact his intent. We can lessen anti-American hatred by choosing wiser foreign policies, and we can render recalcitrant terrorists impotent by simple, intelligently targeted domestic security measures.
We have already discussed the implausibility of terrorists using WMDs, but al-Qaeda and similar groups have commonly resorted to conventional or plastic explosives in suicide bombings, which present a realistic security threat. Although such an attack has not been successfully perpetrated in this country as of writing, we would do well to take precautions against it.
It is not clear that suicide bombing presents a greater threat than non-suicidal bombing, though suicide bombing does give the attacker a couple of advantages. First, it is ideally suited for low-tech forces that have no more sophisticated delivery systems, such as missiles or remote-control bombs. Second, it has the advantage of stealth, as the bomber can walk into a crowded public area without causing the alarm that an exposed bomb would create. This is a marginal advantage, as timed bombs can be hidden in trucks or mailboxes, but once again, a low-tech attacker would find suicidal delivery easier, as this does not require timed detonators. From a security perspective, suicide bombing is not that much more difficult to prevent, for bombs can be hidden in buildings or vehicles just as easily as on people, and truck bombs can deliver far more explosive punch than suicide bombers. American cities and airports already have effective protection measures against bombs, though this menace, like most crimes, can never be eradicated entirely. With the exception of the Oklahoma City bombing, the consequences of this type of crime have been far from catastrophic in the U.S.
Judging from the operations of al-Qaeda and similar groups in other countries, these organizations do not possess the means to deliver particularly devastating attacks. They are low-tech operations that use primitive delivery systems. The Bush administration’s attempt to make them look like James Bond villains confuses Bin Laden’s wild aspirations with mundane reality. Only by cleverly using tanks full of jet fuel as bombs were the terrorists able to circumvent their woeful lack of real firepower. A single U.S. warplane (or just about any warplane) packs more explosive punch than al-Qaeda has delivered in its entire existence. A realistic assessment of terrorist capabilities would have led to a more proportionate and well-directed security response than what we have witnessed.
So far, I have only discussed preventive measures against terrorism through foreign and domestic policy development. What about punitive measures? Crimes like those perpetrated on September 11, 2001 certainly merit the punishment of all involved. Our justice system does not imprison felons merely to prevent them from committing further crimes, but punishes them in proportion to the crimes they did commit. Some of the culprits are to be found in the U.S. and friendly nations, but what of the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan? Perhaps the invasion of Afghanistan was required in order to obtain punitive justice for these criminals. We must recall, however, that the question of criminal justice is entwined with that of jurisdiction. Many murderous criminals have escaped to Rio de Janeiro, but that has never provoked talk of invading Brazil. Crime can be prevented and punished by internal policing and guarding one’s borders. If perchance a criminal escapes, we can pursue legal means of extradition, even offering economic incentives, but ultimately can do no more. The principle of national sovereignty still obtains in international relations as a practical and legal fact, however dubious its theoretical foundation may be.
It is practically impossible to capture a criminal in a foreign country without the cooperation of that government, even with the extravagant use of force displayed in
Afghanistan. Even when successful, the resulting human disaster, in this case thousands of civilian deaths, usually outweighs the benefit of punishing a few criminals. Al-Qaeda would be seriously crippled if we merely arrested and imprisoned its operatives in cooperative countries (that is, nearly the entire world). The leadership in Afghanistan supplies ideas, directives,
and training, but funds come from Saudi Arabia, and physical supplies and recruits come from non-hostile countries. Most of the terrorists
abducted in Afghanistan were really simple soldiers, bodyguards of the al-Qaeda leadership. The actual terrorist operatives are stationed in other countries, many of which have cozy relationships with the U.S. The Bush administration would have been well advised to exploit its diplomatic capital and worldwide sympathy to enforce a serious crackdown on terrorism in allied countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, but instead Bush squandered all our diplomatic capital on misdirected unilateral military campaigns that enraged the Arab world and alienated most of Europe. What is worse, these campaigns did not even achieve the goal of crippling terrorism. On the contrary, the heavy American military footprint on the Middle East has created a vacuum of power and expanded the physical locus of terrorist attacks, spawning the creation of new terrorist organizations.
In a period of spiraling budget deficits, the U.S. is hardly able to afford to squander its resources on misguided policies against the vague entity of terror,
– rather than targeting a well-defined group of organizations. By choosing to fight an undefined enemy and tapping into the nation’s worst fears, the Bush administration was able to justify hundreds of billion dollars in government waste, as long as it is nominally linked to national security. This fiscal irresponsibility is paralleled by a similar lack of restraint in the domain of civil liberties and human rights, which yield to the logic of war on an undefined enemy.
The war on terror has been invoked to justify expansion in the surveillance and interrogation powers of the federal government, reviving practices that amount to inquisition and torture, though using different names. The Roman legal procedure of inquisitio has attained a diabolical reputation, owing to the black legends surrounding the ecclesiastical inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In fact, the inquisitio has a legitimate use, in both its civil and ecclesiastical variants. While most crimes are punishable only after the fact, some threats to public order are sufficiently grave that they should be prevented pre-emptively. An inquisitor judge may summon witnesses who have information about criminal plots, conspiracies, or rebellions, and interrogate the suspects themselves, before sending them to a proper trial. In some instances, torture was used in order to obtain confessions. This was a relatively rare occurrence in ecclesiastical inquisitions, but English propagandists against the Spanish concocted lavish myths of women tortured by horrific devices that in fact existed only in England, not Spain, exposing the deception to a critical reader. The occasional use of torture was rationalized on the grounds of the gravity of the threat such crimes posed, and also that torture was not properly punishment if it did not inflict injury.
Before 9/11, the closest thing American law had to an inquisition was a federal grand jury, which can subpoena witnesses and require cooperation, even if no crime has yet been committed. It is conducted to investigate the possibility of a crime. Another quasi-inquisitorial institution would be the FISA courts that approved warrants for secret surveillance activities. As for torture, the military and the CIA had long used waterboarding, which makes the victim feel that he is drowning, when in fact it is impossible for him to drown by this method. This is every bit as much torture as dunking witches, since in the latter case there was no intent to drown the witch, but only to create the sensation and fear of drowning. The essence of torture is the infliction of physical pain in order to coerce testimony, so even supposedly softer tactics like making a person stand in stress positions for extended periods of time are torture in the primary sense of the term. It is sophistical to suppose that mild, yet increasingly unbearable pain is not torture, while a few sharp blows would qualify. By that standard, Chinese water torture would not be torture, though its victims can attest to the horrific effects. A tactic that does not cause bloodshed or bodily injury is entirely consistent with ancient and medieval definitions of torture, where the object was to torment without inflicting palpable injury that would qualify as punishment. The fact of the matter is that Americans have accepted the practice of torture for decades; we object only to the word.
After 9/11, the open support of inquisition and torture became politically feasible, with a few necessary adjustments in vocabulary. The most notorious has been the treatment of so-called enemy combatants,
imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. According to Secretary Rumsfeld and Bush administration lawyers, these detainees
are conveniently subject to neither the Geneva conventions nor the protections of criminal law. This position relies on several lines of argument, several of which have been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
One such line of reasoning holds that Guantanamo Bay is not American soil, so the protections guaranteed to those held on U.S. soil are not applicable. This is sophistry of the first order, demonstrating the intellectual and ethical bankruptcy of the administration’s position. Guantanamo Bay is a de facto U.S. territory occupied in open defiance of the wishes of the Cuban government, being a remnant of the imperialist conquests of the Spanish-American War. After that war ended in 1898, the U.S. permitted Cuba’s nominal independence, while retaining the power to intervene in that country’s internal affairs until 1933. In 1903, the U.S. forced the Cubans to lease
Guantanamo to them, and in 1934 a treaty set the terms of a lease in perpetuity, which could not be abrogated without the consent of the U.S. Such a nakedly imperialistic lease is incompatible with any notion of Cuban sovereignty over the bay, and the sham is justified by an insulting payment of $4,085 per year (for 45 square miles of land), which the Castro regime refuses to accept. The U.S. has effectively denied Cuban sovereignty of the bay for over a century, only to now disavow American sovereignty in order to deny prisoners the rights of those held in U.S. territories. The mere use of this argument betrays the amorality of those who would insult our intelligence with it. It is perhaps fitting that this notorious affront to human freedom should take place at Guantanamo, a reminder of the numerous occasions when the United States has been an enemy of freedom in Latin America.
Another rationale for the suspension of human rights is the notion that unlawful enemy combatants
are not guaranteed any protections under the Geneva Conventions. While it is true that unlawful combatants are not eligible for the status of prisoners of war, it is a wishful fantasy of the Bush administration that they fall into some legal no-man’s land without internationally guaranteed protections. To wit, the Fourth Geneva Convention defines the status of civilians who are held as saboteurs (the old word for terrorist):
Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.
In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be. (4th Geneva Convention, Part I, Art. 5)
Suspected terrorists (saboteurs) such as those captured in Afghanistan are guaranteed the right to humane treatment and a fair and regular
trial. Suspects may be denied the right of communication only to the extent that security requires, but they are to be restored to their full rights as soon as possible. Under international law, the U.S. is not entitled to use abusive interrogation methods, nor to detain people indefinitely without a regular trial. The U.S. eventually released dozens of detainees, who evidently posed no real threat, meaning that they had been unlawfully deprived of their liberty for years without trial. The more extreme reports of torture at Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons in Europe are difficult to verify, but the admitted practices of total sensory deprivation, waterboarding, threatening with attack dogs, and stress positions are all consistent with the classical definition of torture.
If the Bush administration were to have its way, U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism would not be guaranteed constitutional protections such as immunity from unlawful searches and the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The deceitfully named USA PATRIOT Act gives the executive branch expansive law enforcement powers that would be clearly unconstitutional if we were speaking of any crime other than terrorism. This exception might be justified by the same argument used to defend other forms of inquisition: the necessity of pre-emptively circumventing a grave public danger, or as some alarmist conservative congressmen often repeat, The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
While it is far from clear that guaranteeing the usual due process rights to terrorist suspects would be a suicidal act, we may at least consider the possibility that the gravity and scale of the terrorist threat may merit an expansion of law enforcement powers beyond what would be constitutional for ordinary criminal law.
Even recognizing this possibility, the state must still respect certain basic rights of the accused if the civil liberties of any citizen are to mean anything. If an accusation of terrorism
is not supported by the usual standard of probable cause, this would injure the liberty of all, since anyone can be suspected
of a crime. To argue that terrorists do not deserve liberty or other civil rights misses the point. Murderers do not deserve liberty, yet murder suspects
are nonetheless granted certain rights to guarantee the proper operation of a
justice system whose goal is to determine whether or not the suspect is a murderer. To deny the murder suspect any legal protection on the grounds that murderers do not deserve such protection is to beg the question and assume the guilt of a person simply by virtue of being a suspect. This practically amounts to conviction by
accusation.
Clearly, if terrorist suspects are to be afforded fewer rights than suspects of other crimes, the standard of evidence required to make someone a terrorist suspect should be at least as high as that required for arrest in other crimes, if the population at large is not to be deprived of its constitutionally guaranteed rights. It is not enough for the government to promise that it will not abuse its powers by secretly detaining innocent civilians or political dissidents as terrorists.
The whole point of limited government as opposed to absolutism is that the rights of citizens are properly theirs and not for the government to dole out as it sees fit. If a citizen is wrongfully arrested, his right to legal counsel and speedy trial is an available remedy. If terrorist suspects are to be denied such rights, we must take legal precautions against unlawful arrest, such as the need for search warrants and court orders, and the right to a defense. Instead, the Bush administration has asked the public to simply accept on faith that the government will not abuse its powers, showing a failure to grasp even the rudiments of democracy and accountable government.
As it turns out, most Americans are happy to surrender a substantial portion of their freedom in exchange for greater security, as evidenced by the popularity of the unwarranted NSA surveillance operations. Before the Bush administration, the government was only allowed to spy on the American people with a warrant from a secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was intended to curtail the abuses of previous administrations who had used the CIA, NSA, and FBI to spy on their political enemies. In reality, the U.S. government has spied on its own citizens at will through most of the twentieth century, either openly flouting the law or circumventing it by cooperation with British intelligence. The FISA system brought some level of accountability to this practice, though the issuing of warrants was a practically guaranteed rubber stamp, sometimes done after the search.
Given the ease of obtaining a warrant and permissibility of issuing warrants after the fact, it is incredible that the Bush administration found this process too burdensome, and routinely ordered the NSA to spy on domestic phone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a FISA court. This contradicted President Bush's earlier claims that all wiretapping activities required a warrant, and later that only international calls were tapped. The only plausible rational explanations for this behavior are that the administration believed a warrant application would have been rejected (thus the action was blatantly illegal), or that it wanted to establish a precedent to justify expanded executive powers. The latter possibility carries considerable weight, considering the administration’s espousal of an aggressive form of the unitary executive theory. Either way, most legal analysts agreed that the administration was on incredibly weak legal ground.
Despite the Democrats’ best effort to make political hay of the NSA wiretapping program, polls indicated that a majority of Americans supported the program. This willingness to cede civil liberties in the name of security comes from a belief that such espionage programs only affect terrorists, not good, innocent people who have nothing to hide, as well as a fear of the terrorist threat. This mentality is characteristic of every society that has supported authoritarian government, and represents a propaganda success of the administration.
Another important propaganda strategy of the Bushite ideologues is the substitution of the language of war in place of that of criminal law. Once one accepts the premise that the fight against terrorism constitutes a war in more than a rhetorical sense, it becomes possible to dissuade any talk of civil rights, and to justify the indefinite extension of wartime presidential powers. A war on terrorism
can never end as long as anti-U.S. terrorists exist, so the presidency is guaranteed neverending war powers.
It is obviously false that the war on terrorism
is a war in either a military sense or in the legal sense that would enable wartime presidential powers. Acts of sabotage have existed throughout U.S. history, and not even at the height of the Cold War, when facing a much graver threat than we know today, did any president presume to assert a literal state of war, save where there was an actual military engagement.
Despite hollow assertions that this a new kind of war,
the only way to make the war on terror
seem like a real war is to conduct conventional military operations, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we shall see, these actions are quite consistent with the tactics used previously by the U.S. in dealing with rogue states,
the only difference being that anti-terrorism is the professed motives for these wars.
The closest we have come to a real war against terrorism was the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan, where the Taliban government was so closely allied with al-Qaeda that it was difficult to determine who took orders from whom. Apart from the Taliban regime’s protection, the al-Qaeda leadership possessed its own small army of heavily armed bodyguards. Thus, the threat in Afghanistan represented the closest thing to a palpable army of terrorists that could be engaged in a real war. Strictly speaking, the Taliban soldiers and al-Qaeda guerillas were not terrorist operatives, but defended a leadership that sponsored terrorism.
Naturally, the war on terror
would have to be a new kind of war
(since we are really fighting criminals, not soldiers), that was conveniently immune from diplomatic niceties like the Geneva conventions and respect of the principle of self-determination. Acutely aware of the problem that non-cooperative governments like Afghanistan presented in the apprehension of terrorist leaders, the Bushites sought the simple solution of changing the government to a cooperative one. Unfortunately, the new government is weak outside of Kabul, and of little help in the war on terror
. One must admire Bush’s desire for complete and thorough justice, but he refused to accept practical realities that would cause more sober leaders to direct their energies toward more fruitful
endeavors. Also, he was forced to violate other principles of justice, and wreak havoc among countless innocent civilians, in order to bring a few dozen criminals to justice. Determination and conviction are admirable, but they often bring singlemindedness and narrow vision. We must remember that the neoconservatives generally believe their own rhetoric, and are reacting in anger begotten of fear. They feel that it is their responsibility to protect the American people, and think that this is the best way to do it.
The real purpose for using the language of war rather than that of criminal law is to dissuade any talk of civil rights, and to justify the indefinite extension of wartime presidential powers. In order to make the war motif plausible, it is necessary to inflate the ragtag al-Qaeda group into something from a Tom Clancy novel, and to link them with heavily militarized states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Of course, if we were really at war, no one would need to point it out to you; it would be an unavoidable reality staring you in the face. In fact, if we were to take at face value the alarmist myth that America is currently in a war for her survival, then every man who fails to enlist is a shameless coward. There is no war; there are only the usual police actions and military occupations that the U.S. exercises in order to prop up its collapsing empire.
Spiritually, the great tragedy of 9/11 was the missed opportunity for learning and growth. For a brief moment, there was a climate of profound humility and soul-searching, yet our grasping for answers failed, because we could not let go of our cherished national myths. Religiosity and charity soon yielded to arrogant, militaristic jingoism, the barbarous world-view that helped make the attacks possible and thwarted serious attempts to understand them.
The election of the leftist Barack Obama softened some of the rhetoric, but this president has left in place the machinery of coercion implemented by his predecessor. Homeland security
remains just as stringent, and indeed it has expanded to include virtual strip searches of citizens without probable cause. Prisoners are still held in Guantanamo Bay without being charged with any crime. The casualty rate in Iraq has subsided, only to increase in Afghanistan, and civilians are regularly killed as collateral damage
in America’s soft imperialism.
By pretending that the 9/11 attacks requires a radical transformation into a police state, the United States continues to act as if the rest of the world does not exist. Terrorism did not begin on September 11, 2001. There were many attacks killing hundreds of people at a time in various countries for decades before then. These countries, which range in geography from Europe (including Russia) to Latin America and the Middle East, have all been able to deal with terrorism in much less hysterical ways. The people of the United States, by contrast, for all their professed love of freedom, have displayed such a craven fear of death that they are willing to submit to countless indignities in order to avoid a risk that is less probable than being struck by lightning. Such a flaccid society is worthy of Benjamin Franklin’s famous rebuke: Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
© 2003, 2006, 2010 Daniel J. Castellano. All rights reserved. http://www.arcaneknowledge.org
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