September 17, 2001

For those wondering WHY?...

ADDRESSING THE SOURCES OF MIDDLE EASTERN VIOLENCE AGAINST
THE UNITED STATES

by Steve Niva

In the wake of the immense tragedy of the recent attacks on
American soil it is difficult to get beyond the horror and
shock of what has just happened and engage in serious
reflection on the sources of violence against the United
States. This is understandable given the almost unbelievable
nature of this attack. Yet it is more necessary than ever if
one is to find ways to prevent such attacks in the future.

What we will see in the next few days and weeks will be
further investigations, arrests of individuals and intense
speculation about which groups or states did this and how
the United States should respond.  Unfortunately, if the
pattern of past responses to such attacks is repeated, we
will probably not learn a great deal about the reasons
behind why this attack happened, or the broader sources of
violence against the United States over the past
decade. Instead the usual array of retired generals and
military analysts will be trotted out to explain the
tactical elements of their favored military response.

We now have seen substantial evidence of a Middle Eastern
connection to this attack and media coverage has frequently
mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden as the number one
terrorist suspect and mastermind of this operation. As we
are inexorably led down the road to military confrontation
in the Middle East, it is necessary to gain clarity about
the specific actors and their motivations before one can
even think about how to respond. For Americans who like
their hero's and villains portrayed in simple dichotomies of
good and evil, the result of this kind of clarity will be
disturbing because the United States has created many
enemies through its policies in the Middle East over the
past century and bears a significant amount of
responsibility for creating a fertile soil for anti-American
hatred. Any American response that does not address this
truth is doomed to further the cycle of violence.

WHO IS BEHIND THE ATTACKS?

The recent attacks on U.S. soil are most likely related to
an escalating series of attacks and bombings on U.S. targets
over the past 10 years. In order, these attacks include: the
recent bombing of the USS Cole in October, 2000 that claimed
17 lives; the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in which hundreds were killed; the 1996 car-bomb
attack on a U.S. barracks in Dharahan, Saudi Arabia that
killed 19 Americans; the 1995 car-bomb attack on an American
National Guard Training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that
took 4 lives and, of course, the 1993 World Trade Center
truck-bombing that killed 6 people and injured over a
thousand others.

All of these attacks have been attributed to Islamic
radicals based in the Middle East and Central Asia under the
rubric of a very hazy notion of "Islamic fundamentalism."
Indeed a number of people from these regions with links to
certain militant Islamic groups have been arrested and
charged in some of these actions. Breathless reports of a
shadowy Islamic conspiracy against the U.S. led by Osama bin
Laden have generated a steady stream of cliché's about this
new enemy and its hatred of the U.S., but unfortunately
precious little light has been shed on understanding why
this is happening and what exactly these people
believe. Their enmity towards the U.S. is explained as
little more than the product of a fanatical and inherently
anti-Western and anti-American world view. Stephen Emerson,
a so-called terrorism expert who frequently appears in the
media, claims that "the hatred of the US by militant Islamic
fundamentalists is not tied to any particular act or
event. Rather, fundamentalists equate the mere existence of
the West-its economic, political and cultural systems-as an
intrinsic attack on Islam."

Any explanation of Middle Eastern violence that relies upon
the notion that Islam is an inherently violent or inherently
anti-Western religion is false and misleading. First, Islam
is one of the world's largest and most diverse religions and
like Christianity or Judaism there are thousands of views
within Islam about the religion and also about violence and
the West.  Secondly, there are major differences even among
explicitly Muslim militants and activists regarding these
issues-some insist upon non-violent struggle and others
regard violence as a legitimate tool. There is no way one
can generalize about Islam or any religion for that matter.

So who are the perpetrators and what drove them to carry
this horrendous act? The most likely perpetrators of these
attacks are related to an extremely small and fringe network
of militants whose motivations do not derive from Islam so
much as from a common set of experiences and beliefs that
resulted from their participation in the U.S. backed war
against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980's. These
militants were recruited by the CIA and the Saudi Arabian
and Pakistani intelligence services to fight against the
Soviet Union during the 1980's. They came largely from the
poor and unemployed classes or militant opposition groups
from around the Middle East, including Algeria, Egypt,
Palestine and elsewhere in order to wage war on behalf of
the Muslim people of Afghanistan against the communist
enemy.

Among the many coordinators and financiers of this effort
was a rich young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden, who was the
millionaire son of a wealthy Saudi businessman with close
contacts to the Saudi royal family. Although accounts vary
regarding his actual participation in the war, he played an
important role in helping these groups recruit volunteers
and build extensive networks of bases in Pakistan and
Afghanistan after 1984.

This network of conservative Sunni Muslim militants, who
became known as "the Afghans" in the Middle East, also
served another purpose for the U.S.  and its allies in the
region. Not only were they anti-Communist due to their
rejection of its atheism, they were also opposed to the
brand of Islamic radicalism promoted by the 1979 Islamic
revolution in Iran and its leader Ayatollah Khomeini largely
because it was based on Shiite rather than Sunni Islamic
doctrine, a major doctrinal cleavage within Islam. The
revolution had had toppled a major ally of the U.S., the
Shah of Iran, who played a major role as a pillar of
U.S. hegemony in the oil rich Persian Gulf and was
threatening key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
other oil rich states. Therefore, the clear aim of
U.S. foreign policy therefore was to kill two birds with one
stone: turn back the Soviet Union and create a
counter-weight to radical Iranian inspired threats to U.S.
interests, particularly U.S. backed regimes who controlled
the massive oil resources.

THE FAILURE OF U.S. POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

But this policy has now turned into a nightmare for the
U.S. and has likely led to the recent attacks against the
U.S. in New York and Washington D.C.  After the Soviets were
defeated in Afghanistan in 1989 the "Afghan" network became
expendable to the U.S. who no longer needed their
services. In fact, the U.S. actively turned against these
groups after the Gulf War when a number of these militants
returned home and moved into the violent opposition against
U.S. allied regimes and opposed the U.S. war against Iraq in
1991. They were particularly opposed to the unprecedented
positioning of U.S. ground troops in Saudi Arabia on the
land of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina. As a
result, in the past decade there has been a vicious war of
intelligence services in the region between America and its
allies and militant Muslim groups. Many Egyptian Islamists
believe the U.S. trained Egyptian police torture techniques
like they did the Shah and his brutal Savak security
police. Moreover, the CIA has sent snatch squads to abduct
wanted militants form Muslim countries and return them to
their countries to face almost certain death and
imprisonment.

The primary belief of this loose and militant network of
veterans of the Afghanistan war is that the West, led by the
United States, is now waging war against Muslims around the
world and that they have to defend themselves by any means
necessary, including violence and terrorism. They point to a
number of cases where Muslims have born the brunt of
violence as evidence of this war: the Serbian and Croation
genocide against Bosnian Muslims, the Russian war in
Chechnya, the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands, the UN sanctions against
Iraq and the U.S. backing of dictatorships in Algeria, Egypt
or Saudi Arabia, for example. They claim that the US either
supported the violence or failed to prevent it in all of
these cases. It is these beliefs that enable them to justify
not only targeting U.S. military facilities but also its
civilians.

It should be clear that this network is only a very radical
fringe of militants who have decided that they must use
armed tactics to get their message out to the U.S. and
others. They differ in important ways with the wider current
of Islamic activism in Arab world and more globally which in
addition to its Islamic orientation has an agenda about
social justice and social change against the dictatorships
and corruption in many of the pro-Western countries in the
region. They are anti-Iranian. They are now
anti-Saudi. Their actions have sometimes even been condemned
by militant Muslim organizations ranging from the Muslim
brotherhood in Egypt to the FIS in Algeria to HAMAS in
Palestine. They are somewhat disconnected from these
movements in that they do not locate their struggle in a
national context, but rather in a global war on behalf of
Muslims. Nevertheless, they certainly share many common
sentiments with this wider current of Islamic
activism. There is no question that the one-sided
U.S. support for Israel, the U.S. sponsorship of sanctions
against Iraq as well as U.S.  support for dictatorships
across the region have created a fertile ground for some
sympathy with such militancy.

Osama bin Laden is not the mastermind of these attacks as is
often claimed in the media; he just facilitates these groups
and sentiments with logistics and finances, as do others. He
is simply a very visible symbol of this loose network and
the U.S. obsession with him most likely works to increase
his standing as an icon of resistance to the U.S. The
network with which he is linked has no geographical location
or fixed center; it appears to be a kaleidoscopic overlay of
cells and interlinkages that span the globe from camps on
the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to immigrant communities in
Europe and the U.S.

The rise of this militant network and their adoption of
violence against the United States represents a clear
failure of U.S. strategy in the region, especially the
U.S./Saudi/Pakistani model of alliance between conservative
Sunni Islamic activism and the West. The problem is that US
has no alternative political strategy because they see all
Islamic activists as their enemy and refuse to address the
root causes of anti-American sentiments in the
region. Moreover, the U.S appears to have no long-term
strategy to address the sources of grievances that the
radical groups share with vast majority of Muslim activists
who abhor using violent methods that would include, for
starters, a more balanced approach to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, ending the sanctions on Iraq,
moving U.S.  military bases out of Saudi Arabia, and
supporting the legitimate aspirations of regional peoples
for democracy and human rights.

HOW TO TRULY DEFEAT TERRORISM

Many of us accept the premise that terrorism is a phenomenon
that can be defeated only by amelioration of the conditions
that inspire it.  Terrorism's best asset, in the final
analysis, is the anger and desperation that leads people to
see no alternative to violence.

While only a fringe element has seized upon violence as
their solution, many of the world's 1.2 billion Muslim
people are understandably aggrieved by double standards. The
U.S. claims that it must impose economic sanctions on
certain countries that violate human rights and/or harbor
weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. largely ignores
Muslim victims of human rights violations in Palestine,
Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and Chechnya.  What's more, while
the U.S. economy is propped up by weapon sales to countries
around the globe and particularly in the Middle East, the
U.S.  insists on economic sanctions to prevent weapon
development in Libya, Sudan, Iran and Iraq. In Iraq, the
crippling economic sanctions cost the lives of 5,000
children, under age five, every month. Over one million
Iraqis have died as a direct result of over a decade of
sanctions. Finally, the U.S. pro-Israel policy unfairly puts
higher demands on Palestinians to renounce violence than on
Israelis to halt new settlements and adhere to
U.N. resolutions calling for an Israeli withdrawal from
Palestinian lands.

That anger cannot be extinguished by Tomahawk missiles or
military operations. The present U.S. strategy for ending
the threat of terrorism through the use of military force
will only exacerbate this anger and desperation. When
innocent U.S. citizens are killed and harmed by blasts at US
embassies or bases, or used as cannon fodder for suicide
hijackings, the U.S. government expects expressions of
outrage and grief over brutal terrorism. But when
U.S. Cruise missiles kill and maim innocent Sudanese,
Afghanis, and Pakistanis, the U.S. calls it collateral
damage. Even if Osama bin Laden is killed or captured, the
fertile soil that creates such figures will still be
there. Moreover, any attacks may simply serve to inflame
passions and create hosts of new volunteers to their ranks

There is no justification for the horrendous attacks on
innocent American civilians in New York or Washington. These
attacks have served no cause; they have likely set back
efforts to build popular movements and international
solidarity that, in the final analysis, are the best chance
of achieving social justice and change in the Middle East
and elsewhere.  Yet, at this difficult time, Americans
should critically examine policies with which Arabs, Muslims
and many others have legitimate grievances.  Instead our
leaders refuse to admit the flaws in their policies and find
it easier to demonize those in the Arab world who oppose
them as a way of diverting attention from their own
mistakes.

Military solutions to the problems in the Middle East and
the terrorism that has resulted from these problems is not a
policy but a recipe for more violence and bombings.

Steve Niva teaches International politics and Middle East
Studies at the Evergreen State College.