Terrorism Inc.: Violence And
Counter-Violence (of the Letter)
By Mustapha Marrouchi15 June, 2007
Countercurrents.orgPart One
In a broader sense of the word, to be sure, terrorism is as old as humanity itself. Human beings have been flaying and butchering one another since the dawn of time. Even in a more specialized sense of the term, terrorism runs all the way back to the pre-modern world. For it is there that the concept of the sacred first sees the light of day; and the idea of terror, implausibly enough, is closely bound up with this ambiguous notion. It is ambiguous because the word sacer can mean either blessed or cursed, holy or reviled, and there are kinds of terror in ancient civilization which are both creative and destructive, life-giving and death-dealing. The sacred is dangerous, to be kept in a cage rather than a glass case. The idea belongs to a reflection on the enigma of the linguistic animal: how come that its life-yielding and death-dealing powers spring from the same source, which is to say from language?
Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror, 2. [Emphasis added]
As a word and concept, “terrorism” has acquired an extraordinary status in American public discourse. It has displaced communism as public enemy number one, although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric, and argument that are frightening in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy, and provoking various sorts of murderous actions. And it has imported and canonized an ideology of destruction with origins in a distant past, which serves the purpose of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history. To this extent, the elevation of terrorism to the status of national security threat (although more Americans die each year of heart disease (700,142), cancer (553,768), suicide (30,622), homicide, not including the 9/11 victims, another 17,330, and those who drown in their bathtubs (3,247), are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents) has deflected careful scrutiny of the government’s domestic and foreign policies.1 As President Bush pointed out in January, 2006, no one has been killed by terrorists on American soil since 2001. Neither, according to the FBI, was anyone killed in America by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero.2 Even using 2001 as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about fatal workplace injuries (5,431deaths in 2005 alone).3 To recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those innocent people killed by terrorists on September 11, 2001, but neither should their anguish eclipse that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year (27,801).4 Needless to add the many deaths due to ridiculous gun non-legislation, which brings to mind the question: Is it worse to be senselessly killed by a “terrorist” rather than by a US citizen? After all, the pain of death may be the same for everyone, but each man or woman dies in his or her own way. Even so, every death has its horrors.
We may put this another way by saying that terrorism must not be argued on logic or ideology or even self-interest. It must be disputed on the basis of emotion in that it is an emotion, and a seductive one at that. Like ecstasy, it tends to magnify our perception. And just as affection becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence. Even so, our current fixation on terrorism is premised on the fiction of an unlimited downside, which speaks darkly to the American psyche just as did the unlimited upside imagined during the dot com bubble. Indeed, this hysteria can be seen as a mirror image of the bubble, a run on terrorism. Whereas before we believed without basis that we could all be illimitably wealthy with no work, we now believe without basis that we will die in incalculable numbers with no warning or determinable motivation. Both views are childish, but the Internet bubble at least did not require calling out the National Guard. Contrary to the Bush administration’s claims, the War on Terror is not “a challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our nation.”5
It is not the Cold War, in which the so-called enemy did in fact have the ability to destroy the Earth. It is not even a war in the “moral equivalent of war” sense of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Fighting it does not make us a better people. It is much closer to the War on Drugs–a comic-book name for a fantasy march. We can no more rid the world of terrorism than we can rid it of alienation. This may sound like a splitting of linguistic hairs, but America made a similar error of categorization in Vietnam by calling the invasion of that country a “civil war.” That misidentification cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the cultural divide. As opposed to terrorism, murder at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else is a threat, and by calling it what it is we can recognize that it does not require the wholesale reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder does not require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it call for the distribution of national identity cards, nor does it require the finger-printing of Brazilian tourists. Preventing murder certainly does not require war, which of course is quite murderous in and of itself. It simply requires is patient police work.
Anti-terrorism nevertheless has become the animating principle of nearly every aspect of American public policy. It has instigated two major wars in its time. It informs how we fund scientific research, whose steel or textiles we buy, who may enter or leave the country, and how we sort our mail. It has shaped the structure of the Justice Department and the fates of 180,000 government employees now in the service of the Department of Homeland Security. Nearly every presidential speech touches on terrorism, and, according to the White House, we can look forward to spending at least $50 billion per year on “homeland defense” until the end of time. Whether the spending and/or deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen, but given the almost unconditional assent of the media pundits and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging. I hasten to add one point, however, that is important for my argument. The obvious case to be made against the ugly violence and disruptions caused by desperate and often misguided people has little sustainable power once it is extended to include gigantic terror networks, conspiracies of terrorist states or terrorism as a metaphysical evil. For not only will common sense rise up at the paucity of evidence for these preposterous theories, but at the same time (which is not yet soon enough) the machinery for trumpeting the terrorist scare will stand exposed for the political and intellectual scandal that it is. The fact is that most, if not all, states use dirty tricks, from assassinations and bombs to blackmail. (We still remember the CIA.-sponsored car bomb that killed eighty people in the civilian quarter of West Beirut in early 1984).6 The same applies to radical nationalists, although we conveniently overlook the malfeasance of the bands we support. For the present, though, the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can inflict grave damage.
The difference between today’s pseudo scholarship and expert jargon about terrorism and the literature about Third World national liberation guerillas half a century ago is quite striking. Most of the earlier material was subject to the slower and therefore a more careful process of research; to produce a piece of scholarship on, say, the Algerian War of Independence 1954-62 as Alistair Horne did in his 1977-sustaining A Savage War of Peace, a book hotly sought today by officers bound for Iraq, you had to go through the motion of exploring Algerian and/or French history through anecdotes, perceptions, and situations. This Horne did by citing books, interviewing influential figures, using memoirs, eyewitness journalism, popular history, and footnotes–actually attempting to prove a point by developing a viable argument. Those characteristic details that the medievalist Marc Bloch calls the “delight of the small fry of romantic historians” are here writ large.7 This scholarship was no less partisan because of those procedures, no less engaged in the war against the enemies of “freedom,” no less racist in its assumptions; but it was, or at least had the pretensions of, a sort of knowledge. A case in point is Horne’s likening shrapnel in the corpse of an obese car-bomb victim to “truffles in a Périgord pâté” or evoking Roman ruin on the Barbary coast thereby ignoring, or otherwise negating Algeria and its Muslim history: “In springtime the ruins are a blaze of contrapuntal color: wild gladioli of magenta, bright yellow inulas and spiky acanthus thrust up among sarcophagi carpeted with tiny blue saxifrage.”8 After this wild bouquet on the grave of the West we are whisked to the “luxurious Hôtel Saint-George” in Algiers, “through whose exotic gardens of giant contorted euphoria and sweet-smelling moonflowers Churchill and the titans of the Second World War strolled, laying plans for a world in which Anglo-Saxon predominance seemed assured in perpetuity.”9 Botany serves bathos up to the end of the affair as if Algeria could not exist, except as a colony where Roman ruins and French colonialism induce daydreaming and a nostalgia for bygone days of empire. Or, to put it differently: Algeria could only serve as a suitably “savage” and “exotic” backdrop where Churchill was able to muse on the future of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Here is a book, out of print for twenty years, in which the ambushes of the Algerian resistance on sluggish French patrols evoke that scene from Flaubert’s Salammbô wherein the “wily Spendius stampeded the Carthaginian elephants by driving pigs smeared with flaming bitumen toward them.”10 Wicked moments like these demonstrate what Horne means by saying he writes out of love for war.
Today’s discourse on terrorism is an altogether more streamlined thing. Its scholarship is yesterday’s newspaper or today’s CNN bulletin. Its gurus–Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, William Safire, George Will, Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, A.M. Rosenthal, to name the “happy few”–are journalists with obscure, even ambiguous, backgrounds. Most of the writing about terrorism is brief, pithy, and totally devoid of the scholarly armature of evidence, proof, or argument. Its paradigm is the television interview, the spot news announcement, the instant gratification one associates with the Bush White House’s “reality time,” the evening news based entirely on the sound bite. You are lucky if you get a minute or two to make your point. It is a race against time; a race against the self-congratulatory clips on Fox News. In the meantime, the argument always goes back to the instruments with which we tell our stories: words, words, words. Some mean nothing; others mean something different; still others carry an inherent bias. One wonders if the average person in Nebraska knows what the threat of terrorist violence means, if only because of the regular reminders provided by the media in all its forms? Even so, how can one explain the terror behind the yoke of “annexation” or the deliberate killing of innocent civilians without the risk of being labeled anti-Western is a question in time answered. Take, for example, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In any given year the number of Palestinian civilians killed as a result of Israeli occupation is at least three times higher than the number of Israeli civilians killed as a result of terrorist attacks.11 Yet Western reporters refer to the “bloody suicide bombers” and never to the “bloody occupation.” If these daily horrors remain mostly out of sight, news from countries with dictatorships, say, Egypt, does reach Western newspapers and TV bulletins. But then another problem presents itself: when Western journalists describe events in countries governed by toads and tyrants they borrow their terms from democracies: they use words like “parliament,” “judge,” “election”; they say “President” Mubarak rather than “Dictator” Mubarak, and they talk about Egypt’s National Democratic Party when it is neither democratic nor a party. They quote a professor at a university in Algeria, but fail to add that he is vetted and monitored by the secret service. When a Palestinian is killed, he is said to have been violent; when he is beaten up, he is said to have struck at the Israeli army first; when he is oppressed, he is the one who is guilty. The killing of a Palestinian is, after all, not the kind of event that makes the headlines in Israel or anywhere else for that matter.12 An Arab-African dictator who chooses a political course other than the one dictated to him by the West is “anti-Western,” yet that label is never used the other way around. Have you ever seen a US leader described as “staunchly anti-Arab”? An American politician who believes that only violent action can make his people safe is called a hawk. Have you ever spotted a Sudanese hawk? No, they are thugs, extremists, insurgents, and terrorists. American diplomats who say they believe in talks are doves. Africans with an equivalent political outlook are called “moderates,” implying that deep inside every African, from Mugabe to Gaddafi, there is a violent core but, God be praised, this one has diminished that core. While Islamists “hate” the West, no Western party or leader ever hates Islamists, even if those very same leaders use their parliamentary positions to acquire permissions to drop Tomahawk cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and a host of other high-tech horrors on innocent civilians.13
It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinction between civilized London and the “heart of darkness” quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent, who described terrorism’s affinity for abstractions like “pure science” (and by extension for “Islam” or the “West,”) as well as the terrorist’s moral indignation.14 For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with open terrifying ease.15 But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face today. Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade in the face of jihad, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn from Bernard Lewis’s or Samuel Huntington’s alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from which official discourse took its vocabulary in the first days after the 9/11 attacks. There has since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speeches and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims, and Indians all over the US, the paradigm continues. One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the US. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. Here, we must pause to answer this question: What is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Muslim conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book, Mohammed and Charlemagne, shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, shook the Christian-Roman synthesis, and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, was to resume defense of the “West” against its historical-cultural enemies.16 What Pirenne left out, however, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology, and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne’s world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.17
Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the “Abrahamic religions,” as Louis Massignon aptly called them.18 Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or de-mystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers–not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp–of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, Eqbal Ahmad intoned, is “very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity.”19 But we are all swimming in those waters, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, vegetarians, pedestrians, and be-halfists alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. “The Clash of Civilizations” and “What Went Wrong ?” are gimmicks like “The War of the Worlds” and “America at a Crossroads,” better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.
Against a background of so vicious a system of violence and counter-violence (of the letter), the following set of questions is de rigueur: How far should intellectual responsibility go to denounce arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support of numerous repressive regimes in Africa (Mubarak of Egypt is a case in point, but there are others) and the rest of the world? How much of a guarantee of wisdom or moral vision is military power? Shouldn’t we be skeptical about the present crisis, as “America” girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere “out there”? How costly is the price the US is willing to pay in order to enter a global conflict that it avoided during the Cold War? Is the twenty-first century the century of state terrorism and if so, how far will the US go to maintain its primacy using its economic, military, and cultural power? How far is Al Qaeda indebted to al-Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) for the formulation of its own brand of honor? Is it truly a global political movement and does it really represent an entire religion or is it just another of the many death-obsessed sectarian movements to emerge in the past quarter of a century? What lies ahead for al-Ikhwan and will the organization transform itself into a political party? The 2005-presidential elections in Egypt unveiled hitherto taboo questions thanks mainly to the Coptic evangelist and writer/activist Rafik Habib (close to the younger generation of Brothers, now in their 40s), who stirred the debate on the defense of human rights and struggle against discrimination as well as the relationship between preaching and assuming political office. Two positions emerged. The conservative wing of al-Ikhwan still sees active political engagement as a break with the Muslim project launched by the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, and holds that politics, though important, must not become the organization’s only field of action. The generation represented by Abdel Mon’im Abul Futuh would like to see the creation of a party that conforms to Egyptian law, especially in funding and in its relationship with a-tanzim dawli (state order). The hope is to transform it into an intellectual forum, much like the Arab Nationalist Congress or the Socialist Internationale. The debate between the two wings remains, however, low-key–and theoretical in the absence of any official recognition of the group by the Egyptian regime.20 For now at least, the trouble with a religious organization like al-Ikhwan lies in the primitive ideas of its platform. It resists change while it fosters a climate of violence, which seems all too easily attached to technological sophistication and what appears to be gratuitous acts of horrifying retaliation. The apparatus is made worse by George Bush and Osama bin Laden, who want to persuade us that the world is divided between “us” and “them,” believers and infidels, barbarism and civilization. From this confrontation between tradition and modernity another set of questions manifests itself: What role, if any, should the intellectual in opposition play to denounce an oppressive regime in Egypt, a bloody civil war in Somalia, a ruthless genocide in Sudan that have so far claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, not to mention the misery of the waves of refugees in neighboring countries like Tchad, a country that can hardly sustain itself let alone bear the brunt of masses of people on the move because the diplomatic activity in the region conceals an international political deadlock over potential oil wealth? Aren’t “Islam” and the “West” inadequate banners to follow blindly? What are we to make of the slippage between fascism and Islamism and is “Islamofascism” the correct formula used to describe militant Islam today? And finally: Why are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Martin Amis so angry and why is it all so personal? Their diatribes against Islam and Muslims not only fail as narratives but are distorted by all the hatreds that have possessed them over recent years. After all, demonization of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly when the roots of terror in injustice can be dealt with.21 These are some of the issues I hope to address. Although my main focus involves Africa and the West (the US in particular), I will, however, draw on Europe and the rest of the Third World to make my argument.
I
In the radically changed and highly charged political atmosphere that has overtaken the US–and to varying degrees the rest of the world–since September 11, 2001, Edward Said perceptively writes,
the notion that disparate cultures can harmoniously and productively coexist has come to seem like little more than a quaint fiction. In this time of heightened animosity and aggression, the so-called war on terror has given rise to a world of mistrust, an aggressive American attitude toward the world, and a much exacerbated conflict between what have been called the “West” and “Islam,” labels I have long found both misleading and more suitable for the mobilization of collective passions than for lucid understanding unless they are deconstructed analytically and critically. Far more than they fight, cultures interact fruitfully with each other.22
For Said, the foundational paradigm of the West versus the Rest (the Cold War opposition reformulated in the title of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations) remains untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussions since the tragic events of 9/11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of the West getting stronger and fending off Islam. Instead of seeing it for what it is–the capture of grandiose ideas (I use the term loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes–international luminaries from Benazir Bhutto to Silvio Berlusconi, from Benedict XVI to Martin Amis, from Christopher Hitchens to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from Robert Redeker to the twelve Danish Cartoonists–have pontificated about Islam’s troubles, using Huntington’s ideas to rant on about the West’s superiority: how “we” are rational and “they” are not. Why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo?23 It would be pleasant if one could find an answer to the question posed here, but there is none.
What seems, however, depressing about this reality is how little time is spent in trying to understand the US’s role and its direct involvement in the world. One would think that “America” was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict or another all over the planet: Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, to name only a handful of the victims of US imperialism. At the other end of the spectrum, Al Qaeda ’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history its begetters (Osama bin Laden Limited) might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the imagination in the West. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for a war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about and future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds. For now at least, terrorism “has become a topic of ceaseless comment and controversy,” Thomas Laqueur informs us, “and it always figures prominently on the national and international agenda. It is one of the most emotionally charged topics of public debate, though quite why this should be the case is not entirely clear, as those taking part in the debate do not sympathize with terrorism. Confusion prevails, but confusion alone does not explain the emotions.”24 Although it says nothing about dropping laser-guided Tomahawk missiles from the air, a no less repugnant form of terrorism but one deemed by Western leaders to be morally superior, Laqueur’s “The Terrorism to Come” is a brilliantly constructed and provocatively written essay of extreme importance to those of us who try to make sense of the concept of terrorism. However, Laqueur falls short in telling us why terrorism is not a philosophy but an affront to meaning as such. For the “ism” on the end of “terrorism” suggests that you can make a philosophy out of frightening people. Most “isms” are abstract, but this one is alarmingly concrete: it is as though you can convert rage into an agenda, or build a program out of pure resentment. What you are left with, after all the grand programs and policies, is your fury. The less programs and policies assuage that fury, the more they stoke it, until despair becomes more powerful than any strategy of success. Some kinds of terrorism have achieved success. From the Kenyan Mau Mau to the Algerian FLN and onwards liberations movements dubbed “terrorist” by their enemies have unseated colonial rule. Yet there is also an older vein of terrorism, associated with the late nineteenth-century cults of Romantic-Anarchist violence that is a kind of anti-politics. This is the only form of politics that accepts that it cannot win. Since it cannot realistically hope to bring the system to its knees, it settles for harassing it, rubbing its nose in its own obdurately indestructible presence. However, with the advent of modern technology, this militant defeatism has been dramatically altered. The more powerful your enemy grows, the easier it is to ensnare him in his own strength. If terrorism finds strength in its own weakness, it does so by sniffing out the weakness latent in the enemy's strength.25 For terrorism to go both global and technological means that it now has a chance of victory on the same terms as its antagonists.
From a traditionalist terrorist viewpoint this streamlined, satellite-phone-friendly brand of terrorism is in danger of missing the point. For “pure” terrorism is not just an assault on your enemy's hotels, nightclubs, and office blocks; it is a strike at signification as such. It is less a philosophy than an anti-philosophy. Radicals acknowledge that they share a set of meanings with their conservative opponents. Without this there would be no quarrel between them. For the classical terrorist to confess that a consensus is possible is to have capitulated to the system. Meaningful behavior the system can take; what it cannot stomach is sheer meaninglessness. So the point is to fashion events so outrageous and murderous, so unspeakably aimless and gratuitous, that they shatter the mind and shake meaning to its roots. Or, perhaps events the meaning of which can be understood only in retrospect. On this score, the “pure” terrorist is the terrible twin of the more infantile wing of the avant-garde. Such avant-gardism will not create works of art, even revolutionary ones, since these the middle classes can assimilate. In fact, before too long they will be installing them in the lobbies of their corporate headquarters. Instead it must manufacture gestures, happenings, and arbitrary events too fleeting even to be consumed? Needless to add that some terror is pragmatic; some is indifferent to practical outcomes; some of it mixes the two. Al Qaeda, Eta, and the IRA have specific goals in mind. Those who think these terrorists are in it just for sadistic kicks are the kind of thinkers for whom any fundamental criticism of the West is so inconceivable, it can only be a symptom of insanity. Terrorism blends political calculation with sheer aimless, symbolic expressions of visceral hatred and desperation. In this, too, it resembles the work of art, which, as Kant observed, is a kind of “purposiveness without purpose.”26 Art fits the means to the ends; but the work of art itself is gloriously pointless.
Ultimately, what makes the terrorist most invulnerable is his embrace of his own destruction, not just the dismemberment of others. Armed with this philosophy, which one can also find in fascism, as long as you still fear death you are in thrall to the petty suburban logic of the living. By actively accepting your death, like the suicide bomber, you free yourself from it. In turning your own death into a weapon you extract a point out of the pointless. In addition to being a being a way of killing many people, your death becomes a symbolic statement that the way you are living is even worse than non-existence. On this view, suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels toward the object.27 But the object is never spared in that in killing yourself, you also make the point that there is something stronger than death, namely, your anger. In this way, the suicide bomber is a grisly parody of the tragic hero, who overcomes his death by freely submitting to it. To live with your eyes fixed steadfastly on your own death is to live your life as a sort of eternity, and thus, once more, as a work of art. It insulates you from history, chance, progress. You are insulated from all that smacks of mere flesh and blood. For both the terrorist and the elitist artist the mindless masses are constrained by their biology—by birth, growth, death, and decay. You, by contrast, exist in some shadowy no-man's land between life and death, scornful of both. It is a sterile, exultant existence, at once most glorious freedom and most definitive despair. And it is this that President Bush and his allies think they can root out with their rockets.
This fusion of what are theoretically “tragic” and “comic” materials sets the tone for the social boundaries of terrorism. At the same time, it forces us to try and decode the message 9/11 chimed nearly 6 years ago: our vacation from history is over and done with. “In its psychic impact, it conveys the sense of impossibility-along-with-inevitability that is characteristic of dreams,” Edward Said perceptively writes, and embodies the horrifying shift into fear and uncertainty that is the essence of every nightmare. For most of us, the experience of this transformation is largely symbolic, muted, imaginary; it cannot compare to the experience of those who were actually there. Yet in some way we too are watchers in a tower, brutally shaken out of our complacency, and forced now to scan the horizons of a world from which we can no longer feel apart.28
Or, perhaps we might rather say: as the globe is flattened into a two dimensional space, it is by the same stroke carved rigorously down the middle. In the process, we sense in some strange way that 9/11 awakened us from the dream of Reality into the nightmare dawn of the Real as Lacan understood the term.29 For in the conflict between East and West, tradition and modernity, the local and the global, one transnational movement confronts another. In between times, we realize how powerful is the appeal to religious orthodoxy; how insecure our sense of the secular; how fragile any ideal of cultural understanding. As the decade oozes along with small-arms sniping around an elephant-dung Madonna, the artist takes the heat for a long moment of transition and reminds himself of Voyous by Jacques Derrida, who emphasizes the connection between global capital and local terror, and suggests that the activity of terror is now financed through speculation on the market and that it is simultaneously capitalist and anticapitalist:
Never will a new thinking about the West have been more urgent. . . . And this, outside and inside the West. On all sides. These are simple words, but I repeat: on all sides. I have absolute compassion for the victims of September 11 but that does not prevent me from saying that I do not believe in the political innocence of anyone in this crime (2002: 51-2).30
In another no less impressive essay, an unpublished 1978-lecture, Michel Foucault, in “On Security and Terror,” distinguishes power from security, warning that the security state can quickly become a delirious and pathological one.31 True, insofar as the context and framework of discussion and writing about Islam and/or the West today is too inflamed, too urgent, too locked up in questions of violence and counter-violence for anything that could be considered an adequate understanding of Islam’s or the West’s huge complexities and their basic resistance to reductive formulae. To understand anything about human history, it is therefore necessary to see it from the point of view of those who made or espoused it, not to treat it as a packaged commodity or as an instrument of aggression.
Put simply, at some level, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between the “West” and “Islam” but also between the avant-garde and the avant la lettre, the postmodern and the post-colonial, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz’s nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, does not make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, and sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, “ours” as well “theirs.” The note is perfectly struck in a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan’s most respected weekly, Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a purely Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down rather harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes “a Muslim order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion.” And this “entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds.” As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, and pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in the world’s current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is possible “to recognize the Muslim–religion, society, culture, history or politics–as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages.” The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are “concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda.”32 However, what Ahmad fails to note is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the “Jewish” and “Christian” universes of discourse as witness the Save Darfur Campaign, which stems from one event: the Rwandan Genocide. After all, 2007 marks the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. If the Darfur drive drew a single lesson from Rwanda, it would be the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people under the watchful eye of a bankrupt West. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene in Sudan, for good and against evil, even globally.33
There is another sense in which violence and counter-violence (of the letter) rears its ugly head. The case concerns the huge responsibility the US bears in coercing weak governments to engage in what came to be known as “rendition.” The role Egypt and Morocco have played in what Michel Foucault aptly called the “gentle way in [the] punishment” of suspects who are then transported against their will to secret prisons and tortured, is massive. The uncovering of the CIA abductions in Europe, conducted with the full knowledge of most European governments, bear witness to the prevailing schizophrenia. According to a UN Convention report at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA stopped over at European airports between the end of 2001 and 2005, many of them transporting victims of extraordinary rendition to the illegal detention center at Guantánamo or to prisons in countries such as Morocco and Egypt where torture is common practice. It is now clear that European leaders were well aware of the criminal nature of these secret flights. This wholesale violation of human rights could not have taken place without their complicity on the ground. All those who participated in these kidnapings, those who gave the orders as well as those who carried them out, must fear the law and reflect on the fate of Maria Estela Martinez Peron (Isabelita), former president of Argentina, where the authorities engaged in political abduction on a massive scale in the name of counter-terrorism, Peron has just been arrested in Madrid and charged with the enforced disappearance of a student, Hector Faguetti, 31 years ago, in February 1976. Justice may be slow but it is inexorable. Even so, America sees itself on the side of right, justice, morality, democracy, and peace. All challenges to that view are considered terrorism, unless the US does it. So that the 1986 raid on Libya by the Reagan Administration in which Gaddafi lost one of his daughters plus the 1998 whole-scale bombing of pharmaceutical facilities in Sudan and the so-called insurgency in Somalia with the complicity of the Ethiopian army: all this is simply negligible while the US protests that it is fighting for peace and justice. Nothing else, only those, good old-fashioned values of American peace and justice. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant violation of international law; a violation committed by a super state that is for ever glorifying its respect for the law.
The trouble is that as Africans we never seem capable or willing to engage the US or Europe intellectually and morally in ways that highlight the crimes committed against us. The dismal ignorance of the US that exists in Africa–an ignorance blithely disconnected to the system of American exploitation and its organized cruelties against Africans–makes us prey to the illusion that America is the only arbiter, the last superpower, the one country with the greatest chance of giving us our due. At the core of our difficulty is the lamentable disunity of the dark continent, where rulers think in terms of the narrowest interest and no concern is given to the way in which African states are used against each other, traduced, robbed, punished, and endlessly manipulated. To the official US we remain only the “Africans,” an undifferentiated mass of savages and barbarians much given to fanaticism and raw violence. We develop our consumer instincts more than we do our cultural and scientific talent, and we manifest so widespread a degree of helplessness and incompetence with our endlessly proclaimed summits, the new state of Angola, the crisis in Darfur, the danger of an explosion in Nigeria, that we cannot even take ourselves seriously. The US, on the other hand, is determined to pursue an “imperial policy,” however euphemistically it is described. The debate swirls around the best way of achieving it. One of the more “moderate” strategists put it this way: “The aim of American foreign policy is to work with other like-minded actors to ‘improve’ the market place, to increase compliance with basic norms, by choice if possible, by necessity–i.e., coercion–if need be. At the core, regulation [of the international system] is an imperial doctrine in that it seeks to promote a set of standards we endorse–something not to be confused with imperialism, which is a foreign policy of exploitation.”34 Other American voices are less shy about using tougher terminology in prescribing the US’s role in the world. Consider Irving Kristol, a long-standing theorist of a belligerent conservatism, who shrugs off the notion of constraints and takes for granted an “emerging American imperium.” The more muscular approach is still diffident, however, about adopting the term “imperialism.” “One of these days,” Kristol writes, the “American people are going to awaken to the fact that we have become an imperial nation.” He hastens to reassure his readers that “this is not an intentional development.” Elaborating this curious explanation, he asserts that “a great power can slide into commitments without explicitly making them.”35 Under his imperium, Kristol sees US global control as an unproblematic condition: rivals can be subdued by one means or another.
Richard Haass goes further than Kristol in stating that the US should be the global sheriff. In his scenario, unlike the policeman, the sheriff is more of a part-time laborer. He comes to work when there is a demand to organize a raid on some recalcitrant “rogue state”–that is, an area or group of people that does not accept US-imposed arrangements. In this American view, the frontier species of vigilantism and state terrorism are advocated as foreign policy. How well a “posse” policy will fare in a world with three billion people living below the poverty line, and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like watermelons in a field, is not easy to imagine. Underlying these strategic outlooks is an uncomplicated reading of the outcome of the Cold War. “We won, and the other side not only lost but disappeared.”36 As a result, the moral and metaphysical dimensions transformed the political debate, which became increasingly removed not only from classical realism but even from empirical reality. As a senior advisor to Bush (assumed to be the political strategist Karl Rove) put it to journalist Ron Suskind: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”37 Or, perhaps we might rather say: the 9/11 attacks came to be seen as proof of the failure of previous policies. A unilateralist approach based on prevention was the basis of new ones. The invasion of Iraq was deemed necessary to reform the Arab and Muslim worlds and redraw the map of the Middle East according to the sage maxim cynically formulated by the doyen of ignorance, the most influential pseudo-thinker in policy circles, Bernard Lewis, who writes: “The Arabs only understand the language of force.”38 With such a fixed and inflexible stereotype in mind, the geo-politicians wove their imperial schemes, which resulted in the invasion of Iraq and the uprooting of four million people so far.39 All this, to be sure, stems from the callous behavior, which is, I think, the US belief in jingoism as the right philosophy to deal with reality–jingoism that is anti-metaphysical, anti-historical, and curiously, anti-philosophical. Postmodern anti-nominalism, which reduces everything to sentence structure and linguistic context, is allied with this; it is an influential style of thought alongside analytic philosophy. The newly organized US information effort (especially in Africa where we are still pre-modern) is designed to spread these persistent master stories. As a result, the obstinate dissenting traditions of the US–the unofficial counter-memory of an immigrant society–that flourish alongside or deep inside narra-themes are deliberately obscured.
The problem with the post-9/11 world is how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the US, which in effect has made no secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its interests. Indeed, the US position has been escalating toward a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Mr. President and his faithful servants identify themselves with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny; its external enemies with an evil that is equally absolute. Anyone reading the world press in the past few years can ascertain that people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy toward not only Africa but the rest of the world as well, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for international law, accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions.40 Somewhere, however, in this arid expanse, a question begs to be asked: What does it mean to defeat “evil terrorism” in a world like ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit America and its whims, substituting people we think are “good guys” for evil creatures like Osama bin Laden. The radical simplicity of all this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is neither purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks in the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for its very real and virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known rascal state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half of men and women under arms, all of them willing to serve their country idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush and Condoleeza Rice keep referring to as evil, the chances are that you will be willing to use all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if the administration keeps asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to be added to the already engorged defense budget.41
From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in the West have consented to the Bush program, tolerated and in some egregious cases, tried to go beyond it, toward more self-righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery, more specious argument. When Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pope Benedict XVI, to name but a few, tiresomely sermonize to Arabs and Muslims that they have to be more self-critical, missing from anything they say is the slightest tone of self-criticism. They think the atrocities of 9/11 entitle them to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world, say, Algeria where Al Qaeda is re-surfacing with a vengeance as witness the 4/11 terrorist attacks that left more than 30 people dead and 200 seriously injured, were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral conclusions from. (In Iraq, the monstrous punishing machine is not only vengeful and devouring but also cannibal. The occupation there may now be compared to the Mouli-Julienne, a sculpture designed by Mona Hatoum in the shape of a giant shredder, a Kafkayesque destroyer of sorts, meant to inflict maximum pain and thereby convey a feeling of dread in all of us).42
Notes
1. See Harper’s Index (February 2006): 11.2. See Lewis H. Lapham, “Eyes Wide Open,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2006): 7.
3. See Harper’s Index (June 2006): 11.
4. See Harper’s Index (March 2007): 11; Luke Mitchell, “Briefings,” Harper’s Magazine (April 2007): 79-80.
5. Lapham, “Eyes Wide Open,” 8.
6. Carolin Emcke, Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: California University Press, 1995).
7. Marc Bloc, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London & New York: Norton, 1999): 167.
8. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (London: Viking 1978): 234-5. See also Sam Stark, “Flaming Bitumen: Romancing the Algerian War,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007): 92-7. I have benefitted tremendously from Stark’s essay and do acknowledge my debt to him for the formulation of the some of the ideas I formulate in this section.
9. Ibid., 67.
10. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (Paris: Gallimard, 2005): 56.
11. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” LRB 23 March 2006): 2-21.
12. An authoritative, rigorous, and compelling view of this matter is to be found in Howard Friel and Richard Falk, Israel–Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (London & New York: Verso, 2007).
13. Edwin Morgan, “The War on the War on Terror,” LRB 9 February 2006: 12.
14. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Penguin, 2001): 23-4.
15. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York & London: Norton, 1961): 45; Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000): 655-9.
16. Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005): 56. I owe this insight to Edward Said to whose scholarship I am truly indebted.
17. Alighieri Dante, The Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 2005): 133-6.
18. Louis Massignon, Sur l’Islam (Paris: Herne, 1995): 34-45.
19. Eqbal Ahmad, The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, eds. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 312-13.
20. Xavier Ternisien, Les frères musulmans (Paris: Fayard, 2005): 34-6; Nachman Tal, Radical Islam: In Egypt and Jordan (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005): chap. 2 in particular.
21. And finally, has Western development failed in Africa, an economically, socially, and politically depressed and marginalized continent? Since the end of the cold war it has no longer been of any strategic or diplomatic importance to the great powers. Except when there are emergencies requiring humanitarian aid, no one is really interested in the fate of the continent’s 700 million men and women.
22. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): xvi.
23. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 12-33.
24. Walter Laqueur, “The Terrorism to Come,” Harper's Magazine (November 2004): 13.
25. Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 22-30. I owe a great deal to Eagleton in the formulation of some of the ideas I develop in this section.
26. Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger (Paris: Gallimard, 1966): 61.
27. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1962): 167.
28. Edward Said has studied this problem, especially with regard to the invasion of Iraq. For more on the subject, see his The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-determination 1969-1994 (New York: Pantheon, 1994): 289.
29. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire des Noms du Père (Paris: Minuit, 1963) 56.
30. Jacques Derrida, Fichus (Paris: Galilée, 2002): 51.
31. Foucault warns against the abuses of power by the super state where the citizen can be reduced to rubble. For more on the subject, see Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. I, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997): 67—73.
32. Eqbal Ahmad, Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (New York: Open Media, 2001: 22-3.
33. Another no less important example can be found in the recent acquittal of the French satirical paper Charlie-Hebdo of publicly insulting Muslims by reprinting the notorious Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed as terrorist. The acquittal was done in the name of so-called freedom of expression, which leads us to the question: Can we really say what we want?
34. Irving Kristol, “The Emerging American Imperium,” Wall Street Journal 18 August 1997: 4.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff (New York: Council of Foreign Relations, 1997): 3.
37. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine 17 October 2004: 2.
38. Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, “The Path to War,” Vanity Fair (May 2004): 12. See also Alain Gresh, “Malevolent Fantasy of Islam,” Le Monde Diplomatique (August 2005): 23.
39. A superb thesis is developed along these lines is to be found in Shattering the Stereotypes:
40. Michael Byers, War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict (London: Grove Press, 2007): 122-3.
41. Steve Featherstone, “The Coming Robot Army,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007): 43-53.
42. Mona Hatoum, The Entire World as a Foreign Place (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000): 40-1.
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