Political
Roots Of American Insecurity
By Mohamed El-Moctar
El-Shinqiti
15 October, 2004
Aljazeera
A
few months ago, while speaking of the US war in Iraq, Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said: "We're killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting
arms.
"We just don't
know yet whether that's the same as winning."
Rumsfeld apparently
laid more stress on the "quantitative performance" and "instrumental
efficiency" of an illegal war than on its lack of righteousness
and moral legitimacy.
It's not surprising,
therefore, that even three years after the 9-11 tragedy, Washington's
political elite still lacks the moral vision and intellectual clarity
to delve deep into the roots of the security problem the average American
is facing today. This has, indeed, resulted in further loss of human
life and the wasting of resources.
However, there are
many Americans who, endowed with vision and intellectual clarity, can
see through the potential dangers of some of the US foreign policy and
which result in deep conflict with the Muslim world.
These men and women
aspire to a change of policy; but their voices are often lost in a cacophony
of empty demagogy and false propaganda. Richard Neu, assistant to the
president of RAND Corporation for research and counter-terrorism, is
one of them.
On the first anniversary
of the 9-11 attack, Neu published the article Anti-American Violence,
an Agenda for Honest Thinking, in which he argued that "making
America safer from terrorists will require determined action to get
at the root causes of anti-American violence. An effective long-term
strategy to defeat terrorism must be built on honest thinking about
these potentially painful questions."
Unfortunately for
Americans, and for all of us, "to date, these topics have attracted
little systematic analysis" he said.
"Understanding
and resolving differences between Americans and Muslims" is one
of the challenging issues facing the US policymakers today, Neu said.
Another man who
belongs to this league of wise men and women is simply known as Anonymous,
a pseudonym for an unknown intelligence officer who headed the Bin Ladin
unit within the CIA for some time.
In the introduction
to his new book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on
Terror, published last month, Anonymous argues: "Bin Ladin is out
to drastically
alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world, not
necessarily to destroy America, much less its freedoms and liberties.
"He is a practical
warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon. Should
US policies not change, the war between America and the Islamists will
go on for the foreseeable future.
No one can predict
how much damage will be caused by America's blind adherence to failed
and counterproductive policies or by the lack of moral courage now visible
in the 30-year-plus failure of US politicians to review Middle East
policy and move America to energy self-sufficiency and alternative fuels."
But the American
political elite is still enslaved by its "instrumental mentality"
that judges the legitimacy of any policy by the criterion of efficiency
instead of morality.
That is why most
American politicians who criticise the occupation of Iraq today refer
to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and more than
a thousand American soldiers, and criticise it on a practical - not
moral - basis.
They continue to
make casual references by repeating arguments such as: "President
Bush did not foresee the intensity of Iraqi resistance" or "he
did not send enough troops" or "he did not do enough to bring
more allies" without mentioning the human suffering and material
destruction this war has inflicted on innocent people.
They also do not
seem to bother about the steady deterioration of relations between America
and the Muslim world thanks to this war.
Whoever has read
the 567 pages of the 9-11 Commission Report can easily see through the
shortcomings of this pragmatic mentality. The report contains much technical
jargon and practical recommendations to improve US security; but more
significantly, it has completely ignored the political roots of the
American insecurity.
The report described
some of the American policies as a source of Muslim animosity towards
the US and cited a telling story about Marwan al-Shahhi, one of the
two pilots who slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center.
According to the
report, "when someone asked [Shahhi] why he and Muhammad Atta never
laughed, Shahhi retorted: How can I laugh when people are dying in Palestine?"
(page 162).
After having accepted
that "policies have consequences", the report's authors make
an attempt at justification: "That does not mean US choices have
been wrong," (page 376). This is a major shortcoming by the 9-11
Commission to explain one of the most tragic and horrific events in
world history.
Instead of helping
Americans understand the root causes of the 9-11 disaster, the commission
has interpreted the whole event in PR language, arguing that the issue
is the US's inability to convey its message and show its bright face
to the Muslim world.
Therefore, according
to the commission report, the problem can be easily resolved by sending
western textbooks and providing more funding in the communications media
for broadcasting in Arabic, Urdu or Pashto. (Urdu is a language widely
used in the Indian subcontinent and Pashtu is the language used by Pashtuns
in Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan.)
Evidently, however,
the 9-11 hijackers did not need western textbooks, because they had
already studied them and graduated from American and German universities.
This is true of both the planners and the executors of the attacks.
The mastermind of
the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, studied at "Chowan College,
a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina" (9-11 report,
page 146), and also at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State
University. Three of the "pilots" of the attacks studied at
German universities; all four of them received their pilot training
at American aviation schools. They had no problem relating to the western
culture or education.
What an American
expert called "the gates-and-guards approach" to American
security is a very shortsighted approach, as it ignores the political
roots of the American insecurity.
If "killing
a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms" is not necessarily the
same as winning, as Rumsfeld confessed, then other ways of thinking
and acting should be explored. Promoting justice, dialogue and reconciliation
are among those alternatives.
But the American
political establishment seems to prefer the comfort of ignorance to
the discomfort of bitter truth. Sadly, many ordinary Americans and non-Americans
may have to pay the price for this indolence. Martin Luther King said:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
The wisdom of that
great American humanist is what we all need to understand today.
Mohamed El-Moctar
El-Shinqiti is a Mauritanian writer living in the US.