Colossus (25 page)

The real difficulty the United States faced, however, was that exerting any direct influence in the gulf depended on being able to maintain some kind of military presence there. Yet one consequence of the Iranian Revolution was to make the Saudi regime distinctly unenthusiastic about giving American troops access to gulf bases. Although in the immediate aftermath of the revolution in Tehran, the Saudis welcomed the arrival of a squadron of American F-15s, which were followed in October 1980 by AWACS-equipped aircraft, they drew the line at Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s “strategic consensus,” which implied wider access to gulf bases for American troops. Significantly, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force set up to apply the Carter doctrine was at first based far away in Tampa, Florida. In May 1981 the Saudi-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council declared that the entire gulf region should be kept “free of international conflicts, particularly the presence of military fleets and foreign bases.”
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Only when it became clear that both Iran and Iraq were prepared to attack neutral shipping in the gulf did an American naval presence become acceptable. In 1987 Kuwaiti tankers were reflagged as American ships in order to justify U.S. naval protection.
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Finally, in 1990, the Saudis relented and allowed American troops on their soil. It was to prove a decision fraught with danger for both parties. Unwittingly, the American empire had made a new and dangerous enemy.

THE LOGIC OF TERROR

Why did Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, order twenty-one of his followers, most of them also Saudis, to hijack four planes and fly them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and (in all likelihood) the White House? In their Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against
the Jews and the Crusaders of February 23, 1998, he and his cosignatories gave three reasons for issuing their notorious fatwa “to kill the Americans and their allies”:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

… Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance … the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres …

Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

The aim of killing Americans was therefore clear: it was in order “to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”
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Bin Laden echoed these words in his interview published in
Time
magazine eleven months later and just eight months before the 9/11 attacks.
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His goals, in short, were to get American forces out of Saudi Arabia, to get them out of the Middle East altogether, to overthrow Arab governments sympathetic to the United States and to destroy the state of Israel. Subsequent statements attributed to him are consistent on these points.
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Some Western commentators are deceived by bin Laden’s rhetoric of pan-Islamic, global jihad into imagining that he is a genuine harbinger of a clash of civilizations.
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It would be more accurate to say that bin Laden is the offspring of the Middle East’s distinctive civilization of clashes, a retarded political culture in which terrorism has long been a substitute for both peaceful politics and conventional warfare. No doubt it is gratifying to imagine a collective Muslim sense of historical disenchantment, an old
superiority complex that centuries of historic decline have transformed into “a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression.”
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Yet the ideology of al Qa’eda has relatively little in common with the belief systems of the majority of people in the largest Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Turkey, to say nothing of the immigrant Muslim communities of the West. Even bin Laden’s religious beliefs bear the idiosyncratic hallmarks of Wahhabism, which has historically been confined to the deserts of Arabia. Al Qa’eda is better understood as the extremist wing of a specifically Arab political religion, a term recently and illuminatingly used by the historian Michael Burleigh to capture the essential characteristics of nazism: its messianic leadership, its need to indoctrinate, its appetite for persecution.
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This is not, it should be noted, the same as saying that al Qa’eda is the product of “Islamo-fascism,” though the two certainly have violence and anti-Semitism in common.
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The Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s were never especially adept at terrorism, preferring to seize control of existing nation-states and to make war using traditional military forces. “Islamo-nihilism” would be nearer the mark, or perhaps “Islamo-bolshevism,” for we should not forget that in their early years Lenin and Stalin were also terrorists. Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance between “Hereditary Nobleman Ulyanov,” as the young Lenin liked to style himself, hatching his plans for the overthrow of tsarism from dingy Swiss hotels, and the renegade Saudi millionaire, orchestrating the downfall of America from a secluded Afghan cave. That should also remind us that “Western civilization” (unless we take that to mean only the novel Protestant-Deist-Catholic-Jewish fusion that is today’s American culture) has itself been capable in the past of producing political religions just as intolerant and bloodthirsty as today’s Islamo-bolshevism.

Terror
ism
—meaning the sporadic use of violence by nonstate forces in pursuit of political goals—is nothing new, least of all in the Middle East and least of all against imperial powers. By the 1940s the British were all too familiar with it, since radical minorities among their Irish and Bengali subjects had long engaged in campaigns of assassination in pursuit of independence. Terrorism had already played a decisive role in bringing down the Habsburg and Romanov empires. Since the 1860s men like the Russian anarchist Sergei Nechaev had been preaching a doctrine of terrorism
in which violence—notionally to further the “revolution”—came close to becoming an end in itself. It was Nechaev who wrote the
Revolutionary Catechism
(1868), which declared: “The revolutionary knows only a single science: the science of destruction … [His] purpose is only one: the quickest and most sure destruction of this filthy system.”
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Another European, the Italian Carlo Pisacane, coined the phrase “propaganda by deed.”
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Joseph Conrad too would have grasped at once the thinking behind bin Laden’s choice of targets. Readers of his novel
The Secret Agent
will recall the words of Mr. Vladimir, the subversive mastermind who plots to bomb the Greenwich Observatory as one of a “series of outrages … executed here in this country.” “These outrages,” Vladimir explains, “must be sufficiently startling—effective. Let them be directed against buildings, for instance…. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy … [and be] the most alarming display of ferocious imbecility.” It must, in short, be a symbolic act that speaks for itself. “What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognize—eh, Mr. Verloc?” Vladimir asks his intended bomber.
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A hundred years ago the “fetish of the hour” was science; hence the attack on the observatory. In 2001 it was economics or, to be precise, economic globalization; hence, it might be argued, the attack on the World Trade Center.

Yet terrorism in the real world is about more than symbolism. It is the continuation of war by other means—by those who are too weak to wage proper war in pursuit of their political goals. The characteristic feature of terrorism is that its violence is sporadic. Its technology is primitive. Its operatives are, contrary to popular belief, highly vulnerable to countermeasures—especially when the terrorists have no bases on foreign soil from which to operate. The terrorist’s resources are far inferior to those of the states against which he fights, so that most terrorist organizations depend on a combination of thieving and begging for their funds. It is possible for a terrorist organization to operate in a country without external sources of support, but it requires a secure locality where its members can prepare their attacks without fear of interdiction. When this is not available, the terrorists are bound to seek assistance from abroad. Countries that offer them support—or even mere sympathy—are unlikely to be targets for their violence. Conversely, foreign countries that assist the other side—the government
against which the terrorists are fighting—may well find themselves drawn into the conflict.

Humiliated on the battlefield, the Arab states early on resorted to the sponsorship of terrorism by Palestinian exiles. Operating from bases in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, Palestinian fedayeen (literally “self-sacrifices”) mounted numerous attacks on Israeli civilians after 1949. In the six years from 1951 to 1956, over four hundred Israelis were killed and nine hundred injured by these attacks. After the Six-Day War, the Palestine Liberation Organization operated with impunity from Jordanian territory until Israeli pressure forced its expulsion in 1970.
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The PLO then moved to southern Lebanon, a country whose subsequent descent into civil war created an almost perfect seedbed for terrorist organizations (something the Syrian invasion in 1976 did nothing to alter). Terrorist attacks by PLO guerrillas based in Lebanon prompted the Israelis to invade that country in the wake of a particularly bloody hijacking in March 1978, though they subsequently agreed to hand over the border zone to a United Nations force. Four years later, in June 1982, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon, besieging the PLO’s stronghold of West Beirut and once again driving their leaders out this time to distant Tunisia. The Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was not content with this. His cynical decision to unleash the Israelis’ Maronite Christian allies on Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla led directly to a horrific massacre that claimed between seven hundred and a thousand lives. Amid fierce international condemnation—in which the United States joined—UN peacekeepers were again deployed. Among them were several hundred U.S. marines.

The PLO and its associates had for many years waged their war on two fronts: not only directly against Israel but indirectly against Israelis or supposed Israeli sympathizers abroad. Terrorism is, however, a many-headed hydra. Though the PLO had been struck a severe blow by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1980s saw the emergence of new groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas. Whereas the PLO had owed more to nationalism and Marxism, this new generation of terrorists identified themselves pri
marily with Islam. What set their tactics apart from those of the 1960s and 1970s was their resort to suicide bombing and their much greater readiness to attack Americans. Less significance should probably be attached to the first of these traits. In most countries at most times, terrorists who have committed acts of murder have been in effect suicidal, since they have either died
in flagrante
or been executed subsequently for their crimes. Those experts who were momentarily baffled by the willingness of the 9/11 attackers to “kill themselves so as to kill others” were forgetting the many precedents for such behavior.
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Far more important was the fact that the terrorists now considered Americans legitimate targets. The turning point in this regard came on April 18, 1983, when a suicide bomber attacked the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including the CIA’s entire Middle Eastern team.
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Six months later, in another kamikaze mission, a truck packed with TNT was driven into a Lebanese barracks where American marines were billeted, killing 241 of them. The same tactic killed 4 people when it was used against the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.

Such has been the impact of the attacks of September 2001 that it is easy to forget that the number of international terrorist incidents has in fact been declining since its peak in the mid-1980s (see
figure 9
). There were three times as many attacks in 1987 as there were in 2002. But at the same time (though with a dip in the years 1994–95), the proportion of attacks directed at Americans and American interests has been rising. As table 4 shows, more than one in ten of all the casualties of cross-border terrorism since 1991 has been an American. The World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993. This was followed by the bombings of the U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998 and the attack on the USS
Cole
at Aden in October 2000. It was hardly a wild prophecy when the Commission on National Security, chaired by Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman, warned in its first September 1999 report: “Terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”
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To repeat, the surprising thing about 9/11 was simply that it had not happened before. The United States had for years subsidized Israel. It had shored up the shah’s regime in Iraq. It had deployed troops in Arabia.