Fields of Blood (73 page)

Just over a year after 9/11,
Louis Atiyat Allah would write an essay for a
jihad website after watching
al-Omari’s martyr video. There is absurdity in Allah’s extravagant eulogy, which imagines the hijackers—“mountains of courage, stars of masculinity, and galaxies of merit”—weeping for joy as the planes hit the target. However, it was obviously written to rebut widespread criticism of the 9/11 perpetrators. It was not only “moderates” who deplored the atrocity; even in radical circles, Muslims were apparently objecting that the
Quran forbids suicide; they believed that the hijackers had acted irresponsibly. Their action had been counterproductive too: not only had the atrocity inspired worldwide sympathy for America, but it had weakened the
Palestinian cause by strengthening Israel’s bond with the
United States. In his article rebutting these complaints, Allah retorted that the hijackers had not “committed suicide”; nor were they simply “crazy people who found planes to hijack.” No, they had had a clearly defined political objective: “to smash the foundations of the tyrant and to demolish the idol of the age, America.” They had also struck a blow against the structural violence of the American-dominated
Middle East, rejecting the “silly [rulers] of
Ibn Saud, and Husni [Mubarak], and all the other retards who falsely call themselves ‘those in authority’ ” (Quran 4:59) but who were actually “nothing but tentacles of the octopus upon you, with the head of the [octopus] being in
New York and Washington DC.” The purpose of this operation was to take a “
terrifying historical leap which will … extricate the Muslims in one fell swoop from humiliation, dependency and servility.”
⁷¹

These political objectives were certainly uppermost in
Bin Laden’s mind too in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, although he would also invoke the divine will. In the videotape released on October 7, 2001, he crowed: “Here is America struck by God in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed,”
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buildings that had been carefully selected as “America’s icons of military and economic power.”
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Five times Bin Laden applied the word
kafir
(“infidel”) to the United States, though each time it referred not to the religious beliefs of America but to its violation of Muslim sovereignty in Arabia and Palestine:
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on the same day, President
George W. Bush announced
Operation Enduring Freedom, a
U.S.-led war against the
Taliban in Afghanistan. Like the First
Crusade against Islam, this military offensive was couched in the language of liberty: “We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere.”
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He assured the people of Afghanistan that the United States had no quarrel with them, would strike only at military targets, and promised airdrops of food, medicine, and supplies. Also, just a week following the attacks,
Bush had made clear that America’s quarrel was not with Islam: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”
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Like Bin Laden, Bush, in this carefully secular presentation, also saw the world starkly divided into two camps, one good, the other evil: “In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves.”
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Bush’s Manichean worldview reflected the thinking of the neoconservatives prominent in his administration, who had a semimystical belief that nothing must impede America’s unique historical mission in the twenty-first century. The “
War on Terror” would be waged against any forces that threatened America’s global leadership. Indeed, neoconservatism has been described as “a faith-based system” because it required absolute fidelity to its doctrine, permitting no deviation from its beliefs.
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And so the politics of the secular nation was imbued with a quasi-religious fervor and conviction. The United States had a mission to promote the global free market, the One True Economy, everywhere. It was not a religious message but one that nevertheless resonated strongly as such with Bush’s base of 100 million American evangelical Christians, who still subscribed to the vision of America as a “city on a hill.”

The first three months of the war against Afghanistan, where Taliban gave sanctuary to
al-Qaeda, seemed remarkably successful. The Taliban were defeated, al-Qaeda personnel scattered, and the United States established two large military bases, at
Bagram and
Kandahar. But there were two ominous developments. Even though Bush had given instructions that prisoners be treated humanely in accordance with the
Geneva Conventions, it seems that in practice troops were told that they could “deviate slightly from the rules” since terrorists were not covered by the laws relating to prisoners of war. Bush had been careful to insist that this was not a war against Islam, but that was not how it appeared on the ground, where there was little punctiliousness about religious sensibilities.
On
September 26, 2002, a convoy of
mujahidin were captured in
Takhar. According to one Muslim account, U.S. troops “hung one mujahid by his arms for six days, questioning him about Usama bin Laden.” Eventually they gave up and asked him about his faith: he replied that

Despite their manifest contempt for Islam, this does not mean that U.S. troops saw themselves as fighting a war that was specifically directed against Islam. Rather, the unconventional nature of the campaign, defined as a “
War on
Terror,” a “different kind of war,” had changed the rules of engagement. With this terminology the
United States had liberated itself from the rules of conventional conflict.
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Ground troops seem to have absorbed the view that terrorists were not entitled to the same protection as regular combatants.

Since 9/11, the United States, which still regards itself as a uniquely benign hegemon, has, with the support of its allies, indefinitely retained people who deny any involvement in any conflict, conducted violent and humiliating interrogations, or else sent prisoners to countries known to practice torture. As early as December 2001, hundreds of prisoners—by means of “extraordinary rendition”—were being detained in Guantánamo Bay and Diego Garcia without due process and were subjected to “stress and duress” (i.e., torture).
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The frequent—almost routine—reports of abuse in these U.S. prisons suggest that military and political authorities may have condoned a policy of systematic brutality.
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The second disturbing development in the War on Terror was the large number of
civilian casualties. About three thousand civilians were killed in the first three months—roughly the same number as had died in
New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington on September 11. Thousands more displaced Afghans would die later in
refugee camps.
⁸³
As the war dragged on, the casualties became catastrophic: it has been estimated that 16,179 Afghan civilians perished between 2006 and 2012.
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There was a second wave of terrorist incidents, directed by the “second
generation” of
al-Qaeda, which included the failed plot of British “shoe bomber”
Richard Reid (December 2001), the Djerba bombing in
Tunisia (April 2002), and the
Bali nightclub attack (October 2002), which killed over two hundred people. After
Iyman Faris’s foiled plot to destroy the
Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents.
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But just as the situation seemed to be improving, in March 2003, the
United States,
Britain, and their allies invaded
Iraq, despite considerable opposition from the international community and strong protests throughout the Muslim world. The reasons for this invasion were allegations that
Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had furnished support for al-Qaeda, both of which eventually proved to be groundless.

Again, the United States presented itself as the bearer of freedom. “If we must use force,”
Bush had promised the American people, “the United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq.”
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“We don’t seek an empire,” he insisted on another occasion. “Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.”
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Cheered on by such neoimperialist intellectuals as
Niall Ferguson, the Bush regime believed that it could use the colonial methods of invasion and occupation for purposes of liberation.
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America would force Iraq into the free global economy and change the politics of the
Middle East by creating a liberal, democratic, and pro-Western Arab state, one that would also support
Israel, embrace market
capitalism, and at the same time provide the United States with a military base and access to vast oil reserves.

On May 1, 2003, Bush’s Viking jet swooped onto the deck of USS
Abraham Lincoln,
where the president announced a victorious end to the Iraq War.
⁸⁹
“We have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” he told the assembled troops. “Because of you, the tyrant is fallen and Iraq is free.” In this political message too were the overtones of a holy war. This war of the American nation was directed by God himself. “All of you—all in this generation of our military—have taken up the highest calling of history,” he proclaimed, quoting the Prophet
Isaiah: “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope—a message that is ancient and ever new. To the captives, ‘come out’—and to those in darkness ‘be free.’ ”
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Use of this biblical verse, which
Jesus had quoted
to describe his own mission,
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revealed the messianic streak of the Bush administration.

It was ironic that Bush announced the liberation of captives. In October 2003, the media published photographs of U.S. military police abusing Iraqi prisoners in
Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s notorious prison; later, almost identical cruelty was shown to have taken place in British-run prisons. These photographs were a cruder vision of the official U.S. media presentation of the Iraq War. Hooded, naked, writhing on the ground, the Iraqis were depicted as dehumanized, craven, bestial, and utterly dominated by America’s superior power. The cocky stance of the low-ranking GIs implied: “We are high, they are low; we are clean, they are dirty; we are strong and brave, they are weak and cowardly; we are lordly, they are virtually animals; we are God’s chosen, they are estranged from everything divine.”
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“The photos are us,” the late
Susan Sontag declared.
Nazis were not the only people to commit
atrocities; Americans do so too, “when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion.”
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Clearly the GIs saw nothing untoward in their behavior and had no fear of punishment. “It was just for fun,” said Private
Lynndie England, who had appeared in the photographs walking a prisoner on a leash like a dog. They behaved in this way, the official investigation concluded, “simply because they could.”
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Within a month of Bush’s carrier speech, Iraq had descended into chaos. Most Iraqis gave no credence to Bush’s exalted rhetoric; instead they were convinced that the United States simply wanted their oil and intended to use their country as a military base from which to defend Israel. They may have been glad to get rid of Saddam, but they did not regard the American and British troops as liberators. “They’re walking over my heart,” said one
Baghdad resident. “Liberate us from what?” demanded another. “We have [our own] traditions, morals, customs.”
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The Iraqi cleric
Sheikh Muhammad Bashir complained that if the Americans had brought freedom to the country, it was not for the Iraqis:

The overwhelming 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, the iconic “city of mosques,” has been called the Arab 9/11: hundreds of civilians were killed and 200,000 made homeless. By the following year 24,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq and 70,000 injured.
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Instead of bringing peace to the region, the occupation inspired an insurgency of Iraqis and
mujahidin from
Saudi Arabia,
Syria, and Jordan, who responded to this foreign invasion with the heretofore unusual technique of suicide bombing, eventually breaking the long-standing record of the
Tamil Tigers.
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As to global
terrorism, the situation has become only more dangerous than it was before the Iraq War.
⁹⁹
Following the assassination of
Bin Laden in 2011,
al-Qaeda still thrives. Its strength was always more conceptual than organizational—global revolutionary fervor combining an intense political militancy with dubious claims to divine sanction. Its branch affiliates, including the one founded in Iraq (as of this writing increasingly active there and also in the Syrian civil war) as well as those in
Somalia and
Yemen, continue to promote a restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate objective of their interventions in local politics. Elsewhere, in the absence of any tightly organized cadre, there are thousands of freelance aspirants to terrorism worldwide—radicalized in Internet chat rooms, self-trained, poorly educated, and lacking any clear practical objective. Such was the case with
Michael Adebolajo and
Michael Adebolawe, two British-born converts to Islam, who murdered the British soldier
Lee Rigby in 2013 in southeastern
London, claiming to avenge the deaths of Muslim innocents by British troops. Like
Muhammad Bouyeri, who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker
Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and the Madrid train bombers, who killed 191 people in the same year, they were not directly linked to al-Qaeda.
¹⁰⁰
Some self-starters do seek out the al-Qaeda leadership for credentialing and in hope of being sent to some important operational theater, but it seems that trainers in
Pakistan prefer to send them home to destabilize Western countries instead—as happened with the 7/7 London bombings (July 2005), the
Australian bombing plan (November 2005), the Toronto plot (June 2006), and the foiled British project of blowing up several planes over the Atlantic (August 2006).