Seven Events That Made America America (30 page)

Hence, at the same time that a new generation of clerics called for “Islamic republics” based on sharia law, the Muslim countries were reminded on a daily basis of their scientific, cultural, and economic inferiority. Much of the blame, of course, lay with the Islamic cultures themselves. As Middle East historian Bernard Lewis pointed out, the decline in agricultural output in the region rested in part on the “low esteem in which the cultivation of the earth and those engaged in it were held by government, the upper classes, and to some extent even religion.”
⁵⁶
As late as 2008, a visitor to Qatar noted that most of the nation’s foreign residents were servants who attended to every need of the Qatari citizens:

The writer found that non-Qataris performed
every
“job,” from banking and insurance to executive positions—that the citizens did absolutely no real work. Every shop, no matter how expensive the merchandise, was run by expatriates, and citizens paid no taxes. Overtaxed Westerners may see this as nirvana, but in reality no native truly earned anything, and knew it. With work and investment comes pride; without citizens’ having a real stake in society, including paying taxes, creativity disappears entirely, as does self-esteem. (A 1978 study of lottery winners discovered that over time they soon reverted to previous levels of satisfaction, deriving less pleasure from everyday events such as buying clothes or talking to friends. “Lucky wealth,” obtained without commensurate work or investment, yielded
dis
satisfaction.)
⁵⁸

Obviously, the Palestinians were not frustrated because of their wealth, nor, at the time, did that apply to the majority of Iraqis or Iranians, but the results were the same. Lewis summarized Islam’s descent as a “development . . . overshadowed by a growing awareness” of the loss of “creativity, energy, and power,” and “a passionate desire to restore . . . bygone glories.”
⁵⁹
Instead, military defeats constituted acts of shame in the Arab mind. Virtually none of the reasons given by apologists for Islamic violence—poverty or lack of education—accurately characterized the actual terrorists, hijackers, or suicide bombers. One study of four hundred terrorists concluded that three-quarters were middle class and two-thirds had a college education; and a group of medical doctors were responsible for the failed Glasgow bombing plot of 2007.
⁶⁰

Islam saw itself as challenged by only one force: Christianity, and, more specifically, Christianity as personified in Western culture. Over time, the Islamic world had defeated the pagan Eastern cultures, even the Mongols, whose onetime presence in the Middle East is virtually invisible today. While the Mongols accomplished militarily what Christian Europe could never do (i.e., military conquest of the Islamic lands), the dominance of Western militaries was becoming obvious by the Middle Ages, when European knights first bested Muslim armies at Tours and then later at Malta, and even in the defeat in which the Muslims captured Byzantium—but which was achieved only through the acquisition of Western cannons (which themselves could not be mass-produced by the Turks).
⁶¹
Bernard Lewis points out that in virtually every area of life, Islam has adopted Western traditions and cultures—its architecture almost exclusively uses Western techniques, its literature has become dominated by newspapers and novels rather than Koranic verse, and even a revolutionary Shiite government such as Iran’s finds it necessary to produce . . . a constitution! The West has dominated the infrastructure, amenities, and services of virtually all Muslim cities, and there is “no desire to reverse or even deflect the processes of modernization” except in the rare case of Afghanistan’s Taliban.
⁶²
As an Algerian put it, his country “was once the granary of Rome, and now it has to import cereals to make bread. It is a land of flocks and gardens, and it imports meat and fruit. It is rich in oil and gas, and it has a foreign debt of twenty-five billion dollars and two million unemployed.”
⁶³

Nevertheless, the point is not whether the Islamic fundamentalist revolution unfolded because of shame, poverty, military ineptitude, or any other factor; the point is that it was real and overlooked. No event should have shaken the proponents of the “moderate Muslim” view more than the revolution in Iran in 1979, which filled the government with the very radicalized Shiites that Western apologists said did
not
constitute the “average Muslim.” Despite the fact that no financial crisis or widespread unemployment existed prior to the revolution, the new theocratic regime was hugely popular, with more than 10 percent of the population involved in the demonstrations. (In contrast, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Romanian Revolution of 1989 all had less than 1 percent of the population involved in the rebellion.) Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally (who, thanks to both radical Islamic and Soviet propaganda, was depicted as a U.S. “puppet”), had modernized Iran to a level approaching that of Turkey by 1978. The shah’s father, Reza Pahlavi, had abolished sharia law in favor of Western jurisprudence, prohibited traditional Islamic clothing, and banned the separation of sexes and the veiling of women. Each of these actions prompted clashes with the Muslim clerics, including a rebellion at a shrine in 1935. A combination of British and Soviet troops installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after his father was deposed in 1941, and when a revolution drove him out in 1953, Americans organized a military-led coup that put him back in power. Iran constituted a key southern roadblock to Soviet expansion, and along with Pakistan made up part of the “containment” fence. Seeing an opportunity to foment dissension, the Soviets played on the shah’s habit of ignoring his own constitution and counted on popular reaction to the brutality of the SAVAK secret police. Imams had no more use for the pagan Soviet Union than they did for the (in their eyes) apostate shah, but they allied temporarily with the Communists in order to oust Pahlavi.

One particular cleric, the Shia Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had opposed the 1963 reforms that broke up large landed estates (including those of the mosques and religious foundations), granted women the right to vote, and allowed non-Muslims to hold political offices. Following riots and confrontations with Khomeini’s forces, the SAVAK placed him under house arrest, then, in 1964, exiled him. From 1964 to 1979, Khomeini fomented a new ideology of Islamic revolution, based on the principle that the West was a plague to be stamped out.
⁶⁴
Jihad and martyrdom, he preached, were essential parts of Islam. As for most of his fellow clerics, the martyrdom part never seemed to reach Khomeini. He promulgated the concept of
Velayat-e Faqih
(guardianship of the [Islamic] jurists) to enforce sharia law. Some Iranians rejected Khomeini, including constitutionalists and leftists, but both groups would ultimately be crushed under revolutionary Islam.

When the oil boom brought large numbers of rural, uneducated, and traditionalist Muslims to the cities, they drifted into the revolutionary circles. Inflation ate away their wages. Rumors of SAVAK killing or kidnapping political opponents took on a life of their own. With every new demonstration or protest, the shah’s government seemed to violate still more religious traditions, adding to the ranks of the dissenters. At the same time, actions by the shah to crack down and restore order resulted in a new scolding by Jimmy Carter, which emboldened the revolutionaries even further. At any rate, the shah was finished after Black Friday (September 8), when security forces (many of them ethnic Kurds) shot into crowds, killing dozens whom the clerics insisted were “massacred by Zionist troops.”
⁶⁵
The remaining government, suffering from strikes, sought to negotiate with Khomeini, who quickly returned to the country, arriving to chants of “Islam, Islam, Khomeini We Will Follow You!” After naming a competing prime minister and benefiting from the defection of large numbers of soldiers, Khomeini took over permanently when rebels won the streets. By April 1979, the first “Islamic Republic”—formed with a theocratic constitution—came into being.

Without question, the Carter administration was caught unaware, and had “no clear policy” on Iran.
⁶⁶
Only six months before the shah fled, the CIA assured Carter that it “is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.”
⁶⁷
The CIA’s association with the shah’s regime made matters even worse. Yet Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, assured the shah that he had the full support of the United States. A year later, the ailing shah was admitted to an American hospital for cancer treatments, causing a new wave of protests in Iran. Khomeini demanded that the shah be shipped back home to face execution, and Carter refused. On November 4, 1979, mobs labeling themselves the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” crashed into the compound of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two of the diplomats and staff as prisoners. A half-dozen diplomats escaped and held out at the Canadian and Swiss embassies. Carter dallied, both unsure as to how to proceed and temperamentally unsuited to dramatic military action; his inaction only convinced the fundamentalists of his weakness and lack of resolve. Underscoring Carter’s seeming ineptitude, he later launched a complicated rescue mission that failed abysmally, and Americans were subjected to film of Iranians picking over the charred bodies of American soldiers and airmen.

Iran, naturally, played a part in Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election. Later, leftists would assert that Reagan had planned an “October surprise” that would allow a successful resolution of the hostage crisis in time to benefit himself. In fact, a congressional task force found no evidence whatsoever to support such nonsense, but there was discussion among some of Reagan’s advisers of working with the republicans inside Iran, where Sadegh Ghotbzadeh urged a deal with Reagan, should he win. Abolhassan Banisadr, Ghotbzadeh’s rival, also claimed that he’d had discussions in Spain with representatives sent from Reagan (and later disavowed those comments).
⁶⁸
Banisadr went so far as to warn the ayatollah that Reagan’s election “would signify a change in the American mentality [to] a shift to the concept of intervention in the affairs of others.”
⁶⁹
Khomeini snorted, “So what if Reagan wins? . . . He and Carter are both enemies of Islam.”
⁷⁰

Indeed, negotiations that had moved along briskly suddenly stalled at Iran’s end, mostly out of a hatred for Carter. But privately even Khomeini feared Reagan’s “cowboy” reputation.
⁷¹
In the October 27 debates, Reagan reiterated his “no-negotiations-with-terrorists” mantra, termed the whole episode a national humiliation, and called for a congressional investigation into Carter’s handling of it. (Ironically, the hostages were released and arrived on U.S. soil only minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981.)

Certainly with the Iranian revolution there was little doubt that Islamic radicalism had changed dramatically from the actions of a few to the voice of an entire nation. Jihadism had also now revealed itself to be a religious, not a political, movement with certain core influences which the West had yet to grasp. Central to those influences was the Islamic emphasis on honor and shame. Similar in many ways to World War II-era Japanese Bushido culture, many Muslim societies (though certainly not all) suffered from a heightened sense of shame. Japanese military culture demanded nothing less than
gyokusai
(“glorious self-annihilation”). Kamikaze attacks relied entirely on fanatical “honor deaths.”
⁷²
In the Middle East, these were not new concepts. T. E. Lawrence described the importance of
sharraf
, or honor, in his
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. A modern authority on Arab psychology notes that Islamic society “worships strength and has no compassion for weakness”; John Laffin’s
The Arab Mind Considered: A Need for Understanding
(1975) recounted the Arab’s “sexual frustrations and obsessions, his paralysing [sic] sense of shame.”
⁷³
Similarly, Nonie Darwish related the experience of women in such shame-based cultures, where the slightest misstep would bring dishonor to an entire family, and the careful hiding of possessions, so that envious people would not give them the “evil eye.”
⁷⁴

Ronald Reagan, stepping into the Middle East vipers’ nest, was therefore still guided by a worldview that reflected two basic interpretations of the region. First, he and his advisers blamed Soviet mischief in the region for some of the turmoil, which they determined could therefore be offset by U.S. power. This overlaid the tendency of Washington to view everything within the prism of traditional Western-style government boundaries.
⁷⁵
But the pot was boiling with or without the Soviets’ help. Second, the Reagan administration perpetuated the view that Islamic radicalism remained a minor, but growing, influence, and that more traditional motivations, such as territory, prosperity, and above all, peace, would be valued in reaching a long-term agreement between the Muslims and Jews.

The last in a long line of events to challenge such a worldview occurred in April 1983, when Hezbollah, one of the newest terror groups, sent a suicide bomber driving a delivery van laden with two thousand pounds of explosives into the compound of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Driving the stolen van through an outbuilding, the jihadist plowed the truck-bomb into the lobby and killed 63 troops and wounded another 120. Yet Reagan’s reaction—to send Habib to discuss both Israeli and Syrian troop withdrawals—indicated he hadn’t yet fully grasped the motivations of Hezbollah (occasionally operating under the name “Islamic Jihad”), which was funded and supported by Iran. Congress, as was typical, voted economic aid for Lebanon. The embassy itself was moved to a more secure location, but a week before the U.S. Marines arrived, another car bomb killed 20 Lebanese and two American soldiers at an embassy annex. (After the Marine barracks was bombed, there would be more car attacks on the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in December 1983.)