At an event at the New America Foundation, a member of the audience asked the question (I paraphrase from memory), “Why does Al-Qaida hate America so? Why did they fly those planes?”
While not pretending to fully understand the psychology of suicidal psychopaths and the maniacs who stay safe, sending them out to die, it is necessary to at least attempt to understand an adversary’s motivation in order to find the best way to defeat that opponent.
One thing makes this possible: They have told us why they are doing what they are. All we have to do is take them at their word!
First of all, it may be necessary to dispose of what may have been the questioner’s unspoken assumption. This was that America has done things which could possibly justify (though never excuse) the actions of the hijackers. The subtext of the question is that America’s meddling in the world causing poverty and injustice had at last come home to roost.
America has not always has been blameless in its treatment of people and governments in the world. There are plenty of cases in which the U.S. has created great hardship and injustice. However, it is ridiculous to argue that America is responsible for all poverty and injustice everywhere. Both because it takes tremendous hubris to claim that we have enough power to either create or prevent all problems, and because the claim of American liability allows other governments to successfully avoid taking the responsibility they should acknowledge for the consequences of their own choices.
It is also rather odd that the millionaire son of a billionaire Saudi family, all of whose wealth was handed to him by American interests, can pretend to represent the downtrodden. More on this later.
Instead of blaming America, I propose the radical notion that we take Osama bin Laden at his word. Read what he has said in his fatwas calling for the killing of Americans, and accept that he is neither lying nor holding back any hidden agenda.
Reason One: We of the West are infidels. We do not believe in the One True God, and for that reason alone, deserve to die. Quoting from the Holy Koran, bin Laden’s fatwa opens with these words:
“Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book ‘But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)’; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said ‘I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.’ ” (emphasis added)
Let’s be clear about this. Bin Laden is not interested in tolerance of other points of view. He and his fellow Wahabis are not hampered by doubts of the rightness of their cause, or concerns that we in the West would have regarding justice, freedom, or well-being. They are fighting on behalf of God, and all other viewpoints are wrong, punishable by death.
More than that, their definition of an apostate eligible for the death penalty is quite all-inclusive. To them, infidels include not only all Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Atheists, and Secularists in the world, but also any Muslim, such as Shi’ites, Sufis, Alawis, B’hai or anyone else who does not live their lives according to the strict tenets set by Mohammed ibn abd ul-Wahab and his allied interpreters over three hundred years ago. All who do not completely agree with their beliefs deserve death, because they are denying the true word of Allah. This is Wahabism. This is Salafiism. This is the guiding view, exported by the Saudis through textbooks and other means, which has become the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. (This is also the reason that tying Saddam Hussein to al-Qa'ida was so delusional.)
Any expectations that we may have that they think like us are both misguided and dangerous. They don’t, and they say so.
They don’t trust what they refer to as the Crusader Invaders, so to say that Iraq invaded a neighbor Arab Muslim state, and the U.S. military was called on to defeat and expel that army, and stays in Saudi Arabia to ensure Saudi security, has no meaning for them. Unbelievers simply should not be there. He and his fellow mujahedin defeated the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and brought about the fall of the Soviet Empire, and could have defeated Saddam’s army without help, too. (Don’t mention the massive aid and supplies that America gave the Afghan mujahedin; that was immaterial compared with their faith in God.) And even if the U.S. military were to leave Saudi Arabia, even if Israel were to leave the Middle East, the very existence of unbelievers is intolerable to the true faithful, and there would be other reasons found to murder us all.
Add to this, their resentment of the “humiliation” suffered by Arabs because the U.S. and Western military defended them, rather than they defending themselves. Get your mind around it: the many times U.S. and Western forces have acted to defend the lives of Muslims are grievances, not benefits. Often, as well, our aid to other Muslims doesn’t count, because as I have said, people such as the rulers of Saudi Arabia and any other Arab state don’t count as true Muslims according to al Qa’ida’s intolerant standards.
Reason Two: Oddly enough, economics. Bin Laden shares with much of the rest of the world a lack of understanding of the meaning of wealth. He does not know that wealth is a property, not a thing. To the extent he and his followers think about such things at all, they do not know that money is an action, not an object. They do not know that value is an opinion and that price is knowledge; these are not objective qualities inherent in a thing. And that makes a difference.
In this world view, during the original Caliphate, Arabs and Muslims owned a disproportionately large share of the wealth of the world, which is as it should be. Then came the Crusades – which still continue today – and the armies of the West came and stole the wealth belonging to its rightful owners, Arabs and Muslims. This, and this alone, is the reason that the West, including America (which didn’t exist when the Crusades began, but never mind), is now wealthy and prosperous, and the people of the Middle East are poor and powerless. Al-Qaida’s campaign, then, is meant both to kill unbelievers and to restore their stolen wealth to its rightful owners, defined naturally enough as Al-Qaida’s members and cooperating groups.
All that is clear from, again, the fatwa, which explains:
“The Arabian Peninsula has never--since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas--been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations. All this is happening at a time when nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.”
This claim is made even more difficult to accept, as I have said, coming from a Saudi, the beneficiary of so much American money poured into the Kingdom to pay for its oil. But if you believe that wealth is fixed, then it is clear that the West can only be more prosperous than others because it is extracting their wealth without giving a fair return. Bin Laden has written, “As a result of the policy imposed on the country, especially in the field of oil industry where production is restricted or expanded and prices are fixed to suit the American economy ignoring the economy of the country.” He believes that all the billions of dollars pumped into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States were an underpayment for the true value of the oil. After all, most people in those countries are still underprivileged and poor, and most people in America and the West, according to his standards, live in wealth and decadence.
The idea that wealth is created by human action, by the workings of a free market, is not only inconceivable to these people, it is blasphemy. It implies that humans can create something, when their faith insists that only Allah can create.
It seems absurd that anyone can believe that the wealth of the world is a fixed sum. More rational commentators and economists are accustomed to refuting the fallacy of the “Lump of Jobs” theory, that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world (an idea that was the basis for both of H. Ross Perot’s runs for the presidency, when he said that any job created in Mexico by the Free Trade Agreement was a job lost in America). The idea that there is a fixed “Lump of Wealth” in the world, however, is too bizarre to even recognize as existing, much less to bother refuting. Yet precisely that belief is the basis of the economic policies of many countries. For instance, the confiscatory tariffs and restrictive investment policies in Asian countries like India are based on the belief that making a profit on an investment is stealing wealth from the host country.
Indeed, I must admit that the means by which wealth is created is not really understood by any economist. It is an emergent phenomenon – already a poorly understood idea – and the way it works is, truly, like magic. Economists accept that Pareto Efficiency is real, but they don’t really know how it works its magic. But while we don’t really understand this in detail, we do know one thing: it works. Indeed, it works to the extent that one can say that the one essential ingredient for growth and prosperity is freedom, for only when trade and exchange takes place by choice in an environment of trust is wealth created.
The point of this argument is that any war on terrorism must also address the ideas of the terrorists. There are many Islamic scholars making the case that bin Laden’s campaign to kill non-believers for that reason alone is against the mainstream teachings of the religion. As non-Muslims, we cannot get into that argument other than by publicizing the statements of selected ’ulema (Islamic scholars). To that extent, we are not addressing the terrorists, but the potential terrorists and supporters who are now left ripe to the lure of their fantastical ideas. But we do have standing to address the economic and political justifications that bin Laden and his followers – and his sponsors in the Wahabi establishment in Saudi Arabia – use to recruit new terrorists.
To a certain extent, the invasion and rebuilding of Iraq – if we were really doing what we say we are – would go a long way to making that case. It is unfortunate, however, that the administration has taken every opportunity to ignore basic American standards of justice, decency, economics, and democracy. The leaders of this administration simply have no idea of the true power of an economic system based on free enterprise and the rule of law, just as they have no regard for the value of real independence, sovereignty, and democracy. To them, democracy means no more than doing what they tell you to, which is why their efforts in Iraq were doomed from the start, and have failed so disastrously.
The general policy of the Bush administration in the War on Terror – that the solution to terrorism is to shoot and arrest people and nothing else – is wrong. So is the idea that the solution to terrorism is the redress of grievances in the developing and Muslim world. Both are in fact necessary, but both will fail without a strong dose of -- egad -- education in the basics of social compacts, rule of law, and (yipes) microeconomics. As well as a strong dose of realism in explaining that America may be powerful, but we don’t control everything that happens in the world, either good or bad. People and their governments also share responsibility for their welfare.
However, there are no signs that anything other than military options are even being considered. That’s a recipe for failure.