Head Line Issues

On Sept. 24, Richard Rubenstein was interviewed by the editor of the National Journal on the meaning of the Sept. 11 atrocities.
The full interview follows. It was published on Sept. 29 in edited form, along with the responses of other terrorism experts.

Q:You have been analyzing and writing about terrorist movements for a long time. What new have we learned from the Sept. 11 attacks about the nature of terrorism and terrorists? Do we need to modify our assumptions and working theories? Or does Sept. 11 confirm your own long-held theories on terrorism?

A:I will be glad to answer that question, but permit me to say something first. Talking analytically about terrorism always sounds unemotional. But, especially now, we can’t put thinking and feeling in separate boxes. A few days ago I received a one-sentence letter from an old friend in New York—a sophisticated, knowledgeable executive who heads a major publishing company. The letter said, “I’m so sad and so scared.” Me, too. My heart breaks for the victims of the Sept. 11 atrocities, their families, and friends indeed, for all of us. It also breaks for the hundreds of thousands indeed, the millions of innocents murdered over the past 40 years by weapons supplied by, and armed forces led or trained by, our own government in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Central America, Angola and Congo, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and, of course, Afghanistan. If we can feel the same heartbreak for these victims as for our own, the monstrous acts of Sept. 11 might one day prove redemptive. As for scared, I am plenty scared of what comes next. But we can talk about President Bush’s “war” on terrorism a bit later.

In any case, to answer your question, I do not think that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon teach us a great deal about the causes and nature of terrorism that we didn’t already know. We know that terrorism is violence by small groups claiming to represent massive constituencies and seeking by “heroic,” provocative attacks to awaken the masses, redeem their honor, and generate an enemy over reaction that will intensify and expand the struggle. Assuming that some section or offshoot of the Al Quaeda network was responsible for the attacks, the profile of the terrorists men in their twenties and thirties of more than average income and education, passionately committed to an ideology of transformation and revenge is just what one would expect. Ditto for the method of organization (probably decentralized, effectively cut off from large organized mass movements), except for its rich, independent sources of funding and its long geographical reach.

The terrorists’ motives and strategic goals are not particularly new or mysterious either. That they are essentially independent of existing nation-states confirms what some of us have been saying for a long time: state support is not nearly as important to terrorists as the existence of real grievances that generate a certain minimum of active and passive public support. It is certainly not unexpected that they would claim to represent a large oppressed identity group. Nationalist terrorists feel triply betrayed: by the foreign power that exports violence and an alien culture to their land; by local ruling classes that collaborate with the foreigners; and by their own people, who have not yet risen up in revolt. Their strategy is to alter all these conditions by using dramatic acts of violence to widen and intensify the struggle.

The most novel feature of this terrorist campaign (other than its substantial funding and technical competence) is the fact that the fighters claim to represent a world religion and that they have been able to exploit their connections with its most extreme ultraconservative and puritanical sector. This makes them quite dangerous, not because so many Muslims support them now, but because an unwise response by the Americans could help generate the clash of cultures that Samuel F. Huntington predicted in his famous 1993 article—a lengthy, ghastly war that might well prove to be unwinnable in the long run.

Q:What kinds of people become terrorists—both leaders such as bin Laden as well as his shock troops? Why do they resort to terrorism and what do they hope to accomplish?

A:My previous answer suggests that most terrorists are fairly ordinary people beset by extraordinary circumstances. Many are would-be leaders of an oppressed nation, class, or religious group whose members have not yet decided to rebel en masse. Very often, there is violence in their backgrounds: they have had relatives or close friends killed, maimed, or tortured by powerful foreign and local enemies. Terrorists like these are driven by a combination of despair and hope despair over the inability of corrupt local leaders to defend their people’s dignity and autonomy, and hope for a great awakening that will unite the people behind their own leadership
and free it from both foreign domination and local corruption.

In my view, terrorist strategy is primarily defensive, in the broad sense of the word. Despite the use of words like fascist and Hitlerian to describe them, the militants in this case do not want to lead an Islamic revolution in North America or Europe. They want the North Americans and Europeans to get their troops, their bribe money, and (in some cases) their products out of Islamic lands. These demands may be intolerant and
wrongheaded, but they are not Hitlerian.

Q:We’ve heard many call the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks “cowards” and “suicidal religious fanatics.”
Are these the right descriptions?

A:No. “Coward” is used strangely in this case. I think that when people say the word, they mean that innocent people who had no chance to defend themselves were destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks. The use of some such epithet is understandable, but, of course, a martyr is not a coward. “Suicidal religious fanatic” is also a misleading epithet, even though it is technically true that the perpetrators were willing to die, motivated by religious ideology and intensely committed to their beliefs.

Using the phrase involves two mistakes, in my view. First, “suicidal fanatics” suggests that the perpetrators are loony, unfeeling monsters, whereas we are rational and humane. This ignores the fact that, from their perspective, there is a continuing war against their people that has already caused untold suffering in their lands, while we, insulated from the effects of atrocities perpetrated by those who act in our name, go on exporting violence and making money. But when we go to war, are we any less fanatical than they? We give medals to soldiers that martyr themselves for our cause, and we destroy not just buildings but entire unprotected cities: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Second, the terrorists here do have strong religious motivations, and their ideology is an ultra-conservative form of fundamentalism particularly obnoxious to people who respect human rights.

But “religious fanatic” suggests that their beliefs and acts are dictated by purely religious beliefs, when, in fact, they embrace a particular interpretation of Islamic tradition strongly conditioned by their political backgrounds and experiences. Don’t get me wrong—I am not saying that they are not really religious believers, but only that one has a choice in interpreting sacred texts and religious traditions and that the choices they have made reflect their overwhelming sense that Western intervention in and occupation of Islamic lands represent an intolerable violation of their identity. Osama bin Laden has complained particularly about U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, the continuing U.S. war against Iraq, and U.S. favoritism toward Israel. These events, rather than sacred texts per se, are what shape his interpretation of religious duty.

Q:Two aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks seem important when compared to terrorism by other groups in the past.
First, anonymity seems to have been a deliberate strategy of the perpetrators, and, second, no overt demands were linked to the attacks. In other words, the idea was to kill, strike fear, and doubt. Do you agree? If so, comment on the psychological and tactical importance of the strategy.

A:I don’t really agree that these are important issues. Anonymity has been a feature of many terrorist acts in the past, as has claiming the wrong identity to throw the blame on some enemy group. In this case, the tactical advantages of anonymity seem obvious. First, the people to whom you want your identity revealed (i.e., the Muslim masses in certain countries) already know it, at least in a general way. So taking credit will only make your enemy’s task of identifying and pursuing you easier. Similarly, overt demands are not always made in cases of terrorist attacks since (a) everyone knows what the grievances are, (b) specifying them might help identify specific perpetrators, and (c) not specifying them may create a stronger eventual negotiating position for the terrorists both within the popular movement and between their people and the foreigners. Of course, as Lenin noted, “the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize,” but the attacks of Sept. 11, although unspeakably vicious, were not politically meaningless: they carried with them an implicit political agenda.

Q: The events of Sept. 11 happened within an ongoing, deeper conflict between the United States and many in the Islamic world. Is it possible for the United States to talk or negotiate with the perpetrators? Is there any historical evidence that a non-retaliatory, nonmilitary approach has worked elsewhere?

A: I don’t think that “negotiating” is a meaningful term if that means cutting some sort of deal with the perpetrators. Neither do I think that the perpetrators, whoever they may be, are the party one wants to begin talking to. They should be captured and prosecuted. Talking, however, in the sense of initiating a dialogue with representatives of extreme Islamist movements, as well as with other tendencies, about Western relations with the Islamic world is not only possible but also necessary if we are to avoid a lengthy, bloody, possibly unwinnable conflict.

In the field of conflict analysis and resolution, we have learned that you can talk with pretty much anyone, provided that there is a will on both sides to communicate. Of course, this can’t just be talk for talk’s sake; I am talking about a dialogue, facilitated by independent experts who know what they are doing, that is analytical in that it explores the deep sources of conflict between alienated peoples and that is creative in that it proposes solutions that may never have been envisioned before. And, yes, this sort of dialogue has worked before—in fact, it works where military retaliation is ineffective because the conflict is generated by unsatisfied basic human needs, like the needs for identity and development. The current peace process in Northern Ireland, for example, was preceded by more than a decade of conflict resolution efforts involving Catholics, Protestants, and independent facilitators. A potentially lethal conflict between Malaysia and Indonesia was averted by using these same techniques. Promising efforts are now underway in many other lands where it is clear that official violence only continues the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. In fact, your question assumes that military countermeasures can end terrorism, when that is actually a dubious proposition. Where the terrorists have virtually no mass base (for example, in Italy during the period of the Red Brigade), good police work, combined with offers of amnesty, can be quite effective. But where a mass base exists, even if it is nowhere near a majority of the terrorists’ people, these groups have not been stamped out except at a ghastly cost in human lives and freedom. An example is Argentina’s “dirty war” against the urban guerrilla groups, a ferociously violent campaign from which that country has still not recovered. As I’ve already suggested, a similar campaign directed against Islamic extremists in general has a strong potential to produce both horrible counterattacks and a bloody clash of cultures.

Q: As a country—as a people generally and the Bush Administration in particular, what do we seem to be doing right in the wake of Sept. 11? Conversely, what mistakes do you see brewing in the United States and how might we avoid
them as we carry out our response?

A: It seems to me that the major thing we have done right, up to this point, is not to have bombed Afghanistan. If President Bush’s bellicose rhetoric is intended to serve as a substitute for massive military action, I applaud it, but I’m afraid that is not the case. Bombing Afghanistan will be viewed as an atrocity committed against a suffering people who have already been exploited and abandoned by the West. And to characterize the counterterrorist struggle as war and to state that those who are not with us are against us are music to the terrorists’ ears, since what they hope to provoke is a war of the West against Islam that will force their people to choose between local “patriots” and “traitors.” But the great mistake we are making, in my opinion, is to think only in terms of short-term responses to terrorism rather than in terms of long-term policies aimed at identifying the underlying
causes of the violence.

We Americans desperately need to rethink our role in the world, especially the way in which we have been misrepresented abroad by politicians and companies out to satisfy their own immediate interests, even at the cost of creating the kind of alienation that gestates terrorism. Do we really want to be the new Roman Empire? And, if so, are we prepared to crucify local rebels, massacre innocents, and destroy temples as the Romans did? I think that if most Americans understood who was acting in their name around the globe and what they were doing, they would not stand for it.

Q: Rich.... any other thoughts you care to add?

A: One further thought. Following the civil disorders of the 1960s in the United States, President Johnson appointed
a commission to study the underlying causes of civil violence. It was called the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, and it was led by Milton Eisenhower, Ike’s brother and the president of Johns Hopkins University. I think we need a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Terrorism to do the kind of in-depth study that would guide future policymaking in our country. And if the American government won’t create such a commission, perhaps we in the nation’s communities and universities should do it ourselves.

Terrorism: The Need for a Comprehensive Approach

By Dennis J.D. Sandole, ICAR faculty member

In the film Seven, with Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey plays a bizarre serial murderer who, when asked by detective Brad Pitt why he has committed a series of ghastly murders, replies, “Sometimes you have to hit people on the side of the head with a sledge hammer to get their attention.” Clearly, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, constitute such a hit on the head for Americans. For a country that stopped the Holocaust and launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, that prides itself on occupying the moral high ground in international affairs, and that Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victor in the ideological clash between democracy and communism, it was a double shock, on top of the traumatizing collapse of the World Trade Center, that the 19 hijackers could have hated the United States so much. How could that be? What could the United States have possibly done to incur such wrath, leading to the deaths of thousands and a pervasive sense of insecurity, the likes of which have not been seen since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963? Asking the questions is easy.

The hard part is in recognizing that, in our outrage, grief, and shock, the last thing that many of us want to hear is analysis. However, if we want to win the war against terrorism, then analysis is where we must begin. For many worldwide, the United States—the world’s only superpower—is considered the source of all that is evil in the world. This view, rightly or wrongly, is reinforced by the perception that the United States has arrogantly opted out of multilateral efforts to control the spread of greenhouse gases, small arms, land mines, and racism. This view is further reinforced by the U.S. decision to proceed with the development of a ballistic missile defense system in violation of one of the pillars of Cold War peace and security, the 1972 ABM treaty.

Add to this the clear perception that the United States supports Israel no matter what the latter does, including responding to the violence generated by Palestinian hopelessness with F-16 fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, and house-destroying bulldozers. If the Russians or Chinese were responsible for similar assaults on the indigenous Palestinian population, who have been occupied and oppressed militarily for nearly half a century, the United States and others in the West would be justifiably outraged! There is also the sense, expressed powerfully some 20 years ago during the Iranian hostage crisis, that the United States, as the primary symbol of Western civilization and the engine behind globalization, is the destroyer of traditional culture, society, and religion (e.g., Islam). For wealthy Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who was originally encouraged by the United States to wage warfare against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, the last straw was the stationing of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia during the 1990–91 Gulf War.

Saudi Arabia is the site of two of the holiest shrines in Islam: Mecca, where the prophet Muhammad was born, and Medina, where the prophet proclaimed the first Islamic state. U.S. forces are still in Saudi Arabia! Bin Laden was also frustrated by the strategy of the West, particularly of the United States, to allow the brutal conflict in Bosnia to continue for three years at the expense of the primary victims, the Bosnian Muslims, before being embarrassed and shamed by the genocide perpetrated by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995.

To say that the United States stopped the warfare in Bosnia in 1995 more to protect the credibility of NATO than the lives of the surviving Bosnians is not too far from the truth. To mention any of this is not to excuse the atrocities committed on Sept. 11 against Americans and the nationals of some 80 countries, but only to understand the possible motivation of those who hate the United States and the West so much that they are willing to perpetrate such acts of inhumanity and, in the process, destroy themselves as well. Many years ago, as a young U.S. Marine, I was encouraged to read Mao Tse-tung: On Guerrilla Warfare. When I naively inquired why I should read anything by “the enemy,” I was told, “To better understand him! If you know how your enemy thinks, then you can better deal with him.”

Well, it now seems that I, as an American citizen, have enemies, simply by virtue of being an American. Witness the declarations of holy war issued by bin Laden against all Americans in 1998 and, more recently, following the U.S. and British attacks on his training camps in Afghanistan. Consequently, it would behoove me and others to find out why, in order to better deal with him and his followers—in effect, to better defend ourselves! In the short term, this would mean, among other things, supporting efforts to increase security at airports and on board aircraft (through, for example, inaccessible doors to cockpits and the presence of disguised armed security guards). It would also mean bringing to justice those still alive who are responsible for the crimes committed on Sept. 11. But in the long run, it also means dealing with the deep-rooted problems worldwide for which we are, rightly or wrongly, held responsible and from which terrorists derive their motivation for their catastrophic acts. If this means that the United States and others should act—and be seen to be acting—in a more just and fair way in the Middle East conflict, then so be it. If this means that the United States should reenter the Kyoto protocols to work with others in controlling the spread of greenhouse gasses (of which the United States alone generates some 25 percent), then so be it.

If this means working with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to help them embed their policies within a complex, multidimensional framework that allows them to more effectively pay attention to the nuances of culture, society, and religion, then so be it. If this means that the United States should be criticized for not sending its first African American secretary of state, Colin Powell, to the U.N. Conference against Racism in South Africa, then so be it. We could go on, but one thing is certain: it is far wiser to deal with the underlying deep-rooted problems that prompted these acts of terrorism than to lash out blindly.

Lashing out only exacerbates the problem because it kills hundreds, makes life even more miserable for residents of wretchedly poor Afghanistan, and creates a refugee crisis for neighboring Pakistan that threatens to bring down the government of that Islamic country. Given that there are more than one billion Muslims worldwide, with some seven million in the United States alone— many of whom are being subjected to racial profiling and hate-crime assaults in the wake of the events of Sept. 11, the specter of the world’s only superpower’s bombing an incredibly impoverished Islamic country may lead to the radicalization of Muslims worldwide who are not yet energized by a narrow anti- Western version of Islam. If this occurs, the otherwise contentious clash-of-civilizations thesis promulgated by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington could be radically reinforced, leading to the confirmation of his proposition that conflicts in the post-Cold War era would be waged between Western and other (e.g., Islamic) civilizations.

This is the last thing that the world needs! Despite President George W. Bush’s claims that this war is not being waged against Islam, Arabs, or any other ethnic or religious group, it may be perceived that way. To avoid this and its calamitous consequences, the United States should go through some paradigm and behavior shifting, foregoing its traditional defense and security paradigm in favor of the comprehensive reconceptualization pioneered by an organization to which the United States belongs, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Security for the 55 participating states of this organization, which comprises all former enemies of the Cold War and the neutral and nonaligned nations of Europe, includes the traditional political and military components, but also the nontraditional economic, environmental, humanitarian, and human rights dimensions of security as well.

To win the war against terrorism, therefore, the United States and others must wage their campaign on nontraditional as well as traditional fronts. This means confronting and combating not just the terrorists and their atrocious acts of terrorism, but also the problems that give rise to them, providing them with their motivation. Otherwise, a narrowly based, Realpolitik-only campaign could lead to self-fulfilling confirmation of originally fallacious ideas (e.g., that the West is anti-Muslim and anti-Arabic and/or that all Muslims and Arabs are anti-Western and anti- American). This could, in turn, lead to more acts of terrorism and counterterrorism, perhaps culminating in an explosively new bipolar clash-of civilizations international disorder. And in the process, the new multilateralism between the Americans, Russians, and others may be a pretext merely for exterminating thousands—Bosnians, Albanians, Palestinians, Kurds, Chechens, and others—under the cover of the global war against terrorism.

Given the various imperatives to do something, the time is clearly ripe for the United States and others to think outside the box, just like the 19 hijackers did on Sept. 11. Otherwise, the next time we get hit on the head with a sledge hammer (biological, chemical, or atomic), we may not be so lucky to have yet another opportunity to read the latest Mao Tse-tung: On Guerilla Warfare. Easier said than done? Well, one possibility here, imminently doable and pregnant with positive implications, would be for President Bush’s national security advisor Condoleeza Rice and U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell to launch working groups on global problem-solving across multiple, interlocking traditional and nontraditional fronts, within the context of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations and its secretary general Kofi Annan.

This would be a profound way to demonstrate to peoples in the developing world that Western civilization includes them as well. If the events of, and since, Sept. 11, have any meaning, therefore, it is that we are all intimately interconnected: there is no longer any meaningful distinction between “us” and “them.” On a global scale, we are all “us.” Gratifyingly, since Sept. 11, President Bush and his team seem to be moving toward acceptance of that conclusion.