Headline Issues

America‘s March to War: Short-term Gains Courting Long-term Disaster

By Dennis J.D. Sandole, ICAR Faculty Member

There are at least three scenarios in terms of which a likely U.S. war with Iraq can be explained. According to the first of these, which may be the most likely, U.S. President George W. Bush has pulled off a remarkable feat: he has gone from being president of less than 50 percent of the American voting public to being president of most, if not all Americans, including the Democratic Party leadership in both Houses of Congress. This, right before the upcoming November elections in which the Republican Party seems destined to win back control of the Senate, allowing a strengthened George Bush to pursue his presidential agenda with fewer constraints.

President Bush has done all this by deftly taking advantage of the bolt of lightning delivered to him out of the blue by the tragic events of September 11, 2001.The United States and Americans had been assaulted in a way unparalleled since the War of 1812. But this time, it was not by the British— they are Bush’s primary ally in the current drama. Instead, 19 young Arab (Wahabist) men with box cutters dared to “think outside the box,” succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and in the process, gave Bush his ticket. After the hijacked passenger-filled airliners went careening into their targets like cruise missiles, it was clear that the president had to do something—and be seen to be doing something—comparable to the gravity of the horrific events of the day.

Thus, the “war on terror” was launched against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, hosts to likely 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network and training centers. Militarily, it was fairly easy for the United States, with its immense power resources, and its British, Canadian, Australian, and other allies, to rout the clumsy, archaic Taliban. What has not been easy has been to “build the peace” in post-Taliban Afghanistan, especially since an international peacekeeping force exists only in the capital, Kabul. Warlords have been returning to exert control of other parts of the country.

In addition, it was not clear if Osama bin Laden was dead or alive and if alive, where he might be. Then, further complexity set in. Although the United States was “declared” to “be at war,” it did not really feel or look that way to most Americans. True, airport security had been tightened up, and armed air marshals were on board some flights, but by and large, most Americans were not experiencing the privations normally associated with “being at war.” (Exceptions, of course, are those Arab and Muslim Americans and those who “look” Arabic or Muslim who have been detained, interrogated, and harassed by law enforcement or subjected to hate crimes.) Enter Saddam Hussein! A nasty piece of work if there ever was one, who really does have “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) at least chemical and biological ones which he used against his own Kurdish population during the 1980s.

But this is the same nasty piece of work who was supported militarily by the United States and others during the Iran-Iraq war, forcing us to recall Churchill’s famous comment about Josef Stalin to President Roosevelt that, yes, “Stalin is a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he is our son-of-a-bitch!” Clearly, Saddam Hussein is no longer “our son-of-a-bitch.” George W. Bush, like his father before him, has marketed a war against this evil man with such breathtaking success that to even question whether less bellicose means have been exhausted is to risk incurring charges of nonpatriotism if not treason.

In this regard, President Bush is merely the most recent in a long list of political leaders who have manufactured or marketed “the enemy” for political reasons; as a way to rally otherwise apathetic or discontented constituents around a common cause. What could be better for him, given that we have not gotten the guy who did 9/11 to us, than to go after a “traditional nationstate enemy” that we can attack, destroy, and occupy, while post-9/11 patriotic fervor is still in the air? The problem is, if this is an election ploy, the president may win back the Senate and become president of “all the people” short-term gains to be sure.

But, playing out this scenario further, as Bush prepares to tell the post- November election world that, despite the earlier talk of war, he intends to allow U.N. inspectors back into Iraq, Saddam just may call Bush’s bluff and, adopting Bush’s own preemptive strategy, start launching attacks on U.S. forces in the Gulf and in Israel, thereby forcing Bush to become militarily engaged. However, unlike in 1991, this time it would be house-to-house fighting in the capital of Baghdad, where even diehard Saddam opponents may decide that the Americans have gone too far.

In other words, Bush’s war rhetoric may unwittingly create a self-fulfilling dynamic that makes a “real” war with Iraq more rather than less likely. This would even be the case if, according to a second scenario, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were playing “bad cop” to the “good cop” of the Germans, French, Russians, and others, in an effort to intimidate Saddam through threat of war into allowing U.N. inspectors unrestricted access to all sites, including presidential palaces. According to a third scenario, perhaps the least likely one, if neither an election ploy nor a bluff, and Bush and Blair are really prepared to go to war against this evil dictator to rid the world of him and his WMD—perhaps even gaining access to Iraq’s vast oil reserves in the process—they would do well to listen to the sensible voices of Gen. Wesley Clark, Gen.

Anthony Zinni, and others who have actually been under fire that say a war with Iraq at this time would have the impact of undermining the war on terrorism, exacerbating the Middle East conflict, and further angering Muslims and Arabs worldwide. Even without exploring the “clash-of civilizations” implications of this type of development, just imagine, if Afghanistan will require 20 to 30 years to be rebuilt, what it will take to build the peace in a devastated, destabilized Iraq. Are Americans ready for that kind of commitment, not to mention the thorny issue of accepting, in the short run, high levels of casualties? Instead of entering into this quagmire, the United States should be focusing its efforts on combating terrorism by, as Gen.

Clark has recommended, dealing with the deep-rooted causes of terrorism, one of which happens to be the Middle East conflict. But thus far, at least as far as the U.S. government is concerned, Einstein is still right: “Everything has changed with the atom [and 9/11] except the way we think!”

The Psycho-Political Causes of Religious Terrorism

By Rich Rubenstein, ICAR Faculty Member

Imperialist or neocolonial domination is an evil with which exploited, disorganized, and overpowered groups around the world are quite familiar. Depending upon circumstances, the oppressed population may respond actively or passively, violently or nonviolently, massively or in small groups. The spectrum of possible reactions is very wide, ranging from identification with the oppressor to fatalistic resignation to various forms of revolt. But where oppression is also experienced as desecration, the resulting outrage is almost certain to produce a violent response—massive if the populace is organized to support large-scale violence, smaller-scale or terroristic if it is not. Psychologically, I am not sure why this is so, although I will dare to speculate in a moment as a rank amateur.

It would seem an inviting area for further research by specialists. One way to approach the issue is to ask a situational question: when or under what circumstances will oppression be experienced as intolerable desecration? The first answer that comes to mind seems obvious, but is less satisfactory than one might think. It is that some members of the oppressed group must be conscious of their collective religious identity and must identify measures intended to subjugate or discipline them as attacks on their religion.

For al Quaeda, for example, the positioning of U.S. military forces on Saudi Arabia’s “sacred soil” was perceived as a serious desecration, much as Ariel Sharon’s entry upon the holy ground of the Al-Aqsa mosque was perceived by some Palestinians at the beginning of the current Intifadah. This was partly a matter of religious belief, given Arabia’s special status in Islamic history as the birthplace of the faith and in current Islamic observance as the holy place to which one returns on pilgrimage. But other factors must also have been involved. For one thing, not all Muslims faulted the Saudi government for accepting the U.S. bases established during the Cold War and the war against Iraq. For another, many modern secularists have also been inclined to view the soil of the nation as sacred, and unwanted touchings of it as taboo.

French Revolutionaries assaulted by foreign intervenors gave us the notion of “la Patrie.” Russian patriots worshipped their motherland and pictured the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 as a rape. Pearl Harbor elicited similar metaphors of violation/pollution— and since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans have begun calling their nation a “homeland.” In the nationalist subconscious, it seems, the soil of the nation is its body. And it is a forbidden body, like the bodies of one’s parents or one’s siblings, whose unwanted touching is taboo whether one is a conservative Muslim or liberal secularist. Why, though, would some Islamist activists consider the placement of U.S. forces on Saudi soil polluting even when those troops were formally invited to enter the country by the House of Saud? Recall the entry of Antiochus II’s forces into the sacred precincts of the Temple at Jerusalem—the act that triggered the Maccabean Revolt.

What makes such acts of trespass intolerable to some native groups, it seems to me, is the fact that they are consented to by others. The anger that an act of technical desecration might normally provoke is converted to burning rage when one’s own leaders (parents) or peers (siblings) are complicit in it. The terrorist is, above all, a person betrayed, a person shocked, enraged, and activated by infidelity. The rage of the Maccabean rebels was not directed only at the Greeks but at the Hellenizing Jewish elite that aped their customs and profited by their trade. The Russian terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya and the SRs’ Combat Organization were middle and upper-class youth disgusted and humiliated by their parents’ complicity in the Czarist order. Much the same may be said of the Weather Underground, Red Brigade, and Baader Meinhoff activists of the 1970s and 1980s. Osama bin Laden detested the Saudi regime that had enriched his family and surrendered his people’s autonomy to Western masters.

And Hamas and Islamic Jihad have seldom bothered to conceal their scathing contempt for Yasir Arafat and the Palestine National Authority. Foreign oppression may generate anger, but native complicity generates shame—and at a certain point, a sense of shame demands purifying action. Now let me push this speculation one step further. What if the actor complicit in imperialist oppression is not just some other native group but…oneself? What if one has been tempted to yield or has actually yielded to the power of the foreign oppressor in order to share in the abundant riches, prestige, political influence, and hedonistic pleasures offered to local collaborators? Then, it seems reasonable to assume, shame will become guilt, requiring either that one rationalize one’s participation in the oppressive system or find a way to atone for one’s impurity.

We can hypothesize that a crucial factor in converting oppression into desecration, and a generalized sense of desecration into a trigger for violent action, is the presence of powerful feelings of shame and guilt that activate an urgent need for self-purification. This sense of personal uncleanness may help to explain why some people betrayed by complicit leaders or associates do not take a more forgiving view of their weaknesses. If I recognize myself in that official taking bribes and stealing elections, in that soldier brutalizing his own people, in that businessman looting his own country’s natural resources, I will not be inclined to be forgiving. On the contrary, I will see a chance to burn out my own weakness, to place myself irrevocably in the people’s camp, to revenge myself not only upon my people’s enemies, internal and external, but upon myself. What makes the experience of imperialist or national oppression unholy or polluting is not simply the imposition of external power on a subject population, but the humiliating exercise of that power and the population’s complicity in its own oppression.

Where desecration takes the internalized form of yielding to temptation, harboring forbidden desires can produce a desperate longing for redemption. Modern capitalist hegemony, which is far more transformative in its total impact than classical imperialism, sustains itself by involving subject populations in a variety of complicities. For example, those in non-Western nations subject to Western domination may participate actively in the armed forces, the government, the business community, or other sectors of society effectively dominated by outsiders, effectively “Westernizing” themselves for the sake of power, income, social status, or enjoyment. Or, they may become socially inactive, unable or unwilling to participate in the imperialist project, but deterred from organizing oppositional movements by intimidation, disorientation, and self-doubt. Finally, they may participate marginally but significantly in the foreign-dominated economy and culture, for example, by consuming cultural imports, providing low-wage labor, “hustling” on the margins of the economy, or (more and more frequently), relying on foreign or government assistance in the absence of remunerative and dignified jobs.

In all of these cases, complicity in a system dominated by outsiders which oppresses one’s own people and alters one’s own culture can produce intense feelings of shame and guilt demanding expiation. This seems to be the case especially where it is not simply a matter of being imposed upon, but, at least in part, of welcoming the imposition. Religious systems are particularly well positioned to recognize and express these feelings, since they emphasize the element of free choice in decision making and offer believers ritualized and nonritualized methods of self-purification. In the case of Islamist groups like al Qaeda, the number of well-educated, reasonably prosperous, technically proficient fighters with some experience of the world is notable. (One also notes the relatively large percentage of “martyrs” of respectable family in the current Palestinian Intifadah.) One can hypothesize (subject to confirmation by other data) that some of these fighters, at least, felt besmirched by willing complicity in the alien system and viewed martyrdom as the ultimate act of self-purification.

It is important to re-emphasize, however, that certain psycho-political situations, not religious belief per se, generate these feelings and needs. One recalls that Fidel Castro’s first act on assuming power in Cuba was to close the country’s mafia-operated casinos and whorehouses, and to promise Cubans that they would no longer be tempted to engage in such degrading and dependent occupations in order to survive and prosper. I would argue, therefore, that one cannot reason simply and directly from a cognitive reality—the presence of certain religious beliefs—to a perception that such and such an act by an oppressor constitutes an intolerable desecration. On the contrary, widespread feelings of shame and guilt seem to be prior both causally and psychologically to perceptions of intolerable desecration. There exists a reservoir of self-hatred caused by a certain relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed that inclines the latter to perceive new acts of oppression as acts of desecration requiring individual and collective purification.

The hallmarks of this relationship are, first, that the oppressor not only subjugate members of the oppressed group but also humiliate them, and, second, that members of the oppressed group be complicit in their own humiliation. Humiliation is not hard to identify as part of the psycho-social background that produces terrorists today, including suicide bombers, in such places as Sri Lanka and Israel’s Occupied Territories. On the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, for example, measures taken by the Sharon government in pursuit of Israeli security have had the intended or unintended effect of reducing adult Palestinians to the status of helpless, dependent children, and infusing their children with a desire to rid themselves of shame caused by their parents’ helplessness and guilt caused by their own failure to stand up to the authorities.

In the case of Palestinian terrorism, moreover, it is notable that while some groups of fighters, like those who follow the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, speak in religious terms of desecration and of the need for a purifying jihad, others, like the members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, perform the same acts for the same substantial reasons without necessarily adhering to the same religious beliefs. In both cases, oppression is experienced as something “unholy”— as an intolerable violation of values held sacred by the culture, for example, the father’s duty to protect his home against invasion and his family against humiliation at the hands of strangers. And in some cases, at least, the activists’ violence is also intended to rid themselves of the accumulations of shame and guilt that are almost inevitable in lengthy relationships between the occupiers and the occupied.

This suggests a final hypothesis: Not only is a pre-existing religious commitment inadequate to explain a person’s involvement in religious terrorism, but the line of causation may be reversed. That is, acts of humiliating oppression, combined with a strong sense of potential or actual complicity, may activate a need for purification which creates “religious” terrorism, either by driving people into the arms of already existing religious groups or inducing them to act in ways indistinguishable from those groups. Mark Gopin has argued that the traditions of the world religions provide believers with a wide array of peacemaking and war making alternatives. One cannot understand religious terrorism simply by analyzing the sources and structures of belief, since the factors that influence believers to adopt this or that interpretation of sacred texts and traditions lie outside as well as inside these religious worldviews. The analysis most urgently needed, in my view, is one that explores the effects of America’s global expansion, and the activities of its client regimes, on the mental and emotional lives of peoples “targeted” for hegemonic control either as collaborators or consumers.

This may help us to understand how such targets make use of whatever political and cultural materials they can mobilize to resist intolerable impositions and to restore their self-respect. In time, it may even help Americans to contemplate alternatives to their government’s present role as the world’s newest hegemon and a perceived source of desecration around the globe.