Comprehending the incomprehensible

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

--- Forwarded mail from http://www.juno.com/~margaretch

From: http://www.juno.com/~margaretch
To: http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 09:29:35 -0400

Robert- I received this on emai from prison dharmal- maybe you know who
this teacher is...Mom

From: "Doug Booth" <http://www.cybermesa.net/~dougbooth>
Subject: [prisondharma-talk]

Dear friends and relatives,

As a rule I don't send blanket emails, and I don't intend to make a
practice of it.  However, I found myself so profoundly grateful this week
for the essay below that I feel compelled to share it. If this turns out
to be something you don't want to read, please just forgive me and delete
it.

The attacks this week seemed like a thunderbolt out of nowhere to me and
a lot of other people.  I realized I had no answers to two major
questions: Who are these guys?  and What are the underlying conflicts
that have preceded this?

Steve Niva is a Middle Eastern studies scholar and a colleague of mine at
The Evergreen STate College.  I really appreciate how succintly he's
summarized this history.  We are being tempted right now to simplify and
demonize; it will take all our courage, virtue, and intelligence to
embrace moral complexity and find our way through it.

Pray for justice and peace, Marla.

----- Original Message -----
From: Elliott, Marla <http://www.evergreen.edu/~ElliotMa>
To: <http://www.cco.net/~danmarla>; <http://www.columbialegal.org/~marla.elliott>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 6:18 PM
Subject: FW: Trying to Understand the Violence
-----Original Message-----
From: Niva, Steve
To: All Staff & Faculty DL
Sent: 9/13/01 12:23 AM
Subject: Trying to Understand the Violence

Dear Community Members,
I wanted to share with you a brief article I've written on the terrible
events that have just transpired in the hope that amidst our anger and
pain we can begin to understand in order that this may never happen
again.  I will be sharing some of this paper with the faculty meeting
today at the Tacoma campus.  I based this paper on research and writing
that I've done on Middle Eastern politics and U.S. foreign policy over
the past decade.  This is one of the subjects I teach here at Evergreen.

A group of faculty and students, including myself, are organizing a forum
on campus next week in order to come together as a community to discuss
these issues and share our emotions and thoughts. 

Best wishes to all of you, Steve Niva

 Understanding Middle Eastern Sources of Violence Against the United
States Steve Niva, The Evergreen State College. In the wake of the
immense and sickening tragedy of the recent attacks it is difficult to
get beyond the horror and shock of what has just happened and engage in
some reflection on the sources of violence against the United States. 
This is understandable given the almost unbelievable nature of this
attack.  Yet it is more necessary than ever if one is to cope with the
tragedy and try to find ways to make sure it will never happen again. 

What we will see in the next few days and weeks will be investigations,
arrests of individuals and intense speculation about which groups or
states did this and how the United States should respond. Unfortunately,
if the pattern of past responses to such attacks is repeated, we will
probably not learn a great deal about the reasons behind why this attack
happened, or the broader sources of violence against the United States
over the past decade. 

We are hearing substantial reports of a Middle Eastern connection to this
attack and media coverage has frequently mentioned the name of Osama bin
Laden as the number one errorist suspect and mastermind of this
operation.  If this evidence is verified, it is extremely important to
gain clarity about the specific actors and their motivations before one
can even think about how to respond.  For Americans who like their hero's
and villains portrayed in simple dichotomies of good and evil, the result
of this kind of clarity could be disturbing because the United States has
created many enemies through its policies in the Middle East over the
past century and bears a significant amount of responsibility for
creating a fertile soil for anti-American hatred. 

Who is behind the attacks?

The recent attacks are most likely related to an escalating series of
attacks and bombings on U.S. targets over the past 10 years, including
the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which
hundreds were killed.  This attack followed a 1996 car-bomb attack on a
U.S. barracks in Dharahan, Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans and a
1995 car-bomb attack on an American National Guard Training center in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the 1993 World Trade Center
truck-bombing.

All of these attacks have been attributed to Islamic radicals based in
the Middle East and Central Asia under the rubric of a very hazy notion
of "Islamic fundamentalism." Indeed a number of people from these regions
with links to certain militant Islamic groups have been arrested and
charged in some of these actions.  Breathless reports of a shadowy
Islamic conspiracy against the U.S. have generated a steady stream of
clich=E9's about this new enemy and its hatred of the U.S., but
unfortunately precious little light has been shed on understanding why
this is happening and what exactly these people believe.  Their enmity
towards the U.S. is explained as little more than the product of a
fanatical and inherently anti-Western and anti-American world view.
Stephen Emerson, a so-called terrorism expert who frequently appears in
the media, claims that "the hatred of the US by militant Islamic
fundamentalists is not tied to any particular act or event.  Rather,
fundamentalists equate the mere existence of the West-its economic,
political and cultural systems-as an intrinsic attack on Islam." 

Any explanation of Middle Eastern violence that relies upon the notion
that Islam is an inherently violent or inherently anti-Western religion
is false and misleading.  First, Islam is one of the world's largest and
most diverse religions and like Christianity or Judaism there are
thousands of views within Islam about the religion and also about
violence and the West.  Secondly, there are major differences even among
explicitly Muslim militants and activists regarding these issues-some
insist upon non-violent struggle and others regard violence as a
legitimate tool.  There is no way one can generalize about Islam or any
religion for that matter.

So who are the perpetrators and what drove them to carry this horrendous
act?  The most likely perpetrators of these attacks are related to an
extremely small and fringe network of militants whose motivations do not
derive from Islam so much as from a common set of experiences and beliefs
that resulted from their participation in the U.S. backed war
against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980's.  These militants
were recruited by the CIA, the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence
services to fight against the Soviet Union during the 1980's.  They came
largely from the poor and unemployed classes or militant opposition
groups from around the Middle East, including Algeria, Egypt, Palestine
and lsewhere in order to wage war on behalf of the Muslim people of
Afghanistan against the communist led invasion. 

Among the many coordinators and financiers of this effort was a rich
young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden, who was the millionaire son of a
wealthy Saudi businessman with close contacts to the Saudi royal family.
He was considered to be a major CIA asset in the war against the Soviet
Union.  After 1984, these groups started building major bases in 
Pakistan and Afghanistan and fought against the Soviet Union.

This network of conservative Sunni Muslim militants, who became known as
"the Afghans", also served another purpose for the U.S. and its allies in
the region.  Not only were they anti-Communist they were also opposed to
the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran that had toppled a major ally of the
U.S., the Shah of Iran, who had helped control the oil fields in the
region under U.S. hegemony.  They opposed the revolution because Iranian
Islam is based on the Shiite branch of Islam that differs in important
ways from the major Sunni branch of Islam.  The clear aim of U.S. foreign
policy was to kill two birds with one stone:  turn back the Soviet Union
and create a counter-weight to radical Iranian inspired threats to U.S.
interests, particularly U.S. backed regimes who controlled the massive
oil resources.

The failure of U.S. policy in the Middle East.  But this policy has now
turned into a nightmare for the U.S. and has likely led to the recent
attacks against the U.S. in New York and Washington D.C.  After the
Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan in 1989 this network became
expendable to the U.S. who no longer needed their services.  In fact, the
U.S. actively turned against these groups after the Gulf War when a
number of these militants returned home and opposed the U.S. war against
Iraq and especially the U.S. ground troops placed in Saudi Arabia on the
land of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Madina. In the past decade
there has been a vicious war of intelligence services in the region
between America and its allies and militant Muslim groups.  Many Egyptian
Islamists believe the U.S. trained Egyptian police torture techniques
like they did the Shah and his brutal
Savak security police. The CIA has sent snatch squads to abduct wanted
militants form Muslim countries and return them to their countries to
face almost certain death or imprisonment.

The primary belief of this loose and militant network of veterans of the
Afghanistan war is that the West, led by the United States, is now waging
war against Muslims around the world and that they have to defend
themselves by any means necessary, including violence and terrorism. They
point to a number of cases where Muslims have born the brunt of
violence as evidence of this war: the genocide against Bosnian Muslims,
the Russian war against Chechnya, the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the UN sanctions against Iraq or
the US support of brutal dictatorships in Algeria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia,
for example.  They claim that the US either supported the
violence or failed to prevent it in all of these cases.

It should be clear that this network is only a very radical fringe of
militants who have decided that they must use armed tactics to get their
message out to the U.S. and others.  They have been identified as the
major players in the recent string of anti-U.S. bombings across the
Middle East that culminated in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and
now, possibly, the attacks directly on American soil.

They are very different from the wider current of Islamic activism in
Arab world and more globally which in addition to its Islamic orientation
has an agenda about social justice and social change against the
dictatorships and terrible economic conditions and extensive
corruption in many of  the pro-Western countries in the region.  They are
anti-Iranian.  They are now anti-Saudi. And their actions have even been
condemned by very militant Muslim organizations ranging from the Muslim
brotherhood in Egypt to the FIS in Algeria to HAMAS in Palestine.  They
are disconnected from these movements in many ways although some
sentiments are certainly shared.  There is no question that the U.S.
support for Israel and its support for the devastating sanctions on Iraq,
as well as U.S. support for brutal dictatorships across the region, have
created a fertile ground for sympathy with such militancy. 

Osama bin Laden is not the mastermind of these attacks as is often
claimed in the media; he just facilitates these groups and sentiments
with his money and finances, as do others. He is simply a very visible
symbol of this network and the U.S. obsession with him most likely works
to increase his standing as an icon of resistance to the U.S.

The rise of this militant network and their adoption of violence against
the United States represents a clear failure of U.S. strategy in the
region, especially the U.S./Saudi/Pakistani model of alliance between
conservative Sunni Islamic activism and the West.  The problem is that US
has no alternative political strategy because they see all Islamic
activists as their enemy and refuse to address the root causes of
anti-American sentiments in the region, especially support for
dictatorships and rampant poverty among the majority of the region's
masses of people. Just as important, the U.S appears to have no long-term
strategy to address the sources of grievances that the radical groups
share with vast majority of Muslim activists who abhor using violent
methods that would include a more balanced approach to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, ending the sanctions on Iraq or moving U.S.
military bases out of Saudi Arabia. 

How to truly defeat terrorism
 
Many of us accept the premise that terrorism is a phenomenon that can be
defeated only by better ideas, by persuasion and, most importantly, by
amelioration of the conditions that inspire it. Terrorism's best asset,
in the final analysis, is the fire in the bellies of its young men. That
fire cannot be extinguished by Tomahawk missiles or military operations.
If intelligent Americans can accept this premise as a reasonable basis
for dealing with this threat, why is it so difficult for our leaders to
speak and act accordingly?

The present U.S. strategy for ending the threat of terrorism through the
use of military force will very likely exacerbate these problems. When
innocent U.S. citizens are killed and harmed by blasts at US embassies or
bases, the U.S. government expects expressions of outrage and grief over
brutal terrorism.  But when U.S. Cruise missiles kill and maim
innocent Sudanese, Afghanis, and Pakistanis, the U.S. calls it collateral
damage.  Many of the world's 1.2 billion Muslim people are understandably
aggrieved by double standards.  The U.S. claims that it must impose
economic sanctions on certain countries that violate human rights and/or
harbor weapons of mass destruction.  Yet the U.S. largely ignores Muslim
victims of human rights violations in Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir
and Chechnya.  What's more, while the U.S. economy is propped up by
weapon sales to countries around the globe and particularly in the Middle
East, the U.S. insists on economic sanctions to prevent weapon
development in Libya, Sudan, Iran and Iraq.  In Iraq, the crippling
economic sanctions cost the lives of 5,000 children, under age five,
every month.  Over one million Iraqis have died as a direct result of
over a decade of sanctions. Finally, the U.S. pro-Israel policy unfairly
puts higher demands on Palestinians to renounce violence
than on Israelis to halt new settlements and adhere to U.N. resolutions
calling for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian lands. 

There is no justification for the horrendous attacks on innocent American
civilians in New York or Washington. Yet, at this difficult time,
Americans should critically examine policies with which Arabs, Muslims
and many others have legitimate grievances. Why do we refuse to see the
flaws in these policies? Is it easier to demonize those in the Arab world
who oppose them as a way of diverting attention from our own mistakes?

President Bush and others have labeled all Islamic militants as members
or "affiliates" of the "Osama bin Laden Network of Terrorism." This is,
of course, the common mistake of demonizing one individual as the root of
all evil. In fact, elevating bin Laden to that status only gives him a
mantle of heroism now and, more ominously, will guarantee him martyrdom
if he should die.  Even if he is killed or captured, the fertile soil
that creates such figures will still be there. Moreover,  any attacks may
simply serve to inflame passions and create hosts of new volunteers to
their ranks.  Military solutions to the problems in the
Middle East and the terrorism that has resulted from these problems is
not a policy but a recipe for more violence and bombings. 

Steve Niva teaches International politics and Middle East Studies at the
Evergreen State College. 

--------- End forwarded message ----------

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