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Is
The United States “A Terrorist Magnet”?
by
M. Shahid Alam
August
4, 2003
Is
it possible that a single metaphor, one that has dropped from the lips of a
serving American general, can offer some forbidden insights into the dynamics
of America’s relations with the Islamic world?
On
July 28, 2003, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground
forces in Iraq, while talking to CNN, blamed the “multi-faceted conflict”
Americans face in Iraq on “terrorists,” “former regime leadership,” “criminals”
and “hired assassins.” Then he volunteered an explanation that I think, perhaps
unintentionally, was daring in its clarity. “[There] is what I would call a
terrorist magnet where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of
opportunity if you will.”
Is
it really necessary to pick bones with the General’s description of the Iraqi
resistance as “terrorist activity”? The Iraqis have not attacked any American
civilians, inside Iraq or elsewhere; they have only targeted American troops.
Nor are they not attacking just any American troops. They are attacking only
those who have invaded and occupied their country. Why then does the General
call the Iraqi guerrillas terrorists, criminals and hired assassins? Perhaps,
this is another semantic ploy we have borrowed from the Israelis. The
Palestinians are terrorists even when they attack Israeli tanks and armor, even
when their only weapons are stones.
It
is all the more stunning, after this dissimulation, when General Sanchez offers
his theory of “a terrorist magnet.” It claims that the presence of American
troops inside Iraq has become a “magnet” for “terrorist activity.” It is the
presence of American troops in Iraq that is the source, the cause of
this “terrorist activity.” Moreover, this is natural. What else would you
expect if you placed a “magnet” among iron filings? The iron filings would all
be drawn towards and stick to the magnet.
This
theory of “a terrorist magnet” is disconcertingly heretical. Although no one
seems to have noticed, it undermines two key arguments the Bush administration
has used, both ex ante and ex post, to sell the war on terrorism.
First, the war on terrorism has been based on the premise that the terrorist
attacks by Arab extremists are an ontological phenomenon. It is in the nature
of the attackers, a nature instilled by their societies and in
particular by their religion, to attack America. They fear America’s virtues:
its freedom, prosperity, and the rights it grants to women. The terrorist
attacks are motivated by the ontological rage of an inferior and flawed
civilization – Islam – against the superior, dynamic, Christian civilization of
the West. It is a thesis that has been advanced assiduously by Jewish and
Christian Zionists. And it is this thesis that President Bush embraced when he
declared war against the attackers of 9-11.
The
theory General Sanchez offers contradicts this. It substitutes a Newtonian
explanation for the ontological postulate favored by the Bush administration
and much of the American media. The Iraqi resistance is not rooted in Iraqi
nature, or in Sunni Iraqi nature, or Baa’thi Sunni Iraqi nature. The Iraqis
have not sneaked into the United States to attack American troops. As the
Iraqis see it, the American troops are being attacked because they are in the
wrong place (Iraq), doing the wrong thing (illegally occupying Iraq), for the
wrong reasons (capturing Iraqi oil and deepening Israeli hegemony over the
Arabs).
The
theory of a terrorist magnet would seem to run afoul of a second rationale for
the US war against Iraq. In the first weeks after the official end of the war,
when it appeared that no WMDs were to be found – and there was a risk that the
earlier claims about WMDs would be seen as weapons of mass deception – we
invented a new buzz word: Liberation. The WMDs were not the only reason for
invading Iraq. We went in to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny.
Conveniently forgotten was our support for this tyranny before the First Gulf
War, our betrayal of the Kurdish resistance and Iraqi uprising, and the deaths and
suffering we had inflicted on the Iraqis over thirteen years of bombings and
sanctions.
Why
then have the liberators become “a terrorist magnet”? Admittedly, the armed
resistance is not national yet; it is confined mostly to Iraq’s Sunni Arab
population. But if the Iraqis leading the armed resistance are “former regime
leadership,” “criminals” and “hired assassins,” they could not hide among an
Iraqi population well-disposed to their American liberators. However, to this
date, no Iraqi has yet betrayed members of the Iraqi resistance.
If
the toll of American dead and wounded continues to mount, this will raise more
troubling questions. Why had we not seen this going in? Why had we not foreseen
that 150,000 Americans deposited amidst a hostile population – a population
that we had bombed and besieged for thirteen years – would become a magnet for
“terrorists”? It is true that Muslims have a poor record of resisting local
tyrannies, even when they are proxies for foreign powers; but we should have
known that they have unexceptionably resisted foreign occupations. We should
have known that Mujahideen (“terrorists” for their enemies) from all corners of
the world would soon be entering Iraq to fight the foreign occupation, as they
had done in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Palestine.
So,
if ordinary young Americans are dying today in Iraq – and many more recover
from war wounds – that is not because the administration, the neoconservative
ideologues, and the media could not have foreseen this. They did, but chose to
ignore these concerns. In their calculus, the lives of a few ordinary Americans
were expendable, compared to the great prizes before them. Arab oil had to be
secured; and the Arab world had to be made safe for Israeli hegemony.
The
thesis of a terrorist magnet raises a broader question, one that is at the
heart of America’s relations with the Islamic world. General Sanchez’s remark –
about Americana troops in Iraq serving as “terrorist magnets” – has drawn few
comments from the media. The Newtonian connection he drew between an American
action (insertion of troops into Iraq) and the reaction (Iraqi resistance) was
perhaps too obvious to deny. And who would dare impugn the patriotism of the
General commanding our forces in Iraq? Perhaps, that is why his remarks were
quickly laid to rest.
However,
no one in America’s mainstream media, much less a general or a politician, will
dare to make a similar connection between America’s foreign policies towards
the Islamic world and the anti-American forces that now proliferate in that
region. The American political establishment promotes the ideology that the
United States can do no wrong in its dealings with foreign countries. The
United States is not only the most powerful country that has ever existed; it
is also the most benevolent.
As
a result, it is heretical to suggest that 9-11 may have been a blowback from
our policies towards the Middle East. To suggest such a connection is not to
justify 9-11. Yet most Americans are unwilling to separate the morality and
causality of 9-11. Until we learn to do so there can be no rational discourse
on the etiology of the growing conflicts between the United States and the
Islamic world. And if that does not happen soon, the civilizational war which the
Zionists – Christian and Jewish – and some Islamic extremists so avidly project
may become a frightening reality.
M. Shahid Alam is professor of
economics at Northeastern University. His last book, Poverty from the Wealth of
Nations, was published by Palgrave in 2000. He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu. Visit his webpage at http://msalam.net.
© M. Shahid
Alam
* A
Short History of the Global Economy Since 1800
* Illuminating
Thomas Friedman