10 Years After: No More 911s Part One
By Jeff Hackman
Soon after the horrific events of 911, I saw a bumper sticker that read: “To Stop Terrorism, Stop Terrorizing”. What does this mean? Is the US involved in terrorizing other people?
The bumper sticker tried to address another question heard so often in September and October 2001, but not heard much now: “Why do they hate us?” It seems that that genuine search for understanding was too quickly replaced by simple payback.
On August 6, 2011, a “militant” shot down a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, killing 30 US soldiers including members of the US Navy Seals. Was this person aware of who was on the chopper and wanted revenge for the Seals’ killing of Osama bin Laden a few months earlier? Or was this person—yes, he was a person—fighting a foreign occupation of his country? We’ll probably never know. A few days after the Chinook went down, the US military claimed that F-16 jets had “taken out” the exact “militant” who did it. This is the never ending cycle of death we are now entangled in.
Few Americans read bin Laden’s actual words to try to understand the hate he had for the US in particular, and the West in general. He railed against several actions of the US in the 20th century: posting US troops on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and probably most prominently the US support for Israel—the state that many Arab nationalists view as an invasion of the West into the turf of their brothers the Palestinians.
Some tried to answer the question by saying that radical Islam hates the ideas of democracy, equal rights for women and materialism. There is some truth to that. No one will ever know the exact mix of beliefs that drove bin Laden to his path of destruction.
His critique of US foreign policy has merit however. It is understandable how Arabs might feel the West and the US have encroached on their land and people. It began with the Allied powers of World War I breaking up the Ottoman Empire in a way that divided the Arab nation and enabled them to profit more from the oil resources of the region than the people who actually lived above “our” oil.
Then after World War II, the powers-that-be decided that Israel would be created in Palestine. In the years after 1948, the US funded Israel’s military with billions of dollars of aid. That aid continues today, to the tune of $10 million each and every day.
Besides the argument that Israel is not legitimate to the Middle East region, there’s the way Israel has treated the Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab countries. Israel is now the bully of the region, bombing countries hundreds of miles from its borders: Iraq, Tunisia and even Sudan. We must be clear that the Israelis have legitimate fears of attack, but the overreaction to those fears has only served to amplify the existential threat to the Jewish state.
Cold War dynamics were superimposed on the Arab-Israeli dispute, making the stakes even higher. The Cold War morality (sic) guiding US foreign policy—anything goes—led the US to despicable behavior throughout the region for decades. The CIA was involved in overthrowing the government of Iran. The US propped up corrupt and brutal regimes from Mubarak to Saddam to the Saudi royal family. The US assassinated rulers, bombed Arab states, and intrigued to keep a stranglehold on the control of the region’s vast oil reserves.
Although the Cold War era is over, the anti-terrorism era continues to motivate the US to interfere: more and more military bases in the region, increasing use of drones to assassinate individuals it considers to be a threat, and of course continuing to prop up despots from Sanaa to Manama and Kabul.
Of course, one wrong does not justify more wrongs. The cycle of violence is unacceptable. But we need to look at the history of the US and the Middle East with realistic eyes if we want to understand the response.
Ten years after 911, the US must look to “drain the swamp” of terrorism, rather than assume that bombing the mosquitoes will end terrorism. If the US continues to terrorize the region by propping up dictators, raining death from the skies indiscriminately and building more bases, it can expect more “blowback”.
Some said in the wake of 911, “the world has changed”. Actually, the US joined the world on 911. We now know what it is like to be the victim of terrorism. Unless the US changes its ways in the Middle East, the terror of life in that region will rebound to America’s shores again and again. Several specific examples of what that change would look like will be the subject of part two of this post.
