Instantly,
instinctively, and unrelentingly, the American establishment
has framed the attacks of September 11, 2001, in
the language of a clash of civilizations. The Islamic
terrorists attacked America because they hate our
highest values, our freedoms, our way of life, our
civilization.
President
Bush wasted no time in defining the language of
this discourse in his first speech on September
11, 2001. “Today,” he opened his speech,
“our fellow citizens, our way of life, our
very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate
and deadly terrorist acts.” This thesis was
hammered home again. “America was targeted
for attack because we're the brightest beacon for
freedom and opportunity in the world.”
On
September 20, 2001, the President returned to this
question in his speech to a joint session of the
Congress. Indeed, it was the centerpiece of his
speech. “Americans are asking,” he told
us, “who attacked our country?” His answer:
the attackers are “a collection of loosely
affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda.”
Their goal is “is remaking the world –
and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.”
Americans
are also asking, the President informs us, “why
do they hate us?” His answer is clearly stated. “They
hate what we see right here in this chamber –
a democratically elected government. Their
leaders are self-appointed. They hate
our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our
freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble
and disagree with each other.” It is not clear
anymore if ‘they’ points to al-Qaida,
the Arabs or all Muslims.
A
month after the September 11 attacks, President
Bush made the connection more explicit. "How
do I respond,” he asks, “when I see that
in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred
for America?" Of cuorse, the President is “amazed
that there's such misunderstanding of what our country
is about that people would hate us. I am –
like most Americans, I just can't believe it because
I know how good we are."
This
then is the ideology of America’s establishment
as it wages its “war against terror.”
The Muslims attacked America because they hate who
we are. They want to destroy us because they hate
our freedom, our opportunities, our democratic institutions,
our way of life, our Judeo-Christian heritage. It
is a hatred that is civilizational. It is rooted
in the illiberal, intolerant, misogynist, anti-modernist,
and anti-scientific culture of Muslims and their
religion. This thesis is now spun a thousand times
every day by America’s politicians, press and
pundits.
This
ideology of the clash of civilizations is multi-layered.
First, it seeks to explain to Americans and the
rest of the world why the United States and the
rest of the world must wage this war against terror.
Secondly, the clash thesis – long championed
by Zionist ideologues inside and outside Israel
– is a device for Americanizing the war Israel
has waged against the Palestinians and Arabs. Thirdly,
the war against terror is itself a cover which the
United States is using to establish a more muscular
control over the world.
This
ideology is problematic. First, there is its flimsiness.
It uses an inane concoction to deflect the blame
for the September 11 attacks from US policies in
the Middle East: our craven pandering to Israeli
aggression, our vital support for corrupt and dictatorial
regimes in the Middle East, and the war and deadly
sanctions against Iraq since 1990. It is flimsy
because it contradicts our understanding of human
nature. As Charles Reese put it, “It is absurd
to suppose that a human being sitting around suddenly
stands up and says: "You know, I hate freedom.
I think I'll go blow myself up.” [1]
Despite the incessant brainwashing, most Americans
can see that.
The
ideology fails for at least four additional reasons.
If it is their hatred of freedoms that motivated
Muslims to attack America, why did they wait for
some 200 years to begin their attacks against America
– if we start the clock with the bombing of
American marines in Beirut? The clash thesis raises
another question: why America only? Surely, freedoms
are not unique to America. The Arabs could have
found several easier targets, and nearer their home
bases too, in Europe. Third, if the Islamic world
so hated freedoms, why did young men from all corners
of the Islamic world descend upon Afghanistan to
fight the totalitarian Soviets? Fourth, if the attackers
are such freedom-haters why can’t they get
along with their own anti-democratic regimes, in
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan?
The
clash thesis resoundingly fails another crucial
test. Will the Islamists who attacked the United
States, and prepare for additional attacks, scrap
their terrorist campaign if the United States turns
into a fascist state or – try to imagine this
– if America’s elites convert to Islam
but continue their present policies towards the
Islamic world? One might pose a similar question
for the Zionists who accuse the Palestinians of
anti-Semitism. Would the course of Palestinian resistance
be any different if we could replace the colonial-settler
Jews with colonial-settler Germans, colonial-settler
Chinese or even colonial-settler Pakistanis? The
Islamist resistance does not stem from differences
of race or religion that divide Muslims from Americans
or Jews. It is a response to US-Israeli violence,
systematic and longstanding, that seeks to divide,
undermine, control and humiliate Islamic societies.
Despite
its intense propaganda, the American establishment
has failed to dupe most Americans on the Clash thesis.
In a CBS/NYT poll done in September 2002, 21 percent
Americans place “a lot of blame” on “US
policies in the Middle East over the years, while
another 54 percent place “some blame”
on these policies. According to a Pew Research Center
survey in August 2002, 53 percent Americans said
that the attacks of September 11 were “mostly
because” of the “political beliefs”
of the terrorists; only 25 percent believed that
the terrorists were motivated by “religious
beliefs.” [2] Finally,
a Los Angeles Times poll in September 2002 shows
that 58 percent Americans think that the attacks
were "a direct result of United States' policy
in the Middle East." [3]
The
Clash thesis and the associated war on terrorism
carry little or no credibility outside the United
States. This was first demonstrated in massive world
wide protests against the planned US invasion of
Iraq. Outside of the United States and Israel, the
overwhelming majority of world opinion regarded
this war to be illegal and immoral. Now, more than
a year after a failed occupation of Iraq; after
the revelations of systematic torture by Americans
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay; after the
erosion of liberties inside the United States; after
the establishment of an American Gulag whose geographic
expanse exceeds anything established by the Soviet
Union; American prestige in the world has sunk to
the lowest point in its history. In a poll conducted
by the European Union in October 2003, 53 percent
of EU citizens marked the United States as the second
greatest threat to world peace. It’s chief
ally, Israel, bagged the first prize. [4]
The
bogey of America’s ‘global’ and ‘unending
war’ on terrorism will soon face another test.
While the United States and its neocolonial allies
have incarcerated thousands in Gulags spread across
the world – without charges and without recourse
to law – the ‘war against terrorism’
has produced very few convictions for terrorist
crimes against the United States. If the al-Qaida
is indeed a formidable adversary, with a global
reach, and with sleeper cells in the United States
itself, trained in the manufacture and use of WMDs,
its failure to launch even a single operation against
the United States since September 11, 2001, poses
a problem for the credibility of the ‘war against
terrorism.’
It
is of course all too easy for the United States
to take credit for this failure. ‘Look how
good we have been against this formidable foe. Our
intelligence failed utterly before 9-11, but we
have since fixed all the problems.’ Alternatively,
they might argue that they are fighting these terrorists
in Baghdad and Najaf instead of Boston and New York.
But this rhetoric will wear out over time.
If
indeed al-Qaida fails to launch another attack against
American interests, on American soil or elsewhere,
Americans too will begin to ask: Did the United
States overreact. Worse, they might question if
this war was a phony, a cover to curtail liberties,
to launch preventive wars, to line the pockets of
corporate executives with tens of billions stolen
from American tax-payers. Have so many Americans
died in vain – for a phony war? Have Americans
died for Israel – to fulfill its strategic
objective of balkanizing, pulverizing the larger
Arab states? Once Americans begin to ask these questions,
the consequences could be unpredictable for Israel
and for the exercise of American power in the world.
It
is unlikely, however, that the US-Israeli axis will
allow this kind of questioning to ever take place.
The strategists in Washington and Tel Aviv understand
very well how Newton’s third law of motion
operates in the realm of history. If the ‘war
on terrorism’ is a phony, it can in time –
once the preventive wars are extended to Iran, Syria
and Pakistan – be made to produce the causes
that will make it look more credible, even more
compelling. Great powers have never lacked the ability
or willingness to produce the wars their elites
think are profitable. If the people do not get behind
their wars – or, in our case, start falling
back after getting in line – that is not a
problem. Great democracies know how to manufacture
consent. In the present circumstances, when history
appears to be balanced on a knife-edge, that trick
looks easier than ever.
Let
no one underestimate the power of great countries
– and we are undoubtedly the greatest the world
has ever seen – to convert phony wars into
real ones. Although false, the clash thesis can
become self-fulfilling.
