Tom,
I'm sure your intentions were good, but wrong place and wrong time for that
type of correspondence.
Dennis
*****
At 06:55 AM 9/16/01 +1000, you wrote:
>To those looking for a better understanding of the reasons behind the present
>parlous state of peace this was forwarded to me by a friend in the US.
>
>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 terrorist 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�'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 commit 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 elsewhere 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.
>
>
>Warmest regards,
>
>
>Tom Grimshaw
>coy: Just For You Software
>tel: 612 9552 3311
>fax: 612 9566 2164
>mobile: 0414 675 903
>
>post: PO Box 470 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
>street: 3/66 Wentworth Park Rd Glebe NSW 2037
>
>email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>web: www.just4usoftware.com.au
>
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>
Dennis Fleming
IISCO
http://www.TheBestCMMS.com
