Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (31 page)

The Liberian analogy points up the insensitivity to native interests born of the settler experience. Comparing Liberia and Israel, it is clear both united the victims and perpetrators of the catastrophe in question—even if at the expense of a new set of native victims. Liberia was an experiment championed enthusiastically by both former slaves and former slave owners. With the cause of Israel, there are the most ardent Zionists alongside the most anti-Semitic sections of the Christian right, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Here, for example, is the text of a full-page ad in the
New York Times
of December 3, 2002:

Dear Dr. Pat Robertson: As activist leaders of the Jewish community joined by people of goodwill everywhere, we thank you and other Christian leaders who have shown unwavering support for Israel. At a time when Israel is under such mortal threat, enemies of terror must speak out. For standing up to evil, we say Todah Rabbah. Signed: Coalition for Jewish Concerns—AMCHA [The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, based in Riverdale, New York].

This unity has been forged around commitment to a shared civilizing mission, with civilization understood as a settler product that must be brought to natives. The Americo-Liberians thought it their God-given right to civilize native Liberians who had never left home. Not only that, their notion of “civilization” was forged in the land of slavery; it was punctuated by the very artifacts of the civilization into which they had been denied entry—artifacts ranging all the way from the top hat to the green dollar to the White House. Zionists who return to Israel see Palestinians as interlopers, squatters; without a right grounded in a biblically sanctioned “civilized” history, they must now clear the way for the rightful owners of the land.

America’s response to major catastrophes—first slavery, then the Holocaust—has crystallized a tendency among Americans to see overseas settlements as a solution, not a problem. In both cases, the American solution was a return home, but a return so marked by a callous disregard for the rights of those who were already home, who had never left home, that in each instance the project turned into one of settler colonialism. How does one explain the insensitivity to native interests that seems to be a special feature of American political history? Could it be that America, both official and unofficial, both privileged and not, which has never dared look its original crime, the expropriation and genocide of Native Americans, in the face, has historically tended to see settler projects as effective ways to cope with major internal dislocations, at the same time projecting them as so many civilizing missions to the world at large?

The African experience shows that the claim of a civilizing mission can take many forms. Who can forget that apartheid South Africa claimed to be “the only democracy in Africa,” just as Israel today claims to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”? This is not entirely a hoax, but in neither case does it reflect the whole truth. True, many natives in Dar-es-Salaam or Kampala had lesser rights than some natives in Johannesburg or Durban, and Palestinians in Israel have greater rights than do many natives in the Arab world. The larger truth, however, is that the “civilizing mission” was never meant to include all the natives. It was never meant to generalize the regime of rights or democracy to natives. The whole truth is that, just as the colony of Liberia and apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, too, reflects a contradictory unity, a democratic despotism, in a single space. At a more general level, it is no different from the civilizing mission that Western powers brought to the colonies in an earlier era. To begin with, that mission shut out the vast majority of the colonized from the project of modernity and democracy. But when natives resisted this exclusion, it turned around to stigmatize them as antimodern and thus unworthy of democracy.

The state of Israel is a state. It is not a religion or a people. The Israeli state should be submitted to the same scrutiny as any other state, not only for the sake of the Palestinian people or the Israeli people, but, now more than ever, for the sake of humanity. The scale of Israeli atrocities—“our terror”—has ballooned since 9/11. It has been packaged in the American media as an inevitable response to “their terror” and has shown the way for the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.” A case in point is the building, after 9/11, of what the Israeli government calls “the fence,” the European media has described as “the wall,” and the mainstream American media has chosen not to describe at all. Only
Ha’aretz
, has had the courage to describe this atrocity:

Israelis still use the convenient and misleading term “fence” to describe the system of fortifications that is currently being erected on Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Even “wall,” the term more commonly used in foreign-language reports, is insufficient to describe what is really being built at this very moment: A concrete wall eight meters high, wire fences and electronic sensors, ditches four meters deep on either side, a dirt path to reveal footprints, an area into which entry is forbidden, a two-lane road for army patrols, and watchtowers and firing posts every 200 meters along the entire length. These are the components of the “fence.”

The estimated cost to Israel is $2 billion. The cost to Palestinians is in livelihood: “Thousands of Palestinians have lost their lands, their livelihood and their savings, which had been invested in green houses or reservoirs or houses for their children, because of these fortifications. According to the World Bank, the number of Palestinians who will eventually be directly hurt by the fence is between 95,000 and 200,000.” This is an atrocity comparable to the mass explusions of 1948 and the occupation of 1967. Even if the road map pushed by the Bush administration is followed, concludes Amira Hass in the same article, the borders of the Palestinian state will be defined by “these facts on the ground”: “three enclaves, completely cut off from each other, without the Jordan Valley, without the fertile agricultural lands between Jenin and Qalqilyah, without ‘metropolitan Jerusalem,’ which includes the land between the settlements of Givat Ze’ev to the northwest, Betar to the southwest and Ma’aleh Adumin to the east.” Not an innocuous neighborhood fence meant to keep out trespassers, and far more ambitious than a wall—as in the Berlin Wall, which was meant to imprison the city’s population within an enforced political boundary, this fortification is meant both to fragment and to imprison, as it undercuts the livelihood of thousands. If realized, it will turn the Occupied Territories into a series of halfway houses between apartheid-style Bantustans and Nazi-style concentration camps.

There is more than a passing resemblance between the Zionist project in Israel and the Occupied Territories and the Islamist political project in central Asia. Both have unfolded under the political and ideological umbrella of the United States. In both cases, American patronage has been key to turning religious identities into political ones. In both cases, righteousness in politics has had nihilistic consequences. We have seen that the impact of the Afghan jihad was central both to the Islamization of the Pakistani state under the Zia regime and to the privatization and internationalization of terror during the Reagan administration. On both counts, we can see disturbing parallels in the Middle East. To begin with, Israel—like Pakistan—is dedicated to the notion that a religious community must also be a nation possessing its own state, thereby rendering those of its citizens who do not belong to the state religion as not only a political minority but also second-class citizens with lesser rights. At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims. The shift from a secular to a religious Zionism in Israel under Begin, just as the Islamization of the Pakistani state, under Zia, occurred under the protective American umbrella during the Cold War. At the same time, the settler occupation of Palestinian territories has been internationalized as a political project of both the Christian and the Zionist right. Both cases confirm that righteousness—or fundamentalism—in religion does not automatically translate into political terrorism. Rather, only when a righteous perspective—religious or secular—is integrated into a ruthless and ideologically intolerant political project does it provide the language that fuels terrorism.

Historical Responsibility

To understand who bears responsibility for 9/11, it will help to contrast two situations, after the Second World War and after the Cold War. The Second World War was fought in Europe and Asia, not in the United States. Europe and Asia thus faced physical and civic destruction at the end of the war that America did not face. The question of responsibility for postwar reconstruction arose as a political rather than a moral question. Its urgency in Europe was underscored by the changing political situations in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece in particular. Faced with the possibility of enhanced Communist influence, the United States accepted responsibility for restoring conditions for decent civic life in non-Communist Europe. The result was the Marshall Plan.

The Cold War was largely not fought in Europe but in what came to be called the Third World, through wars that were mostly covert. Should we, ordinary humanity, hold official America responsible for its actions during the Cold War? Should official America be held responsible for napalm bombing and spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos? Should it be held responsible for the environment of impunity that nurtured terrorist movements in southern Africa, central Africa, and central Asia? Official America’s embrace of terrorism did not end with the Cold War. Right up to September 10, 2001, the United States and Britain compelled African countries to reconcile with terrorist movements. Take the example of Sierra Leone, where civilian government was restored in 1998. On January 6, 1999, rebel gunmen killed, maimed, and raped their way across the capital city, Freetown. The unspeakable acts of terror took the lives of more than five thousand civilians. The British and American response was to call for reconciliation between victims and purveyors of terror, between government and rebels, in the July 1999 Lome Agreement. Sierra Leone is but one example of the benign gaze with which western governments have condoned terror—“black-on-black” violence—in Africa before 9/11. Before that, there was the Rwanda genocide, in which 800,000 civilians were killed in ninety days, and the war in Congo, where upward of 3 million have been killed. The demand was always that governments must share power with the purveyors of terror in the name of reconciliation—in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Angola. Reconciliation was turned into a code word for impunity and became part of a Cold War political strategy designed to undermine hard-won state independence.

We need to recognize diverse routes to terrorism. At least three come to mind. I have traced the main route: an imperial search for effective ways of undermining the political support of leftist nationalist governments (such as Frelimo in Mozambique and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua) or simply governments it considered as belonging to a hostile camp (such as the Amin government in Afghanistan). I consider this the main route for one reason: without the strategic embrace of terror by a superpower, there would not have been the global political environment of impunity, which was critical for the development of terrorism by other routes. The second route, its mirror opposite, involved the internal degeneration of guerrilla movements, as with the RUF in Sierra Leone and Shining Path in Peru. The third route has been the result of a profound social—rather than narrowly political—crisis. Instead of terror being espoused by groups with clear ideological agendas, whether of the left or the right, and instead of an unadulterated quest for power, we have in this case the use of political violence by nonideological groups that have neither expounded a cause openly nor attempted to organize support in civilian strata. The best example of this kind of nonideological group is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, a largely homegrown Renamo-style group that kidnaps children and turns them into recruits.

Rather than argue whether terrorism is a foreign import or a homegrown product, I have tried to point up the relationship between the two: the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where at least one superpower turned a blind eye to “its” terror. This, after all, was a logical extension of the Kirkpatrick thesis that distinguished “right” from “left” dictatorships: excusing “our” dictators as both useful and temporary. I have argued that whereas political terror was an import in such cases as Mozambique, and later Nicaragua, the strategic embrace of terror in Liberia and Sierra Leone was more the result of a process of internal degeneration combined with learning by example from other Cold War contexts. Even if terrorism was a Cold War brew, it turned into a local potion as the Cold War progressed. Whose responsibility is it? Like Afghanistan, were these countries hosting terrorism, or were they also hostage to terrorism? I think both.

Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another million and a half were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.

Unlike Afghanistan, which hosted the last great Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Iraq was the first to face a low-intensity barrage through the multilateral proxy of the UN. Supposedly the beneficiary of a humanitarian oil-for-food program, Iraq paid with the lives of hundreds of thousands of children under the tender age of five.