What bin Laden’s sympathizers object to, as they have said again and again, is our government’s propping up of unpopular regimes in the Middle East, the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the American government’s support for the activities of governments (like Russia) that are hostile to their Muslim populations, and what they believe to be an American bias toward Israel. The point is not that we need to agree with these arguments, but that we need to be aware of them if we want to understand what is motivating so many people to rally to bin Laden’s banner. Few people are moved to leave behind their worldly possessions and their families to carry out violence on behalf of a disembodied ideology; it is practical grievances, perhaps combined with an underlying ideology, that motivate large numbers to action.
At a press conference I held at the National Press Club in May 2007, Scheuer told reporters: “About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy. . . . They all agree they hate U.S. foreign policy. To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems.” That’s not what a lot of our talking heads tell us on television every day, but few people are in a better position to understand bin Laden’s message than Scheuer, one of our country’s foremost experts on the man.
Philip Giraldi, another conservative and former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, adds that “anybody who knows anything about what’s been going on for the last ten years would realize that cause and effect are operating here—that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that ‘we’re over there.’” The simple fact is that “there [are] consequences for our presence in the Middle East, and if we seriously want to address the terrorism problem we have to be serious about that issue.”
Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recognized that foreign intervention could have unintended consequences and that the American presence in the Middle East had bred hostility against our country. On May 29, 2003, Reuters reported: “Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion [of Iraq] had been ‘almost unnoticed but huge’—namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance.” In short, according to Wolfowitz one of the motivations of the 9/11 attackers was resentment over the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Again, neither Wolfowitz nor I have ever said or believed that Americans had it coming on 9/11, or that the attacks were justified, or any of this other nonsense. The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet’s nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people. That’s just common sense. But hardly anyone in our government dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy.
Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioned
domestic
program can have. We can only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.
A classic example of blowback involves the overthrow of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. American and British intelligence collaborated on the overthrow of Mossadegh’s popularly elected government, replacing him with the politically reliable but repressive shah. Years later, a revolutionary Iranian government took American citizens hostage for 444 days. There is a connection here—not because supporters of radical Islam would have had much use for the secular Mossadegh, but because on a human level people resent that kind of interference in their affairs.
When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic fundamentalism. Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. The world’s expert on suicide terrorism convinced me to rethink this apparently plausible answer. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, for his book
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
, collected a database of all 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we have believed. The world’s leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or the Sudan.
The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.” Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the United States had troops stationed. While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed. Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the U.S., France, and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon, there were no more attacks. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire potential suicide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs.
Pape is convinced after his extensive research that the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim territories, the greater the chance of more 9/11-type attacks on the United States.
Although most Americans don’t know it, for much of the early twentieth century our country had an excellent reputation in the Middle East, the part of the world we are now told will hate us no matter what we do. Right now, after decades of meddling, our government is hated in the Middle East and around the world to a degree I have never before seen in my lifetime. That does not make us safer.
To be sure, there will always be those who wish us ill regardless of the foreign policy we adopt. But those who would recruit large numbers of their coreligionists to carry out violence against Americans find their task very difficult when they cannot point to some tangible issue that will motivate people to do so. It is bin Laden’s specific list of grievances that has rallied so many to his cause. Predictably enough, al Qaeda recruitment has exploded since the invasion of Iraq.
The war in Iraq was one of the most ill-considered, poorly planned, and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history, and I opposed it from the beginning. But the beginning I am speaking of was not 2002 or 2003. As early as 1997 and 1998, shortly after my return to Congress after a dozen years back in my medical practice, I spoke out against the actions of the Clinton administration, which I believed was moving us once again toward war with Iraq. I believe the genesis of our later policy was being set at that time. Many of the same voices who then demanded that the Clinton administration attack Iraq later demanded that the Bush administration attack Iraq, exploiting the tragedy of September 11 to bring about their long-standing desire to see an American invasion of that country. Any rationale would do: “weapons of mass destruction,” the wickedness of Saddam (an issue that did not seem to keep many of these policymakers up at night in the 1980s, when they were supporting him), a Saddam–al Qaeda link, whatever. As long as their Middle Eastern ambitions could be satisfied, it did not matter how the people were brought along.
By any standard—constitutional, financial, national defense—I could not see the merits of the proposed invasion of Iraq. Any serious Middle East observer could have told us, if we were listening, that Iraq had essentially no connection to terrorism. (At the time of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Osama bin Laden actually offered to lead an army to defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam if necessary.) Iraq had not attacked us, and figures in our own government, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had said that Saddam was effectively contained and no threat to anyone. Saddam’s was not even an Islamic regime; it was a secular one—although, thanks to the war, that is now changing.
Some war apologists to this day still try to argue that the weapons were really there or that Saddam really was linked to al Qaeda, but I’m not sure why they bother. The administration long ago gave up on these claims.
In the midst of all this, it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war, and the lengths to which Christian and later secular thinkers have gone over the centuries to limit and restrict the waging of war. For well over a thousand years there has been a doctrine and Christian definition of what constitutes a just war. This just-war tradition developed in the fourth century with Ambrose and Augustine but grew to maturity with Thomas Aquinas and such Late Scholastics as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez. The requirements for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject shared some basic principles. The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them.
First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged. But there was no act of aggression against the United States. We are 6,000 miles from Iraq. The phony stories we were told about unmanned drones coming to get us were, to say the least, not especially plausible.
Second, diplomatic solutions had not been exhausted. They had hardly been tried.
Traditional just-war criteria also demand that the initiation of war be undertaken by the proper authority. Under the U.S. Constitution, the proper authority is neither the president nor the United Nations. It is Congress—but Congress unconstitutionally delegated its decision-making power over war to the president.
I heard it argued that Saddam had indeed committed an act of aggression against the United States: he had shot at our airplanes. Those American planes were monitoring the “no-fly zones” over Iraq. Authority for such zones was said to come from U.N. Resolution 688, which instructs nations to contribute to humanitarian relief in the Kurdish and Shiite areas. The resolution actually says nothing about no-fly zones, and nothing about bombing missions over Iraq.
That Saddam Hussein missed every single airplane for 12 years as tens of thousands of sorties were being flown indicates the utter weakness of our enemy: an impoverished Third World nation that lacked an air force, antiaircraft weapons, and a navy. This was supposed to be the great threat, requiring urgent action. Such nonsense insults the intelligence of the American people and makes the rest of the world wonder about our sanity.
And yet the propaganda continues even today. In one of the Republican presidential debates, after being called an isolationist—honestly, is the distinction between isolationism and noninterventionism really so difficult to grasp?—I was solemnly informed that the course I recommended in Iraq amounted to the same kind of thinking that had led to Hitler! Now, all of us are used to hearing political propaganda, especially in presidential debates, but this really took the cake: were the American people expected to believe that unless they supported the invasion and occupation of a completely paralyzed Third World country, they were the sort of people who would have given aid and comfort to Hitler? Did this candidate really have such a low estimate of the intelligence of the American people?
How, after all, had Hitler been able to rise to power in the first place? Hitler made a name for himself by denouncing the Treaty of Versailles, which established the peace terms with Germany at the end of World War I. Many observers at the time and since have described the treaty as severe and one-sided. (And no, that is not how all postwar treaties are: after the Napoleonic Wars, the last continent-wide conflict until World War I, the Congress of Vienna imposed reasonable terms on defeated France and fully welcomed her back into the community of nations within only a few years.) Hitler appealed directly to this sense of grievance on the part of the German people: how long, he asked, are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like a third-class nation?
Now let us recall President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to involve the United States in World War I. (The level of popular support for Wilson’s decision may perhaps be gauged by the massive propaganda campaign, without precedent in American history, that the government undertook to win over public opinion.) The war in Europe had been a stalemate prior to Wilson’s intervention. Thanks to that intervention, not only did the Allies win, but they were also now in a position to impose the punitive Versailles Treaty on a defeated Germany. It is not at all a stretch to say, as many historians have indeed said, that Wilson’s decision to intervene gave inadvertent impetus to Hitler’s politics of extreme nationalism, since the treaty it made possible helped catapult him into the limelight. Hitler might otherwise have remained a nobody. German president Paul von Hindenburg was said to have sized him up as potentially a good postmaster general.
Did Wilson
intend
this outcome? Did he intend to hand Hitler and his party a perfect strategy for their political advancement? Of course not. But here we are, faced once again with the unpredictability of foreign intervention, and the strong possibility that by removing a bad government we may wind up not with a better one, but a far worse one.
Ever since then, no libertarian or traditional conservative I am aware of has had anything but contempt for the utopian Wilson. The mainstream Left of his day was largely disillusioned by the outcome, having hoped for a more just peace, and genuine progressives like Robert La Follette, Randolph Bourne, and Jane Addams had opposed the war from the beginning. That essentially leaves a smattering of neoconservatives today as Wilson’s remaining defenders. But here was a historical lesson to learn if there ever was one.