One of the benefits to an American of living abroad is the availability of non-American news. Whereas the news-gathering power of CNN and its cohorts is impressive, the political solipsism of their news analysis can sometimes border on the absurd. Nowhere is this more evident than in the coverage of the terrorist attacks of one year ago.
To most Americans, the salient fact of the attacks is that they were directed at America, a country unaccustomed to enemy action on its soil. Hence the news media, in trying to come to terms with the shock and horror of 11 September, looked no farther than the question, “Why us?” The answers that they came up with naturally ran no deeper than the question itself: “They hate us for our freedom”; “They hate us because we support Israel”; “They hate us because we’re rich”; and, most perniciously, “They hate us because we are the champions of Western civilization, against which Islamic civilization has declared war.” As a result of this self-centered attitude, the United States is busily concocting a new, unilateral and gratuitous war on Iraq that will bring to pass the very conflict of civilizations that almost nobody wants.
The truth that few Americans wish to face is this: the United States was a side-show in the 11 September attacks. The death and destruction of the World Trade Center, and the kamikaze bombing of the Pentagon, were cynical acts of supreme spectacle directed at an audience far removed from those emblems of American power. For Osama bin Laden, the “Great Satan” is not America but the corrupt Arab regimes, and especially the Saudi royal family who cut him off. His goal is not the humiliation of the West (that is just a tactic), but rather a complete revolution in the way the Arab world is governed.
Bin Laden is just the latest example of a phenomenon that has characterized Arab and Islamic politics for half a century: the search for the new Saladin. Arabs, and especially Arab intellectuals like bin Laden, are painfully aware of the lack of unity that the Islamic world exhibits, and its resulting weakness when faced with challenges from the West, or from India, or Russia, or China. From their history, Arabs know that the same situation prevailed in the twelfth century, when divisions in the Islamic world enabled Christian Europe to force its way into the Holy Land and establish a series of “Crusader States”. These alien states – whose boundaries bore a striking resemblance to the map of Israel today – were resented not so much because they were Christian as because they displayed the shameful weakness of the Arabs. When Saladin (Salah ud-Din) succeeded, in 1187, in uniting the Arabs and pushing the Europeans out, he became a hero whose name still resounds with pride in the region today.
So who will be the new Saladin? Gamal Abdel Nasser tried; so did Muammar Gadhaffi, Anwar Sadat, Hafez Assad, Ruhollah Khomeini (not an Arab, but who’s counting?), and Saddam Hussein. Some had the charisma, some had the money, others had diplomatic or military nouse, but no one has yet combined all of these qualities. Above all, no one, until bin Laden, has understood the power of the media. The attack on the second tower of the World Trade Center was timed to occur when every news camera in the world was focused on the first tower: Francis Ford Coppola could not have scripted it better. In other words, America was attacked because it had CNN.
Osama bin Laden will not be the new Saladin. For all his talent at motivation and self-aggrandizement, he lacks any sense of reality; he seems genuinely to have believed that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan could protect him from American vengeance. He and his movement may yet cause much death and misery, but he himself will not profit from it. What he has done, however, is to show the way for the next contender for the Saladin title: work against the Arab governments, not with them. Revolution, like the Internet, is a force that transcends the ossified grasp of “the state”, and holds the promise of a new beginning. What the next contender may aspire to become is not the new Saladin, but the Arab Mao.
When (not if) the new Arab/Islamic entity emerges, how will it define itself with regard to the West? That depends in large part on how the West – and for better or worse, that means America – behaves now. When Mao succeeded in uniting China half a century ago, the American president had to fire his most popular and talented general, Douglas MacArthur, for advocating a pre-emptive military strike against China. Today, the chief advocate for such a strike against the Islamic world is the president himself. Why is this the case? The answer lies in the vision that President George W. Bush holds for his country.
His enemies like to portray Bush as an ignorant Texas redneck, but he is in fact far from stupid. He may be uneducated in matters of foreign policy, but that is a matter of conscious choice, not of intellect. Bush is an absolute patriot, in the sense that he believes in an American destiny that has little to do with the rest of the world, other than perhaps to serve as an example for anyone not fortunate enough to be an American. His attitudes are so far removed from those of his father (ambassador, foreign policy expert, coalition builder) as to suggest some sort of generational rebellion. He watched and learned as his father’s presidency, in spite of international glory in the 1991 Gulf War, was undermined and finally defeated by inattention to domestic problems, and he took to heart the slogan that brought his detested rival Bill Clinton to power in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The inward-directedness of the present Bush administration stems largely from the shame of that defeat, and is visible in everything from the Kyoto environmental accords to the International Court of Justice to the coming war on Iraq. Whereas previous generations of American conservatives expressed this inwardness as isolationism, with Bush it is unilateralism. America will go it alone, because what’s good for America will be good for the world – whether the world likes it or not.
Specifically on Iraq, Bush is motivated by three factors. First, and most crassly, this is a Congressional election year; he and his Republican party need to be seen as vigorous in defense of America’s interests, and there is nothing like a war to whip up electoral support. Second, he was stung by the criticism of his father for stopping the 1991 Gulf War too soon, before “finishing the job” and ridding the world of Saddam Hussein; he sees himself as having been given a second chance to redeem the family name. And finally, Bush is obsessed with what is called the Vietnam Syndrome – the belief that even a superpower has limits to its ability to intervene in the world. Like all good American conservatives, Bush believes the United States could indeed serve as the world’s policeman, if only the nation had a president with the strength of character to get the job done. By proving his point in Iraq, he will incidentally show what a coward and traitor his predecessor Bill Clinton was, in opposing the Vietnam War and dodging the military draft.
Will a war against Iraq really be a bad thing? Few tears will be shed if Saddam Hussein gets wafted away on a puff of American napalm. The Iraqi military and administrative apparatus has been constructed entirely around the principle of sycophancy, so that its survivors will quickly adapt to whatever new power the American army manages to install. Under an optimistic scenario, the victory will be quick and clean, with a body count no worse than the 100,000 or so who died in 1991. Weapons inspectors will identify and dismantle Saddam’s death machine. And none of it will do any good.
Defeating Saddam will be the easy part. The hard part will be dealing with the detritus of victory. Iraq as a country, with its ridiculous borders drawn across the deserts, is an administrative fiction devised for imperial convenience, first of the Ottoman Turks, then later of the British. The Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south both outnumber the now-dominant Sunni Arabs. The nation-state, in its European form, has never had much of an equivalent in Arab history, and has existed there only as an artifact of colonialism. The destruction of the fragile legal entity called Iraq would call into question the equally unsubstantial entities known as Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and all of North Africa. An attack like the one Bush is planning may be all that it takes to bring the whole shaky edifice crashing down – exactly what Bin Laden is after. America may be clearing the way for the Arab Mao, just as imperial Japan cleaned the slate for China’s Mao.
Would that be a bad thing? Perhaps not, if it happened by itself; but if it happens in conjunction with a fresh humiliation at the hands of the West, we would be faced with a hostile and unstoppable political force, imbued with militant Islamic resolve, fired by massive resentment, fortified with a young populace and the revolution of rising expectations, and in control of immense oil reserves and the remains of Saddam’s weaponry. These are the makings of Cold War II, or worse.
The lessons of Korea and Vietnam, it appears, will have to be learned all over again: You don’t enhance your own security by undermining somebody else’s. There could not be a sadder epitaph than this for the three thousand people who died on 11 September 2001.
Waiheke Island, September 2002
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Copyright © 2002 T. Mark James
A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Gulf News,
Waiheke Island, New Zealand, on 5 September 2002.