The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

The second issue al-Qaida has been explicit about is the U.S. role in the Palestinian problem. Most Muslims and much of the rest of the world share this objection to an American policy seen as one-sid- edly favoring Israel. At the root of bin Laden’s implacable hostility, however, is probably his view of the nature of Western culture. He de- nounces it as secular, impure, materialistic, sex- and money-obsessed and implaca- bly bent on undermining Islam. To him, we represent a new “Jahaliyya” (a time of ignorance before the truth was revealed by God), like the previous ones that Abraham, Jesus and, finally, Mohammed were dispatched by God to overcome. This interpretation allows bin Laden to cast himself as a modern-day suc- cessor to those prophetic figures, and he is so viewed by many followers. For these and other reasons beyond the scope of this essay, I believe that the only way to cope with the al-Qaida threat is to destroy its supporting network, and to avoid policies that gratuitously increase its fol- lowing. The Larger Context To craft policies to accomplish those ends, however, we need to take into account the fact that most of the terrorist problems we face in the Middle East were exacerbated by our responses to two events that took place in 1979. The first was the Iranian revolution and the second, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both served to rekindle a dormant radical movement in Islam. The Iranian revolution was largely a reaction to the policies of Shah Pahlevi’s secular regime that had had the open-ended support of Washington. In fact, the U.S. had intervened in 1953 to restore the shah to power after an election had installed a government that threatened to nationalize the oil industry. Washington had backed the shah’s “White Revolution” unreserved- ly, selling him whatever weapons he wanted and over- loading Iran with American military personnel who brought with them a culture that offended many puri- tanical Shiite sensibilities. (The first shot in the revolution was the bombing of a movie house showing American films that reli- gious authorities considered morally offensive.) Then, when Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein because we regarded Tehran, with its strongly anti-Western ideology, as the principal threat. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, our response to the Soviet inva- sion was to work with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in sup- porting the mujahideen by financing and supplying weapons for their resistance. One of the beneficiaries of our support was none other than Osama bin Laden. When the Soviets ultimately withdrew from the coun- try in 1989 our attention wandered, leaving the chaos of “warlordism” that finally brought the Taliban to power to impose a kind of stability of the graveyard. Our policies toward Pakistan soured and exacerbated the problem. Reacting to these developments, the U.S. gradually built up a larger military presence in the Middle East. This led to increasing culture clashes, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where Wahhabism is particu- larly strong. Although only a minority of Arab Muslims practice this austere, fundamentalist strain of Islam, we need to understand it to appreciate the nature of our clash with al-Qaida. Wahhabism took root among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1700s in reaction to the grow- ing secularization and decadence of the Ottoman Sultanate. It is, like its Jewish and Christian funda- mentalist counterparts, a kind of Puritanism, character- ized by the same messianic outlook, the same self-cer- tain dogmatism, the same paranoia of the “true believ- er” — and the same tendency to idealize the rapid spread of Islamic power and influence in the century after Mohammed’s death in 632. During the Golden Era of Islamic civilization, rough- ly corresponding to the Middle Ages in Europe, Baghdad and Cordova were centers of world learning and culture, unequaled in the West. Cairo, Tehran and Istanbul were world-class cities compared to London or Paris. Arab scholars (e.g., the physician/philosophers F O C U S 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 In my view, our focus should have remained on Afghanistan, a difficult enough case on its own.