Can You Do Business with Al Qaeda Terrorists?

The terrorists of the very late-20th century were quite different from their predecessors among, say, the Irgun, the Zionist group led by Menachim Begin in the 1940s, or its mirror image, the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasir Arafat from the 1960s until his death in 2004.  Both of these groups targeted civilians in the hope of removing them and their armed representatives from territory they claimed as their ancestral homeland.  Even so, neither would have considered, let alone undertaken, the annihilation of an entire city by means of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.  The new terrorist movements of the very late-20th century did consider such a project.  That is the big difference between, say, the Irish Republican Army and al Qaeda—the latter, for example, killed almost as many innocent civilians in one day, September 11, 2001, as the IRA had in thirty years of trying.

Philip Bobbitt, the most important contemporary analyst of terrorism, illustrates the difference with a hypothetical scenario comparing the IRA, the PLO, and al Qaeda.  “Fearing popular revulsion, international disapproval, local repression, and threats to their own cohesion, and facing active dissuasion by those states that monopolized WMD even when they were willing to arm terrorists with other weapons, [the IRA and the PLO] turned away from such acquisitions   If someone had said to either Gerry Adams or Yasir Arafat, ‘I can get you a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon,’ one can imagine the reaction.  A cautious gasp, a quick turning away—reflecting the apprehension that one has met an agent provocateur.  But suppose such an offer were made to bin Laden?  He would say, ‘What will it cost?’ ”

The difference of scale between the old and the new terrorism is often explained by the ideological cohesion of the latter—the order-of-magnitude increase in the carnage caused by terrorist groups is an index of their religious intensity, many analysts say.  They typically go on to say that this intensity magnifies an anti-Western, post-liberal attitude toward the evidence of modernity.  The special contribution of al Qaeda, in these terms, has been its graft of a renewed Islamic doctrine, on the one hand, and a variety of political grievances already forged by Muslims’ resistance to western imperialism—by Afghans, Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians—on the other. 

Western observers often complain that Muslims never experienced a Reformation akin to the European upheaval that produced a separation of church and state, and so allowed the emergence of political movements that required no religious support or justification.  What these observers forget is that neither Luther nor Calvin, the Reformation’s founding fathers, favored such a separation: the statutory distance between the sacred and the secular took three centuries to establish, and its measurement still changes as the result of political debate and judicial review.  The intellectual renewal of Islam in the late-20th century through the restatement and revision of original texts—particularly but not only the Koran—has, in fact, amounted to a reformation, but, like the Christian precursor, it reinstates the refusal of a separation between holy writ and statutory law.  Its inventors have insisted that the rules and prohibitions we can derive from the Koran (and of course from its acknowledged antecedents in the Old and New Testament) are sufficient to the demands of modern governance.

Now we may ridicule this position as an anti-modern deviation from the secular example of the West.  We may want, accordingly, to prescribe more economic development as the treatment needed to wake these backward fundamentalists from their benighted dream of a global Caliphate ruled from Mecca.  But look more closely.  There is nothing notably anti-modern about either the religious fervor that would reintegrate the sacred and the secular—transcendent truth and mundane reality—or the political opposition to the liberal distinction between state and society.  Indeed all the successful revolutionary movements of the 20th century, which occasionally used terrorism as an adjunct to their guerilla wars, tried to dismantle this liberal distinction, on the grounds that it no longer made a difference.  These movements, from fascism to communism, were uniformly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, but they were also committed to the most strenuous versions of industrialized modernity.  So we can say that the intellectual renewal of Islam carried out by the spiritual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s (among them, Sayyid Qutb) and appropriated by al Qaeda in the 1990s does urge the erasure of the liberal distinction between state and society; but we should not conclude—as do Paul Berman from the Left and Norman Podhoretz from the Right—that this urge is the symptom of a nihilist sensibility which requires the obliteration of western civilization. 

If we do reach that conclusion, we will continue to mistake a post-liberal doctrine for an anti-modern ideology, and we will, as a result, continue to ignore the specific political grievances al Qaeda files on behalf of Muslims everywhere.  We will continue, accordingly, to say that “they [the terrorists] hate us not because of what we do, but for the way we live,” or that they are the moral equivalent of the Nazis.  President Bush put it this way nine days after the towers fell: “They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.  By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.”  Thus we will understand that there can be no political discussion or compromise with such brutes—we will realize that we must wage a borderless, endless “war on terror,” with all that implies for the militarization of US foreign policy as such.

 Bush and the liberal intellectuals who gathered under the banner of a “war on terror” were emphatic in claiming that the enemy has no political agenda except a “cult of death and irrationality” which somehow entails the end of the world as we know it.  Here is Bush on October 6, 2005:  “In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed [sic] and addressed.  We’re facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.  No act of ours invited the rage of the killers—and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.”  Here is Berman at an even more delirious, and incomprehensible, pitch of prophetic dread, in Terror and Liberalism (2003): “The successes of the Islamist revolution were going to take place on the plane of the dead, or nowhere.  Lived experience pronounced that sentence on the Islamist revolution—the lived experience of Europe, where each of the totalitarian movements [fascism and communism] proposed a total renovation of life, and each was driven to create the total renovation in death.”

But in fact, al Qaeda, like every other terrorist movement before it, has a legible political agenda that flows directly from its specific grievances against the West—especially against the US, the exemplar of western, liberal, imperialist capitalism.  To be sure, this agenda is often animated by the religious vernacular that shapes public discourse in Muslim countries; but in essence it is a set of political goals which has little room for the imagery of Armageddon.  Osama bin Laden insisted in 2003, for example, that the American way of life was neither his.personal concern nor the object of Islamic jihad: “their leader, who is a fool whom all obey, was claiming that we were jealous of their way of life, while the truth—which the Pharaoh of our generation conceals—is that we strike at them because of the way they oppress us in the Muslim world, especially in Palestine and Iraq.”  Before and after the US invasion of Iraq, moreover, he consistently listed three examples of such “oppression”: the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula; the US-sponsored economic sanctions imposed by the UN on Iraq after the first Gulf War (which, according to a UNICEF report, killed 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five between 1991 and 1998); and the unwavering American support for Israel during its ill-fated invasion of Lebanon and during its ongoing settlement of Palestinian territory.

Now we may say that each of these three strategic positions was, or is, an important element in the national security of the United States, and with it the global order over which it presides.  But in doing so, we must understand that none is a permanent or even long-standing fixture of US foreign policy—for all date from the very late 20th century (the consummation and militarization of the US-Israel relation, for example, dates from Reagan’s second term).  We must also understand that each was, and is, a matter of choice by policy-makers; alternatives to all three positions were, and are, presumably available, especially in view of the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan and its subsequent dissolution, both of which reduced Russian power in the Middle East.  Finally, we must understand that the adoption of alternatives to these strategic positions does not entail any disruption in the American way of life.

So, regardless of what we think about, say, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian claims—whether we think it is just or unjust—we can acknowledge that what we do (and support) in the Muslim precincts of the Middle East is far more significant than the way we live in North America.  By the same token, we can acknowledge that what we do in that world elsewhere is subject to reconsideration and revision.  Once we have made these acknowledgments, we can see that our approach to al Qaeda and related threats need not take the form of a borderless, endless “war on terror.”  We can see that this approach might well take the form of diplomacy, perhaps even changes in US strategic positions.  At least we can conclude that the militarization of American foreign policy is not the inevitable result of the terrorist threat to peaceful economic development on a global scale. 

To boil this conclusion down to its essentials, let us ask an impertinent question.  What if it had informed the US response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? What if the story told soon after 9/11 had portrayed these men as rationally using the principal weapon of the weak in seeking to redress specific political grievances and to change recent American foreign policy?  Clearly, war would not have been the only actionable answer, the only conceivable consequence.  Changes in the relevant strategic positions would not necessarily have been the appropriate response, either.  But we would have known that the American way of life was not at stake in responding to the attacks of 9/11, that maintaining the distinction between law and strategy was necessary, and that bargaining with the enemy was therefore possible.  The consequence of this narrative, this knowledge, would be a very different world than the one we now inhabit; at any rate we can be sure that it would not be on a permanent war footing, and that the Middle East would not still be the site of desperate armed struggle. 

But it is notoriously difficult to prove a negative—that is why historians are not supposed to ask “what if” questions. Fortunately, there is another way to prove that, if our purpose is to explain, address, and contain the new terrorism, war is not the answer. It takes us to Iraq in the fourth year of the American-led invasion, when the so-called surge placed 30,000 additional troops in Baghdad. On the face of it the “surge” of 2007 was a military solution to a military problem, the lack of security. And on the face of it, the “surge” worked by reducing violence and improving security. In these terms, war was the answer to the rise of terrorist movements of resistance in Iraq, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. But in fact, the so-called surge did not work as a military solution. It worked instead as a counter-terrorist strategy that acknowledged the primacy, and the legitimacy, of specific political grievances (most of which pertained to perceived inequities of proportionate power within postwar Iraq), and that accorded Iran significant influence over Shi’ite militias in Baghdad.

In sum, a war of position worked where a war of maneuver had failed. Or rather, war as such was not the answer in stabilizing Iraq, or, in a larger sense, when fighting terrorism. The militarization of US foreign policy is not, then, the inevitable result of containing the new terrorism.