5 July 2004
It's Not Always About You
By Gwynne Dyer
You can never say this without hurting the feelings of at least
some Americans, but it needs to be said. At the stone-laying ceremony of
July 4th on the site where the World Trade Center towers formerly stood,
New York state governor George Pataki dedicated the building that is to
replace them with the rhetoric that is standard in the United States on
such occasions: "Let this great Freedom Tower show the world that what our
enemies sought to destroy -- our democracy, our freedom, our way of life --
stands taller than ever." But 9/11 wasn't really about any of that.
Imagine the scene: it's 1999, and a group of wild-eyed and
bushy-bearded Islamist fanatics are pacing a cave somewhere in Afghanistan
planning 9/11. "We must destroy American democracy," says one. "An
America run by a dictator would be a much better place."
"Yes," says the second, "and we must also curtail their freedom.
Americans have too many television channels, too many breakfast cereals,
and far too many kinds of make-up to choose from." Then the third chimes
in: "While we're at it, let's destroy their whole way of life. I've always
hated American football, Oprah Winfrey sucks, and I can't stand Coca-Cola."
No? This scene doesn't ring true? Then why does almost all public
discussion in the United States about the goals of the Islamist terrorists
assume that they are driven by hatred for the domestic political and social
arrangements of Americans? Because most Americans cannot imagine
foreigners NOT being interested in the way they do things, let alone using
the United States as a tool to pursue other goals entirely.
Public debate in the United States generally assumes that America
is the only true home of democracy and freedom, and that other people and
countries are 'pro-American' or 'anti-American' because they support or
reject those ideals. Practically nobody on the rest of the planet would
recognise this picture, but it is the only one most Americans are shown --
and it has major foreign policy implications.
This is what enables President George W. Bush to explain away why
the United States was attacked with the simple phrase "They hate our
freedoms," and to avoid any discussion that delves into the impact of
American foreign policy in the Middle East on Arab and Muslim attitudes
towards the United States. It also blinds most Americans to the nature of
the strategic game that their country has been tricked into playing a role
in.
So once more, with feeling: the 9/11 attacks were not aimed at
American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or
another. They were an operation that was broadly intended to raise the
profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world, but they had the further
quite specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim
countries.
The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim
countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win
over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the
United States to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists
was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce
endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That
might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get
their long-stalled revolutions off the ground.
Specifically, the al-Qaeda planners expected the US to invade
Afghanistan and get bogged down in the same long counter-guerrilla war that
the Russians had experienced there, providing along the way years of
horrifying images of American firepower killing innocent Muslims. Osama
bin Laden and his colleagues were simply trying to relive their past
success against the Russians and get some more mileage out of the Afghan
scenario. In fact, their plan failed: the United States conquered
Afghanistan quickly and at a very low cost in lives, and even now, despite
huge American neglect, Afghanistan has not produced a major anti-American
resistance movement.
The reason al-Qaeda is still in business in a big way is that the
Bush admnistration then invaded Iraq. The Islamists were astonished, no
doubt, but they knew how to exploit an opportunity when one was handed to
them. And so the real game continues, while the public debate in the
United States is conducted in terms that have only the most tangential
contact with strategic reality.
Perhaps it's unfair to ask Governor Pataki to get into any of that
at an emotional ceremony that was in part a commemoration of the lives that
were lost on 9/11, but when will it be addressed, and by whom? What major
American public figure will stand up and say that the United States and its
values are not really under attack; that the country and its troops are
actually just being used as pawns in somebody else's strategy? Many senior
American politicians and military officers understand what is going on, but
it's more than their career is worth to say so out loud.
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Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
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