JEDDAH, 22 March 2004 — The gruesome train bombings in Madrid and the stunning regime change which followed should be seized upon to rethink whether the “war on terrorism”, as conceived and conducted since Sept. 11, 2001, is really the most effective way to deal with a problem that shows no signs of going away.
If a patient is ill, a doctor who misdiagnoses the source and nature of the illness and prescribes a course of treatment for a different disease risks killing the patient. After two and a half years of a “war on terrorism” which is widely perceived in the Middle East as an expansion of a long-running Western war against Muslims or, worse, as a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam, it is worth reconsidering whether the initial diagnosis and the subsequent treatment are more likely to kill the patient than to save him. Americans have tended to view the Sept. 11 attacks as a bolt from the blue, inexplicable, based on pure malevolence and carried out by people willing to sacrifice their lives out of an incomprehensible, irrational and incurable fanaticism unconnected to any concrete grievances or goals. Few Americans have dared to suggest that, however awful the attacks were, they might have constituted a response or a reaction to policies that the United States (or Israel, widely viewed by Muslims — and, apparently, by most Americans — as indistinguishable from the United States) has pursued in the region.
The immediate American response to such appalling violence was to resort to superior violence, and the continuing American reaction to the fear installed by the attacks has been to try to instill a still greater fear in potential adversaries. This has proven to be a “bleeding” cure for an anemic patient.
Viewed from the region, Muslims have been subjected to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation at the hands of Christians, Jews and the West. It started toward the end of World War I with the secret Sykes-Picot treaty, by which Britain and France carved up between themselves the most historic and sophisticated portion of the Arabian Peninsula, which they had told their Arab allies they were “liberating” from the oppressive Ottomans, and the Balfour Declaration, by which Britain promised to give away Palestine, which did not belong to it. It has continued with the expulsion or flight into exile of most of the Palestinians in 1948, the catastrophic war of June 1967, the fall of Baghdad last spring and numerous other humiliations along the way.
The Muslims possess no “respectable” or “socially acceptable” way to fight back. They cannot invade, rocket or send their air forces to attack Western countries. The only tactic available is “terrorism”. If such “terrorism” were properly understood to be a brutal (but not irrational) reaction to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation, and if the desire of Western politicians were really to diminish “terrorist” threats to the West, rather than simply to sustain and exploit them for personal political advantage or to facilitate the implementation of pre-existing agendas, then surely the worst possible approach would be (as it has been) to increase and intensify precisely these sources of frustration and fury through further conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation.
Wise and prudent people seek to assuage, not aggravate, legitimate grievances — and even grievances whose legitimacy they may not accept. The instinctive Israeli and American attitude is that halting or reversing the policies of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation would be to “reward terrorism”. Perhaps, but if, by assuaging grievances, both injustice and terrorism could be diminished and the world could be made more livable and less frightening, would this not be the preferable alternative? In this context, the currently proclaimed American intention, potentially to be supported by the Europeans, to “remake the face of the Middle East” — explicitly to make the region less threatening to America and implicitly to make it less threatening to Israel — promises, if pursued, to be spectacularly counterproductive.
Viewed from the region, particularly by those with access to Western media, it is also easy to get the impression (not irrationally) that, in Western eyes, Jewish and Christian lives are of infinite value while Muslim lives are of no value whatsoever. Needless to say, the deaths of somewhat fewer than 3000 Americans were far too high a price to pay for America’s entire Middle East policy — an event which “changed the world forever” and has been used to justify the killing of many more than 3000 Afghans and many more than 3000 additional Iraqis.
If the West truly wishes to restrain the violent Muslim reaction to Western behavior, it must change its behavior. It must take seriously the principle for which the United States once purported to stand — that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights — and start treating Muslims (particularly the long abused Palestinians) like human beings entitled to basic human rights.
The problem of “terrorism” can be viewed as a moral issue, a scourge toward which no effort at understanding is conceivable and shock, awe and overwhelming force are the only possible response. This approach has been tried for two and a half years. It has failed, and there is no reason to believe that “more of the same” will succeed.
Alternatively, the problem could be viewed as a practical one. What is most likely to “work”, to reduce the violence, which can never be totally extinguished, to tolerable levels? The West could make a serious and sustained effort to reduce the injustices that feed the fury that produces the “terrorism”, starting with the cancerous, 37-year-long occupation of Palestine. This approach has not yet been tried. It should be.
Since Sept. 11, the United States has been dragging the world in precisely the wrong direction, one guaranteed to make an already ugly and dangerous situation even worse. Might Europe, which is both more aware of history and closer to the Middle East, take inspiration from the Spanish elections and lead the world in the right direction? The world is at a crossroads. This should be a moment to pause, to reflect seriously on the abyss, which lies before us and to ask with open minds whether, there is not a better way forward.
— John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer based in Saudi Arabia.
