- PARIS - The calls for war
that have come from Washington since Tuesday's catastrophes - for
"war"
against terrorism, against evil, against enemies of civilization - answer
the psychological demands of the hour, the leaders' need to seem to lead.
But they are wrong. Without tangible content, they fall short. They cannot
satisfy. They risk actions that will make things worse, blows that hit
people who had nothing to do with these attacks, thus adding to the numbers
of those who hate the United States and are willing to die to do it
harm.
-
- The riposte of a civilized nation, one that believes
in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused
and, above all, intelligent.
-
- Missiles are blunt weapons. These terrorists are smart
enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to
exploit
the results.
-
- A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what
they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the
self-righteousness
about their criminal acts against the innocent.
-
- What the United States needs is cold reconsideration
of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee
disasters
that may lie in the future.
-
- Osama bin Laden, peremptorily but plausibly accused of
responsibility for the attacks, is in a position of power today because
of past U.S. policies that focused on the short term and were indifferent
to the future. The United States does not need more of that.
-
- Mr. bin Laden is the product of revolutionary and
anti-American
forces in the Islamic world that remain, for the most part, subterranean
but which exist in his own country, Saudi Arabia. They are the same forces
that produced a revolutionary and anti-American upheaval in Iran.
-
- The fact that the Saudi monarchy is the most important
U.S. ally in the Arab world has disguised from most Americans how fragile
it is. Mr. bin Laden belongs to a generation of well-educated younger
members
of the Saudi ruling elite and its mercantile middle class who consider
the monarchy's accommodation to the U.S. alliance a great betrayal.
-
- They are faithful to the source of Saudi identity, the
18th-century Wahhabi Muslim reform movement, which holds that all changes
or accretions to Islam since the 9th century are illegitimate and must
be expunged. This doctrine, conceived among austere desert Arabs, is the
official religion of an enormously rich state, in which many of the ruling
figures' private lives blatantly contradict the Wahhabi condemnation of
luxury and ostentation. The psychological, as well as social, tensions
this has produced over the last 50 years in the consciences and
psychologies
of the new generation, the sons and grandsons of the desert Wahhabis, may
easily be imagined.
-
- The Saudi elite has appeased the alienated generation
by subsidizing radical Wahhabi movements abroad. Saudi Arabia paid for
the Mujahidin of the Afghan resistance. It subsidizes the Taleban. It paid
for the Mujahidin who fought in Bosnia, and now it subsidizes Wahhabi
movements
in Central Asia and Africa.
-
- Yet Saudi Arabia's own tortured compromise between
alliance
with the United States - capital of materialism - and its professed Islamic
fundamentalism, to which the Saudi masses are attached, must one day
collapse,
just as the Shah's regime in Iran collapsed.
-
- Mr. bin Laden, 44, an engineer by training, is a
committed
Wahhabi Muslim whose first political engagement was at the side of the
CIA in fighting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
-
- Like many of the Mujahidin, he refused demobilization
when Russia abandoned the Afghan war. He had a new war to fight, to save
his own country, and his religion, from the United States.
-
- Mr. bin Laden hates the United States because he believes
that America is an enemy of Islam and has polluted the Islamic holy places.
Washington took advantage of the Gulf War in 1991 to obtain Saudi
acquiescence
in permanent U.S. bases inside Saudi Arabia.
-
- Mr. bin Laden's cause is an Arabia free of foreign
soldiers,
purged of "infidel" influence, under fundamentalist Wahhabi rule.
He wants to "destroy" the United States because it is, to him,
what it was to the Iranian revolutionaries: a source of literal evil in
today's world.
-
- Clearly, the United States needs to deal with Mr. bin
Laden's terrorist organization, but that is essentially a police and
intelligence
problem.
-
- Long-term United States interests cannot afford a
"war"
that risks toppling Saudi Arabia and other conservative Islamic regimes
into alliance with the radical movements already powerful in Iran, Sudan,
Algeria, and influential in Egypt, Pakistan, the Balkans, the Caucasus,
Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. That, though, is the risk.
-
- Los
Angeles Times Syndicate
-
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|