How To
Stop Bin Laden
The
World Needs Justice, Not More Terror
21 January 2005 |
A
PDF of this briefing is available here
Posted: 7 July
2005 |
EXPLAINING
AL QAEDA—THE WRONG ANSWERS
Five days after the 11 September attacks, President
Bush said that Osama bin Laden was ‘the prime suspect’.
He added, ‘Now, I want to remind the American people that
the prime suspect’s organization is in a lot of countries—it’s
a widespread organization based upon one thing: terrorizing.
They can't stand freedom; they hate what America stands for.’
Addressing Congress on
20 Sept. 2001, President Bush said, ‘Al Qaeda is to terror
what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money;
its goal is remaking the world—and imposing its radical
beliefs on people everywhere.’ He added, ‘Americans
are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right
here in this chamber—a democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our
freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote
and assemble and disagree with each other.’
Prime Minister
Blair told the House of Commons
on 14 Sept. 2001 that Parliament had been specially recalled
because ‘these attacks were not just attacks upon people
and buildings; nor even merely upon the USA; these were attacks
on the basic democratic values in which we all believe so passionately
and on the civilised world’.
EXPLAINING
AL QAEDA—THE REAL ANSWERS
The US Government’s official ‘9/11 Commission’
reported that bin Laden’s grievance with the United States
‘started in reaction to specific US policies’. Bin
Laden and his group ‘say that America had attacked Islam...
Americans are blamed when Israelis fight with Palestinians,
when Russians fight with Chechens, when Indians fight with Kashmiri
Muslims, and when the Philippine government fights ethnic Muslims
in its southern islands.’
The US is also ‘held responsible
for the governments of Muslim countries, derided by al Qaeda
as “your agents”.
Such charges, says the Commission, ‘found a ready audience
among millions of Arabs and Muslims angry at the United States
because of issues ranging from Iraq to Palestine to America’s
support for their countries’ repressive rulers.’
(The 9/11 Commission Report, New York: Norton & Co, 2004,
p. 51)
WHAT THE
CIA’S BIN LADEN EXPERT SAYS
The Commission’s analysis may have drawn on the writings
of Michael Scheuer, who served in the CIA for 22 years, and
who headed the CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre’s bin Laden
task force (1996–1999). Scheuer, who retired in Nov. 2004,
wrote two recent books as ‘Anonymous’: Through Our
Enemies’ Eyes and Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing
the War on Terror. (He was unmasked in the Boston
Phoenix.)
Scheuer contests the view put forward by
George W. Bush and Tony Blair: ‘We in the United States
and the West make a mistake when we argue, as has [New York
Times columnist] Thomas L. Friedman, that bin Laden’s
attacks are “not aimed at reversing any specific U.S.
foreign policy,” or, as Steve Simon and Daniel Benjamin
did in Survival in early 2002, that bin Laden has “no
discrete set of negotiatiable political demands”.’
(Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, p. 256)
Scheuer argues that Osama bin Laden has
‘clear, focused, limited and widely popular foreign policy
goals’, including:
‘the end
of U.S. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of
that state;
the removal of
U.S. and Western forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim
lands;
the end of U.S.
support for the oppression of Muslims by Russia, China, and
India;
the end of U.S.
protection for repressive, apostate regimes in Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera; and
the conservation
of the Muslim world’s energy resources and their sale
at higher prices.’
Scheuer observes that, ‘Bin
Laden is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies
toward the Islamic world, not necessarily to destroy America,
much less its freedoms and liberties. He is a practical
warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.’
(Imperial Hubris, p. xviii)
Scheuer wrote, while still a serving CIA
officer, ‘Bin Laden has
been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war
on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom,
liberty and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies
and actions in the Muslim world.’ (Imperial Hubris,
p. x, emphasis added)
Scheuer goes further, arguing that ‘the
United States, and its policies and actions, are bin Laden’s
only indispensable allies’. (Imperial Hubris, p. xi)
WHAT CAN
WE DO?
The 9/11 Commission also asked the question, ‘What can
we do to stop these attacks?’ It suggested that, while
bin Laden’s campaign had begun in reaction to US policies,
‘it quickly became far deeper’: ‘To the second
question of what America could do, al Qaeda’s answer was
that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam,
and end the immorality and godlessness of its culture... If
the United States did not comply, it would be at war with the
Islamic nation’. (The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 50-51)
The Commission produced no evidence that
al Qaeda had such a maximalist programme. Michael Scheuer vigorously
disputes this view, drawing a distinction between ‘the
things a Muslim would find offensive’, and things which
a Muslim might regard as an attack on Islam or on Muslims. ‘Part
of bin Laden’s genius is that he recognized early on the
difference between those issues Muslims find offensive about
America and the West, and those they find intolerable and life
threatening.’ (Imperial Hubris, p. 10)
Jason Burke, Chief Reporter for the London
Observer, points out in his book Al-Qaeda, ‘While bin
Laden’s discourse may be based on an interpretation of
Islamic history, his power is
derived from playing on the current social, economic and political
problems of the Muslim world.’ (Al-Qaeda, Penguin,
2004, p. 25)
In the case of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, bin Laden and other non-Afghan Muslims ‘went
there to fight the Red Army not
because the Soviets were atheists and communists’
but because of their brutal
invasion. (Imperial Hubris, p. 10) After
the invasion was reversed, the mujahideen did not continue
armed action against the atheist and anti-Islamic Soviet Union.
When the grievance ended, so did the mujahideen war.
Scheuer, as already pointed out, argues
that Osama bin Laden has ‘clear, focused, [and] limited’
foreign policy goals. The goal
is not the establishment of an Islamic fundamentalist state
in the US, whatever the 9/11 Commission asserts, but deep change
in US foreign policy.
WHAT WOULD
MAKE AL QAEDA STOP?
After 11 September, bin Laden said, ‘Just as they are
killing us, we have to kill them so there will be a balance
of terror... We will do as they do. If they kill our women and
innocent people, we will kill their women and innocent people
until they stop.’ (Cited in Through Our Enemies’
Eyes, p. 247, emphasis added)
Intervening in the closing days of the
2004 presidential election, bin Laden told the American people,
‘Your security does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush,
or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Each and every
state that does not tamper with our security will have automatically
assured its own security.’ (BBC
translation)
This statement was translated by CNN
as, ‘Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.’
‘Us’ is meant to refer to the community of Muslim
nations and populations, and ‘attack’ has a broad
meaning, as former CIA official Michael Scheuer explains.
Writing before the invasion of Iraq, Scheuer
commented: ‘How will [al Qaeda] recognise victory? Easy,
by forcing drastic changes in U.S. foreign policy... when U.S.
and British forces evacuate Saudi Arabia and the rest of the
Arabian peninsula; when the United States has terminated all
aid to Israel; and when the U.S. and UN embargoes on Iraq are
lifted.’ (These achievements, bin Laden believes, ‘will
lead inevitably to destruction of Israel and what bin Laden
has called the regimes of “hypocrites” in Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere.’) (Through Our Enemies’
Eyes, p. 256)
To these goals, one might add the ending
of the US-UK occupation of Iraq and presence in Afghanistan.
LEGITIMATE
GRIEVANCES
Underlying these demands are legitimate grievances against the
West: Western support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians;
the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; the brutal sanctions imposed
on Iraq (now lifted); and US-UK support for dictatorial regimes
in the Middle East. These are immoral policies which should
be reversed because they are wrong. So is the policy of ignoring—or
supporting—oppression in Chechnya and elsewhere.
It so happens that reversing these immoral policies would drain
most if not all of the hatred which fuels al Qaeda. This is
how we can stop bin Laden. War, retaliation and violence simply
adds to his appeal.
PUNISHMENT
OR SURVIVAL
The governments of Britain and the United States can pursue
the path of punishment and preventive violence, or they can
seek to bring this wave of terrorism to an end. Bringing al
Qaeda-style terrorism to an end means, above all, reducing the
motivation that exists to carry out terrorism. This does not
mean ‘negotiating with terrorists’ or ‘capitulating
to their demands’, but seeking justice and human rights
for all, including the peoples of Palestine and Iraq.
The answer to terrorism is justice, not
more terrorism. London and Washington must also stop practising
the terrorism of the powerful—invasion, occupation, and
indirect terrorism via oppressive states. We should recognise
that in much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading
terrorist state, and with good reason.’ Noam Chomsky (Chomsky,
9/11, Seven Stories, 2001, p. 23)
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