TERRORISM: We've Got Them Right Where They Want Us

   Submitted by Siriel Admin on 2004 Oct 15 - 12:22am 

   [Themes:  | Afghanistan | Iraq | USA | •Causes & solutions | •Imperialism & Neocon. | •Untruthful Propaganda ]

By Gwynne Dyer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 8, 2004.
[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.]

At the Fourth of July stone-laying ceremony on the site where the World Trade Center towers formerly stood, New York Gov. George Pataki dedicated the building that is to replace them, using 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 Sept. 11, 2001, wasn’t really about any of that.

Imagine it’s 1999, and three wild-eyed, 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 makeup to choose from.” 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.”

What? 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?

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” on the basis of supporting or rejecting those ideals. Practically nobody on the rest of the planet would recognize such a 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 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 into which their country has been tricked into playing a role.

In fact, the Sept. 11 attacks were not aimed at American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or another. They were an operation broadly intended to raise the profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world with the further specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim countries.

The true goal of the Islamists is to take 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 terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since such an invasion would produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That, in turn, might push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their long-stalled revolutions off the ground.

Specifically, the al-Qaida planners expected the United States to invade Afghanistan and get bogged down in the same long counterguerrilla war that the Russians had experienced there, providing 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. Even now, despite huge American neglect, Afghanistan has not produced a major anti-American resistance movement. The reason al-Qaida is still in business is that the Bush administration then invaded Iraq. If the Islamists were astonished at that turn of events, they still knew how to exploit the opportunity handed to them.

So the real game continues while public debate in the United States is conducted in terms that have only the most tangential contact with strategic reality.

Gov. Pataki wasn’t about to get into all this at an emotional ceremony that, in part, commemorated the lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. 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 they would jeopardize their careers if they said so out loud.