Quick Links to Speakers
Sen. Richard
G. Lugar
Dr. Chung Hwan
Kwak
Amb.
Bill Richardson
Arnaud
de Borchgrave
Matthew A.
Levitt
Dr. Shibley Telhami
Dr. Graham
Allison
Lawrence
S. Eagleburger
Bill Gertz
Amb. Philip
S. Kaplan
Dr. Timothy
Charles Brown
Dr. Daniel
Pipes
Dr. Muazzam
Gill
Faiz Rehman
Robert Baer
John O'
Sullivan
Hafez
Al-Mirazi
Georgie Anne
Geyer
Dimitri K.
Simes
Dr. Frank
Kaufmann
Amb.
Phillip V. Sanchez
Martin
Walker
Douglas D.M.
Joo
DR. SHIBLEY TELHAMI
Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development,
University of Maryland
PLENARY SESSION I
“The Causes of the 9/ll Attacks and the Scope
of the Threat”
Thank you very much. You know, right after the horror of 9/11, one persistent question in our public debate was, why do they hate us so much? Clearly that’s a question that is still being asked, and it’s a question that suggested it was hatred of America that not only led to the attack of 9/11 but also to the pervasive resentment that we’ve become aware of since then in much of the Muslim and Arab worlds.
In fact, President Bush was very eloquent in responding to this question, why do they hate us so much, in his speech to the joint session of Congress right after the attack, in which he said, “They hate what we see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble, and disagree with each other. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.”
Indeed, it was a very important speech because it identified al-Qaeda for what it was, that is, not merely trying to use its methods to advance certain political instruments—Mr. Levitt is very correct on this score—but that al-Qaeda obviously seeks to disrupt the international order as it exists, to overthrow existing regimes in the region, to establish an Islamist order, and to weaken, if not destroy, American power globally, and certainly as it stands in the Middle East. In fact, its objectives are not harmonious with anything that America stands for. Its objectives cannot be compromised with. In that regard there was no question that the president was right.
But the second part of the president’s position was forgotten over the past year, which is that he made it very clear that when he said they hate us for what we stand for, he was referring specifically to the terrorists. He was specifically referring to al-Qaeda and its supporters. He made it very clear that there is a big differentiation between Muslims and Arabs broadly and their resentment of America and what these organizations stand for. This was a very important position: that the objectives of al-Qaeda are different from the objectives of Arabs and Muslims broadly.
I’m fearful that what has happened over the past year is that this distinction has disappeared in our public discourse. Today when we ask the question, why do they hate us so much, we mean, why do Muslims and Arabs hate us so much, as if it were one and the same.
I want to make the argument here that we must make this differentiation and try to address the relationship between the broader Arab and Muslim sentiments toward America and the sentiment that is projected and which drives such organizations as al-Qaeda. To be sure, when you look at Osama bin Laden, right in his darkest moment, when he faced a possible war on him by the United States on October 7, 2001, he went on Arab television in order to say the following, “And to America, I say to it and its people this, I swear by God the great, America will never dream, and those who live in America will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our land and in Palestine.”
Now it is true that bin Laden is not driven by the issue of Palestine. In fact, bin Laden cannot possibly sympathize with Palestinian nationalism. He doesn’t believe in the state system as it exists. He wants to establish a political order. He sees the entire peace process as unacceptable. He does not accept Yasser Arafat or what Yasser Arafat has been trying to do. He considers the PLO to be an organization that worked against Islamist interests as they define them. So why, you’d have to ask the question, would he appeal to Palestine in his most difficult moment, in his darkest moment? Why doesn’t he go to the rest of the Arab and Muslim world and say, “My aim is to establish a unified Islamic world. My aim is to defeat America. My aim is to bring all the governments down in the region.” Why doesn’t he do that? Those are probably his real objectives, but he doesn’t do that.
He doesn’t do it for a simple reason: because those are not the issues that resonate most with the people in the region, and he appeals to the one issue that appeals most to the people in the region. And no issue, certainly in the past couple of years, has resonated more than the question of Palestine. Therefore, we have to first make a distinction between what his real objectives are and what are the issues that resonate at a broader level in the region among Arabs and Muslims.
We have to see a connection. Not a connection in that those issues drive terrorism, but a connection in that when al-Qaeda seeks recruits, when al-Qaeda seeks funding, when al-Qaeda seeks public opinion and sympathy that it often needs, it rallies the public on these issues. These issues provide what I call the demand side of terrorism.
Now there is a supply side of terrorism, which is like al-Qaeda itself and its organizers, and that demand side of terrorism is a pervasive sense of humiliation and despair in the region. Here I disagree with Mr. Levitt on his position vis-à-vis Tom Friedman. I think Tom Friedman is on to something when he talks about poverty of dignity. Poverty of dignity is a motivator. It doesn’t automatically lead to violence. Not every humiliated person or desperate person uses violence, but it is statistically true that the more desperate people are, the more recruitable they are. It is statistically true that the most humiliated people are more recruitable. It’s not that they automatically seek violence, but groups that organize violent methods are much better able to recruit among those groups.
The real question is, what drives this sense of humiliation, the sense of despair that is widespread in the region. And I think, by the way, humiliation and despair are better terms to describe what makes people join than terms like poverty. Poverty is important, not so much as a motivator, but poverty becomes a factor in the psychology of despair. If you’re poor and you don’t think you’re going to get better tomorrow, or if you’re poor and you think you’re only going to get worse, that’s despair. If you’re poor and you think you have a promise that you can improve your life tomorrow, then your motivation to act is quite different.
It is very important, first of all, to differentiate the attitudes of people in the region broadly from the attitudes and the objectives of groups like al-Qaeda. On that score I want to make a few points. If you look at the sudden discovery that we have seen in surveys that have been conducted since 9/11, that people in the Arab and Muslim world don’t like America much—they certainly like some things about America, but they don’t like much about America, they resent America—that discovery has led us to focus largely on the possible motives from within the Muslim and Arab world.
The first point I want to make is, that’s a mistaken way to look at it. You have to look at it in the global context. In fact, if you look at the attitudes that we have been able to find from surveys about Arabs and Muslims and their views of America, you find that those views are not significantly different on most issues from the views of people in Latin America, Africa, Asia, even Western Europe. So to the extent that there is resentment of America, and I’m not saying whether it’s justified, just as a fact, to the extent that there is a pervasive resentment of America and American foreign policy, that resentment is not only resident in Muslim countries. It is found everywhere, and every survey shows it.
In fact, when you ask people, even in the early days of the war on terrorism, if they thought that America was serving the interest of allies as well as itself in the war on terrorism, the vast majority in every region of the world, including Western Europe, said America is serving only its interests and disregarding the interests of its allies. Unilateralism was the picture painted across the globe.
When you ask people about American policies on a wide range of issues—including the Middle East, by the way—the vast majorities across the globe disagreed with American foreign policy in the same way that Arabs and Muslims disagreed with American foreign policy. So in fact, on issues pertaining to resentment toward America, it’s not an Islamic and Arab issue, though it is certainly more intense in the Islamic and Arab world.
Second, it is also not clear that that intensity of Arab and Muslim resentment toward America has itself, as Mr. Levitt pointed out well, led to more terrorism toward America historically. If we take al-Qaeda as a case that needs to be explained, that must be addressed as a real threat—and personally I think it should be the most important threat to America today, much bigger than the Iraq issue. That is a serious threat, I think. Terrorism is a big threat, and al-Qaeda is the center core of the threat that America and the world face today.
But if you put that aside for the moment and you see the trends in terrorism toward America, or the trends in terrorism broadly, the Middle East has not been the leading region in terrorism globally in the 1990s in terms of the incidence of terrorism, and certainly not the leading region in terms of anti-American terrorism. So it’s not true that the frequency of terrorism in general and the frequency of terrorism against America have been more likely in Muslim and Arab countries. That has not been the trend.
And the Middle East has not led in suicide terrorism, by the way, which has been certainly popularized and unfortunately continues to take place in the Palestinian areas. It’s been the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka, who are neither Muslim nor from the Middle East. So it is clear that we’ve distorted the issue by focusing largely on the Middle East and largely without looking at it with a global perspective to see what are the sources of global resentment toward America today and toward American foreign policy.
I just want to mention one more issue before I turn more specifically to attitudes in Arab and Muslim countries toward America. Al-Qaeda itself is not only a major threat to global security and to the United States specifically, but if you look at its origin, it is clear that the political systems in the region have helped give rise to this organization, particularly the repression and the channeling of opposition energy into underground groups. But here, too, the power of this group, let’s not forget, is its transnational power. Had it been just in Saudi Arabia it would not have been as great a threat, and the transnational power of this group is in large part a function of not only what Saudi Arabia and others have done, but of what the United States unfortunately has done. We have to keep that in mind in the origin of al-Qaeda. The very foundation of al-Qaeda as a group was in part a function of our mobilizing fanatic Islamist activists, especially wealthy ones, to fight what we termed a jihad war against the infidel communists in Afghanistan.
In fact, the extent to which the Saudis, Egyptians, and others provided help was related to our demands and requests for them to help us in that endeavor. Certainly the Saudis, Egyptians, and Americans did not understand the consequences of what was done. When that war was over, we were left with a network of frustrated, mobilized individuals who are fanatical and rich. Clearly that is a problem, but we cannot just ignore our role in its inception.
I think what we have done since 9/11, in terms of looking at accountability, is that, because terrorism is absolutely unjustified and we take a moral position that nothing justifies terrorism—which is I think the correct position, and nothing can possibly justify what happened on 9/11—we also sort of fall into the trap of saying, therefore, we’re not even going to look at factors that may have contributed to that so we can prevent it from happening in the future, that somehow explanation is justification, that somehow explanation is legitimization. That is wrong and certainly not a healthy attitude to take in our pursuit of preventing more horror from happening in the future.
Let me make the last point, which is, what is the source of resentment in the region toward the United States, aside from al-Qaeda? What is the pervasive sentiment that we capture in our public opinion polls that we find across the region? What is the source of resentment? Is it really American values? Do they hate us for what we stand for? Do they hate our Western values, or do they largely hate our policies?
We have a lot of surveys, some of which I’ve conducted on this issue. In particular, in Saudi Arabia I specifically asked that question: Are your resentments toward the United States mostly based on (a) its policies or (b) its values? Among Saudi elites, 86 percent said policies. Only 7 percent said values. Among the general public in Saudi Arabia, 59 percent said policies, and only 19 percent said values. This, by the way, has been captured all across in other surveys, where the biggest source of resentment toward America is policies, not values. You can look at that in indirect indicators.
In Saudi Arabia I wanted to ask a specific indirect indicator to see the extent to which people are driven or idealize religious leaders and religious values in their thinking. I asked the question, “Outside of Saudi Arabia, which world leaders do you admire most?” in order to see what their instinct is. Among elites, no Islamist leader emerged on the list, and the top leaders were Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Jacques Chirac of France, a Western leader, and Mahateer Mohammad of Malaysia. There was no Islamist leader on the list.
Among the general public, the three leaders that took the top votes were Arab secular nationalists. Islamist religious leaders got almost no mention. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Mullah Mohamed Omar, and Sheikh Yusef al Qaradawi combined got only 3 percent, a lot less than President Bush, by the way. That’s an indication to my mind about what their thinking is broadly. And certainly historically, if you think that it’s really Western values that they oppose, look at their views of France versus their view of America. Most people in the region have positive views of France and negative views of America. When you look at that, I mean, certainly they’re two Western countries. The only differentiation is policies, not values.
If you look historically at even the fanatical Islamist groups in Saudi Arabia, when they revolted against the Muslim Ottomans in the early 20th century they sought the help of the British. Clearly, then, the issue is not West versus East but politics and policies much more than values.
Now I don’t say that values are not a factor. Among certain segments that are deeply religious, values have always been a factor, and they are a factor today, and that’s very important in the same ways that in some margins of our own society values are more important than policies. It is the same in the Middle East, but that is not the driving issue for the attitudes that are seen broadly in the region. That is certainly reflected in surveys across the board.
Finally, what are these issues that people care about most? That’s a little bit more complicated, because it isn’t just a single issue. To the extent there is a pervasive despair and humiliation in the region that terrorist groups step into, it is certainly driven by a sense that the entire political order is rotten, and they see America as an anchor of a rotten political order with all that comes with it—the foreign policy issues as well as authoritarian governments that are supported by the U.S. All of that is certainly part of a package of resentment.
But there is no question that every single survey shows that the central issue in the perception, the central issue that exacerbates everything else, the added value that explains the mobilization, is the Arab-Israel issue. Every single survey shows that. And certainly surveys that I’ve conducted in five Arab countries show that over 60 percent of the public thinks that this is “the single most important issue” to them personally. Now that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily willing to go to war over it. It doesn’t mean that they love Yasser Arafat. It may not even mean that they support the PLO. What it does mean is that this issue, particularly the issue of Palestine, has become an issue of national identity, collective identity, in the region for Arabs and Muslims. I would argue in the same way that the issue of Israel has become an issue of identity for contemporary Jewry. You can hate Ariel Sharon, you can dislike the policies of the government of Israel, but if Israelis are seen to be killed, innocent Israelis blown to pieces, or Israel is threatened or its survival threatened, you can’t help but be mobilized. This becomes an important issue to you. It reflects on your own identity.
The Palestinian issue’s role in the Arab world is true for a lot of reasons. I don’t want to say the Muslim world, because it varies, but in the Arab world. You have to put it in perspective. Arabs fought many devastating wars over this issue. They lost a huge war in 1948. They fought a war in 1956 that they saw as an imperialist war that linked Israel to the West. The 1967 war was devastating; there were more territories lost and thousands of people killed and injured and the economy was destroyed.
Dreams have been shattered since the end of the Cold War, largely over this issue. Two generations have had their political identity shaped over big events related to this issue, whether it’s war or peace. And it remains an open wound today after half a century, with continued suffering and occupation, and now driven home by the news media so that no one can ignore it. It’s there at the breakfast table, at the dinner table. You can’t ignore it. It exacerbates this wound, the scar on the collective psyche of the region.
In my judgment, there is no single issue that affects the psychology of the region and its view of the U.S. more than this issue. If this issue is resolved, the tension between America and the rest of the Middle East will not be removed—don’t kid yourself—in the same way that there is resentment in Latin America, Asia and Europe, where there is no Arab-Israeli issue. But the intensity of the resentment that plays into the hands of terrorism would be significantly reduced. Thank you very much.
