Somebody Else's Civil War

Michael Scott Doran

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2002

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Summary:  Osama bin Laden's attacks on the United States were aimed at another audience: the entire Muslim world. Hoping that U.S. retaliation would unite the faithful against the West, bin Laden sought to spark revolutions in Arab nations and elsewhere. War with America was never his end; it was just a means to promote radical Islam. The sooner Washington understands this, the better its chances of winning the wider struggle.

Michael Scott Doran taught for three years at the University of Central Florida and is now Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question. This article is adapted from his chapter in How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War, published by PublicAffairs and Foreign Affairs with the support of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Call it a city on four legs

heading for murder. ...

New York is a woman

holding, according to history,

a rag called liberty with one hand

and strangling the earth with the other.

-Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said],

"The Funeral of New York," 1971

In the weeks after the attacks of September 11, Americans repeatedly asked, "Why do they hate us?" To understand what happened, however, another question may be even more pertinent: "Why do they want to provoke us?"

David Fromkin suggested the answer in Foreign Affairs back in 1975. "Terrorism," he noted, "is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else -- not the terrorist -- to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires." When a terrorist kills, the goal is not murder itself but something else -- for example, a police crackdown that will create a rift between government and society that the terrorist can then exploit for revolutionary purposes. Osama bin Laden sought -- and has received -- an international military crackdown, one he wants to exploit for his particular brand of revolution.

Bin Laden produced a piece of high political theater he hoped would reach the audience that concerned him the most: the umma, or universal Islamic community. The script was obvious: America, cast as the villain, was supposed to use its military might like a cartoon character trying to kill a fly with a shotgun. The media would see to it that any use of force against the civilian population of Afghanistan was broadcast around the world, and the umma would find it shocking how Americans nonchalantly caused Muslims to suffer and die. The ensuing outrage would open a chasm between state and society in the Middle East, and the governments allied with the West -- many of which are repressive, corrupt, and illegitimate -- would find themselves adrift. It was to provoke such an outcome that bin Laden broadcast his statement following the start of the military campaign on October 7, in which he said, among other things, that the Americans and the British "have divided the entire world into two regions -- one of faith, where there is no hypocrisy, and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us."

Polarizing the Islamic world between the umma and the regimes allied with the United States would help achieve bin Laden's primary goal: furthering the cause of Islamic revolution within the Muslim world itself, in the Arab lands especially and in Saudi Arabia above all. He had no intention of defeating America. War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument designed to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers. Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war.

Washington had no choice but to ...

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