Picking Up the Pieces

Peter L. Bergen

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  In three new books, experts explore every angle of September's horrific attacks. The warning signs, it seems, had long been evident. Herewith some strategies for how to read the signals next time -- and how to fight and win the new war on terror.

Peter L. Bergen is the author of Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.

Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure. Not one has proved able to provide its people with realistic hope for a free and prosperous future. The regimes have found no way to respond to their people's frustration other than a combination of internal oppression and propaganda to generate rage against external enemies. Religiously inflamed terrorists take root in such soil. Their threats to the regimes extort facilities and subsidies that increase their strength and influence. The result is a downward spiral of failure, fear and hatred.

And then comes Hill's masterstroke: his conclusion that the deleterious impact of political disenfranchisement in the Arab world has been amplified by "the deeply rooted conviction that virtually every significant occurrence is caused by some external conspiracy. Every societal shortcoming is attributed to a foreign plot." The best example of this culture of conspiracy, of course, is the widely circulated -- and widely believed -- story that the attacks on the World Trade Center were the work of the Jews, as is demonstrated by the supposed fact that 4,000 Jews did not show up for work on the day of the attacks. Accordingly, the lead hijacker's father -- an apparently sane Egyptian lawyer -- remains convinced that the attacks were the work of the Mossad, Israel's security service. And even the appearance of the bin Laden home video -- in which Osama is seen chuckling over the hijackings -- has done nothing to dissuade the undissuadable. After all, as a commentator on al Jazeera television opined, the tape may have been a fake.

Hill goes on to explain that "conspiracy theories blight every society they touch. The people who hold them become impervious to evidence and reason." Indeed, it was precisely this culture of conspiracy that enabled bin Laden to convince a transnational coalition of Arabs that, despite evidence to the contrary, the problems of their home countries were the fault of the United States -- rather than of the incompetence and corruption of their various domestic elites.

AGE OF EMPIRE?

The Age of Terror also features an essay by the prolific British historian Niall Ferguson, in which he takes issue with the notion that the September attacks were the opening salvo of the much-ballyhooed clash of civilizations. "One of the dangers of [this thesis]," he argues, "is that it exaggerates the homogeneity of Islam as a world religion." Ferguson is right. Furthermore, as bin Laden's various statements make clear, the Saudi exile did indeed hope to provoke such a clash between "believers" and "infidels." But this project has turned out to be a spectacular failure. The streets of Karachi and Cairo never filled up with hundreds of thousands of Osama's admirers. Moreover, the United States has not engaged in a wide-ranging war against Muslims. Instead, the U.S. campaign has essentially amounted to a police action in Afghanistan -- one conducted largely by the Afghans themselves, and with the goal of extirpating a group of Arab criminals.

Ferguson turns to the nineteenth-century British Empire to find a more apposite historical model for today's crisis. He describes the spectacular rise and fall of Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi, a messianic Sudanese Islamic fundamentalist whose soldiers stormed Khartoum in 1885, killing British General Charles Gordon along with the city's other defenders. This attack, as Ferguson observes, was the "'September 11' of the era." And the British Empire hardly collapsed as a result. Instead, the outraged British responded decisively to al-Mahdi's provocation, and at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, ten thousand of the rebels were wiped out by British Maxim machine guns. Meanwhile, only a handful of British soldiers were killed. Sound familiar?

Building on this parallel, Ferguson argues that the United States should now take a forceful leadership role in the world -- a role similar to that played by the British Empire -- in order to counter the growing forces of disorder. He establishes a series of premises that show why such leadership is now mandatory: the United States is vulnerable to attack; weapons that can be used against Americans are becoming both cheaper and more readily available; and the United Nations is "incapable of coping with the challenge of global disorder." Furthermore, only the United States can afford the costs of empire. Ferguson concludes with a question: "Do the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?" The answer remains unclear, but one can only hope that isolationist views like those of Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) on America's role in the world have begun to fade into history.

So much, then, for the contours of the battle the United States now finds itself in. One question remains: When can victory be declared? Mandelbaum's essay in How Did This Happen? provides a useful standard. He compares terrorism to a disease that can never be entirely eradicated but can nonetheless be managed. "Victory," he writes,

will have been achieved in the war against terrorism when the issue disappears from the forefront of public attention and when the innovations of foreign policy, law enforcement, and public safety established in the wake of September 11 are absorbed into the everyday fabric of American and international life.

Until then, the United States will remain engaged in a strange kind of "war": one that is neither cold nor hot. And, we should fear, a war in which civilian casualties will vastly exceed military losses.