Giving
bin Laden what he wants
Jeff
Overley
Why
was the United States attacked on Sept.11?
It is not a new question, but it deserves
revisiting.
It
wasn't because terrorists "hate our
freedoms," as President George W. Bush
said shortly after Sept. 11.
Rather,
as Peter Ford noted in his article "Why
Do They Hate Us?" (Christian Science
Monitor, Sept. 27, 2001) and as many Americans
probably now realize, the reasons were grounded
in various U.S. foreign policies in the
Middle East. "[T]he injustice done
to Palestinians, the cruelty of continued
sanctions against Iraq, the presence of
U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive
and corrupt nature of U.S. backed Persian
Gulf governments," all of which gain
a great deal of "popular sympathy"
among the people of the Middle East, were
the root causes, Ford wrote.
Clearly
the murder of thousands of innocent civilians
was a disgusting manner of redressing these
grievances. That aside, there remained an
air of infallibility within the American
public, and, at least in its rhetoric, within
the Bush administration. Many people did
not want to believe that Americans could
have done things to infuriate people to
such a degree. Instead, the thinking went
-- and still goes sometimes -- that anyone
angry with America is misinformed and/or
irrational.
But
let us look again at the aforementioned
complaints of the people of the Middle East,
and where they stand today.
The
war in Iraq has allowed the United Nations
to lift sanctions imposed to prevent Saddam
Hussein from reconstituting his power and
again posing a major regional threat. With
the sanctions gone, the Iraqi people are
on the road to recovery and thousands of
children may not die every week for lack
of food and medical supplies.
Following
the overthrow of the Baath party, the United
States withdrew most of its troops from
the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon
explained that this was not an admission
of fault, but a strategic restructuring
of forces. With Hussein gone, they said,
the troops were no longer necessary to defend
the regional balance of power.
Next,
using the inertia behind its victory in
Iraq, Washington attempted to resurrect
a dead Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
and tried to portray itself as an honest
broker in order to quell the protests of
an angry "Arab street."
Finally,
there is the fact that 15 of 19 Sept. 11
hijackers were Saudis. The Saudi government
continues to provide financial support for
Palestinian militant groups and has shown
shaky cooperation in the "war on terror."
All of this, combined with the complaints
mentioned above regarding U.S. support for
a regime diametrically opposed to putative
American democratic values, has fed a strong
urge to break ties with the House of Saud.
Assuming
the Iraqi government becomes a stable, friendly
and democratic supplier of oil, the United
States will be poised to abandon these links.
So,
then, all of these changes could be the
result of a concerted, yet covert, plan
by the United States to disrupt the blowback
incurred thus far. It might be an inadvertent
outcome of an independent course of action.
And it is possible that various objectives
coincided neatly to serve American interests.
Whatever
the case, and while keeping in mind that
al Qaeda probably has more enmity stockpiled,
we should realize that Osama bin Laden,
because of Sept. 11 -- without which the
war in Iraq never would have happened --
has gotten some of what he wants.
Jeff
Overley is a journalism major at Cal State
Long Beach.
|
