Terror's rotten roots

Many people are fond of explaining Islamist terrorism by blowback theory; that is, they attack West in retaliation for our crimes against Islamic world. This can be seen as an explanation, and also as a justification. The same individuals with some sympathy for the latter option often include socioeconomic factors in their explanation. In addition for being a strike of the powerless against the injustices of world, terrorism also springs of frustration and despair of poverty. This is also our fault, because as we all know, exploitation is the sole determinant of wealth differences. Rich individuals and nations prosper because they rip off the poor. Viva la Marx.

As a partial explanation, blowback is a real no-brainer. To deny that the plight of Palestinians, support of Arab dictators and Iraq War cause resentment towards US and West would take massive, willful blindness. Including poverty has some merit, as well, though it fits better as one explanation for the spread of Islamism, and the domestic terrorism in Middle East and North Africa. A society full of young men with no prospects for future is an explosive one, and a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of extremism. However, no matter how fanatically some Pakistani goat herder or slum youth in Cairo might hate West, he doesn't make a good terrorist. That requires language skills and a capacity to blend in modern society, neither of which he has. Contemporary Islamist terrorists have come from the upper strata of Arab societies, or from the middle classes of European Muslims, who really aren't economically deprived in any meaningful sense. Of course, to act as a jihadi in Afghanistan or Iraq is a different matter... but I digress.

So, these explanations certainly aren't entirely worthless, but are they sufficient? If they were, what implications would that have? Consider South and Central America. These regions have rampant poverty, both in the absolute and relative sense. Slum dwellers and many rural Indians are poor in the extreme, yet the upper classes live in great luxury. Income differences in the region are some of the greatest in the whole world. Also, it is here that United States has acted in nakedly imperalistic way for a long time. They have supported dictators and terrorists, engineered coups, militarily intervened and even outright invaded couple times (Grenada '83 and Panama '89). The economic relationships have been characterized by exploitation of South by US corporate giants. Really, compared to all this America has been a charity to Muslims. If anti-imperialist backlash and economic deprivation would suffice to explain terrorism, US would have been a target of merciless and extensive Latino-Caribbean terrorism for over a century.

Perhaps the International Patriarchal-Imperialist Conspiracy is hiding the evidence, but as far as I know, those groups haven't made a single terrorist attack. How come? Perhaps they do hate our freedoms after all?

In my opinion that is yet another partial truth. Certainly, there are elements in Western culture that Islamists view with utmost loathing. West self-consciously elevates man-made laws above God's law and its own explanations of universe above divine revelations. White whores cavort in the streets semi-naked inciting innocent Muslims to rape, actually daring to think they are somehow equal to men. Homosexuals and other filthy perverts aren't punished for their moral sickness, but allowed to spread their degeneracy. Sayyid Qutb, one of the founding intellectuals of modern jihadism, came to see Americans as "a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money" during the time he spent in USA -- and this was almost 60 years ago, long before the sexual revolution of Sixties and the general liberalisation of lifestyle. What do you suppose he would have thought about this?

So the Western culture is decadent and worthless, the antithesis of Islam. In itself this might not matter. Unfortunately, according to every measure, West is stronger and more prosperous by far than Muslim world. It is intolerable that these disgusting little creatures, not even proper infidels anymore for they have no faith at all, stand above the favored of God. It makes complete mockery of the Salafist idea that Muslims became weak when they ceased to follow the good, original ways. If society's strength is tied to the favor of Allah, what could possibly explain the power of West? It gets worse, for by no means do all Muslims share their poisonous contempt. Rather, a complex mixture of ambivalent emotions seems to dominate, admiration mixing with unease about our debaucheries and bitterness of their own relative weakness. When there is hate, it has political roots, not cultural. Western ways have already metastasized into Islamic cultures, and there's an everpresent danger of further spread as long as West stays superior and Muslims do not firmly reject them. This hardly seems a threat to Islam right now, but Christianity didn't seem to be under any more threat when it started compromising with modernity, and just look at it now.

That the soulless beasts meddle in Muslim affairs, militarily humiliate them and occupy their lands is of course yet another reason for hatred, but it's not just that. The exploitative practices of West give a suitable excuse for their power and Muslim weakness, neatly tying in with Marxist worldview so popular in West itself. They disgrace Western sympathizers and liberal reformers, giving credibility to the idea that West is indeed enemy of Islam. They become an important tool for propaganda and recruitment, perhaps the most important one, for few Muslims are really all that eager to return to 7th century, especially when contemporary Islamist states such as Sudan or Taliban's Afghanistan have been everything but utopian. If they weren't the sentinel of Islam, the only ones fighting against its most deadly enemy, they would have far less to build on, and no excuses whatsoever for the failure of their ideology to build a strong societies wherever they've had power.

Therefore, while the Islamists do hate us for what we are, it is Western policies that help them gain converts and sympathy. As such, they desperately need us to be their enemy, and can be expected to work towards that end. One of the most imporant tricks of any guerrilla or terrorist organization worth anything is to trick its more powerful enemy into indiscriminate reprisals that cause havoc amongst innocents and translate into support for organization largely responsible for them. Perhaps 9/11 was neither defence against imperialism, or some insane, pointless blow against a hated culture, but a calculated provocation. If so, it was certainly a smashing success. With Iraq War, Uncle Sam became Osama bin Laden's recruiting sergeant, and by opening a battlefront on Arab lands, it gave opportunity of fighting for those Islamists with no capacity for international terrorism.

Could we then pull a rug from under their feet by adopting some "ethical" foreign policy, that is, one every Muslim can be happy about? Perhaps in a long term it would have such an effect, but it would be of no immediate help against this ideology's adherents. They would still need us to be their enemy, still have the same reasons to provoke us. Excuses can always be found (from the situation of Europe's Muslims for example, which will never be satisfactory for them), and even if they would seem flimsy to many, once the provocation succeeded, such details would be soon forgotten. How much anger about 9/11 there has been on Arab Street since Iraq War? The realignment of Western foreign policy would be represented as their victory, product of great fear that they struck in the withered hearts of enemy. It might give them the boost they need to seize control of many Muslim states, especially since we'd have to abandon support for friendly autocrats currently keeping them in check. Certainly European Islamists and the criminal scum of Muslim ghettoes would become even more aggressive and arrogant. The inevitable backlash against this would then of course provide ample justification for terrorist attacks. Of course all this is rather academic, for USA will not force Israel to fold to Arab demands and West cannot risk Middle Eastern oil falling in hands of hostile regimes.

Action can be taken against terrorist networks. Their leaders can be seized or assassinated, their communications and finances disrupted. Military force can be used against countries that have very clearly thrown in their lot with extremists. Bombing of Libya and invasion of Afghanistan caused relatively little furour, propably in large part because West had casus belli in both cases, unlike with Iraq. Western intellectuals could stop aiding Islamist propagandists by depicting us as uniquely aggressive, imperialist force, and claiming the sorry state of Third World is primarily result of our actions. It is questionable whether such methods would win the war on jihadi terrorism, but at least they wouldn't make things worse. In a sense that would be enough to "win", for as long as terrorism stays at current low levels, it is ultimately of no consequence. Even if jihadists managed to ramp up their campaign considerably and kill WTC's worth of civilians every year, it'd still be absolutely nothing compared to such killers as tobacco or traffic accidents, both of which have demonstrably failed to destroy the free society. The effect of terrorism is the terror it causes in people ignorant of its irrelevancy; its danger to us the ways in which we overreact to that terror. Every time we lash out blindly in anger rather than in cold-blooded, surgical manner, build up ridiculously expensive surveillance systems of questionable worth, or compromise our liberties for marginal improvements in security, terrorists win.