17 May 2007
Was Osama Right?
Bernard Lewis
Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak.
Recent political trends
won't change their view.
D
uring the Cold War, two things
came to be known and generally recognized
in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything
to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift
and dire. If you said or did anything
against the Americans, not only would there be
no punishment; there might even be
some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians,
journalists and scholars and miscellaneous
others came with their usual pleading
inquiries: "What have we done to offend
you? What can we do to put it right?"
A
few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many
attacks on American
installations and individuals-
-notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series
of kidnappings of Americans, both
official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only
one attack on Soviet citizens,
when one diplomat was killed and
several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed
against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians
were promptly released, and after
that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout
the period of the Lebanese troubles.
These different responses
evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly
attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim
colonial empire accumulated by the
czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.
Most
remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and
other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December
1979. Washington's handling of the
Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing
to fear from the U.S. They already
knew that they need not worry
about the Arab and other Muslim
governments. The Soviets already ruled--or misruled--half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing
any opposition or criticism.
Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer
Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted.
After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded
to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed
intervention in Afghanistan. " The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was
not named. Even this anodyne resolution
was too much
for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria
abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.
One
might have expected that the recently
established Organization of
the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After
a month of negotiation and manipulation, the organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss
the Afghan question. Two of
the Arab states, South Yemen and
Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full
member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and
used this occasion to denounce the U.S.
The Muslim willingness
to submit to Soviet authority,
though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the
Soviet invaders. An organization
known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla
warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets.
For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world--some grants of money, and growing numbers
of volunteers to fight in the Holy War
against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was
a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called
Osama bin Laden.
To
accomplish their purpose, they did
not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the
Muslim perception there has
been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and
opportunity to bring
salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their
path. For a long time, the
main enemy was seen, with some
plausibility, as being the West, and some
Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against
that enemy. This explains the widespread
support in the Arab
countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its
collapse, for the Soviet Union. These
were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural
allies.
Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the
Soviet Union, already ruling
a number of Muslim
countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was
therefore natural to seek and accept
American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of
the unbelievers was divided between
two superpowers. The first task
was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the
Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the
pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy.
We in the Western world see
the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union
as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers,
it was a
Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given
the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.
From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues,
it is clear
that they expected this second task, dealing with
America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged
and so it
seemed, confirmed by the American response
to a whole series of attacks - on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu
in 1993, on the U.S. military
office in Riyadh in 1995, on the
American embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 - all of which evoked only angry
words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to
remote and uninhabited places.
Stage
One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the
lands of Islam;
Stage
Two - to bring the war into
the enemy camp, and the attacks
of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo
of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came
as a shock, and it is noteworthy
that there has been no successful attack on American soil since
then. The U.S. actions in
Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated
that there had been a major change in the U.S.,
and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies
based on that assessment, was necessary.
More
recent developments, and notably the
public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first
assessment was correct after all, and that they need
only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is
not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view.
If they are right, the consequences - both for Islam and for America - will be deep,
wide and lasting.
Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author,
most recently, of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).