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"No one is born a terrorist," a recent commentary noted. Then why does so much of the world hate the United States and wish it harm? If we understand that, we will have gone a long way in ridding the world of terrorism by eliminating the motivation of the terrorists. The following ten ideas are very valuable reading for Americans today.
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September 26, 2001
1. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.
2. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.
3. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward Iraq.
4. The United States has not been a fair mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
7. The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
8. U.S. policy has contributed to the rise of radical Islamic governments and movements.
9. The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has not benefitted most people of the region.
Like much of the Third World, the United States has been pushing a neo-liberal economic model of development in the Middle East through such international financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. These have included cutbacks in social services, encouragement of foreign investment, lower tariffs, reduced taxes, the elimination of subsidies for farmers and basic foodstuffs as well as ending protection for domestic industry.
While in many cases, this has led to an increase in the overall Gross National Product, it has dramatically increased inequality, with only a minority of the population benefitting. Given the strong social justice ethic in Islam, this growing disparity between the rich and the poor has been particularly offensive to Muslims, whose exposure to Western economic influence has been primarily through witnessing some of the crassest materialism and consumerism from U.S. imports enjoyed by the local elites.
The failure of state-centric socialist experiments in the Arab world have left an ideological vacuum among the poor seeking economic justice which has been filled by certain radical Islamic movements. Neo-liberal economic policies have destroyed traditional economies and turned millions of rural peasants into a new urban underclass populating the teeming slums of such cities as Cairo, Tunis, Casablanca and Teheran. Though policies of free trade and privatization have resulted in increased prosperity for some, far more people have been left behind, providing easy recruits for Islamic activists rallying against corruption, materialism and economic injustice.
10. The U.S. response to Middle Eastern terrorism has thus far been counter-productive.
The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States has highlighted the threat of terrorism from the Middle East, which has become the country's major national security concern in the post-cold war world. In addition to Osama bin Laden’s underground Al-Qaeda movement, which receives virtually no direct support from any government, Washington considers Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya to be the primary sources of state-sponsored terrorism and has embarked on an ambitious policy to isolate these regimes in the international community. Syria's status as a supporter of terrorism has ebbed and flowed not so much from an objective measure of its links to terrorist groups as from an assessment of their willingness to cooperate with U.S. policy interests, indicating just how politicized "terrorist" designations can be.
Responding to terrorist threats through large-scale military action has been counter-productive. In 1998, the U.S. bombed a civilian pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under the apparently mistaken belief that it was developing chemical weapons that could be used by these terrorist networks, which led to a wave of anti-Americanism and strengthened that country’s fundamentalist dictatorship. The 1986 bombing of two Libyan cities in response to Libyan support for terrorist attacks against U.S. interests in Europe not only killed scores of civilians, but -- rather than curb Libyan-backed terrorism -- resulted in Libyan agents blowing up a Pan Am airliner over Scotland in retaliation. Military responses generally perpetuate a cycle of violence and revenge. Furthermore, failure to recognize the underlying grievances against U.S. Middle East policy will make it difficult to stop terrorism. While very few Muslims support terrorism -- recognizing it as contrary to the values of Islam -- the concerns articulated by bin Laden and others about the U.S. role in the region have widespread resonance and will likely result in new recruits for terrorist networks unless and until the U.S. changes its policies.
Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as a senior policy analyst and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project.
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