The Arab World After September 11

...More technocratic types convinced themselves that Hussein could be prevailed upon by the Arab league to leave of his own accord...

...Saudis have, after all, not been colonized or occupied by anybody ; they have one of the highest per capita income levels outside of the Western world, and bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan in 1989 neither defeated nor a victim...

...It is very difficult to make peace between peoples when at some primal level they are still in competition with one another over who has suffered the most and whose cause is more just...

...One of the biggest shocks I have had to contend with in the aftermath of September 11 is the realization that on this existential question of Arab politics, bin Laden and I, coming as we do from opposite sides of the political spectrum, shared what amounted to the same extremely unpopular position concerning the seriousness of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and what ought to be done about it...

...My friend justifies his anger by his belief—shared with the overwhelming majority of Iraqis today—that the United States deliberately left the Iraqi tyrant in place after the Gulf War, and then imposed a regime of sanctions that made the people of Iraq pay the price of Hussein's actions in 1990...

...The eight-year-long Iraq-Iran War, to take another defining event of our times, has killed more people than all the Arab-Israeli wars rolled into one...

...My position came straight out of the experience of writing about the Ba`thist regime in Republic of Fear, published in 1989...

...I make this statement not by way of judging my friend...

...For a whole variety of reasons, he does not identify with the perpetrators of September 11...

...Through the oil wealth and power of the Saudi dynasty, and because it could always count on its alliance with the United States, Wahhabism has been able to spread its regressive, archconservative vision of Islam around the world, both within the Islamic world and to the West...

...it is simply unwilling to pay the price and shoulder the responsibility of doing the job itself...

...He probably went through a long process of acculturation and adjustment into the cult-like environment of his new reality...

...There were those who argued that Kuwait was hardly worth fighting for, being an artificial creation of the oil companies...

...It is enough to say that his use of the Quran is about as Islamic as the use of the Sodom and Gomorah story to justify a nuclear attack on New York would be Jewish...

...Bin Laden, even more than Saddam Hussein during the 19901991 Gulf crisis, is an unconvincing convert to the Palestinian cause, which ranked at the bottom of his list of grievances against the United States in his October 2001 videotape...

...Like most Iraqis, he gets angry when I say that this is not the case: the United States wants nothing more than that Hussein be replaced through some sort of palace coup...

...In those days it went under a variety of different labels: antiimperialism, anti-Zionism, Arab socialism, panArabism...

...What is going on here...

...No Arab is capable of planning an operation like this...

...This is DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 7 POLITICS ABROAD a world that has been defeated in one war after another with Israel...

...My friend is an Arab himself...

...The oppressiveness of his own government drove him to Islamic politics at a time when Iraq had launched a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a war that was being supported, from the middle 1980s onward, by the United States...

...But growing up and seeing the streets of Beirut taken over by gangs of young men toting Kalashnikovs and extorting "protection" money from ordinary folk in the name of these high minded "isms" teaches a young, well-intentioned, and probably highly moralistic young man things no book or theoretical treatise can teach...

...After all, they had sent him to the relatively more sheltered environment of a Christian school in Beirut...

...He and I often have arguments about U.S...

...Against this kind of enemy, George W. Bush's "war against terrorism" will do very little...

...I say unusual because there were few Arabs who held the position that Arab should fight Arab and, if necessary, die by the thousands to expel the Iraqi invader from Kuwait in 1990...

...A homegrown tyrant was not the absolute center of their universe...

...Not one of the hijackers or their al-Qaeda bosses is an Afghan...

...They could not have been Arabs," he said...

...the latter involves an amorphous, but nonetheless real sentiment, grounded in desperate and extreme conditions of hopelessness, defeat, occupation, and, in a case like Iraq, gradual societal meltdown...

...Does my friend's denial, in other words, arise out of a sense of shame or deep anxiety that the perpetrators might in fact be Arabs or Muslims...

...Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being totally counterproductive...

...Notice, for instance, the element of self deprecation and inner defeat implied by the idea that Arabs are not capable of pulling off such a fantastic feat of planning and organization...

...the very attempt to do so bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of September 11, which is to blur the lines that separate a terrorist sect like al-Qaeda from the millions of ordinary Muslims and Arabs in the world...

...The economic lot of the average Palestinian is today orders of magnitude worse than it was when the Oslo peace process started...

...The Palestinian question, foundational though it is for the peace of the whole region, is just one of those threads...

...Osama bin Laden not only grew up with this ideology, which is taught today in all Saudi schools, but he turned it against his own regime when it violated its own principles during the Gulf War...

...The offer was turned down...

...In this country, Noam Chomsky, among others, made the same argument...

...On the face of it, the statement that the hijackers could not have been Arabs because no Arab is capable of planning an operation like this sounds simple, a naive comment on the facts...

...The seminal moment here, where so many of the roots of September 11 intersect, is the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991...

...it is not a new phenomenon for the Middle East but rather the latest and most virulent variant of an idea nurtured originally by secular, nationalist Arab intellectuals like myself in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War...

...He may not have been able to theorize about them, and he may not even have accepted fully that they were failures...

...My Palestinian, Lebanese, or Jordanian counterparts, on the other hand, were understandably preoccupied with Israel and its policies in the region...

...It intersects with the mainstream discourse of victimhood and victimization prevalent since the 1967 war...

...Certainly that is part of the answer...

...Is it only that my friend is so horrified by the event that his first instinct is to take distance from it...

...When one thinks of the emergence of bin Laden in the 1990s in the Middle East from this point of view, one must think of the emergence of Hitler from the rubble of Germany after the Second World War...

...He knew failures in his bones, so to speak...

...BIN LADEN'S apocalyptic vision, like that of the Russian nihilists of the nineteenth century, is not going to materialize...

...On' needs to distinguish between an exchange like that and an engagement with the "culture" of anti-Americanism in the Middle East that bin Laden exploits to broaden his appeal...

...8 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 POLITICS ABROAD I am twenty-six years older than he and had already spent years cutting my teeth on Palestinian politics...

...In the wake of that seminal event, it overwhelmed all other doctrines in major sections of the Islamic movement from Algeria to Pakistan...

...But there is still a problem of transition, of understanding how bin Laden got to his radical jihadi worldview from the Wahhabism of his education and his experience fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s...

...His defeat was never really in doubt...

...IT IS IMPORTANT to remember that Arabs are not the only ones to wrap themselves in the comforting mantle of victimhood...

...We don't really know...

...Whatever else one might say about these older labels, at least they had as their point of departure genuine grievances, some of which, of course, were more legitimate than others...

...The creed was unknown in Pakistan or Afghanistan or anywhere outside the Arabian peninsula before Saudi oil wealth spread it around...

...He reminds me that Bush senior called upon the Iraqi people to rise up against Hussein, and when they did so, turned his back on them...

...it had to be someone like the Israelis, who have an interest in making "us" look bad, and who are, everyone knows, very smart...

...Regarding his rationalizations and use, or abuse, of the Quran to justify what he certainly thinks of as a war of civilizations—that has to be the subject of another piece (See my article "Manual For A 'Raid' " in the January 16, 2002, New York Review of Books...

...Al-Jarrah himself almost certainly did not join in the butchery of the Lebanese civil war, euphemistically called the "armed struggle," during the years of his adolescence...

...And yet his anger these days, like that of the September 11 hijackers, is directed at the United States...

...And it fears or does not have any confidence in structural change in Iraq, that is, in the possibility of an entirely different system of power sharing in the country...

...Once the fighting started in January of 1991, and it became clear that Arab armies were there as window dressing, I changed my position and called upon the Allied coalition to finish the war by taking out the tyrant and opening up the possibility of democratic change in the Middle East...

...What explains the 1990s emergence onto the center stage of Arab politics of a terrorist "grand alliance" led by such a man...

...For him, I suspect, there was nothing left to believe in, nothing that had not been tried out in some form or other in the streets of Cairo, Beirut, Ramallah, and Baghdad...

...He would not leave Kuwait because he did not believe anyone would force him out...

...Who could have predicted the coalition that Bush senior put together in 1990...

...Such symmetries (and there are many others) have created a powerful complex of victimhood that undermines reconciliation efforts like those in Oslo, and that is applicable to one degree or another to all peoples of the Middle East (Palestinians, Israelis, Kurds, Armenians, Chaldean Christians, Turkomans, Shi'is, and Sunnis...

...Read the list of names...

...But in the Arab part of the Middle East that unreasonableness (as typical of Israelis as of Kurds, for instance) is fueled by failure...

...In the hands of Arab nationalists and leftist "anti-imperialists" of my generation (of whom I was one), this sense of grievance was not channeled into the hard work of building civil societies and expanding civil liberties in opposition to the existing tyrannical regimes—such as happened in Latin America in the 1980s...

...The other reason I bring up my friend's denial of Arab involvement is because he is not alone...

...And so he gambled everything on its inaction over the issue of Kuwait...

...For him, in those days, these two things were connected—the intolerable brutality of the Hussein regime and American support for it...

...His books include Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq...

...Note that I said most Arabs and some Muslims...

...they were not born terrorists, nor are they inclined toward violent solutions to their problems by the tenets of their religion...

...Some of the statements made by his German girlfriend and his family do indicate a change in approach and behavior—the kind of thing that happens to young people when they are recruited into cults...

...Our failure left a vacuum that was increasingly filled by a conspiratorial view of history, one reinforced by such tyrannical regimes as Hussein's or Hafez al-Assad's, a view of history that ascribed all the ills of our own world to either the Great Satan, America, or the Little Satan, Israel...

...Any "politics of victimhood" is inherently unreasonable...

...I think Ali had the right idea...

...We went on to do things like turning London into a new cultural capital of the Middle East, with five daily Arabic newspapers...

...But in many ways the greatest failure of all has been intellectual, specifically a failure of the intelligentsia—people like myself, writers, professors, artists, journalists, and so forth—who, with few exceptions, failed to meet the challenges of their strife-ridden times...

...against the Iraqi regime in the 1980s terrorism— he will not be too specific about what he did in those days, but I surmise he was part of an Islamist plot to assassinate Hussein, and was one of the lucky few who succeeded in hightailing it to Iran after the plot was uncovered...

...And the United States, having become accustomed to tailoring its policies in the Middle East to autocratic, authoritarian regimes of this kind, was happy to oblige...

...I went to an American Jesuit High school in Baghdad, some 75 percent of whose students were Muslim...

...It is a world that has been torn apart by coups d'état, occupations, intifadas, wars, and civil wars—which in tiny Lebanon alone killed 140,000 people, wounded 400,000, and made refugees of one in every three Lebanese...

...Increasingly, Arabs began to see themselves as the eternal victims of the second half of the twentieth century, consigned to a Sisyphean struggle against absolute or satanic injustice...

...Such would-be leaders are a very far cry from the men who have dominated the Arab political scene since 1967, men like Yassir Arafat or thugs like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Hafez al-Assad, all of whom rose to power from lowly beginnings in nondescript towns and villages through political parties or state institutions like the army and the secret police...

...They are all Arabs who have exported their problems to that unfortunate country...

...A key difference between us, however, was that the "isms" that my generation had believed in had all died by the time al-Jarrah was growing up—Arabism, nationalism, socialism, Marxism, third worldism...

...But bin Laden's style of reasoning, the motivating impulse behind his actions, the application of notions of purity to parts or perhaps even the whole of the Arabian peninsula in modern times, this is strange and in need of explanation...

...Nor is the price going to be paid by being the victims of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that rose so sharply everywhere in the West after September 1 I . It is the much greater price brought about when large numbers of people continue to respond to what happened on September 11 the way my friend did, by sinking more deeply into denial, and more deeply into a sense of their own victimhood, whether at the hands of the United States, or Israel, or the world economic system, or what nowadays is called globalization...

...The first is that it is important to think of the kind of people who perpetrated September 11, however horrific and bestial their behavior, as normal, perhaps even ordinary, people, who have turned to terrorism for reasons that we need to understand...

...I don't want for a second to excuse or justify what was done on September 11—only to insist on the urgency of understanding what it is we are dealing with, if for no other reason than to be able to fight it more effectively...

...Among the legitimate grievances, priority of place must be given to the profound injustice caused by the real dispossession of millions of Palestinians that accompanied the birth and consolidation of the state of Israel in 1948...

...The revolt of bin Laden and his cohorts, like that of Dostoyevsky's characters in that novel, is a nihilistic, all-out revolt of the sons against the fathers who made all the compromises and brokered all the dirty deals that created the constellation of ultimately failed states that we see today in the Middle East...

...Moreover, we know from the bits and pieces of personal information that have begun to surface that the experience of 1990-1991 was a turning point for bin Laden himself...

...The extraordinary depths of human suffering in Iraq today, after two Gulf wars and ten years of sanctions, is simply a special case in an ocean of misery...

...The only difference is that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now...

...Today he is a happily married man, and if he could hear me saying that he might have, in some earlier incarnation, been one of the September 11 terrorists, he would get very upset...

...One "ism" had not yet been fully tested out and proved bankrupt by what men—and they were largely men—had done with it on the ground: political Islam...

...So extreme is the original form of this puritan, image-hating Muslim sect that it views all non-Muslims—as well as nonWahhabi Muslims like me, by the way—as a form of "pollution...

...the modern Israeli sense of identity was, after all, forged on the foundations of the Holocaust just as surely as Palestinian national identity was forged by Israel's harsh treatment of Palestinians under occupation...

...Muslims and Arabs, not Americans, must today be on the frontlines of a new kind of war, one worth waging for our own salvation and our own souls...

...In fact, he returned a kind of hero, flushed with victory over the Soviet Union...

...I would suggest that we are looking at something new in Arab DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 9 POLITICS ABROAD politics, something perhaps analogous to what Russia went through in the second half of the nineteenth century with the rise of revolutionary nihilist movements described by Dostoyevsky in his novel The Demons...

...People imbibe these lessons without even knowing that they are doing so, and, in the case of specially dedicated and conscientious people, they soon seek alternatives...

...They tended to think that negotiations over Iraqi withdrawal before the outbreak of hostilities failed only because of American perfidy and desire to pursue a war strategy at all costs...

...The logic is the same as the "linkage" dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine...

...The Saudis preferred to pay the United States to fight the Gulf War on their behalf...

...But the generation that followed ours mostly stayed behind...

...The "anti-Americanism" of the so-called Arab street that we saw manipulated by Osama 6 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 POLITICS ABROAD bin Laden is built on this sense of victimhood and abdication of responsibility that I have been talking about...

...The great-uncle of bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al Zawahiry, for instance, was the first secretary general of the Arab League set up in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, while bin Laden himself is a son of the megarich generation of Saudis, who (quite literally in the case of bin Laden's father) built modern Saudi Arabia...

...Democratization began, and even took off in some parts of that continent in the 1980s but not in the Middle East...

...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 5 POLITICS ABROAD I make this hypothetical statement about my friend in order to illustrate a number of points...

...KANAN MAKIYA was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and now teaches at Brandeis University...

...That is because we should not let the initial focus of George W. Bush's campaign in Afghanistan obscure the fact that September 11, whatever else it may be, is an outgrowth of the problems of the modern Middle East, not the whole Islamic world as bin Laden would like us to believe...

...Unlike the post-1967 generation of Arabs formed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, bin Laden's wrath is directed not at Israel , but at the whole post—Ottoman Arab order...

...To react to September 11, as some Arabs and Muslims are doing (and not a few liberal and Western voices), by demanding that "Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world," is to make a concession, to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for bin Laden's kind of politics...

...and The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem...

...How bin Laden today rationalizes his apocalyptic vision of the clash between the "true" Islam that he claims to represent and Western civilization must be distinguished from how he arrived at it...

...To exorcise what bin Laden has done in the name of all Muslims and Arabs is the civilizational challenge that Arabs and Muslims, wherever they may live, face at the dawn of the twenty-first century...

...He turned his wrath against the puppet master United States, DISSENT / Spring 2002 n II POLITICS ABROAD which was manipulating the Saudi puppet, as he now saw the relation between the two...

...Battle-hardened by their fight against the Russian Army, they would find the Iraqi troops—who did not want to be in Kuwait in the first place—a pushover, so he must have argued...

...Of course they were...

...WHATEVER MY friend's reasons, the fact is that most Arabs, and some Muslims, have not yet come to terms with what happened on September 11...

...This America looked weak and irresolute in the eyes of Hussein...

...Needless to say, bin Laden's scapegoating of the United States is not new...

...Nonetheless, al-Jarrah surely grew up suffering from its corrosive effects...

...There can be no rational exchange with such a perverted reading of texts...

...Could it be because, unlike Latin Americans, we remained stuck or burdened with a "national question," namely a situation where the collective rights of a whole people to selfdetermination were still, until the agreement reached in Oslo at least, being denied in theory and in practice...

...We saw that brew ignite in 1990, with the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait...

...If anything, they sometimes buttressed them by becoming propagandists for political parties and armed-struggle organizations and by refusing, more generally, to break out of nationalist paradigms—for instance, by extending the hand of solidarity to their counterparts in Israel...

...It is at this point that I run out of good arguments and start going on about how ignorant most Arabs are of how decision making works in Washington, and so on and so forth...

...The former involves a cultlike distortion of reality that is impossible to reason with...

...Look at the pictures...

...I can't think of what to compare it with coming out of the Middle East in recent years...

...He was, a long time ago as a young man, an activist in the Al Da'wa Party, an Iraqi Islamist organization that waged an underground war in the 1980s against the Ba`thist regime of Saddam Hussein after all secular, nationalist, military, and liberal forms of opposition had collapsed...

...In need of answers and a degree of certainty in his life, al-Jarrah found the Islamism of the Hamburg cell that recruited him...

...On September 11, 2001, it did so again...

...It almost no longer matters which agent is held responsible...

...I T IS STRIKING to notice that although what I have said applies to Lebanese who experienced an Israeli war and occupation on top of their own terrible civil war, to Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and to Iraqis suffering under an intolerable regime that they blame the United States for not doing away with during the Gulf War, precious little of it applies to someone such as Osama bin Laden or even to some of his key lieutenants such as Ayman al Zawahiry...

...it had been humiliated in Iran ; and when it tried under Ronald Reagan to intervene in Lebanon, it took one deadly car bomb to send the marines scuttling back to their ships...

...It is no longer capable of projecting its power outside its own borders, perhaps, but it has been given, for all practical purposes, free license to do what it wants with its own citizenry...

...This refusal comes effortlessly, naturally almost, like the deeply distressing but widely accepted story in Egypt and the Gulf Arab countries that Jews or Israelis, not Muslims, were behind what happened in New York and Washington...

...In the absence of that kind of alternative focus, in the thick of all that endlessly selfpitying victimizing rhetoric, is it any wonder that despairing, young, middle-class individuals like Muhammad Atta and Ziad al-Jarrah, two of the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center buildings, men who are a generation younger than I am, gravitated toward ever more radical and eventually terrorist activities aimed at smiting the demonized Other...

...Aziz Ali, the Iraqi alter ego of Bob Dylan, wrote a lyric in the 1930s, that went Da' illi been, minna wa feena, "the disease that is in us, is from us and within us...

...We know that something happened to him there...

...Obsession with questions of purity are a characteristic feature of Wahhabism, the eighteenthcentury creed founded by the fanatical reformer Muhammad ibn al-Wahhah (17031787), who went on to ally himself with the tribal warlords that eventually became the Saudi dynasty...

...Bin Laden reacted in a very interesting way: he called upon the Saudi ruling elite into which he had been born to let him deploy his "Arab Afghan" fighters to expel Hussein from Kuwait...

...And it is given this license under the hypocritical gaze of the whole world, which sits passively and watches...

...its effect, on the countries that waged it, was no less than World War I on, say, France or Germany...

...When did al-Jarrah become attracted to this new and rising ideology fueled by the success of the 1979 Iranian revolution...

...Facing a civilizational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab world is hunkered down, unaware that in the years to come the greatest price to be paid for the apocalyptic acts unleashed upon New York and Washington on September 11 will be borne, not by Americans, hut by them, individuals of Arab or Muslim origin wherever they might live...

...Hounded out of Iraq, he has spent fifteen years as a refugee hopping from one country to the next...

...To begin with, it was highly unusual...

...Billions of Saudi dollars are pumped every year into madrassas and mosques in support of the very particular type of Wahhabi Islam that parades itself as the real thing...

...Had he been born in Saudi Arabia or fallen into a fringe radical Islamic circle in Egypt sometime in the 1990s, he could very well have ended up as one of the hijackers...

...But it is nothing of the sort...

...Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World...

...Is it any wonder that my Iraqi friend, like so many other Iraqis, has grown so bitter...

...Instead, many of us who were formed politically by the 1967 war acted as "rejectionist" critics who largely excoriated their own regimes for being insufficiently anti-Zionist or anti-imperialist...

...Hussein was wrong about the United States in 1990, but he was right about the state of the Arab world...

...they had to fight the wars, and dodge the bullets, and therefore in an important sense, they had to pay the price for our failure, a price that we were unwilling to pay or fortunate enough not to have to pay...

...The important question is, what will his demise mean for a world whose own failures are responsible for creating bin Laden in the first place...

...foreign policy over Iraq...

...From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, the murderous anti-American ideology was passed on to previously marginal religious zealots...

...The psycho-political makeup of a man who cares more about the polluting effect of an American presence in Arabia than anything else that has been going on around him for the last thirty years is very different from that of a desperate suicide bomber in Gaza or the West Bank who lashes out because he has nothing left to lose...

...It is those billions, not bin Laden's allegedly great personal fortune, that directly and indirectly financed al-Qaeda, camped out in war-torn Afghanistan...

...Ziad al-Jarrah, for example, was born in 1975, the year the Lebanese civil war started...

...We have to do it ourselves...

...There is no easy explana0 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 POLITICS ABROAD tion, no one wrong or great act of historical injustice that lies behind what happened on September 11...

...But it is also the kind of answer that can all too quickly be turned into an excuse...

...Nothing, that is, except faith in a holy cause, which so often in politics is a substitute for lost faith in ourselves...

...In his 1998 statement, issued after Bill Clinton's pointless missile attack on alQaeda's training camps in Afghanistan—the statement in which he called on Muslims to kill Americans wherever they might be in the world—bin Laden put at the top of his list of grievances the fact that the Saudi regime allowed non-Muslims, namely American troops during the Gulf War, to pollute "the land of Muhammad," a phrase he used again in his 2001 video...

...AND IF IT is not the Arab-Israeli conflict, what is the driving force of this movement's bid for leadership of the Arab world...

...We can speculate that in Hamburg he became acquainted for the first time with the phantasmagoric vision of an Islamic utopia that would redress all wrongs...

...In fact I know of only two: bin Laden and myself...

...I HAVE BEEN speaking of a failure of systems and institutions, armies and states...

...Shortly after bin Laden returned a hero from Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait...

...A very large number of Arabs and Muslims continue to refuse to accept that their coreligionists or fellow Arabs were involved on September 11...

...On the first day, I certainly hoped against all hope that the hijackers would turn out to be some homegrown group of Timothy McVeighs...

...it is about the mess that the Arab component of the Muslim world in particular is in, a component that is a mere 17 percent of the whole...

...The America that Hussein knew had been defeated in Vietnam...

...After September 11, his family claimed that he was sheltered from the ravages of the civil war, although that is hard to believe of anyone who was growing up during the 1980s in Lebanon...

...they did not feel threatened by the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait the way Kuwaitis or Iraqis suffering under Hussein did...

...Atta and al-Jarrah lived through—on the ground, not in exile or in the West—the practical consequences of the failure of my generation's well-intentioned dreams and hopes...

...The real problem is not about Islam and its relation with the West...

...The dangerous, unstated corollary of this view was the notion that "we Arabs" had no, or hardly any, agency to change the terribly unjust way that the world works...

...Perhaps, large numbers of Arab intellectuals allowed themselves to think, Iraq's much touted military strength would act as a counterweight to Israeli arrogance, forcing Israel to make concessions it would not otherwise make...

...Lost was a sense of ourselves as authentic political agents capable of aiming at concrete and gradual gains in the political arena...

...Hussein, however, was counting on such sentiments, on the acquiescence of a world that he knew to be psychologically defeated...

...We know that he went to Hamburg in the mid-1990s, probably sent by his family to continue his studies...

...He counters by saying that to replace Hussein, after dispatching half a million soldiers halfway across the world to push him out of Kuwait, would be like batting an eyelash for the richest and most powerful country in the world...

...it grew into the foundation upon which such regimes as Hussein's Iraq and Assad's Syria were built...

...Bin Laden also changed his position, but in the opposite direction...

...The fact remains that my generation failed even to pursue issues of individual and civil liberties from the 1960s right through the 1980s...

...The problem is that in all the indices—economic, political, and social— the problems became worse in the decade that followed the Gulf War...

...12 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...

...What his good parents probably meant to say is that he was spared a direct experience of its horrors...

...In particular, they failed to challenge the region's and their respective regimes' wildest and most paranoid fantasies...

...If we but knew how to unpack all that produced it—by no means an easy task—I suggest it would encapsulate tendencies in Arab politics that have been decades in the making...

...And yet many of the threads lead back to that 1990-1991 crisis, to how the war against Hussein was waged, and above all to the irresponsible way in which it was left unfinished, with the whole population of Iraq left to fester...

...Among Arabs in particular, especially after Israel's stunning and unexpected victory in the six-day war of 1967, this complex became the driving force of politics and culture...

...Lost in all of this, as I said, was the hard work of creating a modern, rights-based political order out of or from within those very regimes, one that could eventually form the basis for a more widely based, more general prosperity...

...And that is what his shocked family was trying to say to the news reporters banging on their doors...

...Nor would I call his actions This article was originally given as a lecture at the New School for Social Research in January 2002...

...Or is there, in my friend's denial, perhaps layered onto his shame, overtones of admiration for the feat of the hijackers...

...The Arab world is a potpourri of collapsing economies—mass unemployment overseen by ever more repressive regimes...

...In 1979, it fused with anti-shah sentiments to become one of the animating forces of the Iranian revolution...

...I N RETROSPECT, it is worth examining bin Laden's 1990 position more carefully...

...We, by and large, either sold out to our homegrown autocracies and tyrannies or packed our bags and left...

...The mix of post-1967 wars, revolutions, occupations, acts of ethnic cleansing, intifadas, and civil wars with the condition of being a victim creates a murderously explosive brew...

...Arab businesses and commerce operate today out of many European cities...

...That, as some Muslim scholars will argue, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or excuse them...

...This price is much higher than a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, followed perhaps by one in Iraq, or efforts to hunt down Arab terrorists from the suburbs of Boston and Hamburg to downtown Cairo and Karachi...

...This would be a reasonably positive political impulse, however wrongly founded...

...Nothing symbolizes how much worse these problems have become since the hope-filled days of Oslo than the survival of the regime of Saddam Hussein...