Beyond Terrorism and Militarism Redux
An Analysis of 9-11: Twenty Years Later
Notes from a Speech to Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsförbund
(Social Democratic Student Organization)
By Jonathan Michael Feldman, Stockholm University
September 11, 2021
Overview
In this talk, I will first discuss the causes of the 9-11 attacks. Then I will address, the costs of the immediate attack on the United States and then the costs of the war on terror. I will then analyze the implications of this attack for contemporary realities, followed by explaining how various Social Democratic traditions are relevant. To conclude, I will address some further implications of the debate about terrorism.
Some Principal Causes of the Attacks
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia were caused by multiple factors. Or, more precisely, I can provide several competing or complementary explanations, the resolution of which would require deeper analysis.
First, the 9-11 attacks were part of a political leverage system. This is explained by a team of journalists who wrote The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It. Part of bin Laden’s grievances were based on the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. In explaining his grievances to journalists, bin Laden noted in the 1990s that “his first priority was to get the American military bases out of Saudi Arabia, the holiest of lands in Islam.” Bin Laden told one reporter, “every day the Americans delay their departure, they will receive a new corpse.” He did not care about the Saudi royal family’s preference for a U.S. military presence, explaining: “It does not make a difference if the government wants you to stay or leave. You will leave when the youth send you in wooden boxes and coffins. And you will carry in them the bodies of American troops and civilians. This is when you will leave.” He added, “we do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa.”[1]
Bin Laden considered Americans’ outrage against attacks on civilians a significant double standard, given U.S. killings of Muslim civilians. As John Miller and his co-authors explain, “Bid Laden was claiming, in essence, that what we consider to be terrorism is simply the amount of violence required to get the attention of the American people.” For example, “his aim was to get Americans to consider whether continued support of Israel is worth the bloodshed he promised.[2] In my view this theory can be reframed as part of a larger problem in which militarism triggers terrorism and terrorism triggers militarism and military and terrorist leaders partially act as recruitment agents for one another. The limit to such an analysis has to do with internal dynamics and ideological framing within both military and terrorist actors who perpetuate this cycle.[3] In other words, considerations of ideology, tactics, and bureaucratic organization perpetuate violence and power games at the expense of conflict resolution.
Second, the attacks were part of a revenge killing designed to avenge grievances perceived to involve attacks on Islam. Michael Scheuer explains this factor in the book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America: What must be understood is that what bin Laden has said and done has everything to do with religion and that we will neither understand him nor the threat he has unleashed until we recognize and articulate that there are tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims who, like bin Laden, hate the United States for what they believe is its consistently anti-Islamic behavior.[4]
According to Scheuer, bin Laden attempted “to repel what he [viewed] as Christian aggression, to end what he [considered] the West’s deliberate ‘humiliation’ of the Islamic world, and to restore to Muslims their dignity and control over their destinies.” As a result, bin Laden’s supporters have been committed “to kill, in God’s name, those they deem enemies of Islam, and kill them with whatever means and in whatever numbers are necessary to achieve their goals.” Scheuer explains that many Muslims perceive the policies organized by U.S. and Western states as “anti-Islamic.” Therefore, characterizing bin Laden as a terrorist is insufficient in Scheuer’s view.[5] The essential point here seems to be that the religious branding of the West’s crimes help to build an audience for bin Laden, potentially involving not merely immediate support cells of highly committed individuals, but also a broader audience of public supporters.
The third explanation for the attack displaces a reductionist religious explanation and argues that while not all Muslims are terrorists, some subset of Muslims are. A key author making this point is Bassam Tibi, author of The Challenge of Fundamentalism. Tibi says the key problem was not Islam per se, but “fundamentalism” or “Islam as political ideology.” He writes: In the course of dismissing the perception of an “Islamic Threat,” an effort that I share, some scholars nonetheless seem to confuse the two aspects of Islam. Islam as a religion is definitely not a threat, but Islamic fundamentalism is. It is a threat…only in the sense of creating disorder on a grand scale—as if often contended—in the sense of replacing communism as a “new global enemy for the Western alliance.”
Tibi explains that such fundamentalism can differ according to the region in question.[6] Therefore, Tibi critiques a kind of post-colonial argument in which 9-11 can simply be seen as a reaction to the U.S. or the Western military project in the Middle East.[7]
The fourth explanation for 9-11 is rooted in the factors that lead various recruits to join terrorist operations. These factors are connected to entrepreneurial and organizational building mechanisms that become a focal point for organizing grievances, i.e. the power mechanism that utilizes fundamentalism and/or terrorism to promote grievances. The story partially begins in Egypt. As Miller and colleagues explain: Modern militant Islamism in Egypt traces its roots to 1928, when a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a group dedicated to liberating Egypt from British rule and rebuilding an Islamic empire governed by divine law. By mid-century, membership in the Brotherhood numbered more than a half million, and when Israel declared statehood in 1948, the group’s advance guard turned to violence.[8]
One of the 9-11 terrorists, Egyptian Mohamed Atta, sympathized with the fundamentalists,” part of the larger movement created by al-Banna. He trained at a camp organized by al Qaeda in Afghanistan.[9] Among the actors discussed as financially supporting terrorist organizations like al Qaeda include: the personal wealth of terrorists, voluntary donations, Saudi networks, Islamic NGOs, and narcotics trafficking.[10]
These factors promoting radicalization are not simply based on pro-Israeli policies or the marginalization of Muslims in Europe or the Middle East conflict. Rather, as Farhad Khosrokhavar argues in Radicalization, “the purely subjective dimension is also assuming greater importance.” He explains the larger phenomena of radicalization as follows: In the case of radicalization…sociologists are sensitive to the modalities of individual subjectivization and group membership, as well as to the interaction between the group and the individual, in a play of mirrors where individual psychology has a role along with the group dynamic, the leader’s charisma, and the intensity of attachment to that leader and to the ideals professed by the group.
There are, however, objective factors that promote an incentive for the subjective embrace of martyrdom. Khosrokhavar points to a political vacuum which is exploited by terrorist organizations: Many institutions have been weakened or even obliterated, hobbling entire strata of the population. Such is the case for labor unions and for political parties…whose disappearance or marginalization has made economic and social integration by the lower strata of society extremely difficult.
The decline of such parties leads to social exclusion, but “when exclusion is accompanied by stigmatization, an explosive mix can result.” The excluded who are mistreated and lack a political way out can either “retreat into passivity and silence,” experience “an increased risk of engaging in criminal behavior, or…express their revolt through violence, radical Islamism being one of these modes of expression.”[11]
The fifth factor to explain 9-11 is the breakdown in policing including airport security and the coordination among security offices and agencies. For example, at one point the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) focused on persecution rather than prevention of terrorists. A coordination problem can be seen in the CIA’s belief that the FBI’s “doggedly legalistic approach to cases was getting in the way of their intelligence gathering, and worse, the Bureau was withholding vital information under cover of grand jury secrecy.”[12] An example of the breakdown in airport security can be seen in the U.S. Government’s 9-11 report. The report states: In passing through…checkpoints, each of the hijackers would have been screened by a walk-through metal detector calibrated to detect items with at least the metal content of a .22-caliber handgun. Anyone who might have set off that detector with a hand wand—a procedure requiring the screener to identify the metal item or items that caused the alarm. In addition, an X-ray machine would have screened the hijackers’ carry-on belongings. The screening was in place to identify and confiscate weapons and other items prohibited from being carried onto a commercial flight. None of the checkpoint supervisors recalled the hijackers or reported anything suspicious regarding their screening.[13]
In sum, the “institutions charged with protecting” the U.S.’s borders, civil aviation, and national security did not understand” the severity of the threat. They “did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it.” There were gaps “between foreign and domestic intelligence, and between and within agencies.” There were “pervasive problems” in “managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldly government that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers.”[14]
Consequences for the United States and the Middle East
The terrorist attack on 9-11 helped create a mobilizing context leading to the U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The connection between these countries and terrorism was associated with misinformation about linkages or a pattern of refusal to negotiate in good faith with the Taliban to secure bin Laden. Turning first to Afghanistan, we see that war was not necessary to stop the leading terrorists. On October 14, 2001, The Guardian reported that “President George Bush rejected as ‘non-negotiable’ an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.”[15] Marc W. Herold, an economist, found that “the US and allies’ bombing campaign in Afghanistan…resulted in well over 3,000 civilian deaths due to bombing impacts, the indirect deaths of tens of thousands of internally displaced persons, and thousands of injured in an agricultural society where limbs are crucial.”[16] Various estimates of the number killed from the Iraq War number in the hundreds of thousands.[17]
When it came to Iraq, a report published by the United States Senate clearly showed “that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.”[18]
One key outcome of post-9-11 actions is that the United States has reduced terrorist attacks to minimal levels in contrast to the problems facing Western Europe. Mark Lander, a New York Times reporter, recently explained that “in comparison to the comprehensive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ‘other’ war on terror has so far achieved its bedrock goal of protecting the United States from another 9/11-type attack.” Yet, “the war on terror…utterly failed to prevent the proliferation of terrorist groups.” Some argue that the Taliban’s victory has given such groups “fresh inspiration.”[19]
Lander explains the reasons for the lack of a major terrorist attack post-911: “tighter border security and the ubiquity of the internet, which has made it easier to track and disrupt jihadi movements; or the upheavals of the Arab Spring, which shifted the sights of extremists to their own societies.”[20]
Yet the U.S. is embroiled in a seemingly endless war on terror: “Between 2018 and 2020, the United States was engaged in some form of counterterrorism activity in 85 countries, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.” This includes combat, “directly or through proxies, in 12 countries, including Iraq, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.” The U.S. “has had the legal authority to conduct special operations in Cameroon, Libya, Niger and Tunisia.” It also carried out drone or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In addition, U.S. “troops have conducted counterterrorism training exercises in 41 countries.”[21]
The 9-11 attacks “killed 2,973 and wounded 6,291, not counting the 19 hijackers who flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.”[22] Al Qaeda spent about “half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon.” The immediate costs to the United States were $3.3 trillion based on estimates analyzed by The New York Times. This estimate is based on property and physical damage $55 billion, an immediate economic impact of $33 billion, homeland security and related costs of $589 billion, war funding and related cost of $1,649 billion and future war spending and veterans’ care of $867 billion.[23]
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University concluded the following about the “war on terror”:
Over 929,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war;
Over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting;
the number of war refugees and displaced persons [is 38 million];
The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion;
The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries;
The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the U.S. and abroad.[24]
These costs do not directly address various executive orders and the Patriot Act which have severely constrained civil liberties, nor the torture of political prisoners. President George W. Bush signed an executive order which could use secret tribunals to find someone accused guilty even if one third of the officers at the tribunal disagreed. The accused alien could be executed without the review of a civilian court.[25]
The war on terror has been costly if not counter-productive, with even President Obama acknowledging that the attack on Iraq helped give rise to ISIS. Furthermore, various scholars showed long ago the limits to military power when such power is projected against guerilla forces. Seymour Melman described the problem in 1986 when he wrote “it is appreciated that guerilla forces cannot be overcome by superior equipment and numbers if the guerillas are ready to die, if they have popular support, and if the enemy cannot differentiate them from ordinary people.” He added, “hence the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.”[26] The U.S. has tried to compensate for costs by outsourcing counter-terrorism to other states. It still believes that militarism can fight terrorism. Therefore, it has connected itself to regimes with systemic human rights abuses, like Saudi Arabia, which has been engaged in a horrific war in Yemen, “in the name of fighting extremism.”[27]
Noam Chomsky, a leading critic of the war on terror, argues that traditional policing approaches are the most useful way to address terrorism. Like Melman, he argues that there are limits to the idea for nations to use military power when attacked. By this logic he says, “Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Cuba, and numerous [other countries] should have been setting off bombs in Washington and other U.S. cities, Palestinians should be applauded for bombings in Tel Aviv, and on and on.”[28]
Newer models of terrorist recruitment further underline the limits of using traditional military power to stop attacks. As Omar Ashour explained: in the “‘ideological front’ model, initially advocated by a famous jihadi strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, “the most secure way to organize is without organization.” Al-Suri explained that such a decentralized model “defeats any security arrangement.” This model, and similar ones to it, appears to build on the basic logic of grievances. A narrative is promoted that describes “the severe injustices and humiliation suffered by Muslims,” with the extremist ideology the alleged cure, and then “sympathizers recruit themselves to Al Qaeda or initiate their own operations.” One positive development, however, was that “several movements, factions, leading jihadists, and individual militants were highly critical of Al Qaeda’s behavior, and began to move towards non-violence, depriving Al Qaeda of tens of thousands of supporters.” Ashour argued ten years ago that “the combined effect of intelligence operations, drone attacks, transformations within jihadi ranks, and the Arab Spring has thwarted the power of ‘Al Qaeda Central.’”[29]
The problem with this assessment is that it hardly can explain the rise of ISIS, the triumph of the fundamentalist Taliban, or how drone attacks can be used as a recruitment tool for fundamentalists and terrorists alike. Nor did this apparent victory offer much of a cure for related ills of social exclusion and various grievances. The problems include rising hate crimes. In Sweden, Islamic hate crimes numbered 272 in 2008, 306 in 2012, 439 in 2016, and 562 in 2018, i.e. the number of such crimes more than doubled over ten years.[30] Furthermore, the Arab Spring model turned out to be very limited in long-term effects. Earlier this year, Tunisia’s democracy suffered a coup or coup-like change of government in August. Tunisia was the only democracy “remaining from the popular revolutions that swept the Arab world a decade ago.”[31]
Relevant Social Democratic Traditions for Solutions
There is evidence that traditional social welfare measures can break up the social disintegration associated with crime, riots and terrorism. David Kennedy, a criminology scholar who was recently featured on Swedish Television (SVT) co-authored a study which argued: that problems could be solved by “addressing racial conflict between communities and law enforcement, setting strong community and family standards against dealing; involving dealers’ family members, and offering education, job training, job placement, and other social services.” Such initiatives (among other factors) helped the police department “to close the drug market.”[32]
These anti-gang, anti-drug measures are similar to the requirements for fighting terrorist recruitment. In Minnesota, in the United States, a terrorism prevention program has been successful. This initiative involves various social welfare measures and community engagement, development of “community outreach videos designed to increase comfort and trust with local law enforcement,” community engagement academies and summits, development of after-school study programs, mentoring of children, hosting of open gyms, increased recruitment of Somali police officers (with such officers increasing police understanding of Somali culture).[33]
The traditional Social Democratic community utilized community institutions that were built around social organization through unions tied to locally-anchored businesses. There was a linkage between a variety of community institutions including the Social Democratic Party, companies such as insurance companies, cooperatives, newspapers; trade unions and local community education (as in study circles and ABF), etc. This is classic Social Democracy and involved various kinds of power or capital in an integrating system: economic, human, political, media/cultural capital or power. For a variety of reasons this ensemble of democratic power has weakened leading to alienation and societal breakdown, not just in so-called “Swedish ghettos” but also in rural communities and other places where extremist right-wing parties recruit members. We need to have a debate about how to revive these institutions and link them to urban and rural communities. There are various activists and scholars who have worried about how to develop such initiatives and they can be found among Reformisterna, social ecologists, other Swedish political parties and persons who have been part of the reconstructionist tradition, e.g. Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Seymour Melman and Paul Goodman in the United States; Inga Thorsson and Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden; Simone Weil in France; and G. D. H. Cole, E. P. Thompson and Ken Coates in the United Kingdom.[34]
A key solution to confronting the cycle where militarism links to terrorism and vice versa, is to promote the design of new reconstructive institutions (and alternative designs for existing institutions) that are based on scientific knowledge, research, and analysis of alternative plans.[35] Such plans, which involve experts, technocrats, and scholars can be linked to various mechanisms of community engagements including study circles, scenario workshops, and other mechanisms of democratic, community testing and engagement of plans.[36]
The left must admit to its own dirty laundry and understand the key truths or partial truths capitalized upon by right-wing politicians related to crime, integration not working, and terrorist threats without succumbing to the dysfunctional solutions of such politicians. We have two kinds of problem in terrorism which show the limits of various fractions of the right and left. First, the right is often part of what Nathan Lean calls the Islamophobia Industry.[37] Discrimination against Muslims is something supported by mainstream media that often asks leading questions about Muslims related to domestic violence (where white, “native” Swedes who beat their wives are never questioned about how such beating is linked to Christianity—an absurd association). Second, the left itself has been engaged in repressive tolerance of fundamentalists and a related terrorist network defined by a pre-woke naïve multicultural ideology. This problem was manifested in the Finsbury Park Mosque with equivalent problems in France, Sweden and elsewhere.[38]
There is a need to overcome social media and political “bubbles” in which communities are walled off from one another and do not learn from each other to test the validity of their ideas. To overcome such bubbles requires self-conscious reflection about “knowledge resistance.”[39] The self-conscious learning and reflection involves moving beyond militarism and terrorism or the choice between the Islamophobia Industry and repressive tolerance of fundamentalism and terrorism. This idea is found in an essay by Edward Said. Said wrote in 1988: “…there is room for intellectual discussion that partakes neither of the expert discourse of counter-terrorism, nor of the partisan affirmations about ‘our’ identity. That kind of discussion may involve taking positions on political conflicts in which terrorism or state-violence are regularly employed, but it would more centrally enlarge the scope of debate and induce a spirit of criticism as an antidote to the general yea-saying.”[40]
References
[1] John Miller and Michael Stone with Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, New York: Hyperion, 2003: 190.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Carl Boggs, “Militarism and Terrorism: The Deadly Cycle,” Democracy & Nature, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2002: 241-259.
[4] Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006: 19.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, Updated Edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002: 4.
[7] See his critique of Edward Said in ibid.: 148.
[8] Miller et al., op. cit.: 244.
[9] Ibid.: 245, 252, 260.
[10] Scheuer, op. cit.: 31-44.
[11] Farhad Khosrokhavar, Radicalization: Why Some People Choose the Path of Violence, New York and London: The New Press, 2017: 9-11.
[12] Miller et al., op. cit.: 124-125.
[13] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004: 2.
[14] Ibid.: xvi.
[15] “Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over,” The Guardian, October 14, 2001. Accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5; Alissa J. Rubin, “Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen?,” The New York Times, August 23, 2021; Updated September 2, 2021.
[16] Marc W. Herold, “US bombing and Afghan civilian deaths: the official neglect of ‘unworthy’ bodies,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 26, Issue 3, 2002: 626-634.
[17] See the various estimates here: “Casualties of the Iraq War,” Wikipedia, 2021. Accessible at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War.
[18] “Editorial: The Truth About the War,” The New York Times, June 6, 2008. Accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06fri1.html.
[19] Mark Lander, “20 Years On, the War on Terrow Grinds Along With No End in Sight,” The New York Times, September 10, 2011. Accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/europe/war-on-terror-bush-biden-qaeda.html.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Khosrokhavar, op. cit.: 4-5.
[23] Shan Carter and Amanda Cox, “One 9/11 Tally: $3.3 Trillion,” The New York Times, September 8, 2011. Accessible at: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html.
[24] “Costs of War,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 2021. Accessible at: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.
[25] Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002: 72.
[26] Seymour Melman, “Limits of Military Power: Economic and Other,” International Security, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1986: 72-87, here page 74.
[27] Lander, op. cit.
[28] Noam Chomsky, 9-11, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001: 65-66.
[29] Omar Ashour, “From 9/11 to the Arab Spring,” The Brookings Institution, Op-Ed, Washington, D.C., September 7. 2011. Accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/from-911-to-the-arab-spring/.
[30] “Hatbrottsstatistik,” Brottsförebyggande rådet, 2021. Accessible at: https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistiska-undersokningar/hatbrottsstatistik.html.
[31] Vivian Yee, “Tunisia’s Democracy Verges on Collapse as President Moves to Take Control,” The New York Times, July 26, 2021, updated August 26, 2021.
[32] David M. Kennedy and Sue-Lin Wong, “The High Point Drug Market Intervention Strategy,” Center for Crime Prevention and Control John Jay College of Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, National Urban League and Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Commerce, First published August 2009. Updated June 2012.
[33] “Building Community Resilience Minneapolis-St. Paul Pilot Program A Community-Led Local Framework,” United States Attorney’s Office, Minneapolis, February 2015. Accessible at: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/file/642121/download.
[34] See various works cited in Jonathan Michael Feldman, “Technology, Power and Social Change: Comparing Three Marx-Inspired Views,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2016: 28-72; see also Seymour Melman, After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
[35] For an illustration on how to begin to think about this problem, see Paul Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
[36] For models for combining expert knowledge and participatory democracy, see Richard E. Scolve, Democracy and Technology, New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. For the organizational form of this alternative that links technological knowledge, democracy and workplace organization, see Melman, op. cit., 2001.
[37] Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, London: Pluto Press, 2012.
[38] Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, The Suicide Factory: Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque, London: Harper Perennial, 2006.
[39] Mikael Klintman, Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
[40] Edward Said, “Identity, Negation and Violence,” New Left Review, No. 60, 1988: 46-60.
