Terrific Post!
Lawrence Wright on Al Qaeda's past, present and future
By TigerHawk at 4/29/2007 03:00:00 PM
Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, spoke at Princeton University on Wednesday afternoon. His topic was "Al Qaeda: Past, Present and Future," and he was excellent (which will come as no surprise to anybody who has read The Looming Tower).
I ran into Fausta Wurtz there, and she posted comprehensive notes. See also Hugh Hewitt's recent interview of Wright, which echoed his talk at Princeton on Wednesday.
In light of all that superlative coverage, I'll confine my comments to a few observations.
The important thing to understand about Lawrence Wright is that he is a genuinely independent thinker. While he is plenty critical of American foreign policy in the last six years, neither does he have patience for the partisan opposition. Regardless of your political persuasion, if you are interested in American national security above and beyond its consequences for the next election, you should listen to Lawrence Wright.
With that in mind, here are the high points as I heard them (quotations are approximate):
Where did al Qaeda come from?
Wright forcefully argues that al Qaeda's members are not, by and large, social or economic failures. They come from wealthy families, were not products of the religious schools, in many cases were educated in the West, and had no obvious mental disorders. "So what is it that draws these people to al Qaeda?"
The most common element among all these people is "displacement." The great majority joined the jihad when they were away from home, away from their roots. This is just as true for Yemenis in Saudi Arabia or Pakistanis in England. These people feel marginal in the culture in which they are living. The summer airline plotters were "second and third" generation British citizens. They were marginalized, at least in their own mind.
Wright did not say, but I would add, that Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual forefathers of radical Islam, quite famously radicalized during his extended stay in the United States from 1948-1950. There was no evidence that he was particularly mistreated during his two years in Colorado, but he felt horribly out of place.
Nevertheless, we have much less radicalism in the United States because we have much less displacement. "If you want to know what makes you safer, it is not the contact lens solution that they take away at the airport. It is that Arabs and Muslims in the United States have higher incomes than the American average."
I suppose there must be another difference. American Arabs and Muslims come here quite consciously. The United States has no post-colonial or commonwealth ties to the Muslim world, so we offer no passport of convenience to Arabs and Muslims who hope for nothing more than to duplicate their lives under better economic conditions. The world knows, or thinks it knows, how different the United States is. For better or for worse, Arabs and Muslims who come to the United States by and large know they are rejecting their past and embracing their future here. I have to think that difference in expectations has a huge impact on the extent to which American Arabs and Muslims become alienated.
Wright also emphasized the economic and civil failures of the Muslim world, quoting the well-known statistic that the Muslim world accounts for 20% of the world's population but half of the world's poor, and that Finland's manufactured exports exceed all those of entire Arab world. More than a billion Muslims mostly living in the 57 countries of Organization of Islamic Countries produce less than Germany.
"We are starting from the fact that these are barren economies that offer their young people very little to look forward to."
In addition to Wright's observations on the subject of Muslim economic incompetence, some of our newer readers might be interested in Stephen Den Beste's "strategic overview" post, which I amended and restated in November 2005.
Unfortunately, Wright offered no hypothesis or explanation for the question that burns at the heart of his diagnosis: Why are the economies of Muslim countries so incompetent?
Wright also argued that Muslim countries, particularly the most religious ones, suffer enormously from the absence of Americans call "civil society."
If you are a young Saudi, there are no movies, no plays, no dating, few parks, no political life, no unions -- that entire space of life that we call civil society simply does not exist. There is nothing between the government and the mosque except shopping.
It is not surprising in such circumstances that people are depressed.
A study of depression at a major Saudi University showed huge rates of depression among both men and women.
The separation of the sexes is also a problem. This takes a toll on women. A Saudi woman can't drive, she can't travel without permission of her male guardian. A single Saudi woman can't even check into a hotel.
This also takes a toll on men as well. They are deprived of the solice of female companionship. They haven't spent their adolescence molding their behavior around pleasing girls, which is a lot of what civilization is. It is hard to be a terrorist if your girlfriend won't let you.
Then there is the "element of humiliation." Many of the people around al Qaeda have been personally humiliated, so humiliation is a real factor. But why do bin Laden or other young rich Saudis feel humiliated? Why does the concept of humiliation strike such a chord?
"I think we are talking about a profound sense of cultural humiliation. It goes back to September 11, 1683, when the king of Poland arrived at the gates of Vienna to turn back the greatest advance of the Muslims in Europe."
Again, I wonder what it is about this defeat that makes Muslims feel so "humiliated"? Islam rolled up victory after victory against Christianity for 800 years (from the rise of Mohammad in the early 7th century until the ejection of the Muslim from Spain in the early 15th century), yet there is no record that these serial "humiliations" -- and they were many -- pushed Christiandom into despair. On the contrary, the adversity seemed to strengthen Western civilization, which had fallen into great disarray with the fall of the Roman empire at the hands of the barbarians from the north and east.
In any case, in the words of Bernard Lewis the radicals went from "how did this happen to us?" to "who did this to us?" They settled on numerous enemies, including particularly the United States but really the entire non-Muslim world. It is reinforced among the population by "countless images of Muslims under seige in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine."
Can you imagine living in a culture where everything you touch comes from somewhere else? Even if you are a terrorist your weapons were made somewhere else. The measures we use for cultural excellence are practically missing from the Muslims world.
Again, Wright was much longer on description than explanation. He did not explain why Muslim societies have been so ineffective, or even acknowledge that it is a legitimate question. Indeed, during the Q&A session, no member of the audience put the question to him (I had arrived late and was watching via video feed in an overflow room, and he did not call on Fausta). In my experience, it is almost impossible to generate an honest discussion of this topic in academic settings because nobody wants to suggest that there might be something inherently disfunctional about Arab culture or Islam as a religion.
On bin Laden's own "flypaper" strategy and the impact of Iraq
According to Wright (and any number of others), bin Laden wanted us to invade Afghanistan. "He envisioned Afghanistan to be a great bear trap for us, thinking it would bring down our culture the way that the Soviet Union fell apart." He miscalculated, and even though he and other top leaders escaped, Afghanistan hurt al Qaeda terribly. Even al Qaeda insiders admit that 80% of its membership was captured or killed.
At this point I heard Wright to make two points that struck me as inconsistent, at least without elaboration (perhaps all will become clear if Princeton posts the video, which they usually do within a week or two of an event). At the fall of the Taliban, Wright said, "the war on terror was essentially over. It was Iraq that breathed that war back to life." His point was that Iraq created a huge new basis for the radicals to attract volunteers and contributions from across the Muslim world.
He went on to say, though, that Al Qaeda had long planned for the day when its central organization would be defeated, killed or captured. As early as 1998 al Qaeda had envisioned the day when the leadership would be smashed and they would have to recreate it into a new form.
The old al Qaeda was a top-down centralized organization. "You had to fill out a form to buy a new tire. You had health care!" The leaders knew that wouldn't last forever, so they planned for a new, distributed al Qaeda. Their model for the new al Qaeda was more like an alliance of street gangs tied together by the internet which offers them a safe place to conspire.
So was it Iraq that inspired the recovery of al Qaeda, or was al Qaeda inherently regenerative as long as its ideology had not been discredited? Perhaps there is room for both arguments -- one could argue, I suppose, that Iraq accelerated the healing of al Qaeda.
In any case, Wright argues that the training camps were a vital element of the success of al Qaeda, which is why eliminating them was so important. Now al Qaeda has new camps, including Mali, Somalia, Pakistan, and the tribal areas of Afghanistan, and they are feeding trained recruits into the revived, decentralized jihadi network.
Wright did not discuss the question that dominates many of the arguments over American strategy: To what degree must the enemies of al Qaeda respect the sovereignty of states that cannot or will not interdict al Qaeda operations on their own soil? In that regard, Wright also mentioned that there were al Qaeda training camps in Iraq, but I wonder if there really are "camps" of the sort that exist in these other countries. It seems to me that the training in Iraq is a bit more on-the-job, and that open and notorious camps -- destinations for recruits from Europe, for example -- would have a hard time of it notwithstanding the debate about Coalition force levels.
Interestingly, Wright believes that the continuing involvement of the United States in Iraq is now less harmful than its abandonment would be. He teased his audience in his prepared remarks when he said that "[t]he failure of the American project in Iraq is bound to embolden radical Islamists everywhere," but in the Q&A reported made it quite clear that while he had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he finds himself "in the strange position" of arguing that now the United States must not leave.
On the terrible condition of American intelligence
Whatever we decide to do in Iraq, there are things that we can and indeed must do to defend ourselves.
First, we have to fix our intelligence, which has done such a terrible job of understanding, much less penetrating al Qaeda. Domestically, almost six years after the attacks on September 11 and 14 years after the first WTC bombing, the FBI is woefully unprepared to deal with the jihad. There are only 25 Arab speakers in the FBI, and many of them "took a course at Middlebury" and push the boundaries of their Arabic "ordering food." "We fought the IRA and the mafia with who? Irish and Italian guys!" Those are still the people who dominate the organization.
"We have to turn to the people who can help us. Last year, the FBI graduated a class of 50 new agents. Only one of them speaks a foreign language at all."
I must admit, that really is astonishing.
This incapacity in Arab and Muslim language and culture goes well beyond the FBI. When Wright was last in Iraq, there are a thousand people in our embassy in Baghdad. Only six of them speak Arabic.
Second, we have to fix our reputation in the world. Wright says "we are radioactive. There are a lot of reasons why many countries should be helping us in Iraq, but we haven't been able to marshall them in any regard."
This idea gets dangerously close to the Kerryist idea that we need to "work with our traditional allies." It is actually different, I think, but much more important: We cannot afford to be so unpopular in the world that even countries that want to help us find it politically difficult to do so. Even leading Republicans understand that the Bush administration's failures in public diplomacy have catastrophically undermined the ability of other supportive governments to take risks on our behalf (see, for example, this article in today's New York Times regarding Saudi Arabia's fairly conscious efforts to distance themselves from the United States).
Third, Wright argues that we are also at a "very pregnant moment" in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The governments of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are crippled, but it is clear that the Arabs are suing for peace. They face a much graver threat, by which it was clear, to me at least, that Wright meant both Sunni jihadism and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Recognizing that it is virtually received wisdom among the chattering classes that a two-state settlement of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs will somehow diminish the jihad, I do not understand why. The radicals do not want Israel to exist. Whether or not there is a settlement, the radicals among the Palestinians will continue to attack Israel. The government of the Palestinians will be no more able to stop the radicals from doing this than the governments of any of the other Arab countries, virtually all of which claim they are working to shut down al Qaeda, Hezbollah and so forth, and virtually all of whom have failed miserably. Israel will retaliate for those attacks. Al Jazz will portray the retaliation as aggression, and Arab passions will remain inflamed. That Israel will retaliate from across an internationally recognized border will only make the matter worse, it seems to me. (See Michael Scott Doran's useful essay on this very subject.)
Why al Qaeda can't win
Recognizing his pessimistic tone, Wright offered "three reasons why al Qaeda won't win."
First, everyone is its enemy. Al Qaeda's leadership has called out virtually everybody in the world as its enemy at one time or another. Muslim apostate regimes, Shiites, Jews, Israel, the United States, Westeners in general, NATO, Russia, China, and "atheists, pagans and hypocrites".
Second, most of the victims of al Qaeda are Muslims. Muslims know that al Qaeda is their enemy too, and that they will be the first to suffer under al Qaeda rule.
Finally, al Qaeda offers nothing to the people who follow it. No economic policy, no government, no program to really get to the problems of the Muslim world. It offers only one thing: death. "Al Qaeda is a suicide machine."
Perhaps Wright is right in this. I worry, though, that his ultimate optimism turns on the meaning of "win." Yes, if victory requires that al Qaeda realize its plan for total domination of the world, I agree that represents a tall order. If, however, we recognize that even intermediate "success" -- the destruction of Israel following a nuclear exchange with a radicalized Muslim power, the interdiction of Middle Eastern oil, or something approaching civil war in Europe -- could have devestating consequences, then we have to wonder whether the West's ultimate victory will come at the cost of a great deal that we hold dear. If we are worried about unwarranted surveillance of international communications, trial by jury for foreign nationals or freedom from profiling at security checkpoints, how will we feel about the casualties we will have to inflict in order to crush a suicide cult's will to resist? They could run into the millions.
In any case, even Wright thinks the road ahead will be brutal. He revealed in the Q&A session that he was opposed to a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq because he was terrified of leaving behind a vacuum. He was particularly worried about the consequences for Europe, which he believes will feel the first blowback.
Europe has a big problem. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, you will see veterans returning to new or preexisting cells with enormous experience and training. I don't think the future in Europe looks very attractive.
In this, Wright has synthesized the position of the conservative hawks -- Mark Steyn in America Alone, Berlinski in Menace in Europe, and Melanie Phillips in Londonistan -- and the anti-Bush doves into a frightening scenario for the future of Europe.
He is also obviously pessimistic about the "democratization strategy," which I have long supported. Arab and Muslim civil society is such a mess, Wright argues, that reforms that would take root in other cultures are likely to lead to disaster in this part of the world. As Wright says of the Saudis, "t is not that they like the monarchy. It is that they are afraid of what might come after."
So are we all.
The Looming Tower is a good read for those seeking historical details about al-Qaeda and its prime movers. For explanations, better to look elsewhere.
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