How to end the War on Terror
We can begin to end this ‘war’ now. By withdrawing our support for its cause.
First, we have to admit the fact that the vast majority of ‘terrorists’ have come from dictatorial Arab regimes which America supports. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. The other four were from Egypt, the UAE, and Lebanon The 9/11 Commission Report. Notice that these Arab states are all American allies in the War on Terror. Neither Iraq, the one Arab country we invaded as a result of 9/11, nor Syria, the one Arab country we currently consider a supporter of terrorism, were in any way involved. Read the report. Also notice, from the article on this site’s blogroll, that the largest single group of suicide bombers in Iraq are in fact Saudis. And, of course, Osama bin Laden is Saudi.
Why do our Arab allies produce anti-American terrorists?
Any American who has lived within these Arab countries for years, not on a protected American compound, but on the local economy, can answer this question. I’m one of those Americans, but there are many others. It is a combination of American support for their regimes, American support for the Israeli occupation of Israel, and the undeveloped Arab cultural and political mentality.
We support Arab dictators
We support all of our ‘friendly’ Arab regimes in a variety of ways, but the most important way is political: by not questioning their legitimacy. We accept them. We’re pals with them. In the case of the Arab Gulf states, we let them recycle their oil money by investing in our economy. We sell them billions of dollars of military hardware that we know (our congress doesn’t know, but our military trainers on the ground definitely know) their military forces will never be properly trained, motivated, or even allowed by their own government to use. We seldom complain about their police states, their reliance on torture, their complete lack of human rights. We look the other way.
We support the apartheid Israeli state
By not putting enough pressure on Israel to make the decisions they, we, the Palestinians, and in fact the whole world knows they will have to make, to accept a Palestinian state, we continue to support Israel’s occupation. We continue to support one of the last colonial states; we continue to support the last apartheid state. The siege of Gaza continues because we let it. The wall was built because we let it. Thus we insult the entire Arab world, and disgrace ourselves.
Arabs fear to take personal responsibility
Traditional Arab family culture has its strong points–the Arabs can teach Americans a great deal about ‘family values’–but it also has its weak points. One of these is the taught habit of unquestioned obedience to authority. This feeds into their generally undeveloped political culture, most undeveloped among the peninsular states. The result is a fear of taking personal responsibility for their own political system. Gulf Arabs especially prefer to blame westerners for the disgraceful regimes they live under. Most Arabs of course are decent family men and women, and the result is a confused, conflicted psychology: most Saudis admire Bin Laden, and applaud 9/11; at the same time, they prefer to believe that it was all a CIA plot, rather than admit that their fellow nationals were responsible for the deaths of almost 3,000 civilians. Meanwhile, it does not occur to them that the Saudi hijackers would have been honorable men, if they’d hijacked empty Saudi jetliners and flown them into the royal family’s palaces.
How we can end anti-American, Muslim terrorism
Withdraw our political and military support from Arab police state regimes. Withdraw our political and military support from the Israeli regime, until they agree to a viable Palestinian state.
We’ll be out of Iraq and Afghanistan within two years. In Iraq we’ll leave a mess, and in Afghanistan a much bigger mess–but the alternative is two decades of far more directive nation building than we’ve had the stomach for, or the expertise for, up to now.
The important thing is to start supporting personal responsibility, some form of democratic governance, and respect for human rights, in Muslim countries. This will pull the rug out from under ‘terrorism’ directed toward the US–and, hopefully, push the Arabs towards taking responsibilities for their own governments.
