On September 11 the United States was attacked by utopian fanatics, followers of a movement inspired by an exceptionally narrow interpretation of Islam. Why does this movement enjoy so much sympathy in the Middle East? The answer, of course, is profoundly complex. Social, economic, political and cultural factors, interacting over many decades, have spawned this particular phenomenon. Space permits only a sketch of some features of this twisted landscape, followed by a few brief comments on possible responses.
Please note that understanding in no way condones the murderous actions of September 11. Historians who study Nazism do not justify Auschwitz, and students of Stalinism do not exonerate the perpetrators of the Gulag. Understanding is simply better than the alternative, which is incomprehension. If we fail to grasp the forces behind the attacks of September 11, we will fail to respond wisely.
Most fundamentally, the Middle East finds itself mired in the "modernization process." Changing from a society inhabited by illiterate farmers, who are ruled by a literate, urban elite, into an urban, mass-educated society with an economy based on industry and services has always and everywhere been deeply traumatic. Worse, this transition has always and everywhere spawned grotesque violence. The modern history of both Europe and East Asia, the only places in the world where this transition has been more or less successfully accomplished, often reads like a horror novel: World Wars I and II; Stalin's Gulag, and Hitler's Holocaust, or Japanese fascism, the Chinese revolution, the "Great Leap Forward" and its attendant famine, and the Cultural Revolution. American experience has also been bloody: the extermination of Native Americans, the racial violence of slavery and Jim Crow, and the more than half-million casualties of our own Civil War. Why should we expect Middle Easterners to do better than Europeans, Americans, Japanese or Chinese?
Much of the violence of this transition has been perpetrated by utopian fanatics, a category which includes fascists, Nazis, Leninists and Maoists – and the followers of al-Qaeda. Like their earlier cousins, today's Islamist fanatics have "imagined a future," in this case the "restoration" of the (imagined) conditions of life in seventh-century Arabia. Like all fanatics, they believe that they enjoy a monopoly on truth and that those who disagree with them "are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad."1 Like all fanatics, they believe that there is only one goal for humanity, and they are ready to wade "through an ocean of blood to the Kingdom of Love."2 Fanatics have always built towers of skulls as monuments to their fantasies.
Such movements have their greatest appeal when the dislocations of the transitions to modernity are most acute. Only the slaughter of World War I and its chaotic aftermath allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia; Hitler is inconceivable without the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression; famine, governmental collapse and the horrors of the Japanese invasion set the stage for Mao. The Siren Song of fanatics becomes most seductive when economic, political, social and cultural crises combine, and when people feel that they have been repeatedly humiliated.
The Middle East today is riven by just such a crisis. The utopian fanaticism of al-Qaeda is nourished by the deep despair of huge numbers of young Middle Easterners, two-thirds of whom are below the age of 30, half of whom are younger than 20, and 40 percent of whom have yet to reach their fifteenth birthday. For the first time in history, many of these youths have received some education – enough to make the old, difficult, dirty jobs unsatisfying, but not enough to perform successfully in the modern hyper-competitive global economy.
Massive unemployment has ensued. Because governments have failed so miserably in nearly every aspect of economic policy, the unemployment rate is usually in double digits, and real wages and living standards have declined for more than a decade. In some countries, levels of unemployment are similar to those seen in the United States only during the worst days of the 1930s. After ten to fifteen years of government tinkering with economic policy, in no country has the rate of economic growth been sufficient to reduce unemployment and to raise living standards significantly. Such a failure has spawned profound discontent.
But, of course, the discontent transcends economic hardship. Youth politics have always and everywhere focused not merely on material goods, but also on questions of identity, justice and morality (consider the politics of American "Boomers" during the 1960s.) Impatience – and Manichean thinking – are among the burdens of youth politics, whether in Berkeley or in Cairo. And, as criminologists tell us, the resort to violence is also overwhelmingly a youth phenomenon.
The discontent of these young people is exacerbated by the fact that most of them now live in cities, cities which are crumbling. For example, Karachi, with one million people at the time of independence, now contains 11 million and will swell to perhaps 20 million by 2015. The managers of such cities are completely overwhelmed. The systems providing water, electricity, transportation, health care and education are all swamped. The one place in the slums which is cool while the outside is hot, the one place which is clean while the outside is filthy, the one place which is calm where outside is only chaos – is the mosque. Government policy has played an important role here: government incapacity, and the "abandonment of public space" to private, Islamist schools, clinics, hospitals and welfare agencies have done much to advance the fanatics' cause.
Middle Eastern governments are overwhelmingly unelected, unaccountable and corrupt; they provide no legitimate outlet for youth discontent. Unsurprisingly, these governments are widely despised by their young people. The old ideologies of these governments, largely varieties of nationalism, are also perceived as failures. The old ideology has failed to deliver either material goods or a sense of dignity, at home or abroad. The half-century failure of Arab states to resolve the Palestinian situation, and the inability of Pakistan to ease the lot of Kashmiri Muslims, have contributed to the evident corrosion of regimes' legitimacy in the eyes of youth. Nationalism has not disappeared; it has been assimilated into the Islamists' discourse. And, as George Orwell once said, "the nationalism of defeated peoples is necessarily revengeful and short-sighted."
Some observers may object that, so far as we can tell, most of the criminals of September 11 were privileged and educated. This fact, however, is entirely consistent with the above analysis. Orwell once quipped that "revolutionaries can always pronounce their aitches." Revolutionaries are often, even typically, from relatively privileged backgrounds. Lenin was no muzhik. Mao Tse-tung was the son of a rich farmer. Yet the conditions of Russia and China in their respective youths profoundly shaped their perspectives. People who knew Mohammed Atta in Germany heard him speak of the "fat cats" running Egypt. It is entirely unsurprising that the "shock troops" of a revolutionary movement are educated and privileged. It would be quite ahistorical to argue that their existence – and their appeal – is independent of the social conditions of their societies.
How can we best combat this menace? In the short run, we can (and are) taking concrete steps at home and abroad to protect ourselves. Having no military expertise, I will leave comment on the current campaign in Afghanistan to others. In the longer run, we must find ways of addressing these deeper forces if we are to enjoy security. We must find ways to reduce the appeal of utopian fanatics. What might be done?
We should approach this problem with considerable humility. Take the economic crisis. A strong case can be made that Middle Eastern economies have failed thanks to institutional – and political – deficiencies. Outsiders can do very little to promote institutional change, as the United States found, to its dismay, in Russia and elsewhere. Similarly, resolving the deep cultural crisis of contemporary Islam's confrontation with modernity can only be done by Muslims. Non-Muslim Americans are largely bystanders in this process, as well.
Largely, but not entirely. We can, indeed must, refrain from actions which provide arguments to the fanatics and which discourage those Middle Easterners who would respond differently to the crises facing their societies. Here, of course, our foreign policy can play a role. We must press on with seeking a settlement to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The Mitchell Report is an obvious place to start, and any resolution will be, to say the least, enormously difficult. But we simply have no choice but to try. It is quite impossible for the United States to have peace with young Arabs until this situation is resolved.
Our policies toward the Gulf also cry out for revision. Our policies toward Iraq, however understandable their goals (depriving Saddam of WMD), have contributed to deplorable conditions there and have made us appear arbitrary, capricious and cruel throughout the region. If Saddam remains in power (which seems likely), there will be no alternative to negotiating with him.
Such negotiations would be greatly aided by a rapprochement with Saddam's principal regional enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Improved relations with Iran would transform the regional balance of power. It would also dramatically change our posture in the wider Muslim world, precisely because Iran has already been through an Islamic revolution. Needless to say, "it takes two to tango" here, and hard-liners in Iran (and in the United States) will continue to oppose improved relations. But perseverance could have a very high pay-off.
Finally, U.S. energy policy has long been stunningly myopic. Both the Saudi government and many privately wealthy Saudis have for decades spent untold millions of dollars disseminating their rigid interpretations of Islam. Oil wealth has funded the madrasas and other institutions that have produced many a young fanatic. This is unlikely to change. Nor will an important source of this wealth – Saudi market power over short-run oil prices – diminish. The volume and variability of their production, their enormous reserves, and their low production costs guarantee the continuation of such power, so long as demand remains strong.
Here, however, we can do much. One need not fully accept Shaykh Zaki Yamani's assessment3 to realize that the appearance of hybrid cars on the market (in an environment of exceptionally low oil prices) augurs ill for the long-run importance of oil in transportation, the sector that accounts for roughly two-thirds of U.S. petroleum consumption. As Amory and L. Hunter Lovins have shown, vastly more oil can be saved through energy efficiency than by the administration's quixotic, spoils-system-driven calls to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.4 Whatever is happening in the Middle East, we should promote such energy conservation for environmental reasons. The deepening crisis of the sputtering transition to modernity in the Middle East gives us another good reason to behave sensibly.
We do not need a "Manhattan Project" to do this; the technologies necessary to save huge amounts of oil are already available. All we need to do is to encourage what is already happening in the marketplace. We could raise federal gasoline taxes by $0.25 per gallon, or we could raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Raising CAFE standards by 5 percent per year for a decade could save 1.5 million barrels of oil a day by 20105 (we now import about 2.5 million barrels a day from the Gulf). This is certainly possible even without hybrid cars. Widespread adoption of the latter could reduce oil consumption much further. We have heard much about "asymmetric warfare" recently. Why not play to one of our greatest strengths, the inventiveness and energy of American technological entrepreneurs?
One may object that the widespread adoption of energy conservation measures could impoverish the Middle East. But oil wealth has done much to damage the transition to modernity in the region (as the "rentier state" argument rightly asserts).6 The end of the oil era already looms. We should have encouraged its demise decades ago. We should certainly do so now.
In summary, the youth bulge and its attendant unemployment, the politics of identity so typical of youth, the failure of old ideologies, the rise of a movement of utopian fanatics, the specifics of American foreign policy, and the myopia of American energy policies – all came together on September 11. We must find ways to reduce the appeal of the fanatics and to insulate ourselves from them. The task will be long and difficult, and we should expect reverses. However, we have little choice but to try. We should begin at once.
1 Isaiah Berlin, "Notes on Prejudice," New York Review of Books, October 18, 2001, p. 12.
2 Ibid.
3 “On the demand side there are so many new technologies. The hybrid engines will cut gasoline consumption by something like 30 percent. Thirty years from now, there is no problem with oil. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end not because we had a lack of stones, and the Oil Age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil,” CBS News, June 25, 2000, http://cbsnews.com/now/story/ 0%2C1597%2C209367-412%2C00.shtml.
4 Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, "Fool's Gold in Alaska," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2001, pp. 72-85.
5 American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy: www.aceee.org/energy/cafe.html.
6 See, e.g., Kirin Chaudhury, The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Middle East Policy is fully accessible through the Wiley Online Library
Click below to subscribe to the online or print edition of Middle East Policy and gain access to all journal content.