While we are outraged at the slaughter of more than 5,000 civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, the question remains why were the terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives in a kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Why were they as outraged with us as we now are with them?
Explaining their outrage, as columnist Víctor Reyes pointed out in Spanish last week, is not the same as justifying it. Around the world, there are zealots willing to massacre innocent people for any number of causes: the IRA in the British Isles, for example, or Timothy McVeigh and friends in Oklahoma City.
It is no secret that our government and our international corporations have not always been on the side of social justice. During the Cold War, the US propped up numerous dictatorships merely because they were "anti-communist." Such incidents not surprisingly created pockets of resentment in the Third World. I saw it myself in 1982. While I was briefly working in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, terrorists bombed three US businesses in one hour.
Apparently the mastermind of last week’s attack, Osama Bin Laden, has been able to recruit terrorists from just such pockets of anti-American resentment in several countries.
But even if US businesses and past governments have not always behaved well overseas (and damned few countries have spotless records), Americans did not bring last week’s attack on themselves, as San Francisco’s former Supervisor Amos Brown seemed to suggest Monday. Those who died were innocent victims.
In fact, most foreign countries have benefited rather than suffered as a result of US involvement. I can’t agree with those who say this is all about oil and that the attack was somehow related to our supposedly exploiting Arab countries by taking their oil away. The Arab countries sell us their oil. We don’t control their production or prices; they do. Remember the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo?
Nor was bin Laden’s attack necessarily about our support for Israel. He seems at least as unhappy about our support for the royal family in his native Saudi Arabia, from which he is a fugitive.
And let us not forget that from 1979 to 1989, bin Laden was our ally against the Soviet Union, which then occupied Afghanistan. Ironically, it was our government that made his present hosts, the Taliban, strong enough to take over virtually all of Afghanistan.
In an attempt to disguise our arming of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen, we funneled arms through our sometime-ally Pakistan. However, many of the mujahedeen tribes have members living on each side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, and Pakistan was unwilling to distribute arms to any tribe that might someday turn against the government in Islamabad.
As a result, the Pakistani government distributed the arms among seven tribes, and a disproportionate amount of the weaponry went to a band of 2,000 Pathan school students known as the Taliban. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan was plunged into chaos, with fighting among various warlords. By 1996, most of the country had fallen to the well-armed Taliban, but one small group, the Northern Alliance, is still holding onto a bit of territory along the Uzbekistan border.
Other notes of interest:
• The number of estimated deaths has dropped significantly in the past week, but we’re still talking about 5,369 dead on the East Coast.
• Many of us have compared last week’s suicidal pilots to the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. In checking on the name kamikaze in The American Heritage Dictionary, I learned what many of you probably already knew; it means divine wind. Kami is Japanese for divine, and kaze means wind. But the more interesting part of this etymology is that the word comes from the name of a typhoon in the year 1281. At the time, the Mongol Empire was attacking Japan, but a typhoon blew up and destroyed the Mongol navy.
• It was telling to hear the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has spent much of his career attacking gays, sound almost traitorous when he claimed God let 5,000 Americans die because this country doesn’t share Falwell’s beliefs. Falwell subsequently apologized, and it later turned out that a gay man was one of the heroes who stormed the hijackers of United Flight 93 and made sure it could not strike Washington.
• The idea that the attack was possible only because the US intelligence agencies weren’t up to par is ridiculous. For years, the British have focused most of their sophisticated intelligence apparatus on the IRA. They have excellent airport security. Yet the IRA continues to assassinate people, as well as bomb buildings and buses.