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December 17, 2001
C.G. Estabrook
Who
Opposes the War?
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
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Pakistan
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Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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by James Ridgeway
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
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December 17,
2001
Clash of Civilizations?
By Shahid Alam
In the weeks after the September 11 attacks, and
the instant US declaration of a global war against all countries
that harbor terrorists-a list populated by Muslim countries-it
appeared that the 'clash of civilizations' predicted by Samuel
Huntington was underway, or just around the corner.
The clash of war rhetoric was deafening-aimed
at resurrecting atavistic passions. Instantly, President Bush
began casting the attacks in a Manichaean mould. Osama and his
evil cohorts had declared a war against 'all civilized countries'-long
a code for the West-and they would get the 'crusade' that
they wanted. Osama saw the world with equal clarity, divided
into two warring camps-of believers and infidels. The millennial
war be-tween the West and Islam was about to be joined. Or so
it seemed.
September 11 will remain a day inscribed
in infamy. But does it mark the first strike in a clash of civilizations-predicted
by our sage political scien-tist? Samuel Huntington prevaricates,
but he sticks to his guns. In an inter-view, he declared that
the attacks "were not a clash of civilizations but a blow
by a fanatical group on civilized societies in general."
So, it is not an attack on United States, or its policies,
but an attack on the West-on "civilized societies in general."
But if this is not the clash,
it will come in due time. In his book, The Clash of Civilizations,
Huntington insists that our problem is not Islamic funda-mentalism.
"It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are
convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed
with the inferiority of their power." On the other hand,
the problem for Islam is not US policies: it is the West, whose
people are "convinced of the universality of their culture
and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes
on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the
world." The clash is inevitable.
Are we to accept Huntington's reading-of
September 11 as an attack on the West, and part of an unfolding,
or yet to begin, war between Islam and the West? I will show
that if we eschew Bacon's 'idols' of the tribe and the market,
and stay with the facts-some quite elementary facts-these theses
become indefensible.
First, consider the attacks of September
11, and place them alongside other attacks of a similar nature-of
which they are an escalation. If we examine the history of such
attacks-starting with the 1983 attacks on US interests in Lebanon,
winding through more attacks on US embassies, military facili-ties,
officials and citizens in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Britain,
Germany, Tanzania and Kenya, leading up to the culminating attacks
of September 2001-we have to face two unpleasant facts.
In nearly all cases, the target of these
attacks was unmistakably the United States. It is also the case
that in nearly every case, these attacks were carried out by
Arabs, on Arab soil at first, but moving up to attacks in non-Arab
countries, and, eventually, to attacks on US soil. In the 1980s,
the attackers were mostly Lebanese and Palestinians. Later, they
were to be joined by Egyptians and Saudis.
What is the significance of these facts?
First, they establish that the attack-ers were not waging war
against "all civilized societies in general", but against
one in particular-United States-with less than one-sixth
of the population of the West. Theirs is not a war against the
West, or the free-dom, democracy, and pluralism of Western societies.
It is also worth noting that the attacks were directed mostly
against military and officials targets. The exceptions are the
Lockerbie crash and the two attacks on WTC. Equally important,
nearly all the attackers were of Arab ethnicity; they have included
few Pakistanis, Turks, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Malays, Ni-gerians,
Iranians, or Afghans.
On two counts, then, we must reject the
Huntington reading of the attacks of September 11. This and similar
attacks have had a specific target, viz. United States.
Secondly, even if we regard the attackers as representative of
Arab societies-a highly questionable assumption-this only pits
one-sixth of Islam against less one-sixth of the West. Not exactly
a clash between two civilizations.
Why then has the United States framed
this conflict in terms of univer-sals-as an attack on the West,
on civilization itself? This language is well-chosen. It serves
a variety of goals. And looking into these goals can bring important
insights into our Middle East policies and how they may be con-nected
to the attacks leading up to September 11.
Most importantly, perhaps, this rhetoric
deflects attention from con-cerns-which must be suppressed-that
the death of 3,300 Americans was 'collateral damage' of our policies
in the Middle East: our unflinching sup-port of Israeli expansionism,
the backing we have given to an assortment of corrupt and repressive
dictatorships and oil potentates, and, not least, a policy of
sanctions against Iraq that kills 5000 Iraqi children every month.
The language of an attack on "all
civilized societies"--even as we avow our peaceful intentions
towards Islam--evokes images of an attack by Islam against the
West. It turns the focus away from the reality-of an attack by
a handful of men who have turned to extreme methods to redress
real griev-ances. This has boosted the President's approval ratings
to the mid-eighties, giving him a free hand in waging war, curtailing
liberties, and battening cor-porations.
This rhetoric helps to globalize our
war against 'terror'. If September 11 can be sold as an attack
on "all civilized societies"--read, all Christendom-we
can count on the atavistic passions this will arouse to bring
Europe closer to the American position. But, as we talk of extending
the war beyond Afghanistan, to Sudan, Somalia and Iraq, the Europeans
are beginning to break rank. Even Britain, our trusted ally,
has been showing signs of nervousness.
None of this, however, implies that we
cannot turn September 11 into a greater tragedy than it
already is. It is tempting to leverage this event--wittingly
or otherwise--into the clash that Huntington predicts. We can
do this by holding on to bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, by
pushing the war beyond Afghanistan, or by persecuting our Muslim
minorities and eventually forcing their exodus. The Islamic world
will be watching what we do-more than they will be listening
to what we say. As Americans-and world citizens-we should do
everything we can to stop this human tragedy from turning into
a disaster for humankind.
M. Shahid Alam,
Professor of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA.
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