What Do They Want?

America's civil religion requires us to treat the question "what does al-qaeda want?" as a non-sequiter, akin to asking "what's the greatest speech ever given by a cantaloupe?"; it just doesn't make any sense. Being an apostate to that religion leads me to want to answer that question honestly, rather than to question the legitimacy of the question itself.


The civil religion requires that wherever America is attacked, or wherever American attacks are resisted, the culprits must, by very definition, be nihilism and evil incarnate. Since American motives and actions are held to be universally selfless and beneficent, any opponent of such actions must despise everything that is right, everything that is....American.


This delusion is evident when our leaders, without any influential dissent, endlessly parrot the idea that the hundreds of young Muslim men who have committed suicide in the act of killing Americans do so because they despise feminism and representative democracy.


There is no small amount of truth to this, of course; Islamists despise many aspects of American culture. I empathize with the Islamists in their critique of MTV, for example. And there are many things that I despise about Islamic culture. The question is, would I give my life to express hatred of someone else's culture? No. Would the Islamists? Some, perhaps. But nearly all give their lives because of America's actions, not its culture.


As much as Islamists might abhor American movies or fashion, that is not what really exercises them. Every European state is far more sexually permissive, and far more dismissive of their Muslim minorities, than the United States. Europe is not targeted for attack, however, unless and until its states endorse American foreign policy.


Aren't we much better off with a foe of identifiable and finite grievances, rather than a bunch of suicidal automatons who aim to rule the world in a miserable medieval iteration of an invented past? Of course we are. Unfortunately, we are constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the notion that the Islamists could be sane.

If bin Laden means to destroy America because he can not bear to live in a world with Americans, regardless of what they do, then why does he insist on repeating the same grievances over and over? His three primary grievances are: American support of Israel, American support of Muslim tyrannies, and American occupation of Arabia (first Saudi Arabia, now Iraq and Kuwait).

What do we have to lose by acknowledging that all three of those things are true? They are true. We can say that without ceding any moral authority to bin Laden. At least, we should be able to. But most of us can't.

America has done the three things alleged by bin Laden, cited above. Our leadership has to get its head out of its collective ass and acknowledge what is evident to any child: actions have consequences. Touch the stove, get burnt. That doesn't mean the stove is better than you; it's just how the world works.

Once we acknowledge that the Islamists have rather specific complaints, all grounded in American policy, we can then say, "would it be in our interest to sacrifice anything, anything at all, to avoid such high levels of hostility?" This is a very difficult step for Americans to consider, because we are fed the notion that we deserve to act without restraint or consequence.

The sad reality is, however, that our foreign policy is going to get a lot of us killed. Why not entertain the notion, for example, of ending support for Muslim, especially Arab, dictators? Is the defense of Mubarak or Assad or Abdullah or the al-Sauds worth another 9/11? Maybe it is. I don't happen to think so, but the debate is nowhere to be found.

Ron Paul dared imply that we should at least consider bin Laden's oft-cited grievances, and Rudy Giuliani jumped on him like Paul had just taken a dump on the Virgin Mary.

Here is what the Rudy Giulianis of the world are implying: The terrorists did not attack New York because of anything we had done in the Muslim world; they attacked because they could not live in a world where Rudy Giuliani was free to dress up like a woman and marry his cousin. Mohammad Atta grew up in Egypt and studied in Germany, but when he found out that Americans have freedom of speech, he flew a plane into a building.

When specific actions have detrimental consequence, what rational people would reject the very idea of assessing whether the action was worth the damage incurred? Well, Americans do just that. We're burning our hands on the stove, refusing to let go, the "logic" being that "we're better than the stove."

The irony in all of this is that this refusal to honestly assess the situation has led to an unnecessary war in Iraq, which has consumed lives like snow melting on the sea. Hundreds of thousands of innocents. What we lose sight of is that the United States, the same country that could ruin so many lives in Iraq, failed to use sufficient force in Afghanistan.

This may sound off putting, but our biggest mistake after 9/11 was that we didn't kill enough people. While we desperately need to take a risk/reward analysis of our foreign policy, murder is murder. 9/11 was murder, and we should have killed a LOT of people shortly thereafter.

There were hundreds, probably thousands of people who, directly or indirectly, aided and abetted the 9/11 attacks. The full death-sowing force of the American arsenal was NEVER bought to bear on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That is unforgivable. And that is the price to be paid for refusing to look in the mirror.

We deny that anyone could have any rational complaint with us. When they attack us, we are unprepared, we have no plan to immediately slaughter them where they train, we continue insisting that all that resist are irrational, and then we invade a country that had no relation to the attack, using infinitely more force than we did against the people that carried out the attack. That's us. Who are the irrational ones, again?