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GRIEVANCE-BASED TERRORISM
Assyrian International News Agency
Jan 25 2008
The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public
discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East
motivate Islamist terrorism. Such assumptions, though, misunderstand
the enemy and its nature. In reality, the conflict is sparked not by
grievance but rather by incompatibility between Islamist ideology and
the natural rights articulated during the European Enlightenment and
incorporated into U.S. political culture. Acquiescing to political
grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between
Lockean precepts of tolerance and current interpretations of Islam:
Only Islam's fundamental reform will resolve the conflict.
Many scholars mark the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire
as the origin of Islamist opposition to the West.[1] The idea that
the Middle East would be a tolerant, prosperous contributor to the
global environment today if World War I victors had left intact the
Ottoman Empire is a premise in the literature accompanying the rise
of twentieth-century jihadism. Historian David Fromkin argued in his
influential A Peace to End All Peace that present day Muslim unrest
is the direct result of Winston Churchill's early twentieth-century
decisions.[2] British journalist Robert Fisk also holds British
officials responsible although he prefers to blame Arthur Balfour,
foreign secretary between 1916 and 1919.[3] Both authors are wrong,
though, to base their theories of grievance on such arbitrary
demarcation of eras. The roots of jihadism and its opposition to the
United States as part of the non-Muslim West were cast long before
World War I erupted. The interaction between the United States and
Muslim states and societies dates back to American independence.[4]
Contemporary jihadism is not the result of accumulated grievance;
rather it has for cultural reasons been an integral factor in Islamic
societies' interaction with the United States.
The Die is Cast
Almost immediately after independence, the U.S. government found itself
in conflict with the Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and
Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy,
stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European
sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements
with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail
competition.[5] In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant
ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later,
Algerine pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston
and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England
and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerine leadership
refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington
ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to
protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates.
In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy, President Thomas
Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city
three years later and winning the release of American hostages.[6]
Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of
1812, Algerine pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and
disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James
Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the
pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.[7]
Many historians consider the Barbary wars a sideshow relative to
contemporaneous events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon's
conquests, and the War of 1812, but the Barbary wars are significant
to today's conflict. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and
Madison each believed the Barbary wars to be a continuation of the
American Revolution. The ground war in North America may have freed
the United States from British tyranny, but the Barbary campaign was
necessary to win the same freedom of action and commerce within the
international community.[8] The episode also crystallized perceptions
of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the American mind. While Americans
did not perceive the Barbary wars as a conflict between Christianity
and Islam per se, religion was an issue. The two sides fought, not
over theological differences, but rather as a result of the divergent
ideologies enabled by the two faiths.[9] Washington and Adams referred
to the Muslim leaders as "nests of banditti" while Jefferson's and
Madison's campaign literature called them "petty tyrants."[10] The
"despotic Turk" became the antithesis of early American republican
identity.
What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified
as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris
with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians
are sinners in the context of the Qur'an and that it was a Muslim's
"right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found,
and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners."[11] Islam gave
great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because
the Qur'an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim
paradise after death.[12] Richard O'Brien, the imprisoned captain of
the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to
Algiers, related similar conversations with `Ali Hasan, the ruler
of Algiers.[13] Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify
the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus,
and Ukraine.[14]
The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented
with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the treaties that
U.S. officials entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as
the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves
to American envoys as the "frontier posts of jihad against European
Christianity."[15]
U.S. officials took a conciliatory attitude. Realizing that the North
Africans were hypersensitive to the historic conflict between Islam
and European Christianity, especially in the context of the expulsion
of the Moors from Spain, U.S. officials bent over backwards to deny
the religious and ideological nature of the conflict, especially to
the Muslims themselves. They realized that religious conflict might
jeopardize the commerce that the United States still hoped to find
in the Mediterranean. In 1821, President John Quincy Adams was barely
able to resist assisting the Greeks in their war of independence when
both the American and European publics urged war with the Ottoman
Empire.[16] The founders possessed a deep conviction for religious
tolerance and proudly explained in the short-lived 1797 treaty with
Tripoli that the U.S. was not a Christian state at all but rather one
which had no official religion and maintained laws forbidding the
prohibition of religion.[17] Perhaps their denial of the religious
and ideological nature of the conflict foreshadowed the attitude many
Washington policymakers adopt today. Then as now, it has become the
basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of the conflict.
The Barbary conflict was the beginning of continuous U.S. interaction
with the Muslim Near and Middle East. While Jefferson and Madison
believed that a continuous U.S. military presence in the Mediterranean
was necessary to protect U.S. national interests, in 1831, President
Andrew Jackson secured a treaty of amity and free trade with the
Ottoman Empire leading the secretary of the navy to report seven years
later that it was no longer necessary to keep a U.S. fleet in the
Mediterranean.[18] Three years after Washington withdrew the
squadron, Ottoman privateers began raiding U.S. shipping, forcing
the reconstitution of the fleet after the U.S. Civil War.
No longer, though, did the U.S. government feel content to view
relations with Muslim governments only through a commercial lens. The
Civil War interjected discussion of natural law and freedom into
U.S. policy formulation. American missionaries increased their presence
in the Muslim Middle East throughout the nineteenth century although
Muslim prohibitions on conversion to Christianity led them to focus
their efforts more on aid and education than on proselytization.
Simultaneously, the Ottoman sultan and other Muslim rulers began
to pursue more pronounced repression against both Christians and
Jews.[19] Intolerant, fundamentalist strains of Islam gained ground
on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.[20]
By 1840, the final year of his administration, and again during his
unsuccessful campaign for a second term in 1848, Martin Van Buren
expressed concern for the plight of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which
he called "the most anti-Semitic of countries."[21] In the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, strife between Muslims and Christians in
the Balkans and in Istanbul led President Ulysses Grant to dispatch
six warships to the waterways around the city to ensure the safety
of Americans.[22] In 1882, President Chester Arthur dispatched the
Mediterranean Squadron to Alexandria to help evacuate Americans and
Europeans following anti-Christian violence in the city. President
Grover Cleveland even proposed an Anglo-American intervention in
the Ottoman Empire to assist Armenian Christians against Muslim
violence.[23] In 1903, an assassination attempt on the U.S. consul in
Beirut amid anti-Christian rioting led President Theodore Roosevelt
to dispatch marines to the city. A few months later, marines landed
in Tangiers after the kidnapping of a Greek businessman from the
U.S. consulate there.[24] Behind each incident was Muslim violence
toward minority Christian and Jewish communities.
The nineteenth century foreshadowed increasing conflict between
the United States and Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The failure
of effective Ottoman political reform coupled with the evolution
of Islamic reform toward greater Islamism and less tolerance set
up a conflict between the American notion that governments rule at
the consent of the governed and the dominant attitude among Muslim
potentates who subscribed to an intolerant, coercive, anti-Semitic,
and anti-Christian ideology.
Twentieth-century Continuity
Into the early twentieth century, successive U.S. administrations
sought to remain aloof from Arab and Ottoman politics. President
Woodrow Wilson did not include the Ottoman Empire in the U.S.
declaration of war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
an omission he said was to mitigate the risk of Ottoman retaliation
against its Christian or Jewish populations, thereby implying his
sense that the Porte saw the United States through a religious rather
than just diplomatic lens.[25]
The U.S. government sought to remain detached in all but the commercial
sphere. The U.S. trade relationship with the Middle East expanded
exponentially in the mid-twentieth century. In the decade following
the end of World War II, U.S. commerce increased 167 percent. The
next decade saw a 226 percent rise, and the following decade a 321
percent increase in absolute terms.[26] Such involvement, though,
had diplomatic and strategic overtones.
During the Cold War, "armed neutrality" could no longer protect
U.S. strategic interests. Successive administrations and the State
Department pursued a "pro-Arab" policy in the region to stymie the
expansion of Soviet influence into those countries. In a January 1945
correspondence, Dean Acheson, secretary of state and chief architect
of the U.S. Cold War Soviet containment policy, argued for a pro-Arab
tilt to U.S. policy in order to deny the Soviet Union any possible
inroads into the region.[27] Successive administrations embraced the
policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdul Nasser against
Israel, France, and Great Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis. While
the U.S. government often stayed on the sidelines, in eleven of the
twelve major Cold War and immediate post-Cold War conflicts between
Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and
non-Arabs, the U.S. government supported the former group.[28]
Washington, for example, backed the Afghan mujahideen against the
Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and supported Bosnian Muslims against
Serbs and Croats. U.S. administrations have even leaned hard on Israel,
preventing the Jewish state's destruction of the Egyptian, Jordanian,
and Syrian armies in 1967; ignoring the Israeli government's pleas
not to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Saudi Arabia; and pressuring
for concessions to the Palestinian Authority despite its embrace
of terrorism. The only exception to Washington's pro-Arab tilt has
been U.S. diplomatic intervention in support of Israel at the United
Nations and White House commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative
military edge.
During the six decades since Washington abandoned its "armed
neutrality" policy in favor of deeper relations with Arab states,
friction has increased between U.S. officials and Islamist
ideologues. The pro-Arab tilt Washington pursued during the Cold
War to stymie Soviet intrigues and maintain energy security, meant
partnership with non-democratic regimes and often corrupt rulers
in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian
Gulf emirates. Islamists and other opposition groups argued that
Washington should support the people and not autocrats. But such
rhetoric is laid bare by the antagonism that U.S. support for Israel
engendered among many of these self-professed democrats. Israel is the
only democracy in the region. Its citizens, 17 percent of whom are
Muslim, enjoy basic civil liberties regardless of their faith and,
even in the West Bank, enjoy a standard of living far superior to
that of Egyptians and Jordanians.[29]
Jihadi Antipathy
Both the United States and Jews have become the focus of Islamists'
irrational enmity as Islamist thinkers and Arab demagogues deflect any
internal responsibility for Muslim countries' woes. This was a common
theme both of Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue
and, later, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.[30] In Knowing the
Enemy, Mary Habeck, a professor of military history at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies, documents
how Qutb and bin Laden spread a message that the decline of majority
Muslim polities is not the result of flaws within Islam itself but is
instead the deliberate effort of the United States and the Jews.[31]
Today Pakistani madrasas (Islamic schools) alone spin out more than
one million graduates per year steeped in jihadi ideology.[32]
Underlying much jihadi thought is antipathy toward democracy. Both Qutb
and bin Laden argued that democracy is not a solution to inequity
and corruption in Islamic societies.[33] In a video that marked
the sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, bin Laden said, "It has
now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the
democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples
and their bloody sacrificing of soldiers and populations to achieve
the interests of major corporations."[34] While some Islamists-such as
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Muhammad Khatami in Iran[35]-speak
of their embrace of democracy, seldom do they include Enlightenment
concepts such as tolerance, rule-of-law, and property rights. They do
not accept, as did the U.S. founding fathers, that people are endowed
with both the natural right to freedom from coercion and the liberty to
improve their lives. In practice, then, regardless of their rhetoric,
they eschew democracy.
The failure of Islamic states to incorporate the Enlightenment's
advances in thought has caused their stagnation, if not decline,
over the last several centuries. In contrast, the incorporation of
Enlightenment and democratic principles into Western governance has
resulted in history's most rapid improvement in the human condition.
Only those Muslim countries that have embraced, in some fashion,
Western principles of democracy, free markets, property rights,
tolerance, and the rule of law have prospered. Most Arab states
refuse. Bernard Lewis, perhaps the doyen of Middle East studies in the
Western world, explained, "By all indicators from the United Nations,
the World Bank, and other authorities, Muslim countries-in matters
such as job creation, education, technology, and productivity-lag ever
further behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind
the more recent recruits to Western style modernity, such as Korea,
Taiwan, and Singapore."[36] All majority Muslim countries except
Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Turkey, which have recently adopted
significant free market and democratic reforms, rank in the bottom
half of world productivity; of the rest, only Morocco, Indonesia,
Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh reach the third quartile.[37] According
to the World Bank, the average per capita income of all majority
Muslim countries collectively is less than half of the average for the
globe. Only Kuwait approaches the global average life expectancy;[38]
all other Muslim majority states lag in the bottom half of the world
in this important measure of health.
Jihadis thrive in such stagnated conditions. This leads to negative
annuity: Jihadism both grows amid stagnation and fuels stagnation. It
accelerated coincident with the European Enlightenment and the
relative decline of the Muslim Middle East. At its core, jihadism
is a violent rejection of many of the fundamental principles of
the European Enlightenment. Democracy, free markets, tolerance and
freedom of religion, secular government, and separation between
the religious, the political, and the individual spark religious
fury. It is no coincidence, then, that jihadis, under the banner of
cleansing their religion of evil Western influence, have focused
their attentions on the United States, the clearest manifestation
of the European Enlightenment today. They will continue to threaten
Western civilization until they are checked.
Fumbled Strategy
One of the greatest challenges facing strategic leaders today is
objectively examining the centuries-old roots of Islamic jihadism and
developing a strategy that will lead to a lasting solution to the
Western conflict with it. Many Western policymakers fail to assess
realistically why Arab and Islamic governments have been unable to
improve the condition of their populations, especially in contrast
to the West. This inability to grasp the root of Islamic jihadism is
the result of a moral relativism prominent in modern Western liberal
thought. For example, over the last few decades, it has become common
to value diversity and multiculturalism above societal well-being
and improvements in the human condition.
It is not, as Thomas Friedman argues in The World Is Flat, that the
fruits of the American experiment-free markets, property rights,
tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law-have left Islam behind.[39]
On the contrary, it is Islam that has opted out of progress by
allowing, promoting, and embracing centuries of reactionary and
retrospective reforms that rejected the idea that humans can indeed
improve their condition through reason and rationality. Muslim clerics
and leaders within the impoverished nations of the Islamic world need
to understand that they are responsible for the condition and grief
of their people. It is Islamism's rejection of religious tolerance,
democracy, and the rule of law, in conjunction with its embrace of
anti-Semitism, theocracy, and sectarian strongmen exempt from law
and privileged by the authority they have usurped, that is the real
enemy in the Islamic world's centuries-long interaction with the
United States. While Islamists skillfully manipulate the Western mass
media to enunciate an ... la carte menu of grievances, eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century interactions show these are not the root cause
of jihadi terror. Indeed, a U.S. intelligence assessment, published two
years before Israel's independence and any subsequent jihadi grievance,
already highlighted Islamist terrorism as a long-term threat.[40]
So long as Western officials adopt a nearsighted, grievance-based
view of the roots of Islamist terror, they will embolden jihadis
through appeasement.
It is essential that the grand strategy of the United States
addresses this basic conflict of interest. The present conflict is
not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogues" have
misappropriated religion is both na~Kve and counterfactual. U.S. and
Western leaders must confront the reality that jihadism is a religious
phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten
the continued progress of the American experiment and the European
Enlightenment. In the new grand strategy to defeat Islamic jihadism,
America must campaign, through its scholars and theologians if
appropriate, to encourage and facilitate imams and other Islamic
religious authority figures to reform Islam in a forward direction,
one that breaks from the past and encourages tolerance, the rule
of law, free inquiry, and free markets. Imams who support, either
passively or actively, jihadism should be undermined and exposed.
How should the United States revitalize its strategy? At home, the
U.S. government must better educate and explain the conflict to the
general audience. Education at all levels should inculcate U.S.
citizens in the history, philosophy, mechanics, virtues,
responsibilities, and achievements of the Western approach to freedom,
liberty, and the free market. Tolerance and diversity need not mean
acceptance of oppression and tyranny. Such an effort would entail
reinstalling this subject matter into the curricula of public
schools. The strategic leadership of the nation should drive the
public education effort, much as the founders did in the eighteenth
century. The Federalist Papers, generally attributed to James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, are prototypical examples of
effective strategic communications that aimed, among other things,
to create a government strong enough to defend itself against the
Barbary pirates.
Internationally, U.S. foreign policy should reflect U.S. national
values and long-term objectives rather than near-term expediencies
devoid of the principles enumerated by the founding fathers. U.S.
foreign aid programs need reform.[41] Washington should set a visible
standard by supporting non-corrupt democracies, rather than funding
kleptocracies. Rather than fund short-term stability in regimes where
power is centrally concentrated, Washington should promote trade and
development in Islamic nations supporting the rule of law, tolerance,
and democracy. Trade and development in these nations empowers people
and entrepreneurs, catalyzes economic progress, and decentralizes
power in a culture that has deep tendencies toward autocracy.[42]
The half-century-long policy of supporting Arab state stability
regardless of its governance is a relic of the Cold War. In order
to defeat jihadism, U.S. foreign policy should marginalize Muslim
nations that are not supportive of the development of the rule of
law, tolerance, and democracy. Washington should not apologize for
supporting regional countries that seek peace, prosperity, and the
improved well-being of their citizens. To do otherwise fuels jihadi
rhetoric that the U.S. government seeks to oppress Muslims throughout
the world.
Another requirement is for the West to embark on a radical program
to redefine how its economies obtain and distribute energy. Former
director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey argues that denying
jihadis the use of oil as a weapon against the United States and the
West should be Washington's highest priority.[43]
Finally, the history of U.S. interaction with Muslim polities shows
that "diplomacy backed by force" is the only effective approach to
relations with them.[44] Diplomacy is essential to ensure intentions
are understood. Consistent diplomacy is essential to build the trust
that majority Muslim countries need to support U.S. aims to advance
Enlightenment ideals. Military weakness and the inability to project
U.S. power have consistently led jihadis and Muslim kleptocrats to
launch attacks against U.S. interests.
[1] Ussama Makdisi, "`Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World: An
Interpretation of a Brief History," Journal of American History,
Sept. 2002, p. 546.
[2] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry
Holt, 1989), pp. 23-62.
[3] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the
Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 305-15.
[4] Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle
East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[5] Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the
Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), pp. 106-9.
[6] Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 103-30; Lambert,
The Barbary Wars, pp. 49-78.
[7] Kevin Baker, "The Shores of Tripoli," American Heritage,
Feb./Mar. 2002, p. 21.
[8] James A. Field, "Novus Ordo Seclorum," America and the
Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969), pp. 3-26; Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 15-28.
[9] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 106, 112-4.
[10] Ibid., pp. 110, 123.
[11] Thomas Jefferson, "`The American Commissioners' Report to John
Jay," in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9
(New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904-5), p. 358; quoted in
Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 116.
[12] Thomas Jefferson, "The American Commissioners' Report to John
Jay," p. 358; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[13] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 110-1.
[14] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last
2,000 Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 175.
[15] "The Truce with Tunis," Naval Documents Related to the United
States Wars with the Barbary Powers, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 158-9; quoted in Lambert,
The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[16] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 133-40.
[17] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, pp. 134-5.
[18] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, p. 209.
[19] Ibid., pp. 345-73.
[20] Ahmad Dallal, "The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist
Thought, 1750-1850," Journal of the American Oriental Society,
July-Sept. 1993, p. 352.
[21] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 345-73.
[22] Ibid., pp. 368-70.
[23] Ibid., pp. 445-7.
[24] Anne Cipriano Venzon, "Gunboat Diplomacy in the Med," Proceedings
of the U.S. Naval Institute, Apr. 1985, pp. 26-31.
[25] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 259-60.
[26] Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror
(New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 126-8.
[27] Dean Acheson, "Internal Correspondence of the U. S. Department of
State, January 1945," quoted in Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil
(New York: Crown, 2003), p. 79.
[28] Barry Rubin, "The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism," Foreign
Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2002, p. 75.
[29] R. James Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East: The Long
War of the 21st Century," in K. M. Campbell, ed., An American Grand
Strategy for the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute,
2004), p. 37.
[30] Richard W. Bulliet, "The Crisis within Islam," The Wilson
Quarterly, Winter 2002, p. 15.
[31] Mary R. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadi Ideology and the War
on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 12.
[32] Michael G. Knapp, "The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam,"
Parameters, Spring 2003, p. 92.
[33] Reza Aslan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future
of Islam (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 138; Habeck, Knowing the
Enemy, p. 162; Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 159.
[34] Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, CNN, Sept. 7, 2007; United Press
International, Sept. 7, 2007.
[35] Muhammad Khatami, "Islamic Civil Society," speech to the eighth
session of the Islamic Summit Conference, Tehran, Radio Islam, Dec.
9, 1997.
[36] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 114.
[37] James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and William Easterly, Economic
Freedom of the World, 2006 Annual Report (Vancouver: Fraser Institute,
2006), p. 39.
[38] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 113-9.
[39] Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the
Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005),
pp. 470-9.
[40] "Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946," Middle East
Quarterly, Summer 2006, pp. 76-82.
[41] Alberto Alesina and Beatrice Weder, "Do Corrupt Governments
Receive Less Foreign Aid?," American Economic Review, Sept. 2002, pp.
1126-38.
[42] Iqbal Z. Quadir, "The Bottleneck Is at the Top of the Bottle,"
The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Summer/Fall 2002, pp. 86-8.
[43] Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East," pp. 33-4.
[44] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, p. 160.
By Melvin E. Lee Middle East Quarterly
Melvin E. Lee is a sea captain and a nuclear engineer in the United
States Navy. He serves as special operations officer for the commander,
U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and commander, U.S. 6th Fleet.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the Department of
the Navy or U.S. government.
Assyrian International News Agency
Jan 25 2008
The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public
discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East
motivate Islamist terrorism. Such assumptions, though, misunderstand
the enemy and its nature. In reality, the conflict is sparked not by
grievance but rather by incompatibility between Islamist ideology and
the natural rights articulated during the European Enlightenment and
incorporated into U.S. political culture. Acquiescing to political
grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between
Lockean precepts of tolerance and current interpretations of Islam:
Only Islam's fundamental reform will resolve the conflict.
Many scholars mark the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire
as the origin of Islamist opposition to the West.[1] The idea that
the Middle East would be a tolerant, prosperous contributor to the
global environment today if World War I victors had left intact the
Ottoman Empire is a premise in the literature accompanying the rise
of twentieth-century jihadism. Historian David Fromkin argued in his
influential A Peace to End All Peace that present day Muslim unrest
is the direct result of Winston Churchill's early twentieth-century
decisions.[2] British journalist Robert Fisk also holds British
officials responsible although he prefers to blame Arthur Balfour,
foreign secretary between 1916 and 1919.[3] Both authors are wrong,
though, to base their theories of grievance on such arbitrary
demarcation of eras. The roots of jihadism and its opposition to the
United States as part of the non-Muslim West were cast long before
World War I erupted. The interaction between the United States and
Muslim states and societies dates back to American independence.[4]
Contemporary jihadism is not the result of accumulated grievance;
rather it has for cultural reasons been an integral factor in Islamic
societies' interaction with the United States.
The Die is Cast
Almost immediately after independence, the U.S. government found itself
in conflict with the Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and
Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy,
stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European
sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements
with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail
competition.[5] In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant
ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later,
Algerine pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston
and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England
and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerine leadership
refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington
ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to
protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates.
In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy, President Thomas
Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city
three years later and winning the release of American hostages.[6]
Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of
1812, Algerine pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and
disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James
Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the
pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.[7]
Many historians consider the Barbary wars a sideshow relative to
contemporaneous events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon's
conquests, and the War of 1812, but the Barbary wars are significant
to today's conflict. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and
Madison each believed the Barbary wars to be a continuation of the
American Revolution. The ground war in North America may have freed
the United States from British tyranny, but the Barbary campaign was
necessary to win the same freedom of action and commerce within the
international community.[8] The episode also crystallized perceptions
of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the American mind. While Americans
did not perceive the Barbary wars as a conflict between Christianity
and Islam per se, religion was an issue. The two sides fought, not
over theological differences, but rather as a result of the divergent
ideologies enabled by the two faiths.[9] Washington and Adams referred
to the Muslim leaders as "nests of banditti" while Jefferson's and
Madison's campaign literature called them "petty tyrants."[10] The
"despotic Turk" became the antithesis of early American republican
identity.
What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified
as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris
with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians
are sinners in the context of the Qur'an and that it was a Muslim's
"right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found,
and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners."[11] Islam gave
great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because
the Qur'an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim
paradise after death.[12] Richard O'Brien, the imprisoned captain of
the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to
Algiers, related similar conversations with `Ali Hasan, the ruler
of Algiers.[13] Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify
the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus,
and Ukraine.[14]
The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented
with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the treaties that
U.S. officials entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as
the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves
to American envoys as the "frontier posts of jihad against European
Christianity."[15]
U.S. officials took a conciliatory attitude. Realizing that the North
Africans were hypersensitive to the historic conflict between Islam
and European Christianity, especially in the context of the expulsion
of the Moors from Spain, U.S. officials bent over backwards to deny
the religious and ideological nature of the conflict, especially to
the Muslims themselves. They realized that religious conflict might
jeopardize the commerce that the United States still hoped to find
in the Mediterranean. In 1821, President John Quincy Adams was barely
able to resist assisting the Greeks in their war of independence when
both the American and European publics urged war with the Ottoman
Empire.[16] The founders possessed a deep conviction for religious
tolerance and proudly explained in the short-lived 1797 treaty with
Tripoli that the U.S. was not a Christian state at all but rather one
which had no official religion and maintained laws forbidding the
prohibition of religion.[17] Perhaps their denial of the religious
and ideological nature of the conflict foreshadowed the attitude many
Washington policymakers adopt today. Then as now, it has become the
basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of the conflict.
The Barbary conflict was the beginning of continuous U.S. interaction
with the Muslim Near and Middle East. While Jefferson and Madison
believed that a continuous U.S. military presence in the Mediterranean
was necessary to protect U.S. national interests, in 1831, President
Andrew Jackson secured a treaty of amity and free trade with the
Ottoman Empire leading the secretary of the navy to report seven years
later that it was no longer necessary to keep a U.S. fleet in the
Mediterranean.[18] Three years after Washington withdrew the
squadron, Ottoman privateers began raiding U.S. shipping, forcing
the reconstitution of the fleet after the U.S. Civil War.
No longer, though, did the U.S. government feel content to view
relations with Muslim governments only through a commercial lens. The
Civil War interjected discussion of natural law and freedom into
U.S. policy formulation. American missionaries increased their presence
in the Muslim Middle East throughout the nineteenth century although
Muslim prohibitions on conversion to Christianity led them to focus
their efforts more on aid and education than on proselytization.
Simultaneously, the Ottoman sultan and other Muslim rulers began
to pursue more pronounced repression against both Christians and
Jews.[19] Intolerant, fundamentalist strains of Islam gained ground
on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.[20]
By 1840, the final year of his administration, and again during his
unsuccessful campaign for a second term in 1848, Martin Van Buren
expressed concern for the plight of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which
he called "the most anti-Semitic of countries."[21] In the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, strife between Muslims and Christians in
the Balkans and in Istanbul led President Ulysses Grant to dispatch
six warships to the waterways around the city to ensure the safety
of Americans.[22] In 1882, President Chester Arthur dispatched the
Mediterranean Squadron to Alexandria to help evacuate Americans and
Europeans following anti-Christian violence in the city. President
Grover Cleveland even proposed an Anglo-American intervention in
the Ottoman Empire to assist Armenian Christians against Muslim
violence.[23] In 1903, an assassination attempt on the U.S. consul in
Beirut amid anti-Christian rioting led President Theodore Roosevelt
to dispatch marines to the city. A few months later, marines landed
in Tangiers after the kidnapping of a Greek businessman from the
U.S. consulate there.[24] Behind each incident was Muslim violence
toward minority Christian and Jewish communities.
The nineteenth century foreshadowed increasing conflict between
the United States and Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The failure
of effective Ottoman political reform coupled with the evolution
of Islamic reform toward greater Islamism and less tolerance set
up a conflict between the American notion that governments rule at
the consent of the governed and the dominant attitude among Muslim
potentates who subscribed to an intolerant, coercive, anti-Semitic,
and anti-Christian ideology.
Twentieth-century Continuity
Into the early twentieth century, successive U.S. administrations
sought to remain aloof from Arab and Ottoman politics. President
Woodrow Wilson did not include the Ottoman Empire in the U.S.
declaration of war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
an omission he said was to mitigate the risk of Ottoman retaliation
against its Christian or Jewish populations, thereby implying his
sense that the Porte saw the United States through a religious rather
than just diplomatic lens.[25]
The U.S. government sought to remain detached in all but the commercial
sphere. The U.S. trade relationship with the Middle East expanded
exponentially in the mid-twentieth century. In the decade following
the end of World War II, U.S. commerce increased 167 percent. The
next decade saw a 226 percent rise, and the following decade a 321
percent increase in absolute terms.[26] Such involvement, though,
had diplomatic and strategic overtones.
During the Cold War, "armed neutrality" could no longer protect
U.S. strategic interests. Successive administrations and the State
Department pursued a "pro-Arab" policy in the region to stymie the
expansion of Soviet influence into those countries. In a January 1945
correspondence, Dean Acheson, secretary of state and chief architect
of the U.S. Cold War Soviet containment policy, argued for a pro-Arab
tilt to U.S. policy in order to deny the Soviet Union any possible
inroads into the region.[27] Successive administrations embraced the
policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdul Nasser against
Israel, France, and Great Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis. While
the U.S. government often stayed on the sidelines, in eleven of the
twelve major Cold War and immediate post-Cold War conflicts between
Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and
non-Arabs, the U.S. government supported the former group.[28]
Washington, for example, backed the Afghan mujahideen against the
Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and supported Bosnian Muslims against
Serbs and Croats. U.S. administrations have even leaned hard on Israel,
preventing the Jewish state's destruction of the Egyptian, Jordanian,
and Syrian armies in 1967; ignoring the Israeli government's pleas
not to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Saudi Arabia; and pressuring
for concessions to the Palestinian Authority despite its embrace
of terrorism. The only exception to Washington's pro-Arab tilt has
been U.S. diplomatic intervention in support of Israel at the United
Nations and White House commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative
military edge.
During the six decades since Washington abandoned its "armed
neutrality" policy in favor of deeper relations with Arab states,
friction has increased between U.S. officials and Islamist
ideologues. The pro-Arab tilt Washington pursued during the Cold
War to stymie Soviet intrigues and maintain energy security, meant
partnership with non-democratic regimes and often corrupt rulers
in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian
Gulf emirates. Islamists and other opposition groups argued that
Washington should support the people and not autocrats. But such
rhetoric is laid bare by the antagonism that U.S. support for Israel
engendered among many of these self-professed democrats. Israel is the
only democracy in the region. Its citizens, 17 percent of whom are
Muslim, enjoy basic civil liberties regardless of their faith and,
even in the West Bank, enjoy a standard of living far superior to
that of Egyptians and Jordanians.[29]
Jihadi Antipathy
Both the United States and Jews have become the focus of Islamists'
irrational enmity as Islamist thinkers and Arab demagogues deflect any
internal responsibility for Muslim countries' woes. This was a common
theme both of Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue
and, later, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.[30] In Knowing the
Enemy, Mary Habeck, a professor of military history at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies, documents
how Qutb and bin Laden spread a message that the decline of majority
Muslim polities is not the result of flaws within Islam itself but is
instead the deliberate effort of the United States and the Jews.[31]
Today Pakistani madrasas (Islamic schools) alone spin out more than
one million graduates per year steeped in jihadi ideology.[32]
Underlying much jihadi thought is antipathy toward democracy. Both Qutb
and bin Laden argued that democracy is not a solution to inequity
and corruption in Islamic societies.[33] In a video that marked
the sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, bin Laden said, "It has
now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the
democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples
and their bloody sacrificing of soldiers and populations to achieve
the interests of major corporations."[34] While some Islamists-such as
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Muhammad Khatami in Iran[35]-speak
of their embrace of democracy, seldom do they include Enlightenment
concepts such as tolerance, rule-of-law, and property rights. They do
not accept, as did the U.S. founding fathers, that people are endowed
with both the natural right to freedom from coercion and the liberty to
improve their lives. In practice, then, regardless of their rhetoric,
they eschew democracy.
The failure of Islamic states to incorporate the Enlightenment's
advances in thought has caused their stagnation, if not decline,
over the last several centuries. In contrast, the incorporation of
Enlightenment and democratic principles into Western governance has
resulted in history's most rapid improvement in the human condition.
Only those Muslim countries that have embraced, in some fashion,
Western principles of democracy, free markets, property rights,
tolerance, and the rule of law have prospered. Most Arab states
refuse. Bernard Lewis, perhaps the doyen of Middle East studies in the
Western world, explained, "By all indicators from the United Nations,
the World Bank, and other authorities, Muslim countries-in matters
such as job creation, education, technology, and productivity-lag ever
further behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind
the more recent recruits to Western style modernity, such as Korea,
Taiwan, and Singapore."[36] All majority Muslim countries except
Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Turkey, which have recently adopted
significant free market and democratic reforms, rank in the bottom
half of world productivity; of the rest, only Morocco, Indonesia,
Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh reach the third quartile.[37] According
to the World Bank, the average per capita income of all majority
Muslim countries collectively is less than half of the average for the
globe. Only Kuwait approaches the global average life expectancy;[38]
all other Muslim majority states lag in the bottom half of the world
in this important measure of health.
Jihadis thrive in such stagnated conditions. This leads to negative
annuity: Jihadism both grows amid stagnation and fuels stagnation. It
accelerated coincident with the European Enlightenment and the
relative decline of the Muslim Middle East. At its core, jihadism
is a violent rejection of many of the fundamental principles of
the European Enlightenment. Democracy, free markets, tolerance and
freedom of religion, secular government, and separation between
the religious, the political, and the individual spark religious
fury. It is no coincidence, then, that jihadis, under the banner of
cleansing their religion of evil Western influence, have focused
their attentions on the United States, the clearest manifestation
of the European Enlightenment today. They will continue to threaten
Western civilization until they are checked.
Fumbled Strategy
One of the greatest challenges facing strategic leaders today is
objectively examining the centuries-old roots of Islamic jihadism and
developing a strategy that will lead to a lasting solution to the
Western conflict with it. Many Western policymakers fail to assess
realistically why Arab and Islamic governments have been unable to
improve the condition of their populations, especially in contrast
to the West. This inability to grasp the root of Islamic jihadism is
the result of a moral relativism prominent in modern Western liberal
thought. For example, over the last few decades, it has become common
to value diversity and multiculturalism above societal well-being
and improvements in the human condition.
It is not, as Thomas Friedman argues in The World Is Flat, that the
fruits of the American experiment-free markets, property rights,
tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law-have left Islam behind.[39]
On the contrary, it is Islam that has opted out of progress by
allowing, promoting, and embracing centuries of reactionary and
retrospective reforms that rejected the idea that humans can indeed
improve their condition through reason and rationality. Muslim clerics
and leaders within the impoverished nations of the Islamic world need
to understand that they are responsible for the condition and grief
of their people. It is Islamism's rejection of religious tolerance,
democracy, and the rule of law, in conjunction with its embrace of
anti-Semitism, theocracy, and sectarian strongmen exempt from law
and privileged by the authority they have usurped, that is the real
enemy in the Islamic world's centuries-long interaction with the
United States. While Islamists skillfully manipulate the Western mass
media to enunciate an ... la carte menu of grievances, eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century interactions show these are not the root cause
of jihadi terror. Indeed, a U.S. intelligence assessment, published two
years before Israel's independence and any subsequent jihadi grievance,
already highlighted Islamist terrorism as a long-term threat.[40]
So long as Western officials adopt a nearsighted, grievance-based
view of the roots of Islamist terror, they will embolden jihadis
through appeasement.
It is essential that the grand strategy of the United States
addresses this basic conflict of interest. The present conflict is
not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogues" have
misappropriated religion is both na~Kve and counterfactual. U.S. and
Western leaders must confront the reality that jihadism is a religious
phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten
the continued progress of the American experiment and the European
Enlightenment. In the new grand strategy to defeat Islamic jihadism,
America must campaign, through its scholars and theologians if
appropriate, to encourage and facilitate imams and other Islamic
religious authority figures to reform Islam in a forward direction,
one that breaks from the past and encourages tolerance, the rule
of law, free inquiry, and free markets. Imams who support, either
passively or actively, jihadism should be undermined and exposed.
How should the United States revitalize its strategy? At home, the
U.S. government must better educate and explain the conflict to the
general audience. Education at all levels should inculcate U.S.
citizens in the history, philosophy, mechanics, virtues,
responsibilities, and achievements of the Western approach to freedom,
liberty, and the free market. Tolerance and diversity need not mean
acceptance of oppression and tyranny. Such an effort would entail
reinstalling this subject matter into the curricula of public
schools. The strategic leadership of the nation should drive the
public education effort, much as the founders did in the eighteenth
century. The Federalist Papers, generally attributed to James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, are prototypical examples of
effective strategic communications that aimed, among other things,
to create a government strong enough to defend itself against the
Barbary pirates.
Internationally, U.S. foreign policy should reflect U.S. national
values and long-term objectives rather than near-term expediencies
devoid of the principles enumerated by the founding fathers. U.S.
foreign aid programs need reform.[41] Washington should set a visible
standard by supporting non-corrupt democracies, rather than funding
kleptocracies. Rather than fund short-term stability in regimes where
power is centrally concentrated, Washington should promote trade and
development in Islamic nations supporting the rule of law, tolerance,
and democracy. Trade and development in these nations empowers people
and entrepreneurs, catalyzes economic progress, and decentralizes
power in a culture that has deep tendencies toward autocracy.[42]
The half-century-long policy of supporting Arab state stability
regardless of its governance is a relic of the Cold War. In order
to defeat jihadism, U.S. foreign policy should marginalize Muslim
nations that are not supportive of the development of the rule of
law, tolerance, and democracy. Washington should not apologize for
supporting regional countries that seek peace, prosperity, and the
improved well-being of their citizens. To do otherwise fuels jihadi
rhetoric that the U.S. government seeks to oppress Muslims throughout
the world.
Another requirement is for the West to embark on a radical program
to redefine how its economies obtain and distribute energy. Former
director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey argues that denying
jihadis the use of oil as a weapon against the United States and the
West should be Washington's highest priority.[43]
Finally, the history of U.S. interaction with Muslim polities shows
that "diplomacy backed by force" is the only effective approach to
relations with them.[44] Diplomacy is essential to ensure intentions
are understood. Consistent diplomacy is essential to build the trust
that majority Muslim countries need to support U.S. aims to advance
Enlightenment ideals. Military weakness and the inability to project
U.S. power have consistently led jihadis and Muslim kleptocrats to
launch attacks against U.S. interests.
[1] Ussama Makdisi, "`Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World: An
Interpretation of a Brief History," Journal of American History,
Sept. 2002, p. 546.
[2] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry
Holt, 1989), pp. 23-62.
[3] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the
Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 305-15.
[4] Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle
East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[5] Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the
Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), pp. 106-9.
[6] Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 103-30; Lambert,
The Barbary Wars, pp. 49-78.
[7] Kevin Baker, "The Shores of Tripoli," American Heritage,
Feb./Mar. 2002, p. 21.
[8] James A. Field, "Novus Ordo Seclorum," America and the
Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969), pp. 3-26; Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 15-28.
[9] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 106, 112-4.
[10] Ibid., pp. 110, 123.
[11] Thomas Jefferson, "`The American Commissioners' Report to John
Jay," in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9
(New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904-5), p. 358; quoted in
Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 116.
[12] Thomas Jefferson, "The American Commissioners' Report to John
Jay," p. 358; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[13] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 110-1.
[14] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last
2,000 Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 175.
[15] "The Truce with Tunis," Naval Documents Related to the United
States Wars with the Barbary Powers, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 158-9; quoted in Lambert,
The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[16] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 133-40.
[17] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, pp. 134-5.
[18] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, p. 209.
[19] Ibid., pp. 345-73.
[20] Ahmad Dallal, "The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist
Thought, 1750-1850," Journal of the American Oriental Society,
July-Sept. 1993, p. 352.
[21] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 345-73.
[22] Ibid., pp. 368-70.
[23] Ibid., pp. 445-7.
[24] Anne Cipriano Venzon, "Gunboat Diplomacy in the Med," Proceedings
of the U.S. Naval Institute, Apr. 1985, pp. 26-31.
[25] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 259-60.
[26] Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror
(New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 126-8.
[27] Dean Acheson, "Internal Correspondence of the U. S. Department of
State, January 1945," quoted in Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil
(New York: Crown, 2003), p. 79.
[28] Barry Rubin, "The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism," Foreign
Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2002, p. 75.
[29] R. James Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East: The Long
War of the 21st Century," in K. M. Campbell, ed., An American Grand
Strategy for the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute,
2004), p. 37.
[30] Richard W. Bulliet, "The Crisis within Islam," The Wilson
Quarterly, Winter 2002, p. 15.
[31] Mary R. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadi Ideology and the War
on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 12.
[32] Michael G. Knapp, "The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam,"
Parameters, Spring 2003, p. 92.
[33] Reza Aslan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future
of Islam (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 138; Habeck, Knowing the
Enemy, p. 162; Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 159.
[34] Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, CNN, Sept. 7, 2007; United Press
International, Sept. 7, 2007.
[35] Muhammad Khatami, "Islamic Civil Society," speech to the eighth
session of the Islamic Summit Conference, Tehran, Radio Islam, Dec.
9, 1997.
[36] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 114.
[37] James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and William Easterly, Economic
Freedom of the World, 2006 Annual Report (Vancouver: Fraser Institute,
2006), p. 39.
[38] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 113-9.
[39] Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the
Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005),
pp. 470-9.
[40] "Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946," Middle East
Quarterly, Summer 2006, pp. 76-82.
[41] Alberto Alesina and Beatrice Weder, "Do Corrupt Governments
Receive Less Foreign Aid?," American Economic Review, Sept. 2002, pp.
1126-38.
[42] Iqbal Z. Quadir, "The Bottleneck Is at the Top of the Bottle,"
The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Summer/Fall 2002, pp. 86-8.
[43] Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East," pp. 33-4.
[44] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, p. 160.
By Melvin E. Lee Middle East Quarterly
Melvin E. Lee is a sea captain and a nuclear engineer in the United
States Navy. He serves as special operations officer for the commander,
U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and commander, U.S. 6th Fleet.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the Department of
the Navy or U.S. government.