Why Do They Hate Us So Much?

If you don't know what "blowback" is, allow me to explain. It is a term, invented by the Central Intelligence Agency, to describe the unintended and unforseen consequences of a covert action. It has, through its unfortunately frequent use, also come to mean the unintended consequences of American foreign policy.

On July 3, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed a document that would, through the blowback it would cause, eventually seal the fate of nearly 3,000 innocent people in New York, Washington D.C. and the plains of central Pensylvania a quarter-century later. He signed the first directive to provide secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. With the benefit of that aid, they would engage in ruthless acts of terror and sabotage, throughout the entire Afghan nation and lead to the destabilization its government. It was ultimately intended to induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, drawing them into what would be called Russia's Vietnam, bringing untold misery and suffering to the people of Afghanistan. It would provide support to a new group of Islamic fundamentalists, known as the Taliban, and their allies, a secret, violent terrorist group known as Al Qaeda, run by the son of one of Saudi Arabia's princes, whose connections could provide the covert economic support to get it going.

The principle architect of this plan was Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. When the war was finally over, and the country had effectively been devastated to the point of living in the Stone Age, Brzezinski was asked if he regretted the suffering he had caused. His reply was telling for its sheer arrogance, hubris and shortsightedness:

"Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: 'We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.'"

"What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

But the support for the Taliban and the fostering of Al Qaeda would have long term consequences that would eventually become huge indeed, leading to a horrible terrorist incident of unprecedented scale, causing an ugly scar on the American psyche. It would create a force for terrorism and instability that will take decades, if not centuries to repair. For while the USSR was destined to soon be consigned to "the dustbin of history" anyway, insults suffered by Islam are remembered and recounted in detail for centuries by Islamic militants. Indeed, many Muslim school children today can recite in graphic detail atrocities commited against Muslims by Christian crusaders a thousand years ago. These are wounds that are not allowed to heal. And what was to become the Afghanistan betrayal and its aftermath was destined to become one of these wounds.

So how did Al Qaeda, originally funded, supported and nurtured by the CIA, come to become America's most serious terrorist enemy?

It was the result of another arrogant, ill-considered act of American foreign policy. After the Soviets had bombed Afghanistan back to the Stone Age but had been defeated and left under the gun, America simply walked away. Rather than helping the victors secure the country, repair the damage and build a nation with democratic institutions and a modern, western outlook, America simply abandoned them to their fate. Why not? Arrogant, hubristic and selfish leaders in America, like Brzezinski, had got what they wanted. Why hang around?

Inevitably, warlords arose during the post-war power-vacuum in Afghanistan and a two-decade-long civil war developed that radicalized Muslims throughout the Islamic world, not just the Middle East. But the United States did nothing. The Taliban and Al Qaeda had served their purpose, so the suffering of the Afghanis was of no importance to the leaders of America. This abandonment really rankled. That was enough to anger the Islamic world, but it wasn't the end of the insults. There was more to come. Much more.

The final parting of the ways between Al Qaeda and the CIA happened during the first Gulf War. President George Bush Sr. stationed American troops, infidels almost to a man, in Saudi Arabia to help prop up that thoroughly corrupt and indifferent regime, against the will of most of the Saudi population - mostly because that regime was friendly to the United States and was happy to be compliant with Washington's wishes, but it had little support and needed to be propped up. And, at the end of the war, Bush failed to withdraw them as he had promised when they arrived. To the deeply religious Osama Bin Laden, this was an intolerable insult and an unsufferable transgression against Islam. It was tatamount to an occupation, by infidels, of the holiest region in all of Islam (see below). It could not be allowed to continue. If ever there were a cause for a jihad (holy war), Osama saw this as that cause. Osama's pleas were ignored. His warnings fell on ears totally deaf to the religious and political sensibilities of Islam.

To send a message that could not be ignored, Osama engineered the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The coordinated explosions happened almost simultaneously and killed hundreds, devastating both buildings and many buildings surrounding them. And the response, the war against Al Qaeda, began, when President Bill Clinton sent cruise missles into Afghanistan to destroy the Al Qaeda training camps there. It wasn't hard to find the training camps. The military knew right where they were. After all, the CIA had helped build them.

As horrific as the African embassy bombings were, and subsequent bombings of troop barracks in Saudi Arabia were, they, and the retaliation they spawned, was quickly forgotten by the American public. But Osama was determined to send a message that Americans could not forget. And so, on September 11, 2001, that message was delivered. And unfortunately, the meaning of that message was totally lost on the American public, due to the determined obfuscation by America's political leadership.

And this war against the monster America itself created, will continue.

The favorite theory of the conservatives of this being an issue of jealousy and envy is laughable to the rest of the world. It's not only laughable, but it is downright dangerous, as this misimpression, and the course of action America will inevitably take as a result, will simply lead to more terrorism. Consider this report as broadcast around the world on the BBC World Service's "Newshour" program on September 21, 2002, just a week and a half after the first anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy (requires Real Player; 16kbs, 4 minutes).

Terrorism is Nothing New

It might come as a surprise to many Americans to discover that the term was used by the British to describe the American colonialists who were fomenting the American Revolution. But one can go back much further than that; there are recorded instances of what today we would call "terrorism," including the use of that word, in Roman times. This is truly an ancient problem.

Which raises the question, then, of why this all seems so new. Why has it become such a problem now, when it has seldom been a problem in America's past?

The reason is quite simple. It is called "blowback." There are two reasons which have worked synergistically in a most sinister manner to create this "new problem" with terrorism and the blowback that spawns it:

First, America has, over the last half-century, been abandoning three key values that had always made it respected around the world: egalitarianism, compassion, and an appreciation of the importance of rigorous education in reason and critical thinking, with an emphasis on the civics of democracy and the ethical and moral values of the Enlightenment. This is a trend I've discussed at length elsewhere on this site. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the world, which apes every American cultural trend uncritically, has largely followed suit, and that trend in education abroad has fertilized the ground internationally for fundamentalist religion with all its extremism, just as it has done here in America.

Second, America, through it's reckless foreign policy and free and easy use of clandestine force and terrorism itself for achieving short-term, mostly economic goals, while publicly condemning such behavior with its obvious hypocrisy, has invited this kind of response. History is replete with dozens of examples of where American covert activities and overt foreign policy has thoroughly and callously undermined the very values that the American government so publicly and loudly proclaims. Americans tend not to see this, because they are unconcerned with the rest of the world and tend to uncritically trust their government to do the right thing, believing what they are endlessly told about the promotion of freedom, democracy and human rights, and assuming that their leaders are sincere in what they say and without guile. Seldom do they see the behavior of their government abroad as the rest of the world sees it. But the victims, millions of them around the world, do see it, and see it in their lives every day, and they know who is ultimately responsible.

So if you're an American and are genuinely puzzled at why America is hated with such passion, and why much of the world reacted to September 11 as it did, here's a quickie course in a few of the more important things your government has been doing in your name while you weren't looking:

The Islamic World and the Middle East

• In 1948, Israel came into existence primarily at the behest of and completely dependent on the United States, as a result of the many thousands of American and European Zionists who had moved there over the previous decades, mostly illegally, to fulfill their Zionist dreams. Within a year, a wave of terror, deliberately instigated by the Israeli government and conducted by the Israeli Army and the terrorist organizations run by the far-right Zionists, swept through the Palestinian villages under Israeli control and nearby areas. Waves of refugees, nearly a million in all, quickly fled to the Gaza Strip (then under Egyptian control), the West Bank (then under Jordanian control) and into Lebanon and Syria, to what were intended to be temporary refugee camps. The number of Palestinian villages in Israel was reduced from 365 to little over a hundred in just a few months - pine forests were planted by Israel to hide the foundation stones from tourists. Today, a half century later, the refugees continue to live on international handouts in those same "temporary" refugee camps, their homes, factories, farms and pastures (at least among those old enough to remember) a distant, fading memory. In the intervening years, Israel has not lifted a finger to alleviate the misery it has caused among these refugees, nor has the United States ever urged it to do so.

  Not only did the United States do nothing to stop the wave of terror, but, for purely domestic political reasons, actually aided and abetted it, and has unflinchingly supported Israel then as it has ever since. Not just morally, either, but with the best weapons in the American arsenal, and with vast amounts of money, no matter how egregious its repression of Palestinians. Israel quickly became and has remained for many years by far the largest recipient of American foreign aid, both military and economic, in spite of the fact that most Jewish Israelis live much better than do many Americans - enjoying a much lower poverty rate than Americans do. This, even while Israel continues to engage in forced, uncompensated expropriations of deeded Palestinian land, the demolition of innocent Palestinians' homes, detention without trial of innocent Palestinians, often for years, and now even widespread extrajudicial killings - Israel has adopted a policy of simply murdering whoever it doesn't like, using any means at its disposal, and totally disregarding collateral damage and casualties of innocents. Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships now frequent Palestinian villages, shooting up the place at will, causing dozens of casualties and fatalities, as often women and children as men. Ambulances taking the wounded to hospitals, are often held up at roadblocks for hours at a time, often leading to the death of the patients, while Israeli traffic continues to move smoothly, quite unhindered. All this, while America only expresses "regret" if we say anything at all.

  The Palestinians know quite well that this repression wouldn't be possible without American support and acquiescence. So then Americans wondered why the Palestinians celebrated when the World Trade Center was destroyed? How does America's hypocritical talk about "state-sponsored terrorism" sound to them? And to the rest of Islamic world? And why should the Palestinians not feel entitled to reply in kind?

• Throughout the Islamic world, the United States is regarded with suspicion because of it's unabashedly pro-Israeli policies. Europe is regarded by Israel with deep suspicion because it has at least occasionally opposed Israel's brutal repression and clearly illegal settlement activities in the Occupied Territories. So neither would be regarded by all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute with anything approaching objectivity.

  Hence, it would be logical that the real arbitor of this dispute should be the one agency that was specifically set up to arbitrate and settle international disputes, the only agency that still has any credibility with both sides: the United Nations. Yet because of America's permanent seat on the Security Council, and it's knee-jerk support for Israel, the U.N. Security Council has been barred from even passing a meaningful resolution on the dispute, much less intervening in it.

  Israel has successfully used the U.S. to block the entry of U.N. peacekeeping forces into the region, and even block U.N. observers on many occasions, so the U.N., probably the only agency that could do some good, is prevented from even reporting to the world what is happening there.

  This intransigence has come with a price. The United States has become widely viewed as opposing a peace settlement in the Middle East that isn't imposed strictly on its own terms, meaning as favorable as possible to Israel - and it is viewed this way with good reason. The fig-leaf that the U.S. has traditionally offered for opposing all U.N. resolutions and involvement on this subject, namely that of preventing the Security Council from getting involved in an intractible dispute, has become transparent in view of the fact that the U.N. has become quite successfully involved in many other disputes of similar intractibility - such as East Timor, the Balkans, Central Africa and others.

  So how does American words about "fairness and justice" sound in the ears of the people of the Middle East who really do hold to such values?

• George Bush Senior had, through the first half of his administration, been happily arming Iraq to help it fight it's futile war against the Iranian fundamentalism that America's own covert activities had caused to develop there (see below). Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Senior both appear in numerous photographs, genially shaking hands with Saddam. This, in spite of Saddam Hussein's long history of bloody genocide against his own people, many of them Kurds and Shiite Marsh Arabs, brutally repressed by Baghdad at the cost of thousands of lives. The United States never did object, but even helped supply the weapons of mass destruction used against the Kurds and Marsh Arabs.

  But when Saddam decided to occupy Kuwait, that was intolerable. It was intolerable because it jeopardized the assets of George's oil billionaire buddies, and so George decided that the occupation of Kuwait had to be ended by whatever means necessary, even if that meant an exceedlingly bloody and expensive war. To whip up American support for his campaign to save his oil buddies' assets, lies were fabricated about babies in Kuwaiti hospitals being murdered by Iraqi troops, and lurid stories of gang rapes and wholesale massacres of Kuwaiti civilians were fabricated, stories mostly made up out of whole cloth. A wholesale campaign of flag-waving nationalism, based on a sham propaganda campaign ensued. America went to war.

  The result was the death in the desert of over 100,000 Shiite Arab conscripts, who were annihilated by bombs dropped by B-52s from high altitudes. The Shiite conscripts, who would have been natural allies of the U.S. had they been captured, were kept on the front lines by their Iraqi commanders by the simple expedient of giving them cheap plastic shoes, which made long treks across the desert impossible. Their commanders fled. They had boots, mostly supplied years earlier by U.S. military aid. Meanwhile, American troops re-installed the very un-democratic rulers of Kuwait.

  While prosecuting the war, the U.S. littered the desert with thousands of "depleted" uranium artillery shells, which despite Defense Department claims to the contrary, are still 60% as radioactive as would be munitions made from the "non-depleted" variety of uranium. The result was thousands of unreported American casualties, who, along with their families, still live with disabilites caused by the radiation from this unholy munition. And sanctions on Iraq, imposed after the war, have led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi poor, at least half of them children, while leaving Saddam stronger and more entrenched in power than ever, and living the high life as much as ever while America did nothing to make Saddam's life as miserable as it had made theirs.

  After the war, the Americans urged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam and overthrow him. But when the Marsh Arabs actually did rise up, the U.S. not only did not lift a finger to help them, but actually gave Saddam permission to fly his helicopters over the area, enabling Saddam to put the revolt down with brutal efficiency.

  When the U.S. finally did move "against Saddam," a decade later, mostly to secure a supply of oil for itself and neutralize a security threat to Israel, its ill-considered post-occupation plan (read: no discernible plan at all) ended up killing between ten and thirty thousand innocent Iraqis, because of a refusal to take security issues seriously enough to spend the money and commit the required troops to adequately secure the country.

  So how does the average Iraqi view American respect and commitment for life and liberty?

• While, during Gulf War I, the Iraqi Army was being bombed back to the stone age by remote control from Washington, the flourishing corruption within the Saudi Arabian royal family, long propped up by the American administrations, had become an increasing irritant to devout Muslims around the world, who were affronted by the American support of the increasingly corrupt and immoral leadership of this holiest of Muslim lands. To add insult to injury, the Americans asked for and got temporary permission to stage U.S. troops on Saudi Arabian soil during the Gulf War. They'd be gone as soon as the war was ended, the Islamic world was assured. Well, contrary to the promise, they're still there, a decade later, propping up an increasingly unpopular regime, while doing what military forces always do when they're posted abroad - drinking and engaging in, well, what military forces engage in when far away from wives and girl friends. Such activities in the holiest land of Islam is as much an affront to devout Muslims as Soviet troops would have been to devout Christians or Jews if they had been posted in Jerusalem or the Vatican.

  And we wonder why so many Muslims regard America as the Great Satan?

• In 1953, a popularly elected and widely supported government in Iran decided to nationalize the assets of the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The British sought and got the help of the newly reorganized CIA in doing something about this little inconvenience. The CIA organized a propaganda and terror campaign which eventually led to the overthrow of the regime, and the installation of the CIA's pet dictator, the brutal and ruthless Shah Reza Pahlavi, beginning a reign of terror that would last two decades. His regime was so overwhelmingly unpopular that many Iranians were driven to Islamic fundamentalist conspirators who promised to overthrow the Shah. In 1976, he was overthrown in a popular revolt, much to the surprise of the CIA which seems to have been believing its own propaganda, and was replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist radical, the Ayatollah Khomeni. The Ayatollah promised to drive out the foreign devils, and that is exactly what he proceeded to do. The rest is history - Iran has become almost synonymous in the popular mind with reclusive Islamic fundamentalism and state-sponsored terrorism. All because America itself had engaged in state-sponsored terrorism there a quarter century earlier - so an oil company could get its property (and profits) back.

  And we wonder why Iranians scoff at us when we talk about state-sponsored terrorism?

The Far East

• Indonesia in the late 1960's was gripped in a reign of terror led by General Suharto, who was installed by the CIA in a heavily funded covert operation. That reign of terror cost the lives of nearly a million members of dissident and left-wing organizations throughout Indonesia during the "year of living dangerously" - one of the bloodiest coups of all time, for which the CIA was responsible, a fact the Indonesian people are quite well aware of.

  In 1975, without effective opposition, (and with the explicit acquiescence, if not permission of the United States), Suharto felt free to invade the Portuguese colony of East Timor, against the strong opposition of the East Timorese. The United States did absolutely nothing while Suharto's troops savaged their way through the countryside, and proceeded to massacre over a third of the population, at least 200,000 people. The world was appalled at this wholesale genocide, but Suharto, who was "our son of a bitch," wasn't opposed by anyone in the U.S. government. America didn't lift a finger to stop the genocide. We didn't even express our infamous "regret" but we continued our support for Suharto throughout the genocide.

  So how do Indonesians and East Timorese view America's commitment to freedom and human rights?

• At the conclusion of the Vietnam War in 1975, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, stood poised to take over Cambodia. With U.S. acquiescence, and even covert support, they did so, beginning one of the bloodiest regimes in the 20th Century, creating the so-called "killing fields" in which they murdered a third of Cambodia's population. Yet the support by the American government, either overtly or covertly never wavered - right up until the invasion and takeover of that country by Vietnam, which went in for the sole purpose of stopping the killing. The United States actually opposed the invasion.

  So how do you think the Cambodians feel about America's actual commitment to the values of "human rights" and the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"

Latin America

• When America's new U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte rose to praise the United Nations' Sept. 28, 2001 resolution on terrorism, reminding delegates that the action "obligates all member states to deny financing, support, and safe haven for terrorists," his remarks were greeted with stunned silence by the Latin American delegates. Twenty years earlier, John Negroponte himself was financing and supporting terrorist death squads in Honduras and providing "safe haven" in Honduras for the CIA-sponsored Contras, who used sabotage and murder in their efforts to overthrow the Sandinista regime next door in Nicaragua.

  When Negroponte took over as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in 1981, the outgoing Carter Administration appointee, Jack Binns, warned him that human rights abuses in Honduras were on the rise. Negroponte not only ignored him, he oversaw a huge jump in U.S. military aid, from $3.9 million in 1981 to $77.4 million in 1984, in spite of the fact that the Honduran military had been notoriously disrespectful of human rights during those years. At the time, Honduras had no internal or external enemies, and therefore no need for such an army, but it was serving as the security guards for a major staging base for Reagan's illegal Contra war. Locals dubbed the country "the U.S.S. Honduras" - America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in Central America.

  At the time Negroponte was using Honduras as if it were a fully-leased American military base, the Honduran military's notorious Battalion 3-16, a secret unit trained by the CIA, and headed by Gen. Gustavo Alverez Martinez, a graduate of the U.S. Army's "School of the Americas," was kidnapping and murdering opponents of the government. Some 184 murders, including American Jesuit priest Joseph Carney, have been documented by human rights organizations. According to a 1995 series in the Baltimore Sun exposing the U.S. role in training Battalion 3-16, the unit used electric shock and suffocation as its favored interrogation technique, murdering prisoners afterwards. Honduran Congressman Efrain Diaz Aarrivillaga told the Sun he took up the issue of Battalion 3-16 with Negroponte, but said the Ambassador's attitude was one of "tolerance and silence." Diaz told the Sun, "They needed Honduras to loan it's territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed."

  And we wonder why Hondurans laugh when we pontificate about "rogue states" and "state-sponsored terrorism?"

• In December, 1981, the American-trained Atlacalt Battalion rounded up the 900 residents of the town of El Mazote in El Salvador and systemically murdered all but a few who escaped. They shot them with American supplied M-16s, cut their throats, burned them alive, and machine gunned and macheted scores of children. The massacre was exposed by Ray Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post. The massacre never got any serious publicity because Elliot Abrams, then working for the Reagan administration, intimidated the American press into not widely covering the story. The full story only came out with the United Nations Truth Commission report in 1993. It found that 85 percent of the 22,000 extra-legal executions in El Salvador during the Reagan era were carried out by U.S. sponsored death squads in alliance with the Salvadoran military. Abram's response? "The [Reagan] Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." (See the Dec. 6, 2000 issue of the New Yorker Magazine for the full details of the massacre.)

  So how does "rule of law" sound to Salvadorans when hearing it from Americans?

• In 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-sponsored regime of Juan Batista that had become so thoroughly corrupt, morally, politically and economically, that it proved to be unable to defend itself against Castro's rag-tag band of rebels. Castro tried hard to establish good relations with the Eisenhower administration, which rebuffed his efforts at every turn. Castro, a pragmatist, realized that good trade relations were essential to the modernization of Cuba, which he was very desirous of promoting. He was willing to put some of his Marxist ideals on hold, provided he could maintain those relations. But the Eisenhower administration, miffed that he had thrown out "our son-of-a-bitch," would have none of it, and rebuffed his every overture. Castro could see that he had no choice - he had to turn to the Soviet Union, which he did, just as Ho Chi Minh had done in Viet Nam only a few years before. He began the expropriation of the vast holdings of American corporations and the super-rich Cuban elite, turning them over to the Cubans who actually worked on them, and announced that in fact, he was a Communist. He invited the Soviet Union to help him build his island's future, which they were more than eager to do, as they could see Cuba could be to them what Turkey was to the United States - a secure military base right on the enemy's doorstep.

  This was more than the Eisenhower administration could take. Believing their own and the Cuban elite's propaganda that the Cuban people hated Castro and Communism and would surely rise up instantly to overthrow both if given the opportunity, Eisenhower, who was one of World War II's most effective military commanders but a politically naive man, organized the Bay of Pigs invasion. Much to the shock of the American people, when the invasion actually happened, it completely floundered. The Cubans not only didn't rise up to support the invasion, they worked hard and made great sacrifices to stop it, and were ultimately successful - the stories told about their sacrifices are still popularly told and retold in Cuba to this day.

  The new Kennedy administration, under which the invasion actually took place, responded by imposing an economic blockade on Cuba, which of course, was the outcome Castro had feared most.

  The displaced Cuban elite which had fled to Miami in the weeks and months following the Cuban revolution, were as shocked as anyone else in the United States about the results of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was from among their ranks that the invasion force had been assembled. But had they actually been in touch with the peasantry of Cuba before they had left, they wouldn't have been surprised at all - but would have realized that their invasion was doomed to fail, as it had virtually no popular support. What never occurred to them was that it was their own arrogance, selfishness and hubris that had created support for Castro's revolution in the first place and doomed their plans to replace him.

  So that brings us to the twenty-first century, with Castro still in power after 40 years, and the sanctions still in place after 40 years, and the Miami Cubans still thinking, in their hopeless hubris after 40 years, that the Cuban people still hate Castro and would overthrow him in a hearbeat. Of course the reality is that the majority of the Cuban people very much appreciate that Castro has given them the highest literacy rate in the Americas, one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, but above all else, a sense of independence and dignity that they've never had as a nation, even if they remain economically desperately poor. And so Castro, in spite of his numerous human rights abuses, remains so popular that he still, to this day, drives himself around Havana in his open jeep, with little security. It's not necessary. His people love him.

  But the sanctions go on. And the Cuban people, who listen to the BBC just like other Latin Americans do (neither the BBC nor the Voice of America is jammed), and know quite well what is happening, not only in their own country, but in the rest of the world as well, can't understand why America hates Castro as much as it does.

  Meanwhile, Canadians as well as Latin Americans can and do travel freely to Cuba. They all know what Americans don't - that Castro has always had and still enjoys the overwhelming popular support of his people, that Cuba has made a great deal of progress for its poorest, in spite of the sanctions, and that freedom and human rights, while not as respected as anyone would like, still aren't as brutally supressed as Americans like to believe, and certainly not anywhere near as brutally as they are suppressed in many American-sponsored regimes around the world.

  And we wonder why both Cubans and other Latin Americans consider us hopelessly provincial and ignorant, as well as arrogantly hubristic?

• In 1982, the CIA, at the behest of Ronald Reagan, installed a "born-again Christian" dictator in Guatemala. This supposed fine Christian gentleman (at least to hear Reagan tell it), with the help of the CIA, promptly launched a wave of death-squad terrorist activity that led to the death of far more than the documented 2,400 people, taking 400 Indian villages right off the map in the process. The people of Guatemala are not fools; they know who was behind the Rios Montt coup, and they know that the CIA was behind the death squads (a death-squad training and management document which the CIA has admitted to having written, was discovered by the press in Latin America and was widely publicized).

  So how does the rhetoric of "democratic values" and "respect for human rights" and "non-intervention in the affairs of other nations" sound to Guatemalans?

• In 1990, the Sandanista government of Nicaragua stood for re-election. The leftist Sandanistas, which had inherited the second poorest country in the hemisphere, a nation bereft of development and thoroughly looted by a corrupt Somosa regime (which had been installed by the U.S. government many years before), were poised to win a free and fair election. They were running well ahead in the polls, because they had achieved significant gains in the alleviation the grinding ignorance, misery and isolation of the poor rural population, in spite of a war conducted against them by the Reagan administration, which itself was a direct violation of American law (the Contra element in the Iran-Contra Scandal).

  George Bush Sr., by then president, did everything he could think of to subvert the Sandanista regime and swing the elctions, including mining the harbors (an act declared illegal by the World Court). George just couldn't stand the thought of a left-wing, anti-American government actually getting re-elected in a free and fair election right on his doorstep, so he made it very clear to the Nicaraguans that they were being made an offer they couldn't refuse: Vote out the Sandanista government or face Cuba-style sanctions. The Sandanistas were narrowly defeated, and the next day after the elections, there was an eerie quiet in the streets of Managua, the capital. There were no wild post-election celebrations as there normally are in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan people understood full well that they had been strong-armed by the United States.

  In 2001, the Sandanistas, who twice before had voluntarily surrendered power when voted out of office, once again stood a good chance of being elected to power. George Bush Junior renewed his father's threat. The result, again, was the narrow defeat of the Sandanistas. Again, no post-election celebrations. The Nicaraguans know full well why they have the repressive right-wing leadership that they do. They know who strong-armed them.

  So how does American noise about "free and fair elections," and "respecting the right of self-determination" sound to Nicaraguans?

These are just a few of the many dozens of incidents, worldwide, of the gross hypocrisy of the American government and the ignorance of the American people. I could have made this list much, much longer - book length, in fact. Indeed, others have. But this list is intended to illustrate the point - America cannot, with any reasonable hope of success, go on doing what it has been doing in the world and expect the world to continue to tolerate it. It is not surprising, then, that the victims and their terrorist allies will strike back with the only means available to them. This is particularly true as long as America continues to stagnate culturally, economically and politically, while the rest of the world moves forward and grows ever stronger and more powerful.

If the United States wants to cease being a prime target for terrorism, Americans need to fix the foreign policy problems that make the U.S. so hated and such an inviting target. In other words, the United States needs to put its moral money where its mouth is, and start being what it claims to be.

In view of this, here is my four-point plan for ending the problem of terror in America and the rest of the world:

• First, we need to recognize that "an eye for an eye" will, in the words of Mohandes Gandhi, "only end up making the whole world blind." We must accept, whether we like it or not, that revenge attacks on an essentially powerless Islamic nation such as Afghanistan will only succeed in inflaming Islamic passions all over the world, and that others, sympathetic because of what America has done to them as well, could well join in a terrorist response. This will make life difficult for America at the very least, because as big and rich as it is, free trade and globalization has made it just as dependent on the rest of the world as is any other nation. At worst, it could lead to a new world war - a war between the west and all of Islam, a fifth of all humanity. Going to war against a defenseless country like Afghanistan is pointless, as we can't hope to win it, any more than the colonialists of the 19th century were able to assert their imperialism in Afghanistan. All the Special Forces troops in America will never find Bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan, and we'll never displace the Taliban permanently, because our very act of going to war against them will increase their support and bring aid to them from all over the world. They will simply melt away into the countryside, and wait for an opportunity to re-emerge. This isn't acquiescence to terrorism, it is simply a recognition of life as it really is, and a reasoned pragmatism.

• Second, we need to acknowledge and fix our own gross, glaring hypocrisy. As outlined above, our behavior in the rest of the world invites, as retaliation, the very terrorist atrocities that we have seen visited upon us. For a half century, we have recklessly sown the wind, and it shouldn't surprise us that we are now forced to reap the whirlwind. We need a foreign policy that genuinely pursues the interests of the poor rather than the rich, the powerless rather than the powerful, the repressed rather than the repressors, the people rather than the elite who seek to control them. This isn't "blaming the victim," it is merely accepting responsibility for our own hypocritical arrogance and the reaction in the world that it naturally causes. The longer we engage in selfishly motivated covert behavior and the assertion of authoritarian governance abroad, the worse, and the longer, the period of "blowback" will be.

• Third, we need to undertake nothing less than the intellectual and moral refurbishing of our civilization. We can do this by recognizing that bigotry and ignorance, parading as religious doctrine, whether at home or abroad, is still bigotry and ignorance. Religious fundamentalism of all stripes, Christian and Islamic both included, can only flourish in an atmosphere of ignorance, intolerance and blind obedience. To counter that blind obedience, bigotry and ignorance, we need to teach reason, logic, critical thinking skills, and the fundamentals of philosophy right from the very first grade through the end of our public schooling, and do it with rigor. This can be fun, engaging and interesting, and need not be done at the expense of teaching other needed skills and knowledge - it can be done by simply teaching what we already teach, but using the "Socratic Method." By the third or fourth grade, the formal elements of critical thinking and philosophy should be introduced, and integrated into the Socratic Method, so that students come to understand very well the nature of fallacious thinking and learn how to both detect it and avoid it habitually. By teaching philosophy, we will renew our commitment to the egalitarian and compassionate values of the Enlightenment, and we can refurbish our own civilization both morally and intellectually, and inspire the rest of the world to do the same. In so doing, we and the rest of the world would deprive fundamentalism, of all kinds, of that which nourishes it - ignorance and the blind obedience that ignorance encourages to leaders and doctrines, both political and religious. We need to rediscover and re-emphasise, both domestically and in our foreign policy, the human values of the Enlightenment - the notions of liberty, trans-cultural brotherhood and egalitarianism, not the elitism, greed and arrogant disregard for fundamental human rights that began a half century ago, but became popular during the Reagan administration and that have been ascendant in American culture ever since.

• Fourth, we need to recognize that moments of great distress are not the time to debate the surrender of civil liberties. The fear and horror of the moment can and will cause us to make commitments we will live to regret in the long term. The dirty little secret of the intelligence community is that it analyzes only five percent of the intelligence it is currently gathering. What is needed isn't more information, inevitably gathered at the expense of civil liberties, but it is more and better analysis. And we don't need new criminal laws, either. The ones we have are quite adequate to deal with terrorists. We simply need better analytical tools of existing information and better enforcement of existing laws. The politicians know that. So when they ask us to surrender our basic civil rights, so they can better watch us, we should be suspcious. We should be very, very suspicious. Thomas Jefferson foresaw this dilemma and had little patience for those who would eagerly surrender their freedoms to it. He was fond of saying that "He who would give up a little freedom to gain a little order will lose both and deserves neither." And in surrendering our freedom, we are voluntarily imposing upon ourselves the very oppression that the terrorists would love to impose on us if they could. Surrender of our civil liberties for a mess of pottage is what terrorists would love to see happen. They win, we lose. Just as they had planned.

Postscript... And Some Predictions

In addition, the terrorists, who know us better than we know ourselves, have won. They got one of the main things they wanted. They have caused us to surrender our freedom. They couldn't punish us with their own brand of tyranny, so they have gotten us to foolishly surrender them to our own conniving neo-fascist politicians, so we will punish ourselves.

The cynically and disingenously misnamed "U.S.A. Patriot Act" of 2001 was passed by congress and has been gleefully signed into law by George W. Bush Junior, a man who himself once said in reference to a satirist-critic that "some people have too much freedom." It contains provisions that make the CIA in essence a secret police force, by giving it the authority to spy on Americans at home, and giving the FBI the power to arrest and hold Americans in secret, just like the KGB once spied on and arrested Soviet citizens secretly. Worse, the act also creates the authority for secret trials, conducted outside the scrutiny of the press, much like what occurred regularly against dissidents in the Soviet Union. The police tell us that this isn't a problem if we just simply trust them, but they have clearly shown us, as recently happened in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere, that such trust is clearly not warranted.

Yet for all the seriousness of the threat to civil liberties these provisions represent, none of these abuses of authority would have prevented the events of September 11, 2001. Just as I predicted, those events proved to be used as a pretext to motivate us to surrender some of our most cherished freedoms - for the duration of a "war" that will prove to be as endless as the "war" on drugs. And all these abuses would have been very familiar to the founding fathers of the American republic. They are among the abuses that the American Revolution was fought to end. They are among the abuses in which Americans once prided themselves in being different, and better, than the rest of the world. So now in America, we are no different than the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the real causes of the terror, as discussed above, have not been addressed or even examined. As always, the conservatives and fundamentalist Christians continue to scapegoat rather than address the real problems. The terrorists have won and they couldn't be happier - and the sad part is that Americans don't even realize that their own leader has become the poster-child for terrorist recruitment.

Some predictions. I'm predicting that none of the recommendations of this essay will ever be adopted. And because they won't, I'm going to make some predictions as to what will be the result, each recommendation listed above leading to a prediction here - and remember, you read it here first:

• First, our legitimization of both "preventative" strikes and massive retribution as a national foreign policy already has and will continue to lead to other governments to use it as a precedent for their own misbehavior, of which we are publicly disapproving. It will cause increasing level of international lawlessness, some of which will be directed at us. This is only the beginning - other nations will use our behavior in the "war" on terrorism as a precedent for their own agendas, many of which will be inimicable to our interests. An eye for an eye does indeed only end up making the whole world blind.

• Second, our glaring hypocrisy, which is continuing to be an irritant to the rest of the world, will continue to foster terrorist movements around the world and "blowback" for Americans living, traveling and working abroad. They will continue to attack American as well as foreign interests allied with America. They'll use the many examples of our continuing hypocrisy in the recruitment of new suicide bombers, footsoldiers, technical experts and subversives. The number of incidents will only increase in the long term - and Americans will grow increasingly insecure, both at home and abroad. Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden will continue their nefarious work, and support for them, particularly in the Islamic world, will only increase. The more we use covert operations to repress other peoples, the more "blowback" will eventually come back to haunt us in the long term. Iran is a good example of what is to come. And Americans will continue to be puzzled as to why this continues.

• Third, instead of doing the moral heavy lifting of refurbishing our commitment to the moral and philosophical values of the Enlightenment, and helping to spread that commitment to modernity to the rest of the world, we'll cave in to the neo-conservatives and fundamentalists in our own ranks, and continue to "Christianize" our political and cultural institutions - including adopting the Christian brand of that same repression - with the inevitable result that Islamic fundamentalists will continue to see themselves increasingly under threat from the "infidel" hordes, both in America and elsewhere. That will only add to their paranoia and increase their own fundamentalism abroad as well as at home - and foster a nasty, brutish anti-Islamic bigotry here in America. Tensions between the two religions will continue to increase at home and abroad. Ultimately, the extremists in both camps will begin to see the obviously rising tension as a sign of "end times" and use it as an excuse to militarize. If allowed to go far enough, both sides may eventually even use proxies to go to war with each other. Both will, without a doubt, increase their use of terrorism against each other. But on "our" side, of course, we'll just call them "freedom fighters." Eventually, Pakistani president Musharaf's prediction of an "iron curtain" descending between Islam and the West will come true.

• Fourth, the "War on Terrorism" and the political repression it has made possible in America will never end. For the reasons that I have cited above, because of "blowback," the problem of terrorism will actually increase, with the result that the fascist tendencies of the far right here in America will continue to use it as an excuse to circumscribe civil liberties here even more than they have. Among the first liberties to go will be the right to privacy - FBI monitoring of email will become universal - and Big Brother will start watching our travels, our purchases (especially books), our social relationships and our political leanings. Especially our political leanings. The "U.S.A. Patriot Act" will not only never be repealed, it will be strengthened to more effectivly abolish the Bill of Rights than it does now. It will come to be widely used to spy on political dissidents who have nothing to do with terrorism.

Remember, you read it here first. Bookmark this page. Come back often and re-read this essay. I am quite cofident that you'll see that I'm right. I wish it weren't going to end up like this, but of course it will. We just don't have the stomach for doing the hard work and making the hard choices that need to be made. And in the end, we'll all pay the price.

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