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Foreign Affairs
Somebody Else's Civil War
By Michael Scott Doran
Michael Scott Doran taught for three years at the University of Central Florida and is now Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question. This article is adapted from his chapter in How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War, published by PublicAffairs and Foreign Affairs with the support of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Call it a city on four legs
heading for murder. . . .
New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other.
-Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said], "The Funeral of New York," 1971
In the weeks after the attacks of September 11, Americans repeatedly asked, "Why do they hate us?" To understand what happened, however, another question may be even more pertinent: "Why do they want to provoke us?"
The EU's opposition to the merger has highlighted the risks that multinational corporations face as antitrust laws proliferate around the globe. Some analysts have argued that the time has come to harmonize antitrust policy internationally to reduce potential conflicts. That goal is laudable — but not if it means yielding on U.S. antitrust principles, which protect consumers and resist propping up inefficient businesses.
Bin Laden produced a piece of high political theater he hoped would reach the audience that concerned him the most: the umma, or universal Islamic community. The script was obvious: America, cast as the villain, was supposed to use its military might like a cartoon character trying to kill a fly with a shotgun. The media would see to it that any use of force against the civilian population of Afghanistan was broadcast around the world, and the umma would find it shocking how Americans nonchalantly caused Muslims to suffer and die. The ensuing outrage would open a chasm between state and society in the Middle East, and the governments allied with the West — many of which are repressive, corrupt, and illegitimate — would find themselves adrift. It was to provoke such an outcome that bin Laden broadcast his statement following the start of the military campaign on October 7, in which he said, among other things, that the Americans and the British "have divided the entire world into two regions — one of faith, where there is no hypocrisy, and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us."
Polarizing the Islamic world between the umma and the regimes allied with the United States would help achieve bin Laden's primary goal: furthering the cause of Islamic revolution within the Muslim world itself, in the Arab lands especially and in Saudi Arabia above all. He had no intention of defeating America. War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument designed to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers. Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war.
Washington had no choice but to take up the gauntlet, but it is not altogether clear that Americans understand . . .