The Threat Within

July 28, 2004

By Robert Bruce Ware

Why is it that Osama Bin Laden and his band of 40 thieves have been able to turn us inside out?  Is it because he’s still breathing and 3,000 Americans are not?  Is it because we know he’s going to do it again?  In the run-up to the general election?   Won’t he try to finish what he failed to accomplish when the fourth plane fell short of its target?  Won’t he attack our political system, as the first two planes attacked our economy and as the third attacked our military?  It’s interesting that in the sequence of attacks, our political system came last.  Is that Bin Laden’s ranking, or is it ours?

The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel understood history as a sequence of hegemonic states that he called “world historical nations” (WHN).  Each one rose to power on the strength of its principles, values, and ideals as expressed in its social, economic, and political organizations.  In any historical period, Hegel thought that the state which best embodied freedom and rationality would lead the world, since these principles impart a competitive edge to any society.  To understand that point, one need look no further than the last two hundred years of American history.

But Hegel also warned that as a WHN gives expression to it principles and ideals through its struggles and achievements, it also reveals the limitations of those values, which appear in the form of contradictions or internal conflicts.  The very success of WHNs inevitably brings them into conflict with their core values; their hidden contradictions emerge in the moment of their triumph.  When this happens, they weaken and wither from within, while growing vulnerable from without.

This is the gauntlet that Osama Bin Laden has thrown.  His challenge is not only in the damage that he’s done, or the danger that he presents, but also in the riddle that he poses.  His fascination lies in the failure of our own self-knowledge.  He has attacked us in the place where we are most vulnerable, because it is the point where we have become incompatible with ourselves. 

Bin Laden doesn’t hate us because we cherish freedom.  He hates us because we have forsaken it. We abandoned freedom at the moment when its American embodiment was triumphant, shortly after World War II.  In 1953, the CIA overthrew the pro-western, democratically-elected government of Mohamed Mossadegh because it nationalized the Iranian oil industry.  America installed the Shah and trained Savak, the Iranian secret police that imprisoned, tortured, and murdered Iranians on a disassembly-line basis.  So that the Shah would be able to afford American weaponry, we encouraged him to inflate oil prices in 1972, thereby inspiring OPEC.  It was about that time that we began backing Israel with up to $3 billion per year, which the Israelis used systematically to deny the Palestinians everything that America stands for.

In 1979, religious radicals drew from a deep well of Iranian anger to depose the Shah and establish a fiercely anti-American Islamic republic.  So we backed Saddam Hussein, and armed him with conventional and chemical weapons during his grisly eight-year war with Iran.  The long war ran up massive debts, which motivated Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990.  So we sent Saddam packing, but kept our bases in Saudi Arabia, where we became easy targets for Bin Laden a few years later.  Bin Laden hated our bases only a little more than he hated Saddam, but when we moved our bases to Iraq on the pretext of a Bin Laden-Saddam-cabal, we effectively produced that alliance. We made ourselves targets for those that support either of them, while providing a world-wide windfall for al-Qaeda recruiters.

Since 1953, we have staggered from one misstep to the next.  We have turned the Middle East into one big tar pit, in which we have become more deeply mired with each misstep, and we have made a misstep each time we betrayed our core values.  Since 1953, we have put economic and military interests ahead of political ideals.  Is that why the first two planes attacked our economy, and the third attacked our military?  The fourth one ploughed into Pennsylvania before it could crash into our political system, but, ever since then, we’ve been dismantling our political system all by ourselves.  Having abandoned freedom and democracy abroad, it seemed that we had no choice but to begin abandoning them at home, until it has become difficult to recognize ourselves and our country in any but the most superficial terms.  Now we must speak of freedom constantly in an effort to persuade ourselves that we still know what it means.

A military response is necessary in places like Afghanistan, where the extremists provided us with military targets.  But it is not necessary for them to provide us with military targets, since they are everywhere and nowhere.  We are unlikely to defeat this enemy in strictly military terms. We must defeat them politically, and we will not do that until we stop defeating ourselves.  We must remember what it means to be Americans, and start putting freedom and democracy first, every step of the way.

We must accept responsibility for our past missteps in the Middle East.  We must stop constructing permanent military bases in Iraq and make plans for our complete departure from that country.  We must stop supporting Israel until it abandons all settlements in Palestinian territories, and gives the

Palestinians a real opportunity for freedom, democracy and self-determination.  We must do this not because terrorists desire it, but because our ideals demand it.  Then we must restore traditional American rights and freedoms at home.  We can win this struggle, but not before we realize that we are struggling primarily with ourselves.  We will win only when we are no longer in conflict with our own values and ideals.

Robert Bruce Ware is an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.