What do the terrorists want?

• Author: Payne, James L.
• Position: Essay

The mayhem of 9/11 has been the attention-getting event of modern times, the exclamation point that marks the end of security and the beginning of an age of anxiety. Alas, attention does not imply analysis. The very notoriety of the 9/11 attacks made us all feel we were experts on terrorism, leading us to bypass the need for background research. We knew what the terrorists were up to just by consulting our guts.

Unfortunately, in a stressful conflict situation, guts are a poor guide to understanding the enemy. Participants who respond emotionally are inclined to imagine the worst about opponents and attribute to them all sorts of evil, threatening designs. Then, on the basis of these fears, they take extreme measures that compound the conflict. U.S. policy toward Islamic terrorism is today entrapped in this cycle of misperception and escalation.

The George W. Bush administration and the neoconscrvative architects of its foreign policy have from the beginning insisted on demonizing the terrorist enemy. Swept up by the shock and hysteria of 9/11, this camp leaped to the conclusion that the terrorists are out to conquer the world. Prominent neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle put this view bluntly in their 2003 book An End to Evil. "The terrorists," they say, "espouse an ideology of conquest, just as the Nazis and Soviets did" (277-78). "A radical strain within Islam has declared war on us. This strain seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and its law.... In militant Islam, we face an aggressive ideology of world domination" (42-43).

President Bush expressed this view shortly after 9/11 in a speech to a joint session of Congress: "Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world--and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere" (Bush 2001).

What Does Osama Say?

What evidence supports the idea that the terrorists seek to impose their doctrines on the West? The reader of Frum and Perle's book is surprised to find that to back up their assertion that terrorists seek world domination, they do not present even one quotation from a terrorist leader announcing this aim. This gap in An End to Evil ought to arouse our curiosity. Are terrorists making lots of "we're going to conquer the world" statements that Frum and Perle just didn't bother to collect, or are they saying something else?

To seek an answer, I undertook an analysis of Osama bin Laden's statements. In a useful book, Messages to the World (2005), editor Bruce Lawrence has brought together all of the important and certifiably genuine statements bin Laden issued over the period from 1994 to 2004, twenty-four documents altogether. Using obvious categories, I coded each page, or part thereof, according to the theme bin Laden raises. The results are presented in table 1.

The first surprise is that the topic of imposing fundamentalist Muslim beliefs and practices on the West is essentially absent. With one inconsequential exception--a rote call to Islam, discussed later--this theme does not appear at all. There is no mention of how Western societies should be turned into Muslim ones, and no thought given to what they would look like if they were.

The topic that does appear on page after page, amounting to 72 percent of the total, is criticism of the United States and other Western countries for their aggression against Muslim lands and the need to defend against and punish this aggression. "What America is tasting today," wrote bin Laden shortly after the 9/11 attack, "is but a fraction of what we have tasted for decades. For over eighty years our umma [Islamic community] has endured this humiliation and contempt. Its sons have been killed, its blood has been shed, its holy sanctuaries have been violated, all in a manner contrary to that revealed by God, without anyone listening or responding" (Lawrence 2005, 104). The "Crusader-American alliance," says bin Laden, is "tearing the Islamic world apart and plundering the wealth of Muslims in an unprecedented manner" (89).

Bin Laden may be rigid and subjective in his perceptions, but his point of view is not without substance. Great Britain was the colonial master of many Muslim lands, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and especially Palestine, which, with the approval of the United States, the British turned over to the Jews for the state of Israel in 1948. U.S. military aid and military advisors have blanketed the Middle East for generations. The U.S. military has bases in Djibouti, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. It sent troops to Lebanon twice, in 1958 and 1983, and to Somalia in 1992. The U.S. Sixth Fleet, with forty ships and twenty-one thousand servicemen and women, patrols the eastern Mediterranean, and the Fifth Fleet, with fifteen thousand personnel, patrols the Persian Gulf. Its Cartier Strike Group and Expeditionary Strike Group are poised to deliver military might anywhere throughout the region. This great show of military power may have achieved little in the way of domination, but to a local Muslim it can certainly look vicious and threatening.

Furthermore, American leaders have proclaimed the goal of spreading the American conception of democracy to the world. The neoconservatives have frankly urged the U.S. government to use military force to carry out this goal (see, for example, Kristol and Kagan 1996; Frum and Perle 2003, 278). Some might say this talk about spreading democracy by force is empty rhetoric for the most part, but to the man on the street in the Middle East it can certainly look like an aggressive program to impose American social and cultural values on Muslim lands. Shortly after 9/11, Bush described his war on terrorism as a "crusade," a point that bin Laden didn't miss: "The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouth [that America is waging a crusade against Muslim lands]" (Lawrence 2005, 121).

The second most prominent theme in bin Laden's statements, criticism of Saudi leadership, extends the "defense of Islam" issue. Saudi Arabia implements fundamentalist Muslim doctrines more fully than perhaps any other country in the world. Therefore, a fundamentalist ought to view this regime...