The September 11 attacks have been revealed as a last gasp of a fading, cult-like twentieth-century vision, not as the wave of the future. They were the equivalent of the frenetic dashing to and fro of a chicken already beheaded. Al-Qaeda’s core assumptions have been refuted by subsequent events and above all in 2011 by the Arab Spring.
Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.
All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.
Second, it has been demonstrated that the leading edge in political change in the Arab world is relatively secular youth who support labor unions and dignity for working people– i.e. that the most effective revolutionaries are a kind of Arab New Left, not small cells of fundamentalist terrorists. Muslim fundamentalist political parties may benefit from the political opening achieved by the Arab New Left youth movements, but they have mostly tagged along behind the latter.
Third, it has been shown that the United States and Western Europe can be constrained to support the overthrow of even pro-Western dictators if the masses persistently come out and demand democratic change. That is, it is not necessary to attack the US militarily in order to achieve political transition in pro-American regimes such as that of Mubarak.
Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.
Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.
Fourth, it has been demonstrated that most publics in the Arab world see parliamentary democracy as the most suitable political system going forward. They are thus rejecting the Leninist critique of parliaments as mere tools of oppression by the rich and as ultimately undemocratic because only representative– a critique that had been taken into both leftist and Muslim fundamentalist Arab ideologies. The dream of direct democracy has over and over again revealed itself to be a mere illusion enabling a ferocious dictatorship. Qaddafi even maintained that he had stepped down from power and wasn’t ruling, an absurd assertion credited by his more gullible useful idiots in the West. No one has suffered more from the anti-democratic utopianism of the twentieth century, which most Arab countries implemented on becoming independent from their colonial masters (the British, French and Italians). But the age of dictators and Supreme Guides who incarnated at once the will of the people and the will of God is passing in the Middle East, leaving authoritarian movements like al-Qaeda in the dust of history.
Ironically, American politicians attempted to pull the wool over our eyes by saying that al-Qaeda hated us for our values. But it turns out that the Arabs are now the peoples sacrificing most for a rule of law, accountability, transparency, and parliamentary governance. One wonders, indeed, if they do not now value those things more than most Americans.
The decade kicked off by the September 11 attacks has been a nightmare for the United States, from which we strive and fail to awake. The attacks themselves were an exercise in mass terror, and among the more effective such operations in modern history. They were intended to have one of two consequences. One possibility was that they would draw the US into the Middle East, as the Soviets had been drawn into Afghanistan, which would allow al-Qaeda and its allies to mire its troops in a fruitless and enervating guerrilla war. (It has been widely noted that the Reagan administration had been unwise to enlist radical Muslim organizations in the anti-Soviet jihad in the first place, giving them the idea that they could take on superpowers.)
Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan visited Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996:
” It seems Osama bin Laden had a long-term strategy. He told me personally that he can’t go and fight the Americans and their country. But if he manages to provoke them and bring them to the Middle East and to their Muslim worlds, where he can find them or fight them on his own turf, he will actually teach them a lesson.”
The other possibility was that the US would decide that imperial micro-management of the Middle East was not worth the cost, and would withdraw from the region, thus allowing the overthrow of their clients among the Arab governments. The entire ideology was never more than a crackpot vision, entirely unrealistic and all the more violent for that. (A corollary is that one reason the US was not attacked again on that scale is that 9/11 was bait, and George W. Bush took the bait.)
The US public responded nobly to the attacks, but US elites replied with perfidy. Americans pulled together, so that feelings of racial alienation declined. They were careful not to blame Muslims in general, and remembered that American Muslims were among the victims. They were ready to sacrifice to make their country safe.
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.
The political leaders of the United States refused to look in a cleared-eyed way at the roots of Middle Eastern anger at Washington, and they missed the opportunity to deprive al-Qaeda of its recruiting tools. Had the US moved the region quickly to a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, it would have resolved 80% of the dissatisfaction with the US. Had it lifted the blockade on medicine and chlorine in Iraq, it would have forestalled charges of being implicated in the deaths of half a million children. But the Bush administration believed in beating people into submission, not in working toward political compromises that might repair the American reputation.
At home, our politicians, bureaucrats and even many judges actively pursued a profound betrayal of the US constitution and its bill of rights, virtually overturning the fourth amendment right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure of private correspondence and effects. Nearly a million Americans were put on a travel watch list and their travel often interfered with, most of them for no reason other than that they had attended peaceful demonstrations. The US government advocated for torture, assassination, and extra-judicial kidnapping. Via Abu Ghraib it became the world’s largest purveyor of prison pornography. A vast and labyrinthine national security state was constructed that appears to be under no one’s control, and the intelligence estimates of which are too numerous and too closely guarded for them ever to be given practical effect by our legislators.
The al-Qaeda masterminds of September 11, now mostly deceased or incarcerated, imagined that they would destroy the US as an imperial power and would go on to take power in the Middle East. They were wrong on both fronts, being megalomaniacs and having no sense of reality. They were reduced to irrelevancy in the region, however, by leftist youth movements such as April 6 in Egypt.
In and of themselves, they had little impact on the United States, perhaps taking a point off economic growth in 2001-2002. Their danger for the US was that they were used as a pretext by a coterie of powerful American nationalists tied to right wing billionaires, who, like termites, were eager to gnaw away at the foundations of the rule of law, individual rights, and basic liberties on the domestic scene. In that regard, September 11 was not primarily an event in US foreign policy, but rather a launching pad for domestic forces of the worst sort, who could neutralize public opinion by constantly frightening them with alleged Muslim terrorists. The US took a turn to the far right ten years ago, toward a praetorian state of perpetual war, a society where workers were forestalled from unionizing, a society where the government routinely spied on phone records and emails, a society where warrantless surveillance became routine, a society where basic rights such as habeas corpus were placed in doubt, a society that hid from itself its own methods of empire– torture, disappearance, bombing raids on civilian cities with no shred of international legal justification.
Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.
9. You really don’t want David relentlessly making fun of you in revenge; ask Madonna.
8. David has survived that thing on his head for years, he can survive some fool wearing pajamas using his mother’s computer to threaten comedians
7. When you are already a loser laughingstock terrorist, you only make yourself look worse by being a touchy terrorist
6. You are giving away that the most effective way to deal with a handful of fanatic fundamentalists trying to hijack Islam is to ridicule them
5. Kind of underlines that you are irrelevant as a terrorist organization when your major target is no longer the Pentagon but rather the host of “Is it Anything?”
4. David is friends with Bruce Willis, who likes to blow things up for no reason
3. You’re kind of giving away that you’re a Leno fan, and after what he did to Conan, that can’t help your reputation in radical circles.
2. You might as well forget about ever being flashed by Drew Barrymore
1. David has entertained the Navy SEALS in Afghanistan, and you really don’t want to get on their list … ooops, it may be too late…
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said on his arrival in Kabul that the US could be on the verge of defeating al-Qaeda, and could do so in the wake of the killing of Usama Bin Laden by keeping the pressure on in Afghanistan, northwest Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
‘…explained his reasoning saying there are between 10 to 20 key al-Qaida leaders in areas like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa and tracking them down would mean the defeat of the terror organization. “We have undermined their ability to conduct 9-11-type attacks,” he said. “We have them on the run. Now is the moment, following what happened to [Osama] bin Laden to put maximum pressure on them, because I do believe if we continue this effort we can cripple al-Qaida as a threat. Panetta said al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is most likely in hiding in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area. ‘
Panetta’s way of thinking about al-Qaeda is welcome in the sense that he is depicting it as a small network with only a few capable leaders (10 to 20). After years of getting the scale of al-Qaeda wrong, we should by now realize that despite its widespread tiny cells, it is a miniscule organization, if it can even be called an organization.
But thinking about al-Qaeda as an organization to which entrepreneurial leadership is key is itself problematic. Most al-Qaeda plots have been relatively low-tech and frankly have been mediocre, such as the plan to attack tourist hotels in Jordan in fall of 2000, which was finally undertaken in fall 2005. What did that accomplish? It redoubled the insistence of the Jordanian government on cooperating with the US in the fight against al-Qaeda. It made al-Qaeda deeply unpopular in Jordan, and that unpopularity attached also to some other Muslim fundamentalist groups. It may well have helped lead to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-proclaimed Jordanian “al-Qaeda” leader active in Iraq, on whom US military men implausibly blamed a majority of attacks in Iraq in that period.
When Zarqawi was killed in spring, 2006, in Iraq it had no effect whatsoever on the rate of the bombings and other killings claimed by radical Muslim organizations in that country. Indeed, the rest of 2006 was the most violent period in 21st century Iraqi history. This outcome was because there were many angry Sunni Arabs in Iraq perfectly willing and able to take up the kind of plots and attacks that were Zarqawi’s trademark.
So here is how you really defeat al-Qaeda:
1. Stop over-estimating it. The organization, despite having one big success at mass murder, is tiny and full of marginal personalities. It should be a concern of the FBI and Interpol, not of the US Secretary of Defense.
2. Don’t depend on private armies, including ‘contractors’. Ronald Reagan’s deployment of the Mujahidin and their Arab allies against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s created al-Qaeda in the first place. Likewise Reagan used right wing death squads in Nicaragua. He seems to have liked to make an end run around the constitution that way. Panetta showed pride in the supposedly apolitical and professional American military in his talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But the US is increasingly willing to mobilize private rightwing militias and mercenaries for military purposes, which likely will create more al-Qaedas. Military actions should be the province of the Department of Defense.
3. Keep a light US military footprint in places where the US is unpopular. Al-Qaeda began with its fight against the Soviet Union, then occupying Afghanistan, and with an alliance with the US. The illegal US invasion of Iraq and subsequent military occupation of that country gave an opening for violent and unscrupulous men to create an al-Qaeda branch in that country of some significance, and created a recruitment tool for manipulative al-Qaeda recruiters.
4. Support Palestinian statehood and immediate full human rights for Palestinians. The Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 now have millions of descendants, millions of them lacking citizenship in any state and therefore lacking ‘the right to have rights.’ Some 40 percent of the people of Gaza are refugees from what is now Israel, many of them still living in camps. On top of all that, the Israelis won’t even let them export their made goods, keeping them down economically. Most Muslims sympathize with the Palestinians and resent the way they have been treated, and the unresolved character of this dispute is a major driver of radicalism. This resentment is a potent recruitment tool for the radicals. Al-Qaeda itself is manipulative and insincere, but it has had some success in recruiting from among ordinary young men..
Instead of doing the above, the US is unwisely pressuring Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq to allow thousands of US troops to stay after next January, despite the obvious prospect that their presence will further destabilize Iraq. If you wanted to destroy al-Qaeda, getting out of Iraq militarily would be an excellent first step. Arranging for a just settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict would be the nail in the coffin of such recruiting.
There were never many radicals in the Muslim world, and what little success they have had depended on being able constantly to recruit new blood, preferably from the educated classes. The US should not allow itself to be blackmailed by these small cells of monsters with C4 explosives. But where doing the right thing anyway also has the side effect of reducing resentment, that is yet another reason to do it. The resentments generated by the clear injustices done to the Palestinians, and by big US military footprints in Arab and Muslim lands set the US off on the wrong foot with many in the region. That rift is reparable, but Americans and their regional friends have to recognize it and want to repair it.
The way to defeat al-Qaeda is not to kill 20 leaders. It is not to create an atmosphere in which such hothouse movements thrive.
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley on Sunday, and he sees a diminished American superpower on the horizon. Gates foresaw the winding down of the Afghanistan War, a slow grinding ultimate victory for NATO in Libya, fairly deep cuts in the war department budget on the horizon, but a residual force of American troops in Iraq. He again lambasted NATO allies for not keeping up with the massive US spending on armaments and military technology. He insisted on the US remaining a superpower, because of its interests in the world, and maintained that it has been a world power since the late 19th century.
While it is true that the US conquered the Philippines in the aftermath of the war with Spain in the very late 19th and early 20th century, it is incorrect to see the US as a great power in that period. Despite its one large colonial possession and its informal interventions in Latin America, the US was a relatively minor player in world affairs and had a small military. Holland, with its Indonesian possessions and its great navy, was probably of more consequence.
Gates’s idea of our historical arc distorts our history as a relatively un-militarized Republic until World War II and its aftermath, when we became a nuclear-armed behemoth. And enormous outlays on weapons, technology and war in just the last decade, as Karen Greenberg points out, further distort this arc. Rather than Gates’s steady state over a century, we should see US militarization as a steep upward graph with a stark vertical denouement at the far right.
Gates confirmed that the US State Department has for the past few weeks been negotiating directly with the Taliban. He seemed to expect something eventually to come of those negotiations. NATO allies are afraid that the US will go for a quick fix at the upcoming Bonn conference. It should be noted that the US government probably had preferred that those negotiations remain secret, but they were outed by our erratic and often hateful so-called ally, Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai.
As the Guardian noted, the direct talks with Taliban leaders are likely an outcome of the killing of al-Qaeda leader Usamah Bin Laden.
Outgoing US ambassador Karl Eikenberry blasted Karzai over the weekend in Herat for the various uncomplimentary things Karzai has had to say about the US in recent months, including branding them as on the verge of becoming foreign occupiers. Eickenberry according to State Department cables revealed by wikileaks thinks Karzai is flaky and “paranoid.”
The big debate in Washington is how many US troops President Obama should take out of Afghanistan this year, beginning in July. Senator Carl Levin has suggested 15,000. While it had been thought last year that the incoming Tea Party Republicans would attempt to forestall the drawdown, the Afghanistan War has suddenly become so unpopular that Republican presidential hopefuls are beginning to campaign against it. It appears that Obama will get pressure from both the right and the left to begin a relatively steep withdrawal. Gates clearly does not like this idea. He points out, though, that Obama put an extra 65,000 troops into Afghanistan, so there were be a lot of US military personnel in that country next year this time, no matter what.
Gates says he thinks Afghanistan will end as Iraq did, with the local government and army supplying just good enough security as the US draws down. There are many contradictions here. First, Gates doesn’t think Iraq is ready for a complete US withdrawal, even now. Second, the Iraqi military and Iraq officers and officials are from a literate, industrialized society and have capacities that their Afghan equivalents mostly do not. Third, al-Maliki leads the majority Shiites of the country and has good relations with the Kurds. Karzai’s constituency seems notably less broad, and the forces arrayed against him larger and more determined. Fourth, Gates’s conviction that 25% of Afghanistan is now under the effective control of the Afghanistan National Army and that turning over the rest of the country to it, province by province, is unproblematic, is probably wildly and uncharacteristically optimistic.
Speaking of Iraq, Gates is campaigning with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to make a deal to put some number of US troops into Iraq in January 2012, despite the Status of Forces Agreement that specifies all US troops out of that country by the end of 2011. Gates portrays Iraq as beset by radical Shiite militias acting on behalf of Iran, and maintains that they are now more dangerous than ‘al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.’ The most active Shiite political movements in Iraq are, however, the most nativist, and they typically dislike Iran. That scruffy urban street youth in Nasiriya or Diwaniya following Muqtada al-Sadr can be seen as cat’s paws of an Iran they viscerally mistrust is a longstanding American fallacy. Iraq does not need US troops to protect it from its own majority Shiites. Al-Maliki himself is head of the fundamentalist Shiite al-Da`wa (Islamic Mission) Party, and has warm relations with Iran (even warmer since Wahhabi Saudi Arabia put troops into Shiite-majority Bahrain).
As for US troops being killed in Iraq, it is the very prospect of Gates succeeding in keeping them there that has caused violence against them to spike. When it was understood that they were leaving, the attacks on them declined enormously. (Likewise, the press to somehow keep Western troops in Iraq has caused renewed violence against Western interests generally. Today there was a bombing of a French embassy car in south Baghdad that wounded 7 Iraqis.
Although Gates professed himself optimistic that al-Maliki would ask for US troops for 2012, al-Maliki himself has kicked it to his cabinet, which is made up of representatives of the country’s major political blocs. I would give the chances of the cabinet coming to a decision on this matter in time for it to matter as low. That is, they will likely keep discussing the matter past January 2012 when all US troops are out, and then putting some back in would be a hot potato no one would be willing to take up.
Gates is worried about big across-the-board cuts to the Defense Department budget (which is as big as the next 20 or so countries combined). He says he has grown disillusioned with ‘wars of choice’ like that in Iraq, and says any president who goes to war again in Africa or the Middle East should have his head examined.
We are witnessing a belated fin-de-siecle in American confidence (or perhaps we should call it what it is, arrogance), exemplified in a tired old Realist ushering the US, a bit against his instincts, out of superpowerdom and into an age of limits and multilateralism. Even the Libya War, of the prosecution of which he has been bitingly critical, will turn out all right, he thinks, because NATO will stay in the fight and remain united. That is a multilateralist sentiment. It isn’t what we were hearing from Washington in 2003. One has a sense of an age passing, and to the extent that the age was characterized by unilateral adventurism, its demise will benefit us all.
Ooops, a golden oldie from 2009 thrown up by mistake.
Tom Ridge appears to be alleging in a new book that the Bush administration put political pressure on him to raise the terrorism threat level in fall of 2004 so as to help George W. Bush’s chances of reelection.
Ridge may have felt bad about that SNAFU, and so resisted similar pressures in October. The book is not out yet, so precise details are not yet available.
Frances Townsend, Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration figures are denying the charge. But, of course, they are seasoned liars and so their denials don’t count for much.
Between 70,000 and 100,000 members of the Sadrist Shiite political bloc rallied in Baghdad on Thursday, demanding that the some 47,000 US troops still in Iraq leave altogether. Sadrist leader Muqtada al-Sadr says that if the troops remain, he will reactivate his Mahdi Army militia. It is a powerful threat. But in some ways, his political clout is more important than any such prospect of renewed paramilitary activity. It was Sadr’s support that allowed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a government late last fall, and the government could easily fall if Sadr pulled out.
Al-Maliki said a couple of weeks ago that he would go to each of the major political blocs for advice on whether to request a new agreement with the US to leave some troops in Iraq. This statement was widely misinterpreted, I think, in the West. What al-Maliki was actually saying was that he refused unilaterally to extend the US troop presence. The main US hope for keeping American soldiers in Iraq is that al-Maliki would ask them to do so unilaterally, acting sort of presidentially. Instead, he has signalled that he will do no such thing, but will act as a prime minister, beholden to his coalition in parliament. I can’t imagine that any of the major blocs in parliament with the possible exception of the Kurds will advise al-Maliki to do a new SOFA that retains American soldiers in his country. And so it seems to me most likely that the US will have to leave, in part because of sheer political inertia in Iraq, as well as because the Sadrists have made it very clear that a US departure is a prerequisite for social peace. The Mahdi Army militia roiled the country in 2004 and could do so again. The US sees them as a proxy for Iran, but this view is largely incorrect. They are Shiite Iraqi nativists and don’t like foreigners in general, sort of an Iraqi Tea Party.
Now Pakistan is kicking out US special forces troops, showing its government’s displeasure with unilateral security operations on Pakistani soil. This move is in part a reaction against the Raymond Davis case, where a CIA operative shot two Pakistanis in broad daylight. But it also responds to the US incursion into Pakistan, when SEALS killed Usamah Bin Laden.
And as Iraqis and Pakistanis sought an end to US troop presence in their countries, the US House of Representatives surprised itself by almost passing a resolution urging a speed-up of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. the measure failed by only 12 votes, garnering 204 votes, 28 from Republicans. This is substantially more than a similar measure gained last summer in a Democratic-controlled House.
President Obama’s plan to begin drawing down US troops in July, 2011, had originally been controversial, opposed by generals like David Petraeus and by most Republicans. There was speculation that the Republican majority that came in last fall would attempt to stop the withdrawal. But the interminable Afghanistan War, the clear unreliability of President Hamid Karzai, and the killing of Usamah Bin Laden have all changed the political landscape so that momentum is building in the House for a quicker withdrawal than Obama initially proposed. Vice President Joe Biden has spoken about 2014 as an end date for the US military effort in Afghanistan, but it is unclear that the electorate will be patient for that long. Nearly 60 percent of Americans want out.
Younger Americans cannot remember when the US was not at war. Could we be seeing the glimmerings of a time, not long into the future, when no US soldiers will be fighting and dying anywhere on the globe? And, how long before a weary public finally demands that the bloated US war department budget finally be reduced, commensurate with the country’s increasingly straitened circumstances? (No other country beggars itself with military spending as the US does, and most do better economically and seem perfectly secure militarily).
Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
“A Moment of Opportunity”
U.S. Department of State
May 19, 2011
As Prepared for Delivery –
I want to thank Hillary Clinton, who has traveled so much these last six months that she is approaching a new landmark – one million frequent flyer miles. I count on Hillary every day, and I believe that she will go down as of the finest Secretaries of State in our nation’s history.
The State Department is a fitting venue to mark a new chapter in American diplomacy. For six months, we have witnessed an extraordinary change take place in the Middle East and North Africa. Square by square; town by town; country by country; the people have risen up to demand their basic human rights. Two leaders have stepped aside. More may follow. And though these countries may be a great distance from our shores, we know that our own future is bound to this region by the forces of economics and security; history and faith.
Today, I would like to talk about this change – the forces that are driving it, and how we can respond in a way that advances our values and strengthens our security. Already, we have done much to shift our foreign policy following a decade defined by two costly conflicts. After years of war in Iraq, we have removed 100,000 American troops and ended our combat mission there. In Afghanistan, we have broken the Taliban’s momentum, and this July we will begin to bring our troops home and continue transition to Afghan lead. And after years of war against al Qaeda and its affiliates, we have dealt al Qaeda a huge blow by killing its leader – Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden was no martyr. He was a mass murderer who offered a message of hate – an insistence that Muslims had to take up arms against the West, and that violence against men, women and children was the only path to change. He rejected democracy and individual rights for Muslims in favor of violent extremism; his agenda focused on what he could destroy – not what he could build.
Bin Laden and his murderous vision won some adherents. But even before his death, al Qaeda was losing its struggle for relevance, as the overwhelming majority of people saw that the slaughter of innocents did not answer their cries for a better life. By the time we found bin Laden, al Qaeda’s agenda had come to be seen by the vast majority of the region as a dead end, and the people of the Middle East and North Africa had taken their future into their own hands.
That story of self-determination began six months ago in Tunisia. On December 17, a young vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi was devastated when a police officer confiscated his cart. This was not unique. It is the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world – the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity. Only this time, something different happened. After local officials refused to hear his complaint, this young man who had never been particularly active in politics went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.
Sometimes, in the course of history, the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has built up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia, as that vendor’s act of desperation tapped into the frustration felt throughout the country. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets, then thousands. And in the face of batons and sometimes bullets, they refused to go home – day after day, week after week, until a dictator of more than two decades finally left power.
The story of this Revolution, and the ones that followed, should not have come as a surprise. The nations of the Middle East and North Africa won their independence long ago, but in too many places their people did not. In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of the few. In too many countries, a citizen like that young vendor had nowhere to turn – no honest judiciary to hear his case; no independent media to give him voice; no credible political party to represent his views; no free and fair election where he could choose his leader.
This lack of self determination – the chance to make of your life what you will – has applied to the region’s economy as well. Yes, some nations are blessed with wealth in oil and gas, and that has led to pockets of prosperity. But in a global economy based on knowledge and innovation, no development strategy can be based solely upon what comes out of the ground. Nor can people reach their potential when you cannot start a business without paying a bribe.
In the face of these challenges, too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression. Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else.
But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and diversion won’t work anymore. Satellite television and the Internet provide a window into the wider world – a world of astonishing progress in places like India, Indonesia and Brazil. Cell phones and social networks allow young people to connect and organize like never before. A new generation has emerged. And their voices tell us that change cannot be denied.
In Cairo, we heard the voice of the young mother who said, “It’s like I can finally breathe fresh air for the first time.”
In Sanaa, we heard the students who chanted, “The night must come to an end.”
In Benghazi, we heard the engineer who said, “Our words are free now. It’s a feeling you can’t explain.”
In Damascus, we heard the young man who said, “After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity.”
Those shouts of human dignity are being heard across the region. And through the moral force of non-violence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades.
Of course, change of this magnitude does not come easily. In our day and age – a time of 24 hour news cycles, and constant communication – people expect the transformation of the region to be resolved in a matter of weeks. But it will be years before this story reaches its end. Along the way, there will be good days, and bad days. In some places, change will be swift; in others, gradual. And as we have seen, calls for change may give way to fierce contests for power.
The question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds. For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce, and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.
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