A Challenge that Remains Ungrasped

We can best assess where we are at the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack against the US this week within the broad outlines of the past three decades, which very schematically can be sketched as follows: In the 1980s, Arabs and Americans promoted a campaign of resistance and terror against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In the 1990s, militant Islamists who were galvanized in Afghanistan launched an intermittent terror campaign against American targets around the world. In the current decade, the US has launched a global "war against terrorism," whose central battlefield today, according to George W. Bush, comprises Afghanistan and Iraq.

In retrospect, we can identify two prevalent forces throughout this period: Islamist militancy and criminal terror, and the power and global reach of the American military. They stem from very different values and traditions, aim for different goals, and are not comparable by any moral, political, or motivational standards. Yet they have become the two main protagonists in the battle of our world, the tragically conjoined twins of global warfare.

Our world is much more jittery and dangerous than it was two years ago — did you watch the chemical gas attack simulation in central London a few days ago? — largely because of how these two forces have interacted in recent years. Three things strike me as fascinating and relevant in this respect.

First, the United States is learning, as the Soviets did in Afghanistan, that military power and strong political convictions can never dominate another people's will to remain unoccupied.

Second, the American government's attempt to define its occupation of Iraq as the central battle against global terror is unconvincing to most of the globe — probably because most of the reasons that the US gave for attacking Iraq (mainly the imminent threat of Baghdad-based weapons of mass destruction and terror) have proved to be either false or tendentious.

Third, public opinion in much of the world either silently understands or actively supports the attacks against the Anglo-American occupation forces in Iraq, which are seen as normal expressions of resistance against foreign occupation. Washington's corollary attempt to explain its presence in Iraq as a prompt for pan-Arab freedom and democracy is as unconvincing as its original claim that Iraq threatened the American heartland.

One of the mind-boggling ironies is that among the Islamist militants who are killing Americans in Iraq are the same individuals whom the US financed, trained, and equipped to fight Russians in Afghanistan two decades ago. If an American plane soon is shot down in Iraq with Stinger missiles that the US originally gave Islamist guerrillas to shoot down Russian planes in Afghanistan, the terrible and cruel circle of irony would be completed.

The very different forces of Islamist terrorism and American militarism operate according to peculiarly similar criteria: They see the whole world as their legitimate battlefield; they paint their actions in a context of divine mandates and existential struggles for the triumph of good over evil; they cater explicitly to their public opinions and exaggerate fears and threats from the other and, most troublingly, they repeatedly misdiagnose the motives and miscalculate the reactions of the other. Both cater to narrow domestic audiences that are angry, tormented, fearful, and confused, and behave accordingly.

American militarism and Islamist terror have both failed to win significant global support, and also generally have not brought about the changes they seek in people's values and behavior, or nations' policies. In fact, the opposite may be happening — and this is my candidate for the most important lesson to ponder and absorb this Sept. 11: Islamist terror has galvanized and unleashed a terrible American fury of guns that has devastated lives, shattered existing orders and economies, and brought many Third World regimes into the war against terror. America's military response to Islamist terror, for its part, has instigated worldwide resistance to American political hegemony and dictates, and spurred new recruiting successes for the Islamists.

We have yet to grasp the challenge of identifying the underlying causes of criminal terror and other forms of deviant behavior in the Third World, including the impact of the policies of sovereign states throughout the world. Sept. 11 was a terrible milestone on a path that started decades before and continues today — a continuum of deviant behavior and ill-advised policies by Islamist militants, Arab and Asian governments and political elites, American foreign policy, the world's only active colonial enterprise in Israel, and frightened, volatile publics everywhere.

To designate one or two of these actors as the culprits, while ignoring the full cycle that includes the others to various extents, would only ensure the continuation and the worsening of the present war and its underlying foundation of political and intellectual blindness. We owe it to all those innocent people who have died in the United States, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Israel, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, and other lands to do much better than we have done since Sept. 11, 2001 in accurately diagnosing the full causes of our mutual killing, so that we can bring the mutual killings to an end, instead of simply expanding the battlefields where the killings occur.