There is widespread agreement that the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States ushered in a new stage of world history, one distinct from the last 50 or 100 years. Secretary of State Colin Powell has referred to the period since 9-11 as the "post-post-Cold War." NewYork Times columnist Thomas Friedman has described it as "World War III." Many others, citing Samuel Huntington's theory, have portrayed the war as a "clash of civilizations" that has superseded the Cold War clash of ideologies. The war, writes political scientist Louis Rene Beres, is "a civilizational struggle in which a resurgent medievalism now seeks to bring fear, paralysis and death to 'unbelievers.'" Indeed, Osama bin Laden has promoted this view of his actions.
But it's possible to support the vigorous prosecution of the waragainst al-Qaeda and to reject the view that the war itself is the beginning of anew era in world history. In fact, this war is not the first phase of a new stagebut the last phase of an old stage of world history. Al-Qaeda and bin Ladenrepresent the reductio ad absurdum of the anticolonial revolts that shook Asia,Africa, and Latin America during the twentieth century. If the United States cansucceed in destroying al-Qaeda, and if the Bush administration can build on thisvictory in its Mideast diplomacy, the U.S. may not see a recurrence of anorganization like al-Qaeda for decades, if ever. There will still beterrorism--it seems to be an inevitable by-product of a new global communicationsystem that allows a Timothy McVeigh or bin Laden a moment of immortality. Butthere will not be organized international terrorism under the banner of anIslamic jihad.
You have to consider the two very different kinds of wars that were fought inthe twentieth century. World Wars I and II and the Cold War pitted advancedindustrial powers against one another. They were fought over differences inideology, but they were also what Lenin called wars of redivision, the result ofan attempt by second-rung economic powers to use their military might in order togain control of land, peoples, sea-lanes, and natural resources at the expense offirst-rung powers. Of course, al-Qaeda and bin Laden are not waging a world warof redivision: They do not seek to displace the United States atop theinternational division of labor.
The second kind were anticolonial wars and conflicts that pitted revolutionarymovements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America against Britain, Japan, Germany,France, and other colonial powers. The original was, perhaps, China's BoxerRebellion in 1900. After World War I, these movements took heart from WoodrowWilson's call for national self-determination. After World War II, they wereencouraged by Soviet and Chinese support for wars of national liberation. TheFrench were driven from Southeast Asia and Algeria, the British from Africa andthe Mideast, the Japanese from China and Korea; U.S.-backed governments wereousted in Cuba, South Vietnam, and Iran; the Portuguese were driven out ofAfrica; and so on.
Some of the movements--such as those led by Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran andJacobo Arbenz in Guatemala--failed, but a century later there are not manycolonies left, and most of them, like Puerto Rico, are ambivalent about theirstatus. In addition, the United States and Europe, with a few exceptions, havestopped intervening to prop up client regimes threatened by their own people. Yetthere are still political movements, particularly in the Mideast, that derivetheir meaning from these older anticolonial struggles. They are similarhistorically to the monarchical, Catholic, and neofeudal movements (the Carlistsin Spain, for example) that haunted Europe for centuries after the transition toliberal capitalism. Bin Laden's al-Qaeda is such a movement.
There is a direct line of progression, or regression, from the anticolonialmovements in the Mideast and Northern Africa to the post-sixties radical Islamicmovements to al-Qaeda. The post-World War II anticolonial revolutionaries of the1950s, such as Algeria's Ahmed Ben Bella and Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser, weresecular-state socialists who were influenced by the Soviet model of development.Their politics and program came to dominate Syria, Iraq, Libya, the Sudan, andYasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). But while this blend ofArab nationalism and state socialism scored some initial successes, it eventuallyproved to be an abysmal failure. Egypt, once an agriculture exporter, came toproduce less than half of its food. In 1977, Egyptians rioted over food prices.
During the 1970s, the anticolonial left morphed into the radical Islamic rightwing. Some Nasserite leaders like Libya's Muammar Quaddafi and Sudan's Gaafaral-Nimeiry embraced their own bizarre versions of Islam. What was more common wasthe formation of Islamic political groups that challenged the older generation ofArab leaders while adopting much of their underlying political framework. AsOlivier Roy argues in his 1994 book The Failure of Political Islam, these Islamists adopted the Leninist theory of revolution. They blamed the failure of their societies not on their native rulers but on Western exploitation and imperialism--and on Israel's Jews, who were seen as representatives of Western imperialism. Some of the Islamic leaders--such as Egyptian Labor Party General Secretary Adel Hussein--were themselves former leftists. And the movement's leading members were drawn from the same educated classes as the older left-wing movements. Writes Roy: "The prototype of the Islamist cadre is an engineer, born sometime in the 1950s in a city but whose parents were from the country." Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, the leader of al-Qaeda's September 11 terrorist attacks, was an engineer. So was Kuwaiti Ramzi Yousef, who was the leader of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The new movements' program and their vision of society were different from theolder Nasserite movements, but they closely resembled those of Cambodia's KhmerRouge, Peru's Shining Path, and other reactionary utopian movements that claimedthe anticolonial mantle. The radical Islamists of Iran, Algeria, Egypt, andPalestine saw themselves creating an Islamic community that would be governed bythe Sharia, the law of the Koran, and subject only to the will of Allah. Thestate itself would wither away. Indeed, the radical Islamists also lacked anycommon economic program. Some still backed Nasser's brand of state socialism.Others fantasized about Islamic banks that would not charge interest. Others puttheir faith in Allah. As Judith Miller recounts in God Has Ninety-Nine Names, a young supporter of Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) told her: "We want an Islamic state. God will give us food and housing and money when we are guided by Muslims. God will provide."
Over the last two decades, most of these movements and thecountries in which they have seized power have fared poorly. In spite of its oilreserves, Iran has been beset by unemployment and is now facing a revolt from amiddle class weary of living by the Sharia. Sudan is a basket case. Afghanistan'sTaliban collapsed so quickly because it had never gained a real foothold in thecountry. Radical Islamic movements in Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have metwith severe repression and have been diverted away from politics into what Roycalls "neofundamentalism." The only Islamic organization that has posed acontinuing political threat is Hamas, which was formed in 1988 by radicalIslamists opposed to the PLO's acceptance of a two-state solution, and whichsurvives on the inability of Israeli and Palestinian moderates to make good onthe promise of the 1993 Oslo Accords. But Hamas has no chance of realizing itsaim of driving the Jews from Israel.
Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1989, but it didn't assume its currentform until the early 1990s, when he moved to the Sudan. Like Algeria's ArmedIslamic Group (GIA) and Egypt's Islamic Jihad, it was a relatively smallterrorist group, based on cells, that sought to intimidate its opponents intosubmission. But its methods and objectives were even more delusional than theirs.Its aim was world Islamic revolution. According to Peter Bergen in Holy War,Inc., bin Laden drew a comparison between his move in 1996 from the Sudan (where he was deported at the insistence of the United States) to Afghanistan and Muhammad's Hegira from Mecca to Medina. Bin Laden believed that just as Muslims now mark the Hegira as the beginning of Islam's spread throughout the world, they would someday mark his journey to Afghanistan as the beginning of a new world revolution.
Bin Laden's adaptation of anticolonialism to radical Islam was similarlynutty. He went back not just to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 but to thetwelfth-century Crusades. In 1998, bin Laden announced the formation of the"World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders." The September 11attacks were clearly intended to provoke a mass uprising among the Islamicmasses--to produce the clash of civilizations that Huntington predicted--butafter a few street demonstrations, enthusiasm for bin Laden seems to have waned.
Al-Qaeda's eventual defeat will probably not alter politics in Europe or theUnited States, and it may not make much difference in U.S. relations with China,but it could lead to a transformation of politics in the Mideast that wouldbenefit the United States. It would deal a blow to Islamic militants and givemoderate reformers a chance to focus on the region's flagging economies and toopen government to greater public participation. As one female Algerianintellectual told Judith Miller, the choice between military dictatorship andIslamic militants (who, if elected, would have installed an Islamic dictatorship)had been between "the plague or cholera." With the militants weakened, theregion's middle classes might begin to demand alternatives to the militarydictatorships and monarchies that now prevail.
In Israel, peace may seem as remote as ever, but al-Qaeda's defeat may giveArab states pause at supporting Hamas and other radical Islamic groups thatpromise unending strife. Just as happened after the Gulf War, moderate Arabstates could join the United States in bringing together those Israelis andPalestinians who believe in a two-state solution. That effort came surprisinglyclose to succeeding in spite of radical Islamic and right-wing Israeliopposition. Finally, al-Qaeda's defeat should intimidate Iraq, North Korea, andother countries that harbor ill will toward the United States and their neighborsbut whose ambitions are regional rather than global. Without the support ofneighboring states in the Persian Gulf and the emergence of a viable opposition,the Bush administration would risk disaster in launching a full-scale war tounseat Iraq's Saddam Hussein. But the American success in Afghanistan should makeit easier to contain him and, perhaps, to force him to agree to a new round ofweapons inspections.
The world is certainly not entering a period of blissful cohabitation. Thereis a global recession to contend with. The prospect of diminishing energysupplies could eventually provoke new conflicts in the Mideast. The TaiwanStraits and the Korean peninsula are still unsettled. By the same token, however,9-11 did not, as some commentators have suggested, call forth a new dark age ofrandom terror and global disorder. It may, in fact, have laid the basis for thedestruction of the bin Ladens. And it may also--if the United States doesn'tblunder--lead to the creation of a more just and stable order in the Mideast.
