How to Be Tough on Terrorism

By Robert B. Reich, The American Prospect. Posted October 29, 2001.

The righteousness of our cause shouldn't prevent us from asking why so many people around the world who aren't terrorists hate America and from seeking ways to reduce their hatred. Recognizing America's past failing in this regard isn't justifying terrorism. Finding means of ameliorating the hatred isn't appeasing terrorists. Rather, it's looking at terrorism's larger context -- the soil in which it has taken root -- and examining our role in helping to create those conditions or allowing them to endure.

Here's where America's political and intellectual left and right seem incapable of reasoned debate. Much of the left is still bemoaning America's Cold War support of anticommunist dictators -- the shah, Mobutu, Somoza, Greek colonels, Korean generals, Pinochet, Marcos, Armas, the mujahideen -- and our nation's gruesome record advising them, training their death squads, schooling and equipping their torture specialists, and helping them squirrel away their vast wealth. Given this history, the post–September 11 effulgence of American flags, patriotic hymns, and "freedom and democracy" bromides offered by American politicians strikes many on the left as dangerously ahistoric if not downright hypocritical.

The right dismisses this sordid history as irrelevant to the current crisis and accuses anyone on the left who dwells on it as "blaming America" for terrorism. Both sides are wrong: the left for suggesting that this history should make us any less determined to fight Islamic extremism and the right for assuming that this record has no bearing on why much of the third world is hostile toward us. Of course, we must proceed against terrorists with full force. Yet it's also important to understand that our checkered history has shaped the understandings of many poor nations whose cooperation we need in order for that force to be effective and many of the world's poor who are both attracted to radical fundamentalism and repelled by American bullying.

This blaming-versus-understanding terrain is also where American backers and critics of Israel butt heads. Backers don't want to admit that part of the third world's animosity toward the United States comes from its unswerving support for an Israeli government that's been assassinating Palestinian leaders, bombing Palestinian towns, demolishing Palestinian homes, and expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Critics, meanwhile, fail to acknowledge the immensity and randomness of the violence aimed at Israeli Jews, and their legitimate worries about surviving in a region whose hostile Arab population is growing quickly. Here, too, much of this debate is beside the point. It's time for the United States to pressure Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat to resume the peace process with an eye toward a separate Palestinian state on the West Bank. Indeed, the United States and the West may have to take a stronger role in creating that state. Without it, continued hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians will only further inflame the Muslim world.

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