Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (13 page)

A “purist”
(salafi)
extension of this second path to Muslim power, more virulent and violent, categorically rejects the brotherhood’s willingness to compromise with other political organizations and the state. The mission of the friends and admirers of Al Qaeda is to usher in universal justice by purging Muslim society of “deviant and impure” elements, such as Shi’ism and Sufism, which had supposedly violated the spirit and letter of the sacred texts
(sunna)
and helped to bring ruination to Islamic Arab civilization. But to accomplish this task against “the near enemy” within, the Islamic community must first fight “the far enemy,” who gives life support to corrupt governments that continue to crush the aspirations of all pure Muslims and prevent others from finding the true and righteous path. This far enemy, primarily the United States and its allies, are the “New Mongols.”
¹⁵
Most people in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world reject this most radical and violent political path. But its rise on the world scene will likely continue to strongly influence hearts and minds and events for some time to come.

CHAPTER 6
THE TIDES OF TERROR

And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

—JUDGES 16:30

T
errorism involves spectacular and often unexpected killings in order to destabilize the social order and promote a greater cause.
¹
The tactic is probably as old as
Homo sapiens,
but its use waxes and wanes with the tides of history. To bring in new blood, terrorist groups routinely goad their enemies into overreacting, preferably by committing atrocities: Get the others to drive in the sheep, and collect the wool. Two millennia ago, the first Jewish revolt against Roman occupation began with youths throwing stones, and Roman commanders telling their soldiers to sheathe their swords and defend themselves with wooden staves. The Jewish Zealots and Sicarii (“daggers”) upped the ante, much as Hamas would do later against Israelis, and Iraqi and Afghan insurgents would do against America’s coalition. They attacked Roman soldiers and their Greek underlings in self-sacrificial acts during public ceremonies, cranking up the wheels of revenge and retribution. The Sicarii and Zealots, who claimed to be freedom fighters but whom the Romans deemed terrorists,
²
modeled their mission on Samson, who centuries before had brought down on himself a Philistine temple for love of Israel.

The Jewish revolt ended with mass suicide of perhaps hundreds of Sicarii warriors and their families at the desert fortress of Masada in
A.D.
73. But that was hardly the end of the story. This “heroic” death inspired two subsequent revolts, ending with Rome expelling Jews from Judea, including many Christians who still considered themselves Jews. Judea became “Palaestina,” renamed for the Philistines. The Jewish Diaspora spread a universalizing faith to the far corners of the world, eventually converting the Roman emperor Constantine and the Arab tribesman Mohammed to monotheism.

To be sure, these subsequent developments were largely unplanned and unintended consequences of the Jewish revolt. History, like evolution, is a largely contingent affair based on opportunistic responses to chance and happenstance, whatever those who believe in Revelations, Marx, or Mohammed may preach. But one constant is that faith in a divine or historically transcendent purpose is often cause enough to excuse even the murdering of innocents, because in many a cause only the committed can be fully human.

THE ANARCHISTS AND THE FIRST AMERICAN WAR ON TERROR

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined … must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars … which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

—GEORGE WASHINGTON, FAREWELL ADDRESS,
SEPTEMBER 17, 1796

[W]e must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the twenty-first century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad.

—GEORGE W. BUSH, FAREWELL ADDRESS,
JANUARY 16, 2009

Between these bookends is the history of America’s ambitions. The tipping point came with the first “War on Terror” around the turn of the last century. Historian David Rapoport argues, with some justification, that anarchism represents the first wave of the modern tide of terrorism.
³
Beginning in Russia around 1870, a loosely connected worldwide movement arose, egalitarian in principle and dedicated to the elimination of the power of the state and international capital. The Russian group, Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), conceived of violent action as “propaganda by deed” to force the czarist state to grant constitutional rights. To this end, the only feasible politics was political terrorism, using spectacular, theatrical displays to sensitize the masses. Modern suicide bombing as a political tool stems from the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881 by a member of Narodnaya Volya, Ignacy Hryniewiechi, who intentionally blew himself up in the attack.

The People’s Will introduced the idea that terrorists should tailor attacks to maximize publicity, and encouraged science education to gain the means to enhance the dramatic power of the deed. This was also the view expressed by Sergei Nechayev and Mikhail Bakunin in the
Revolutionary Catechism
(1870), which called on those opposing “the ruling classes,” especially students, to develop a new “science of destruction,” for which they should be studying “mechanics, physics, chemistry, [and] perhaps medicine.” In Russia, anarchists succeeded in assassinating numerous government ministers.

The anarchist movement soon spread throughout Europe and on to the Americas. Between 1894 and 1900, anarchist assassins had killed the president of France, the empress of Austria, and the king of Italy. In September 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. president William McKinley. The world community of nations considered anarchism to pose the greatest threat to the internal political and economic order and to international stability. The political (and to some extent social and economic) consequences from this first wave of modern terror were similar in many respects to those of the 9/11 attacks.

In his first Annual Message to Congress after McKinley’s death, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, declared the anarchist to be the incarnation of “evil” and a “foe of liberty” acting against all mankind: “The cause of his criminality is to be found in his own evil passions and in the evil conduct of those who urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the state to do justice to him or his.”
⁴
Roosevelt made the defeat of anarchism an overriding mission of his administration: “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance. The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind; and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other.”
⁵

Roosevelt didn’t restrict the fight against terrorism to anarchists alone. He expanded the war on anarchy into an imperial mission to intervene in any country around the world if necessary to protect it from foreign evil and preserve it from chaos. “Chronic wrongdoing,” he said, “or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and may lead the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
⁶

Most tellingly, the war against anarchy and terror helped to justify the brutal repression of a native insurgency against U.S. rule in the Philippines.

Resentful of Spain’s lingering colonial hold in the Americas and sensing how easy it would be to defeat that decaying imperial power, many in the United States called for war. An opportunity came when the U.S battleship
Maine
mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898. By the end of that year, the United States had officially taken possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Albert Beveridge, a Republican senator from Indiana, proclaimed: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic Peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain contemplation. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world…. He has made us adept at governments that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”
⁷
President McKinley declared that “there was nothing for us to do but … to educate the Filipinos and to Christianise them,” although most Filipinos were already practicing Catholics.

In the presidential campaign of 1900, Roosevelt accused Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan of catering to barbarism and chaos by refusing to support America’s civilizing mission in the Philippines. Civilizing in the Philippines, instituted by General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas MacArthur), involved a scorched-earth policy reminiscent of Sherman’s march to Atlanta, devastating villages, even whole regions, and torturing prisoners, a preferred method again being water-boarding.
⁸

Among the natives of the Muslim south, insurgents known as
juramentados
(from the Spanish
jurar,
to take an oath) fought with simple bladed weapons against American personnel whom they considered to be unbelievers and trespassers. They swore to become martyrs to jihad, often attacking near markets to maximize mayhem and publicity from their acts, expecting to be killed, much in the manner of the Jewish Zealots nearly two millennia before. The future commander of U.S. military forces in World War I, John “Blackjack” Pershing, was an intelligence officer in Moro Province who ordered fallen
juramentados
to be wrapped in pigskin to show their communities that heaven was barred to terrorists.
⁹
Muslim nationalists in the area today have appropriated the term Moros. The jihadis among them consider themselves heirs of the
juramentados,
still suffering the broken vow of the Bates Treaty of 1899, in which the United States had promised the Moros, who had long been fighting the Spanish, their sovereignty.
¹⁰

While the anarchist threat was used to justify international adventurism, state reaction to anarchism played a formative role in creating national police and intelligence. The Secret Service and later FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Russian Okhrana (forerunner to the NKVD and KGB) were born to bust anarchist conspiracies. What seemed to make anarchism such a pressing threat was the radical transformation in political, economic, communication, and transportation patterns of the age. Under popular pressures unleashed by the French Revolution, absolute monarchies were softening into constitutional monarchies and even liberal trade democracies. People and capital moved across international frontiers with an ease that in some respects is not matched even in today’s era of “globalization.”

In 1912, two years before the start of World War I, Imperial Russia and the Turkish Sultanate alone required passports. Only with the world trade agreements in the late 1990s were capital flows again able to recover this pre–World War I degree of freedom. The telegraph, mass daily newspapers, and railroads flourished in this period. The first “real-time” diffusion of news across the world could be arguably dated to August 27, 1883, when the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa exploded and disappeared.
¹¹
Again in 1912, the first transpacific radiotelegraph service linked San Francisco with Hawaii.

From the beginning of human history until the nineteenth century, the exercise and extension of human power depended almost exclusively upon physical forces readily available in nature: sun, water, wind, plants, animals, and minerals accessible by muscle. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the airplane, automobile, and transcontinental communication by wireless radio were beginning to shrink time and space by quantum leaps over all previous advances.

Most worrisome was the ability of anarchists to get their hands on the first weapons of mass destruction: the machine gun, invented during the American Civil War but first used with totally devastating effect in the Boer War;
¹²
dynamite, invented by Alfred Nobel, and its derivatives, including hand grenades and other forms of personal bombs; and chemical weapons.

Although the policies of the U.S. and European states to combat anarchism were often predicated on fighting a well-organized international terrorist network, in fact there was little international or centralized terrorist planning (and in the case of the McKinley assassination, no organized plot at all). Remarkably, it was only when the Warren Commission inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy studied previous assassination attempts against U.S. presidents did the government conclude that there really never had been an “anarchist central.”