OPTIONS ARE LIMITED


The signatories of “What We’re Fighting For”:
We read your communiqué which declares your position regarding the campaign led by your country against “terrorism”. Upon considering it, reviewing the American history and its relationship with the Muslim world and analysing current events, we have arrived at the following points. We think you might benefit from considering our conclusions.

You have unwittingly put moral justification for the September attacks
You consider the current war waged by your country a justifiable response to an attack directed against civilians. Thus, unintentionally, you legitimise strikes against America in its long history of targeting innocent civilians in many parts of the world. Your country sought and perpetrated attacks on civilians as an end in themselves, not as an unavoidable by-product of war, in many cases. If America targets civilians, according to your reasoning, then waging war against her carries moral justification. The form and intensity of such response becomes a matter of detail. Of the scores of examples of America’s targeting of civilians we choose two cases that reveal how your ethics are founded.

First: To our knowledge, America still considers dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan a morally justifiable action and refuses to apologise for it. You well know the two nuclear bombs were not aimed at military or strategic installations, but were intended to kill civilians. That act was not meant to deter an attack or to level the field in the face of Japan’s advantage in battle. Japan was attacked with nuclear weapons while its armies were retreating. If America considers nuclear attacks against civilians, merely to hasten an inevitable defeat of an opponent, then how could you consider the strikes against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon unjustifiable? If you claim that you do not condone America’s nuclear attacks, then you should consider her act as more morally repellent than that of those who attacked New York. Accordingly the strikes against America is as legitimate as the way her war against those who attacked her is justifiable.

Second: When Madeline Albright was in office, so expressing the views of the United States, she said that killing half a million Iraqi children through sanctions “was a price worth paying” to contain Saddam Hussein. America is aware that her policy entailed the killing of half a million children and has no problem with this, so much so that this policy is still in place. The number of children killed is now nearing a million. If you do not object to that policy, then you have forfeited your right to pass judgement on those who attacked the World Trade Centre. For killing half a million Arab children is not on par with killing few thousands as a result of targeting vital installations. Also, Iraqi civilians did not elect their government; therefore they are not responsible for the actions of their leaders, unlike Americans. If you do object to your government’s policy of killing children, then you condone the waging of war against your country in the same way you bless your war against “terrorism” and the targeting of civilians.

Why Muslims?
You admit that America’s foreign policy is arrogant and you speak in general terms overlooking the fact that your problem with Muslims is more specific and far deeper. You need to understand that your crimes against Muslims are particularly abhorrent. Of these we list few:

First: The complete and unqualified support for Israel and all it’s crimes, defending Israel in all international forums and adopting a policy towards our area which puts the security of Israel above any other consideration. Is it unfair for our people to view America as partner in Israel’s crimes? Is it not possible to view America’s part in these crimes as more harmful since tour country is the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s wellbeing in whatever it does?

Second: America insists on maintaining its military presence in Arabia, a land sacred to Muslims and forbidden to non Muslims. American officials persistently declare that you are there to stay indefinitely. Your decision makers claim that these forces are there by invitation of local governments. But you and your government know that those rulers do not represent their people. You know well that the peoples of the area do not want your presence and consider it both an insult and a provocation to their religious sentiment.

Third: America persists in starving Iraq although America is well aware of the plight of its civilian population. You know that sanctions are damaging the people and not the government. America insist that Iraq obeys a particular UN resolution and comply with it according to American impossible interpretation of it, while justifying Israel’s defiance of scores of UN resolutions and refusing to apply any pressure to force her to comply.

Fourth: An ongoing crime committed by America against the people in our area is its continuous support of oppressive regimes and conniving with these governments to systematically ransack wealth and natural resources. These governments concede to America’s theft in return for her undertaking to keep them in power against the will of their people.

It has to be said that your country’s policies succeeded for a while in deterring Arabs and Muslims from fighting back. That was achieved by means of oppression and gagging, prescribed by your government and executed by the local regimes. But America’s recurring crimes and persistence in disregarding religious sensibilities made hatred and desire for revenge, directed against America and the regimes sponsored by her, a most natural outcome. We think it is preposterous that you were taken by surprise at the eruption of these sentiments.

Islam and you
In your communiqué, you claim that the American values and principles are a model to be followed and sought to market them to Muslims. You further claim that Islam cannot be both a religion and a basis for a state and asked Muslims to separate the state and politics from Islam. Much as you believe that your values are exemplary, Muslims belief in Islam as a religion and a basis for the state is more profound. When you promote your values and claim that they encompass freedom, justice, equality and preservation of human dignity, you know – from American experience - that this is a false presentation. On the other hand, Islam cannot be presented falsely and its values have no room for subjectivity and poetic licence. Disregarding those rulers and intellectuals who try to flatter you and present you with an image of Islam which suits you, Islam’s message is clear, well documented and jealously guarded, and no one can tamper with its principles. No matter how much those flatterers try to pick and choose half quotes and misrepresented dictums, the truth remains that Islam, as you may know, really calls on its followers to overcome opponents and reach the whole word with its universal message. Muslims believe that Islam is not a list of suggestions put forward by intellectuals but a religion based on scriptures emanated from God. Muslims belief in God means that their texts provide superior values to those you adhere to. They believe that they are your superiors in interpreting and understanding life, man, the universe and history. If you happen to be well enabled politically, militarily, economically and technically at this point in time, then that does not prohibit their religion from propelling them to challenge all your abilities and overcome them. As long as you remain convinced of the superiority of your values and Muslims maintain their immovable belief in what they have is divine, you have no alternative but to admit that you and Muslims are on a collision course. No one who aims at turning this confrontation into a peaceful dialogue shall succeed.

Why could you not prevent the attack?
You spoke at length in indicting the September attacks but overlooked the fact that the operation did not “come out of the blue” in a country which knew nothing of those who executed those strikes. They occurred while your security establishments were on full readiness to deal with such threat. Did you ever ask yourselves the simple question: how could the perpetrators manage to paralyse the entire intelligence apparatus and carry out a most sophisticated operation with its enormous planning and logistics without being detected, let alone prevented, by your security forces? No one could have been more prepared nor have committed so many resources than the US. Yet, here is your intelligence chief refusing to admit liability and declaring that no intelligence service could guarantee protection against such strikes in the future. It might surprise you to know that we agree with your intelligence chief in that these strikes cannot be prevented by means of security and intelligence. Politicians have to appease public opinion, but you are intellectuals and thinkers who populate think-tanks and institutes and have no excuse in dodging the all important questions about what caused that failure. To our knowledge, none of your institutes raised that question let alone came up with an answer. Your communiqué certainly did not raise the question. This failure to raise a direct, simple and logical question means that the best of America’s thinkers and opinion shapers are no different than the man in the street, offering nothing but anger and the desire for revenge. America’s thinkers, it seems, are incapable of addressing an important issue such as this with deep and logical vision. This begs one question: with this apparent incapability, do you really think that you are fit to take on Islam?

How your opponents changed the world
While avoiding raising the right questions, you claim that the event of 11th of September has changed the world and that it marks a turning point in history. The event, as you see it, was not merely that of a few highjacked aircraft colliding with buildings, but a great event from an historical prospective. Most of the signatories to your communiqué believe in the inevitably of confrontation with Islam and subscribe to the “clash of civilization” concept. You do not seem, however, to view the seriousness of the event and its historical repercussions in the light of how limited the act itself was and how few were the perpetrators. Thus you fail, yet again, in raising another important question: how could a limited and besieged fringe group change the course of history? Again we do not see in the publications of American strategic studies institutes, nor in your communiqué, any mention of what the explanation might be. You chose to bypass reasoning to dwell on matters such as the enormity of the event in order to legitimise the severity of reprisals. Were you not among the adherents to the concept of confrontation, we might have excused you for failing to raise these issues. But people like you, who believe in global polarization into an US-led West versus Islam, reveal their cultural and intellectual impotence when they exhibit enormous gaps in understanding so important an issue.

We volunteer an answer
The solution that might shed light on these contradictions, explain how the problem was never that of intelligence failure, and shows how a besieged fringe group can change history, lies in understanding reality as it is. The world before and after September 11 is the same, save for one difference: the cultural confrontation between Islam and the West, America in particular, was unmasked. The group that carried out the attack might have been small and of limited resources. Yet it managed to execute the attack and amplify its repercussions by exploiting the opportunities provided by the hidden confrontation. You might see the attack as a criminal act of “terrorist” proportion, but in its true nature, it was an act of upsetting a clumsy balance by targeting its pivotal point. This is something that you will never admit, not because you do not realise it, but because such admission acknowledges the fact that those who carried out the September missions drew strength from that reality which more than compensated for their weakness and limitations. If you allow yourselves a measure of humility, you will realise –according to this polarity- that America is the natural field for operations of this group. By “field” we do not mean place, rather we mean the cultural and intellectual environment. The way you deal with events, your manner of viewing the world, and Islam in particular, forms a fertile field for that group to attempt turning the power equation against you, and they succeeded. The manner in which your country responded to the September attacks proves this point and indicates that you will continue to provide a suitable field for those who attacked in September to strike again and again with more venom.

You will not understand
Although we volunteered to address these issues and supplied an answer for them, we doubt whether you will understand or accept what we submit. That is not for want of abilities to comprehend, for you are clever people, nor it is for lack of information, for you most definitely have more information than we do. What prohibits you from understanding is your arrogance, conceit and that naivety that comes with military, economic and political superiority. To modify your grasp of the issue according to the answers we provide means admitting cultural defeat. People like you have an automatic deterrent against admitting such defeat. But on an individual level, upon moments of solitude and absoluteness, you might begin to grasp these notions, they might find acceptance in your logical receptors, but your intellectual environment and collective reason automatically reject them. With the passage of time you are bound to suppress more and more truthful notions and find yourselves participating in founding the values of deceit and hypocrisy. It is to this state that we attribute how sixty American intellectuals who know their county’s record of killing innocent civilians, ransacking other nations’ wealth, sponsoring corrupt and oppressive tyrannies and crushing human rights, can claim that American principles form the ideals for all.

The future of confrontation
Clearly, your ineptitude in understanding the issue is not only academic but also practical to the extent that you offer blessing to the US campaign of revenge. You may believe that your government’s response, aided by colossal political, media and military clamour, has brought you security, but the fact remains that this campaign raised the level of confrontation between civilizations to a critical state. Thus, it has prepared the ground for any group similar to those who carried out the September attacks to execute a bigger strike. When that happens, the American public will feel frustrated upon realising that nothing can stop this type of opponents of America. We mean to say the “American public”, for it has elected its government and blessed its actions. Thus, the repercussions of the campaign’s failure will reflect upon that public as well as the government. The arrogance that barred you from putting the September events in their right pretext will prevent you from realizing that your nation is laying the ground for its self-destruction.

Options and repercussions
Although it is now late for deciding on the right response, and although your government has opted for the choice expected of her, and despite our conviction that the chances of your understanding our vision of the September event are rather remote, it is essential that we express an opinion in the choices you face and their repercussions. Logically the options are limited to three:

First
The wide military, political, security, legal and cultural campaign already opted for by your government driven by the desire for revenge and dictated by the confrontational mentality. We think that America will see this through especially after what appears to her as a victory in Afghanistan. Your government is perceived to have conquered the Taliban and Al-Qa’eda and quenched the public thirst for revenge by displaying the captives in cages in Guantanamo. When America first opted for this it seemed hesitant, but now looks drunk with its perceived success to the extent that it publicly endorses Israel’s bloody crimes with breathtaking brazenness. By making this choice, you have pushed yourselves towards the escalation of confrontation. It is strange that you have forgotten that the result of three years of a similar American approach after the Kenya and Tanzania bombings was the growth in your enemy’s strength to the level of executing the September attacks. Your response to the September attacks does not differ in essence from your response to the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Your response now is merely a magnification of the previous one. Therefore, commonsense tells that the coming strike against you will be of bigger magnitude proportionately just as the September strike was a multiple of the Kenya and Tanzania bombings. In short, you don’t seem to realise that this war is unique in the sense that the more you intensify the level of confrontation, the weaker and more exposed you render yourselves to be and the more daring and devastating your enemy becomes. We do not exaggerate if we assume that by this you will destroy yourselves eventually.

Second
The second option is to put security above all other considerations of life and culture. It means taking severe steps to shelter you from outside breaches. But the nature of your society means the presence of security loop-holes that cannot be sealed without nullifying many of your essential civil rights and accepting living in a military-barrack society. This also means creating a monolithic existence, getting rid of any race, religion or culture that might cause a breach of social safety. It is true that such steps have already started to take shape and will continue with much more vigour after the first option fails. We anticipate that some states will opt for the secluded society solution, loosing confidence in Washington, once the frustration with the first option sets in. Thus the grounds are laid for some sort of disintegration in your country.

Third
This is what we identify as the reasonable and realistic option which would guarantee that attacks, like those of September, will not happen again. An option we are confident that the American mentality and psyche will not choose. This option calls for America’s men of reason and intellect to forgo arrogance and to re-examine the issues starting from scratch and contemplate why Muslims hate them and understand the nature of the confrontation with Islam. Had you opted for that, you would have decided to revise your policy towards the Muslim world and your stand on issues concerning Muslims. You would have realised that you should stop biased support for Israel immediately, withdraw your forces from Muslim land and Arabia in particular, lift sanctions against Iraq and put an end to your conniving with tyrannical regimes. In order for the reconciliation to be complete, the American government should apologise for its previous crimes against Muslims and offer to compensate them materially and morally for those crimes. America has the means to do so if it decides to take this course.

Finally
We believe that American perception will not change nor will its policy - certainly not until America receives the shock of another devastating event. We think that America chose to learn the hard way. If, however there are still men of reason who have the ability of abstraction and the will to rid themselves of arrogance, they should rise today to warn their people and convince them to opt for the third option.


Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA)

London May 15 2002



MIRA Website

 http://www.islah.org

English Section
 http://www.islah.org/english.htm

See the text of “What We’re Fighting For”
 http://www.americanvalues.org













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