Monday’s terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia brings to mind the words of the famous New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
During the 1980s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a friend and ally of the U.S. government, even to the extent that our own government authorized the delivery of weapons of mass destruction to him so that he could use them against the Iranian people.
Then, after signaling no opposition to Saddam’s plan to invade Kuwait, U.S. officials turned on him once he initiated his invasion in 1991.
After the U.S. intervention successfully expelled Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush declared victory and, amidst tremendous military fanfare, claimed that the war was over.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Persian Gulf War actually began the long decade of the 1990’s (and afterward) in which U.S. officials, along with the American masses in whom they continued to engender tremendous fear, became increasingly obsessed with the need to “get Saddam.”
There were, for example, the cruel and brutal sanctions whose consequences, as we can now see so clearly, fell not on Saddam Hussein and his palatial lifestyle but rather on ordinary Iraqi people, to the point of contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. (These are the sanctions that President Bush is now calling on the world to lift in order to relieve the horrible suffering that they produced among the Iraqi people.)
The U.S. government also stationed U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, primarily to enforce the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq, which had not been authorized either by the United Nations or by the U.S. Congress. In the (illegal) enforcement of those “no-fly zones,” the U.S. government continued to kill innocent Iraqi people with the bombs and missiles that were being routinely dropped and fired inside those zones. (These are the troops that President Bush has announced will soon be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia.)
When one of the convicted terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was sentenced, he told the federal judge that one of his principal motivations for his terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was the deaths of Iraqi children that the sanctions were continuing to cause.
When Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war against the United States before the September 11 terrorist attacks, he specifically cited the deaths of the Iraqi children, the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands in Saudi Arabia, and U.S. aid to Israel as the principal reasons for his declaration of war.
Thus, in retrospect one reason that the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington are so tragic is that they might have been avoided. If long ago the U.S. government had done what it is doing now — lifting the sanctions on Iraq (without invading and causing more deaths and suffering among the Iraqi people) and pulling all U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia — as well as ending all foreign aid to Israel (and all other countries), it’s entirely possible that the victims of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington would be alive today. Their deaths are rooted in the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and the terrorist response to that policy.
The tragedy is compounded when we recognize that the sanctions and “no-fly zones” failed to produce their intended result — a “regime change” in Iraq that would have ousted Saddam Hussein and instead contributed to the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi people, which in turn gave rise to so much hatred and rage in the worldwide Muslim community.
Equally tragic was the horrible indifference among U.S. officials to that suffering, as best exemplified by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and later U.S. Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright’s famous response to 60 Minutes when asked about the deaths of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Not denying that the sanctions contributed to the deaths, she said, “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think the price is worth it.”
And now, it’s terrorism déjà vu all over again. President Bush has declared victory in his war on Iraq and, amidst tremendous military fanfare, claims that the war is over.
He is wrong. The war is just continuing, with more terrorist attacks in response to the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy, including its recent invasion and occupation of Iraq, just as CIA officials and other people predicted would happen if the U.S. government invaded and occupied Iraq.
But just as they did after the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. officials are now expounding the same predictable line — that the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia have absolutely nothing to do with the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy, its 12-year war against Iraq, or even its recent invasion and occupation of Iraq.
President Bush declared, “These despicable acts were committed by killers whose only faith is hate” while U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell added, “I think it’s just part of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations’ willingness to kill innocent people in order to push forward a criminal agenda — a terrorist agenda that very often has no purpose, has no meaning other than to strike out in rage.”
In other words, Monday’s terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia was based on the hatred for America’s “freedom and values” — just like the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center — just like the terrorist attacks on the U.S.S. Cole — just like the terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa — and just like the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
That innocent interpretation of all those terrorist attacks, of course, serves a valuable function: It helps to distract the attention of the American people away from the two critical foreign-policy issues that urgently cry out for national discussion, reflection, and debate as we move forward into the new century:
(1) Which paradigm should we — the American people — embrace: America as a noninterventionist republic, as our Founders intended, or America as a world empire, as modern-day interventionists desire?
(2) What are the consequences that flow from each paradigm, not only with respect to foreigners but especially with respect to the freedom and well-being of the American people?