Most acts of terrorism are perpetrated to achieve some goal: getting England out of Ireland, Israel out of Palestine, US embassies out of other countries, or blowing up your own government buildings in the hopes of starting a race war. Generally that tactic is used against civilian populations in order to try and instill fear in the population so that people will demand their governments do what the terrorists want (or in the case of McVeigh, start the civil war he thought was coming). But we seem to have now moved into a more general reason for terrorism: either simple revenge or simple murder. Whereas in the past a group would have taken responsibility for the act and made some demand, or at least stated what it wants, we now have acts of murder perpetrated upon civilians without anyone stating why.
Perhaps the terrorists know why they are doing it. Perhaps they assume everyone else knows why they are doing it. Suicide bombers in Isreal don’t have to leave messages about why they drove a truck into a disco. They assume everyone knows it is retaliation for Isreali military strikes against Palestinian civilians. Perhaps whoever attacked the US with its own airplanes assumes we know why. The problem is, Americans are so utterly uninformed about the effects of our government’s policies around the world that we do not.
The people who believe American government policies and actions are responsible for death and destruction of their own people, and who believe that American culture is the main threat to their own cultures, are relatively powerless. They have no military to strike at the US. They don’t even have a country that can declare war on the US (actually, that in itself is one of their complaints: most Middle Eastern countries either have westernized elites or are willing to deal with the US in some fashion or other). So they have reacted in the only way they perceive is left to them: attacking in ways that we call terrorist attacks, and they define as warfare. For them, it is the only weapon they have.
Unfortunately for all involved, that weapon will not bring about the ends they desire, assuming they desire the end of the US cultural hegemony in the world, and US political and economic power in the middle east.
For one thing, since Americans have almost no knowledge whatsoever about the effects of American power and cultural influence in the middle east, most Americans haven’t a clue as to why this was done. It just looks like an unprovoked attack carried out for no reason other than to "get the US". There will be no mass movement in the US to end US involvement in the middle east. There will be no desire in the US to limit our own cultural incursions in the middle east. Given the state of the US media, Americans will not be told or shown much of anything that will help them understand why this happened or what the terrorists hope to gain from it. Thus there will be no popular pressure put upon our government to change its behaviors and policies.
American citizens will not demand anything of our government because we do not have any idea what our government or economic influence does in the middle east.
Nor will the American government lean toward policies that fulfill the desires of the terrorists. Our elites and our government are dedicated to the idea that our own cultural and economic hegemony is good and true, and that belief will continue to drive our political and economic policies toward the region. Since we think our way is right and true, the only response we have to this attack is to declare war. Actually, that is our main response to anything we don’t understand. War on drugs. War on crime. War on terrorism. And all will have about the same level of effect: no to small.
The worst thing about this situation is that no one will get what they want. The US is not going anywhere, and certainly western capitalist culture in the form of music, dress, secularization, and market society is not going anywhere. On the other hand, our War on Terrorism will have little effect on terrorism in general. We might kill some of the people involved in this act, but that will just make more terrorists who will kill us back because we killed them. For every Islamic fundamentalist we kill, we give 100 more enough reason to hate us enough to kill us.
The only outcomes to the present impasse will be negative. In the middle east, increased US military presence in the region and increased American demands upon other governments will increase the animosity toward the US by fundamentalists and other who are already unhappy about our presence. Here at home, increased security, loss of more civil rights in the name of another "war" and "security" operations, and giving our own home-grown hate mongers another scapegoat for their own violence are the forseeable results.
Increased acts of violence abroad and at home.
The only way out of this is to start thinking about ways in which we can help create a world in which everyone feels they have a say in their own lives. A world in which, even if we are a dominant economic and cultural force, other peoples feel that they have a say in how that force is applied to their own cultures. Start thinking, in other words, about ways to make the world more democratic in the true meaning of the word.
That means that Americans will have to be told what our corporate and political elites are doing in our name. The American media will have to start telling the stories of the middle east and its peoples from more than one perspective. Americans schools will have to give our kids and college students some idea of what we do there, and allow us to ask if we should change how we deal with the middle east and the rest of the world. We might decide we don’t want to change our own actions. But we might decide we do want to change some things in order to foster a more democratic world society. We must be given that choice.
Otherwise, we are stuck with terrorist attacks that don’t achieve the ends of the terrorists, and "wars" that don’t achieve the ends of the US.
Dr. Swearingen teaches in the Cultural Foundations program at St Edwards University in Austin TX. He can be reached at wsswear@admin.stedwards.edu.