But They Wanted To!
Dana Goldstein captures a particularly inane bit of the hearings:
Sen. Lindsay Graham just asked Gen. Petraeus, “Why did they [Al Qaeda in Iraq] come to Iraq?”
Petraeus responded, “To establish a base in the heart of the Middle East.”
Okay, right. But why was that possible? Because we destabilized the region through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, giving terrorist groups a new foothold.
Dana’s obviously right – the key variable in Al Qaeda setting up shop in Iraq was not anything intrinsic to AQ, but instead the fact that we created a near perfect environment for them. Not only did we, as she said, destabilize the country and create a lawless zone in which they could fester – and even this isn’t entirely accurate as much of AQ wasn’t/isn’t foreign – we also gave Al Qaeda a chance to do their favorite thing: shoot at Americans and their allies! Graham’s logic, whereby Al Qaeda does what it wants and then we respond, is backwards: we enact policies and then Al Qaeda is able to act in our wake.
Al Qaeda and such are almost like parasites or viruses in the international system. They have very little agency and can’t just do what they want, when they want, in the same way that a state can. They instead depend on all sorts of conditions and circumstances to be right to implement their agenda. Look at, for example, the occupation of Saudi Arabia or the US funding of guerrillas in Afghanistan. Before that, plenty of people wanted to fight the Soviets with big guns, but couldn’t until we gave them said large guns. And while Bin Laden wasn’t a big fan of the US before the Gulf War, when we had troops in Saudi Arabia, he could make a convincing case that Americans were occupying the Arab world. Also, if you look at terrorist attacks in Europe, they probably wouldn’t have happened (Spain certainly) without the invasion of Iraq.
I think it’s more useful to look at the threat of transnational terror as an emergent property of the world order rather than some sort of exogenous force that is entirely independent of outside influence and is entirely self-directed. To use a comic books reference, transnational Islamic terrorism is not like the Phoenix Force - it’s not the “immortal and mutable manifestation of the prime universal force of life. Born of the void between states of being, a child of the universe…the nexus of all psionic energy which does, has, and ever will exist in all realities of the omniverse“
The problem with making this type of argument these days is that when you do, people claim you’re “blaming America first” or that you’re saying there’s “moral equivalence” between the West and Al Qaeda. To be very clear , I don’t “blame” the US for terrorism, clearly terrorists are responsible , I just want to point out how many of our policies and actions certainly don’t help reduce the threat of terrorism, and how many of them exacerbate it.
