Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Islamic radicalism had already spread, not only through the Muslim Brotherhood, but also through the mosques, where the themes of Jew-hatred and vengeance against the West figured prominently in sermons. Al-Qutb’s mantle passed to another Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Cairo surgeon, radicalized since age fifteen, who opposed Anwar Sadat and called for the defeat of the Jewish and American devils. He was, ironically, innocent of charges that he had participated in the assassination of Sadat (he only learned about the plan a few hours before, and took no direct action), but his time in jail turned him into a “hardened radical whose beliefs had been hammered into brilliant resolve.”47 Relocating to the friendlier confines of Saudi Arabia, he met Mohammed bin Laden, whose construction companies did a great deal of kingdom business, and bin Laden’s son, Osama, who had himself served jail time for his affiliation with the attackers who struck the Grand Mosque in 1979. Despite the fact that the Saudi government had crushed the siege (and subsequently carried out sixty-seven public beheadings in four Saudi cities), the bubbling radicalism inside the kingdom merely simmered while it looked for other, softer targets. It had not been controlled, and certainly had not been stamped out.

  Bin Laden fell under the influence of the “warrior priest” Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, whose view of the world typified that of many Islamic radicals—“Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.” Seeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a struggle against infidels, bin Laden offered to purchase an airline ticket, lodging, and expenses for any Arab (including family members) who joined the mujahideen.48 When he joined the holy warriors himself in 1986, he was reunited with Zawahiri, and in 1988 the two formed al-Qaeda (“the Base”). At the time, of course, neither of these malevolent misfits had appeared on the radar screen of any major intelligence service, save perhaps those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It’s doubtful that even Israel knew who they were, nor at the time was it apparent they would become such malignant viruses infecting Middle Eastern politics and religion.

  Meanwhile, a radicalized strain of Islam that blamed all Muslim problems on Israel, the West, and apostates was metastasizing, and it was far more pervasive than all but a handful of Western analysts were willing to admit; the preoccupation (including Reagan’s) with “moderate Muslims” ignored the reality that when it came to Israel, there were no moderate Muslims. Bud McFarlane, who at the time supported the Marine mission, later saw clearly how the events in Lebanon tied into radical Islamic views of a “weak” America and noted of the subsequent Iran arms-for-hostages deal that, “there is, in terms of western logic, a very good case that there ought to be moderates in Iran. That is logical. It is not, I think, the reality.”49 Robert B. Oakley, who worked in the State Department’s counterterrorism office during the negotiations with Iran, came to the conclusion even before McFarlane that there were no moderates in Tehran. Nonie Darwish, who grew up in Egypt and who, through her job as an editor and translator for the Middle East News Agency, interacted with Westerners, came to appreciate the hatred and anger into which Muslim children were indoctrinated through their school systems. Yet even some of her friends, including those considered well educated by Western standards, had fully internalized the radical jihadist teachings.

  To most Americans, including those in the Reagan administration, radical Islamic fundamentalism still hadn’t registered. In Karen DeYoung’s 640-page biography of Colin Powell, for example, there are only two references to Islamic fundamentalism, and, based on their public comments, it seems that neither Secretary of State George Shultz nor Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger thought much about it.50 Navy Secretary John Lehman came the closest of anyone in the administration to identifying Islamic radicalism as a significant threat, but he focused almost entirely on the PLO.51 William Clark was attuned to the issue, but he had just resigned as national security advisor. Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), usually noted as a visionary, impressed White House staffer Ken Duberstein with a speech that warned that neither the American people nor the news media were “intellectually prepared” to deal with the world as it was, and that the media was still “covering Viet Nam and Watergate.”52 Yet even Gingrich failed to mention Islamic fundamentalism. In box after box of correspondence, memos of meetings, and policy debate contained in the Reagan Library, one searches in vain for the words “Islamic,” “Islam,” or “Muslim,” and even when discussions turned to topics such as the Achille Lauro or Iranian hostages, they were almost universally defined as “illegal acts,” not “terrorism.”53 One exception occurred in July 1982 when Reagan referred to terrorism in a speech as a “worldwide threat.” But he still did not blame Islamic fundamentalism. 54 To reporters at a press luncheon on October 24, 1983, Reagan reaffirmed the Cold War context by tying together Lebanon, KAL 007 (the Korean airliner shot down by the Soviets), and Grenada. 55

  Why did so many people, including Reagan, misjudge the extent and depth of this Islamic sea change upon them? Why, despite a connect-the-dots history of carnage worthy of a pointillist, did so few of the Western intelligence agencies appreciate its significance? Diplomats downplayed it; traditional Cold Warriors interpreted it as a smaller piece in the global conflict between free and Communist nations; and all but the Israelis treated Islamic terror as a massive case of “Arab boys gone wild.” But there was a track record of blood and horror whose starting point varied depending on whom you asked, and while the creation of Israel was a convenient excuse, the descent into jihad was a long process most visible initially in the rash of airline hijackings.

  Probably the first example of a terrorist hijacking occurred in 1968 when an El Al flight was hijacked by militant Palestinians. The same group (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) seized other flights, then the group hijacked four airlines simultaneously from different international terminals and landed them at Dawson’s Field in Jordan. Hostages were traded for released prisoners, and the incident prompted President Richard Nixon to introduce the air marshal program in 1970. Two years later, Yasir Arafat’s Fatah organization sent Black September terrorists to take the Israeli Olympic team hostage, killing 11 athletes and coaches before their rampage ended. Another hijacking—one of the most dramatic ever—unfolded in 1976 when Palestinians took Air France Flight 139 and flew it to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where the terrorists found safe haven under Ugandan thug dictator Idi Amin. Israeli commandos flew to Uganda, assaulted the airport buildings where the hijackers kept the captives, and rescued 105 passengers while killing all the hijackers. But the next year, the Palestinians were at it again, hijacking a German flight that was forced down in Somalia before a similar rescue occurred in which 86 passengers were freed (the pilot died in the rescue), and the hijackers were again eliminated. In the first two years of Reagan’s presidency, more Islamic-related hijackings occurred, including one of a Pakistani jet and another of a Kuwaiti airplane. The severity of this threat was probably obscured by the fact that, between 1970 and 1982, ten other major hijackings took place, each at the hands of a different non-Muslim group and each perpetrated for its own (sometimes incomprehensible) reasons. These included the Aer Lingus hijacker who demanded that the pope release the “third secret of Fatima,” and Garrett Trapnell’s 1972 demand that Richard Nixon release Angela Davis from prison.

  Another factor clouding the perceptions of a growing Muslim terrorist threat was the overwhelming early focus on Israel. Bombs went off routinely in crowded markets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but the Western press ignored the incidents. In 1976 alone, five separate bombings and a grenade incident produced a crimson flood in Israel. Palestinians seeking to fire a SAM-7 missile at an El Al plane at Nairobi’s airport were stopped before they could complete their mission. However, many other terrorist incidents worldwide were misreported as non-Islamic-related attacks. These included two hijackings in 1976 alone by the Moro Liberation Front in the Philippines, the “Red Guerilla” bombing near the Iranian consulate in San Francisco, and the assassination of three Roc
kwell employees in Iran. Nor did the press consider attacks against the Syrian government (which sided with the Lebanese Christians against the PLO) as essentially “Islamic terrorism,” because they happened to Muslims.

  The murders of Jesuit priests and Dominican nuns in Salisbury, Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), by Muslim militia recruiters, and the seizure of the Washington, D.C., city council chambers (a hostage standoff that was finally resolved without bloodshed) raised no red flags among the media. Bombs detonated near the U.S.-owned Parisian Discount Bank in 1978, as well as the announcement by the Palestinian Arab Revolutionary Army that it had spiked exported oranges from Israel with mercury a month later, failed to persuade anyone of a large-scale movement. Even in Latin America, where terrorists who bombed the Bogotá hotel office of Lufthansa Airlines invoked the name of Andreas Baader (a pro-Palestinian leader of the Baader-Meinhof gang), no one seemed to link the Islamic killers to a larger worldwide movement. Bombs went off virtually every sixty days in Turkey at some American office or installation, and gunfire into the U.S. consulates in Turkey occurred routinely. Moderates, such as Ali Yassin of Kuwait, or Youssef el Sebai, the former Egyptian cultural minister and editor of Al Ahram, were assassinated in 1978. The following year saw more hijackings, more bombings in Israel, ambushes of U.S. military personnel in Iran, the bombing of the Cairo Sheraton, the kidnapping and murder of U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs in Kabul, Afghanistan, multiple bombings in Turkey and France, plus a bombing each in Cyprus and Vienna. Still more incidents were prevented: a grenade attack in Belgium on Israeli passengers was thwarted by Belgian police, and Berlin police stopped seven Lebanese Muslims from blowing up the city’s largest fuel depot.

  Collectively, this murderous track record—only a tiny sampling of Islamic terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s—was largely dismissed as the work of “a few individuals,” of groups that didn’t represent mainstream Islamic thinking. Academics and terror experts said most Muslims were not radicalized, and were not violent. To say that most did not take up the AK-47, however, was quite different from understanding the underlying religious culture that justified those who did. And the very moderates whom the West reflexively cited found themselves at the end of smoking gun barrels. Even if jihad had at one time only meant “self-struggle,” as some Islamic apologists claimed, the definition was juiced between 1960 and 1980 to mean almost exclusively struggle against Israel and her allies. Along with the more militant redefinition of jihad came geopolitical shifts that repeatedly demonstrated the powerlessness of the Muslim states. Israel won war after war; the Saudis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis had their oil, but that seemed to gain them little. If anything, the discovery of oil in the Middle East only confirmed the weakness of the Muslim nations, which relied entirely on the petroleum processing science and technology of the West. Armies of Western workers arrived to do what the Saudis and Iranians could not do, extract the wealth from their own lands. Little had changed from the time the Suez Canal was built—conceived by French engineers, necessitated by Western commerce, funded and protected by British bankers and armies, and driven by the irrepressible Ferdinand de Lesseps.

  Hence, at the same time that a new generation of clerics called for “Islamic republics” based on sharia law, the Muslim countries were reminded on a daily basis of their scientific, cultural, and economic inferiority. Much of the blame, of course, lay with the Islamic cultures themselves. As Middle East historian Bernard Lewis pointed out, the decline in agricultural output in the region rested in part on the “low esteem in which the cultivation of the earth and those engaged in it were held by government, the upper classes, and to some extent even religion.”56 As late as 2008, a visitor to Qatar noted that most of the nation’s foreign residents were servants who attended to every need of the Qatari citizens:There is a clearly defined hierarchy of servitude. At the bottom of the ladder are laborers from Nepal. . . . Next come the Indians. . . . Then there are the Filipinos who, with their English-language skills, work in hotels and restaurants. . . . A Qatari drives up to a store, any store, and honks his horn repeatedly and forcefully. Within a matter of seconds, a Pakistani or Indian or Sri Lankan worker scurries outside into the blazing heat and takes the Qatari’s order, then returns a few minutes later with the merchandise.57

  The writer found that non-Qataris performed every “job,” from banking and insurance to executive positions—that the citizens did absolutely no real work. Every shop, no matter how expensive the merchandise, was run by expatriates, and citizens paid no taxes. Overtaxed Westerners may see this as nirvana, but in reality no native truly earned anything, and knew it. With work and investment comes pride; without citizens’ having a real stake in society, including paying taxes, creativity disappears entirely, as does self-esteem. (A 1978 study of lottery winners discovered that over time they soon reverted to previous levels of satisfaction, deriving less pleasure from everyday events such as buying clothes or talking to friends. “Lucky wealth,” obtained without commensurate work or investment, yielded dissatisfaction.)58

  Obviously, the Palestinians were not frustrated because of their wealth, nor, at the time, did that apply to the majority of Iraqis or Iranians, but the results were the same. Lewis summarized Islam’s descent as a “development . . . overshadowed by a growing awareness” of the loss of “creativity, energy, and power,” and “a passionate desire to restore . . . bygone glories.”59 Instead, military defeats constituted acts of shame in the Arab mind. Virtually none of the reasons given by apologists for Islamic violence—poverty or lack of education—accurately characterized the actual terrorists, hijackers, or suicide bombers. One study of four hundred terrorists concluded that three-quarters were middle class and two-thirds had a college education; and a group of medical doctors were responsible for the failed Glasgow bombing plot of 2007. 60

  Islam saw itself as challenged by only one force: Christianity, and, more specifically, Christianity as personified in Western culture. Over time, the Islamic world had defeated the pagan Eastern cultures, even the Mongols, whose onetime presence in the Middle East is virtually invisible today. While the Mongols accomplished militarily what Christian Europe could never do (i.e., military conquest of the Islamic lands), the dominance of Western militaries was becoming obvious by the Middle Ages, when European knights first bested Muslim armies at Tours and then later at Malta, and even in the defeat in which the Muslims captured Byzantium—but which was achieved only through the acquisition of Western cannons (which themselves could not be mass-produced by the Turks).61 Bernard Lewis points out that in virtually every area of life, Islam has adopted Western traditions and cultures—its architecture almost exclusively uses Western techniques, its literature has become dominated by newspapers and novels rather than Koranic verse, and even a revolutionary Shiite government such as Iran’s finds it necessary to produce . . . a constitution! The West has dominated the infrastructure, amenities, and services of virtually all Muslim cities, and there is “no desire to reverse or even deflect the processes of modernization” except in the rare case of Afghanistan’s Taliban.62As an Algerian put it, his country “was once the granary of Rome, and now it has to import cereals to make bread. It is a land of flocks and gardens, and it imports meat and fruit. It is rich in oil and gas, and it has a foreign debt of twenty-five billion dollars and two million unemployed.”63

  Nevertheless, the point is not whether the Islamic fundamentalist revolution unfolded because of shame, poverty, military ineptitude, or any other factor; the point is that it was real and overlooked. No event should have shaken the proponents of the “moderate Muslim” view more than the revolution in Iran in 1979, which filled the government with the very radicalized Shiites that Western apologists said did not constitute the “average Muslim.” Despite the fact that no financial crisis or widespread unemployment existed prior to the revolution, the new theocratic regime was hugely popular, with more than 10 percent of the population involved in the demonstrations. (In contrast, the French Revolutio
n, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Romanian Revolution of 1989 all had less than 1 percent of the population involved in the rebellion.) Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally (who, thanks to both radical Islamic and Soviet propaganda, was depicted as a U.S. “puppet”), had modernized Iran to a level approaching that of Turkey by 1978. The shah’s father, Reza Pahlavi, had abolished sharia law in favor of Western jurisprudence, prohibited traditional Islamic clothing, and banned the separation of sexes and the veiling of women. Each of these actions prompted clashes with the Muslim clerics, including a rebellion at a shrine in 1935. A combination of British and Soviet troops installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after his father was deposed in 1941, and when a revolution drove him out in 1953, Americans organized a military-led coup that put him back in power. Iran constituted a key southern roadblock to Soviet expansion, and along with Pakistan made up part of the “containment” fence. Seeing an opportunity to foment dissension, the Soviets played on the shah’s habit of ignoring his own constitution and counted on popular reaction to the brutality of the SAVAK secret police. Imams had no more use for the pagan Soviet Union than they did for the (in their eyes) apostate shah, but they allied temporarily with the Communists in order to oust Pahlavi.