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By Edward T. Brett, Ph.D.

Professor and Chair

Department of History

La Roche College.

Enough time has now passed for scholars to gain some perspective so they can begin the process of analyzing the terrible terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Through the analytical process, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have a duty to try to uncover the underlying causes of this tragic event. Scholars must attempt to find out, for instance, why the 19 terrorists felt such hatred for the United States that they were willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to inflict harm on Americans. Scholars likewise need to ask if there is anything that the U.S. can now do to mitigate the possibility that a similar attack might take place in the future. Consequently, I will attempt in the following essay to present some of my thoughts on the September 11th tragedy from the perspective of a historian.

First of all, it seems clear to me that the terrorist attack on the Trade Center represents a new phase in the history of warfare. The Cold War ended around 1990 leaving the U.S. as the world’s only superpower. So in the post-Cold War era enemies of the U.S. know that they cannot defeat her using traditional methods of warfare. It would be suicidal to try. Consequently, to negate overwhelming U.S. military superiority, they have come up with international terrorist cells. These cells are covert and decentralized. They are hard to track down; they can do great damage--both physical and psychological—with minimal weaponry, manpower, and money. In a nutshell, using terrorist tactics is the only way that violent anti-American groups, which do not have massive military power, can hope to inflict damage on a superpower.

At first glance, it is tempting for the U.S. to fall back upon a reliance on traditional military methods in response to the violent acts of these terrorist cells, but if we do so, we play right into their hands. If we respond by massive bombings, which kill large numbers of innocent civilians, or use the terrorists’ actions as an excuse to attack unfriendly countries like Iraq, Iran, or Syria, we create thousands of new recruits for the terrorist networks. Even if we capture or kill some of their leaders, we create martyrs for their cause.

So how should we fight this new kind of warfare? Just as the terrorist groups have developed new strategies to neutralize our advantages as a superpower, the U.S. must develop new strategies to neutralize the advantages of the terrorists.

• First, our military response should be limited and must keep civilian casualties to a bare minimum.
• Second, we need to develop an international coalition of nations that can work together to ferret out terrorists, while tracking down their finances and those who donate to their cause.
• Third, we need to counteract the image that these terrorists try to portray, an image of themselves as warriors of God fighting a holy war.
• Finally, we need to find out the reasons why so many people resent and even hate us and support terrorism against us. If some of these reasons are legitimate, then we need to rectify our conduct; we need to change what we are doing. Since this point is so important, the remainder of this essay will be devoted to it.

If you ask people not only from the Islamic world but from the developing world in general what they dislike about the U.S., one answer you will frequently get is that they feel that the U.S. supports repressive governments in their countries and is even sometimes responsible for creating them. Is this true? Let us look at the case of Iran, which President Bush has recently labeled part of the axis of evil. Following World War II, England was forced to grant this oil-rich colony its independence. But the British, not wanting to lose their oil profits, left the Shah in control of the country, knowing that with him as head of state they could continue exploiting Iran’s primary natural resource. Soon the Shah was overthrown and Mohammed Mossadegh took control of the government. Unable to convince the British that Iranians deserved a fair share of the revenues from their own oil, Mossadegh decided to nationalize the petroleum industry. Not only did this move upset England, but it also alarmed the United States. American companies controlled Saudi Arabian oil and the Eisenhower Administration reasoned that if Mossadegh succeeded in his bold move against the British, the Saudis might follow his example and nationalize their country’s oil. The U.S. further concluded that Mossadegh, unlike the British, could not be counted on to keep Iranian oil out of the hands of the Soviet Union. Consequently, in 1953 President Eisenhower had the CIA topple Mossadegh and the Shah’s son was put in power. The U.S. next trained and equipped a special police force for the Shah, one that terrorized the Iranian people over the next quarter century. In the late 1970s, when the Shah was forced to leave Iran for cancer treatment, the Iranian people seized the moment and revolted. Out of the chaos that followed rose the Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Shiite Islamic religious leader who called on Muslims everywhere to fight a jihad against the U.S., which he dubbed the “Great Satan”. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that Khomeini’s call for a jihad marks the beginning of the modern anti-American radical Muslim movement.

Now let’s look at a second country that Bush also listed as part of the axis of evil, Iraq. Most Americans think that Saddam Hussein’s dealings with the U.S. began in the 1980s with the Iran-Iraq war. It did not. It started in a 1963 CIA-sponsored coup carried out under the direction of the Kennedy administration. Five years earlier, General Abdel Karim Kassem had toppled a pro-Western Iraqi monarchy. Soon Kassem was maneuvering to obtain weapons that would enable him to rival Israel as the dominant military power in the region. Kassem also worried Western oil interests when he made belligerent overtures towards Kuwait. Thus, in 1963 the Kennedy administration, backed by Britain and Israel, clandestinely planned the overthrow of the dictator. France and Germany opposed such a move. (Needless to say, any similarities to recent events in the Gulf area are not coincidental). Ignoring them, Kennedy had CIA agents conspire with the small fascist-like but anticommunist Baath Party. Among the collaborators was a young 25-year old Saddam Hussein.

Following the coup, the CIA provided the Baathists with a long list of suspected communists and leftists. Included were hundreds of doctors, lawyers, professors, and technicians. They were all systematically rounded up and executed. The U.S. next provided the new regime with sophisticated weaponry and soon Bechtel, Mobil, and British Petroleum were making millions from Iraqi oil.

In 1968, when internecine squabbling developed among the Baathist leaders, the CIA backed another coup in which a kinsman of Saddam Hussein came to power. This opened the way for Saddam who was made vice president in 1975. Just four years later, at an infamous meeting where he denounced 21 senior Baathist leaders and had them taken out and shot, Saddam became president and absolute dictator. This was the same year that the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah took place. When the Ayatollah Khomieni took power and set up a Shiite fundamentalist theocracy, both the U.S. and Saddam were greatly concerned, the latter because 60% of the Iraqi population was Shiite and most of these saw Khomieni as their hero. Saddam therefore ruthlessly murdered thousands of them. He then invaded Iran on September 22, 1980. At first his army did well, but soon they were being beaten back. This is when the new Reagan administration decided to intervene. It altered U.S. law to allow American corporations to sell Iraq materials for weapons of mass destruction. It also used U. S. satellites to pin point the location of Iranian forces so that Saddam could bomb them with chemical missiles. When Saddam’s military began gassing the Kurds in Halabja, Reagan officials intervened to prevent the U.S. Senate from passing a “Prevention of Genocide Act”. According to some sources, the U.S. even delivered seven strains of deadly anthrax to the murderous Saddam, and Donald Rumsfeld was involved in this.

Indeed, from 1981 through 1988, the Reagan-Bush administration considered Saddam Hussein to be its main ally in the Persian Gulf region. A constant stream of Republican notables including Rumsfeld, flew frequently to Baghdad to confer with the dictator. Bechtel Corporation, later headed by then Secretary of State George Schultz, even negotiated with Saddam to build an oil pipeline through Iraq.

So close was the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, that Saddam erroneously thought that the U.S. would allow him to do what it had refused to permit Kassem to do, that is, take over oil-rich Kuwait. But Saddam wanted to make sure. He asked Ambassador April Glaspie how the U.S. would respond if he invaded Kuwait. After consulting with higher ups in the Bush administration, she told him that the U.S. would consider such a move as a regional conflict that was none of the U.S.’s concern. So Saddam invaded thereby bringing about the first Gulf War.

Suffice it to say that although most Americans know nothing of this history, many in the Middle East and Europe do and this is at least part of the reason why a majority of the people in every country except Israel opposed our recent invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But Iran and Iraq are not isolated stories. There are scores of similar examples of the U.S. stifling nationalistic movements throughout the Third World. So the question arises: What has caused the U.S. to support so many despotic governments, we who see ourselves as the world’s greatest champion of democracy?

The answer lies in part in the strategy we developed to fight the Cold War against Stalinist Russia following World War II, a strategy that can be traced back to the Truman Doctrine. To Truman the Cold War was a war between freedom and communist slavery. This was certainly an oversimplification, for there were countless countries that were noncommunist but where citizens had no freedoms and were brutalized by their fascist-like governments. Greece, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, and Nicaragua were just a few of the repressive, undemocratic countries receiving unconditional support from the Truman Administration. Over the next five decades many more despotic regimes would be the recipients of U.S. military and economic aid. Believing that any type of government was better than communism, U.S. presidents, with straight faces and the support of Congress, would claim that these right-wing dictatorships were “imperfect democracies” and, without U.S. help, they would certainly be overthrown by Moscow-directed communists. And this, in turn, would have a domino effect on all the countries in their region. Of course, what actually happened was that these despotic regimes used their U.S. aid to eliminate moderate reformers in their countries, reformers who were the only hope for true democracy.

So, although throughout the Cold War we spoke of “the free world” versus that of communist oppression, in truth we came to support many countries that oppressed their own people. As long as a government was willing to align itself with the U.S. in the global fight against communism, we did not ask questions about its lack of democratic values. Ironically, we were soon seen by reform-minded people throughout the developing world as a nation that only seems to care about democracy within its own borders, as a nation that as often as not hinders economic and democratic development elsewhere.

Under the Eisenhower Administration our foreign policy was amended in a very important way. The U.S. would no longer allow neutrality in the Cold War. A nation had to be with us or we would consider it against us. In other words, it would have to join the U.S.-led alliance against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, or we would treat it as our enemy.

This Eisenhower addendum to our foreign policy proved catastrophic to underdeveloped nations. A year after the 1953 CIA intervention in Iran, Eisenhower again used the CIA, this time to overthrow the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. What was its crime? He had nationalized, but with compensation, unused land from large landowners and redistributed it to landless peasants. Since the U.S.-based United Fruit Company owned much of this land, Eisenhower sent the CIA to overthrow what virtually all scholars consider the best government in Guatemalan history. Since that time until the present, U.S.-backed Guatemalan governments and their death squads have murdered as many as a half-million of their own people. These include one Catholic bishop and over twenty priests.

Neither Arbenz in Guatemala nor Mossadeigh in Iran were communists. They tried to be neutral in the Cold War and they put the economic interests of their own countries above that of the U.S. As a result, for the first time in history the CIA was used to overthrow foreign governments. Almost all future U.S. presidents would use the CIA or the U.S. military for similar assignments. We would overthrow governments in the Congo and Indonesia and throughout Latin America. We would help keep in power corrupt, oppressive regimes in South Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, to name just a few. And in all these places we would intervene with catastrophic results that especially hurt the poor.

Only the Carter Administration was willing to question the U.S. Cold War blueprint. Carter felt U.S. policy should be predicated on human rights. If a government was undemocratic and mistreated its citizens it should not receive U.S. aid, even if it were anticommunist. Unfortunately, Republican leaders and most influential Democrats considered Carter’s view naive. It was harshly attacked by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential race and Carter was easily defeated. After this, no serious presidential candidate resurrected Carter’s human rights argument again. Conventional wisdom said to do so would be political suicide.

Even the problems the U.S. faces in Afghanistan today can be traced in part to our myopic foreign policy. It was Reagan’s CIA director William Casey who in 1986 created the international radical Muslim movement in Central Asia. Casey had Pakistan recruit thousands of Islamic extremists, one of whom was Bin Laden, from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, China, and elsewhere. The CIA armed and trained them and then sent them to join the Afghan Mujaheddin in their war against the Soviets. Altogether the U.S. sent $2 billion in military aid into Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets. Much of this aid eventually wound up in the hands of the Taliban. Some scholars argue that without this military help the Taliban could never have seized power in 1994.

Evidently neither Casey nor other members of the Reagan Administration seemed to understand the long-term ramifications of their actions. The radical Muslims had an agenda very different from that of the United States. Once the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan these religious extremists turned their hatred towards the U.S. They reasoned that if they could drive the Russians from Afghanistan they could also drive the other superpower from the Muslim world. Indeed, the U.S. had helped create a monster that it could not control.

But the story does not end here. Despite their horrendous human rights record, until late 1997 the Clinton Administration, working through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, actually supported the Taliban in the civil war that followed the defeat of communism in Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban were anti-Iranian and promised to give Unocal, a U.S. oil company, exclusive rights to build a lucrative oil pipeline through Afghanistan once the warlords were defeated.

Some might argue that our foreign policy was justified because of the Cold War—that communism is indeed the worst form of government and that therefore the U.S. was justified in its support for right-wing, oppressive governments because not to do so might have meant that communists would have come to power. Even if this were true, which I do not think is the case, the Cold War is over. So is it not time to do what President Carter wanted to do? That is to have a foreign policy based on human rights. Now I am not so naïve as to think that the creation of such a policy will end the threat from Al Qaida and other terrorist groups overnight and dry up their source of recruits. But it’s a start, and if seriously adhered to, terrorists will become less and less effective over time