[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 161 (Tuesday, November 27, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H8399-H8400]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MORE THAN A WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, this evening, as our Marines are on the
ground in Afghanistan, I would like to posit that the United States is
engaged in more than a war. Indeed, we are engaged in the middle of a
revolution.
Today, Thomas Friedman, New York Times News Service, wrote an
editorial entitled ``Shedding the Veil of bin Laden,'' which I will
submit for the Record, and I will only read a small part of it. Mr.
Friedman is traveling in that part of the world, in the United Arab
Emirates, and he says: ``Over coffee the other day here in the gulf, an
Arab friend confided to me something that was deeply troubling to him.
He said, My 11-year-old son thinks bin Laden is a good man. For
Americans, Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. But for many young
Arabs, bin Laden, even in defeat, is still Robin Hood. What attracts
them to him is his sheer defiance of everything young Arabs and Muslims
detest,'' Friedman goes on, ``their hypocritical rulers, Israel, U.S.
dominance, and their own backwardness.''
He then goes on to quote Steven Cohen, the Middle East analyst, who
says, ``We in America can't just go on looking at the Arab world as a
giant gas station, indifferent to what happens inside. Because the gas
is now leaking and all around people are throwing matches. Every day,''
he says, ``I see signs that this war of ideas is possible.''
And, indeed, we are involved in a war of ideas. I would like to
commend again the book ``Sacred Rage'' by Robin Wright, as a very
important contribution to our own understanding of the revolution in
which we are engaged. In 1986, when this book was first published, and
is now being updated, the author, Robin Wright, quotes Sajib Salom, the
former Lebanese Prime Minister, who said, ``The growth of Islamic
fundamentalism is an earthquake.''
She recounts from her own personal experience living in the Middle
East the turning point of this revolution, centering it in Iran. Of
course, the government that the United States of America had supported
collapsed in Iran in 1979, the Shah of Iran deposed, something that the
United States had not anticipated. And, in fact, his government at that
time, serving as policeman for the entire gulf region. Well, shortly
thereafter, in March of 1982, there was a huge conference in Tehran,
where some 380 men with various religious and revolutionary credentials
met at the former Hilton conference ballroom. Their goal was to help to
create the ideal Islamic government.
As the government of Iran switched from a monarchy to a theocracy,
they had many declarations that came out of that seminar, and she
recounts this going back to the mid 1980s. The conclusions of the
seminar in some ways were vaguely worded and riddled with rhetoric, but
revolutions are that way, and Islamic militants, mainly Shi'a but
including some Sunnis, and more recently even more of them, would
launch a large-scale offensive to cleanse the Islamic world of the
Satanic Western and Eastern influences
[[Page H8400]]
that they viewed as hindering their progress, and they agreed to the
following back in the early 1980s:
First, that religion should not be separated from politics; secondly,
that the only way to achieve true independence, true independence, was
to return to Islamic roots; third, there should be no reliance on
superpowers or other outsiders, and the region should get rid of them;
and, fourth, they recommended that the Shi'a should be more active in
getting rid of foreign powers.
Dr. Marvin Zonis, at that time the director of the Middle East
Institute at the University of Chicago, had a stunning comment about
the Psychological Roots of Shiite Muslim Terrorism in a Washington
seminar, in which he stated this message from Iran: No matter how
bizarre or trivial it may sound on first, second, fourth or 39th
hearing, is, in my opinion, the single most impressive political
ideology which has been proposed in the 20th century since the
Bolshevik Revolution. If we accepted Bolshevism as a remnant of the
19th century, then, he argues, that we have had only one good one in
the 20th century, and I would put the word good in quotes, and it is
this one: Islamic fundamentalism. This powerful message will be with us
for a very long time, no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.
As I end this evening, I would just commend this book ``Sacred
Rage,'' and say I will continue with briefings on this as the days
proceed, and I submit herewith, Mr. Speaker, the newspaper article I
referred to above:
[From the Toledo (OH) Blade, Nov. 26, 2001]
Shedding the Veil of bin Laden
(By Thomas L. Friedman)
Dubai, United Arab Emirates.--Over coffee the other day
here in the gulf, an Arab friend--a sweet, thoughtful,
liberal person--confided to me something that was deeply
troubling him: ``My 11-year old son thinks bin Laden is a
good man.''
For Americans, Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. But for
many young Arabs, bin Laden even in defeat, is still Robin
Hood. What attracts them to him is not his vision of the
ideal Muslim society, which few would want to live in. No,
what attracts them to him is his sheer defiance of everything
young Arabs and Muslims detest--their hypocritical rulers,
Israel, U.S. dominance, and their own economic backwardness.
He is still the finger in the eye of the world that so many
frustrated, powerless people out here would love to poke.
The reason it is important to eliminate bin Laden--besides
justice--is the same reason it was critical to eliminate the
Taliban: As long as we're chasing him around, there will
never be an honest debate among Muslims and Arabs about the
future of their societies.
Think of all the nonsense written in the press--
particularly the European and Arab media--about the concern
for ``civilian casualities,'' in Afghanistan. It turns out
many of those Afghan ``civilians'' were praying for another
dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties
or not. Now that the Taliban are gone, Afghans can freely
fight out, among themselves, the war of ideas for what sort
of society they want.
My hope is that once bin Laden is eliminated, Arabs and
Muslims will want to do the same. That is, instead of
expressing rage with their repressive, corrupt rulers, or
with U.S. policy, by rooting for bin Laden, they will start
to raise their own voices. It's only when the Arab-Muslim
world sheds the veil of bin Laden, as Afghans shed the
Taliban, and faces the fact that Sept. 11 was primarily about
anger and problems with their societies, not ours, will we
eradicate not just the hardware of terrorism, but its
software.
``We in the West can't have that debate for them, but we
can help create the conditions for it to happen,'' remarked
the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen. ``America's role is
to show the way to incremental change--something that is not,
presto, instant democracy or fantasies that enlightened
despotism will serve our interest. We can't just go on
looking at the Arab world as a giant gas station, indifferent
to what happens inside. Because the gas is now leaking and
all around people are throwing matches.''
Every day I see signs that this war of ideas is possible:
It's the Arab journalist who says to me angrily of the Arab
world today, ``We can't even make an aspirin for our own
headache,'' or it's Ahmad al-Baghdadi, the Kuwaiti professor,
who just published a remarkable essay in Kuwait's Al Anbaa
and Egypt's Akhbar Al Youm titled ``Sharon Is a Terrorist--
and You?''
[Ariel] Sharon was a terrorist from the very first moment
of the . . . Zionist entity,'' wrote Baghdadi. But what about
Arab-Muslim rulers? ``Persecuting intellectuals in the
courtrooms [of Arab countries], trials [of intellectuals] for
heresy . . . all exist only in the Islamic world. Is this not
terrorism? . . . Iraq alone is a never-ending story of
terrorism of the state against its own citizens and
neighbors. Isn't this terrorism? . . . The Palestinian Arabs
were the first to invent airplane hijacking and the scaring
of passengers. Isn't this terrorism?
``Arab Muslims have no rivals in this; they are the masters
of terrorism toward their citizens, and sometimes their
terrorism also reaches the innocent people of the world, with
the support of some of the clerics . . .
``[Ours] is a nation whose ignorance makes the nations of
the world laugh! The Islamic world and the Arab world are the
only [places] in which intellectuals--whose only crime was to
write--rot in prison. The Arab and Muslims claim that their
religion is a religion of tolerance, but they show no
tolerance for those who oppose their opinions.
``. . . Now the time has come to pay the price . . . and
the account is long--longer than all the beards of the
Taliban gang together. The West's message to the Arab and
Muslim world is clear: mend your ways or else'' (translation
by MEMRI).
We must fight the ground war to get bin Laden and his
hardware. But Arab and Muslims must fight the war of ideas to
uproot his software. The sooner we help them get on to that
war, the better.
Ask the folks in Kabul.
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