[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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