Decline and Fall

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, fundamentalism, GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, Islam, OOIBC, personal, politics, terrorism

On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, militants in Pakistan tried for a repeat of one of the acts that solidified their place in the "enemies of all that is good" category:

Suspected pro-Taleban militants have tried to blow up an ancient carving of Buddha in north-west Pakistan. The statue, thought to date from the second century BC, sustained only minimal damage in the attack near Manglore in remote Swat district.

At least the statue is mostly unharmed. But read to the bottom of the article:

Last week, militants blew up about 60 music, video and cosmetics stalls at a market in the valley after stall owners ignored warnings to close businesses deemed un-Islamic.

60 of them. That's a shocking number. Imagine 60 shops in an American shopping mall being destroyed in this way. It would be a national emergency. In Pakistan and much of the Middle East, it garners barely a footnote in the world press.

It's useful to remember why we are fighting in Afghanistan. It's too bad our reasons for fighting in Iraq aren't nearly so justifiable. And it's a crying shame that our fight in Iraq has taken us so far afield from the fight against violent religious extremism. No matter what your opinion of our military (mis)adventures in southeast Asia, it behooves you to remember that there are still bad guys out there, and they are still murderously intent on imposing their will.

Labels: fundamentalism, religion, terrorism

Andrew Sullivan ponders the significance of a study that says conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced than atheists and agnostics. I don't find this surprising at all. I've long thought that the trend toward fundamentalism is a product of the perception that the world is getting worse and that something stringent needs to be done about it. We can see this in the Muslim world, where the increasing liberalization of their traditional way of life is changing their society in new and unseen ways; and we can see it in America, where people are turning more and more toward more radical and literal interpretaions of our version of the good book. People turn to strict observance of age-old dogmas because they are afraid of the modern world.

Add to that the zeal of the newly-converted, and you have set the conditions for fundamentalism to flourish.

My own parents serve as an object-lesson in this. Both of them lived through the 60's, and while neither participated fully in the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the bay area in those days (Dad was a grad student at Berkeley and Mom lived in San Francisco in 1969), they didn't reject it out of hand, either. After the societal degradation they witnessed during the 70's, they were searching for something real, something to make sense of the crazy world they had seen change before their eyes. When Christ came a-knocking (in the form of their 6-year-old son, yours truly, who wanted to go to church because the girl down the street did) they grabbed at it. It was what presented itself in their moment of need.

A couple of years later, they were homeschooling me in the ways of Christian fundamentalism: we watched the 700 Club every morning, we learned all about the "holes" in the theory of evolution, and we learned about the "Christian History" of America, as taught by charlatans and faux-historians such as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Barton and Peter Marshall. Mom even chaired the Pat Robertson for President campaign in our area. They indoctrinated me into the religious right, which, to their credit, was what they believed to be the truth.

I was able to escape that dogma through keeping an open mind and doing research of my own, but I often wonder if part of the reason I was able to see behind that curtain was simply a function of having never had it as bad as they did; at least in terms of world-upheaval. I didn't grow up in the post-war boom, I never saw the Eisenhower years, I missed Watergate entirely, and I never had to deal with the excesses of the drug culture.

My parents did, ultimately, teach me to seek the truth behind the way the mainstream presents it. This bit of skepticism turned out to be the foundation of my own skepticism, which has led me to atheism (or at least agnosticism, which in my case is practically the same thing), distrust of government, and distrust of authority, even religious authority.

I well remember learning about how John Wycliffe bravely challenged the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy to publish the Bible in English. I managed to translate that lesson into challenging the puritanical American orthodoxy's stranglehold on what constitutes "Christian" behavior. I also learned to be scrupulous about telling the truth and being humble about my estimation of my own abilities. I also learned to value the American experiment for its focus on the reason ("God's viceroy," to quote John Donne) of the average person. I was brought up to be a child of God, I ended up being a child of the Enlightenment.

Another thing about my parents: one was a divorcee (the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree there) and the other had a child out of wedlock. So they had made mistakes they weren't keen on repeating. In a lot of ways this caused them to rear me correctly, which has ultimately, ironically, made enough of an independent thinker of me to make a free thinker of me.

So I'm not surprised that conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced. It is precisely that sort of foundational experience (or "Primal Scene," to use Freud's term) that lends itself to such an abrupt and total change in outlook.

Labels: fundamentalism, personal, reason, religion

Some things are simply beyond parody. Kos links (via Burnt Orange Report) to a report that the Chairman of the Texas State House Appropriations Committee, Warren Chisum (R-Pampa), doesn't merely believe that God created the Earth in six days, but that the earth is fixed, and the sun revolves around it.

But that isn't even the worst of it. Chisum distributed a memo detailing the strategy to take the teaching of evolution out of public schools by exposing the true root of the "religion" of "Copernicanism." What is this root, you ask? If you guessed the Jews, you're right:

Indisputable evidence--long hidden but now available to everyone--demonstrates conclusively that so-called "secular evolution science" is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate "creation scenario" of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is developed concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic "holy book" Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.

Now you might say this is all just the crazy rantings of one seriously unstable legislator. But it's not just him. He got the idea from a Representative in the Georgia House, Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland), who is a member of the Higher Education Committee. This guy has a say on matters relating to the University of Georgia system, including funding priorities.

I'll give the whackjobs at The Fair Education Foundation this: they actually take the Bible as literally as young-earth creationists only claim they do. They point to 67 places in the Bible where it strongly implies that the Sun revolves around the Earth. This cannot be denied--it's right there in the good book. Thus, it is only logical to conclude that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is thoroughly incompatible with the universe as it is actually observed. Either the evidence of science is right, or the Bible is. Both cannot be true.

Labels: creationism, fundamentalism, religion