We should be under no illusions about our struggle against Osama
bin Laden and the cultists and terrorists arrayed around him.
Although we control the sea lanes and skies of that Arab-Muslim
world, he appears to hold sway over the streets of a thwarted
civilization, one that sees him as an avenger for the sad, cruel lot
that has been its fate in recent years.
A terrible war was fought between rulers and Islamists; the
regimes in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt won, but the insurgents took
to the road, and vowed to return as triumphant conquerors after the
dynasties and the despots were sacked.Rich, famous, free and young,
bin Laden taunts the rulers of a silent, frightened Arab world
seething with resentments of every kind. He and his lieutenants
cannot overthrow the Arab ruling order, so they have turned their
resentments on us.
Consider the three men who taunted us in the video that came our
way on Oct. 7, courtesy of the Qatari satellite channel, Al-Jazeera.
In it, bin Laden is flanked by two lieutenants. The older one, a man
of 50 years, is an Egyptian physician, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a
sworn enemy of the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Twenty years ago, he had
been picked up in the dragnet that followed the assassination of
Anwar Sadat. He was tortured, and imprisoned for three years. He
drifted to Pakistan, then made his way to the Sudan and Afghanistan,
and took to the life of terror.
The younger man, spokesman for bin Laden, is a Kuwaiti theocratic
activist by the name of Sleiman Abu Gheith, who hails from a quaint,
stable principality, with generous welfare subsidies and an American
trip-wire to protect it against a predatory Saddam. Abu Gheith had
been an employee of the Kuwaiti state, an imam of a
government-sponsored mosque, and a teacher of Islamic studies. Those
who know him tell of a man who had become fanatical in his view of
Islam's role in political and social life.
It is no mystery that reporters from Arab shores tell us of
affluent men and women, some with years of education in American
universities behind them, celebrating the cruel deed of Mohamed Atta
and his hijackers. The cult of the bandit taunting the powerful has
always been seductive in broken societies. Bin Laden and Zawahiri
and Abu Gheith and Atta did not descend from the sky: They are the
angry sons of a failed Arab generation. They are direct heirs of two
generations of Arabs that have seen all the high dreams of Asr al
Nahda (the era of enlightenment and secular nationalism) issue
in sterility, dictatorship and misery. The secular fathers begot
this strange breed of holy warriors.
A suffocating hate separates the ruler from the ruled in Arab
lands. The former own those lands, they have closed up the universe,
and their dominion stretches as far as the eye can see. Their scions
stand at the ready to claim the good things of the earth. Imagine
the way Arabs read the ascendancy of the sons of the dictators of
Syria, Egypt and Iraq in public life; a trick has been played on
them. Under their eyes, the republics have metamorphosed into
monarchies in all but name. Alone, in God's broad lands, it seems to
them, they are to be excluded from a share of today's democratic
inheritance. The rulers can't deliver to us these sullen, resentful
populations and--shrewd men--the rulers know it. They have ducked
for cover as America blew in asking them to choose between the
terrorists' world and ours.
We were "walk-ons" in this political and generational
struggle playing out in Araby. America and Americans have a hard
time coming to terms with those unfathomable furies of a distant,
impenetrable world. In truth, Atta struck at us because he could not
take down Mr. Mubarak's world, because in the burdened, crowded land
of the Egyptian dictator there is very little offered younger
Egyptians save for the steady narcotic of anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism. The attack on the North Tower of the World Trade
Center was Atta's "rite of passage."
In the same vein, bin Laden and Abu Gheith can't sack the
dynastic order of the Gulf. (Were they to do so, they would replace
it with a cruel reign of terror that would make the yuppies of
Jeddah who have been whispering sweet things in the ears of foreign
reporters about bin Laden yearn for the days of Al Saud). So the
avengers come our way. Our shadow, faint and mediated through hated
rulers and middlemen, has fallen across their world. They struck at
the shadow, but it is the order that reigns in their lands that
fuels their righteousness. And it is the sense of approval they see
in the eyes of ordinary men and women in their societies that tells
them to press on.
A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs. Nothing
grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and
populations given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to
their most malignant hatreds. Something is amiss in an Arab world
that besieges American embassies for visas and at the same time
celebrates America's calamities. Something has gone terribly wrong
in a world where young men strap themselves with explosives, only to
be hailed as "martyrs" and avengers. No military campaign
by a foreign power can give modern-day Arabs a way out of the cruel,
blind alley of their own history.
Mr. Ajami, author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs"
(Vintage, 1999), teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies.
Arabs Have
Nobody to Blame
But Themselves
Bin Laden heads a frustrated
and failed generation.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Tuesday, October 16, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
