By Georgie Anne Geyer (Fri Jul 6, 6:02 PM ET)
WASHINGTON -- Did it seem strange to anybody else -- everything seems pretty strange to me these days -- that President Bush used this year's July Fourth celebration to compare our war against Iraq to the American Revolutionary War against England?
Speaking before members of the National Guard and their families in Martinsburg, W.Va., the president painted a grand canvas of considerably exaggerated truthfulness. "We give thanks for all the brave citizen-soldiers of our Continental Army who dropped pitchforks and took up muskets to fight for our freedom and liberty and independence," he told the crowd. "You're the successors of those brave men. ... Like those early patriots, you're fighting a new and unprecedented war."
But there is a secret here that is at the heart and soul of America's wars in our era today -- a secret that, if we would let it, could solve the dilemma of how to get out of Iraq and the other quicksands we seem to be drawn to.
For if you look closely at the wars America has been fighting lately, they do not so much parallel our fight against the British so long ago as they personify the fact that we are fighting for the pitiful remains of European colonialism. How foolishly and expensively we replaced the French colonialists in Vietnam! Even in a doomed place such as Somalia, we waded bravely ashore, replacing (in the Somali mind) the hated Italian conquerors, who eventually had the good sense to go home.
But Iraq is the worst of all, for there we are seen by most Iraqis -- who repeat this sentiment over and over in polls and interviews -- as the descendants of the British colonialists of the 1920s and '30s. Somebody, somehow, forgot to tell Washington before we ever went into Iraq that the British lost more men in the Mesopotamian campaign of the 1920s than in all the rest of the Middle East. Equally, much of the Iranian hatred of America also comes from our moving in on the Brits' shirttails.
This reality has not escaped many of our best analysts. In a speech last fall at the International Center for Journalists, columnist Fareed Zakaria told the group, shaking his head sadly: "We may not be a great empire, but we're a great nation-state. But we can't continue insisting upon playing the role of the last British empire -- over and over again."
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Carter, carries this analysis to address the question that obsesses us as a nation: What truly motivates the "terrorists," the insurgents, the suicide bombers, all those people who apparently hate us for one reason or another?
The commonly accepted knowledge in the administration and in the Pentagon is that this is a religious war, that these men blow themselves up for God. Not at all, says Brzezinski: "These are political questions. They may seen religious, but in reality they are directly related to our policies. Look at who they are against: the U.S., the Brits, the Israelis. We are seen as the new British colonialists, just as in Vietnam we were seen as the continuation of French colonialism."
Actually, all the investigations into who the terrorists are and what inspires them are clear about the fact that their primary inspiration is not religious, but political. The study of 300 suicide bombers made by professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago found that virtually none of them was religiously inspired; they were communists, socialists, Muslim Brothers, Arab nationalists, but above all, they were inspired by Western occupation and dominance of their lands.
Last week, at a meeting at the New America Foundation, CNN's seasoned terrorist specialist, Peter Bergen, impatiently told a group of us after someone brought up the old question of Islamic madrassah schools inspiring terrorists: "Of all the terrorists that I have known, almost none were from the madrassahs. If they were educated, they were usually from Western universities; they were engineers ..."
And they are doctors.
Instead of confusing us, the fact that the suspects captured in Britain this last week after attempting car bombings were doctors actually confirms the "political inspiration" theory. We might stop to recall that it was doctors in Hitler's concentration camps who performed the most frightful operations on the inmates (remember the grotesque Dr. Josef Mengele?), and that Soviet doctors stood obediently at the right hand of the communist state, performing every possible horror.
In today's world, for these "doctors" from the Middle East, the craft that they learn in London or Yorkshire or wherever has very little link with their private emotional motivation. Indeed, the Brits who captured them said all had been radicalized by the Iraq War -- that same war we think we're fighting to keep ourselves safe from terrorism.
Britain's new prime minister, Gordon Brown, showed some good sense this week in his first confrontation with terrorist attacks. In sharp contrast to his predecessor Tony Blair, who egged W. on with visions of new colonial grandeur, Brown took what was described in London as a "minimalist approach." The episode was a crime, rather than a threat to civilization. The London Times said his poll ratings were "soaring."
It is becoming more and more clear that if anything besides Armageddon is to come out of our present involvement in the Middle East, then we must embrace the political argument while keeping an eye on the religious one -- but swiftly adjust our policies in order to change the situation. Would that we would.
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