I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin
Laden was killed, Bob wanted me to say a few words about it … about
al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York
Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters,
won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle
East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m
an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the
news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what
al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it
intimately.Editor’s note: Chris Hedges made these remarks about
Osama bin Laden’s death at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los
Angeles on Sunday evening.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation
that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military
occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world,
following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases,
dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of
terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.
And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in
al-Qaida – that’s clear – he’s kind of a spiritual
mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that
Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren
about Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months
ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it.
That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he
may have signed off on, he no way planned.
I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of
al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … and I covered the first Gulf
War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra
during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by
the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi
Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait,
bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help
organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And
American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times
Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I
stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and
was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7
collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark
elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is
always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the
other.
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t
make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about
it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight
terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within
their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned
to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived
and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon
transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations
in the Middle East and Europe.
So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered
the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were
appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had
major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawy, the head of al-Azhar –
who died recently – who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced
them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama
bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or
religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And
the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had
built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than
we are.
We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to
respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the
explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death
above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert
McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he
did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the
North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of
civilians dead.
These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our
response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of
occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been
handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will
spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most
probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where
we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the
brute and brutal force of empire.
And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As
Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others
it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to
Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of
empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in
the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind
of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know
it’s intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life
reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any
way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as
Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to
fight.
Thank you.
