As the nation once again honors American war dead on Memorial Day, instead
of spouting the usual nationalistic platitudes that U.S. soldiers fought to
keep the country “safe and free,” perhaps we should analyze whether
that is really true.
Since the 9/11 attacks, more than double the number of Americans killed in
those terrorist attacks have been sent to their deaths in the war on terror
(for example, in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), not to mention the US government’s
killing of an order of magnitude more people in many Islamic countries using
conventional military forces and drone attacks. Yet during this 15-year period,
Americans have been in denial about why Islamist terrorists attack or threaten
US targets at home and overseas. US politicians don’t want to discuss the unpleasant
reality, because it might anger some voters and threaten their all-important
chances for reelection. The American media – putting on what the public
wants to see, hear, and read to get big advertising revenues – overhypes
coverage of Islamist groups like ISIS, because sensationalist coverage of diabolical
villains doing heinous acts sells, but astutely buries the reasons these groups
attack the United States.
American media coverage of Islamist terror groups has focused on their proliferation
and their increasing savagery – for example, ISIS’s beheadings of hostages,
its brutal methods of rule, and its barbarous destruction of archeological treasures
– but never examines the question of how much of a threat many of these
groups pose to US targets at home and abroad and why these groups would want
to attack a country so far away.
In fact, fundamentalist Islam has been around for centuries, just as radical
branches of other religions have been, and most radical Islamist groups have
local or regional grievances – for example, ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and now
Libya; Boko Haram in Nigeria and surrounding countries; Al Shabab in Somalia;
and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in the region of West Africa. Jenifer
Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies was recently quoted in a New York Times article about the US
military giving assistance to various governments across Africa to fight such
groups. She made a very telling, if understated comment, “Some of the threats,
whether it’s Al Shabab, ISIL[ISIS], Boko Haram, or AQIM, pose a more direct
and sophisticated threat to African states, to European allies, and potentially
to the United States.” The last phrase is used as a euphemism by experts
on terrorism to acknowledge that the United States is harder (but not impossible)
for such groups to attack, because it is more distant across oceans and it doesn’t
have as many radicalized sympathizers to shelter prospective “evildoers.”
The fact…