The Clash of Barbarisms September 11th and the Making of the New World Disorder Gilbert Achcar (Translated by Peter Drucker) Monthly Review Press New York 2002 $15.95

Gilbert Achcar’s The Clash of Barbarisms is an essential book for anyone wanting to get a working understanding of the factors that led up to the events of September 11. Achcar, who has written extensively on the Middle East, lived in Lebanon before moving to France, where he teaches Politics and International Relations at the University of Paris - VIII. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, the author of several books on contemporary politics published in French, and editor of The Legacy of Ernest Mandel (Verso, 1999).

One of the central theses running through Achcar’s book is that in most fundamental respects the Al-Quaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the logical (if unanticipated) consequence of US foreign policy toward the Middle East. For fifty years the US has sought to increase its control in this strategic region by diplomatic means, by economic and political pressure, and by violence. It engineered the overthrow of the progressive nationalist Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. It sent Marines into Lebanon in 1959 (and again in 1983). It has propped up regimes of torture like Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, and feudal family dictatorships like the Saudis. It overthrew the Iraqi government in 1968, helped install the Ba’ath regime, supported Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979, sold him chemical and biological weapons in the early 1980s, and backed his war against Iran. It supported King Hussein of Jordan, including his slaughter of perhaps 40,000 Palestinian refugees in September 1970. It has backed the Israeli state from its very beginning, has helped arm it to the teeth, and now has a close and intimate alliance with the butcher of the Sabra and Chatilah refugee camps, Ariel Sharon. It gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait, and then itself invaded Iraq. It incited Iraqi Kurds and Shi’a to rise up against Hussein, and then stood by and watched them get slaughtered. It then imposed a brutal embargo on the people of Iraq that according to UN estimates has killed around 900,000 Iraqis, 400,000 of them children, and about which an article in the bourgeois US journal Foreign Affairs has commented

"if the UN estimates of the human damage in Iraq are even roughly correct, therefore it would appear that – in a so far futile effort to remove Saddam (Hussein) from power and a somewhat more successful effort to constrain him militarily – economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." (John and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction”, Foreign Affairs, 78, (May/June 1999), p.51)

Achcar shows how September 11th has been transformed into a unique event, unprecedented in human history, almost of mythic proportions. He then demolishes this myth, pointing out that

"on the scale of carnage for which the U.S. government is directly responsible, and has never expressed the least regret for, it was all in all a pretty ordinary massacre. Is it forbidden to mention the 200,000 civilian victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...? What about the three million Indochinese civilians who were victims of US aggression...?”

Clearly, as far as atrocities against innocent civilians are concerned, the US government can dish it out, but it can’t take it.

The Clash of Barbarisms lays out in considerable detail the multiple ways in which the policies of US imperialism directly laid the basis for the September 11 attacks. For more than fifty years US diplomacy has ferociously targeted the left throughout the Arabic world. This had the result of marginalizing the left as a political alternative to the despotic and feudal regimes throughout the region — and of creating an enormous political space for anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to pose itself as the alternative to the pro-Western regimes like the house of Saud.

But the US government did more than that. It not only created the space for political terrorism, it created the actual instrument itself. It is now common knowledge that the cadre of Al Quaeda, like the Taliban and other currents of extreme Islamic fundamentalism, were rallied, organized, armed, trained, supported and encouraged at every turn by successive American administrations starting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. And ultimately, as Malcolm X pointed out, chickens come home to roost.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is its lengthy segment in Chapter Two that traces the evolution of Sunni fundamentalism in the emergence of the Saudi kingdom. Achcar shows how the alliance between Sheik Mohammed bin Saud and the fundamentalist Wahhabite movement created the Saudi regime, one of the most reactionary and fundamentalist governments on the planet. He traces the development of this uneasy and tension-ridden alliance to the emergence of modern oil politics beginning with the first petroleum concession contract to Standard Oil of California in 1933. This was followed by the first appearance of an American military presence during World War Two, starting with the construction of the airfield at Dhahran in 1943. Achcar details the evolution of this alliance into one of the tightest relationships Washington has with any Third World regime. It’s a fascinating picture, particularly in its description of the many uses Washington found for the reactionary fundamentalism of the Saudi regime, for example, as a weapon to attempt to counteract the growth of modernizing nationalist currents like the Nasser regime in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the equally fundamentalist but anti-US government of Iran following the overthrow of the Shah.

Achcar states that, “unlike historical fascism, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism is not an acute manifestation of an imperial policy and a reaction to the rise of the workers movement. Rather, it is an acute manifestation of opposition to imperialist domination and to the corrupt bourgeois regimes on which that domination depends.” This fundamentalism in its most extreme form has thrown up a series of currents of which Al-Quaida is only “the most fanatical, most violent fringe.” He points out that the social base of Islamic fundamentalism is reflected accurately in the makeup of the group itself: “the fact that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were “Saudis” does not at all imply that they were oil sheiks. According to the investigations carried out by U.S. services, ‘most hailed from poor villages where fundamentalism thrives. But their families appeared to be on the upper rungs: their fathers were religious leaders, school principals, shopkeepers and businessmen.’”

Achcar offers a sobering perspective on the relative strength and appeal of Islamic fundamentalism (and on the relative weakness of revolutionary socialism) in Middle Eastern politics: “In order for Islamic fundamentalism as the mass phenomenon it has been since the 1970s to wither away lastingly as well – in the absence of an “economic miracle” – new political movements would have to emerge that pose progressive political alternatives to the degenerate peripheral capitalism of the age of globalization/ Americanization. They would have to prove themselves able to reconquer the terrain of national, democratic and social struggles. Such movements are not yet on the horizon.”

The key weakness of The Clash of Barbarisms lies in the fact that much of the book is already dated. We see daily the steps the US is taking in withdrawing from its special alliance with Saudi Arabia, in order to be able to reconstruct its domination of the Middle East through its military occupation of Iraq. This has less to do with the book than with the pace of events in the Middle East. Achcar’s book came out in March 2002, and the events since then – the consolidation of the US position in Afghanistan, the invasion and annexation of Iraq, the current jockeying around an Israeli-Palestinian “road map” – have altered much of the terrain on the ground.

The book has other weaknesses as well. From time to time it lapses into a prose that is excessively jargonistic. And sometimes it deals only briefly with issues that warrant a lot more attention than they receive. For example, the book fails to explore fully the prospects for the anti-globalization movement to develop a credible political and economic alternative to neo-liberalism. It also refers only briefly to the professed Christian fundamentalism of the Bush administration, a factor of central importance in understanding the contemporary face of American imperialism.

However, the book’s weaknesses are massively overshadowed by its strengths. This is particularly true in regard to its moral clarity. Achcar does not make a single concession to imperialism on where the moral responsibility for September 11 lies. It unflinchingly lays the blame with the “brutal, murderous, cynical, arrogant” US government. As for terrorism, “no civilized ethic can justify deliberate assassination of noncombatants or children, whether indiscriminate or deliberate, by state or nongovernmental terror.” But it is also important to distinguish between barbarisms. “Admittedly, barbarism can never be an instrument of “legitimate self-defense”; it is always illegitimate by definition. But this does not change the fact that when two barbarisms clash, the strongest, the one that acts as the oppressor, is still the more culpable.”