“You make yourself into a monster so you no longer bear responsibility for what you do.” — Lila to serial killer Dexter Morgan on the Showtime series Dexter

Whatever else they may be, truth and reality are stories we tell ourselves. Our senses diminish the universe but it is still overwhelming. Luckily, we have built-in cognitive biases that shape reality into coherent narratives that provide meaning. Unluckily, they also impede objectivity. Confirmation bias, for example, filters our senses by saving bits of information that support a trusted proposition and ignoring bits that don’t. Evidence supporting our beliefs piles up in our minds and opposing points of view come to seem malicious or moronic or, if we’re feeling generous, mistaken.

Our understanding of Osama bin Laden and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 emerges from the narratives we follow. For each question “why” or “whom to blame” there are multiple answers, and our narratives determine which answer seems significant to us. It is easy to accept our narrative without question. Understanding what matters to others, and why, is more difficult emotionally and intellectually, but increases our understanding of the cause and effect relationships that affect us and our planetary neighbors.

Bin Laden’s father Muhammad was a self-made billionaire businessman with close ties to the alSaud family which then, as now, ruled Saudi Arabia’s Sharia-based monarchy. When he died, a preteen Osama became a millionaire many times over. The son took a few faltering steps on his father’s path. He enrolled in college business management courses but felt greater attraction to Islamic studies. From the Society of the Muslim Brothers he learned to demonize the relatively secular Arab Nationalism and all foreign influence on Muslim holy lands.

When he was just 23 years old he helped manage Saudi Arabia’s aid to the mujahedin who were fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In Peshawar he helped established al-Qaeda as a base for launching jihad and worked with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and the American CIA.

In 1990, 33-year-old bin Laden returned home just in time for Ba’athist and Arab Nationalist Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, which put a host of potentially hostile troops on Saudi Arabia’s border. Bin Laden wanted to organize Arab veterans of the Afghanistan war to repel Hussein, but Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd rejected his proposal and instead pled for American military support. Bin Laden was angry; perhaps his outrage over the fact that Saudi Arabia had invited foreign invaders into the land of Mecca and Medina was sharpened by the shame of personal rejection. He protested publicly and was arrested as part of a crackdown on political dissent.

He was soon released, but exiled. He went to Khartoum, Sudan for five years, where he plotted a revolution against Riyadh, dodged Saudi assassination attempts, decried the Arafat-Rabin-Clinton Oslo Accords, arranged for mujahedin veterans to travel to Somalia, and nearly succeeded in assassinating Egypt’s president, secular Arab Nationalist Hosni Mubarak.

When the kitchen became too hot he repaired to Tora Bora, Afghanistan where he enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Pakistan-supported Islamist Taliban and organized the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds. The FBI put him on the Ten Most Wanted list and President Bill Clinton tried to kill him with a missile attack.

In 2001, al-Qaeda successfully hijacked four jetliners and in suicide attacks destroyed the most prominent buildings of Manhattan’s skyline and severely damaged American military headquarters in the most significant attack against the United States mainland since the British burned Washington, D.C. in 1814.

Despite an American-led conquest of the Taliban and an extensive survey of hostile people and land between Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden remained free until President Barack Obama ordered a targeted raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011. American forces killed bin Laden who, though unarmed, had allegedly retreated into a room containing at least two weapons.

_“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

– President George W. Bush, September 20,2001, address to a joint session of Congress.

Bush’s assertion that Islamist terrorists hate us for our freedoms is foolish on its face. But to theonomists, whether Muslim followers of Sharia or Christian dominionists, some of the liberties of a secular society seem no more than licentiousness. Our unholy dress, language, sexuality, and diet offend the word of God. From their perspective, true freedom resides in obedience to the word of God, not in civil liberty. In this sense, bin Laden would surely agree with Bush’s interpretation.

In 2004, bin Laden drew a sharp distinction between belief and unbelief, Islamists and infidels. He said, “The approach of [secular leaders in Islamic countries] is extremely dangerous ... because they have let their wishes and desires compete with God’s law, which as everyone knows is a grave sin. God Almighty said: ‘When God and his Messenger have decided on a matter that concerns them, it is not fitting for any believing man or woman to claim a freedom of choice in that matter: whoever disobeys God and his Messenger is far astray.’ (Qur’an, 33:36) [1]

Divine law’s superiority to political freedom is a theonomist article of many different faiths. It’s the impetus behind horrors like genital mutilation and honor killings, and continuing political controversies surrounding abortion, gay marriage, and evolution.

The September 11 terrorists drew their inspiration from Islam, but they could execute their plans only because their ideology gained significant political (read: popular) support. There is a certain kind of Westerner who abhors Sharia but fails to recognize that his dominionist impulse is congruent with the Islamist’s. American Christians who want the government to kneel at Jesus’s feet are more dangerous to Western Enlightenment values than the average Muslim, and a superterrorist may yet arise from among them. In fact, it is naive to think that there aren’t American Christians today who, given the talent, resources, and resolution of bin Laden, would fly airliners into Mecca and Medina.

Consider the similarity between bin Laden’s admonition and the words of Mormon dominionist Marion Romney, Mitt’s father’s cousin, as he makes the case for obedience over political freedom in a 1981 speech at a church conference:

“lust as following wrong alternatives restricts free agency and leads to slavery, so pursuing correct alternatives widens the scope of one’s agency and leads to perfect liberty,” he said. _‘As a matter of fact, one may, by this process, obtain freedom of the soul while at the same time being denied political, economic, and personal liberty.”

Dominionists leave no doubt which kind of freedom to choose, or allow, should there ever be a conflict. They hate icons of the secular progressive worldview like Planned Parenthood, gay marriage laws, Charles Darwin, and the ACLU. To those who believe God’s law should also be incorporated into human government, these have stretched civil liberty into civil libertinism – they have crossed the line separating political and intellectual freedom from spiritual bondage.

But for bin Laden Western decadence was primarily a rhetorical tool that gave a theological, rather than emotional, motive for violence.

_“Who said that our blood isn’t blood and that their blood is blood?” – Bin Laden in an Al Jazeera interview, October 21, 2001

Bin Laden’s listed justifications for Islamist violence included barbaric United Nations sanctions against Iraq, Israel’s illegal expansion and disproportionate violence against Palestinian Arabs, a general American callousness toward civilian casualties resulting from our diplomatic and military operations, and the unholy alliance between the Saudi theocracy and the United States.

Regardless of whether these constitute justifications in a reasonable ethical system, someone who seeks to understand the situation and be prepared for possible reactions can’t dismiss them.

Western powers have been killing civilians in the Middle East with weapons of regular and mass destruction ever since East met West. For example, some of Saddam Hussein’s greatest crimes occurred while the United States was supporting Iraq militarily and financially. And Winston Churchill gassed Iraqi villages in the 1920s.

If the deaths are a grievous wound then America’s blithe attitude toward them must seem like salt to the average Muslim. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and future Secretary of State Madeline Albright, faced with the statistic that half a million children had died as a result of United Nations sanctions against Iraq, said in 1996, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it [3].”

President Bush declared a “war on terror” just days after the September 11 attacks, which immediately raised the question of who, exactly, was a terrorist. Noam Chomsky represented a large portion of the anti-war left when he said, “ .. .it is a very hard problem to define ‘terrorism’so that it singles out what they do to us and our clients, but excludes what we and our clients do to them [4].”

Albright later said she regretted her words. But they remain on record as a quotable symbol of the narrative through which many Muslims understand the motives and values of the United States.

Bin Laden, hypercognizant of the deadly results of the Western juggernaut’s Middle East interventions, reserved the right to return tit for tat. He said al-Qaeda “didn’t set out to kill children” on September 11, but “we treat others like they treat us. Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop doing so [5].”

Challenged by a reporter on religious grounds, he said, “They say the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid, and for proof, they say the Prophet forbade the killing of children and women, and that is true. It is valid and has been laid down by the Prophet in an authentic tradition ... but this forbidding of killing children and innocents is not set in stone, and there are other writings that uphold it [6].”

His pentateuchal ethic is congruent with Albright’s attitude, and equally chilling.

In the American exceptionalist narrative civilian deaths are regrettable but justified. And if one can view hundreds of thousands of innocent people as collateral damage – sacrifices to a higher cause – then one cannot reasonably object to bin Laden’s rationale. The difference is not a matter of fact, but of narrative.

That doesn’t mean one must adopt an enemy’s perspective. A secular society based on Enlightenment values cannot always tolerate the brutal theocratic or religion-exploiting regime. The totalitarian should always conflict with Western values, and a well-armed totalitarian is not likely to be overthrown by peace-wielding opponents. Christopher Hitchens made a strong case, for example, for deposing Saddam Hussein.

Dead civilians are partly a regrettable side effect of defending human values, but also a measure of how we value human life. At a financial cost we could presumably be more accurate in our attacks, even to the point where we parsimoniously dispatch only those duly judged intolerably offensive. The military operation resulting in bin Laden’s execution is a success for the planet in that sense, even if it felt more like an assassination than law enforcement. Bin Laden was partially an American creation, and perhaps America made partial restitution by destroying him. But the blood of thousands of civilians who died collaterally while we shot our missiles and guns at every flitting shadow that might have been bin Laden is unexpunged even by Obama’s tardy victory.

“Am I to blame if somebody else chooses to commit murder? The fisherman catches fish, and he is damned for it. But are we damned for eating the fish? Certainly not. Why not eat the fish once it is dead? You should study the Scriptures more carefully, my dear Kin Kin.” – -U Po Kyin in George Orwell’s Burmese Days

When we understand not only what matters to us but also what matters to those whose worldviews are shaped by different narratives we increase our comprehension of events and thereby our power to influence them. Few individuals subscribe to both the “they hate us for our freedoms” and “America brought September 11 on itself” narratives, because each is based on facts the other side, while sometimes stipulating, considers irrelevant to the “real point” it is trying to make.

Americans are not directly responsible for radical Islam or its propensity to violence, but to reject responsibility for the civilian casualties of its military and diplomatic operations and to refuse to recognize why those dead people have become martyrs for the Islamist cause narrows our view.

Bin Laden did hate our freedoms, if not with passion then at least with puritanical absoluteness. If we downplay that religious component of his worldview we can’t begin to understand what happened on September 11, 2001.

The West has caused hundreds of thousands of Muslim deaths and has not taken meaningful responsibility for them, preferring to write them off as regrettable collateral damage. If we ignore the origin of generations of anger our actions and attitude have sprouted we are left perplexed, wondering why our enemies are so full of hate.

Applying principles of statistical correlation and the basics of cause and effect to foreign policy will make our own narrative more robust and help us understand others’ reactions. Politics is about blame – finding an opponent wanting when contrasted with oneself. Blame can be a powerful rhetorical tool. But in foreign policy, assigning blame concentrates the mind on a small portion of causes at the expense of others. Yes, the terrorists hate American-style freedom. But it is dangerous not to take into account the terrorists’ other motivations. Even if the civilian deaths they decry were unavoidable collateral damage in a noble enterprise to spread democracy, discounting their effect on the Muslim mindset makes us ignorant. Incorrectly accounting for the effect of our behavior when we prognosticate their likely behavior will result in more resentment against us and more terror attacks. We are responsible for others’ actions insofar as we can affect them, even if those actions violate our values.

The Arab Spring comprising revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, a civil war in Libya, and large demonstrations in many other countries in the Middle East presents a singular opportunity for the West: oppose the old, corrupt dictators we have propped up and support the people trying to replace them with secular governments. What if President Ronald Reagan had defended the Kurds while Saddam Hussein was trying to exterminate them from 1986 to 1989 instead of continuing to arm Iraq? What if President Dwight Eisenhower had supported democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh instead of reinstalling the Shah, setting the stage for the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini?

The Arab Spring is evidence that al-Qaedas ideological influence is weak. The Islamists have resented and tried to assassinate the old infidel Arab Nationalists for decades but it was finally tyranny, not godlessness, that inspired the people to rise up. For the West this is an opportunity to begin a process of atonement and restore moral integrity. For bin Laden’s legacy it could be the beginning of the end.

Additional bibliography

Heuer Jr., Richards J. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Central Intelligence Agency, 1999. 127-146

References

1. Lawrence, Bruce ed. Messages to the World the Statements of Osama bin Laden. New York: Verso, 2005. 261.
2. http://lds.org/ ensign/19811l1/the-perfect -law-of-liberty
3. 60 Minutes (12 May 1996)
4. http://blog.zmag.org/node/2502 (2006)
5. Lawrence 119
6. Lawrence 118