The American Muslim (TAM)

Pat Buchanan and Ray McGovern Answer Helen Thomas’ “Why” Question

Sheila Musaji

Posted Jan 13, 2010 •Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

Pat Buchanan and Ray McGovern Answer Helen Thomas’ “Why” Question

by Sheila Musaji

When Helen Thomas in a recent press conference asked regarding Abdulmutallab “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why”, she did not receive an answer (or at least not any answer that made any sense). I was absolutely amazed to find clear answers given by individuals I might not have expected to be so clear thinking and brutally honest.

In an article entitled Why Are They At War With Us? Pat Buchanan gives the bottom-line answer to the often asked questions of who exactly we are at war with, and why they hate us. It isn’t because of our freedoms, or because there must be an inevitable clash of civilizations or clash of religions, or because Muslims are just naturally violent, or any of the other nonsense that has been spouted by so many “experts”. As an American Muslim, I find it refreshing to hear someone, especially someone from the conservative establishment speak so clearly and honestly. Certainly, as a Muslim, I would not have been able to have written such an article without being accused of attempting to justify terrorism. I encourage readers of The American Muslim to write to both Pat Buchanan and Ray McGovern and thank them for their honesty.

Buchanan notes Helen Thomas’ unanswered question at the recent press conference, but Ray McGovern in another must read article, Answering Helen Thomas on Why really goes into this in detail. I encourage you to read the entire article. McGovern says in part:

I had been hoping Obama would say something intelligent about what drove Abdulmutallab to do what he did, but the President uttered a few vacuous comments before sending in the clowns. This is what he said before he walked away from the podium:

“It is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations … to do their bidding. … And that’s why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress. … That’s the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists.”

But why it is so hard for Muslims to “get” that message? Why can’t they end their preoccupation with dodging U.S. missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza long enough to reflect on how we are only trying to save them from terrorists while simultaneously demonstrating our commitment to “justice and progress”?

Does a smart fellow like Obama expect us to believe that all we need to do is “communicate clearly to Muslims” that it is al Qaeda, not the U.S. and its allies, that brings “misery and death”? Does any informed person not know that the unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced 4.5 million from their homes? How is that for “misery and death”?

Rather than a failure to communicate, U.S. officials are trying to rewrite recent history, which seems to be much easier to accomplish with the Washington press corps and large segments of the American population than with the Muslim world.

But why isn’t there a frank discussion by America’s leaders and media about the real motivation of Muslim anger toward the United States? Why was Helen Thomas the only journalist to raise the touchy but central question of motive?

Peeking Behind the Screen

We witnessed a similar phenomenon when the 9/11 Commission Report tiptoed into a cautious discussion of possible motives behind the 9/11 attacks. To their credit, the drafters of that report apparently went as far as their masters would allow, in gingerly introducing a major elephant into the room:

“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” (p. 376)

When asked later about the flabby way that last sentence ended, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission, explained that there had been a Donnybrook over whether that paragraph could be included at all.

The drafters also squeezed in the reason given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as to why he “masterminded” the attacks on 9/11:

“By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed … from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

Would you believe that former Vice President Dick Cheney has also pointed to U.S. support for Israel as one of the “true sources of resentment”? This unique piece of honesty crept into his speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009.

Sure, he also trotted out the bromide that the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world.” But the Israel factor slipped into the speech, perhaps an inadvertent acknowledgement of the Israeli albatross adorning the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Very few pundits and academicians are willing to allude to this reality, presumably out of fear for their future career prospects.

And, here is Pat Buchanan’s amazingly concise answer to Helen Thomas’ question:

“We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.”

Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why.

After his remarks, Helen Thomas during a White House briefing asked a follow-up question to which we almost never hear an answer:

Why is al-Qaida at war with us? What is its motivation?

It was Osama bin Laden himself, in his declaration of war in 1998, published in London, who gave al-Qaida’s reasons for war:

First, the U.S. military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Second, U.S. sanctions causing terrible suffering among the Iraqi people. Third, U.S. support for Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians.

To Osama, we started the war. Muslims, the ulema, must fight because America, with her “brutal crusade occupation of the (Arabian) Peninsula” and support for “the Jews’ petty state” and “occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there,” was waging war upon the Islamic world.

Terrorism is al-Qaida’s unconventional tactic, but its war aims are quite conventional.

Al-Qaida is fighting a religious war against apostates and pagans in their midst. On Sept. 11, they were over here—because we are over there.

Nothing justifies the massacre of Sept. 11. But these are the political goals behind the 9/11 attack, and this is why Islamists fare well in elections in the Middle East. Tens of millions of Muslims, who may despise terrorism, identify with the causes for which Osama declared war.

Consider. America lost 4,000 soldiers in six years in Iraq, with 30,000 wounded. Yet not one American of the 125,000 soldiers in Iraq was killed in December. Why not? Because we no longer conduct raids, patrol streets, kick down doors and pat down suspects. We have ended our combat operations, withdrawn to desert bases and seem anxious to go home. When we stopped fighting and killing them, they stopped fighting and killing us.

According to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, we must now prepare for 300 to 500 dead and wounded every month in Afghanistan by summer.

Why are the Taliban killing our soldiers? Because we threw them out of power, took over their country and imposed the Hamid Karzai regime. And our troops, some 100,000 by fall, are the force preventing them from recapturing their country. We will bleed in Afghanistan as long as we are in Afghanistan.

But if, as Obama said, “we are at war with al-Qaida,” why are we fighting the Taliban when al-Qaida is in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa?

Hezbollah has used terrorism but not against us since the bombing of a Marine barracks a quarter-century ago. And our Marines were attacked in Lebanon because we were in Lebanon, intervening in their civil-sectarian war. Had the Marines not been sent into the midst of that war, they would not have been targeted.

When Ronald Reagan withdrew them, the attacks stopped.

As long as we take sides in Muslim wars, those we fight and kill over there will come to kill us over here. This is payback for our intervention. This is the price of empire. This is the cost of the long war.

Pat Buchanan is the author of “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War.’” He is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior advisor to American presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN’s Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election. He co-founded The American Conservative magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause. He has been published in Human Events, National Review, The Nation and Rolling Stone. He is currently a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network including the show Morning Joe and a regular on The McLaughlin Group. (from Wikipedia. Pat Buchanan contact page http://buchanan.org/blog/contact

Ray McGovern now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During a 27-year career at CIA, he served under nine CIA directors and in all four of CIA’s main directorates, including operations. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

UPDATE 7/7/2010

Doug Bandow has published an excellent article Terrorism: Why They Want to Kill Us which discusses the motivation behind terror attacks.

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