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Why Do Terrorists Attack?

The withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would do nothing to end attacks such as the London bombings, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an article published on Monday. Writing in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, Rumsfeld said “extremists” had been killing people in attacks around the world for at least 20 years […]

The withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would do nothing to end attacks such as the London bombings, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an article published on Monday.

Writing in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, Rumsfeld said “extremists” had been killing people in attacks around the world for at least 20 years before the arrival of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The extremists do not seek a negotiated settlement with the west,” he wrote. “They want America and Britain and other coalition allies to surrender our principles.

“Some seem to believe that accommodating extremist demands, including retreating from Afghanistan and Iraq, might put an end to their grievances, and, with them, future attacks,” he added.

“But consider that when terrorists struck America on September 11 2001, a radical Islamist government ruled Afghanistan … and Saddam Hussein tightly clung to power in Iraq.”

Rumsfeld said those behind such attacks would always offer “empty justifications” to try to explain their actions.

“They seek to destroy things they could never build in 1,000 years and kill people they could never persuade,” he wrote. ~Reuters

There is at least one thing we can be sure Mr. Rumsfeld has wrong: Islamist terrorists do not want us to “surrender our principles” (to whom would we surrender them?), but to abandon certain territories in the Near East and central Asia and let them have their way with the various dictatorships and monarchies of the region. Many Americans tend to assume that, if we left the region, there would be a wave of Islamist revolutions overthrowing more or less friendly governments (a fear that does not really mesh with the oft-stated assumption that Muslims everywhere yearn to breathe free and will leap at the chance to vote for pleasant, secular liberals).

We do not resist Islamist demands because of “our principles” (“our principles” have not stopped the government from arming and abetting Islamists throughout the Balkans), unless fake machismo is a principle (in which case Bush and Blair are mighty principled men), but because our government apparently deems these regions and the governments we back as being in some sense vital to national interests. Plainly stated, none of them is vital to American interests, or at least neither so vital nor so threatened that they require extensive deployments of ground forces to secure them.

It might be preferred that the entire region not become an Islamist hothouse, but if it did America need hardly be bothered. Saudi Arabia already is an Islamist hothouse, and this is no way harmed our working relationship with that country so long as there were no American soldiers in their country. That presence in Saudi Arabia, more than any other single thing, explains the motives of the September 11 attackers. Doesn’t Rumsfeld wonder why there was not a single attack by Muslims against an American installation or building between the Tripolitanian War and 1979? Doesn’t he wonder at all why there was not a single Islamic terrorist attack against Americans anywhere before the deployment to Lebanon in a one-sided intervention in support of an Israeli invasion?

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