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Our theme for this week, week six of our course, is to look at the decades and
the years leading up to 9/11 from the perspective of American policy.
And, how did America perceive this growing threat of Al Qaeda?
How did we act towards it?
What actions did we fail to take to prevent what occurred?
This specific focus of this lecture, America, The Middle East and
Terrorism in the Decades Before 9/11 is to look at the early 80s and 90s.
And look at how American presidents, especially Carter, Regan and
the first president Bush dealt with Middle East policy.
And how did the actions they took lead into a much more
active period of dealing with terrorism for
President Clinton in the late 1990s.
We're going to look at this from two perspectives, a liberal and
a neo-conservative.
Let me first talk about the neo-conservatives,
represented here by Commentary magazine.
The neo-conservatives are a group of former democrats who
were aligned with the kind of anti-communism and
cold war strength from the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, John F Kennedy.
But became disillusioned with the democratic party because of
the anti war movement in opposition to the Vietnam War.
And it started really as a critique of the anti-war and
the Democrats' move to the left on foreign policy, at least this group believed.
Some of its earliest proponents were people like Norman Podhoretz,
the editor of Commentary magazine.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, who eventually went on to serve in the Reagan administration,
and Irving Kristol.
His son, William Kristol, went on to open a new magazine, The Weekly Standard.
And then many neo-conservatives aligned with this movement ended up serving
in high-ranking foreign policy positions in the Bush administration.
And that would include, at the highest levels, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld,
the Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and others like Douglas Feith,
Elliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, had a very strong influence,
especially national security positions in the first Bush administration.
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Now if we could generalize I think what the neo conservative view was
that there was a variety of threats arising from the Middle East,
that threatened United States interests and values.
Whether it be the totalitarian ideologies and parties,
dictatorships of people like Saddam Hussein,
Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya, the Islamic revolution and
theocracy in Iran led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The revolutionary nationalism of Palestinian Yassir Arafat,
or terrorist organizations ultimately
developing with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
The neocons argue that there is a growing threat emanating from
this amalgamation of sources, but all of them coming from the Middle East.
Never manifesting themselves in a variety of ways, in a variety of incidents.
And their concern was that America was not strongly responding to
show its strength and to try to halt the development of these threats.
First instance of course the hostage crisis in Iran that spanned for
well over a year and
paralyzed United States foreign policy at the end of the Carter administration.
The crisis ended, but Iran was not penalized, or
made to pay a price for these activities.
When President Reagan intervened in the Lebanese Civil War in 1983,
first there was a large scale bombing at the United States Embassy in Beirut.
And then tragically, Hezbollah Islamic Jihad,
non-state actors acted in the region,
bombed the marine barracks again in Beirut, killing well over 200 marines.
The greatest loss of marine soldiers since World War II.
Again these actions happened according to the neo cons, and
no effective response form the United States.
There were a series of things like hijackings,
killing of embassy personnel.
Again not responding to this photo represents
the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in which
Navy officer Roberts Stephane was killed and
his body thrown onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport.
In 1985, the hijacking of a passenger cruise liner.
Where an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer,
was killed, and then his body thrown overboard.
Again, no serious response.
In 1985, a bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin.
This time suspect to be the work of the Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
And this was a discotheque often frequented by US service
members in Berlin and many were killed in the attacked.
This motivated President Reagan to respond and
he targeted Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli
unsuccessful in a effort to try to attack him.
But this was one of their first vigorous responses
in the Middle East to these acts of terrorism.
But, Gaddafi it appears was not deterred, because in 1988,
the terrible lockerbie bombing where a bomb was placed in
a cargo hold of a 747 jetliner, killing all the passengers and
crew on board, most of them Americans and British.
And also killing people on the ground in Scotland,
the biggest aviation disaster to this point.
Again, there was gravely suspected it that Libya and
Gaddafi were involved and ultimately, there was diplomacy.
Ultimately, it was resolved through a compensation to the victims paid
by Libya that negotiations which spent into the new century.
But again, there was no military response of any sort to the Lockerbie bombing.
And we go on into the Clinton administration with
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu.
And then in 1996, the bombing again from Hezbollah.
The bombing of another marine barracks,
this time at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
So the Neocons looked at this history of growing radicalism and growing
violence directed at American Interests over the course of over a decade.
And they saw this as what Samuel Huntington coined
in a famous article in 1992, as a clash of civilizations.
The argument that at the end of the Cold War, this was not,
the future was not going to be a battle between nation states and
ideologies, but rather civilizations,
which were an amalgam of states and cultures and ideas.
And that two of the major forces in the clash between them
would be a clash between the United States and the Islamic world.
Then when 9/11 occurs in 2001,
Norman Pritchard is essentially the godfather of Neoconservatism.
David SchanzerAssociate Professor of the Practice
