Writer hopes Arab Spring can be an antidote to terror

BY STANFORD REPORT STAFF

When Lawrence Wright was in high school in Dallas, he wanted to take his girlfriend out for a nice date, but he didn’t have much money.

So Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and author, took her to the airport, Dallas Love Field. There was a Pan Am plane sitting on the tarmac, and the teenagers wandered out and ventured into the plane, where they made themselves comfortable in first class, acting as if they were on their way to Paris.

After a while they decided to visit the air control tower. There was an elevator up to the top, which they entered.

"Come on up, kids!" the controllers called, and so they did.

"That world," Wright said, "is lost."

Al-Qaida may be fading, he told a Stanford audience Thursday evening, but the anti-terrorism community and all those anti-terror laws are here to stay. "It’s very difficult to walk back to that place of confidence," that time in 1964 when two kids could play make-believe on a tarmac.

Wright is worried about al-Qaida, of course. "But my main concern is terrorism in other countries, especially Lashkar-e-Taiba," the Pakistani-based organization held responsible for the 2008 mass killings in Mumbai, he said.

According to his sources, after the U.S. attacks on Tora Bora, the mountainous region of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden’s forces holed up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "all those people were picked up by Lashkar." It is basically a nationalist group, he said, though affiliated with al-Qaida, which is looking for a viable leader after bin Laden’s death.

"Terrorism won’t disappear," said Wright, whose 2006 book The Looming Tower traced the antecedents to the Sept. 11 attacks. "But we don’t know where it will appear next."

That sobering thought emerged during a lively on-stage discussion between Wright, political science Professor Martha Crenshaw and English Professor Tobias Wolff, as part of the " Ethics and War " series organized by the Center for Ethics in Society. The evening’s event was called "Beyond Terror: America After bin Laden."

Arab Spring

Wright began by reflecting on the succession of uprisings and turmoil known as the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt and Syria, countries he knows well and that are undergoing what he called an "immense nonviolent revolution."

He began his journalistic career covering the civil rights movement, which, he noted, had its martyrs. But today in Syria, more than 6,000 people have been killed, "they’re fighting helicopters and tanks. It’s an unbelievable and unappreciated sacrifice," he said.

The challenge for Egypt and Syria extends beyond removing a dictator; rather, they must tackle the "psychological burdens of years and years of oppression," he said.

What made al-Qaida possible, Wright said, "was despair in a generalized way. There’s massive unemployment, gender apartheid, no education, an absence of progress. It’s a young, young world, with so little to look forward to."

Those years of oppression have created an attitude "that the only force strong enough to resist tyranny is Islam," he said. "The Islamic movement has credibility because they were in prison all those years, and all other movements are seen as vitiated."

So women are covered, when years ago they weren’t, but that amounts to the only political agenda for many Islamist groups, he said.

"Covering women’s heads doesn’t get them jobs," he said, adding later that Saudi women, for example, are generally very highly educated, but they just can’t work.

"The Muslim Brotherhood [in Egypt] is inheriting a broken country, and their own ideology is at war with things that would make Egypt fit into the world. I think Egypt is in for a very, very rough road," Wright said. "It will take decades to succeed, but Egypt has a sense of itself as a nation that is almost eternal."

Wright’s knowledge of Egypt dates back to when he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and ended up doing his alternative service as a teacher at the American University in Cairo. (The other options were going to Canada; joining the National Guard, which Wright said was where the Dallas Cowboys all went; or joining Tobias Wolff as a soldier in Vietnam.) He arrived in Cairo when he was 22, not entirely sure what language people spoke there.

Religion and belief systems

Perhaps as a result of having lived in the Middle East – and he obviously deeply loves the region – Wright’s take on phenomena such as terrorism and dictatorship is enmeshed in society, particularly in a society’s belief system.

"I’ve always been interested in why people believe what they believe," he said. "Here, in the United States, we can believe anything. That’s not true in other places; they say, ’this is what we’re serving,’ and that’s what there is. So why do we believe one thing and not another?"

One directly relevant reason why young people with no evident alternative might join a terrorist organization is community, he said. And there is no stronger community than religion.

"I’m convinced that religion is more influential than politics," he said. "They are similar belief systems but religion is tectonic, it moves surface structures around."

That is why, he said in response to a question from the audience, sharia, or Islamic law, has such an appeal: "It’s seen as a brake on the executive. Only religion can stop a dictator, people think."

Wright knows whereof he speaks; he has written at one time or another on the Amish, Pentecostals, Mormons and Satanists, as well as on the hysteria attached to so-called recovered memory syndrome.

"It’s still mysterious to me why people ally themselves to a belief system," he said. In the case of religion, "people can perceive that they are surrounded by absurdity, and that creates community. It’s a safe, happy place to be." And there is little incentive to leave. (He noted in an aside that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, did his two-year mission in the French wine country. Needless to say, he made no converts, but the experience was a bonding one, to Romney and to anyone else in that situation, Wright said.)

Crenshaw, who has been studying terrorism since the 1970s, asked Wright to comment on the ongoing U.S. unmanned drone strikes against militants.

"I worry that they will come back on us," Wright said. "It’s a terrible moral dilemma, and it’s creepy, in a way, that someone in Arizona can kill someone around the world and then go out for a drink." Possibly the best-known victim of a drone attack was, precisely, one of the few candidates with sufficient charisma to supplant bin Laden, the American-born Yemeni Anwar al-Awlaki.

"On the other hand," Wright said, "we have very few tools at our disposal, and we have rotten intelligence." The lack of good intelligence – or the unwillingness of the FBI and CIA to share the intelligence they had – was precisely one of the crucial antecedents of the Sept. 11 attacks outlined in The Looming Tower, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. So the United States relies on intelligence from other sources, what Wright called an "unholy alliance."

Iran was the subject of another question from the audience, and Wright took care to say he is no expert. But, he said, "without the war on Iraq, we wouldn’t be talking about Iran. It’s the law of unintended consequences." Decisions such as supporting Pakistan when the Soviet Union supported India, or backing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, led to problems down the road, in other words, and Iran admittedly is a serious problem.

However, "we should not push them over the edge," he cautioned. "Syria holds the key, because it’s an unnatural ally" of Iran, another unintended consequence of prior alliances and policies. "Left to their own devices, the Iranian people can inflict far more damage on their government than we can."

The "Ethics and War" series of events, now in its second year, is sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford Creative Writing Program, Program on Human Rights, Stanford Summer Theater, Program on Global Justice, Stanford Continuing Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, Stanford Lively Arts, United Nations Association Film Festival and John S. Knight Fellowship Program.

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