Texas Monthly Talks
Lawrence Wright
(Page 2 of 2)
No, there was no Iraqi involvement. A couple of Iraqi individuals were part of Al Qaeda, but the government of Iraq was not involved. Saddam Hussein made overtures to Al Qaeda at least twice, once while Al Qaeda was in Sudan during the years 1992 to 1996 and then again in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda relocated there. He was interested in the way the Iranians were able to use Hezbollah as a kind of underground arm of foreign policy, as a terrorist arm. He wanted Al Qaeda to serve that purpose for him. And he made overtures to bin Laden—he sent people to Sudan who flattered him and called him the Muslim prophet. But bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein, and he was on a campaign in 1990, in his home country of Saudi Arabia, to point out the danger that he would pose. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, bin Laden went to the Saudi minister of defense with a rather cockeyed plan to defend the kingdom using Al Qaeda and unemployed Saudi youth against Saddam’s million-man army in one of the largest tank wars in the world. The evidence, again and again, is that he spurned Saddam’s overtures and repeatedly denounced him as a secularist and a heretic. There’s no evidence that they worked together.
So why does this misperception persist among people who should know better?
It was a deliberate manipulation on the part of some of the neocons in the administration who had, from the very beginning, wanted to invade Iraq to “reset the table in the Middle East,” as they said, and they used 9/11 as an opening. There was political will following 9/11 to do something, and the facts were manipulated to allow the administration to do it against Iraq.
Afghanistan aside for the moment, were there other countries—you mentioned Saudi Arabia—more culpable and therefore more appropriate than Iraq to retaliate against?
The Saudis bore a lot of cultural responsibility for creating the kind of climate that inculcated this fanaticism. I think there are many causes for the despair that is at the root of Al Qaeda and the complaints of radical Islamists all over the Muslim world, but the fact that they are unable to participate in a meaningful way in their own societies is a strong reason for joining radical groups. And the Saudis made that environment themselves.
Did they play enough of a role in this that we should have been aggressive toward them in response?
I don’t think we should have been aggressive toward the Saudis. They’ve made some changes.
In response to 9/11?
Yes, they’ve moderated a lot of their education systems, and they’re trying to open up some of their political dialogue, but within a very narrow range. The problem with trying to change another culture, especially a traditional tribal culture like Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, Iraq, is that it’s difficult to accomplish when you understand so little about the internal mechanics.
You’re pushing against thousands of years of history.
I think Saudi Arabia is a very poorly understood society. People often talk about how slow it is to change, but when I was living there, when I was teaching young reporters in Jeddah, I met an editor named Muhammad Shoukany. He was a man about my age, and he had grown up in Asir, in the southern part of the country, where many of the hijackers came from. When he was a boy, he was a shepherd, and like other Asir boys, he wore his hair in curls and had a garland of flowers around his head. And he hadn’t seen an automobile until he was nine years old. Then he went to Jeddah, and after that, he earned a scholarship at the University of Texas, as a matter of fact, and got a degree in comparative literature, and then he went back and became a professor and the editor of a newspaper. The point of his story is that he lived out, in his own lifetime, the entire Industrial Revolution. He grew up in a completely pastoral environment but encompassed all the changes the world has seen in the last 250 years, so one can’t say that his life has moved slowly. It’s moved at a head-snapping pace. There’s only so much change that individual lives or societies can accommodate.
Did we do enough in Afghanistan?
No. There are several tragic mistakes we’ve made that are going to be difficult if not impossible to rectify. One of the greatest was that we had really destroyed Al Qaeda after the battle of Tora Bora in November and December of 2001. Right after 9/11, American and coalition troops swept aside the Taliban in six weeks and pummeled Al Qaeda; its own internal memoranda and memoirs say that 80 percent of its members were captured or killed. Yes, the leaders got away, but the survivors were scattered and destitute and unable to communicate with each other and repudiated all over the world. Al Qaeda was dead. The war on terror was over. We should have stayed in significant force in Afghanistan to make sure that country was safe and free of the radicalizing elements of the Taliban and begun a much more assertive reconstruction program. Instead, we invaded Iraq and diverted our resources and re-created the monster that we had slain. Al Qaeda would not have been able to come back to life, in my opinion, had we not invaded Iraq. That action breathed life back into the movement. Now it’s stronger than it’s been since 9/11—maybe in its entire history. It’s spread through many different countries. Far from being homeless, as it was after 9/11, it’s now deeply rooted in many countries, with training facilities in Iraq, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, in Mali, and probably again in Afghanistan. And it’s been able to accomplish this mainly because of our actions in Iraq.
So we actually have made the world less safe.
No doubt about it. We’ve created the reality that we imagined. Before we invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda was not in Iraq. There were radical Islamists in Iraq, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but they were opposed to Saddam’s regime, and they weren’t given sanctuary. Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration described the country as being a sanctuary for Al Qaeda, which it was not, but it is now. They also described it as a country that was linked to radical Islam, which it was not, but it is now. It’s dismaying to me personally, because I was opposed to invading Iraq and now I’m opposed to getting out, because Iraq is the country that we feared it was when we marched in so blithely.
You’re opposed to getting out?
I’m not saying that I have the answer. I think there are terrible consequences either way. But I’ve been looking at the world through Al Qaeda’s lenses for nearly six years now, and I can imagine how they’ll treat the withdrawal of American troops. What a great victory they’ll celebrate. The problem, Evan, is that you can’t walk backward through this and try to get out of the tunnel you came in. And we have a lot of moral responsibility for creating the sad situation that we have in front of us, so we are obliged to the Iraqi people to give them as good a chance as possible for some kind of peace. If we pull out now, there will be really appalling carnage. We’ll only be forestalling it if we stay, but it’s important to give enough space for people to create a stable entity to hold the country together. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have to try.
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