 Good afternoon, I know there's still a few people arriving, but I think it is time to start. I'm Rebecca Blank I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy And I'm very pleased to welcome you to today's Josh Rosenthal Education Fund lecture Today's the fifth anniversary of the horrific events of September 11th 2001 Today's gathering is a memorial to that event It's a living memorial, one that focuses on the opportunity to think about the impact of 9-11 on international policy In earlier eras, the foreign policy of nations focused on the balance of power or the containment of particular powers After September 11th 2001, it became very clear that international policy makers needed to look beyond the political interactions of nations In today's world, it is equally important to pay close attention to the role of non-state actors and the permeability of nation-state boundaries Our program today is in memory of Josh Rosenthal, a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan who died in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th Josh, who worked in the world of international finance, was engaged by the broad questions of public policy It's a tribute to Josh that we are here today to explore some of the toughest questions facing us This lecture memorializes Josh by providing the opportunity for all of us to analyze and interpret recent events To discuss and reevaluate our positions and to seek new policy approaches to both national and international security issues I want to recognize several members of the Rosenthal family who are present today Josh's cousins, Ellen Krieger and Richard Krieger, Suzanne Waller and Gary Sarota As we begin, I want to ask Marilyn Rosenthal, Josh's mother, to say a few words, Marilyn As you can imagine, today is a swirl of emotions I feel to a certain extent the original chaos of September 11th, 2001 I feel a certain amount of confusion left over from those days I have feelings of thanks for all the people who've been so helpful to me and to my family and all of you who've supported the Josh Rosenthal Education Fund and I also have learned about the power of knowledge and the power of hope Okay, and I'll say a little bit more about that in just a minute But I want to thank my family who came a distance to be with me today I love them very much. Even if you don't come, I love you very much And I I want to thank Dean Blank and her staff Laura Lee and Jean Stepp and I want to thank a new partner in the Josh Rosenthal Educational Lecture that is the Provost Office and particularly Dilip Das who has helped us add a new feature to the lecture out in the hall during the reception You will see some material provided to us by a group called our voices together and they are a group of 9-11 families from all over the country That are dedicating themselves to making something good Come out of the horror And they're dedicated to building hope and not hate and what they're encouraging is that Students and all of us get involved in service projects, particularly some that have an international flavor and try and work in this direct way to make this a Better world so I urge you to take a look at their literature and I'm proud to be a member of This group trying to do something positive Five years later. I have to admit that the chaos caused by the attack on 9-11 Has not subsided if anything it seems to have spread shocking five years later to recognize that I Think there's continued obfuscation continued confusion of the issues that arose out of 9-11 I think there's very strange uses of the word terrorism And I've met many 9 of 11 families this this last year They and I think American families all over the country are filled with increasing frustration There's a longing a deeply felt longing for more clarity for deeper insight and Creative imagination to address the complex issues of the Middle East. I Believe in the power of knowledge I believe in honest information and I believe in the power of balanced analysis and the power of open discourse to arrive at thoughtful policies and Strategies that not only address immediate problems, but consider long-term Consequences as well and of course the university is the place where this kind of discourse can be found indeed This is the obligation of the university and I am eternally grateful to be part of An enterprise which values expertise and careful scholarship. I am so proud to have Joshua's name connected With that university enterprise and the Josh Rosenthal educational fund so Gratified that this fund is part of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Honoring a president who symbolizes integrity and decency in American politics A few days ago I was in New York and as this anniversary approached the city seemed heavy with sadness But here today in this auditorium we are remembering not just Josh But all the victims of 9-11 in the most appropriate way possible by honoring the kind of expertise That may help us find our way out of the chaos that continues to haunt us We're fortunate this afternoon to listen to an articulate knowledgeable expert on the Middle East I'm delighted and proud to know he can be found in the halls of our University and I look forward to his lectures and to the questions and discussion afterwards You'll have many opportunities to have plenty of opportunity to ask questions after professor Cole's lecture And I just want you to know an audience can be judged by the quality of its questions So start getting your questions already One more observation Today is not only the fifth anniversary of the attack on the United States on September 11th 2001 it is also the 100th anniversary of the Gandhi movement for peaceful nonviolent change Which began on September 11th 1906 perhaps there is hope as Remember as we remember both 9-11s. Thank you for coming Thank You Marilyn at lunch today the Rosenthal family Presented to the Ford school a picture of Josh shaking hands with President Gerald Ford as part of the summer intern program that he was in It's a wonderful picture and we're going to hang it in our new building Which is just south of the law school You're also all invited to visit that building at some point and it will be a fitting long-term memorial of this relationship between The Rosenthal family and the Ford school The events of 9-11 are indelibly set in the national psyche The attacks on the World Trade Center in the Pentagon became a starting point for a vigorous and ongoing National debate about security and about the conduct of what would become known as the war on terror as The aftermath of the attacks continues to reverberate at home and abroad There has been an ongoing debate about the most appropriate and best theories Frameworks and principles to guide our nations and other nations international behavior in a post 9-11 world Our speaker today is in the midst of that debate Professor Juan Cole is a distinguished member of the University of Michigan faculty He has written extensively about modern Islamic movements in Egypt the Persian Gulf And South Asia his books include sacred space and holy war modernity and the millennium and Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East and should you want to talk about something different? I understand he's just completing a book on Napoleon's invasion of Egypt Professor Cole is widely quoted in the media and has published political writings in places as diverse as the Guardian The San Jose Mercury news salon calm the San Francisco Chronicle and the nation The commentary insight and resources he offers on his web log reach audiences all over the world If you haven't looked at this I encourage you to and have had a significant impact on the public debate over the war in Iraq and US mid-east policy In our last three lectures in memory of Josh Rosenthal We went outside the University and brought some wonderful people here to campus But as we were talking about names this year It became very clear that the best name to bring in this year was actually sitting right here I am absolutely delighted to call professor Juan Cole to the podium to speak on the topic Are we winning the fight against al Qaeda? Reflections five years later Juan Are the mics hot now? Yeah Okay Could could we is it possible to bring down the lights a little bit on the slideshow so it can be seen more clearly? Thank you Well, it is a matter of great honor to me. I'm very touched to be invited To give the Josh Rosenthal education fund lecture this year all of us in the United States were deeply affected and traumatized by the events of September 11 five years ago but of course No one more so than the families of the direct victims I Myself had two relatives in the Pentagon that day and I can only imagine the horror of hearing of the death of a loved one of an innocent in What at the time seemed a bizarre? set of events Unparalleled in some ways since the Pearl Harbor attacks and yet very different in so far as Those were the attacks of a state on a state They were unexpected but not Ununderstandable What happened on September 11th was of a different order of magnitude and it was the action of a non-state actor September 11th Focused the energies of the US government counterterrorism personnel diplomatic personnel the US military Intensively on the Middle East and the Muslim world and let us just step back and Consider for a second what we're speaking of when we speak of the Muslim world. It's an exact map Some may want to query with some of the details But I would defend its overall usefulness for thinking about the subject the Muslim world as the Geographical extent of the spread of the Muslim religion and its practice Is represented in green for areas that are predominantly Muslim In light green in Nigeria and in Kazakhstan for situations where it's 50 50 And then the yellow shows something like 7% to 15% Muslim population India is therefore in some real sense a Muslim power with 12% population Muslim and of course given that India has over a billion people 12% amounts to something Russia is a Muslim power with 10 to 15% Muslim given that the Russians have Somewhat mysteriously decided for the past 10 years to stop having children It seems likely that in the over the next century The proportion of Muslims in Russia will rise substantially since they They know they want big families France is a Muslim power It's controversial the exact percentage of Muslims in France, but five to seven percent is What's usually thought and it's going to increase substantially Especially with regard to the voting population in the next 20 years of 14% of the French voting population may well be Muslim So the Muslim world stretches from the Atlantic all the way over to Indonesia and the Indian Ocean And in some senses this the stretches is unbroken Although there's a majority India population. It is laced with with Muslim populations That Muslim world that we're looking at Is being concentrated upon by the United States as a focus of threat And I think it would be a mistake to see it in any way in a monolithic sense. This is not the Soviet Union Rather it is from this Muslim world that a series of very small tiny asymmetrical organizations Have recruited and sought to recruit members These are non-state organizations, but but are political challengers to states Some have suggested that the best pre-modern analogy to them is piracy Pirates often had a certain degree of organization on the high seas and they Had the apparatus of states which is warships, but they put them to private use These small groups are focused on inflicting harm on the United States and on US allies in the region and in Europe The reason for which they wish to inflict this harm has to do with their own political aspirations in the Muslim world For leadership. I'd like to caution against two common errors in this regard First of all radical Muslim fundamentalism is not intrinsic to Islam There is nothing in Islam that engenders such groups naturally They are political Organizations which are made possible by the technology of modernity their ideologies are Very frequently thin not well grounded in Islamic texts indeed Osama bin Laden The leader of al-qaeda will very frequently misquote the Quran in the sense of quoting only half a verse You know you can you can have your way with the text if you don't quote the last part and It's very common among these among these radicals to misuse the Quran in this way and they have been condemned for it by Authorities in the Muslim world by clerics I would argue that in their smallness In their appeal to a kind of pathological nationalism These groups are analogous to the Ku Klux Klan in the United States In some ways to other cult-like groups such as the David Quresh group at Waco Islamic law itself the mainstream of the tradition forbids terror As our colleague at the University of Michigan Sherman Jackson has a long article on Haraba or the for the forbidding of terror in Islamic law and As for holy war or jihad It is a complex subject I Guarantee you that most Muslims most of the time don't have it on their mind But for those who do there are rules about jihad about holy war in Islam. It's a ritual You have to give the enemy notice that you're coming You have to give the enemy the opportunity to convert if if the enemy so desires and so to avoid a war You may not kill non combatants innocents women children on our men Who are not part of the war effort? If you go through their very long thick books on the rules of jihad and medieval Islamic jurisprudence Something like a terror attack is simply not Islamic it's not Islamic law. It's not part of the tradition It's it's contrary to it in every way the other The other caution I'd like to make is that I view it as a profound error To see the problem of al-Qaeda and kindred groups as one of large social movements Analogous to fascism Or the state challenge analogous to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union These are small fringe groups they do not have very much support in most of the Muslim world and As you'll see what support they do have is often declining They do not represent Very very large numbers of people. They're not a movement and They don't at the moment control any states at all so if we looked at the Muslim world from the point of view of American foreign relations with governments with states it wouldn't look at all like a Monochrome mass like like like a monolith I have put in in in dark blue the countries that have more or less secular regimes The military regime in Egypt, which is based on secular Arab nationalism the military regime in Algeria, which is based on secular Arab nationalism and which has since the early 90s fought a bloody and long civil war with Islamic groups seeking to impose Islamic law on Algeria the secularists in Algeria Won that civil war and within the course of which over a hundred thousand people died in the 1990s Turkey is a secular militantly secular government The former Soviet States of now now independent of Kazakhstan Uzbekistan Turkmenistan And so forth all have secular governments disapprove of too much practice of Islam I Think we mostly those of us who have it any of us who haven't Encountered haven't been to those places haven't encountered Muslims from that background aren't aware of how Deracinated the Muslims of the former Soviet Union really are I had a conference in Tashkent in the mid 90s on Uzbekistan at the end of which the Uzbek scholars insisted that we had to have a party to Celebrate the end of the conference and I agreed They showed up with these huge white shopping bags that were very bulky and full of Jingling things and we wondered what what this party was doing to consist of and they started pulling out the bottles of Stolichnaya vodka one after another In this map, I've shown the dark blue as pro-American secular states mainly Nationalist states of one way one sort or another and I've shown in In light green a conservative states that are either pro-American or have good relations with the United States And So what's left that's a menace and with regard to states Well, the only places on this map that show Muslim majority states Which have bad relations with the United States our dark green which are Iran Sudan and Somalia Somalia not so much that they're determined to have bad relations with the United States is that they can't get their act together about having a government at all and and Syria the little red spot which is a secular Arab nationalist regime But also not in good relations with the United States So it is the the green spaces and the red Not very much of the Muslim world Looks like it has bad relations with the United States This is one of the things that as someone who has lived in the region for many years and who studies it Professionally I hear Washington politicians talking about the Muslim world or the Middle East as though it's full of enemies and yet I Can't find them on the map Even the enemies that I can find so-called are ambiguous So for instance, I remember Colin Powell the former Secretary of State coming out and saying that Sudan had been extremely Cooperative and useful in the war on terror. Is that an enemy? Syria was as well and Then as for Iran, which is dark green and now increasingly In the sights of Washington. It is a Shiite Islamic State as true. It's had often bad relations with the United States, but it hates Al-Qaeda and the Taliban so the one Islamic State in the region, which the United States has bad relations with In a way is a potential ally against Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda was born to fight the Soviet occupation of Muslim Afghanistan It was a Cold War phenomena It was complex The Soviets overplayed their hand and going into Afghanistan, which is known into historians as a graveyard of empires and The idea that was then apparently predominant in Moscow that the Push-toons would make good communists Puzzles all of us to this day And of course the response of the push-toon population the major population in Afghanistan Who are known through Modern history as strict Muslims and as having given the British Empire a great deal of trouble as well The their response to the Soviet invasion was to take up arms and to try to push the Soviets back out as foreign atheists bothering a Muslim country Importantly they gathered these mainly push-toon although there were some other ethnic groups involved as well the Tajiks the Persian speakers threw up some Mujahideen or freedom fighters in Afghanistan That was back when President Reagan approved of Mujahideen and Appraised them as freedom fighters They also gathered allies among Arab populations predominantly although some others Who were volunteers? They would young men who would pick up from Saudi Arabia Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere and go off to Fight as irregulars against the Soviets this The people who did this the young men who went off to engage in that fight often had fought their own government at home or or deeply disapproved of their own government at home as a secular pro-western government and Their fight in Afghanistan against Soviet atheism was a form of sublimation They were doing that because they had failed at the other or didn't have good prospects at it the Saudi Arabia One of America's main allies in the Middle East Had agreed with the Reagan administration to match American contributions to the Mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan the Saudis Gave a lot of money directly The Saudis the Saudi government appears to have recruited a young man named Osama bin Laden from a wealthy construction family as a fundraiser and Given his business connections and his own personal interest in Fundamentalist religion he proved a very successful fundraiser for the movement Ultimately, it succeeded the United States funding of the Mujahideen and its Arab allies which became al-qaeda to the tune of five billion dollars matched by Saudi Arabia Made so much trouble for the Soviets in Afghanistan that they simply Could not stay and by 1989 the last Soviet tank had gone across friendship bridge back over into Uzbekistan Well for bin Laden and the other movement leaders This victory was bittersweet Because on the one hand it was a big victory on the other hand. What do you do now? And bin Laden was not the sort of person who wanted to go back to building condos in Riyadh Which is what the sort of thing his family did for a living and He looked around for other causes He fixed upon the first intifada or uprising of the Palestinians in the West Bank On Kashmir on Chechnya on Bosnia on places where he felt Muslims were being unfairly oppressed by non-Muslims and there was a strong element of Pan-Islamic nationalism in his In his ideology So al-qaeda had a two-fold character Which is Difficult to disentangle on the one hand it clearly was defensive Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. They were attempting to impose the communist system on a Muslim country And many of the groups associated with al-qaeda were genuinely concerned about situations in which Muslims were being Killed in large numbers by non-Muslim occupiers from a Muslim point of view But there was also an offensive element to al-qaeda Which is that it was made up of politicians of people who wanted to have a leading role in their society And so it was intended to mobilize Muslim publics From bin Laden's point of view most Muslims weren't worth much as Muslims. They sat around watching American sitcoms and Arabic translation drinking Coca-Cola wearing blue jeans listening to Western music To the extent that they had any politics. It was secular politics. They were all enthusiastic about being Arab nationalists or Egyptian nationalists or something like that And so they were in the back pocket of the United States They were they had given up Islam more or less for other forms of political identity and Bin Laden felt that this had been a huge error and had led to them being weak and easily dominated a Muslim world full of tiny countries with a colonial legacy like Tunisia or Jordan Was it was a region full of non-entities? Why would anybody care in Paris or London or Washington or Beijing? What Jordan or Tunisia wanted? From Bin Laden's point of view the Muslim community had had in the form of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century a relatively united polity which was a big important empire and was taken seriously in rural affairs and In World War I the Ottoman Empire was carved up Made into small colonies and mandates by the Western powers Which they then bequeathed as a legacy to the region Bin Laden would like to see that reversed. He would like to see a Muslim super state with a caliph or Muslim Pope-like figure at its head. It would also be a political figure But this so dream of a Pan-Islamic Superstatus is of course a kind of utopia and it's not expected that it would be achieved anytime soon It is a way of mobilizing Muslim publics into a different kind of politics not nationalist not pro-western It's also a way of mobilizing them away from being good capitalist consumers which Bin Laden has fought against For years and and without very much success indeed it has said that he was very frustrated to Frequently find his children drinking coke Al-Qaeda also sought and its constituent parts sought the overthrow of secular pro-western Middle Eastern governments Egypt Algeria Saudi Arabia well Saudi Arabia is not a secular government, but it's a pro-western one And from that point of view it didn't really matter Saudi Arabia You know is it says its its its constitution is the Quran it is a society in which Islam is very strictly practiced and there are people called volunteers Who carry sticks and if you're out lullag-agging on the street during prayer time you may expect a rather sharp blow To encourage you to go to the mosque and pray This is not a This is not a Wimpy bleeding heart liberal westernized society here, but from bin Laden. It's not Islamic enough Saudi Arabia needs more Islam from his point of view and part of what it needs is to break with the United States in Egypt, which is a relatively secular society The fringe group Egyptian Islamic jihad led by a man is a wary a prominent physician from a prominent Egyptian political family Attempted to kill the president most new abaric in 1995 They would do things like shoot down tourists at tourist spots in Egypt They conducted street battles with the Egyptian security The Egyptian government replied by just arresting everybody who looked like they might think about some day perhaps empathizing with Islamic radicals 30,000 people were put in jail for essentially thought crimes And they weren't let back out until it was clear that they had given up this Islamic jihad business in Algeria The government actually waged a civil war with the Islamic Salvation Front and the armed Islamic group in which all together over a hundred thousand died and It's unclear who did most of the killing this clear that that's very serious human rights violations were conducted on each side and and so by the late 90s you see The radical Muslim political groups who had political aspirations in their societies had been roundly defeated They couldn't plan an operation in Egypt Without one of their members immediately writing a memo on it to Husni Mubarak. They had been infiltrated They couldn't achieve anything from Algeria 9-11 had to be launched from a failed state Afghanistan and From a Western state with relative freedom, which hadn't yet been alerted to the dangers like Germany Because he couldn't have been launched from Egypt. Egypt had taken care of them I mean as a way and the Egyptian Islamic jihad were on such In such difficult straits by late 90s that they were broke as the Wahari was having difficulty in fundraising and It is alleged by some Although it is controversial that one of the reasons that as the Wahari agreed to join bin Laden in 1998 to merge the Egyptian Islamic jihad and the Mainly Saudi Al Qaeda was that bin Laden still did have some monetary resources whereas the Wahari was broke That's been challenged. There are other reasons for which the deal was struck But they formed the international Islamic front against Jews and crusaders With a particular animus against the United States and They concluded that their attempts to overthrow the Mubarak regime Of course, they had assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Assadat in hopes of provoking a popular revolution that never Materialized their attempts to overthrow the Algerian government Their intrigues in Saudi Arabia Etc had not borne fruit They had been defeated everywhere they tried and why had they been defeated? Well, they concluded because the United States Backed these governments the United States gives two billion dollars in aid every year to the Egyptian government. It conducts joint military Exercises with the Egyptian military it provides counterterrorism advice Egyptian Islamic jihad couldn't overthrow his Mubarak as the Wahari increasingly argued because he was backed by a superpower and Al Qaeda therefore Begins thinking that in order to accomplish its goals in the Middle East of overthrowing the westernizing secular regimes or at least the Western the pro-western ones That it would be necessary first to deal with the United States To hit it to make it timid to push it out of the region to end its support for regimes like that of Egypt and That was why they planned it out and carried out September 11th, and in that way September 11th really did resemble Pearl Harbor in some significant Respects Pearl Harbor Was an attempt to get the US Navy out of the way Because the Japanese Empire desperately needed petroleum the United States had cut it off from American petroleum The only other source of petroleum nearby was in what is now Indonesia the Dutch East Indies And it was clear to the Japanese that if the Americans were going to cut them off They had two choices one was to give up their empire in China the other would be to replace the American petroleum with with the Indonesian petroleum In order to do that they would have to conquer Southeast Asia and The thing standing between them and conquering Southeast Asia was the US Navy That was why they hit Pearl Harbor was to get the fleet out of the way and it was a tactically a Successful move they did get the fleet out of the way and then they swept through Southeast Asia and conquered it And they conquered Indonesia and they got the oil and they were able to keep their empire going for a while The US Navy had the last say in the matter It was only a temporary tactical success in the same way Al-Qaeda wanted to get the United States out of the way so that it had a clearer shot at overthrowing governments like that of Mubarak the Al-Qaeda organization I think was confident that were the United States to reply to the September 11 attacks with a Conventional military strike in Afghanistan that that could be with stood It was their experience that when the Soviets put tanks down the Panjshir Valley that they could just blow up the tanks And so they expected the United States to be similarly flat-footed The team of around George W. Bush Including CIA had George Tenet However came up with an alternative plan, and I believe that the credit goes very substantially to Tenet providing US close air support including smart weapons to The Northern Alliance that faction of Afghans that had not accepted Taliban rule and Tipping the balance of military power in Afghanistan towards the Northern Alliance it had always been Somewhat evenly matched the Taliban had a slight advantage and therefore were gaining territory But with the US air support the Northern Alliance could rather easily defeat the Taliban once the Taliban tanks were disabled and their Toyotas with the machine gun emplacements in the back were were reduced to rubble the Northern Alliance was able to push the Taliban back and to defeat them and in the course of the war United States destroyed the 40 al-Qaeda terror training camps which were being used to produce legions of terrorists. They were compared by one US analyst to Swamps from which the mosquitoes came and had those camps been allowed to continue to operate They would have continued to produce terror attacks on the United States the Afghan Afghanistan War of 2001 2002 was a victory a tactical victory in the war on terror But it was a compromised victory in retrospect Ben Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders escaped The new Afghan government that was installed is weak and unstable President Karzai who did win a national election with millions of votes nevertheless Is often derisively referred to as the mayor of Kabul because it's not entirely clear that his power and authority run to the rest of the country Almost immediately with the end of the war the old warlords of the early 90s those who had been Mujahideen in the 80s Re-emerged to establish warlord rule in much of the country US reconstruction funds Were often given to private contractors and so didn't much reach the ordinary Afghans Over time there's been a resurgence of the Taliban in the south in the push-tune areas and There's also been a very unwelcome and worrisome Resurgence of the poppy trade poppy cultivation is way up in Afghanistan. It's up a 60% this year it accounts for Well over half of Afghanistan's Gross domestic product there are many many farmers. They're deeply dependent on it Nearly 80% of the world's opium now is coming from Afghanistan and the security concern here is Terrorism when you have that much money coming in from an illegal drug It's entirely possible that it will be Siphoned off by the Taliban and a resurgent al-Qaeda for terror purposes in the meantime Al-Qaeda and its branches and its affiliates continued to Conduct terror attacks against their targets Already in late December in late 2001 the jayshin Muhammad and lush curry taiba radical Muslim groups focused on Indian Kashmir which has a Muslim majority, but is ruled by Hindu India Attacked India's Parliament 12 October 2002 there was the bombing of the Bali nightclub which two hundred and two persons were killed That was an operation of the Jamaati aslami Which is the Southeast Asian branch of al-Qaeda led by a some Hanbali Who had fought in Afghanistan with bin Laden? And who later on was captured in Thailand? 16 May 2003 we had the bombings in Casablanca in Morocco And note that much of this activity is actually occurring in Muslim countries This becomes important for our analysis later. You had simultaneous tanks and attacks in Casablanca By the Salafi jihadiya organization not directly related to al-Qaeda, but inspired by it October 7th 2004 you had bombings at Taba in the Sinai Targeting Western tourists and particularly Israeli tourists in Egypt In 27 November 2004 you had The bombing of a hotel and a missile fired in an Israeli airliner in Mombasa, Kenya Saudi Arabia became a major Focus of al-Qaeda activity. There is a Saudi branch of the al-Qaeda which is extremely active and Has a certain political base in Saudi Arabia. It's a small base, but it exists so The first big attack was on the 1st of May 2004 which was called Black Saturday in Saudi Arabia Seven people were killed at a rampage in the at an oil company in Yanbu and up until then Saudi al-Qaeda had not focused on Oil facilities in Saudi Arabia wanted to take over the country. So it wanted all the oil to be Flowing nicely so that they would get it But they decided to begin attacking the kingdom where it was vulnerable attacking foreigners there were attacks in Riyadh in the US consulate in Jeddah was attacked people were killed There were suicide bombings in Riyadh and this continued in 2005 in 2006 in February of 2006 just this past winter a Major attack was attempted on the abt take oil facility in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia produces Over 9 million barrels a day of petroleum in the whole world only about 86 million barrels a day are produced So the Saudi production is enormous and the Saudis export most of that And there's a place in Saudi Arabia at abt take which is pretty important for the Saudi petroleum coming together at a refinery And if that were taken out That would be a good month or two until it could be repaired You take 9 million barrels a day of petroleum off the market You see what happens to your gasoline prices in the meantime? And this would be a very significant if short-term event in the world economy That's the kind of thing that al-Qaeda has been up to in Saudi Arabia Now there have been successes in fighting al-Qaeda It's command and control has largely been disrupted There are some of its major leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ramzi bin al-Shib Six other six hundred others in Pakistan were captured some of them through a sting That the FBI and the CIA got up in the Western Union office in Karachi The Western Union office was used by the terrorists to send the money So when we figured that out we just had our guy take the order and Mysteriously people would just would disappear into Guantanamo Bay However that operation as successful as it was eventually became no I mean The Western the the CIA and the FBI apparently were somewhat amazed at how long They kept falling falling for this. I mean didn't they notice like their friends weren't around anymore, but Eventually they caught on So it's been some time now I think since we've had an inside operation That's able to target al-Qaeda and so there are al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan That we don't have a good fix on Despite the war in Afghanistan and the counter-terrorism measures in in Pakistan There were larger issues that September 11 seemed to me to broach I think it was a signal that it's unwise for a great power. They like the United States to allow profound cultural and civilizational conflicts to fester But the use of the good offices of the United States to come to an equitable Resolution something that all sides can live with that's that's what diplomacy is about is incumbent and in the absence of such Thoregoing and responsible statesmanship the United States is living in a dangerous environment and so it seems to me that a Push for Adjust an equitable resolution of the Israeli Palestine issue Which was very near to being resolved in 1999. It's now often forgotten In 1999 2000 Adjust an equitable resolution in Kashmir Chechnya other hotspots Which affect Muslims and which enraged them Would have been also the good that wasn't done in any significant way and Bob Pape at the University of Chicago brought out a book in which he studied the suicide bombers that had been active in the world since 1980 not by any means all of the Muslim there are the Tamil Tigers in South Asia but he found that He could explain almost all suicide bombing by reference to a feeling of foreign military occupation But it is a response to feeling That that one is one is occupied by foreigners militarily involuntarily He also found however that it tended to be deployed where the occupier at a relatively democratic Society there was a public opinion and so forth No suicide bombers against the Chinese There are people in Xinjiang which is a Muslim area of Northwest China which are not we're not very happy about the way the Chinese are running Xinjiang But they don't bother trying to impress upon the Chinese government how upset they are This this is a technique that's used with regard to relatively open societies and then of course the Bush administration made a fateful decision To turn its injury its energies towards Iraq Already in November of 2001 Sencom commander General Tommy Franks was being asked by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for a war plan against Iraq Already in early winter of 2002 Money and material were actually being diverted from the Afghanistan effort to Kuwait It's been Questions have been raised as to whether this was even legal since Congress hadn't authorized it Bush administration alleged that Iraq Was a gathering threat to the United States That it had weapons of mass destruction and an active nuclear weapons program, which was two to five years from producing a bomb Vice President Dick Cheney Repeatedly asserted or hinted at a strong connection between the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda Neither of these allegations was true the set of allegations was questioned by the State Department Intelligence and research unit among the best little intelligence agencies we've got in the US government But those questions that data was shouted down and there was a rush to war Enormous resources resources were diverted from the struggle against Al Qaeda and and the struggle to reconstruct Afghanistan to Iraq and Then the Iraq occupation Became itself a generator of terrorism First of all the US conquest of Iraq was not accepted by the Sunni Arab Minority that had ruled Iraq Some 20% of the population This was a well educated group of people on the whole Who had had managerial experience? They were the ones that they were the ones who ran the state Industries, they were the officers in the military They They Waited a bit to see what was going to happen in the new Iraq and they decided they didn't like it the United States in Iraq backed a set of Shiite and Kurdish leaders Who implemented a plan for what they called debauch vacation? This was a punishment to all members of the bath party Above a certain level and it was a relatively low bar Which excluded them from political society often resulted in their loss of jobs at a time when the Iraqi economy was Paralyzed When unemployment was very high 100,000 Sunni largely Sunni Iraqis were fired from their jobs for having been members of the bath party and things were set up in Iraq in the old days so that If you were a high school teacher an English teacher and you wanted to go to London for a summer course on Shakespeare To be a better English teacher there in Samara Well, you had to have a passport to go to London How do you get a passport in? 1994 You have to be a member of the bath party so the ambitious Would apply for a passport join the party and go off to study Shakespeare comes 2003 and George W. Bush fires them For having done so this a number of other missteps began an insurgency in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq that has grown from strength to strength has come to encompass Virtually the entirety of the Sunni Arab population and Has thrown up governing structures alternative to those of the new government installed by the Americans in Fallujah and Ramadi in Samara to Crete and in much of Baghdad the capital of the country a very great deal of Baghdad is not under us or Iraqi government control in order to Fight this insurgency The United States took desperate desperate measures It took literally tens of thousands of Sunni Iraqis into custody Interrogated them Sometimes people were arrested for being in the wrong area at the wrong time and were kept for three months without charges Search and destroy missions were were set up The Marines would knock down doors go into a place where the family was suspected of supporting the insurgency Search the house Go through the women's underthings as they stood in their nightgowns in the middle of the room in a society that practices strict gender segregation and where I'm Unrelated males are not to see a woman unveiled You had the Marine standing there in the woman's living in a bedroom And her in her nightgown and they were going through her underthings These sound like minor things and no doubt they seemed minor to the US military They were cultural affronts of a very severe sort and the accumulation of such humiliations Created a feud between all of the major Sunni Arab tribes and the US military a Feud that continues today among those captured and interrogated at Abu Ghraib some were tortured the Torturing of those people was inexcusable and a crime taking pictures of them being tortured Was inexcusable a crime and extremely stupid and those pictures eventually surfaced Carl Rove President Bush's political advisor suggested that it would be 25 years before the United States began overcoming the public relations problem with the Muslim world that those pictures produced and Then the US reduced the city of Fallujah, which had become an insurgent stronghold in November of 2004 Sparking a wide spread wide spread revolt throughout the Sunni Arab regions and knocking many Sunni Iraqis off their fence If they had wondered whether they should join the insurgency this decided them Fallujah was seen as a Significant military victory by the United States. It was seen as an unwarranted Destruction of an Iraqi city by the Iraqi Sunnis and the story of Fallujah where two-thirds of the buildings were destroyed where some unknown number of civilians were killed the story of Fallujah circulated throughout the Muslim world including in the UK among Britons of Meir Puri or Kashmiri heritage and became a recruitment tool for al-qaeda and al-qaeda like groups And so in on 7-7 in London the subway is blown up by young men Who in their suicide tapes that have now been released by a man as a waheri the number two man of al-qaeda? talk about their grievances over the oppression inflicted on the Muslims of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom There have been a number of terrorist strikes that are directly related to the US presence in Iraq The 11th of March 2004 Madrid train bombings, which was by a local group not directly in contact with al-qaeda But which had learned from the internet And and and by example In 9 November 2005 were very significant bombings of hotels in al-man And I'm on by an al-qaeda in Iraq affiliate over 60 were killed in 115 injured increasingly Al-qaeda is becoming a franchise In the sense that the small local groups of disgruntled radicals will take up its banner But without a direct relationship to the old al-qaeda organization the internet has become an extremely important vector for such franchising any struggle against Islamic radicalism or Muslim radicalism Requires a waging of a war for hearts and minds How has the United States been doing in that war in the Muslim world? Attitudes towards the United States are generally unchanged in the past six years. They dipped substantially in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq But they were already very low The United States is viewed in the Arab world as playing an unhelpful role in the Arab Israeli conflict as as unduly Partisan towards the Israeli side as unduly unsympathetic to the Palestinians and other Israeli Opponents negative views in Egypt in Egypt of the US were already at 76 percent in 2002 That's two-thirds had a negative view of the United States Now you would say that's about as bad as it could get but in 2004 the wake of Abu Ghraib the the negative View of the United States in Egypt went to 98 percent I'm quite sure the other two percent didn't like us either, but there was some reason for which they wouldn't admit it And that's far now in 2005 to 85 percent On the other hand there is this one Anomaly I can't figure out in Morocco We became more popular in the past year and in 2000 from 2004 to 2005 And about half of Moroccans are now saying they have a favorable view of the United States the Pew Charitable Trust which does this polling things that may have something to do with women and youth being favorable towards the United States and being afraid of the rise of Islamic conservatism, but I'd want to see next year's poll too because it could be a fluke Indonesia the world's largest Muslim country population wise 245 million people began a transition to democracy in 1999 that has been pretty robust. There's a lot of freedom of speech freedom of press parliamentary politics GDP gross domestic product per capita per annum of $3,600 that's in purchasing power parity It would be lower if we were in straight dollar conversion But a very substantial important country a oil producer and a main and the largest Muslim country in in the year 2000 70% of the Indonesians had a favorable view of the United States That's quite remarkable Whoever the State Department people were in Indonesia in the 1970s and 80s 90s should be found and congratulated in 2002 in the wake of the Afghanistan war, which was largely unpopular in the Muslim world It was it was felt that the United States went too far that it was kind of went a little crazy Okay, so bin Laden's a bad guy so capture bin Laden. You don't have to overthrow a whole country That was the kind of thinking that was going on so it fell to 60% still not so bad. You could live with that But then when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 the favorability rating of the United States in Indonesia went to 15% That pitiful little red thing down there was what was left of our favorability that rebounded interestingly in 2005 in the wake of the tsunami when President Bush announced that he was sending the Navy to help the Indonesians and with relief work and did and the US did a lot of good work in Indonesia and and provided aid and That brought us back up to 38% approval But then the most recent sounding taken in 2006. We'd fallen back to 30% Good deeds only go so far when you're occupying a whole Muslim country in Turkey There's in a way a sadder story Over 50% of Turks had a positive view of the United States in the year 2000 remember Turkey is a largely secular government at least and a lot of the population is secular and Is a member of NATO had fought with the US in Korea and a long-time ally so With the Afghanistan war the favorability rating falls to 30% with the Iraq war it falls to 15% the Indonesians and the Turks agreed about this and Then There's a slight bump, but then in 2006 it's back down to 12% 12% favorability rating in Turkey and these are our old-time friends Well, I suspect that some of this Dislike of the United States and it's all related to policy whenever you asked the Muslims Why do you dislike this like the United States? They never say because of their way of life They always say because we don't like us foreign policy and in fact the statistics I'm showing you demonstrate this because why would they bounce around like that? We haven't changed our way of life from year to year not that much anyway It's because of policy But I suspect that the rise of Iraqi Kurdistan The prospect that Iraq may break up and create a Kurdistan which might then threaten Turkey with break up since it has a large Kurdish population in eastern Anatolia and the ways in which the Iraqi Kurds have been allowed by the Americans to harbor PKK terrorists who have been hitting Turkey all of these things I think must have fed into this very negative view of the United States and Turkey now So let me conclude with with in two ways one with some good news and one with some cautions the good news is Contrary to what you will hear and I have heard with my own ears in Washington DC from prominent US politicians The United States does not face a large-scale conventional and weapons of mass destruction military threat such as that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union Most Muslim majority states are US allies or cooperative with the United States hostile states such as Syria and Sudan have been willing to cooperate against al-Qaeda And it's very clear that there are ways in which those could be brought aboard Al-Qaeda's own popularity has fallen in much of the Muslim world Moroccans Turks and others Confess increasing doubts as to bin Laden's competence Many Muslims report themselves as worried about Terrorism or Islamic extremism as a homegrown problem Saudi Arabia and Morocco and elsewhere when al-Qaeda began conducting bombings on Muslim soil they turned against them many of their potential recruits But there are cautions going forward The al-Qaeda leadership is still out there is still active I personally believe that there is good evidence that a man is a wahri was behind the 7-7 London London subway bombings Last year. I think it's very suspicious that now he has shown up in Al Jazeera with two of the suicide tapes of bombers I believe he worked through a radical Pakistani group like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba the good army to recruit these Britons of south asian heritage for this operation There has been a rapid deterioration as we've just seen in public approval of the US in the non-Arab Muslim world Muslim world our reputation was already in the Arab world our reputation was already shot as a partisan in the Arab-Israeli conflict In the wider Muslim world in places like Indonesia and Turkey where that issue didn't have as much salience Salience we had a higher reputation that now seems to have declined very substantially and the reason given To the pollsters by the respondents is the Iraq occupation Al Qaeda copycats are spreading via the internet the most worrisome such incident was the Madrid train bombings In 2004 Afghanistan is increasingly unstable. There was a resurgent Taliban two to five thousand fighters The poppy cultivation is a potential source of funding for resurgent terror in that area The guerrilla insurgency in Iraq is spreading terror in Iraq itself And there's some evidence that it's spilling over under neighbors such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia and even Madrid and London There is a severe danger as we speak of an Iraqi civil war and of a breakup of the country There's a danger that any such breakup will spill over onto the rest of the Middle East It will not leave Jordan Israel Syria Saudi Arabia Iran and Turkey unaffected and Al Qaeda Increasingly and this was underlined by a man is a Wahri and a videotape released today is targeting US economic interests in the Persian Golf especially with regard to petroleum so the upcake attack which was foiled and Did not wreak the kind of harm that it could have Is perhaps however a harbinger of further such attempts we all live In an economic environment in which Our access to energy To petroleum natural gas is very important We've seen a big run-up in prices of the economy has withstood that run-up for various reasons But it's not clear that another doubling or tripling would be sustainable and It appears that Al Qaeda is thinking seriously About hitting us where it hurts Thank you Professor Cole is willing to take some questions. We have mics that should be here in the aisles We are recording the session so we do want people to speak into the mics when they ask their questions I'm assuming we have mics here Is that right? Do I see people with mics? Jean Do we have mics? Down here. Oh, okay. Okay. I see him. All right. Do you want to call on people? Thank you, Professor Cole. Thank you very much for your lecture. It's very enjoyable and educational I am I'm Frustrated by the war in Iraq and the Bush administration and the American public's Seeming fixation on the idea that we were attacked because they don't like our freedoms They don't like our democracy We never seem to think about our interests of Israel and oil and I I guess I'm I'm frustrated with the Democrats for not being willing to Oppose the Bush administration and the Republicans for not being willing to oppose the Bush administration and the American public We can you give us some guidance on? How can we have an intelligent articulate, you know Forward a policy that really deals with rational causes of the attacks on the on the United States and not just They don't like our way of life and it's all about democracy. Thank you You know, let me let me address that question No, which is a very good question in two ways. Let me say first of all that I'd like to make a distinction between Al Qaeda as an organization and Al Qaeda like organizations and the general Muslim publics They they're not the same thing. They don't overlap very much Al Qaeda is a kind of weird cult from the point of view of most ordinary Muslims and so what I would say is that Al Qaeda's Grievances often strike me as somewhat fantastic or overblown and I wouldn't spend a lot of time Worrying about what upsets those people if you listen to the trial transcripts of someone like Zacharia Masawi Who was initially accused of being the 20th hijacker doesn't seem actually to have been Nor nor to have been of the caliber of person that could have engaged in that operation He just sounded to me like a crackpot and A lot of these people sound like that I'm not saying that they're they're not rational but they're Amen as a wary just lives in his own little world So I Kind of agree with the Washington consensus of this consensus that you just can't pay a lot of attention to those people But of course, it's unwise as I suggested to have the public's a very large swathes of the world deeply disliked us policy And especially where us policy could be improved upon And so I think we really have to worry about the recruitment pool. We have to worry about the young men in particular who might be targeted and Community centers and mosques and gyms by al-qaeda recruiters and whose ears would be full of these Accusations against the United States of being a genocidal state towards Muslims and so forth and that regard It's it seems to me that as you say Some relatively simple steps could be taken to much improve the relationship of the United States with Muslim public's One would be to restart the Israel-Palestine peace process and to come to fairly quickly to a Resolution everybody has agreed about the Arab-Israeli conflict. There's not really any conflict I mean, it's not a conflict over basic principles at this point in 2002 the Arab League met in Beirut The king of the president king of Saudi Arabia put forward a plan which all of the Arabs would Recognize Israel they'd have full trade and diplomatic relations with Israel They'd have complete peace all that Israel would have to do would be to go back to the 67 borders Well, that's unacceptable to Israel, of course, but Nevertheless once the Saudis and the Arab League have said that to Israel. It can't take it back They can't say well. Yes, we we we agreed that we can we can live with you We can recognize you we can have peace with you, but you didn't meet our one little criterion here. Therefore, it's all off No, I mean they have they have they have recognized Israel more or less with this proposal There are conditions under which they would they're saying likewise the Israelis increasingly Recognized that they can't just keep the territories that they conquered in 1967 they Tried to withdraw from Gaza Gaza kind of won't let them keeps wanting to fight but They're not committed to the maximalist dream of encompassing all of those territories Well, if they're willing to withdraw from Gaza, then why won't they withdraw from this that the other thing there should there should be some Way that you could get the Palestinians and the Israelis together and have them agree on What should be withdrawn from and the day you come out and you have a president of? the country of Palestine not just as the Palestine Authority as you have now and the president of Palestine says I'm very happy with my Israeli partners in the peace process the day you have that that happens 80% of the problems the United States has in the Muslim world evaporate It would be better for the Israelis that would be better for the Arabs It would be better for us. So why don't they do it already? With regard to Iraq That's become a quagmire and there are no good solutions You leave it falls apart the world goes into chaos you regret it You don't leave it falls apart the world goes into chaos. You regret it it's It's not a good situation and However, I can say that the that staying the course just going on doing more of whatever we have been doing Clearly it's just not working this summer. We had the battle of Baghdad. Did you know about the battle of Baghdad? Did they tell you about that? They had the battle of Baghdad the US military brought in thousands of extra troops 3500 were brought down from Mosul and they went into the Sunni Arab neighborhoods Ghazaliya Amaria where the death squads were operating and the insurgents were in control and said they were going to do sweeps They're going to clean it out. There's not going to be so much death and destruction in Baghdad in July 1500 people were killed in Baghdad a lot of them 90% just showed up in the morning dead one bullet behind the the ear and Handcuffed and tortured and some were Shiites tortured by Sunnis some were Sunnis tortured by Shiites So we expected with the battle of Baghdad having been gone in early August that by late August We'd have some good news here There would be less death and destruction and so and the US military actually came out and said yes The murder rate has fallen. Well, I wondered what do they mean the murder rate has fallen I mean is that really the problem in Baghdad is the murder rate? I mean is it is it like irate neighbors taking each other out? I mean the problem was the death squads So what has fallen in that regard it turns out nothing had fallen 1,600 dead in in August According to the Baghdad morgue. So the battle of Baghdad has produced an increase of 100 in in those kinds of deaths That was I heard from a US military officer in Baghdad that this was Iraq's last chance. This was the big push if if this didn't work Then it just was over with well. I don't see any evidence that it's working it seems like throughout your throughout your entire lecture you sort of Kind of avoided one of the big topics in American Middle East policy, which is that of around right now And how can the US deal with sort of the increasing? Anti-American hatred that's emanating from there combined with sort of Iran's kind of power surge and their quest for nuclear weapons Like what sort of policy proposals can the US actually make? The question has to do with Iran I didn't address Iran because my subject was the war on al-Qaeda really and Iran being Adherents of the Shiite branch of Islam deeply dislikes al-Qaeda, which is hyper Sunni and Influenced by Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and considers the Shiites to be wretched heretics It's now forgotten and I was saying this at lunch that in the aftermath of September 11th the Iranians sympathized with the United States They had suffered from terrorism things have been blown up in Iran and In particular had suffered with the Taliban and al-Qaeda who were right on their borders and had killed Iranians in in Afghanistan had massacred Hazara Shiites in the center of the country Who were political clients of Iran? So after September 11th, there were candlelight vigils in Iran You can actually find still pictures of the Sun in Google images if you look In sympathy for the United States and President then President Mohammed Khawad Ami came to the United Nations and spoke I think with great warmth and sincerity about The horror he felt at what the United States had suffered So it's not a given Iran has to be an enemy in this in this respect then in January of 2002 suddenly President Bush gave his State of the Union address and he tagged Iran as a member of the axis of evil The Iranians were very confused by this because they'd like had the candlelight vigils and They had spoken about how they sympathized with the US and And they were even more puzzled because from a from an Iranian point of view Here's what happened in in the late 90s is that the Pakistanis first of all developed an atomic bomb and then They wanted strategic depth in Afghanistan for their struggle with India So they created and promoted the Taliban and caught in the Taliban coddled Al Qaeda So after September 11th Pakistan is threatened by Colin Powell the then Secretary of State and it switches around it betrays the Taliban cuts them off And becomes an ally of the United States in the war on terror So the Iranians are looking at this and say hey those guys have an atomic bomb They created the Taliban they coddled Al Qaeda and now they're the good guys and we're in the axis of evil We were fighting the Taliban They can't understand why why did the Washington decide to do this? well, of course, there's a long history of animosity between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States their old grudges and There are suspicions that the Iranians Nuclear energy program, which is all that we know that they have is a nuclear energy research program may also be Intended ultimately to produce an atomic bomb I mean from an Iranian point of view, I guess they could ask why is it all right for Pakistan to have one but not us? and You could say well, Pakistan's been an ally and then the Iranians would throw up that Taliban thing at you Iran It seems to me is a more complex issue than is being made of it in Washington. First of all I Would estimate that no more than 20% of Iranians support the present government It is a very decidedly minority government It was elected in a runoff from a runoff and more over there were very serious allegations of Electoral misconduct in the course of the election a liberal candidate seems to have been the victim of ballot stuffing so It's not as if we're facing a united Threat, which is anti-american and so forth the Iranian government is certainly a Problem for Washington it has engaged in activities that Washington feel is very unhealthy It has engaged in anti-americanism but there's not good evidence of Since 1997, which was a big change in Iranian politics. There's not good evidence in my view of Iran having conducted any terrorism against the United States itself and So I don't I don't view Iran as a Question in the war on terror. I I think it's a completely different set of issues There's a long history between Iran and the United States If if what the United States wanted in Iran was a parliamentary democracy well, they had that in 1953 and we overthrew it So I think that that just simply characterizing them in a certain way is not going to solve the problems Yeah, I was excuse me I was going to ask a question about islamo fascism But I am more interested in your opinion of whether you think bin Laden and Zawari are still sort of hanging out in a cave together Or whether al-Qaeda has sort of Diverged these two leaders of al-Qaeda have diverged in terms of propaganda and policy