Editor,
In response to W. Christopher Epler's letter in Friday's Daily Lobo, in which he writes, "It's time to talk about causes and effects. It is relatively common knowledge among the nonbrain-dead that terrorism is a symptom, not a cause. And it's not even a complicated symptom. It's simple to see that Middle Eastern hot-houses of terrorism are fertilized with hopelessness and fear."
May I ask for your attention in stepping outside of the conventional thought process that deems every issue has some cause or trigger? Sometimes, the world is more sophisticated than simple cause and effect. Foreign policy expert Michael Radu wrote a piece in 2002 arguing that searching for so-called "root causes" of terrorism is a futile quest. I agree.
Acts of political violence - whether they come in the guise of fascism, which appeals to past mythology and nationalistic glories, communism and its promises of a better world for the laboring class, or Islamic terrorism, which vows to remove stains of Western imperialism from its periphery - all have one common aim: alteration of the current global power arrangements.
Most revolutionary or terrorist leaders are not poor simpletons. Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire. Fidel Castro was a lawyer from a large landowning family. The leader of Peru's Shining Path was a former university professor. Mussolini was a newspaper editor, and many Nazis were former military officers who came from the middle- and upper-echelons of German society.
This negates the argument that poverty causes terrorism. Others argue policy is a cause of terrorism, but each brand of terrorism is different in its targets and methodologies.
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Groups like al Qaeda are committed to spreading an Islamic revolution in the Middle East, much like Castro was in the business of exporting communism in Latin America. Other groups - like Hamas and Islamic Jihad - are driven by the goal of destruction of Israel or at least a reduction of the Israeli presence in the Arab-populated areas of Palestine, making it a purely local or regional conflict in which those groups never act directly against the United States.
Issues like poverty, injustice, occupation or other grievances are simply road maps utilized by the counter-elites such as bin Laden. This serves two purposes: creating a sense of legitimacy for one's cause and increasing recruitment. These all are tools of the process of taking power, and that is the true cause of political violence: power, who holds it and how to obtain it.
Andy Watson
Daily Lobo reader
