The Pied Piper of Tora Bora
Standing alone.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
December 11, 2001 7:30 a.m.

ussia, Eastern Europe, and most of South and Central America and Asia have accepted the demise of Communism and caudillos alike. Most states of the world have conceded that dumas, politburos, and the Praetorian Guard do not give people hope or freedom, and so are beginning to entertain free elections and unbridled speech. Similarly, people in the real world recognize that widespread poverty more often is state-induced than a result of racism, colonialism, or global exploitation. Mature nations have learned that Communism proved no paradise, but instead left millions of corpses in its wake and dearth as its legacy. Even China seems determined to adopt free markets — while fighting a desperate, and probably hopeless, rear-guard action against liberty and democracy. The world has always had its share of religious zealots and crackpot fundamentalists, but most states now acknowledge the truth that God did not intend to directly govern man.

So, outside of the university economics, English, and anthropology departments — and similar fundamentalist churches — we know that there is no solution for starvation, continual violence, and chronic chaos other than the adoption of consensual government, open economies, personal freedom, and secular rationalism. Everywhere at the millennium, the human community agrees that fascism, theocracy, Communism, tribalism, statism, and fundamentalism lead nowhere but to misery — everywhere, that is, except the Islamic world of the Middle East.

Iraq is a hooligan state, Algeria chaos incarnate. Iran is run by a fraudulent theocracy; Afghanistan preferred a more lunatic brand. Syria and Libya have fancy murderous dictatorships, while the tribes and monarchies of the Gulf embrace fundamentalism at home, blondes and booze abroad. Sudan, Somalia, and Lebanon remain as chaotic as Yemen and Egypt are bankrupt. Morocco is sort of trying. All this tragedy is proof enough that it did not take Israel to ensure that Jordan, Palestine, and Gaza would be as unfree as they are broke.

Rather than looking to itself — by emancipating women, holding free elections, opening markets, drafting constitutions, outlawing polygamy, curbing fundamentalism, insisting on secular education, and ending tribalism — the Islamic world has more often cursed others. And, consequently, a musician has been welcomed into town — one not conversant with the true tune of salvation, but arriving as a sinister player, whose narcotic chords of resentment have captivated the Muslim world and so tragically led it, singing as it went, right over the precipice of disaster.

Bin Laden's mesmerizing jingle of a sinister Israel and conspiratorial America has stampeded an entire culture. At the vanguard of the enthralled were the terrorists and the piper's own al Qaeda gangsters. Thanks to bin Laden's insane and cowardly attack on the world's sole superpower, his cells have been rounded up in nearly every European country; their Middle East nests are burning; and hundreds themselves have been torched or blown to bits. Bullets or bars await them and any other self-loathing killer in the Muslim world who believes the West — not his own conduct and culture — brought him his misery. The siren song of bin Laden has done more to destroy terrorism than has any cruise missile or Interpol operative in the last decade.

Close behind the terrorists in the shuffling, spellbound multitude was the purportedly formidable Taliban, who bragged and postured all the way to the abyss — not so much a religious order as a crass guild of bloody incompetents that hijacked an entire country through bribes, random assassination, and old-fashioned terror. These vicious bureaucrats believed their irrelevancy, remoteness, and sheer lunacy might make their cruelty relatively unimportant and therefore safe from retribution, until bin Laden, the mad minstrel, seduced them — with dollars and half-baked schemes of grandeur — to countenance one hit job too many. And so the Taliban also followed at his heels, screeching and threatening right over the cliff and into the nothingness below.

Next in line in the entranced swarm was the puffed-up Muslim street — the millions of illiterate and unemployed in Islamabad, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, and the West Bank who sadly cannot vote, cannot read, and cannot talk freely without the nod of a mullah or a government thug. When news broke that thousands of Americans were butchered, skyscrapers toppled, the Pentagon afire, and jets blown apart, they too joined the ranks of the piper's pack. For three months the world has recoiled in both horror and embarrassment as thousands of the ignorant have cheered on their mass murderer, hawked his posters, and rushed into the bazaar to shake their fists and wave their pathetic, misspelled banners and kindergarten scribblings. Europe, the Americas, Russia, India, and even China have all stared in disbelief at their trance — and rightly or wrongly decided that these are rather crazy, dangerous folk, better left alone in their lockstep march to paradise than allowed to visit or emigrate to the more sober nations of world. No Israeli, no rogue CIA agent, no Christian or Hindu fundamentalist could have done so much damage to the global image of the Islamic populace as Mr. bin Laden, whom the Muslim masses so mindlessly follow — indeed elbowing each other to be first over the edge.

We should not forget the center and rear of the performer's frenzied host, who were just as hypnotized — and are meeting the same fate as those who rushed out in the front rank. The so-called moderate governments of the Middle East, though rather coyly, listened to the sweet lyrics of "Islam ascendant" married with the chorus of an "America in flames." A Saudi sheik gave lectures to us at Ground Zero. Those who were once rescued in Kuwait a decade later snickered on 60 Minutes about the American inferno. Moderates from Egypt to the Gulf cried crocodile tears for our dead — before immediately publicly resisting requests for financial records, travel logs, or antiterrorism intelligence. All their hostility was packaged with polite "but" speeches: "We do feel for the victims of September 11, but — " (fill in with comments on either "Israel" or "your government's foreign policy").

Yet news has leaked out to the American people (to the embarrassment and chagrin of our own government) that many of the Saudis were rather amused at what happened to our innocent, and that the Palestinian elite was not all that unhappy with the idea that thousands of Americans had been murdered — victims whose taxes helped to pay $100 million a year in subsidies to the West Bank kleptocracy. Consequently, it will take millions of dollars in slick ads in Time and the Financial Times to bring back confidence in Kuwait; thousands of glossy infomercials of gleaming airports and highways in Saudi Arabia to reassure us that it is civilized; and hundreds of bought-and-paid-for retired American generals, ex-diplomats, defense contractors, and oil men to lobby and mislead us that the real Middle East didn't mean it at all. And still the damage wrought by bin Laden to the "moderate governments" will not be undone.

You see, hidden among the thronging mob — slightly embarrassed, shuffling rather than skipping, with canes rather than jogging shoes — were the geriatric sheiks and the unelected autocrats in ties and suits. Bobbing in and out of the crowd, at last they really did join the hypnotized columns, and so have hobbled right to the brink of the chasm of no return — never realizing that the music of jihad was dooming them, not us.

Finally, of course, was the opportunistic rear guard, who caught only a stanza now and then of bin Laden's mad piping. Liking much of what they heard, they tagged along nonetheless, thinking they could fall out before reaching the cleft. And they, too, are now going over with the rest. These were the so-called intellectuals in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and the Gulf who knew better. These novelists, newspaper editors, lobbyists, and the other assorted glib and sophisticated were no fundamentalists; indeed, they claimed that they knew the West, and sometimes resided in America and Europe. Afraid to confess openly that they also found the music of bin Laden's entertaining too clever by half, they called the mad piper a "symptom," "a wake-up call," or a "barometer" — anything other than a megalomaniac looking to murder the helpless.

So those who brought up the rear of the hypnotized mob were not the ignorant but the educated. When not drugged by bin Laden's melodies, they understood the freedom, prosperity, security, and power of the West — knew it and, of course, wanted something like it for themselves. Worse still, they not only desired us, they knew exactly whence our superiority arose — not from the legacy of colonialism, not from racism, not from the Jewish state of Israel, and not from the foreign policy of America — but from the institutions of democracy, capitalism, and individual liberty: the very ideals of the West that they were so attracted to, and that thus left them so angry at their own unquenchable and yet unattainable desire.

The educated of the Middle East hid in the dust and melee of bin Laden's entranced throng, but joined in at the back nonetheless. Did their ears prick up to his wafting notes out of envy — and with it, a sense of inferiority? Or was their behavior explicable — because they merely lacked the courage to demand of their own culture an end to fundamentalism, polygamy, sexual apartheid, the clan, statism, and all the other pathologies that prevent Islam from moving ahead in the modern world?

In their equivocation, contortions, and passive-aggressive circumlocutions, the educated too are close to going over the edge with all the rest of the piper's zombies. Every time a novelist or journalist — whether the respected Nobel laureate Mr. Mafhouz or Abdul Rahman al Rashed of the state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat — announces that the American bombing of Afghanistan was as much an act of terror as September 11, the piper smiles and plays on. No Western chauvinist, no crazed nativist or half-educated xenophobe has done so much to discredit the Middle Eastern intellectual as has the snickering minstrel bin Laden.

Now the piper is perhaps safely — for a time — holed up in his cave, while most of his hypnotized herd has already plummeted into the gorge. The rest of the world — Europe, the Americas, Russia, China, India, Japan, and the Pacific — grimaces at their fate, sad at the plunge of the deceived flock, but ever more determined not to listen to the cacophonous songs of hate, lies, and envy that have led them only to catastrophe.