Somewhere between Casablanca and Rawalpindi, in the vast arc defined by poverty and Islam, a young man will leave his village and family today and go to the big city, propelled by despair and drawn by the promise of the good life that he’s seen in American videos on the village television set.
Semieducated and semiliterate, equipped only to beg in four languages, he will join swarms of other young men in unemployment, idleness and growing bitterness. Sooner or later his wasted mind will make contact with the hateful sermons of some extremist imam and he will end up in a remote, secret desert camp, a terrorist in training.
This is the sea from which Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders pull recruits like fish into their global campaigns. It is a great swath of the world that has been passed over by the global economy, which is no more than a rumor for most of the millions who live there.
For these have-nots, the inequalities of the global economy have not only fueled the rage that led to the attacks of this black September, but also created the means and targets for future attacks, and the tools to carry them out.
Nothing–no complaint against corporations or capitalism–justifies the slaughter of innocent civilians at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the West and especially the United States have to understand the alienation that the American-led rush toward globalization has caused in these left-behind regions of the world.
“In a globalized world with instant communications, it is impossible to have excessive opulence alongside grinding poverty without something, sometime, somewhere, exploding,” said William Van Dusen Wishard, a former official in the Commerce Department and president of WorldTrends Research. “We Americans have flaunted our affluence and power in the face of the world, and the world has reacted in varying degrees, terrorism being only the most extreme form of reaction.”
The myth of globalization
The globalization gospel insists that a rising tide lifts all boats and that the global economy is increasing incomes and improving lives everywhere it goes. This is not true even in more favored areas, as farmers and factory workers from the Midwest to Southeast Asia can attest.
In large areas of the world, global communications have excited expectations and overturned centuries of traditions, but the global economy has not arrived to fulfill those expectations or to replace those traditions with something of value. Africa is an example, of course, but the Middle East is Exhibit A.
“The Middle East is really pathetic in its relative lack of participation in the global economy,” said Marvin Zonis, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and an expert on the region.
The global economy is powered by trade and investment, but, apart from the oil and gas industry, there is virtually no Western investment in or trade with Middle Eastern economies, Zonis said. Foreign investment in the region was about $6.5 billion in 1998, according to UN statistics. Of this, $4.8 billion went to Saudi Arabia alone; the other countries, with more than 400 million people, got $1.7 billion. This is less than the amount that went to Hungary, with 10 million people, one-third as much as what went to Thailand (60 million people), one-twelfth as much as what went to Sweden (8 million people).
If any region has got the worst of the global economy but none of the best, it is the Middle East.
“People see the disruption in their own lives,” said William Reno, a political science professor at Northwestern University. “They recognize that markets can be a very destructive force. In the United States, which is the center of this economy, jobs are destroyed, businesses are destroyed, there is destruction. But our economy offers opportunities, too, for new jobs and businesses and training. In marginal parts of the world, all they get is the destruction.”
The West’s role
For all this, the global economy and the United States get the blame: It is no accident that the first two terrorist attacks were on the very symbols of that economy.
It’s true that the West, in insisting that Third World governments slash budgets to pay their debts to the West, have only made things worse by wiping out government jobs, which often are the only ones available to young people. But all the blame does not lie with global corporations or investment bankers.
As Zonis point outs, the region’s enormous oil riches have gone to a handful of princes, dictators and magnates, “a small group of economic and political elites that benefit immensely from the way things are. They’re doing just great and they don’t want to see privatization or a market economy.”
It’s easy to say that the West should be investing more in the Middle East. But these local oligarchs have worked to keep out investment, which might benefit their people but could also derail their own gravy train.
The result is increasing misery in most of the oil states. OPEC oil revenues have plummeted over the past 20 years, from $580 billion in 1980 to $105 billion now, when inflation is taken into account. But population has soared. Assuming these revenues were spread evenly (which they aren’t), they would have amounted to $1,750 per person in 1980, but only $300 per person now.
Creating angry armies
In the United States, 70 percent of Americans age 15 to 64 have jobs. In Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, it’s 35 percent or less.
“The poor are getting poorer,” Zonis said. “Real economies are not developing. So all these kids don’t have jobs, even in Saudi Arabia. And we know what that does.”
What that does is create angry armies ready to do a terrorist warlord’s work.
But if the global economy has cut them out of its benefits, it has more than compensated by equipping them for this murderous work.
Soaring immigration is only the most obvious weapon. Our young terrorist, once trained, is free to move about the world, legally or illegally. Almost certainly, he has a cousin in St. Louis or an old friend in Boston to give him cover.
The other weapons are less obvious but just as lethal.
The global economy is powered by global financial markets, spinning nearly $2 trillion a day around the world in a blinding flow of electronic cash. For a bin Laden eager to launder money or pass secret funds through no-questions-asked banking havens, this virtually unregulated system is ideal.
On the spear point of globalization are thousands of global corporations, some of them–for instance, General Motors and IBM–richer and more powerful than the countries where they do business. These symbols of global America have highly visible foreign operations in poor countries, specifically chosen for their low wages and regulatory loopholes, where terrorists have friends and admirers. For sheer vulnerability to terrorism, these outposts are unsurpassed.
The drive belt of globalization is trade, much of it between the scattered parts of these global corporations. We can make our airports reasonably secure, but we have not even begun to think about the potential for terrorism posed by this trade.
People and goods flow into the United States through 3,700 terminals in 301 ports of entry. In 1999, more than 5 million loaded 40-foot maritime containers entered this country–1 million through Long Beach, Calif., alone. According to U.S. Coast Guard Academy teacher Stephen Flynn, it would take five customs inspectors three hours to thoroughly inspect each one of these containers.
But these containers must move swiftly, to meet the just-in-time requirements of their customers. If each container were really inspected, the whole global economy would seize up. The upshot, Flynn said, is that customs officials in Long Beach clear one container every 20 seconds–in other words, virtually without inspection.
Now, let’s assume that one of those containers holds a biological weapon, loaded in Pakistan by a bin Laden agent with ties to a plausible shipping company, and destined for, say, Baltimore. That container would be zipped through Long Beach, loaded on a train and be halfway across the country–in Chicago’s transshipment yards, for instance–when that weapon was activated.
Other factors that work in terrorists’ favor–illegal immigration, the easy spread of diseases such as Ebola, drug trafficking–have been encroaching steadily.
The impoverished world lashed out at us in a sudden fury Sept. 11, but it’s been exporting its problems to us for years.
In a world in which 2 billion people earn less than $2 a day each, this can only increase.
Chance to change things
If government’s top priority is to protect America and Americans, the arrest of bin Laden is barely a start. We have just learned that we can’t turn ourselves into a gated civilization, safe from an angry world out there.
The opportunity exists. The developed world has already promised to cut world poverty in half by 2015 but has not begun to keep this vow. This year, the World Trade Organization is scheduled to hold its next big meeting in the Arab kingdom of Qatar in November. For security reasons, it may well be postponed.
Why not turn that meeting into a global forum to begin the slow, agonizing task of closing the gaps, fulfilling the promise and giving that young would-be terrorist something better to do with his life?
