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http://chicagotribune.com/
Monday October 1 , 2001
Published on Sunday, September 30, 2001 in the Chicago Tribune
The Seeds of Terror Thrive in Poor Ground by RC Longworth
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?
R.C. Longworth is a Tribune senior reporter Copyright ) 2001,
Chicago Tribune ###
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