The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror

3. Rising Anti-Americanism in the Global Audience

87 3 RISING ANTI-AMERICANISM IN THE GLOBAL AUDIENCE The September 11 attacks were motivated in part by issues related to Middle Eastern oil, but such issues have been germane beyond their impact on Al-Qaeda. These issues are followed by a global audience, partly due to their emotive importance but also because globalization has allowed world politics to become a mass spectator event.The response of the audience of Muslims and non-Muslims matters to the broader question of transnational terrorism. We cannot understand it well if we treat it as a phenomenon in isolation from the larger context in which it gains meaning and which affects its nature and direction. U.S. foreign policy has generated a variety of outcomes, but regardless of what one thinks of it, the U.S. role in oil-related issues tends to play into a not uncommon historical perspective in the Middle East and beyond: that the United States is a power-hungry imperialist actor seeking control over oil, a state bent on advancing its interests at the expense of local Muslims. Al-Qaeda has attempted to capitalize on this perspective in order to advance a conflict of ideas, to generate anti-Americanism even among those who would never adopt Al-Qaeda’s ways, and to recruit followers to its side. Polling data from the Muslim world, which, given the difficulty of accurate polling in authoritarian societies, are not definitive , strongly suggest that aspects of Al-Qaeda’s message did strike a broader chord, though its message lost traction over time. Al-Qaeda has been more effective at generating anti-Americanism than in making its own ideas attractive to others. It has sought to generate a clash of civilizations but so far appears to have 88 PART I: OIL AND TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM failed in this effort. However, this does not mean that it has not gained adherents and sympathy beyond its small numbers. Cognitive Lenses and Belief Systems How human beings make decisions is an area of great interest and importance. We do know that in making decisions, we sometimes delve into the relevant past knowledge and experience stored in our long-term memory, such as that reflected in analogies.1 Much of cognitive psychology revolves around schemas, scripts, and analogies.2 Knowledge structures such as analogies help human beings process and evaluate information, in part by assisting them in matching new pieces of information against their stored memories.3 Beliefs derived from analogies or other sources feed into decisionmaking by helping us decide what information matters, analyze new situations, and explore key questions about human behavior and the world in which they live.4 Some scholars believe that“operational codes”represent an aspect of an individual’s beliefs—those that deal with politics. They can be highly influential in affecting how individuals interpret information, perceive the broader environment, and make decisions in the political world.5 All of us draw lessons from the past to deal with current issues, either consciously or subconsciously. In the Middle East, perhaps more than in other regions, it is common to interpret the present through the lens of the past. This can illuminate events and the actions of others or distort them. While we must be careful not to indulge in gross generalizations, it is fair to say that some Westerners view some Middle Easterners partly through a lens that shapes what they see in the first place, what they consider important, what they fear, and what they mistrust. A Washington Post–ABC News poll released in March 2006 found that nearly half of Americans—46 percent—had a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.6 In a poll conducted in August 2010 by the Pew Research Center for the 1. For a good overview and formulation of cognitive process theory, see Taber, “Interpretation of Foreign Policy Events,” 29–52. 2. Ibid., 25. 3. Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference, 17–42, 28–42; and Abelson and Black, “Introduction,” 1–20. 4. Rosati, Power of Human Cognition. 5. On this literature, see Renshon, Stability and Change in Belief Systems, 820. 6. Deane and Fears, Negative Perception. RISING ANTI-AMERICANISM IN THE GLOBAL AUDIENCE 89 People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public...