Did Bush Get It Right?

One of the most common canards of those who oppose President Bush’s strategy of reforming the Middle East is that the “root causes” of terrorism must be removed before we can expect to see any progress. The prime “root cause” bemoaned by the left has always been poverty, because people who are poor are supposedly desperate. Poor people, they say, carry out acts of violence and terror because they simply have nothing to lose—they do not fear death because life could scarcely contain more misery. However, like so much of the conventional wisdom concerning the Middle East, the idea that poverty is a precipitator of terrorism is flat-out wrong.

While I’m sure that many would expect my source of information to be National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, or merely the diseased recesses of my evil conservative mind, the study I want to reference instead comes from that bastion of neoconservative thought, the John F. Kennedy School of Government. What makes the study all the more illuminating is that its author, Alberto Abadie, did not set out to disprove what was previously the standard belief in the international studies community; rather, when he started he “believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism had its roots in poverty.”

Instead of poverty, however, Abadie discovered a distinct relationship between “the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism.” Those nations at either extreme—North Korean on the totalitarian side and the United States on the democratic side—had very few instances of terrorism, whereas those nations in the middle, nations that were neither totally free nor totally state-run, had the highest rates of occurrence. It should come as little surprise that the Middle East falls into the middle category of nations where terrorist activity is to be most expected.

Indeed it is entirely baffling to me why the conventional wisdom that “poverty breeds terrorism” survived for as long as it did. While the Middle East’s great wealth is not evenly spread, the average citizen’s standard of living there is considerably higher than in most parts of the world. Pakistan and Indonesia, two recent terror hotspots, likewise are not particularly wealthy but neither are they particularly poor, their incomes ranking somewhere in the middle worldwide. And, the most well-known perpetrators of terror, the thugs that carried out 9/11, were from the upper-middle class of their respective countries: they certainly did not engage in terror due to the disastrous state of their material circumstances.

Thus President Bush’s promise to bring liberty and freedom to the Middle East should not be viewed as some crackpot scheme or the manifestation of a bizarre messiah complex, but rather a course of action that is exceedingly common-sense. Knowing what we know now about the nature of terrorism, it seems that Bush’s ideas are not only reasonable but are in fact the only long-term solution to the problem we face. Since only freedom has been shown to reduce the incidence of both domestic and international terror, doesn’t it make the most sense to try and increase freedom in the part of the world where terrorism is most severe and dangerous? I would say that it does, even though conventional wisdom might disagree.

Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.