Was State Senator Obama Right That Poverty Causes Terrorism? By Joshua Keating. Slate, September 11, 2013.
Barack Obama on the 9/11 Attack. Hyde Park Herald, September 19, 2001, p. 4.
Keating:
With
the 12th anniversary of 9/11 today, several people are sharing this scanned page from the Sept. 19, 2001 issue of the Hyde
Park Herald, featuring reactions to the attacks from several local
politicians, including one State Sen. Barack Obama. Obama wrote:
The
essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of
empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with,
the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness
to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate nor,
history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity.
It may find expression in a particular brand of violence and may be channeled
by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a
climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair. . . . [W]e will
have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes
and prospects of embittered children across the globe – children not just in
the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and
within our own shores.
The
theme of terrorism as a symptom of poverty was a popular one from that era.
George W. Bush also said that “We fight against poverty because hope is an
answer to terror.” But the argument that poor and uneducated people are more
likely to become terrorists is more controversial than you might think.
The
9/11 hijackers and plotters, after all, were predominantly educated men from
comfortable backgrounds, an extremely wealthy one in Osama bin Laden’s case.
But the causal relationship has also been difficult to demonstrate on a more
general level.
A widely-cited 2002 paper by economists Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova (also
summarized in a New Republic article)
found that support for attacks against Israeli targets among Palestinians
living in the West Bank and Gaza did not decrease among those who were more
educated and wealthier. They also found that “a living standard above the
poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated
with Participation in Hezbollah,” the Lebanese military group. Israeli settlers
who attacked Palestinians also tended to be wealthier than average. A 2004 study by the Harvard economist Alberto Abadie found that this was also true at
the country level: terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer
countries.
But
there may also be another side to the story. The political scientist Ethan
Bueno de Mesquita argues that economic conditions affect terrorist recruitment
in a more subtle way. Terrorist groups are more likely to want to recruit people
with useful skills, in other words those with more education and success in the
labor market. But it become easier for them to do so during economic downturns,
when there are fewer non-terrorist opportunities available.
And
indeed, a 2011 study using microlevel data on the Palestinian economy found
“evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics
of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment
enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more
experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli
targets.” A recent country-level analysis by three German economists found
evidence that “education may fuel terrorist activity in the presence of poor political
and socio-economic conditions, whereas better education in combination with
favorable conditions decreases terrorism.”
So the
image that statements like Obama’s and Bush’s conjure up of terrorists as
uneducated and desperately poor people born into hopeless circumstances may be
misleading. But there also may be some link between economic opportunity–among
many other factors–and political violence.
In his
book, The Finish, journalist Mark
Bowden refers to the Hyde Park Herald
column as an example of Obama’s earlier liberal worldview, which was challenged
by the events of 9/11, and would eventually evolve into the hard-hearted
realism of the man who ordered the Abottabad raid. Obama was “working his way
toward a personal definition of evil,” Bowden writes.
That
may be true, and it’s certainly hard to imagine Obama phrasing his remarks
quite the same way today, but the same argument still appears in his rhetoric.
In his address on counterterrorism last May, for instance, Obama argued that
“foreign assistance cannot be viewed as charity. It is fundamental to our national security
and it’s fundamental to any sensible long-term strategy to battle extremism.”
Such aid, he argued, would create “reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize
extremists.”
The reason
why the more simplistic argument is popular among politicians of both parties
is obvious. It links an unpopular idea—spending taxpayer money to help poor
people abroad—to a popular one: protecting the United States from terrorists.
The link to do may be tough to prove and more nuanced than generally
understood, but helping poor people just for the sake of helping them is not a
political winner.
