Colonizing Without Colonies
Al Qaida didn't create their doctrine. The Taliban didn't invent their radicalism. Daish didn't emerge from nothing. They were built from something that was already there.
That something was the Wahabi movement. The West handed them a country to run it from.
The Middle East is broken for exactly one reason: a century of Western interference — fear first, then guilt, then greed. Starting in 1916, it became an exercise in colonizing without colonists. The Ottoman Empire was carved up and distributed like slabs of beef, handed to whatever aligned interests the Western powers could identify, regardless of how extreme, how dangerous, how disconnected from the populations they were given authority over. Families loyal to American and Western interests received sultanates, royalties, crowns. The House of Saud was handed the Arabian Peninsula — and guardianship over Mecca — and with it, the Wahabi doctrine they would export through every institution they ever touched.
Osama bin Laden didn't invent terrorism. For a significant part of his early life, he was something closer to a philanthropist. What made him dangerous wasn't Afghanistan. He was radicalized as a child, inside the House of Saud, following the extremist doctrines the West had blessed into power and never troubled itself to examine. The Taliban was built on the same doctrine. Al Qaida. Daish. The thread runs directly from Riyadh to every organization the West has spent the last three decades pretending was mysterious.
As a Sunni, I rejected Shiite doctrine outright. As a Muslim, I respected their Islam — as I do every other offshoot of the tradition. The heresy of Wahabi extremism is specific. And it wasn't contained by the country we chose to partner with. It was systematically exported by them.
I was driving to work on September 11th, 2001. The office was across the street from an airport. I got there on time; everyone else was late. I spent the next hours fighting to keep servers online — systems that fed national news through algorithmic distribution. Someone wheeled a television into the room. I watched the second tower come down. The men who flew those planes were radicalized in Saudi Arabia. Financed by Saudi money. Fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi nationals. The documentation of Saudi government involvement in financing those attacks was classified for nearly three decades.
The United States' closest ally is the colony it established in Palestine and calls Israel. The second closest is Saudi Arabia.
This week, while the United States prosecutes an active war against Iran — built on the argument that Iranian nuclear enrichment and radicalization are existential threats — the current administration signed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia that includes a path to uranium enrichment. The country that financed September 11th. The country that has spent decades sponsoring Al Qaida and the Taliban, both of which have explicitly stated that nuclear dirty bombs are on the table.
And while prosecuting that war, the United States has been targeting civilian infrastructure in southern Iran. Both sides have hit civilian infrastructure in this conflict — that's been reported without ambiguity. The difference is that the United States entered this war as the initiating party, framing it as a response to existential nuclear threat from a country whose Supreme Leader issued a Fatwa against nuclear weapons over twenty years ago. Under Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, civilian infrastructure is a protected category. Under the rules of armed conflict the United States has spent decades claiming to champion, what is happening in southern Iran has a specific legal name.
Compare that to Iran's actual record. Iran accidentally destroyed a civilian aircraft five years ago, under a defensive alert posture after being directly attacked. Iran bans chemical weapons as haram. Saudi Arabia has no Fatwa against nuclear weapons, no ban on chemical weapons, and has spent years complaining that Israel, India, and Pakistan are nuclear-armed while they are not. That gap is now closing, with U.S. assistance.
Both governments are brutal to their dissidents. Both butcher religious minorities. Neither gets clean hands on human rights. But one of them funded the September 11th attacks. One of them sponsors the organizations that want dirty bombs. That's the one receiving enrichment technology while we bomb the other's infrastructure.
This week the United States also imposed new tariffs on dozens of countries — including close allies and major trading partners — over "forced labor." The justification: goods produced with coerced or uncompensated labor constitute unfair trade competition.
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, in relevant part: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."
Except as a punishment for crime.
Emancipation didn't end slavery in America. It transferred it. Removed it from private hands and placed it into state and federal ownership. Every state prison system in the country operates work mandates. No state pays a living wage for that labor. The system extends into municipal government through mandatory community service. By any honest accounting of the number of human beings performing compelled, uncompensated or near-uncompensated work, the United States operates the largest forced labor system on earth — not hedged against other Western democracies. Any nation. And the United States is, as far as the historical and legal record shows, the only major Western democracy that has enshrined this exception in its founding documents and has not removed it.
We sanctioned our allies this week for forced labor. We are the world's largest practitioner of it.
We're the bad guys. The United States. The Western Alliance. We didn't colonize the Middle East by installing our own citizens — we colonized it by installing whoever would serve our interests, no matter what they believed or what they'd do with the power. We bomb civilian infrastructure while invoking international law. We impose forced-labor tariffs while the Constitution explicitly authorizes slavery. A century of that is sitting in front of us now.
We're still acting confused about where the violence came from.
