BrianGarst.com

Given the current political climate, I suppose I should be happy to see an op-ed coauthored by two left-leaning individuals arguing for free trade. However, I must take issue with the central premise of their case.

When trade flares up as a political issue — as it is likely to do in the presidential campaign this year — one aspect of the debate is almost always neglected. There is a fierce competition among foreign countries to sell their products here, in the United States, the largest commercial market in the world.

Moreover, by opening up our market to Muslim countries, we could not only help American consumers, but also serve a larger strategic goal: that of boosting the economies which now produce large pools of unemployed, embittered youth. We can make trade an effective weapon against terrorism.

Our tariff regime puts many nations in the Middle East, whose young people are susceptible to the sirens of Islamic fundamentalism, at an unintended disadvantage. This works against our efforts to stamp out jihadism. Fortunately, the problem is easy to fix.

First off, putting others at a disadvantage is exactly the intention of tariffs.  But that’s a minor quibble.  My real concern is with the flawed understanding of jihad exhibited in this argument.  The implication is that, if only they weren’t poor, there wouldn’t be so much terrorism.

There is little evidence to support this claim.  The few empirical studies on the matter have indicated no direct relationship between poverty and support for terrorism.  If anything, there’s a reverse correlation.  The 9/11 hijackers were not poverty stricken youths with no opportunity.

They were not born to be soldiers — none seems to have come from a military background — and there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from “an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt” and had led “a sheltered life” until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, “laid-back” fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, “not the world’s most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000,” which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he “had any serious scholarly ambitions.”

Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, “had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools.” He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, “intelligent, friendly, and ‘very courteous, very formal,’ a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot.” He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was “the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut,” a “secular Muslim” family that “was easygoing — the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach.” At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, “the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants”; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.

The benefits of free trade are myriad and, to anyone who bothers to observe the evidence, undeniable; but I see little evidence to suggest that defeating jihad is among them.

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