Speach delivered February, 2002 at Swarthmore College as part of the Pendle Hill Lecture Series, "Discernment in the Aftermath of September 11"
In the summer of 1988, I was part of a group that travelled to the Israeli Occupied Territories to interview Palestinians about the intifadah, which was then about six months old. During my first day in a refugee camp, my host was chatting about the US when he asked, "So which state are you from?" When I said, "Pennsylvania," he responded, "Oh Pennsylvania! That's where the tear gas is from." He sent a small boy out to the street, and in a minute the boy was back presenting me with a used tear gas canister which read clearly, "Made in the USA, Salzburg, Pennsylvania."
In a Palestinian hospital a few days later, I met a woman who could barely breathe because Israeli soldiers had thrown tear gas into her home in the middle of the night. Prior to my trip, I had studied the Arab/Israeli conflict. I knew the intifadah I had come to witness was the eruption of decades of Palestinian frustration under Israeli occupation. I knew that US political and financial support for Israel had helped to make Israel's intransigence toward the Palestinians possible. Yet I never felt a personal connection to my government's policy in the region. Holding the tear gas canister -- made in my home state and arguably paid for by my taxes -- shook my sense of separation from the conflict.
The events of September 11 have had a similar effect. Many Americans were genuinely surprised to find that the United States was so hated abroad. On the afternoon of September 11, I spoke to one woman who had heard that the highjackers were Arab, maybe Palestinian. "We've never done anything to those people," she said in confusion. A few hours later my neighbor had a similar reaction: "What did we ever do to them?"
Since September 11, I have felt led to speak to that question as clearly and honestly as I can. In some ways I feel unqualified to answer. For the last five years, my primary job has been mothering, which means I rarely read more than the headlines of the Sunday newspaper. On the other hand, my academic training has prepared me to answer this question, along with my personal experiences in Africa and the Middle East. Although I don't feel like an "expert" in world affairs, I know enough to notice what the experts aren't telling us. For example, in an interview last October, Larry King asked Dan Rather why people around the world hate the US. Rather responded, "They hate us because they are losers. They see us as winners. And those who see themselves as losers sometimes develop a deep and abiding hatred for those they see who are winners."
Describing Americans as winners and casting our critics as "loosers" implies that there has been some fair contest, and that we have won because we are smarter, or faster, or more deserving. Rather's answer implies that our country has done nothing to incur this "deep and abiding hatred." Those who have pointed out legitimate grievances against the US have been dismissed as "intellectuals" and "moral-relativists." We've been accused of excusing the terrorists. One letter from a Newsweek reader sums up a common response: "If there is evil in this world it lies in the hearts of the Taliban, not in America."
I'm no apologist for the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But their sins do not absolve us of our own. I'm not surprised we don't want to question our moral superiority. Seeing fault in our country, or in our selves, is painful. It is much more comfortable to see the evil outside of us, to see the sawdust in our brother's eye, as Jesus put it. But our blindness is dangerous, spiritually and politically. If we really want peace -- inward peace and peace with our neighbors -- we must be willing to look critically at ourselves and our country.
My goal tonight is to take such a critical look, first on the political level and then on the personal level. I will argue that US foreign policy reflects our culture's pursuit of power and profit, a culture that we US Friends are part of, whether we like it or not. I will also suggest that just as greed, racism, and violence often go together, so the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, equality, and peace are integrally connected.
To begin to understand how we came to be seen as winners, and most of the world's people as losers, I believe we must begin with the story of colonialism, the system of domination that paved the way for the political and economic inequalities of today. Although colonialism may seem like ancient history to people in the US, colonialism is not forgotten in the 85 per cent of the world that was colonized less than a century ago. Indeed, in many parts of the world, the US is seen as the heir to the colonial legacy.
Colonialism had two primary goals: power and profit. It's no accident that European imperialism peaked along with the Industrial Revolution, for the political domination of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin American made European and North American industrial growth possible. British imperialist Cecil Rhodes summed up his economic ambitions this way:
We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies [will] also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.
These goals were often achieved with brutal force. In the Congo, for example, Belgian King Leopold II built his fortune exploiting wild rubber, which became tremendously profitable in the 1890's as industrial demand grew for tires, hoses, and electrical wiring. Leopold sent armed Europeans into the rain forest to force the local unarmed people to collect wild rubber. These African conscripts were often worked literally to death. If they failed or refused to collect the demanded amount of rubber, their whole village was murdered. Historians now estimate that during the peak of the rubber boom, the population of the Congo fell by ten million people within a few decades.
This leads to a third aspect of colonialism: racism. Those using the new rubber tires and hoses were able to ignore reports of the atrocities happening in the Congo because African lives counted for so little. In fact, it wasn't until an Englishman was killed that the European press started paying serious attention to the gruesome stories coming out of central Africa.
Unfortunately the Congo, although particularly brutal, was not an anomaly. Rain forest peoples throughout Africa and Latin America were forced to collect wild rubber under similar conditions. Throughout the colonized world, indigenous people were forced out of their traditional economies to harvest raw materials, such as gold, copper, and diamonds, or to grow crops for export, such as cotton, sugar, and coffee.
In the Middle East, European colonialism was not as brutal as in Africa and Latin America, but it still included violent domination, economic exploitation, and racism. During World War I, Britain saw an opportunity to gain control of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire, which included British trade routes to the East. Britain promised Arabs their freedom if they helped to defeat the Turks. During the same period, however, Britain also secretly promised a large slice of Arab territory to France and promised another slice to European Jews who hoped to establish a homeland in Palestine. In the post-war settlement, Arab independence was the first promise to be broken. The Arab territories were carved up, with France taking Syria and Lebanon, and Britain taking the rest. Britain chose the king of the new territory of Transjordan and put his brother on the throne in neighboring Iraq, which was believed to have oil. British access to oil had given them a decisive advantage over the Germans in the war, and Britain was eager to start exploiting what was clearly the fuel of the future.
It was in this colonial context that Britain allowed European Jews to emigrate to Palestine while still claiming to protect Arab interests. This contradiction created a morass for British-ruled Palestine, especially as the trickle of Jewish immigrants after WWI turned into a flood by WWII. By the time Israel declared statehood in 1948, most Israelis had come to see the British as an obstacle to independence. Most Arabs, however, saw them as having given Arab land to other Europeans. This is why even today most Arabs identify the conflict with Israel as a struggle against colonialism, while supporters of Israel see it very differently.
After WWII, exhausted European powers no longer had the resources or the stomach to keep occupying armies all over the world, particularly as independence movements developed throughout the colonies. Over the next few decades, many nations gained independence, but most lacked infrastructure and needed Western capital to modernize. Many new rulers, such as the kings of Jordan and Iraq, were indebted to Europeans and willing to protect Western economic interests. This arrangement, called neo-colonialism, still gave Westerners access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and markets for surplus goods, the very economic ambitions named by Cecil Rhodes.
By now the United States and the Soviet Union had replaced Britain and France as the world's most influential powers. Through a combination of threats and bribes, newly independent nations were pressured to take sides in the Cold War. Those who became US allies were rewarded with military and economic aid. Some new rulers used our military aid to oppress their own people and used western money to build presidential palaces rather than schools and hospitals. To people in the US, it seemed we were helping the less fortunate. To people in the former colonies, the United States seemed to be pursuing its own interests, irrespective of the needs of the local people, just as the former colonizers had done.
No one knows the full human toll of the Cold War. In addition to the wars in Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan, there were many other conflicts fueled by the superpower rivalry. US politicians said that we were fighting for democracy, but in truth the US did not protect democracy outside its borders. It protected capitalism and the way of life enjoyed by most citizens of the United States. Let me give just three examples from different continents and decades:
In 1951, the newly elected prime minister of Iran, Dr. Mossadeq, nationalized the oil fields run by British Petroleum. Both the US and Britain wanted to discourage countries from nationalizing their resources, so when a two-year boycott of Iranian oil failed to bring Mossadeq down, the CIA organized a coup, returning power to the Shah. In the aftermath of the coup, US oil companies were given concessions in Iran for the first time. The Shah went on to brutally rule Iran until the 1979 revolution.
By the time the Congo achieved independence in 1960, it had become an important source of copper, tin, manganese, zinc, and uranium. Western leaders became nervous when the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, gave rousing speeches demanding that Africans control their own resources. Lumumba was soon assassinated, allegedly with help from the CIA, which a few years later, supported a coup, launching the thirty year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
In Chile, when socialist Salvador Allende was elected in 1970, he nationalized large sectors of the economy, including the copper mines, the credit institutions, and the telecommunications industry. Some US companies, such as International Telephone and Telegraph, had billions of dollars of direct investments in Chile. After Allende's reelection in 1973, a coup was orchestrated by the CIA (with help from ITT and the AFL-CIO), installing the infamous military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
This history is widely known. Many in the US look back and say, well it was the Cold War. The Soviet Union was a real threat, and we believed in the domino theory, the idea that if a country like Chile or Congo fell to communism, the countries around it would start falling too. Whether with regret or justification, many talk about this period of foreign policy as if it were ancient history.
But there's an aspect of this story that I don't hear acknowledged very often, and so I want to emphasize it. It wasn't just fear of communism as an ideology that motivated US actions during the Cold War. It was also the fear of losing access to markets, cheap labor, and raw materials: copper, gold, diamonds, uranium, oil.
Our current dependence on foreign oil illustrates what hasn't changed since the end of the Cold War. Of the nearly 20 million barrels of oil used in the US each day, more than half come from imports, about 13% from the Persian Gulf. Our fear of losing access to this oil has motivated a long history of policies harmful to people in the region. Some have argued that oil interests were behind the US war against the Taliban. Although Afghanistan itself is resource poor, since the mid-1990s, it has been eyed as a pipeline route for Central Asia's vast reserves of oil and natural gas to travel to the sea. Unocal's plan to build such a pipeline through Afghanistan stalled in the late nineties due to political concerns about the Taliban and the overall instability of the country.
Fear of political instability in the oil rich Persian Gulf has motivated continued US support for the Saudi regime, despite its oppression of women, torture of prisoners, and total lack of democracy. Just since 1990 the US has exported $40 billion worth of sophisticated military equipment to the Saudis, as well as smaller arms and instruments of torture. Ironically their close association with the US has further undermined the Saudi's legitimacy. Although the US spends an estimated $106 billion per year on the military defense of the Persian Gulf, our military presence there has made the world less safe by inspiring the current jihad against the US, spearheaded by Osama bin Laden.
Some have said that Bin Laden's own wealth shows that this struggle has nothing to do with the economic inequalities of the world, and indeed Bin Laden is not a champion of the poor. But like many radical movements, the leadership of Al Qaeda is privileged while its grassroots support is predominantly poor and powerless. Most of the countries currently suspected of harboring terrorists are impoverished nations whose people have legitimate grievances against the west, like the Philippines, first colonized by Spain, then the United States, then later ruled by Ferdinand Marcos who, while supported by the US, plundered his country and oppressed his people. Likewise the Congo, impoverished and in chaos after Mobutu's rule, is now a source of blackmarket revenue for Al Qaeda. The seeds of war have grown in the fertile soil of poverty and desperation. It doesn't help that about 80% of the world receives arms made in the USA.
Although I believe it is important for citizens of the US to acknowledge the harm that has been done in our names, I want to end this section of my talk with a qualifier: We should be careful not to assume more than our fair share of blame. To say that all the world's problems are the fault of the United States is a perverse kind of snobbery that denies people in other countries their own agency and responsibility. Although tonight I am focusing on the US role in the world, there are many other parts to the story. The people of Africa, Asia and Latin America were not just given independence. They fought for independence. They resisted. Sometimes they made terrible mistakes. Pointing out our wrongdoing does not absolve anyone else of their own, although rulers like Saddam Hussein would like it to. In fact the real sins of the US have often been magnified by unjust rulers wanting to deflect their people's anger. But the US is no more the repository of evil than any other country. We just have more power.
The title of this series is "Discernment in the Aftermath of September 11." Whether we're talking about individual or group discernment, a first step is often to take stock of where we are and how we got here. That is why I have spent so much time tonight outlining the historical context of our foreign policy, to illustrate that violent domination and economic exploitation have historically gone together. This is why for me the peace testimony cannot be separated from the simplicity testimony and the equality testimony. I believe that if we want to witness for peace, we must also witness for a different way of relating to the world's resources and the world's people.
My own discernment in the wake of September 11 has been informed by the eighteenth century Quaker abolitionist John Woolman who wrote: "May we look upon our treasure, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try to discover whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions." I've found this exercise uncomfortable, for it quickly brings neocolonialism much closer to home. For example:
I look at my wedding ring, and I wonder if the gold was mined in South Africa where the United States played a greater role in supporting Apartheid than we would like to admit. One of our concerns was that if the ANC ever came to power, they would nationalize the gold and diamond mines.
I look at my clothes, most made in south Asian sweat-shops. There's no doubt my closet would be more spare if it were not for cheap foreign labor.
I look at my diet, knowing that in much of Latin America, rain forest has been cleared to produce meat and coffee for North America, while dangerous pesticides are used to grow our bananas.
I observe how much chocolate I consume, even after learning that in some parts of West Africa, child slaves pick the cocao that makes my candy bars. One anti-slavery organization estimates that every third bite of chocolate we eat has slavery in it.
I look at my computer which like mobile phones and other high tech equipment most likely contains tantalum, a mineral found in the Congo. Soaring demand for tantalum a few years ago made it tremendously profitable on the blackmarket, helping to fuel the Congolese war which has so far led to the deaths of an estimated 3 million people.
And I wonder how in the world John Woolman would live in a global economy. There are no easy answers here, Friends. We can try to be more conscious of our consumption, buying fair trade organic coffee, instead of Starbucks. We can avoid clothes from overseas sweatshops by going online to Coopamerica rather than to the mall. We can also reduce what we consume or buy second-hand. While these types of changes are important, it is impossible to completely separate ourselves from the inequalities of the world. Even anti-slavery organizations do not advocate boycotting chocolate because they fear depressed cocoa prices would only drive more African children into slavery. Instead they advocate consumer pressure on chocolate producers to develop fair trade policies.
Ghandi's experiences in South Africa led him to give away all he had so he would not feel he had to defend his possessions against those who had less. I'm not quite there yet, but I appreciate the challenge of Ghandi's example. Living in Southern Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer certainly taught me how few possessions we really need, especially when we live in community. In Botswana if one neighbor owns an axe and another a wheelbarrow, they share their tools, making little distinction about who owns what. If a Motswana is cooking dinner and realizes she is out of onions, she asks her neighbor for an onion, whereas most of the westerners I knew in Botswana would put on their sun hats and walk a mile in the scorching heat to the village store. When I finally caught on and started relying on my African neighbors, they were delighted. While self-sufficiency is highly valued in our culture, interdependence is at the core of Tswana culture.
It was, as they say, culture shock to return to the US where a person who needs an axe or an onion will jump in the car and drive to Home Depot or ShopRight. Observing my home culture through new eyes, I felt deeply alienated. I watched friends leave the faucet running while they walked around the kitchen, and I thought of drought afflicted Botswana, where the buckets of water women haul on their heads are rarely wasted. I saw people in the US throw away shopping bags and clothes that in Africa would have many more years of use. What alienated me most was our sense of entitlement and our unawareness of our privilege and our impact on the environment.
Now fifteen years after that Peace Corps experience, I struggle to remain conscious of what I'm using. Instead of feeling guilt about my relative prosperity, I sometimes touch my ring or my shirt and imagine all the people who helped bring this object into my possession. I find this exercise an antidote to the popular illusion than America stands alone, that our prosperity is all our own making. In fact, most of us have benefited materially from the foreign policy we deplore. We haven't benefited as much as Exxon or McDonnel Douglas, but our comfortable lifestyles are to some degree made possible by the poor of the world who produce what we consume. Our possessions connect us to people around the globe, whether we realize it or not.
I have been particularly aware of our interconnectedness since September 11. Like so many others I was moved, shaken, by the thousands of deaths that day. There were little stories that still bring me tears, stories that made the loss real: I read of two hands, one black, one white, found holding each other in the rubble of the twin towers. No wrists or arms, just the two clasped hands. I heard of the woman who called her husband from the plane to say goodbye, and the army officer killed in the Pentagon who had a peace bumper sticker on his car. I did not know anyone personally who was killed, but I know people who know people. Like other citizens of the US, my sense of invulnerability was shaken, especially by the media coverage which was relentless and personal.
Despite my travels and my longstanding interest in the rest of the world, September 11 forced me to recognize my emotional distance from the suffering of people in other countries. The CIA sponsored coup in Chile, for example, outraged me in a righteous political way when I read about it in graduate school. But it didn't make me cry the way September 11 did, even though the coup killed about the same number of people as the terrorist attacks.
After September 11, I felt my armor had been torn off, and other people's suffering could no longer be shut out. When I heard commentators like Larry King and Dan Rather speculating on the reasons for anti-Americanism, I thought of people like six-month old Hassan who died of a simple infection in an Iraqi hospital which didn't have antibiotics due to US-led sanctions. I remembered Luis Miguel, one of many children born with severe brain damage in southern Columbia where the US supports widespread chemical spraying on coca fields as part of our war on drugs. Although coca is grown in many parts of Columbia, the spraying is only happening in the in the rebel-strong south which happens to have oil.
Stories like Luis and Hassan's do not make me feel less sympathy for the victims of September 11, rather more. Hearing stories of grief from around the world reminds me that we are all human, vulnerable as well as sometimes violent. A poll recently conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests that majorities in all parts of the world think "it is good that Americans now know what it is like to be vulnerable."
Feeling vulnerable can prompt defensiveness or it can prompt spiritual growth. The choice is ours. We in the US can allow our losses to numb us with anger, making us indifferent to the suffering of other peoples. Or we can allow our suffering to fill us with compassion which makes us naturally more sympathetic to the suffering of others. If we choose the former, we will likely continue to foster the cycle of violence, bringing more suffering upon ourselves and others. If we choose the later, compassion will compel us to recognize as family all the people who have suffered as much or more than we have. Compassion will compel us to radically alter the way we relate to other nations.
Some say we are suffering from compassion fatigue. I don't believe this. We're suffering from bad-news-fatigue, violence-on-television fatigue, feeling-helpless-and-irrelevant fatigue. We haven't really given compassion a try. Where is our compassion for the people of Columbia or Iraq? Where is our compassion for the 3,767 Afghans killed by the US bombing, more people than were killed in the September terrorist attacks? For that matter, where is our compassion for the thousands of victims of gun violence in our own country or the people who live in poverty in our own backyards?
When I returned from Botswana, friends and family often asked, "Were you alone in your village?" When I answered, "No, there were ten thousand people in my village," there was usually an awkward moment as the implication of my answer sunk in. Of course what they were really asking was, Were you the only white person? Or perhaps, Were you the only American? Their question reflected an unconscious assumption that those people were somehow too different from me to count. Such prejudice is one common barrier to compassion. I can't help thinking that if the Congolese were white, the world would be paying more attention to 3 millions deaths.
For me September 11 has highlighted the many ways in which our lives are out of sync with Gospel Order. Our addiction to oil is only a symptom of our allegiance to the god of materialism. Ultimately the simplicity testimony is not about denying ourselves goodies, but about making space in our lives for the Divine. For me simplicity means letting go of the scarcity mentality that is so prevalent in our culture and that motivates so much hurt in the world. Only when we learn to trust in God's abundance can we choose to live with less.
In its Latin root, the word sacrifice means "to make holy." It implies giving up something secular to gain something sacred. Every major religion has practices, such as fasting and almsgiving, which are meant to humble us, to heighten our compassion for others, and teach us to surrender to God. One such practice is Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Another is Lent, which began eight days ago. This Lent, I've been struck by how counter-cultural it is to choose to live with less, although sometimes tragedy can inspire us to heroic self-giving. I think this is what touched people so deeply watching the firefighters at the World Trade Center. The outpouring of donations for the victims and the relief workers reflected a common longing to be in solidarity, to do something helpful.
People across the political spectrum have suggested that one small way to help would be to reduce our country's dependence on foreign oil. Since I'm not quite ready to give up my car, this year for Lent I decided to give up driving over the speed limit. There are a few people in this audience who have actually driven with me, and they may be able to imagine what a challenge this is. Although it may sound trite, from the first day, I could see the spiritual lessons:
First, I was surprised to realize how inattentive I have been behind the wheel. Whenever I stop concentrating on the speedometer, I find myself speeding again. It challenges me to consider all the other areas of my life where I am not paying attention to the journey because I'm thinking about the destination. I'm becoming more aware of how much I rush, how I need to slow down and do less. I'm also more aware of how fast everyone else is. By driving 25 mph on Lincoln Drive, where most cars cruise at 45, I have been thwarting the speed of my fellow Philadelphians, many of whom don't seem to appreciate this as a spiritual practice. When I look in the rearview mirror and see cars backing up behind me, I instinctively speed up, not wanting to get in anyone else's way. I'm aware how hard it is to buck convention, how hard it is to oppose the values of our culture. Driving the speed limit has also made me acknowledge the pride I have taken in being a fast driver, the number of times I've boasted about making "good time" on a trip, even though going 75 uses 30% more fuel than going 55. I'm more aware of the control that's so attractive in driving, that one doesn't feel when waiting for a bus.
I share these personal challenges because I think they relate to our weaknesses as a culture: our pride, our impatience, our desire for control, our unconsciousness. As Friends grapple with discernment in the aftermath of September 11, I believe we have to face these fundamentally spiritual issues. We need to ask in what ways we support the dominant culture and in what ways we hope to challenge it. We don't need to be perfect ourselves before we witness publicly. Rather, changing the world and changing ourselves are simultaneous challenges. I believe that inward and outward transformation go together, that action and contemplation are not contradictions.
There are many levels to the problems I've discussed tonight and many different ways we are feeling led to respond to them. I think the increased popularity of the Pendle Hill lecture series is evidence that many of us want to learn the parts of the story that we're not hearing from Dan Rather. Many of us are learning about Islam and reaching out to Muslims in our communities for the first time. Many are becoming conscious of their own fuel consumption and trying to reduce it, while some push for the development of more fuel efficient transportation. Some work to change our campaign finance laws so that oil companies and arms manufacturers have less influence, while others protest specific aspects of US foreign policy. And many of us are feeling led to prayer, in private, in our meetings, or in public vigils like the weekly one in front of the Liberty Bell.
As we discern individually how we are led to act, I hope we will be willing to also discern together, to find ways to witness as a community. Particularly in this area of cooperation and community building, I think we have a lot to learn from people in less individualistic cultures. Finally, I hope we don't forget what it's like to feel vulnerable, for I believe that feeling our vulnerability can help us experience our interconnectedness to each other, to other nations and to God.
Notes
Rather also noted that many people around the world admire the United States and want to immigrate here. "Anthrax Scare: Interview with Dan Rather," CNN Larry King Live, aired 18 October 2001. http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/180lkl.00.html
Letters, Newsweek, 3 December 2001, p. 16.
Quoted in Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2001), p. 13.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998).
Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: the Great Oil Companies and the World they Shaped (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
Barry M. Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: the American Experience in Iran (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
Hochschild, p. 302; and Ludo De Witte, trans. by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby, The Assassination of Lumumba (London, New York: Verso, 2001).
Jack Scott, Yankee Unions, Go Home! How the AFL Helped the U.S. Build an Empire in Latin America (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1978), ch. 18.
Statistics from: World Petroleum Consumption, 1990-1999, Energy Information Administration/International Energy Annual 1999; New York Times, 29 October 2001; "Office of Transportation http://www.ott.doe.gov/facts/archives/fotw191.shtml November 19, 2001.
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Federation of American Scientists, "U.S. Arms Clients Profiles: Saudi Arabia," 15 January 2002. http://fas.org/asmp/profiles/saudi_arabia.htm
Statistic on defense spending quoted in Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, "A New Grand Strategy," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 289 no. 1, January 2002, p. 42.
Julius Mucunguzi, "Bin Laden Linked to DRC Diamonds," The Monitor, 31 December 2001. http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200112310299.html
I found this statistic in a Brandywine Peace Community fact sheet. They cite the U.S. State Department as their source.
Information about tantalum (refined from coltan) from Michael Bond and Colette Braeckman, "A Moral Minefield," New Scientist, 7 April 2001. www.newscientist.com/hottopics/phones/phones.jsp?id=22855200/. Statistic about the Congo war from Danna Harman, "War-torn Congo Struggles to Revive," Christian Science Monitor, 21 May 2001.
"The Pew Global Attitudes Project," The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 19 December 2001,
Statistic from Afghanistan from Marc W. Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting," 27 January 2002. www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm