I’ve just been read­ing today’s New York Times arti­cle about the con­vic­tion of the New York City World Trade Cen­ter bombers. With it is a com­pan­ion piece about the plot leader, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who hoped to kill 250,000 peo­ple when the tow­ers col­lapsed onto the city below. Born in Kuwait to a Pak­istani mother and Pales­tin­ian father, his life began as an alle­gory for the social dis­place­ments of the Mid­dle East, and he grew up with anger towards the Israelis-and by exten­sions the Americans-who had forced his father from his home­land. Even so, Yousef came to school in the West, to Wales, where he stud­ied engi­neer­ing. But in 1989 he left it for another edu­ca­tion, fueled by his anger and lead­ing to the death of six in the heat and smoke of the mas­sive under­ground explo­sion in down­town Manhattan.

Yousef trav­eled to Afghanistan to join the Muja­hedeen rebels in their fight against Soviet occu­piers, and there learned the guer­rilla tech­niques he would later employ in New York. Who sup­ported the Muja­hedeen and paid for Yousef’s train­ing in ter­ror­ism? The United States Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, who fun­neled the Afghan rebels mil­lions of U.S. tax­pay­ers dollars.

It would seem a sim­ple case of U.S. mil­i­tarism com­ing home to roost, but it is not so sim­ple and it is not uncom­mon. Fol­low most trails of ter­ror­ism and you’ll find United States gov­ern­ment fund­ing some­where in the recent past.

Tim­o­thy McVeigh was another angry young man, one who had to drop out of col­lege, couldn’t find a steady job, and moved from trailer park to trailer park as an adult, won­der­ing if the Amer­i­can Dream included him. He did what a lot of economically-disadvantaged young kids do, and enlisted in the U.S. Army (this has been described by some as “the poverty draft”).

In 1988, he met Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols at the U.S. Army base at Ft. Ben­ning, Geor­gia (coin­ci­den­tally home of the infa­mous School of the Amer­i­cas). There he was taught how to turn his anger into killing and was quickly pro­moted, get­ting good reviews and being awarded with the Bronze Star and Com­bat Infantry Badge for his ser­vice in the Gulf War.

Later he came back to the U.S. with his Ft. Ben­ning friends and turned his anger against the U.S. gov­ern­ment. He used his mil­i­tary skills to build a bomb (allegedly with Nichols, now at trial, with the knowl­edge of Fortier, who turned state’s wit­ness). On a spring day in 1995, he drove the bomb to Okla­homa City’s fed­eral build­ing and set it off, killing 168 peo­ple. McVeigh’s mother said, “It was like he traded one Army for another one.” (Wash­ing­ton Post, 7/2/95)

Another ter­ror­ist trained by the United States government.

But it doesn’t end there either. This same dynamic hap­pens on the nation-state level as well. Today’s head­lines also include sto­ries about the stand­off between Iraq’s Sad­dam Hus­sein and United Nations arms inspec­tors, a sit­u­a­tion which threat­ens to renew mil­i­tary fight­ing in the region. Who funded Hus­sein and gave him mil­lions of dol­lars worth of weapons to fight the Ira­ni­ans dur­ing the 80s? Why, it’s the U.S. gov­ern­ment again.How come the United States is directly involved in train­ing some of the biggest ter­ror­ists of the decade? Haven’t we learned that mil­i­tarism only leads to more mil­i­tarism? Would Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Tim­o­thy McVeigh just be polit­i­cal unknowns if the United States hadn’t taught them to kill with their anger? Would Sad­dam Hus­sein be just another ex-dictator if the U.S. hadn’t funded his mil­i­tary dur­ing the 1980s?

We can never know these answers. But we can stop train­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of ter­ror­ists. Let’s stop fund­ing war, let’s stop solv­ing prob­lems with guns and explo­sives. Let today’s angry twenty year olds cut peo­ple off in traf­fic and do no more. Let’s stop these unde­clared wars.