I welcome your feedback. Unlike many of our talking heads, I don't claim to know it all. I'll warn you in advance, though, that time constraints will probably prevent me from engaging in prolonged or lengthy correspondence with anyone. I don't want to get lots of spam by putting my E-mail address here in computer-readable form, so you'll have to enter it yourself: davidb at scn dot org.
That much is simple. Drawing further conclusions is not.
But in the long run, by far the most important question is "Why?". Before continuing, I want to stress that nothing can justify such enormities as happened this week. There can be no valid excuse or extenuating circumstances. But there are valid explanations.
"Col. Roosevelt and his U.S. dollars overthrew Mossadeq They wanted his oil now they got Ayatollah's dreck They put in the Shah and they trained his police the Savak All Iran was our hostage quarter-century That's right Jack" -- Allen Ginsberg
Suicide terrorists don't just magically pop out of nowhere. They're still people, whom like everyone else have to be conceived, born, and raised through childhood. Their minds are, overall, surprisingly like our own: psychology has taught us that human behavior, far from being an incomprehensible mystery, tends like all other subjects to lend itself quite readily to the scientific process of theory, experimental testing, and refinement of theory. They are most assuredly not insane; no literal madman has the mental capacity and fortitude lengthy process of preparation for such an act. They are not cowardly; they knew they were giving their lives to whatever cause they advocated.
So, the question is begged: just what sorts of influence might there be that could turn a baby into an adult who thinks it justified to obliterate not only himself, but thousands of civilians in the name of his cause? Certainly, such an act is a hallmark of blind rage and utter desperation.
It's still fairly early in the investigation process as I write this, but already, as more and more evidence gets uncovered, it seems increasingly likely that the individuals that perpetuated this crime came from the Middle East. Therefore I shall do a bit of leaping to conclusions and assume for the sake of argument in the rest of this essay that this is indeed the case.
The history of the Middle East in the 20th century has been a history of imperialism. Six centuries of domination by the Ottoman Empire gave way in the early twentieth century to domination by Britain and France. Then oil was discovered, the Second World War leaves Britain and France as weakened second-rate powers, and as the American thirst for oil grows by leaps and bounds, our nation embarks on a decision to do whatever is expedient at the moment to keep that oil flowing.
And expedience has always been the order of the day. The traditional imperialist model having been abandoned after the war, the expedience took the form of supporting whomever seized power, no matter how unsavory, as long as he was agreed to keep the oil flowing. And if there were any glimmers of democracy that happened to threaten in the least way this flow of oil, such as the Mossadegh government in Iran, that government's days were numbered. And then of course there's the decades of chummy relations with the House of Saud, that paragon of human rights that allows no free elections, opposition parties, and routinely performs executions and amputations on the accused without the slightest pretense of a proper trial.
In the history of the mideast during the past century, the case of Palestine is particularly tragic. Taken by Britain from the Ottomans as spoils of the First World War, it was subsequently given to the Zionists by a British government, with no consultation whatsoever with the inhabitants of that land. How would you feel if your homeland, under six centuries of unwanted foreign domination, was taken by someone else as "punishment" for a war that your previous overlord had entered on the losing side of, then handed to yet a third party? Would you feel particularly inclined to respect the nation that arose from such a series of transactions? (Yes, that's only half the story, of course, but the whole problem of the Israel/Palestine conflict is that each side clings tenaciously to its particular half of the story.)
And then there's the story of the nation that's probably going to be the theater of most of the coming military action: Afghanistan. The plaything of a long series of despotic governments, it was invaded and brutally occupied by the USSR. Competition between superpowers being the order of the day, the USA then proceeded to shovel massive amounts of aid to anyone willing to fight the invader, without being particularly picky about what kind of people they were. One of those recipients of aid was Ossama bin Laden himself. Eventually, the USSR pulled out, defeated by their equivalent of Vietnam, but not before the country was devastated and laid to waste. There's currently talk about bombing Afghanistan back into the stone age; sorry, that's already been done.
It might make us feel better to call our enemies cowardly or madmen, but it is not true. It might make us feel better to say it's an episode of pure evil that has no good explanation at all, but it is not true. It might make us feel better to say that the United States had been nothing but the pure, shining, light of democracy and freedom on earth but it is not true.
The first commandment of war is "know thy enemy". Having nice feelings doesn't even enter into the picture.
"... war is hell." - General William T. Sherman
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."
- Sir Winston Churchill
If any readers found the previous section unbearably difficult, then you've probably answered the issue for yourselves: no war. There's not much point going on; it is too much to bear for your own personal constitution. I mean no malice to anyone by saying this; we're talking about the most extreme and unpleasant means of conducting foreign policy here.
If, however, you still suspect the actions of 11 September justify war, read on. Realistically, tragically, I have to admit that it just might. Whatever the past history that propelled events to this outcome, our nation has been attacked, and in a most horrific manner. Sometimes turning the other cheek simply lets evil flourish unpunished, undeterred, and unabated. But let's make it clear just what war is, and just what it means.
More than anything, war is the supreme admission of failure. It means we, as a nation, have gotten ourselves into a situation that should have been avoided in the first place had only better policies been pursued in the past. It is no cause for celebration.
War means that we haven't begun to taste hardship and loss. The destruction of the Pentagon and the World Trade center is just the tip if the iceberg. What we did to Iraq wasn't war, it was a cheap plastic imitation of a war, one that nonetheless has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children alone, and which is doubtless right now helping to create a new crop of yet more terrible suicide bombers. War means more than aerial bombardment and cruel sanctions; it means conquering the designated enemy's territory and vanquishing its government. It means going in on the ground. It means sacrificing probably an order of magnitude more Americans alone than have already died.
And that's not all. If that war is not, like the First World War, to create a second in its aftermath, then we must treat the conquered enemy like we treated Germany and Japan after World War II. It means a longtime commitment to the reconstruction. Again, anything less is just a cheap plastic imitation of war; or retaliatory terrorism to use a less kind choice of words.
So maybe it's too expensive after all. Despite my suspicions that it may be necessary, I also have reasons to suspect it might not be. Like I said to start with, I don't know it all.
Retaliation is something that the United States started practicing more aggressively in the Mideast in the early 1980s; first with shelling Lebanon, bombing various nations accused of being harbors for terrorists, and culminating in the Gulf War and the sanctions that never end against Iraq. Retaliation is interpreted by our adversaries as yet another piece of evidence that America is indeed the Great Satan. Retaliation got us where we are today.
The available evidence suggests that retaliation is a poor anti- terrorism policy.
Prevention and security, however, ought to be our goal. Like I said early on, this is different; for the first time in my life there really is a justification for military action. But what sort of action, and in what context?
I really think it boils down to one of two choices: (1) some form of limited police action to locate and arrest those identified as being responsible for this specific act, or (2) proclaiming one or more entire countries to be enemies and waging all-out war on them.
There's no middle ground, I'm afraid. Anything involving a larger projection of force than the first option will produce a level of civilian suffering that, unless we're present to administer the process of reconstruction, will merely serve to fuel the next cycle of violence.
It all boils down to a question of ends and means. I don't have the space or time here to enter into a lengthy discussion on the whole ends-versus-means debate, so I'll just point out that my own conclusion is that both poles of the issue are incorrect. Certainly a purportedly desirable ends can't be used for to justify any means whatsoever in the present, but on the flip side, limiting oneself to only those means compatible with in the end state itself can lead to paralysis in the face of an evil that needs to be fought aggressively.
In making the calculation, it must be realized that even in the case of a limited police action, some civilian casualties are probably inevitable. One of the common tactics pursued in military strategy is to deliberately embed the enemy's likely targets in a civilian matrix, in the hopes that the adversary will either find an attack too much to stomach, or if the attack is made to furnish raw material for propaganda showing how dastardly and evil the enemy is. It is almost certain that those held responsible for the attacks on the 11th will pursue such a strategy against our side.
And if it's anything more than such an action, civilian casualties will quickly approach the level of carnage we've seen in New York. Given that this hasn't exactly caused an outpouring of sympathy for the causes of the believed attackers in the USA and the rest of the Western world, how can we believe that damage inflicted by us on the enemy will be have any but a similar effect on their side? If one of the proclaimed enemies is Afghanistan, that piece of territory is bristling with guns right now; if we go in on the ground, expect a lot of people to be taking shots at our servicemen. And remember, if we don't go in on the ground, we can't pursue reconstruction, and we'll almost certainly get some future retribution that makes what we saw on the 11th look like a Sunday picnic in the park.
So there you have it. Really looks like a limited police action is the best policy, doesn't it? Of course, that all depends on the good graces of whomever's territory the actions take place on not to interpret that police action itself as an act of war and escalate. Relying upon adversaries to do exactly what you want them to is not generally regarded as a good basis for military strategy.
Yes, that's exactly what we're up against. Not pretty. And I haven't even begun to touch on the domestic ramifications of something that big. Just crack open a history book about the World War II years for an idea: a military draft, numbers of people coming back in body bags that will make the carnage in New York and Washington seem minor, censorship, rationing, price controls, shortages.
Can't stand the idea of that? Then if you're a citizen, don't clamor for our politicians to do anything military. If you're in the news media, can the "we must respond" rhetoric. If you're a politician, have the backbone to say "no".
Myself, I'm somewhat ambivalent and confused. I'm very glad that no bombing has been done yet and that there's many politicians -- including conservative politicians that I usually don't have many nice things to say about -- saying that this is going to take lots of time, planning, and care, and cautioning people not to expect anything dramatic real soon. Part of me wants to see justice done, part of me thinks it's pointless to throw potentially orders of magnitude more American lives as a way of showing that it was wrong that so many died already.
And then there's the fact that for the past year or so, I've smelled a whiff of the same stench that came out of Nazi Germany emanating from Afghanistan. That was a case when the other side wanted nothing less than to enslave the whole world under their domination. There's only one language that the Nazis spoke, and that was the language of a loaded weapon aimed their way.
Some of the stuff said about our President -- a man that chickened out of Vietnam but who seems to have far less qualms about military action when he's the one sitting in the easy chair and someone else's ass is on the line -- about the need for "retaliation" creeps me out.
Exactly what is meant by "terrorism" has yet to be precisely defined by anyone calling a for a war on it. In recent years, the label has been applied rather broadly, even to acts that are property crimes instead of violent ones (such as the actions of the "black bloc" groups at anti-globalization protests). "Terrorism" is defined in my dictionary as "the systematic use of [violence or intense fear] especially as a means of coercion". By that measure, terrorism appears to be part of the human condition: I cannot think of a period of history where human society was free from it.
So, absent further clarification, "war on terrorism" essentially means "giving the government unlimited power to exercise force against anyone it wants to, for an indefinite period of time, and with no end condition specified". Like I said, this creeps me out. I can certainly understand why Ms. Lee felt compelled to cast the lone "no" vote on the recent emergency legislation.
Most basically, there is a need to get serious about civil defense against terrorism. Better airport security is part of the picture, but it's important not to be too focused on that. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link; beef up airport security a lot and the bad guys will just look for other ways to launch attacks; say, a biological warhead packed inside a shipping container detonated by radio control once the vessel carrying it is in an American port.
It is absurd to think that adversaries of limited financial means would resort to using intercontinental missiles to attack the US when there are so much more economical and easy ways to do so (as we've just seen). "Star Wars" missile defense programs are a dinosaur from the Cold War era; a high-tech Maginot line that will be as useful protecting America as the original one was at protecting France. Scrap it.
And, of course, the whole reason the USA has been so heavily involved in the Middle East has been the black gooey stuff that lies under the sands there. Wean our dependence on it. Start proclaiming that excessive energy use, and an energy-consumptive lifestyle, is unpatriotic. It galls me to no end to realize that a large number of people are about to be asked to sacrifice their lives just because several generations of Americans wanted to drive big cars and heat big tract mansions, and several generations of American capitalists wanted transportation to be cheap so they could more easily ship jobs overseas and hold wages down.
Every so often, a hue and cry is raised in the US news media about Japan's failure to admit some war atrocity or another it was responsible for during World War II. Well, we've got some apologizing to do ourselves for all the harm and suffering US imperialism has caused, not only in the Middle East, but around the world.
In one way, the Arab world is lucky: their oil is something that the rest of the world wants to buy. Even though the nations there are run by a bunch of corrupt dictatorial bastards who love to squander the national wealth, there's so much wealth to be squandered that some eventually trickles down to the common people. The rest of the third world is not so lucky: the first generation of corrupt bastards (many of whom received the political backing of the US) that came to power after independence squandered borrowed money on themselves. So did the second, the third, and so on. Now the First World is demanding that the people of these countries must be "responsible" and make sacrifices so that these debts can be repaid, as if somehow a starving child is responsible for the actions of a dictator who ruled years before s/he was even born. Forgive the debts, or be prepared to repeat the lesson learned by our failure to forgive the debts of the Weimar Republic.
Many of these recommendations have long been suggested on humanitarian grounds. Not only do they make good humanitarian sense, they make good national security policy!
Ultimately, as a leftist who sometimes has used the label "anarchist" to describe his views, the realization that US military action will probably be necessary in this situation, and in a number of scenarios worthy of support, has not exactly been an easy one.
On the Friday after it happened, someone on the train home from work who was listening to a headphone radio started saying "There's shooting going on in the Middle East.". I hurried home from my stop, and turned on the radio. Nothing significant being reported on any station. Suckered by a the rantings of a crazy. But it could have happened, and it could yet happen at any moment. All it would take is one rogue soldier on either side out to teach the "Great Satan" or the "towelheads" a lesson, the side fired on naturally interprets the shot as an attack and returns fire, presto: instant war.
If that kind of all-out war breaks out (and as I've alluded, there's other ways it could happen, such as a police action that escalates out of control), there's no question of whom to support. As a homosexual, a disbeliever in gods and the supernatural, a countercultural hippie, I'd be marked for some sort of particularly hideous and cruel form of death many times over should the other side's world view prevail.
And yet, the imperialism, the inequality, the injustice, the anti-intellectualism, the institutionalized homophobia of the military, the war profiteering from the rich while the children of the poor and the middle class die. And perhaps more disturbingly, the focus right now from some of our leaders on revenge and the shadowy nature of just what a "war on terrorism" is.
They're bastards, but they're our bastards. Right now, it would make my life much simpler for me if I could just chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" as if all the good was on our side and all the evil was on theirs. But I can't.