World War III
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
JERUSALEM
As I restlessly lay awake early
yesterday, with CNN on my TV
and dawn breaking over the holy
places of Jerusalem, my ear somehow latched onto a
statement made by the U.S. transportation secretary,
Norman Mineta, about the new precautions that would be
put in place at U.S. airports in the wake of Tuesday's
unspeakable terrorist attacks: There will be no more
curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a group of
terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping
coffee, also watching CNN and laughing hysterically:
"Hey boss, did you hear that? We just blew up Wall Street
and the Pentagon and their response is no more curbside
check- in?"
I don't mean to criticize Mr. Mineta. He is doing what he
can. And I have absolutely no doubt that the Bush team,
when it identifies the perpetrators, will make them pay
dearly. Yet there was something so absurdly futile and
American about the curbside ban that I couldn't help but
wonder: Does my country really understand that this is
World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of
World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.
And this Third World War does not pit us against another
superpower. It pits us — the world's only superpower and
quintessential symbol of liberal, free-market, Western
values — against all the super-empowered angry men and
women out there. Many of these super-empowered angry
people hail from failing states in the Muslim and third
world. They do not share our values, they resent
America's influence over their lives, politics and children,
not to mention our support for Israel, and they often blame
America for the failure of their societies to master
modernity.
What makes them super-empowered, though, is their
genius at using the networked world, the Internet and the
very high technology they hate, to attack us. Think about it:
They turned our most advanced civilian planes into
human-directed, precision-guided cruise missiles — a
diabolical melding of their fanaticism and our technology.
Jihad Online. And think of what they hit: The World Trade
Center — the beacon of American-led capitalism that both
tempts and repels them, and the Pentagon, the embodiment
of American military superiority.
And think about what places in Israel the Palestinian
suicide bombers have targeted most. "They never hit
synagogues or settlements or Israeli religious zealots,"
said the Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit. "They hit the
Sbarro pizza parlor, the Netanya shopping mall. The
Dolphinarium disco. They hit the yuppie Israel, not the
yeshiva Israel."
So what is required to fight a war against such people in
such a world? To start with, we as Americans will never
be able to penetrate such small groups, often based on
family ties, who live in places such as Afghanistan,
Pakistan or Lebanon's wild Bekaa Valley. The only
people who can penetrate these shadowy and
ever-mutating groups, and deter them, are their own
societies. And even they can't do it consistently. So give
the C.I.A. a break.
Israeli officials will tell you that the only time they have
had real quiet and real control over the suicide bombers
and radical Palestinian groups, such as Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, is when Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority
tracked them, jailed them or deterred them.
So then the question becomes, What does it take for us to
get the societies that host terrorist groups to truly act
against them?
First we have to prove that we are serious, and that we
understand that many of these terrorists hate our existence,
not just our policies. In June I wrote a column about the
fact that a few cell-phone threats from Osama bin Laden
had prompted President Bush to withdraw the F.B.I. from
Yemen, a U.S. Marine contingent from Jordan and the U.S.
Fifth Fleet from its home base in the Persian Gulf. This
U.S. retreat was noticed all over the region, but it did not
merit a headline in any major U.S. paper. That must have
encouraged the terrorists. Forget about our civilians, we
didn't even want to risk our soldiers to face their threats.
The people who planned Tuesday's bombings combined
world-class evil with world-class genius to devastating
effect. And unless we are ready to put our best minds to
work combating them — the World War III Manhattan
Project — in an equally daring, unconventional and
unremitting fashion, we're in trouble. Because while this
may have been the first major battle of World War III, it
may be the last one that involves only conventional,
non-nuclear weapons.
Second, we have been allowing a double game to go on
with our Middle East allies for years, and that has to stop.
A country like Syria has to decide: Does it want a
Hezbollah embassy in Damascus or an American one? If it
wants a U.S. embassy, then it cannot play host to a rogue's
gallery of terrorist groups.
Does that mean the U.S. must ignore Palestinian concerns
and Muslim economic grievances? No. Many in this part
of the world crave the best of America, and we cannot
forget that we are their ray of hope. But apropos of the
Palestinians, the U.S. put on the table at Camp David a
plan that would have gotten Yasir Arafat much of what he
now claims to be fighting for. That U.S. plan may not be
sufficient for Palestinians, but to say that the justifiable
response to it is suicide terrorism is utterly sick.
Third, we need to have a serious and respectful dialogue
with the Muslim world and its political leaders about why
many of its people are falling behind. The fact is, no
region in the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, has
fewer freely elected governments than the Arab-Muslim
world, which has none. Why? Egypt went through a whole
period of self- criticism after the 1967 war, which
produced a stronger country. Why is such self-criticism
not tolerated today by any Arab leader?
Where are the Muslim leaders who will tell their sons to
resist the Israelis — but not to kill themselves or innocent
non-combatants? No matter how bad, your life is sacred.
Surely Islam, a grand religion that never perpetrated the
sort of Holocaust against the Jews in its midst that Europe
did, is being distorted when it is treated as a guidebook
for suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim
leader will say that?
These are some of the issues we will have to address as
we fight World War III. It will be a long war against a
brilliant and motivated foe. When I remarked to an Israeli
military official what an amazing technological feat it was
for the terrorists to hijack the planes and then fly them
directly into the most vulnerable spot in each building, he
pooh-poohed me.
"It's not that difficult to learn how to fly a plane once it's
up in the air," he said. "And remember, they never had to
learn how to land."
No, they didn't. They only had to destroy. We, by contrast,
have to fight in a way that is effective without destroying
the very open society we are trying to protect. We have to
fight hard and land safely. We have to fight the terrorists
as if there were no rules, and preserve our open society as
if there were no terrorists. It won't be easy. It will require
our best strategists, our most creative diplomats and our
bravest soldiers. Semper Fi.
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