Like it or not, we need to understand the other side.
Not agree with them, but understand them. Then our response needs to be the correct one.
Correct link :
sfgate.com
COMMENTARY
The high price of disengagement
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, September 13, 2001
Paris -- At 8:45 a.m. on a brilliantly clear Tuesday
morning in New York, a fatal combination of
history, ignorance and power caught up with
America. Thousands have probably died as a result.
What remains to be seen is whether the same
combination will now prove fatal to thousands
more.
Unprecedented power has brought the United
States into the daily lives of nearly everyone on
Earth -- and into their nations' often tortured
histories. Yet as we have grown ever more
powerful since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
economically and militarily, we have also grown
ever more ignorant of the world beyond our
borders.
We are ignorant, especially, of the awful weight of
that world's unresolved history, and our inevitable
enmeshment in it. That is the starting point for
understanding why so much of the Islamic world
appears to detest the United States, to the point of
cold, inhumanly calculated suicide assaults on
countless innocent victims. Nothing can excuse such
assaults. But neither can our blindness be excused.
The weight of history is oppressively evident in the
tortured relationship between Israelis, the principal
recipients of U.S. military aid, and the Palestinians
with whom they are now at war. In the small corner
of the planet they must share, the unresolved
memory of the Jewish Holocaust meets the
unresolved crisis of the Palestinian diaspora. The
explosions in New York and Washington were
ignited in that moral standoff.
Whoever planned and carried them out, the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle is at their core.
Americans, however, haven't begun to grapple with
that history and its larger implications.
There is no shortage of culprits for our collective
ignorance. "When I began teaching 20 years ago,
our seniors were taken through an entire course of
world history up to the year in which they
graduated," says Mariann Nogrady,
a faculty member at the prestigious Newton
Highlands High School in suburban Boston.
Now, after funding cutbacks and a reordering of
priorities, she says, "we're lucky if we get through
U.S. history, let alone to the Civil War."
Our president, who professes pride in his lack of
worldliness, has determinedly avoided serious
engagement in foreign affairs, at the very moment
when Washington's hand in the Mideast is critical.
American newspapers and television stations have
all but abandoned any commitment to international
coverage. The most powerful nation in modern
history has become an ostrich with its head in the
sand.
In the last days of the Bosnian war, a young couple,
both of them U.S. Air Force officers, were traveling
by train to Paris. She was a ground analyst with a
graduate degree from Duke University. He was an
F-16 pilot, educated at the Air Force Academy,
participating in the NATO assault on the Bosnian
Serb Republic. "Now this place Sarajevo," he
asked another American passenger, "is it a country?
Or is it just a city?"
America has a fondness for oversimplification. Most
Israelis, in dress and lifestyle, resemble us. Most
Muslims do not. The Arab-Israeli conflict, in
mainstream American perception, pits a civilized,
democratic state -- born of the Holocaust, the 20th
century's most heinous crime and the moral bulwark
of Israel's existence -- against barbaric tribes under
the leadership of satanic monsters: Osama bin
Laden today, following on the heels of Saddam
Hussein of Iraq, Moammar Khadafy of Libya,
Hafez Assad of Syria and the Ayatollah Khomeini in
Iran.
Each of these leaders has deserved our informed
contempt and level-headed hostility. But the reality
of their societies is infinitely more complex. It is
partially to be found in the images that galvanize
ordinary Arabs and help keep them under the sway
of despots: children confronting tanks and missile-
equipped Israeli helicopters with stones, Jewish
"settlers" consuming hundreds of square miles of
Arab land in the Occupied Territories -- with the
consent of no authority apart from that of the Israeli
government and the acquiescence of Washington.
In 1996, during a spate of suicide bombings in
Israel, a Palestinian official living in the West Bank
hills between Jerusalem and Ramallah asked, "Do
you know what it means that four consecutive
generations have lived here?" His squalid refugee
camp was within walking distance of Israeli settlers'
walled ranch-home subdivisions.
"Two generations held onto the hope that they
would once again see the land where they were
raised," he said. "The next was raised in the camp
and lost hope." He paused, then went on: "As for
the fourth generation, even I am afraid of them."
At that time, almost all of the bombers had come
from the area around Ramallah. Five years and
many "targeted assassinations" later, a far more
lethal generation of martyrs has emerged, across the
Islamic crescent from Algeria to Afghanistan, with
New York City and Washington, as its latest
targets.
The enveloping despair, the erosion of human
values, are neither a sudden development nor a
permanent feature of Arab life. This is a disaster that
has been evolving, building, for four generations.
Now we appear ready to unleash our vast power
on some part of the Muslim world. A world that
recalls the past much more vividly, and remembers
the fact that radical Muslims like Osama bin Laden
and his followers were trained and armed by the
United States to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
That such retaliation may set in motion an endless
exchange of atrocities haunts many people around
the world today.
"My God, I hope that America will not allow this
horrible event to drive the world into war," wrote
Zhou Qiu-xiang, a Chinese travel agent, in an e-
mail to The Chronicle from Southeast Asia.
"What will become of America if it takes revenge on
other innocent civilians to make up for these
deaths?" Danielle Morand, a French educator,
asked in a phone call.
As if in reply, President Bush said: "We will make
no distinction between those who carried out the
attacks and those who harbor them." |
