... from the "New Yorker", October 1, 2001 ...
COMMENT
THE TRAP
Issue of 2001-10-01
Posted 2001-09-24
Three years ago, Osama bin Laden and his fellow-members of
something calling itself the World Islamic Front for Jihad
Against the Jews and the Crusaders launched from eastern
Afghanistan a grandiloquent "Declaration." Its text
fulminated against the United States for its "occupation" of
the holy land of Arabia, its "aggression" against Iraq, and its
support of "the petty state of the Jews." After a series of
quotations from the Koran, the authors shifted to their own
authority, concluding, "To kill Americans and their allies,
both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim
who is able, in any country, where this is possible, until the
Aqsa Mosque" (in Jerusalem) "and the Haram Mosque" (in
Mecca) "are freed from their grip and until their armies,
shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of
Islam."
The precise contours of the awful conspiracy aimed at the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon remain hazy. But there
is little doubt that bin Laden's rhetoric of jihad inflamed the
damaged imaginations of enough young men to produce an
act of true evil and, in a morning, to smash a decade in which
America drifted lazily along waters untroubled by the
riptides of history. Now all of us live in history. And all of
us, in government and elsewhere, grope to make sense of it.
Beyond the grief for what has been lost there is the need to
know what to think and how to act. Part of the struggle is to
put a name to this immense and indecent event.
In 1993, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington
published, in Foreign Affairs, an essay entitled "The Clash of
Civilizations." Its thesis was that the essential divisions in
the post-Cold War world are not among nations or ideologies
but among "civilizations": Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox,
Confucian, Hindu, Japanese, and Western. "The next world
war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations,"
Huntington wrote. Just as Francis Fukuyama's essay on "the
end of history" was—for a while, in certain circles—a
convenient and triumphal way of looking at the collapse of
Communist ideology, one that allowed us to dream sweetly
of the inexorable spread of market democracy to all reaches
of the world, Huntington's much darker scheme is now sure
to be revived in primary colors by some as a map of the
conflict now before us, with the most irreconcilable clash
being between the West and Islam.
Huntington's was a simplified and even simplistic vision, not
least in his view of Islam as a monolithic civilization. In one
of the more devastating rejoinders to "The Clash of
Civilizations," Fouad Ajami, a scholar who was born in
Lebanon and now lives in the United States, noted that the
Islamic world is not even remotely monolithic: that in Iran,
the birthplace of Islamic revolution, many young people are
in earnest rebellion against fundamentalist clerics; that
Saddam Hussein came to dictatorial power as an avowed
secularist and waged war for a decade against Iran; that
leaders in Egypt and Jordan found a way to sign peace
treaties with Israel; that in places as various as Egypt and
Turkey modernity and secularism (twin towers that are not
so easily reduced to rubble) have proved resilient against
profound challenge—in short, that "the world of Islam
divides and sub-divides."
Sharpening and poisoning those divisions and subdivisions,
with a view to bringing about the downfall of moderate Arab
governments, is part of what the likes of Osama bin Laden
hope to achieve. Beyond that, however, a "war of
civilizations" is precisely what the horror of September 11th
was designed to incite. What the terrorists did was aimed
only in the first instance at the destruction they so
spectacularly achieved and the demoralization and disruption
they sought to engender. What they did was, in the classic
sense, a provocation; and what they meant to provoke was
war—the bigger, the better.
The assault of September 11th was technological jujitsu.
Operating in the frictionless ether of the modern world (with
its freedom of movement, its free market, its electronic
nervous system of instantaneous communication and
information), a score of terrorists turned the materials of that
world against it. What did they actually do? They redirected
the flight paths of four airliners. The immediate sequel was
automatic: within the first two hours, the steel-melting fires,
the collapses, the entombment of—at the latest doleful
estimate—more than six thousand people; within the first
week, the beginnings of an economic earthquake. Now the
terrorists hope for a further cascade of secondary explosions.
Just as American planes were the found object that
devastated American cities, the terrorists hope that American
passions will inexorably ignite a greater and ultimately far
more dangerous conflagration.
The trope of war has been omnipresent since the day of the
attack. In his address last Thursday evening to a joint
meeting of Congress, President Bush did not, and could not,
retreat from it. His speech was simple and direct, with an
unhackneyed vigor of language. And even as the President
spoke of war his remarks reflected an awareness of the snares
that word carries. Justice, more than war, was the speech's
theme.
Implicit in what Bush had to say was a recognition that this
eruption of evil must not be allowed to metastasize into a
conflict among civilizations or even, to the extent possible,
among nations. On the contrary. "This is civilization's fight,"
he said, one in which "we ask every nation to join."
Furthermore, "the enemy of America is not our many
Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends." The
enemy, rather, is "a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist
organizations."
The demands that Bush made on the Taliban thugs who rule
Afghanistan are almost certain to be rejected. American
military intervention in that country is therefore almost
certain as well. Bush gave few particulars about the form
such intervention might take, its duration, or the goals that
will be defined for it, but he promised that the Taliban "will
hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." At
the moment, then, our "they" encompasses only the
terrorists and their Taliban hosts. How the "they" comes to
be defined in the months ahead, and who does the defining,
will be absolutely critical. The terrorists' fondest hope is that
"they" will expand to include countries inhibited and
ultimately paralyzed by the fear (or the power) of their own
Islamic extremists (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia); countries where
corners of "the street" exulted in the sight of the falling
towers (the Palestinian territories, Egypt); and, finally, the
whole of the Arab if not the Islamic world. "Either you are
with us, or you are with the terrorists"—this was Bush's
formula. It carries heavy risks, of which the Administration
seems well aware. But, through inadvertence, miscalculation,
or the unintended consequences of actions taken mainly to
assuage the supposed impatience of the American public,
"they" could expand anyway.
The steps Bush outlined in somewhat more (though still
sketchy) detail will come mostly in the form of police work,
albeit police work of an unprecedented intensity, breadth,
urgency, and global scale. That is as it should be. For a long
time to come, the only goal that will make sense is
prevention, and the only means that will make sense are
those which hold out hope of making further terrorist attacks
less likely. Bush's "wanted, dead or alive" comment last
Monday, apparently unscripted, was widely seen as
evidence of rhetorical excess, a bit of cowboy bravado. In
fact, taken as a policy pronouncement of sorts, it pointed in
the right direction. This is a conflict that pits all of civilized
society against a comparatively small, essentially stateless
band of murderous outlaws. Thinking of it in this way—as
primarily a mobilization against a kind of organized crime or
criminal insurrection—does not mean that military resources
should not be used, or that the matter is less urgent or serious
than Bush says it is. Nor does it mean that the only solution
is the sort of due-process law enforcement that makes it
prohibitively hard, in Bush's words, "to know the plans of
terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike."
He made the point memorably when he said, "Whether we
bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies,
justice will be done."
Bush's speech went some distance in reassuring those who
feared that his response to this crisis would be a primitive
spasm of vengeful violence. America learned long ago (first
through the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the
Second World War and again in Vietnam) that the
indiscriminate bombing of cities—intended to crush an
enemy's will, as distinct from his ability, to fight—has an
effect opposite to the one intended. The peaceful planes
turned terrorist missiles that brought down the World Trade
Center were bombs of that kind. They were designed to
undermine our spirit, unhinge our reason, and fog our vision.
Whether they will prove to have succeeded or failed is
beyond the power of the terrorists to decide. It is entirely up
to us.
by Hendrik Hertzberg and David Remnick |
