Mr Hitchens, poor deluded man that he is, writes another angry screed of that which he does not understand. Could any man be more out of touch than Mr. Hitchens? Possibly the people who read him and agree, I suppose. There certainly are a lot of angry loud people out there.
Washington
What is known in American psycho-babble as ‘denial’ strikes in many insidious forms. It
can express itself as the simple refusal to admit that a painful event has occurred. It may
manifest itself as a cheery rationalisation of something ghastly. Or it can involve a crude
shifting of blame. It’s actually a more useful term than it sometimes looks.
The reaction of much of the Left to the human and moral catastrophe at the World Trade
Center, and to the aggression that lies behind it, has partaken of all three variants. For
me, the best encapsulation came in an angry email I received shortly after I denounced
the rationalisers in a column published in New York. It came from Sam Husseini, who
runs a dove-ish Washington outfit innocuously called the Institute for Public Accuracy. (I
hope it goes without saying that I am not picking on Mr Husseini because of his
Arab-American origins: he speaks here for many a brow-furrowed Wasp and
conscience-stricken Jew.) The forces of Osama bin Laden, he wrote, ‘could not get
volunteers to stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem like it was supposed
to — and the US stopped the sanctions and the bombing on Iraq’.
That neatly synthesised all three facets of denial. ‘Envelope-stuffing’ reduces the
members of al-Qa’eda to the manageable status of everyday political activists with a
programme; the same image obstructs the recognition of the full impact of the attack; the
diplomatic measures that supposedly could have warded off the atrocity become, by an
obvious transference, the source of responsibility for it. This is something more like
self-hatred than appeasement.
The death-squads of New York and Washington have not favoured us with a
posthumous manifesto of their grievances, but we are nonetheless able to surmise or
deduce or induct a fair amount about the ideological or theological ‘root’ of their act.
The central plan was to maximise civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown
Manhattan. Whatever Mr Husseini may say about Israel, the plan was designed and
incubated long before the mutual masturbation of the Clinton– Arafat–Barak ‘process’.
The Talebanis have in any case not distinguished themselves by an interest in the
Palestinian plight. (It ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian
self-determination is, as before, a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever,
but now as ever.) They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the
reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of Sheria law.
The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense and (on the best evidence we
have available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all its
symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit of the American ‘war-machine’, and is
set in a crowded Virginia neighbourhood. You could certainly call it a military target if
you were that way inclined, though the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything against a
guarded airbase or a nuclear power-station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we
would now doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge for
globalisation).
The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives — poor things, to be
sure, but our own. The White House is where the elected president and his family and
staff are to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it down, and
the attempt of the Confederacy to take Washington DC, and this has hallowed even its
most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a
gutted Capitol or a shattered White House. I am quite certain that in such a case the
rationalising left-liberals would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to
roost. Only those who chose to die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a
further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate
fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of
11 September to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in
August 1998.
To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a
plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon
every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its
very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full
of passengers.
So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the true anti-human and
anti-democratic motivation. What about the animating ideas? The teachings and
published proclamations of the Wahhabi-indoctrinated sectarians of the al-Qa’eda cult
have initiated us into the idea that the tolerant, the open-minded, the apostate or the
followers of different branches of The Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt. And
that’s before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and secularists, have even been
factored in. As before, the deed announces and exposes its ‘root cause’. The grievances
and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West
Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had
to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic
wounds.
And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taleban and its surrogates are not content
to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and
they deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to visit hell
upon the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition
of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he
is not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think, not
possible. (I say ‘fortunately’ because I am also convinced that such coexistence is not
desirable.)
But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is us, really.
Did we not aid the grisly Taleban to achieve and hold power? Yes, indeed ‘we’ did. But
does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove it from power? A sudden
sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat. Would that not be ‘over-reaction’? All I want to
say for now is that the under-reaction to the Taleban by three successive US
administrations is one of the resounding disgraces of our time. There is good reason to
think that a Taleban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy.
The sponsorship of the Taleban could be redeemed by the demolition of its regime and
the liberation of its victims. But I detect no stomach for any such project. Better, then —
more decent and reticent — not to affect such concern for ‘our’ past offences.
Ultimately, this is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby former
clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taleban
cease to be our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. The figure of 6,500
murders in New York is almost the exact equivalent of the total uncovered in the
death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at Srebrenica, the demented General Ratko Mladic
agreed to release all the women, all the children, all the old people and all the males
above and below military age before ordering his squads to fall to work.) On that
occasion, US satellites flew serenely overhead recording the scene, and Mr Milosevic
earned himself an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after appalling false starts
and delays, it was found that Mr Milosevic was too much. He wasn’t just too nasty. He
was also too irrational and dangerous. He didn’t even save himself by lyingly claiming, as
he several times did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia.
It must be said that by this, and by other lies and numberless other atrocities, Mr
Milosevic distinguished himself as an enemy of Islam. His national-socialist regime took
the line on the towel-heads that the Bush administration is accused — by fools and
knaves — of taking. Yet when a stand was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was
Noam Chomsky, among many others, who described the whole business as a bullying
persecution of — the Serbs!
I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on
crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I’m
thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters
what they think.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Return to top of page |
