Part 1
9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond?
Transcript / Events related to 9-11
Date: May 07, 2005 - 01:29 AM
by David Ray Griffin
[Note: This lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on April 18, 2005, and first broadcast by C-Span2 (BookTV) on April 30. Although this text does not correspond exactly to the lecture as orally delivered, all the differences are trivial except that, of course, the oral presentation had to get along without footnotes. DRG]
I will begin by unpacking the key terms in the title of my talk: “9/11,” “American empire,” and “religious people,” beginning with the last one.
1. Religious People
Although I am a Christian theologian, I am in this talk addressing religious people in general. I am doing so because I believe that religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire in a particular way because of moral principles of their religious traditions that are common to all the historic religious traditions.1 I have in mind principles such as:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors’ oil.
Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify killing them in order to steal their oil.
This language is, of course, language that we associate with the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the same basic ideas can be found in other religious traditions.
I turn now to “American empire,” which has been a highly contentious term.
2. American Empire: Divergent Views
In his 2002 book American Empire, Andrew Bacevich points out that it was long a “cherished American tradition [that] the United States is not and cannot be an empire.”2 The words “American empire,” he adds, were “fighting words,” so that uttering them was an almost sure sign that one was a left-wing critic of America’s foreign policy. But as Bacevich also points out, this has all recently changed, so that now even right-wing commentators freely acknowledge the existence of the American empire. As columnist Charles Krauthammer said in 2002: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’”3 This new frankness often includes an element of pride, as exemplified by Krauthammer’s statement that America is “no mere international citizen” but “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”4
Given this consensus about the reality of the American empire, the only remaining matter of debate concerns its nature. The new frankness about the empire by conservatives is generally accompanied by portrayals of it as benign. Robert Kagan has written of “The Benevolent Empire.”5 Dinesh D’Souza, after writing in 2002 that “American has become an empire,” added that happily it is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever.”6 According to Krauthammer, the fact that America’s claim to being a benign power “is not mere self-congratuation” is shown by its “track record.”7
Commentators from the left, however, have a radically different view. A recent book by Noam Chomsky is subtitled America’s Quest for Global Dominance.8 Richard Falk has written of the Bush administration’s “global domination project,” which poses the threat of “global fascism.”9 Chalmers Johnson was once a conservative who believed that American foreign policy aimed at promoting freedom and democracy. But he now describes the United States as “a military juggernaut intent on world domination.”10
Andrew Bacevich is another conservative who has recently changed his mind. Unlike Johnson, he has not come to identify with the left, but he has come to agree with its assessment of the American empire.11 He now ridicules the claim “that the promotion of peace, democracy, and human rights and the punishment of evil-doers--not the pursuit of self-interest--[has] defined the essence of American diplomacy.”12 Pointing out that the aim of the US military has been “to achieve something approaching omnipotence,” Bacevich mocks the idea that such power in America’s hands “is by definition benign.”13
3. 9/11: Four Interpretations
If “American empire” is understood in different ways, the same is all the more true of the term “9/11.”
For those Americans who accept the official interpretation, 9/11 was a surprise attack on the US government and its people by Islamic terrorists.
For some Americans, “9/11” has a more complex meaning. This second group, while accepting the official interpretation of the attacks, thinks of 9/11 primarily as an event that was used opportunistically by the Bush administration to extend the American empire. This interpretation is effectively presented by writers such as Noam Chomsky, Rahul Mahajan, and Chalmers Johnson.14
For a third group of Americans, the term “9/11” connotes an event with a more sinister dimension. These citizens believe that the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and intentionally let them happen. Although no national poll has been taken to ascertain how many Americans hold this view, a Zogby poll surprisingly indicated that almost half of the residents of New York City do.15
According to a fourth view of 9/11, the attacks were not merely foreknown by the Bush administration; they were orchestrated by it. Although thus far no poll has tried to find out how many Americans hold this view, polls in Canada and Germany some time back indicated that this view was then held by 15 to 20 percent of their people.16
4. 9/11 and the American Empire
Religious people who take the moral principles of their religious tradition seriously will probably have very different attitudes toward the American empire, depending upon which of these four views of 9/11 they hold.
If they accept the official view, according to which America was the innocent victim of evil terrorists, then it is easy for them to think of America’s so-called war on terror as a just war. This is the position taken by Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, in a book called Just War Against Terror.17 From this perspective, the “war on terror” has nothing to do with imperial designs. It is simply a war to save the world from evil terrorists.18
The second interpretation of 9/11, according to which the Bush administration cynically exploited the 9/11 attacks to further its imperial plans, has quite different implications. Although it thinks of the attacks as surprise attacks, planned entirely by external enemies of America, it usually regards these attacks as “blowback” for injustices perpetrated by US imperialism. This second view also typically regards the American response to the attacks of 9/11, which has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as far worse than the attacks themselves. This interpretation of 9/11 would lead people who take their religion’s moral principles seriously to support a movement to change US foreign policy.
An even stronger reaction would normally be evoked by the third interpretation, for it entails that the Bush administration allowed thousands of its own citizens to be killed on 9/11, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, for the sake of advancing its imperial designs, and then used this event as an excuse to kill hundreds of thousands of people in other countries, all the while hypocritically portraying itself as promoting a “culture of life.” Of course, those who accept the previous interpretation know that hypocrisy with regard to the “sanctity of life” has long been a feature of official rhetoric. And yet most Americans, if they learned that their government had deliberately let their own citizens be killed, would surely consider this betrayal qualitatively different. For this would be treason, a betrayal of the oath taken by American political leaders to protect their own citizens.
If this third view implies that the Bush administration is guilty of a heinous and even treasonous act, this is all the more the case with the fourth view. For many Americans, the idea that we are living in a country whose own leaders planned and carried out the attacks of 9/11 is simply too horrible to entertain. Unfortunately, however, there is strong evidence in support of this view. And if we find this evidence convincing, the implications for resistance to US empire-building are radical.
As Bacevich has emphasized, the only remaining debate about the American empire is whether it is benign. The interpretation of 9/11 is relevant to this debate, because it would be difficult to accept either the third or the fourth interpretation and still consider American imperialism benign.
I turn now to some of the evidence that supports these views. I will look first at evidence that supports (at least) the third view, according to which US officials had foreknowledge of the attacks. |
