The horror in New York was literally awesome. The Pentagon fire
was almost a sideshow by comparison, horrible and lethal, but familiar: We’ve
seen similar footage from Beirut, Belfast, Baghdad, or Belgrade. The World Trade
Center was of a different order of magnitude. The Titanic comes to mind: an epic
tragedy laden with symbolism, to be dissected by intellectuals and elaborated
by popular culture gurus for decades to come. Whatever its motives and its significance
this was a crime against all of us.
Having stated the obvious let us look
at the implications.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: When every printed page and flickering
screen says "It’s Osama bin Laden!" the normal reaction of any rational
person is to assume that it was someone else. This time, however, it seems that
only the usual suspect, and others of his peculiar cultural ilk, combine the five
key ingredients that produced America’s Black September: (1) the will and motive
to strike against America; (2) the lack of moral inhibitions against doing it
in that particular manner; (3) the financial resources; (4) the logistic and organizational
infrastructure; and, a key criterium, (5) the fanaticism of would-be martyrs eager
to caress the houris promised by their Prophet before the day is out.
Already
at the time of the first WTC attack in 1993, it was obvious that belligerent Islam
had a firm foothold within the Muslim diaspora in the United States. In the meantime,
the demographic deluge has continued unabated. By 1998, President Clinton joyfully
announced that "there are over 1,200 mosques and Islamic centers in the United
States," and that those "six million Americans who worship there will
tell you there is no inherent clash between Islam and America." His discovery
of user-friendly Islam implied that that religion was tolerant of other beliefs,
and thoroughly "American." In reality this peculiar creed has been synonymous
with violence and intolerance since its earliest days. It is both a religion and
an ideology that seek to impose mind-numbing uniformity of thought and feeling
on its faithful, and to subjugate and ultimately destroy all non-believers.
Its
adherents’ murderous extremism, manifested on September 11, should spell the end
of another kind of extremism: the stubborn insistence of the ruling establishment
on treating each and every newcomer as equally meltable in the pot. They let millions
of people into this country every year without seriously asking them who they
are and why they are here. The federal government’s refusal to implement a rational
immigration policy costs lives. Its refusal to accept that certain ethnic and
cultural traits make some groups more (or less) readily assimilable into America
than others has rendered our country incapable of considering reality. An obvious
lesson of September 11 is that it is necessary to curtail immigration from the
Islamic world, which fuels diasporas in both North America and Europe that allow
terrorists to remain anonymous and untraceable.
RETALIATION: One way of
dealing with anger is to lash out, but the horror of New York cannot be assuaged
with amber flashes in some God-forsaken Afghan valley, compliments of the U.S.
Air Force. In the aftermath of bomb attacks on two East African embassies in 1998,
revenge proved counter-productive: In Afghanistan it was ineffective, while in
Sudan it was misdirected. More importantly, the awful thought is that retaliation
may be ordered and executed by those same people, or their cloned heirs, whose
actions have caused the murderous reaction abroad. As Michael Pierce put it, nothing
could keep his gorge from rising when General Wesley Clark began to pontificate
about the need for a strong response: "it was this wretched man who whined
loudly that we hadn’t murdered enough Serbs. Who was overseer of the ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo. Who armed Islamic terrorists by the literal tens of thousands . . .
Today we got to see some Christians a little closer to home, running from burning
buildings that had been hit by terror bombers. Thanks, Wes, we owe you."
Clark and his ilk do not know--let alone care for--Thomas Paine’s warning that
"sanguinary punishments corrupt mankind." Randomly violent and indiscriminate
revenge in which more innocent civilians will die is exactly what the attackers
want, and expect. It would be unworthy of the victims to strike at anyone but
the verifiable culprits.
CUI BONO? Whoever did it, the Palestinians are
the chief and immediate losers. For the first time in decades, despite the lynching
of Israeli conscripts, the shooting of settlers, and the suicide bomb attacks,
the public sympathy for the Palestinians has been rising. As Arab teenagers are
shot in the streets for throwing stones, Israel has been losing the public relations
battle. This is likely to change. The impression that we are now in the same boat
with Israel is mistaken, but it will be promoted nevertheless. Jubilation in the
streets of Nablus and Ramallah at the news from across the ocean will prove costly
for the Palestinian agenda, at least in the short term. The peace process will
remain stalled, and ever more stringent Israeli counter-measures will be approved.
The need for a new American policy in the Middle East will be blurred, at least
temporarily.
We have been reminded that belligerent Islam is the most
immediate and lethal threat to America’s domestic security and, in the longer
term, to the survival of our civilization. Islam is unable to create a country
fit for a civilized person to inhabit, but it is good at destroying others. The
creative response to it is to avoid the perception of a permanent bias in Middle
Eastern affairs that breeds anti-Americanism and Islamic fundamentalism. But above
all it is necessary to rethink the U.S. policy in the Middle East. American national
interests in the Middle East are primarily economic: It is vitally important to
the United States to have permanent access to secure and affordable sources of
energy. It is not vitally important to the U.S. whose flag flies over the Dome
on the Rock. We need a stable peace in the Middle East that should be based on
a scrupulously even-handed treatment of the conflicting parties’ claims and aspirations.
The desirability of any possible solution must be assessed from the point of clearly
defined American geopolitical, economic, and diplomatic interests.
ANTHRAX
TO COME? There will be many other lessons of September 11 on offer from every
talking head in the nation. One will be an even stronger demand for the antimissile
shield around America, regardless of the obvious fact that death came to New York
and Washington by a more prosaic and less predictable route. The key security
lesson of last Tuesday’s carnage is that the real threat to the United States--especially
to its large cities--comes from terrorism, rather than any "rogue states."
Rich, urban targets meet determined but cheap attackers. The next attack may well
be biological or chemical rather than nuclear, and the method of delivery will
be a smuggled suitcase rather than a ballistic missile. Even a nuclear device
could be activated on a freighter sailing under the Verrazano or Golden Gate Bridge.
Missile defense will cost billions, and will not defend against such threat. If
built it will be the most colossal exercise in futility in American history, the
wrong response to the wrong security assessment. If nine-tenths of the population
of a major city dies of a biological attack, and some Islamic terrorist group
announces a hit list of a dozen more such targets in North America or Western
Europe, the folly of missile defense will be obvious even to Mr. Rumsfeld.
LIMITS
OF INTELLIGENCE: At the technical level, September 11 demonstrates the limits
of intelligence gathering even in this ultra-high-tech age. The U.S. intelligence
community is simply not designed to counter this kind of attack. Its fundamental
architecture was created more than 50 years ago to counter the communist threat.
The question is whether this structure, which has remained largely unchanged for
decades and remains primarily focused on military threats, can deal with the challenge
of transnational, non-state adversaries. Military force and economic sanctions
may work against state-sponsored terrorism, but to counter an essentially private
operation a new understanding of the threat is needed.
BILL OF RIGHTS,
R.I.P? The mind-boggling failure of the U.S. "intelligence community"
to anticipate and prevent last Tuesday’s attacks will be used by the proponents
of further centralization of the power of the government. Those proponents of
perpetual war for perpetual peace will demand expanded controls over the Internet,
obligatory e-mail decoding devices, and more satellites that monitor us from the
skies. But those attacks prove yet again that there is no substitute for human
assessments based on a thorough understanding of the particular social, cultural,
or historical milieu of the attackers. Human intelligence assets are needed, not
more electronic gadgetry, to identify, target, and then destroy the individuals
and organizations that can, and therefore will strike again.
TIME FOR INTROSPECTION:
At the fundamental level, however, September 11 shows that the real and present
danger is with us now, and will remain with us for as long as the United States
remains committed to the concept of unrestrained projection of power everywhere
in the world. It is amazing that no mainstream commentator stated the obvious:
people who wish America ill are not merely "jealous of its power and wealth,"
they are deeply resentful of what they perceive as Washington’s bullying, arrogance,
criminality even. "Benevolent global hegemony" will entangle America
in more wars and more lies, and result in more innocent victims at home and abroad.
It is unconnected to this country’s interests, at odds with its tradition, and
contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of its people. The paramount lesson
of this American tragedy is that the threat to America exists because of the policy
of global hegemony pursued from Washington. Designating "threats to national
security" must follow the clear determination of a country's national interests.
If those interests are assumed to include the ability to project power everywhere
and all the time, then indeed the threat is also unlimited and permanent.
