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THE WAR AGAINST TERROR: WHERE WE AS A PEOPLE CAN
OFFER LEADERSHIP
a) The Need for Political Activism
As much as any in American history, this is a crisis in which the
American people should not hesitate to formulate and express their
own opinions. This is not a time for blind faith in official leadership.
Our leadership is confused and even involved in its own internal
conflicts. Meanwhile Congress, the normal vehicle for political
debate and criticism, has been neutralized by a resolution more
sweeping even than that passed in 1964, in response to a Tonkin
Gulf incident that probably never occurred.
About a month after 9/11, the US press reported the tension in
Washington between two increasingly intransigeant camps. One
favored the multilateral approach of Colin Powell and the State
Department, which would limit the US military response to such
measures as would receive support from other nations, including
Moslem nations, in the new anti-terrorist coalition.
The other camp included unilateralists like Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz, who seem at times quite willing to drive the rest of the
non-Anglophone world into the ranks of the anti-US opposition.
Wolfowitz first articulated his vision of the US as a great power
which should tolerate no competitors in a draft Defense Policy
Guidance statement ten years ago. The draft explicitly called for
the US to exercise its power unilaterally, adding that it "must
sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial
nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership" (New
York Times, 3/8/92). The draft caused such an uproar when leaked
that it was redrafted to pay lip service to multilateralism (Financial
Times, 5/26/92).
Our first challenge as a people is to help ensure that such
triumphalist unilaterism is again not allowed to prevail.
No Attack on Iraq:
Thus, for example, we should express our disapproval of current
noises from what has been called the "Wolfowitz cabal" that the
US should expand its campaign to include Iraq. As I noted in a
story for Pacific News Service on 10/23/01, this could well put an
end to the coalition assembled by Colin Powell. As I reported in
that story, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on October 19:
"Britain, Russia, China, Europe and, importantly, the Arab states
that have given their backing to the war against Afghanistan and
Osama bin Laden have publicly stated their total opposition to any
raids on Baghdad."
October 29 update: The London Times today reiterated the
disagreement of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw with the idea
of targeting Iraq, a prospect raised on 10/28 by US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Also on 10/28, CBS Sixty Minutes
featured a segment which suggested strongly that Iraq might be
behind the anthrax attacks in the US. Neither Rumsfeld nor Sixty
Minutes dealt with the important story of 10/24/01 in the well-
informed British scientific journal New Scientist, arguing that "The
bacteria used for the anthrax attacks in the US is either the strain
the US itself used to make anthrax weapons in the 1960s, or
close to it. It is not a strain that Iraq, or the former Soviet Union,
mass-produced for weapons."
On 10/29/01 New Scientist went further, arguing that the
weaponization method used to process the anthrax reinforced the
genetic evidence that it is an American, not an Iraqi product. It
claimed further that this was known to US scientists.
The article is worth quoting at length:
"As anthrax continues to turn up in US postal facilities, and postal
workers, evidence is emerging that it is an American product. Not
only are the bacteria genetically close to the strain the US used in
its own anthrax weapons in the 1960s, but New Scientist can
reveal that the spores also seem to have been prepared according
to the secret US "weaponisation" recipe.
"This is troubling, say bioterrorism specialists. While the terrorists
behind the anthrax-laced mail US might have got hold of the strain
of anthrax in several laboratories around the world, the method the
US developed for turning a wet bacterial culture into a dangerous,
dry powder is a closely-guarded secret.
"Its apparent use in the current spate of attacks could mean the
secret is out. An alternative is that someone is using anthrax
produced by the old US biological weapons programme that ended
in 1969 - in which case the scope for further attacks could be
limited. Experiments to determine which is true are underway now
in the US."
Stop the Bombing:
To oppose an attack on Iraq is to endorse a viewpoint within the
current parameters of official US policy. As I have written
elsewhere, we should also reinforce those elements of elite public
opinion who are calling for a stop the bombing, as
counterproductive, politically dangerous, and leading to a
humnitarian disaster.
Even ex-CIA operatives like Raymond Close have warned that it
aggravates our terrorist problem if we try to defeat terrorism with
bombs. This common sense judgment has been exhoed by a
number of counterinsurgency experts working for the US. And as
Stanley Hoffman of Harvard wrote in the New York Review of
Books of 11/1/01, in an article dated only days before the iombing
began, a direct military attack on Afghanistan "risks sending us
into an Afghan quagmire of disastrous proportions, causing a huge
new exodus of miserably poor people, and creating revulsion and
perhaps revolt among the Pakistanis, or at least some factions
among them." This is the informed consensus of the world,
articulated clearly almost everywhere except inside the
Washington beltway. As the American people, we should give this
consensus clout.
October 29 update: As the bombing continues to expand and we
hear less and less about any search for terrorists, one has to
wonder if the real objective is not, as John Pilger has argued, a
campaign to secure Afghanistan permanently as a US military
base at the edge of oil-rich Central Asia. Another consideration is
that we now know the US has had to worry for some time about its
access to military bases in Saudi Arabia, particularly since the pro-
US King Fahd suffered a severe stroke in November 1995, and
Crown Prince Abdullah, a Pan-Arabist, has been the de facto ruler
in his place. (The authoritative Washington Institute for Near East
Policy noted in 1994 that "Succession -- or rather, squabbles over
it -- could greatly affect the closeness of ties with the United
States.")
It is clear that the advocates of US unipolar supremacy, both inside
the government like Wolfowitz, and outside it like Brzezinski,
regard it as vital that the US maintain a forward base in order to
dominate the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of Central Asia.
b) The Need for Cultural Activism:
Common sense has been impressed on our leaders before by the
American public, whose capacity for coming to understanding and
right judgment was illustrated in the case of Vietnam. (Iran-Contra
was another such case. But in retrospect we can see that the
public debates over Iran-Contra deflected us from examining the far
more serious policy debacle of Afghanistan -- which Congress
supported.)
But the current crisis, far more than Vietnam, engages the very
nature of our American culture, and how it should relate to other
cultures in the rest of the world. Thus most people's reaction to the
crisis has been not just political, but existential.
Like many of my friends, I have felt estranged from a world that
could produce horrors like the WTC disaster, and also by the US
response of bombing an already pulverized nation. Understandably,
verses written by Auden in 1939 (some of which were later
repudiated by him) are now flooding our emails. But Auden wrote
as he did, and then turned to the luxury of a private disengaged life,
because he knew that as a Briton he was irrelevant to the policies
of his newly adopted United States.
We do not have that luxury of irrelevancy (not even I, for many
years a green card Canadian alien in this country I love). Instead
we are faced with an inadequacy which is also a challenge.
However this tragedy develops, it seems certain that now Moslem
Asia and the West will know each other a little better. As they
must.
I wrote my Ph.D. on the political ideas of T.S. Eliot, who as a
philosopher-poet reflected extensively about civilization, culture,
and the unity of a world that had both an East and a West. (See
my essay "The Social Critic and His Discontents," in The
Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (1994), 60-
77.)
In the course of writing that dissertation, I came to mistrust the
essentialist and pessimistic theories of Toynbee (a precursor of
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations). I came to believe (a
belief now being tested) that civilization could unite this world,
without annihilating cultural differences (as American globalization
in contrast threatens to do).
>From this perspective, it is barbarisms that clash, not civilizations.
To be worthy of the term, civilizations (a product of urban culture)
must learn from and communicate with each other. Medieval
European culture became elevated to a new level of civilization as it
began to learn from and incorporate the best of the advanced
Moslem culture of Andalusia, from lyric poetry to the Arab-
transmitted Aristotle which so influenced St. Thomas Aquinas.
One faint cause for hope in this catastrophe is that even bin-Laden,
the Wahhabi "fundamentalist" (as we clumsily call him), recalls
with nostalgia the lost greatness of al-Andalus. It was indeed a
moment of peak civilization, not just for Islam but also for the Jews.
Its barbaric defect, common in that age, was to have done too little
for the uneducated Christian underclass. Thus in the end northern
crusaders were able to oust the Moslems, by then a hated
minority, from the Spanish peninsula. (El Cid is an early epic of
that crusading zeal; and even in that poem of war there are
moments when El Cid is protected by Moslems against those in
the Christian court who would oppose him.)
Clashes arise from ignorance, deprivation, and resentment, which it
is the task of civilization to overcome. This is a task for the public
more than for governments, which are of necessity infected by the
barbarisms of violence they have to deal with. It is my belief and
hope that our society is civilized enough so that it can attain to a
tolerant and compassionate understanding of Islam. This will
include the legitimate complaints of Islam.
This is a task for ourselves, not our governors. President Bush's
visit to a mosque was a welcome if unprecedented first step.
(Some of my friends and I have done the same.) But much more
needs to be done before our world of civilized communication
expands to include the Moslem one.
As I say, our society is well-equipped to rise to this challenge, and
it must. Our leaders, to put it politely, are not. Bin Laden in his
hatred understands the West and its limitations far better than our
leaders do the complexities of Asia.
We all have a lot to learn. For example, the Sudanese Moslem
leader Hassan al-Turabi is allegedly "known in Western
intelligence circles as the "Pope of Terror" (Daily Telegraph
(London), 3/7/01). And he has been "accused by American
intelligence officials of having an important political and financial
relationship with Mr. bin Laden" (New York Times, 8/24/98). And
yet we learned this year that al-Turabi had been arrested in the
Sudan for his efforts to negotiate an end to Sudan's murderous war
against Christian and animist rebels in the country's oil-rich south
(New York Times, 2/23/01). And from the Web we learn that in his
own words Hassan al-Turabi talks of trying "to focus on the
international human dialogue of religions generally, not only a
dialogue, but further on, perhaps, an institution or machinery for
cooperation as well."
It is obvious that there is an information gap here which "Western
intelligence circles," heavily oriented towards the perspectives of oil
companies, cannot be relied on to bridge.
Postscript:Those who would like to know more of my ideas on this
subject are invited to look at my recently completed Minding the
Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (the third part of my long
poem Seculum. By chance this poem begins with the shock of
experiencing a city's partial destruction by burning (Berkleley in
1991), and ends with the scene of "secular capitalism...facing the
theocratic alternative of shariah and jihad" (p. 240). As I explain in
my Preface (finally published as an "Afterword," pp. 245-46), the
poem predicts that both secular and spiritual "enlightenment (the
current word is development) are damned, even murderous, if they
do not honor each other."
In response to 9/11, I shall add to my website Section I.ii of the
poem, in which my Heideggerian sense of loss from the firestorm is
consoled by the historic sense that cities (including Washington)
have been destroyed by fire before. I quote a monk from around
1000 AD who deduced from the burning of cities (including the
burning of Cordova by Christians) that it was the end of the world.
And the monk cited (as do I) Chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation:
"alas that great city.... for in one hour so great riches is come to
nought" (18:10, 18:19).
But it wasn't the end. In fact it was the beginning of an era when
(as noted above), western Europe soon resumed trading with the
Moslem world, and profited culturally from that trade with the
cultural flowering of troubadour love poetry and Thomistic
Aristotelianism.
May such fortunate exchanges happen again.
End<{{{
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