There is no alternative to war

Blame-the-U.S. pacifism misses the point. Bin Laden wants to eradicate Western modernity, not liberate Palestine, and the U.S. has no choice but to fight him.

By David Rieff

Sept. 25, 2001 | We will resume our normal lives, but the fear will not go away. The airliner as bomb, the bomb in the stadium, the sarin gas in the subway: These are the prospects that will haunt us. Such thoughts will be paranoid, of course, and somewhat self-indulgent. Obviously most people will live out their lives with no more contact with terrorism than the horrific images they see on their television sets. But it will be enough.

The terrorists chose their targets well when they struck on Sept. 11, 2001. By destroying the symbolic center of international capitalism -- the World Trade Center; what name could be more alluring if your aim was to bring globalization to its knees? -- and the military command center of the most powerful nation in the world, the reality that no person, no place and no institution is beyond the terrorists' reach was driven. It will not be forgotten in the lifetime of anyone alive when the towers fell, whatever the outcome of the war against terrorism to which the United States has committed itself.

Whether Americans of the left or right really understand what such a war entails is open to question. Our leaders fairly openly admit they do not. On the left, those in Western Europe and North America implacably opposed to the use of force feared that the United States would respond with saturation bombing or even a nuclear strike. Many anguished opinion pieces were written bemoaning the Bush administration's rhetoric and warning against, as the liberal cliché has it, the "spiral" of violence.

Some on the left -- there are, it seems, still a few good Fanonists left -- all but legitimized the attacks. Writing in the London Guardian, Dutch migration expert Saskia Sassen wrote, "The attacks are a language of last resort; the oppressed and persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the message. So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation." Or as Sara Pursley wrote in Salon about the Sept. 14 National Cathedral memorial ceremony: "There was not an ex-president in that church who did not have the blood of tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians on his hands, and who did not commit these acts in the name of the American people."

Admittedly this sort of exercise in depraved rationalization -- the murder of more than 6,000 people as a message from the oppressed; bin Laden couldn't have put it better himself -- was the exception rather than the rule. But once again, not only in Western Europe but also, though to a somewhat lesser degree, in the United States, that by now familiar gap between leftist activists and intellectuals and artists, who tended to oppose American retaliation and called for the attack to be treated as a criminal matter (as if there were in place an international police force capable of "arresting" bin Laden), and large majorities of the population, who favored American military strikes, was exposed. By now, it is probably unbridgeable.

The left actually took a few steps away from its reflexive blame-the-U.S. pacifism during the Bosnian war and the run-up to the conflict in Kosovo, when some intellectuals and politicians actually supported military action against the Milosevic regime. But now such arguments are almost never heard. Now the left warns against "bellicism," and insists that, in the words of the American radical Howard Zinn, people in the United States needed to "think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action," and to understand "how some of these people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism." There's a stubborn determination to inform the American people that the terrorist assault had been a response, albeit a mad and wicked one, to American power and American foreign policy.

So far, no one has updated the '70s-era poster that circulated widely in radical circles, in which a Vietcong in a conical hat hands his Kalashnikov like a runner in a relay race to a Palestinian fighter in a keffiyeh -- by having that Palestinian, perhaps, hand the rifle on to Osama bin Laden. But the question of Palestine specifically, and United States Middle Eastern policy generally, has been the unavoidable subtext of most of the calls for the need to look for the root causes of terrorism. Such a view has many attractions. Greatest among them, I think, is that it permits anyone subscribing to them to go on believing that the attacks were on the United States for what it has done and continues to do -- provide arms and diplomatic support for Israel, maintain the embargo on Iraq, etc. -- rather than on modernity itself. Thus there's an imaginable way -- ending those policies -- to prevent such attacks in the future.

Because if the attacks, however reprehensible, are rooted in bad American actions, then it is still possible to believe that terrorism is a reactive phenomenon that would be vastly diminished if the United States started to behave differently, if it was more "even-handed" in the Israel-Palestine dispute, if it lifted the embargo against Iraq, stopped supporting emirs and sheikhs, and so on. By this account, the way for the United States to fight terrorism is to mend its ways, morally and geopolitically -- and not to lash out at the terrorists, which, it is confidently asserted, will only breed more terrorists. Those holding this view tended to focus most fervently in their writings and pronouncements on the evil being done to Muslim immigrants in America, for it buttressed the case that the United States badly needed to put its own house in order.

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