In five parts
1. Al Qaeda and the Crusades
There is a profound misconception as to the meaning and nature of Islamic fundamentalism in the world. At its heart lays a struggle within Islam for its future direction which has nothing to do with the West. Yet in the haze and horror of 9/11 we misconstrued both the specific threat that terror represents and what our response to it should be. The net result has been that our reaction to 9/11 has not only been much more damaging to our nation’s future and reputation than it had to be but has ultimately harmed us far more than the original attack this reaction was meant to avenge. Until the nature of terrorism is better understood we will continue to make mistakes in dealing with it.
Scared by the viciousness of this assault our leaders have been too easily seduced and confused by the rhetoric and appearances surrounding them. First, there are many individual acts of terror which do not conform to the specific type of Islamic fundamentalist terror we are at war with, nor rise to the level of anarchy and negation of life and civilization that al Qaeda and others like it aspire. Most terror acts, in fact, drawing on the disaffected and impoverished, from the IRA to the Palestinians to Iraq, even though jihadist rhetorically, are strictly nationalistic in purpose.
We forget too that Islam, though ancient, among the major religions of the world is relatively young. Islam today, like those who consider themselves disenfranchised everywhere, considers itself threatened by outside forces of globalism over which it has little control. Frequently in the past when religious practices fall in influence, at least as far as their earthly estate and material influence and success provide for their followers, the weak minded among them have resorted readily to irrational violence in futile efforts to turn back the restless tides of time. In the West this was most infamously and intensely manifested in the Crusades.
The rationale employed by the Popes then to rally the faithful on their bloody, greedy splurges to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity and inspire a unifying pan-national spiritual revival (and enhance the prestige of the papacy in the process) is much the same principle employed by terrorists to rally the Muslim world today. The theory is that material success is proof of spiritual worth or, in other words, if we are as holy as we say, we should be more dominant and successful against our imagined enemies than we are. Of course, the moral justification and political efficacy of this theory is no more legitimate then than now, just as Islamic terrorism is no more Islamic than the Crusades were Christian. As abstract spiritual beliefs, religions can’t legitimately be in low material competition with each other without betraying their own higher spiritual aspirations. It’s only when spirituality becomes corrupted with economic, political, personal and cultural prejudice and aims that it takes on the aspect of a deadly weapon in the hands of a true believer.
But the appeal, the hypocritical call to a higher ideal on the one hand, but expressed through the lowest methods of vengeance theology, hate intolerance, cultural bigotry and ultimate violence on the other, has proved as beguiling as universal to the human experience. So though crusaders and terrorists have many differences their essential concept of Paradise is similar. And the desire for martyrdom as a short cut path to the hereafter has been used in both instances as a crutch to increased fervor and enhanced recruitment. The perverse justification they employ is that any act no matter how heinous, if nominally committed in the name of God or Allah, is immediately laundered holy.
Except in certain rare and airless corners this idea has been largely outgrown or overborne in the older religions of the world but it remains potent in Islam no matter how absurd the construction or blatant the contradiction. Because to imagine “martyrs” with the fresh blood of innocent victims on their hands seeking salvation through blessed mass murder and cowardly suicide, is not only a misdefinition of martyrdom, but an heretical insult to all that is holy in every religion.
But while there are similarities between the crusaders and terrorists there are also differences. When the popes of the Middle Ages were trying to raise the bloody crosier high over Western Europe in a cathartic, catholic orgy of violence to galvanize the Faith across national borders and leave the Dark Ages behind, it was as unchallenged leaders of a monolithic faith who were content to leave the essential operations and management of individual monarchies be. Islamic radicalism differs because it is far more decentralized and diffuse. Its proponents are at heart independent, ego-centric, franchise operators seeking general upheaval and personal prominence in a war within Islam to change its political orientation by attacking outsiders. It doesn’t offer an escape from the Dark Ages but a return to them.
Terrorism then is not an end in itself but a means of personal advertisement, not to overthrow the West but to remake Islam according to the terms envisioned by the terrorists. In terms of Western history, since Islamic terror seeks strong systemic political and moral change simultaneously, terror becomes a particularly gruesome historical admixture of both the Crusades and a politically oriented Reformation. And since there is no titular authority at the head of a hierarchically organized Islam, but many individual Imams and terrorist leaders and cells contesting for popular authority, Islam today, in purely organizational terms, less resembles Catholics of the Middle Ages than fundamentalist Baptists of America today.
It should be kept in mind then that Muslim terrorists are more John Brown than the Archbishop of Canterbury, more political revolutionaries than religious fundamentalists. Preying on a legitimate desire for social progress and economic equality, the terrorists lurk behind religion the same way Communist revolutionaries couched their latent tyrannies behind grand theories of economic egalitarianism. The jihad against infidel foreigners is merely a cover for the political, social and economic domination the terrorist leaders hope to ruthlessly wield some day over their fellow Muslims.
This becomes even more deceptive in Islam than it would be in Christianity because, unlike Jesus, Mohammad founded a religion and state together. And where Jesus, born under the unchallengeable aegis of the military authority of the Roman Empire, specifically taught separation of church and state; Islam came into being in a political vacuum and carries no similar stricture against theocracy. Therefore it becomes more difficult in Islam to separate the secular from the religious than it is in Christianity, where it is often hard enough.
Muslim regimes which have misunderstood this and negligently allowed this noxious weed of religious radicalism to grow in their midst in the hope that it will infest our crops to advantage them against us, are finding out that it is their own political fields that this scourge is ultimately bound to ravage. In the West once the infestation is identified we can erect defensive quarantines and acquire immunities against its spread which its host nations will not be able to inoculate themselves against. Muslim governments have only slowly come to grasp that the revolvers they have complacently stood by and watched being loaded are eventually to be revolutions aimed back at them.
The enigma of Islamic extremism in practice then is its sheer irrationality for, like communist economic theory before it, it cannot work. Instead of achieving the material and secular supremacy in the world terrorists preach as the validation of their moral worth their very success is bound to ensure its decimation. Because of their archaic and patriarchal nature, the crude, backward looking, tyrannical and theocratic social and economic systems the absolutists envision have already been proven to be too inflexible, unworkable and anachronistic to do anything but fail in material competition with rest of the modern world.
Therefore the terrorists offer nothing beyond the blood lust, hate and violence of the present as their only hope for the future. Most Muslims know this intuitively, the Taliban proved it definitively. Indeed, bin Laden and Zawahri were in Afghanistan not because they were succeeding in uniting the Muslim world behind them but because they had already failed. Bin Laden had wanted to be king of Saudi Arabia and Zawahri president of Egypt and neither had been allowed to. All of their acts of persuasion and pressure and violence and intimidation had already been rejected within the Muslim world. This proves that Islam is far less passive, regressive and monolithic than our simplistic policies toward it are capable of reflecting.
So what are megalomaniacal sociopathic stalkers to do when all their best efforts have already been rejected by the object of their desire? Turn even more murderous and vicious, amoral and extreme. Instead of continuing to blame Islamic slackers for their own internal failures, bin Laden and his followers chose to reverse the context of the debate by pretending it is the West, with the U.S. as the most obvious magnet of modernity, which has seduced an unwilling Islam into second class moral citizenry.
It is absolutely vital then if we are to fight terrorism that we understand that this most extreme version of the world wide religious war against the West is merely a ruse. The U.S. is merely a convenience, a stalking horse and whipping boy, the Great Satan, the boogie man. Just as the specter of terrorism has been used by our leaders to justify unpopular policies, we have been caricatured as the all-powerful infidel for terrorists to justify theirs. As other dictators and sociopaths before him, from Hitler all the way to John Brown, Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh in our country, bin Laden hoped to unite in hate, fear and blood those politically unsophisticated followers al Qaeda couldn’t persuade with threats and logic. In this way he hoped to gather enough force behind him, not to win against the West or to promote the ideals of Mohammad, but to acquire enough adherents in the Muslim world to achieve the stature and leverage he needs to remake it in his own demonic, seventh century image.
It doesn’t require a great mind to realize the ultimate insanity and deep amorality of this calculus but even if the math is bad, the threat remains real. Yet when seen clearly the ultimate strategic threat bin Laden and his ilk represent to us, notwithstanding the maddening disproportionality of the damage possible by individual attacks in this day and age, is essentially nonexistent. Therefore, as difficult as it is to control our legitimate anger and passion in the face of such calculatedly inhuman and heartless attacks against innocent people, to do otherwise is to risk playing into al Qaeda’s hands and making them stronger than they deserve.
Though 9/11 has frequently been compared to Pearl Harbor and the war on terror to a world war, it is really nothing of the sort, more shallow noise and breadth than substantive depth, more about sheer fear and bloody tantrum than sustainable movement. Pearl Harbor was the deadly harbinger of an entry into a real world war against powerful nations with considerable spheres of interests and large populations and military establishments and economies able to be marshaled to a long war on multiple fronts over a vast territory. Al Qaeda and its followers control no government, have no military, no national or economic resources nor native population at their disposal and lack both firepower and resources and therefore the time and ability to endure for long without continued significant successes.
For reference then al Qaeda and its offshoots are much more like the Bolsheviks and Nazis if they hadn’t succeeded in gaining control of Russia and Germany, respectively. In this instance al Qaeda is reduced to its pure incorporeal and irresponsible strain, undiluted by any commerce with success, constraint, rationality or ethics. As a geopolitical threat then it is desperate, degenerate, despicable and dangerous, of course, but also (even after, if not especially after, 9/11) still able to be effectively contained and marginalized as nothing but an extremist sect of the greater Islamic world with few real followers and no enduring political base to build upon.
Terrorism is always futile. It’s a last gasp, self flagellating war against a much stronger foe when all other legitimate methods have failed and it must always expect to receive violence back far stronger than it can give forth. It is a vampire wildfire that feeds on the blood of its victims and will, once this essential fuel is denied, like oxygen to a real fire, eventually smother of its own fumes. The attack of 9/11 was not a sign of strength but of ultimate, inevitable weakness. In football parlance it was a profane Hail Mary, a last hope, an historical anomaly.
It should have marked, even if completed as unluckily and horrifically as it was, the beginning of the end for terrorism of that type on that scale, with no lasting political or historical endurance (just as it was for McVeigh and the militia movement and as it was for the Crusades), not a signal of its strength or a sign of its rebirth.
Moreover, this is not even our fight. The ones with the most to fear from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are the Muslim people themselves. This is their schism not ours. Naturally, the crudely simplistic answers and bloody logic they employ will lure a few hateful and politically unsophisticated followers to their cause, but such movements cannot long endure on their own merit. Those Muslims who haven’t realized this already soon will discover that it’s a very short step from outgoing brutality against foreigners to brutal, oppressive tyrannies against them. Ultimately, it is up to the Muslim nations themselves to bear the brunt and burden of controlling the terrorists they have spawned and they will as soon as we quit confusing the issue and remove ourselves from their midst as a surrogate target.
2. The United States and al Qaeda
After 9/11 we were faced with a choice. The Islamic fundamentalists are fighting an irrational rearguard war they can never win against the consensus of their own people contrary to all logic, progress and the inexorable forward movement of the world itself. Knowing this, should we stand aside, vigorously punish those who attack us, protect ourselves, provide moral and material support to our allies when required, confident of ourselves and the future of the modern world that we have done more than any other nation to shape? And while concentrating on the containment of the contagion calmly await the death rattle of this struggle’s inevitable outcome?
We are busy and flush with the wealth and health that prosperity, hard work and elegant law and democratic procedures have brought us. The world has been largely democratized, the West has largely won the war of civilization, certainly the momentum is all ours and time is on our side. We won the Cold War with just such patience, reticence, rectitude and endurance, secure in the most just cause against a much, much graver threat than a few mad terrorists could possibly ever represent to us.
Or should we act like a cat frightened at its own shadow, abandon our dignity as the world’s leader, run off half cocked, get completely involved in a fight that is not our own, that we barely understand; and at grievous cost to ourselves wage war on several different fronts simultaneously, embroil and enrage all sides, alienate our allies, become a self-important, blustering, polarizing force which will make the struggle larger and harder and more costly to all sides without making it any easier to win?
Unfortunately, while publicly espousing the former course of action we pursued the latter. While properly denying the terrorists’ claim of a world wide religious war in public, privately we took their bait and behaved exactly as if we secretly believed there was.
The previous section illustrated several major potential complications which might arise if we acted recklessly and thoughtlessly after 9/11. The first was the counterproductive danger which would confront us by overreacting to the terrorists’ intentional provocation which dared us to overreact to it. As a general rule one should avoid doing what one’s enemies most want you to do. The second problem is that the inextricable combinations of church and state create such a tangle of cross purposes and interconnected contradictions subtly layered through Islamic countries that to go to war in one country is to risk going to war against a part of them all.
After 9/11, apparently completely oblivious to the dangers confronting us, beyond their wildest expectations and proportional to our own fears, our actions gave the terrorists exactly what they wanted. Instead of tamping their reputation down we immediately magnified it far beyond what it deserved by broadening a simple punitive police action against a single specifically defined political terrorist organization into an epochal, nearly biblical conflict, the so-called and misnamed “war” on “terror.” The inanity of our approach is apparent in the title.
War is a terribly tangible enterprise but terror (defined as irrational fear) is an abstraction, a psychological state of being designed not to win a war but to create chaos and disorder in the reaction. It is the “fear itself” that Roosevelt spoke of. To fight the goal the terrorists hoped to achieve – terror - we have accepted their aim as our premise and lost the psychological war for the hearts and minds of the world before we began. Fighting terror with warfare is like fighting an oil fire with gasoline. Before long we had taken the metaphorical use of the word “war” in the title and adopted it as a tactic, until soon we were being told that we can’t be fighting terror unless we are at war, even on several widely disparate fronts. This leaves us to fight the effects of warfare by the means which create it, creating new terrorists by spreading the very disorder in which it can best flourish.
Calmness and reason, tradition, law and order, world consensus, inescapable logic, carefully calibrated force and deliberate justice are the mortal enemy of terrorists. Yet these are precisely the tools our government immediately jettisoned as they rashly committed us to fight full scale and open ended wars against enemies they couldn’t find, define or even comprehend.
On the contrary, history proves that the best use of power is its sparing use. In any fight between unequals, as in Iraq, a big nation against a smaller one, or against shadowy figures such as al Qaeda, special care must be taken. Battles of unequal strength seldom profit or earn credit for the greater power no matter what the initial provocation or eventual outcome. The particular and unique province which power alone possesses is the prerogative of building broad consensus and working through coalitions in harness to a common cause, to act through surrogates and intermediaries as subtly behind the scenes or as overtly as you choose; to pull strings to have other pull strings for you so you may organize a response which insulates yourself somewhat as the primary polarizing and instigating target. This multiplies the depth and reach of your approach. This is how influence is maintained. When great power is used directly and crudely, unilaterally, erratically and in untrustworthy ways for narrow applications, it diminishes disproportionately fast.
Power itself is roughly divided into three parts. The first part is actual. The second part is a vacuum comprised of either a voluntary or forced ceding of fealty to a superior element from a weaker due to self-interest, necessity or fear. The third part of power is myth tinctured of expectation. The second part of power must be consistently nurtured and earned if the third part is not to evaporate. This erosive and evaporative tendency is only exaggerated when power is used inappropriately for self-aggrandizement or temporary gains of phony glorification of a small minded, fearful, self-involved leadership. When it is employed reasonably, philanthropically, justly, ethically, for public order and general prosperity it is ennobled, preserved and enhanced without constant recourse to force.
It is an immutable rule of history that any nation that considers itself invulnerable will sooner or later cause a congeries of enemies to array against it until it is brought back to the middling pack. If pride goeth before a fall, arrogance often precedes and hastens its complete collapse. In this case great power is beaten equally often by an attack against weakness as against perceived strength; less often from its being overcome as from its being misused and less often from outside than from corruption and misperception grown from within. In our own history of the last fifty years, all of our greatest defeats have been completely avoidable, self-inflicted on us by our worst leaders against our weakest foes. The United States has never been beaten in the field except by the exaggerated fears, arrogant hubris, poor execution and lack of intellectual and moral capacity of our own politicians.
Therefore to militarily search out terrorists where they are hiding, the stated goal of the war on terror, is misguided and counterproductive policy and misspent energy. This places us in the unenviable position of the behemoth trying to chase down gnats. It is a complete misapprehension of the balance and use of our power in the world. Although there’s nothing the terrorists can ever do to us directly to diminish our well deserved stature as the world’s only superpower, our mistaken response to terror has achieved it for them. Even 9/11, heinous and horrible as it was, was like a pinprick to a giant as an assault against the essential power of the United States. However, if an elephant overreacts to its provocation it may run itself ragged, eventually to disorientation and finally off a cliff if it persists in trying to chase down scurrying insects in this way.
Self-evidently the “war” on terror should have stayed a metaphor. This fight has always been more about effective law and enforcement and shrewd diplomacy and brains rather than massive and wildly unpopular and inefficient military brawn deployed in the field which are operations far more costly to us to mount than they are difficult for terrorists to evade. As a result, in the four years since 9-11 our policies, even despite all their exorbitant costs to our citizens, our military and our country have been efficient primarily in diminishing our moral capital, accumulating more enemies than friends and creating more terrorists overseas than we destroy.
3. The United States and Islam
Far and away, the greatest danger of our overreaction to 9/11 has been the sheer breadth of our involvement in the debate over the future of Islam into which it has plunged us. Because despite our bold talk and persistent denials when we carelessly conflate two extremes of the Islamic world extended and compare a secular tyrant like Saddam Hussein with a fanatical religious sociopath like bin Laden an invisible abyss opens before us. As a hunting season which incorporates both extremes of moose and mouse tends to make all members of the animal kingdom nervous, painting evil across the Muslim world with such broad and careless brush strokes does nothing but turn the entire region against us. For reasons of shallow political justification at home our rhetoric has made it appear to the unsophisticated masses as if we have adopted bin Laden’s - a fanatical religious sociopath who lives in a hole in the ground – thoroughly insane view of world history in preference to operating under a coherent alternative one of our own.
Now we find ourselves fighting two actual wars in the Muslim world which can never be definitively won. We support Israel against the Palestinians more openly than ever before. With all our boorish self-righteousness and contentious, culturally insensitive saber rattling diplomacy we also support and occasionally insult governments as diverse as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia against the Chechens while opposing Syria and Iran. We generously support regimes that are clearly dictatorships at the same time we claim to be trying to establish democracy at the sharp, narrow end of a sword in Iraq.
Not all of these policies are wrong but our policy aims are frequently as murky and contradictory as our rationales for them. It is difficult enough to wade these bottomless waters diplomatically, though as the world’s most powerful nation we must, but when we cement our policy to the ground in the midst of a broad Islamic upheaval militarily we lose all our diplomatic flexibility and become ensnared beyond extrication as the sands shift around us like a Chinese finger trap to prevent our departure.
Talk, as in diplomacy, we’re told, is cheap but it happens to also be infinitely less expensive than war. Yet we now eschew tact in diplomacy as a tool for wimps and when we do go to war we deride exit strategies and disparage the use of overwhelming force while consistently plying our greatest weakness, our lack of agility on the ground, against the very mobility and terror which are our enemy’s only strengths.
Make no mistake about it, to pour men and materiel into the middle of a war over the future of a foreign religion and culture we can’t even understand on their own soil is more than just absurd it is a cause lost in its own theory. Like any vicious fratricidal feud the only thing these warring factions will ever find common cause to unite against is a meddling outsider easily portrayed as an occupier and infidel.
Although the modern world has changed and we have changed within it, we persist in trying to impose ancient failed strategies onto it. In Iraq we seem to be trying to transform a simple police action against a few well defined terrorists in another country into a resurrection of some self-destructive model of a new imperialism or old colonialist’s nightmare. We do this even though the steadily revealed lesson of the entire last century is that the long glorious era of war for war’s own sake is ended. The world has grown too small, is over populated and there are no longer any hidden areas, no enduring spheres of influence, no hope of false glory that war brings. Modern warfare has no purpose, economic reward or long term advantage to it; there’s no satisfying adventurism or glory to be earned, no self-aggrandizement possible; only cost on cost on cost to its perpetrators.
War is a defensive necessity at times, certainly, but when undertaken gratuitously, delusionally, offensively, for light and transient causes, when not properly planned through with all possible contingencies accounted for, when waged contrary to international sensibilities and conventions, or unilaterally; the costs to the aggressor will invariably far, far outweigh all the benefits that come to it from the aggression. Any occupied country with modern weaponry, transportation and modern communications can make certain hell of any unwanted occupation and drive a great power out no matter how great their power is or how altruistic they claim their intentions are, when that power has a home to return to. After the fall of the Soviet Union, even limited hegemonic empires will be increasingly difficult to sustain, and imperialistic and colonial ones impossible.
This was the punitive lesson we administered to Iraq in the first Gulf War for its invasion of Kuwait and the same lesson in reverse it is now administering to us in the second Iraq war for having invaded them.
Therefore, a preemptive war of sheer aggression against an unarmed country followed by a military occupation of uncertain purpose and length; a war ostensibly to impose democracy on another country at the point of a gun during a civil war and foreign occupation against the backdrop of international terrorism in the most volatile region in the world; was not only doomed to not succeed but almost perfectly designed to fail. No nation has the right to invade another it dislikes and remake it in its own image merely because it chooses to. The war in Iraq as a part of the war on terror can only be seen in its true light as a blight and betrayal of our historical record, the ideals of our fathers and the entire flow and rush of modern history.
4. The United States and Athens
In our defense, for the United States, the so-called world’s only superpower, there is almost no recent historical example that compares to the position in which we now find ourselves. On a much smaller scale the best model to our current situation may be to our great and august predecessor, Athens, just prior to the Peloponnesian War. Unfortunately the lesson of this tale is more cautionary than exemplary. After the Persian Wars Athens had become the dominant power of its day. What it failed to perceive in all its hauteur, the belief in the genius of its people and the infallibility of its institutions was that, like us, the bulk of its power was built less on tangible things like trade, maritime and military prowess and economic strength than on the trust, balance and respect which accrued to it from the democratic firmness and justness of its behavior.
We are taught that democracies are not predatory or expansionist. True, generally, but to settle old grudges Athens cloaked its predatory and meddlesome aggression beneath a veneer of egalitarianism and phonily contrived “common” interest which arrogated by implication to itself a higher preferment of both executioner and judge. In a short time, through arrogance, pride, elitism and self-interest they managed (partly, again like us, by being goaded by enemies into divisive contradictions and overreactions) to unite the majority of the Greek city states that had previously been allied in their favor into a coalition against them under the reluctant leadership of Sparta and the eventually decisive influence of the Persians.
It remains a sad and moving spectacle today how even legendary, intelligent and eloquent Athenian statesmen like Pericles and Demosthenes, from hard liners like Cleon, to well intentioned and reasonably capable mediocrities like Nicias all the way to talented but unprincipled charlatans like Alcibiades, each in their own way helped lure Athenian democracy farther along the road to its own destruction. Nor was Athens weak or corrupt at the time but, like us, it was at the very height of its influence, reach and power. If the histories are to be believed the people of Athens reached their decisions with considerable self-conscious logic and fought their battles with formidable bravery, strength, cleverness and fortitude. Yet within thirty years Athenian power was destroyed. The lesson from this is it is not enough to be just good or merely powerful, you must also be right and true to the source of your power to continue to hold onto it.
Much as we may chafe at the international restraints our power brings with it, we too may not impose this power callously. As the world’s leading democracy we are only as strong as we are right and as weak as we are wrong. All cultures and idioms share the same indelible intuition which reads in one version that “those who seek victory win not so much by strength and might as by truth and mercy and law and enterprise… Where law goes, flows victory.” Simplistic? On the contrary, it’s embarrassingly naïve and ignorant to believe anything else. Where cowards are quick to betray basic moral principles and behave foreign to their finest instincts and call their cowardice courage, their weakness necessity and their corruption good; it takes real bravery and strength to adhere to ethics in trying circumstances. The evidence of history is indisputable - ethics and honesty, law and justice triumph in the short term much more often than not, and in the long run always.
Yet we now profess to believe that since we are the largest and most powerful country individually we may impose our will whether right or not on the rest of the world collectively. We may ignore the democratic principles that are the root of our greatness, undercut the basics of international law, ignore diplomacy and old alliances, shade proof, erode civil liberties at home and do as we would rather than as we should. All in the fatal belief that our power is so great that it renders us impervious to criticism or to the inevitable negative consequences that follow corrupt and careless behavior like a shadow.
The fallacy of this behavior is that like Athens, even though we are the single most powerful nation in the world, the rest of the world, should it choose to unite against us is collectively much larger, wealthier and stronger than we are. To thumb our nose at its sensibilities while simultaneously and gratuitously abdicating our responsibility of world leadership is foolhardy. To have the majority of the world arrayed against us is to set ourselves up against an enemy against which we can never possibly win.
Yet in these five short years since 9/11, despite the fact that the civilized world initially rallied to our support spontaneously, our historic trust and popularity and respect in the world have plummeted. Arguably, America’s actions are more hated and less supported now than at any time in our long history. Still we persist in policies which not only can do nothing to retrieve our reputation but only continue to cause it to erode. And not only have all the most egregious of these policies been completely unnecessary and usually ineffective but generally directly counterproductive to the real goals we are trying to achieve.
It’s a clear seduction of power, hubris, to crudely trample world conventions and international standards and organizations, many of which far better represent our historic past than our own current policies do, at the same time we continue to sacrifice our most cherished freedoms here. It is nothing but pernicious to continue in activity that undermines rules of law and principles of honor and justice which are the vital bulwarks against the very chaos these actions are ostensibly designed to contain.
There is a little explored corollary to the well known ratio which governs cost vs. benefit. It may be called the Law of Exponential Costs. This adds to the inherently debilitating cost of doing the wrong things the concurrently accumulating expense of being precluded by these actions from doing the right ones. This allows us to more accurately compute the passive costs of omission and the active costs of commission together. Simply illustrated, if you have planned a journey of a hundred miles to the west and accidentally travel a hundred miles due east before you determine your error, you might normally consider the length of your journey to have just doubled. But in fact it has actually tripled as your original trip of a hundred miles will now take a three hundred mile journey to conclude.
And once you add all the additional costs attendant to this journey of much greater time and distance, as say, flat tires, missed connections, errors from haste and anger (like speeding tickets and potential for accidents, for instance) in trying to correct your mistake, etc. And when you consider that the basic viability of your original journey might be called into question or even rendered impossible because of the long delay in completing it then it’s easy to see where the expense in time and money of your error might easily quadruple and more over what they would have been had you simply completed the original trip as planned. And finally, in the real world of foreign affairs, business and human relations if it happens that you never acknowledge your original mistake but merely continue along the wrong road until you can go no farther down it (as in, say, the case of Viet Nam, Enron or Ahab), the cost of your efforts compared to your return for them may approach totality or even, if computed mathematically, infinity.
While not suggesting that our mistaken policies in reaction to 9/11 may or should be perfectly quantified, we must remain aware that natural laws do exist which account for the otherwise inexplicable and precipitous fall of empire and great capital enterprises. Wrong and reckless decisions by great countries have massive consequences that compound far in excess of what may first seem obvious. There is a gravitational vertigo which attends the accumulation of power which increases in tension the higher it seeks to rise above the mean. The way to build something up is much more difficult than it is to tear the same thing down and the way up in life is harder than the retreat from progress which would effect it. It may take an afternoon to push a piano up a hill and only an unguarded moment and a few seconds for it to roll all the way back down. Likewise the honorable reputation it has taken many generations of honest, hard working Americans to build it has taken this generation of leadership a few short years of complete mismanagement to permanently tarnish.
Yet we blindly persist in a disingenuously conceived, optional and poorly executed and open-ended war in Iraq as part of a bad policy in general, egregiously expensive of lives of men and women, materiel, money, credibility and time, that creates more terrorists than it captures and that erodes our hard won integrity in the world even as it undercuts our freedoms at home; all for an outcome as uncertain as the wind and much more likely to be a disaster than a success.
To begin a war like the one in Iraq so erroneously and meretriciously and then merely “stay the course” even though the course we set out on was obviously the wrong one from the beginning in hope things badly begun make turn out better later is like the drunk gambler who has already lost his house, politely asking you if he may now bet yours too. This is the Viet Nam theory of leadership. It is the Law of Exponential Costs in action. This is more about politicians who never have to pay for the mistakes they make finding it easier on themselves to continue to make them rather than have to find the guts, wisdom and hard work necessary to first admit them and then correct them.
At the same time the initial diligence necessary to beat the terrorists and protect ourselves and unify the world against them through trust in the leadership that only a healthy and honorable United States loyally devoted to its finest historical traditions has the power and authority to provide is not only left undone but is daily being made more difficult to achieve. This work will have to be begun again at the point where we left off which has since moved (as have we from it) much farther away into the distance.
5. The United States Present and Past
Ultimately the truest historical tests to which a nation or person must stand comparison is not with any other era but with its own successful past. The test is not how we react to prosperous and easy times but what our response will be under strain and duress. Do we adhere all the more tenaciously to our highest standards and deepest principles in times of crisis or do we let events toss us capriciously from expediency to expediency?
How then does our reaction to 9/11 rate with our own proud history of accomplishment and bravery, with our founders, with Washington’s steadfastness, with Lincoln’s soaring logic and with Franklin Roosevelt’s “we have nothing to fear but fear itself?” America at its finest has always been as much an ideal as a nation. This is the standard against which we have always sought to measure ourselves.
We have always been blessed to find a reservoir of strength and courage to raise ourselves to our highest levels of achievement in times of our greatest crises. How do we stand the test of time so far? Unfortunately not well. So far this generation of leadership has not demonstrated that it has the moral or mental capacity or internal will or even the basic day to day honesty or competence in action to handle the great power that has been given it to further and protect.
The holy truth of America’s compact with the world is that we are the world’s leader because we are the fairest and broadest based nation, standing slightly above and removed from the turmoil of the rest of the world. We are the historic melting pot of world culture, the champions and curators of all that is the accumulated best in law, science, ethics and culture in world history.
This democracy has always innately comprehended that clear adherence to ethics, law and democratic organization is the only common denominator which can unify disparate peoples. Our founders understood that only firm principles of equality and tolerance can accommodate the vast cultural and religious differences that when yoked to a common good create infinite dynamic possibilities but when selfishly divided among themselves lead only to desolation.
But a government is not free to operate under two sets of principles and act one way abroad and another at home. Anti-democratic behavior abroad inevitably leads to anti-democratic behavior at home to enable and justify it. For a democracy to remain democratic it must arrive at its policies through clear and open debate and fairly applied procedures properly instituted. Once it begins to behave rashly and unilaterally for selfish, partisan or vain purposes it not only divides us against ourselves but own traditions and eventually eviscerates the invisible sinews of its own authority.
At its first frightened reaction to the events of 9/11 our leadership in its ignorance, weakness and panic abandoned the premise of these great principles in their entirety. In so doing they have shifted us far out of alignment from our own high standards which have made us renowned, prosperous and wise.
Fostering a fallacy of being engaged in a world war against an inexplicit and nearly invisible threat that is everywhere and nowhere, that can have no clear ending and may be shifted around at will to suit their purposes, has been used as an excuse to commit ourselves to vital infringements of freedom at home and ongoing compromises of character and law abroad. This can only be thought of as fatal concessions to liberty and permanent retreat from the high ideals which have been the source and sustenance of all our success and power.
For all this massive loss, we have allowed ourselves to be comforted with banalities of justification. We are assured that we must change the basic structure and ideals of our nation’s nature to save its remnants. We are told that the world is changed now, that the old rules which always worked well in the past don’t apply anymore or are too hard to maintain and that these changes for the sake of the defense of democracy are too sensitive to be debated in public democratically. We are told that we can hold no secrets from government while at the same time we are told that it must operate in complete secrecy from us.
But freedom is a verb as well as an object and is not a commodity that may be stored or bartered but is renewed in every moment of being. It must not only be exercised to be but must be generously used to be saved and cherished to be consolidated. To curtail it temporarily is to kill it permanently. To infringe on freedom to save it, to protect it by denying it or to impose democracy on others by less than democratic methods in a way which denies it to ourselves is an absurdity as profound as drawing the drapes down to trap the afternoon sunlight inside in anticipation of the night.
When you cease behaving like a free democracy you cease being one. The United States can’t be an unethical, truculent, despotic and militantly imperialistic democracy overseas without destroying our right to call ourselves a democracy here. This no more than a preacher can operate a crack house and a house of ill-repute to build a higher steeple and buy a bigger bell to enhance his spiritual standing in the community.
By all our actions since 9/11 we have sought, almost by careless design, to destroy these same institutions and compacts and agreements and conventions, international law and bedrock principles of justice and freedom which are the load bearing pillars of our strength for short term chimeras and ill-conceived political profits which risk severe long term losses and ultimately imperil our own preeminence.
