|
|
"we'll try to stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb"Mar 25 '03 (Updated Sep 11 '09) Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Books
The Bottom Line My position on the last war, with postgame analysis, so you can know whether to trust me on the current one.
1. PREMISE. In all the flurry of opinions over whether the United States should or should not be pursuing George W. Bush's war against Iraq, I find myself wishing more of the writers were open about what military actions they have or haven't supported in the recent past, what their reasonings were, and whether, in retrospect, they feel good about their old opinions. Or, put differently, I've seen a few writers who _have_ taken this approach, and I've been grateful for the chance to judge their new opinions in context. Therefore, the largest part of this essay is an unmodified reprint of my response -- long before I'd heard of Epinions -- to the original September 11th bombings, and to the then-foreboding prospect that we would attack the Taliban in Afghanistan. I wrote it on September 23rd using facts known at the time. The last part of this essay will be my updated feelings, and how I apply them to Iraq. ********** 2. SEPTEMBER 23rd, 2001. My immediate, unplanned reaction to news of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was "Okay, yeah. I was wondering when something like that was gonna happen". I'd called in late for work, gone downtown, registered and paid for the class in UMass's Education department that I'd just gotten into, gotten into the train to Eliot station where my girl Cindy was to pick me up for work, and spent the first 23 aboveground minutes trying unsuccessfully to call her, getting only busy signals. When I finally reached her, the attacks (knocking out cell phone servers and overloading the 1-800-COLLECT lines with urgent inquiries) handily explained my communications difficulties. And while the airplane-crash notion was ingeniously low-budget -- its $200,000 cost turns half of the people on my Brookline street into ringleader suspects -- I'd had several philosophical conversations in the previous year trying to understand why this level of terrorism hadn't happened. With former Soviet Republics losing track of nuclear material, half a billion homes capable of housing extra-credit level chemistry sets, and white upright Family Values madmen like Timothy McVeigh running Mr. Wizard seminars in the explosive possibilities of off-the-shelf fertilizer, it seemed harder every year to explain the lack of catastrophic attacks by statistical chance alone. Could we assume that human beings come with some handy shutoff switch, or saving cowardice, that keeps even the worst of us from inflicting the maximum harm of which we are capable, at least until we win governmental power? Maybe, but it's hard to fathom a shut-off switch so subtle as to permit incompetent bomb attacks, mass shootings of high schoolers, and nerve gas attacks killing hundreds of Japanese commuters, yet somehow force people into good conscience just when the death toll they planned was approaching four digits. Could we believe that a God was saving us from our worst catastrophes? Perhaps He also helped us shut down the breeder reactor that almost destroyed Detroit; perhaps He secured the 40-minute margin by which a new work shift at Three Mile Island noticed the stuck-open valve that would've led to meltdown; perhaps He kept the wind westerly rather than easterly on the day that escaped military nerve gas killed thousands of sheep rather than thousands of citizens of Salt Lake City? Maybe, and He might've tweaked John Kennedy's mind in a peacemaking direction during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's hard to trust a God whose anti-emergency agenda saw nothing wrong with the rivers of blood in the genocide at Rwanda. So my first response to the attacks, like it or lump it, was to note with interest that the world was now a shade less mysterious. (Although I will note that the attackers conveniently didn't sneak a pound of uranium onto any of the planes. Luck?) After that, of course, I went into worry mode, contacting all of my friends to see if and how they were affected, offering sympathy and sharing anxiety. One or two of you in my readership may have lost someone you loved to the attacks, or if not, there's a decent chance some of you at least had someone you love lose one of their friends. I expect those of you show no willingness to intellectualize this, and perhaps no willingness to hear puzzled quibbles about the plans for forceful response. That is okay; I'd feel the same. But the closest I actually came, in terms of personal effect, is that two of my friends each have a friend I haven't met who in turn lost a friend, and that's too distant for me to feel an enraged "don't dis my paisans" reflex. Let me clarify: the attacks were vicious and evil. Regardless of the terrorists' agenda -- probably an anti-Americanism that may have been well earned, although they've been strikingly shy about telling us -- they managed to spare the foreign policy establishment that has done them harm, and to murder receptionists and fire fighters by the thousands. The harm they'd planned was even greater; hours before the attacks, CIA director George Tenet was telling Senator John Kerry about the several attacks from Osama bin Laden that they'd just been stifling, and the timing of this information (pre-attack rather than post-) makes me believe it. The TV pictures of laughing Muslims in Jerusalem, celebrating the attacks, were appalling, as grotesque as the pictures of happy Americans cheering while firebombs dropped into the ranks of Iraqi draftees in 1991. It is possible that the random innocence of the victims was the point: that the terrorists were making an analogy to the innocence of the people killed by Isreali soldiers and the victims of American military action. It is also possible to explain calculus to 4th graders by singing a lecture in Esperanto while hopping on a pogo stick and farting in 7/4 time, but that's no way to reach a receptive, attentive audience either. I think the terrorists were mean and I don't like them. What I don't think is that I've earned the right to treat the September 11th victims as the center of my thoughts and my concern as a human being. And I wonder if you have either (unless, again, you have personal ties to the victims). The death toll, a few thousand people, is a record for American turf, but it's low next to the number of Kurds killed by the American-allied government of Turkey this year, and I probably think about those people, glancingly, once every several months; how often do you think about them? I bet far more ethnic-minority people in Indonesia were killed this year than lost their lives at the World Trade Center, but for all I know that isn't going on anymore, because I've stopped paying attention; how bout you? There is too much senseless murder going on to react to it all. The last new slaughters that I really permitted to hurt me were the Rwandan genocide (1995) and the massacres of Nigerians after its government, with support of American oil companies, nullified the elections it had arranged (also 1995, I think). I supported military intervention in Serbia throughout the 1990's, and was pleasantly surprised when it not only happened but worked, but there are many many wrongs in the world, and I've come to prefer thinking about the ones that can be handled with activism and laws, because those I have some clue how to deal with. I could let the WTC attacks make me scared, but being scared won't make me safer, so why bother? So instead, I'm afraid of our government, by which I mean Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert and that one guy, George something; and a bit afraid of the 90+% of our citizenry suddenly ready to support it. The consensus right now (September 23rd) is that the government has efficiently rounded up all the suspects who planned the attacks (not counting the "faceless cowards" who, um, voluntarily chose to die in the act), and that the planning was definitely by Osama bin Laden, who is being protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Therefore, we must go to war with them. Resident Bush has delivered a speech which left essentially no wiggle room to escape the option of total war if we don't manage to capture Mr. bin Laden at once. A few problems: 1. Mr. bin Laden has not claimed any credit for the attacks or made any speeches justifying them. (EDIT: This was true at the time.) I believe that he had given public warning of upcoming attacks; I believe that the CIA foiled the attacks they say they foiled. One possible conclusion is that his silence is one of jealous fury in seeing a bunch of underfunded nobodies trump his plans. 2. Assume he's guilty. As I was pleased to see get at least a little publicity, Mr. bin Laden was extensively trained in terrorist attacks by the United States government itself during the 1980s. Traditional teaching methods would award him a gold star and passage to the next grade. 3. As has received almost no attention, the United States awarded the Taliban $43 million just four months prior to the attacks, in reward for their opposition to native opium growers. {EDIT: This is false: see below.) That's fine; selling opium is not nice, we have a right to reward our friends when they help protect our children from physical harm. But crikey, even Saddam Hussein hadn't getting money from us _that_ recently when we attacked him; it had been several years. 4. 100% of the information we the citizenry have been given, in terms of whom to blame, is coming from exactly the genius organizations that planned that training and that donation. So. Having said that, I don't want to align myself as a knee-jerk pacifist, either. It is extremely possible that our government, in blaming bin Laden and the Taliban, is lying to us; but it's also possible they're telling the truth, and possible (although a little less so) that they know they're telling the truth. Let's pretend they've identified the enemy correctly. Would war, in that context, make sense? It might. The closest prior situation to this was when Ronald Reagan ordered bombers to destroy the tent of Libyan Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who?d sponsored numerous small anti-American terrorist attacks. We failed to kill him, though we caused a death in his family. I thought the bombing was a horrible idea, likely to provoke Qaddafi into escalated attacks, and granting that I was eleven at the time, I would feel the same now -- only, it worked. Qaddafi decided to behave, and terrorist incidents became radically fewer. Many innocent lives were saved. It's stupid to use one incident as a rule for eternity, of course. What if the incident you wish to go by instead is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in the late 1970's? Mountain fighting against natives proved extremely difficult, and the Soviets stalled for almost a decade before retreating. Attacking the Taliban and losing is obviously not a useful response; quite the opposite. On the other hand, the recent U.S. bombings against Serbia, also a mountainous area, were remarkably successful. On the other other hand, the Taliban's army is far more experienced than Slobodan Milesovic's troops. Then again, maybe the Taliban will get scared and we won't even have to test our military to win. It's a game of chicken. But of course, it's a game of chicken in which the drivers are only endangering the lives of subjects they've never met. War is a real thing; it happens. So far there's been just the one set of attacks, just a few thousand deaths, just a few more infringements on civil liberty to follow eight years of infringements of civil liberty that the Clinton administration never needed a war to justify. The robo-patriots suddenly plastering their lives with flags and hideously militarist take-offs on Dr. Seuss's verse, they have a very important point: if bin Laden is guilty, and he isn't punished, this is a lesson to other terrorists that the odds of attacking us are better than they'd known. Even if he isn't guilty, the U.S. has made people think he is, so perhaps the publicity effect of not retaliating is unacceptable either way. It's all very nice for me to keep lobbying for a solar-power based economy and universal employment, but history has not reflected well on countries that timed their liberal reformist agendas to occur while other nations were crushing them out of existence (see: Poland, First and Second and Third Partitions, say; or the Spanish Republic of the 1930's; or France, Legislative Assembly, 1792). If the terrorists were wiping out more than 0.002% of our population at a blow, war might seem unavoidable. Of course, they aren't, which makes them kinder than some of Bush's regulatory repeals. My position, in the end, is this: I oppose any act of war by the present United States government. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden doesn't deserve to die. Even assuming his innocence in this particular attack, he does deserve to die. I am not saying that the Taliban doesn't deserve to be knocked out of power; it does, for its barbaric treatment of women alone (Afghani women can no longer be employed, own property, appear in public without full veiling, charge a man with violence or rape, or see a doctor). But our government does not deserve to be trusted with their punishment. Resident Bush has shown a consistent willingness to follow in the footsteps of his lawfully elected father: giving money to loathsome dictatorships, giving training to terrorists, demonizing foreigners to distract people from his failures. President Bush started a war to capture one man, Manuel Noriega of Panama: the war killed roughly 20,000 natives, led to Noriega's luxurious exile, and left a new government that wasn't notably better. President Bush started a war against a government he characterized as "worse than Hitler"; after slaughtering half a million draftees in 100 hours, he stopped the war, declared victory, and left the worse-than-Hitler figure in power, where he creates misery and death to this day. Resident Bush and his administration have proven themselves to be liars and thieves. They allowed themselves to be awarded the presidency by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, though laws about conflict of interest require two of those pro-Bush justices not to have voted, as Bush immediately gave well-paid government jobs to their children. They passed a radical tax cut that would affect less than 2% of the American people, claiming to repeal a "death tax" in the name of "small farmers", shameless about the fact that the personal benefit per cabinet member and for Bush and Cheney would average several million dollars each. (The Whitewater scandal, if real, was about thousands of dollars.) They have allowed the largest companies in industry after industry to write their own new regulatory standards, including standards for the safety of American lives, promising that these large companies would write the rules to create "competition". And now, they have pretended to be lifelong enemies of the nice Islamic boys they so recently treated as friends. Governments have many times been overthrown or forced to resign for any one of these offenses. Justice and security, in the matter of terrorist attacks, are not of course possible. But it is very possible that there is a war the United States could conduct that would make us less insecure, make the world a tiny bit fairer. Our current government will not conduct that war. So please, let's cut the tough talk. *************** 3. THEN VS NOW. For quite awhile, it looked -- and I was open to admitting this -- that I had been wrong about the upcoming Afghanistan war. First of all, I _was_ wrong about the $43 million gift to the Taliban mere months before the attacks. That was a vicious smear I received via Michael Moore, who passed it on from its originator, the columnist Robert Scheer. Details available if you search http://www.spinsanity.com ; at any rate, I apologize for my role in spreading the myth, and have learned to treat Michael Moore more cautiously. (Scheer, on the other hand, I'd already regarded as a jerk). Meanwhile, as we know, the war in Afghanistan was a military success, far beyond what anyone could have expected. The Taliban was rapidly decimated, its leadership mostly killed or sent into hiding. American casualties were very few. Even Afghani civilian war casualties were amazingly few: the most provocatively high claims I've seen from sources making any serious effort to calculate have announced 6000 dead (slightly higher than the World Trade Center death count, but quite possibly lower than the next terrorist attack will be or would have been), while less fiercely pacificist analysts have come up with death totals between 1000 and 3700. It is absolutely true that starvation deaths, in the wake of the American attack, were in the hundreds of thousands, but it is not at all clear that the blame for this should be laid on the Americans, given pre-existing conditions in Afghanistan. Whether or not the Taliban was directly involved in protecting our attackers -- as indeed it seems to have been -- it was a vicious, fanatical regime destructive of its own people. And so, for awhile, it seemed that Resident Bush had led a humane, considerate war (to the extent that war can ever be such), gotten effective revenge, send a legitimate warning to future attackers, destroyed al-Qaeda and Taliban credibility, and given Afghanistan's survivors a chance to rebuild a country slightly less deadly for their next set of children to feed. What's remarkable, in fact, is how little information Americans have received to the contrary. But you can take the word of leftists, or you can take the word of the C.I.A.: the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan. What happened? What happened is that the U.S. military, rather than being left in guardian positions throughout the Afghani countryside, was withdrawn to the borders of Iraq. What happened is that George W. Bush -- a man who is currently attempting to turn Medicare (guaranteed health care for the elderly) into a limited state-run block grant that can run out of money, a man who is withdrawing all welfare reform allowances for education or job training or part-time work, a man who has no interest in maintaining the "rebuilding" done to our own country by generations of responsive politicians -- had no interest in rebuilding Afghanistan. The U.S. military still has control of Kabul, Afghanistan's capitol, where 2% of Afghanis live. The C.I.A. considers the Taliban, otherwise, to be near its mid-2001 strength again, with flocks of angry new recruits, and the Taliban has regained much of the country. Conclusion? I was right, was even more cautious than needed. There _was_ a just war to be fought in Afghanistan: with exclamation points, not a "very possible". George W. Bush had no intention of winning that just war. Why should we trust him again?  |
| Read all comments (15)|Write your own comment |
- Top 1000|
Ads by Google
|
