Posted on 11/02/2001 12:55:20 PM PST by DaveCooper
Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
Listening to America.
If one talks at campuses or on the radio in support of the current American military response, the staccato of both hostile questions and the questioners themselves often blurs into a depressing pattern. What follows is a mélange from the dozens of actual inquiries I have encountered since September 11, along with the more or less standard replies.
The Pacifist
(The question is rarely presented as a question, but rather as a quite heated and very un-pacifistic rant — with ample references to little-known foundations, books, and the questioner’s own high-minded efforts and programs.)
Q. Violence begets violence. What did war ever solve? Do we have to reply in kind — to get down to their level? Haven’t we learned more than “an eye for an eye” in the last thousand years? You cannot bomb in my name.
A. Violence can, in fact, often breed an endless circle of violence (note Northern Ireland) — but only if there is no clear moral consensus, and it is practiced solely in equal measure. But overwhelming violence in response to great evil, while tragic, is not therein evil. Such a military response constitutes real humanity and bravery because it is not rhetorical or cheap, and stops the killing on the part of the killers. Those who work in peril 20 hours a day on carriers and behind enemy lines on the ground did not ask for this war, but they are nonetheless fighting to ensure that their own children and those of others to come do not have to make the sacrifices they are now so bravely enduring.
War — whether to end slavery, to ruin the Nazi death camps, or to dismantle the Japanese military — has in fact ended great evil inflicted on millions. And if we don’t reply now — as we didn't to Hitler after Czechoslovakia, the Italians in Ethiopia, or the Japanese in Nanking — murder unchecked goes on to kill millions. Ask the Cambodians, Bosnians, or Tutus. We have learned from the last 2,500 years that human nature is unchanging and that the well-intentioned efforts to disarm and outlaw war are dangerous — and that such utopian pacifism is always at someone else’s expense: usually those poorer, less educated, and not so “sophisticated” as yourself.
Can you please tell me what you would have advocated on December 8, 1941? And if we cannot in your name bomb the source of our terror, can our domestic forces at least use deadly force here at home to protect civilians from more crashing airliners and suicide bombers?
The Voice of Moral Equivalence
(Like the Pacifist, the moralist offers no realistic plan of action to deal with September 11, but wishes to force you to concede that you are in fact a murderer like the Taliban).
Q. They bomb us; we bomb them. They kill children; now we kill children. So what is the difference between them and us?
A. Quite a lot. First, we do know that almost 6,000 innocent were murdered, but we do not know how many Afghani citizens have been killed — either due to misplaced American bombs or to Taliban shells falling back among their citizens or to Taliban executions and terrorism against their own people. We do know that it is the deliberate policy of the Taliban to put their combatants among mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure their survival, out of the expectation that Americans, unlike themselves, would not deliberately inflict collateral damage. If our enemies know that difference, why do not some of our own citizens, such as yourself?
For the sake of argument, let us assume that more than 100 noncombatant Afghanis have so far been killed. The dead, of course, are the dead, and their loss is tragic. But there is a difference, a moral difference, between deliberately targeting civilians in peace and deliberating attempting to avoid them in war — especially at the risk of endangering the lives of our own pilots. And just wars have never been waged with 100 percent moral perfection, but rather — as against Germany or Japan, for example — with the full knowledge that innocents die in order that the mass murder of their governments be stopped, and on the expectation that their own lives, and those of their children, will not in the future be sacrificed as victims of or abettors to their own government’s evil.
The Europeanist
(The questioner is soft spoken and sometimes condescending, typically highly educated, well-traveled abroad, and a denizen of either coast. In a live setting, clapping usually follows his question)
Q. This is more of the senseless retaliation that is typical of American unilateralism. After Kyoto and Durban, why should Americans expect European support?
A. Well, the 6,000 dead are ours, not Europe’s. And we, not they, must take care of our own — as we, not they, see fit. Still, although it took 21 days to invoke NATO’s Article Five, in theory Europeans and Americans are not mere friends but military allies, sworn as such under treaty. The terrorists struck the U.S. first, but not necessarily last — and might equally have hit the Louvre (cf. the destruction of the great Buddha in Afghanistan), the Vatican (cf. their deadly rhetoric about non-Muslims, the murders in Pakistan of Christians, and murmurs of plots against the Pope), or the Eiffel Tower (as we now know was once planned). Without a long climate of permissiveness in Europe for terrorists, much of the present carnage would have been impossible. We in America were naïve and foolish, but those in Europe were far more knowingly and deliberately lax. The shores of the southern Mediterranean and what lies far across the Aegean are much closer to Europe than America — and most in Europe now recognize that far better than we. If anything, as our military continues to blast apart the enemy, small flotillas of European ships will join the fray before it ends.
The Anti-Americanist
(Full of all sorts of false knowledge, strange, but unsupported and fascinating, “facts” and conspiracy theories; usually his voice breaks into pained stammering by the fourth minute of the question, which can be summarized by the following.)
Q. Why don’t you admit that this is just more of the same imperialism, and that we have killed millions all over the globe in places like Iraq, Serbia, Panama, Grenada, and Haiti?
A. U.N. sanctions hurt Iraq, but not nearly as much as did its own government, which built palaces and bought weapons while its people — according to Iraqi “journalists” — went without. Those who preferred to act militarily and unilaterally against Saddam Hussein, rather than by sanctions with the U.N. against the Iraqi people, would have incurred even greater animus from you. How odd that we were told to work with the U.N. to obtain embargos, and then, after they were implemented, they were dubbed “U.S.” sanctions. Hussein’s attacks with nuclear and biological warfare, if they reach fruition, are indiscriminate and will not distinguish you from me; the fact that we are American, free, and relatively affluent makes us the same target in his eyes.
The bombing in Serbia — against Christian butchers of Muslims — saved hundreds of thousands, as even our European critics now admit. Hundreds, not millions, were lost through American intervention in and around the Caribbean. Despite our past unpredictable policy and sometimes poor planning, most in Panama, Grenada, and Haiti confess that they enjoy life now more than they did under the tyrannies we replaced.
The Military Alarmist
(Usually half-educated, he has culled the Internet for bits and pieces about Alexander the Great and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)
Q. Afghanistan has swallowed up dozens of armies — do we really want another Vietnam?
A. In fact, Alexander the Great and the British alike were eventually successful there, and at last defeated far greater armies with their own very small forces far from home. The Russians gave up because they sought, insanely, to replace Islam with atheism — and yet after a decade quit only due to sophisticated American support to their enemies, and their own collapsing society at home. How strange that, before the bombing started, we were told that Afghanistan was too formidable to attack — and then after we obliterated much of the command and control structure of the Taliban we are now “bullying” an “asset-poor” country. That Afghanistan might be more difficult than the Gulf War hardly makes it Vietnam. In fact, so successful and brilliant have been our war-makers in the last decade that we now define a three-week war — with hundreds, if not more likely thousands, of enemy dead, and fewer than five of ours — as “protracted.”
The Islamist
(Usually a visitor from the Middle East, who mentions “Israel” in the first ten seconds of a very, very, very, long non-question, ending with . . .)
Q. America just won’t leave Islam alone. You Americans quit intervening throughout the world to hurt Muslim nations!
A. The great killers of Muslims these last decades have been other Muslims — whether in Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Palestine, or Lebanon. Indigenous theocracy, homegrown statism, and traditional autocracy — not Israel or the United States — have impoverished the masses of the Middle East. The United States has intervened out of its own self-interest, but also with the result that Muslims have been helped, rather than hurt — in Kuwait, among the backwaters of Iraq, in Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. Our great fault is that we have supported illegitimate régimes, out of an understandable fear that their overthrow might produce something like the past reign of terror in Iran and Algeria, rather than Jeffersonian democracy. Still, promotion of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan may be our only chance of salvaging a viable Middle East policy — and therein thwarting the fundamentalists, as well as the corrupt and illegitimate Arab moderates who are alike now enemies of democracy. Israel has about as much to do with the poverty in Cairo or the undernourished babies in Baghdad as does life on Mars. What exactly is your question?
The Advocate of the Palestinians
(Usually on a student visa, he raises the word “Israel” after second two, and thereafter every third second, until minute five of the question. Questioner usually announces that he is a moderate, but then proceeds to prove by voice and tone that he in fact is hardly moderate at all. He also ends with . . .)
Q. The events of September 11 are very sad, BUT only to be expected given the American bombs Israel uses to kill Palestinian children. Why are you surprised?
A. I’m not surprised, but for reasons far different from your own. American restraint and timidity, not recklessness, got us into this mess. Bin Laden, like Saddam Hussein, only mentions the Palestinians when he is desperate and near defeat. Israel — unlike its opponents — is quite able to craft its own guns and planes without our help. We deplore the killing, and in the past have supported the concept of a Palestinian state that has reasonable borders and that pledges nonviolence toward Israel; in fact, we provide over 100 million a year to Mr. Arafat and 20 times that to Mr. Mubarak, despite the animus shown America in their state-controlled papers.
But we are not stupid either. Despite American prompting, Palestine is not a democracy; it has no free judiciary, nor any history of protecting human rights. It waged its first three wars not to free the West Bank, but to destroy Israel. And we remember Mr. Arafat’s past alliance with Saddam Hussein and the present cheering in the streets of the West Bank at the news of our dead — not unlike the similar jubilation there a decade ago at the rumors that the Iraqi SCUDs landing in Tel Aviv were laden with gas. We are humans, not gods, and — like you, in fact — have a long memory. If you dislike us so, perhaps, by mutual agreement, for a year or two Americans will promise not to visit Palestine and you should not visit us. And finally, could we carry on this conversation in safety inside Palestine?
The Frightened
(Often refers to kids, suburbs, work — as if he or she alone has such concerns.)
Q. If we have the Twin Towers and anthrax now, what can we expect when we kill bin Laden or invade Iraq — nuclear bombs and smallpox in our streets and schools? How can we stop this nightmare?
A. In fact, we can, if we wish, envision all sorts of nightmares. But the anthrax was postmarked contemporaneously with the World Trade Center ruination, not after our response in Afghanistan. The enemy is going to do what it desires until it is stopped by us. Past policies of accommodation and moderation, not strong responses, have endangered our children. In every war there is always the unpredictable, but close analysis of our actions since September 11 suggests that few Americans have died and many of our enemies have and will. Kabul is a far more dangerous place than Washington, D.C., and will become even bleaker still.
Not a soul believed, in December 1941, that not a soul four years thence would claim to be a Nazi or Japanese militarist. Yet by 1945, not a soul bragged to be either — and so it will be with the Taliban and the bin Ladens, whose fate is already sealed. Such past revolutionary change in the hearts of millions was not accomplished by therapy, or by expressions of fear and guilt, but by military force, joined with humanitarian aid to the humiliated, misled, and soundly defeated. After December 1941, there was never again an attack on the homeland of the United States — but quite a lot on Germany, Italy, and Japan. By any standard of military history, our armed forces are doing a superb job under the most trying of conditions. Our edgy critics are clamoring for more movement, yet our observant enemies in the Middle East are as we speak quietly hoping that such a terrible arsenal, and the brave professionals who run it, are not turned loose against them.
The Academic
(Usually a professor of English, sometimes of political science or government, in his/her mid 50s — their long questions require a very short answer.)
Q. Like some bull in a china shop, you charge into, as it were, some in fact quite complex issues of culture, race, class, and gender in the Middle East that simply cannot be resolved by brute military force used in a very unsophisticated, unfocused, and I must say frightening way that we saw only too well in Vietnam. We have foolishly spent much of the world's sympathy accrued after September 11 in just the sort of unnecessary saber-rattling you so recklessly advocate. I have argued at length elsewhere that the United States must take very seriously complaints coming in from almost every corner of the Islamic world regarding its treatment of Muslims, from Palestine to Iraq to Saudi Arabia, and its predictable inability to hear the voices of those who by any reasonable definition are genuinely oppressed.
All too often we offer only the worst of our culture to those in dire need of basic necessities; if we must intervene in the internal affairs of others — something in itself extremely problematic, and which I remain very troubled by — it would be far better to craft a second Marshall Plan with no strings attached than to rain down bombs on children. September 11 was an unfortunate event, for which proper criminal and judicial measures — albeit with special care to prevent the ominous onset of a police state — must be addressed; but simply lashing out at suspected sympathetic governments will only compound the problem, and leave a legacy of hatred and impoverishment that will last for generations. By your logic we should bomb the havens of Boston or Frankfurt, where in fact terrorists were known to have lived quite safely.
A. Bin Laden would agree with almost everything you have said.
The Oil Conspirator
(Prefaces questions with odd bits of information about redwoods, the ozone layer, and far-distant pipelines with strange names.)
Q. I see that you deliberately chose not to tell the audience that Cheney and Bush are oil executives. Do you know anything about the oil in Afghanistan? Or why we are really in Saudi Arabia?
A. I know about as much about the oil in Afghanistan as I do about all the purported oil that was “really” in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. If our government has cozied up to corrupt oil producers like the sheiks in the Gulf, it was not to give Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney impressive stock portfolios, but more to provide cheap electricity and gas for the likes of you and me. A principled position of disengagement from the Middle East would require you, in a significant way, to extricate from our current electronic-guzzling world — laptops, SUVs, plane tickets, and vacations abroad — or to support coastal drilling off Santa Barbara and in the Arctic Circle, or to explain how hydrogen, solar rays, strong breezes, or batteries can power our cars, power plants, and aircraft this year. If our policy was solely designed to protect cheap oil, then we would not be responding in the Middle East at all — as, in fact, a number of isolationists and oilmen have cautioned.
The Ignoramus
(Most often a student activist, and the most interesting of all the questioners, since he reveals instantaneously the erosion of the American educational system during the last three decades — arrogance coupled with ignorance proving a fatal combination.)
Q. Why don’t you mention that the U.S. killed 2 million babies in Iran last year?
A. Wrong country, wrong number, wrong year — wrong planet?
This is a great column. I laughed as I recognized every old "joke."
BTTT
Keep in mind that not all leftists supported the embargo or sanctions. Many were always opposed to them and that does not necesairly mean that they supported Hussein. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the people of Iraq were relatively prosperous before the sanctions.
the present cheering in the streets of the West Bank at the news of our dead
Nor to be fair is this unlike the cheering that went on in the U.S. during the Gulf War.
And finally, could we
carry on this conversation in safety inside Palestine?
What difference does that make? Assuming for a second that the U.S. does mistreat Palestine -and that is a quite debateable proposition- do the problems of the PA give the U.S. the right to do the same. This article seems to be saying that Americans have no right to critical of U.S. foreign policy because they couldn't do that in another country. We aren't in another country. We are in the U.S.
All too often we offer only the worst of our culture to those in dire need of basic necessities; if we must intervene in the internal
affairs of others — something in itself extremely problematic, and which I remain very troubled by — it would be far better to
craft a second Marshall Plan with no strings attached than to rain down bombs on children. September 11 was an unfortunate
event, for which proper criminal and judicial measures — albeit with special care to prevent the ominous onset of a police state
— must be addressed; but simply lashing out at suspected sympathetic governments will only compound the problem, and
leave a legacy of hatred and impoverishment that will last for generations. By your logic we should bomb the havens of Boston
or Frankfurt, where in fact terrorists were known to have lived quite safely.
A. Bin Laden would agree with almost everything you have said.
Snide comments rarely make for effective answers.
Keep in mind that I am not against the war for sure. I am just questioning it and see a lot of problems with the arguments of both sides.
But you are trying desperately to set up some moral equivalence between us and the terrorist countries as if we do things like bomb other countries or enact sanctions on whims rather than concrete reasons. Nobody is going to pretend that we do everything right, but everything considered, we do very well. Simply stated the misfortunes of the lesser-off countries of the world is not our fault.
Keep in mind, that I admit to not knowing what the answer and I guess I do have some level of luke warm support for current military actions but, even if a person does not have a better plan, it is still their duty as an American to speak out against the problems in current policies.
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