| September 11, 2001 |
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| Written by Daniel Treiman | |||||
| Sunday, 09 June 2002 | |||||
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For some the world didn't change In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Brooklyn rabbi by the name of Yaakov Perlow remarked: "Today, the world is not the same as it was yesterday. If we are the same as we were yesterday, then it is pure folly." For some people, however, it's still business as usual. Students have organized anti-war protests on college campuses across the country. Anti-war flyers have begun appearing around New York City. Their message: "no more killing," "war is not the answer," "stop the cycle of violence" etc. These are mantras, uttered reflexively and without real thought--and they should be recognized as such. Their underlying assumption seems to be that the path of non-violence is always morally superior to waging war. History, however, teaches that sometimes it's wrong not to wage war. Rather than fight Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain promised "peace in our time." And we all know how that turned out. Today's anti-war protesters also fail to realize that we have actually been at war for quite awhile, but until September 11, our losses had not been great enough for us to summon the will to confront this harsh reality. Our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the USS Cole, and now the World Trade Center and Pentagon--all demonstrate that failing to respond decisively to terrorism only yields more attacks. Osama Bin Laden long ago explicitly declared war against America (and all Jews). His camps in Afghanistan train terrorists to murder innocent American civilians. He has reportedly attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction--even experimented with them in his camps--and after September 11, we can only assume his followers would not hesitate to use them. Despite our pleas, Afghanistan's de facto government, the barbaric Taliban regime, has long refused to turn over Bin Laden or shut down his camps. Is knowingly providing a safe harbor from which Bin Laden can wage war against us not an act of war? Would the anti-war protesters have us leave Bin Laden and Al Qaeda unmolested in their camps, free to develop more horrifying ways to kill Americans? Perhaps some of the protesters are driven by legitimate concerns as to whether we will pursue our war against terror with prudence and caution. But many others would simply oppose any use of American force, no matter how necessary. Nor does the blindness of many of the anti-war protesters end with their reflexive pacifism. Some simply cannot digest the reality that on September 11, America was an innocent victim of evil. Instead, our nation's self-flagellators insist that we somehow brought this tragedy upon ourselves. A generous critic might attribute their stance to a morally blind relativism--a relativism that simply rejects terms like good and evil out of hand. And they do fancy themselves moral sophisticates. Note their revulsion whenever President Bush casts the war on terrorism as a battle between freedom and evil. Of course, failing to recognize evil when you see it is not a sign of moral sophistication. But attributing the madness of the self-flagellators to relativism is actually letting them off too easy. Our nation's self-flagellators do at least condemn the recent terrorist attacks. (For which they deserve no credit--it is not a particularly hard thing to do.) But for them the "root cause" of terrorist attacks is invariably some legitimate grievance. And these legitimate grievances are invariably the result of American misdeeds. Hence, implicit in their position is the notion that America is the ultimate fount of evil. (That's why they counsel us to pursue social justice as an alternative to war, as if we would live in a terrorism-free world if only we unilaterally decided to be a better-behaved country.) This is not relativism; this is anti-Americanism. Nevertheless, let us take the self-flagellators seriously for a moment and look at their specific charges. What crimes do they say we committed that have so inflamed the Muslim world? They blame US-supported sanctions for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. They condemn us for our support of Israel, citing the toll the occupation has taken on the Palestinians. They allege that our trade policies create the economic misery in the Arab world that fosters extremism. They note that we ally ourselves with undemocratic and repressive Arab regimes. Never mind that Osama Bin Laden has made clear that the mere presence of American troops ("infidels") in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia--which clearly doesn't qualify as a misdeed--is what angers him most. Never mind that the United States tried to ease sanctions on Iraq, and Saddam Hussein resisted our efforts to do so. Never mind that terrorism continued unabated during the period when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was still alive. Never mind that fanaticism in the Muslim world is in large part the cause of its economic backwardness and not just the other way around. Never mind that the terrorists want more repression not less. And never mind that America took military action to defend Muslims in Kosovo. In any case, would America's self-flagellators really prefer that Saddam Hussein, armed with biological or nuclear weapons, controlled the world's oil supply? Would they prefer that we left Israel alone to fend for itself in a sea of enemies? No, the United States is not perfect. We have done things that are indefensible, sometimes without the purest of motives. Has America done more bad things on the world stage than, say, Switzerland? Of course. But have we also done far more good than Switzerland? Of course. And these two facts are not unrelated to each other. A country that is engaged on the world stage as a force for good will inevitably be forced to make difficult decisions. And it will err sometimes--both morally and tactically. Moreover, even the pursuit of noble goals will sometimes necessitate having unsavory allies (Stalin in World War Two, the Mujahideen during the Cold War, and now some pretty vile Arab regimes in our war on terror). Does this mean we should withdraw from the world stage to salve our self-flagellators' consciences (which are acute to the point of obtuseness)? Of course not! That would be an abrogation of our moral responsibilities to the world. Yes, American mistakes and misdeeds (as well as those of our allies such as Israel) do add fuel to the fire of Islamic extremism. And yes we should always strive for a more just and enlightened foreign policy. But it is worth remembering that the terrorists hate us for our virtues as well as our vices. (And they hate Israel's existence more than they hate the occupation.) Indeed, the fury of the Islamic extremists, as Paul Berman noted in The American Prospect, is as much rooted in fantasy as it is in real grievances. But none of this really matters to America's self-flagellators. For them anti-Americanism is also not a reasoned response to reality--it is a matter of faith. And no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, they will always be able to scour our imperfect world and cobble together some facts to support their indictment of America. I had thought that maybe the events of September 11 would shatter the twisted faith of the self-flagellators. But they are still the same as they were yesterday. What folly.
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