Although
it is far too early to tell, it looks like the grand-scale invasion of Afghanistan
– and virtually the entire Middle East – envisioned by our more
aggressive warhawks is
not about to happen. While the President's speech to Congress clearly
identified the Taliban as a threat right up there with "fascism, Nazism,
and totalitarianism" (this latter a euphemism for Communism), his secretary
of state is ratcheting down the bellicose rhetoric and focusing in on the
fundamental military problem of how to respond to the September 11 atrocity.
With respect to the nature of the regime in Afghanistan, that is not uppermost
in our minds right now," he said. I'm not going to say that it has become
one of the objectives of the United States government to either remove or
put in place a different regime.
The
gasp of disappointment that greeted this news could be heard all the way from
Washington, where Bill Kristol was fulminating
that the President and his secretary of state had gone defeatist before the
war on terrorism had even begun.
"What
is going on here?" Kristol demands to know. I'll tell you what's going
on, Bill. Our secretary of state sees the trap the wily bin Laden set for
the US – and it is one that he has no intention of springing. For a massive
US military intervention, an invasion force, could not be unleashed without
seriously destabilizing the entire region – undermining the very governments
whose cooperation is essential to any purely military response to the September
11 atrocity.
While
the Defense Department rushed bombers to the area, it wasn't clear, exactly,
where they would strike. Kabul? This city is hardly the center of support
for the Taliban, which is explicitly anti-urban, and in any case Osama bin
Laden & Co. won't be among the casualties. But none of this matters to
Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives,
who recently published their
own set of war aims in a statement circulated by the Project for a New
American Century. Among their goals is the military invasion of not only Afghanistan,
but also Iraq, and even Syria. This view, upheld by deputy defense secretary
Paul Wolfowitz and implicitly backed by his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, appears
to have lost out, at least for the moment, and Kristol is furious. In a piece
for the Washington Post ["Bush
Vs. Powell," September 25], he avers:
"One
might say that Powell's remarks simply reflect the natural perspective of
a secretary of state. But of course Powell had the same distaste for large-scale
wars in 1990. Then, in the run-up to Desert Storm, Powell worried, in accord
with his Powell Doctrine, that the American people were not united for war
behind the first President Bush (as they were not). Powell did his best to
persuade President Bush not to wage that war against Saddam.
"Now
the American people are united, but the Powell doctrine has gone global. Talk
of war might fracture the global coalition that we have assembled. That coalition
is key to this war against terror – as long as it never becomes an actual
war. Powell seems now to be as sensitive to global public opinion as he once
was to what he took to be American public opinion."
What
kind of a person does not have a distaste for large-scale wars, or,
indeed, wars of any scale whatsoever? One might believe that such a war was
necessary, and justified, and yet feel a strong distaste at the prospect.
This is the natural reaction of ordinary decent human beings, but the neocons
are far from ordinary (I won't speculate on their decency). While the rest
of us are content to live out our mundane little private lives, these large-domed
Deep Thinkers are consumed with visions of "national
greatness" – a state never fully attainable, it seems, until
and unless the nation is at war. Surely the announced objective of the Kristolian
foreign policy – "benevolent
world hegemony" – is not achievable by any other means.
Kristol
assumes that the American people are united behind his war aims, almost
as if the GOP 2000 presidential primary had had a different outcome, and he,
Kristol, had been installed in the White House by John McCain, his favored
candidate. But isn't it up to the President of the United States, and not
the editor of a dinky little subsidized neocon magazine, to announce the nation's
war aims? You might think so, but, then again, one whose goal is "world
hegemony" is better off without either a sense of proportion or modesty.
The
great divide between Kristol and Powell is the difference between armchair
generals and the real thing. The latter looks at the problem of how to respond
to the mass murder of September 11 in purely military terms. In order to reach
the perpetrators and their support network, the US must secure the full cooperation
of neighboring countries – the very countries whose governments are bound
to be undermined by precipitous US military action. Tightly focused on his
mission – cornering and destroying the terrorists – Powell's perspective
is oriented toward practical results. Go in there, get them, and then get
out. Kristol, however, and his chorus of warmongering pundits and politicians,
have a whole other agenda, that has little if anything to do with the original
provocation. John McCain has already declared that Bush's war "will be
a failure if it leaves in place the regime that aids and abetted these acts
of war against the United States." But how will installing a new King
on the Afghan throne avenge the worst terrorist attack in American history?
A
military response to the devastating attack on the WTC and the Pentagon is
not only appropriate, it is required: as many pro-war correspondents have
pointed out, especially the ostensible libertarians, military defense is,
arguably, the one legitimate function of government. But this does
not settle the question of how to respond, and against whom. In the
days following September 11, the Defense Department rushed squadrons of bombers
to the region, even before a vital question had been asked: Where do we drop
the bombs?
Kristol's
answer is: everywhere from Kabul to Damascus. What is needed, he says, is
a "broad" campaign to eliminate the terrorist threat. A more rational
answer is implicit in Powell's focused approach, which has a specific and
achievable goal: not the conquest of the Middle East, but the smashing the
terrorist network associated with Al Qaeda. The libertarian approach to this
whole question is roughly approximated by Powell's apparent stance: military
force is justified in self-defense, but only in proportion to the initial
act of aggression – and only against the actual aggressors. Carpet-bombing
Kabul, as Kristol and some elements within the Defense Department are clamoring
for, would put us on the same moral level as the devilish mad bombers of bin
Laden's suicide squad, who wantonly slaughtered 6000-plus. Talk about moral
equivalence – it is the "hawks" who are guilty of this, not
those of us who put the events of September 11 in some historical context.
In
a powerful editorial
for the prestigious and popular Nightly Business Report on PBS, the
conservative economist Walter Williams warned us that politicians are taking
advantage of this terrible tragedy to do what they are driven to do: increase
their own power: "The true threat to liberty comes not from terrorists
but from our political leaders whose natural inclination is to seize upon
any excuse to diminish them." On the international level, the same strategy
is being utilized by many of the same people to advance another kind of agenda:
the radical acceleration of our interventionist foreign policy.
The
interventionist response to the massacre of September 11 is to launch a massacre
of our own, albeit on a much larger scale. Theirs is an agenda of military
conquest, to go in and stay in – to spread "democracy" throughout
the Middle East, to impose it by force of arms – and, coincidentally,
make the world safe for Israel. On the other hand, the anti-interventionist
response is quite different: it is roughly congruent with Powell's arguments,
as expressed to date, that we need to go in, kill 'em, and leave – without
playing into Osama bin Laden's hands. For the radical Islamists would like
nothing better than a full-scale invasion of the Middle East, as recommended
by Kristol – all the better to spread his jihad far and wide.
It
suits bin Laden to a tee that the US government is refusing to make public
the alleged evidence pointing to the Bearded One's culpability, and once again
the American secretary of state is on the right side of this question. It
was Powell, reportedly, who argued to release the evidence, while the Defense
Department and the intelligence community held out for keeping it "classified."
On this front, at least, it looks like Powell is losing out. This means, perhaps,
that some day, a young boy will ask his mother: "Why did Daddy have to
die in the Afghan War?" And she will answer: "I'm sorry, son, but
that information is classified."
To
point out that it is a mistake to garrison thousands of American soldiers
on the Saudi peninsula does not justify the destruction of the World Trade
Center: it only helps us to understand why it happened. To hold that it does
not serve American interests to unconditionally support Israel hardly justifies
terrorism. To say that the continual bombing of Iraq is a war crime is not
to engage in "moral equivalence" – it is to state a fact glaringly
obvious to the Arab "street" and Muslims all over the world. To
point to the sources and inspiration of bin Laden's movement is not to prettify
it but to analyze it: for only by such sober analysis will it be possible
to rip up the terrorist network by its roots. Those roots are ideological,
in the conviction that the American and British "crusaders" are
out to destroy Islamic civilization: to go in there, as neocon columnist Ann
Coulter suggests, and forcibly "convert them to Christianity."
Thanks, Ann, for sharing that: that's one point on which you and Osama bin
Laden seem to agree.
The
non-interventionist solution is not a pacifist response, but it doesn't engage
in overkill, either. After releasing the evidence against Osama bin Laden
and his followers – or whoever – we need to go in and take
them out. The conquest of the Middle East, or even Afghanistan, needn't enter
into it. An attack on our own soil must be meant with retaliation swift and
sure: but what kind of retribution is it that demands we go in and
engage in "nation-building" as
neocon columnist James Pinkerton suggests? It seems like an open invitation
to terrorists everywhere: just blow up a few major American landmarks, and
we'll rebuild your nation for you! Was a loopier idea ever conceived?
No,
much better to strike – and leave. For that is the lesson of this horrific
event, the overriding conclusion imposed on us by the sheer horror of it all:
let us be done with this nest of Middle Eastern vipers. Let them keep
their lousy oil: we can drill elsewhere, in Alaska, in South America, off
the California coast if need be. Let them fight among themselves as to whether
the Holy Land is to be called Palestine or Israel. Why is this any of our
concern? Here's a concrete solution to our problem, one that can be enacted
immediately with overwhelming public support: Let us close our borders to
all immigrants, and impose an absolute moratorium until further notice. The
perpetrators of this sickening crime were legal residents of the US, in some
cases, or else sneaked into the country under the current lax regime.
The
massive intelligence failure that made September 11 possible can be fixed
– some seem to think – by throwing money at the problem and a quick
change of personnel. But the real failure, here, is of our interventionist
foreign policy. In Osama bin Laden, yesterday's anti-Communist "freedom
fighter," the virtual embodiment of that policy has come back to haunt
us. A military strike, limited to liquidating the guilty parties, can take
care of our immediate problem: but, in long-range terms, a change in our foreign
policy is the only possible solution.
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