The present war, if that is the correct word, mayvery well be, as President Bush has observed, a war of a new kind--the "first warof the twenty-first century." But in one important respect, the present war alsoappears to be--and this, too, the president has hinted at indirectly--a war of anold kind, perhaps even the last war of the twentieth century. The terror assaultwas an astonishing event, but also a familiar event. And so it is possible, byglancing at the century that has just passed, to hazard a few guesses about thetorrent of events that is already pouring over us.
The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long agobecame old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For ahundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comfortingsentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality andorder were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, andmodernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by theWestern imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greaterlandscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. ButWorld War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, andthe outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And aseries of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on theidea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to bea lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror.
The antiliberal movements took root in Europe and in small degree even in theUnited States. As the years went by, though, those same movements spread to otherplaces and eventually to every remote spot where Western culture had alsospread--that is to say, almost everywhere. The antiliberal movements flourished inseveral different versions, sometimes in versions that seemed utter opposites ofone another. The Communist insurgency in Russia, dating from the world waritself, was merely the first. Then came Italian Fascists, German Nazis, theSpanish crusade to re-establish the Reign of Christ the King, and so forth, eachcountry producing movements of its own based on local mythologies and customs.Antiliberal movements of the left and the right saw in one another the worst ofenemies (except when they saw one another as allies and brothers, which didhappen). Yet each of the movements, in their lush variety, entertained a set ofideas that pointed in the same direction.
The shared ideas were these: There exists a people of good who in a just worldought to enjoy a sound and healthy society. But society's health has beenundermined by a hideous infestation from within, something diabolical, which isaided by external agents from elsewhere in the world. The diabolical infestationmust be rooted out. Rooting it out will require bloody internal struggles, cappedby gigantic massacres. It will require an all-out war against the foreign alliesof the inner infestation--an apocalyptic war, perhaps even Apocalyptic with a capital A. (The Book of the Apocalypse, as André Glucksmann haspointed out, does seem to have played a remote inspirational role in generatingthese twentieth-century doctrines.) But when the inner infestation has at lastbeen rooted out and the external foe has been defeated, the people of good shallenjoy a new society purged of alien elements--a healthy society no longer subjectto the vibrations of change and evolution, a society with a single, blocklikestructure, solid and eternal.
Each of the twentieth-century antiliberal movements expressed this idea in itsown idiosyncratic way. The people of good were described as the Aryans, theproletarians, or the people of Christ. The diabolical infestation was describedas the Jews, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, or the Masons. The bloody internalbattle to root out the infestation was described as the "final solution," the"final struggle," or the "Crusade." The impending new society was sometimespictured as a return to the ancient past and sometimes as a leap into the sci-fifuture. It was the Third Reich, the New Rome, communism, the Reign of Christ theKing. But the blocklike characteristics of that new society were always the same.And with those ideas firmly in place, each of the antiliberal movements marchedinto battle.
The wars that ensued, one after another in the decades after World War I,likewise shared a number of characteristics. Certain of the antiliberal movementssucceeded in capturing a national state, from which they launched their wars in amore or less conventional manner: thus, the Nazis in Germany and the Communistsin Russia. It was possible, as a result, to describe the twentieth-century warsin nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century terms--as wars of nation-states againstone another, perhaps in alliance with other nation-states, bloc versus bloc. Butthe antiliberal movements were never fully synonymous with national states. TheFranco-Prussian War of 1870 was genuinely a war between national states in theold-fashioned style.
But the war between France and Germany in World War II was complicated byNazism's ability to call on sympathizers and co-thinkers all over Europe,including in France--which is one reason why the French went down to defeat.Communism was likewise an international affair, even if simpleminded analysts onthe anticommunist side found it comforting to picture communists all over theworld as mere agents of a reconstituted Czarist Empire. Likewise the Warriors ofChrist the King, who may have described themselves as narrow nationalists butnonetheless drew their support and even their Warriors from all over the Latinworld. And the twentieth-century wars displayed one other pertinent trait. Theliberal side in those wars, the side that stood for a liberal and democraticsociety, was never entirely sure of itself.
The liberal side was internally divided. On the liberal side, there werealways people, sometimes in large numbers, who suspected that the antiliberalsmight be correct in their view of liberalism and might even have justice on theirside. And so the twentieth-century wars were ideological in a double sense. Therewas the struggle of liberalism against its enemies; and there was the struggle ofliberalism against itself, a self-interrogation, which was liberalism's strengthas well as its weakness.
The present conflict seems to me to be following the twentieth-century patternexactly, with one variation: the antiliberal side right now, instead ofCommunist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist andIslamic fundamentalist. Over the last several decades, a variety of movementshave arisen in the Arab and Islamic countries--a radical nationalism (Baathsocialist, Marxist, pan-Arab, and so forth) and a series of Islamist movements(meaning Islamic fundamentalism in a political version). The movements havevaried hugely and have even gone to war with one another--Iran's Shiite Islamistsversus Iraq's Baath socialists, like Hitler and Stalin slugging it out. TheIslamists give the impression of having wandered into modern life from the 13thcentury, and the Baathist and Marxist nationalisms have tried to seem modern andeven futuristic.
But all of those movements have followed, each in its fashion, thetwentieth-century pattern. They are antiliberal insurgencies. They have identifieda people of the good, who are the Arabs or Muslims. They believe that their ownsocieties have been infested with a hideous inner corruption, which must berooted out. They observe that the inner infestation is supported by powerfulexternal forces. And they gird their swords. Their thinking is apocalyptic. Theyimagine that at the end they, too, will succeed in establishing a blocklike,unchanging society, freed of the inner corruption--a purified society: the victoryof good. They are the heirs of the twentieth-century totalitarians. Bush saidthat in his address to Congress on September 20, and he was right.
It is worth remarking how often an antipathy for the Jews has recurred inthese various movements over the years. Nazi paranoia about the Jews was anextreme case, but it would be a mistake to suppose that Nazism was alone in this.At the end of his life, Stalin, the anti-Nazi, is thought to have been likewiseplanning a general massacre of the Jews, of which the "doctors' plot" was aforetaste. The Nazi paranoia, just like Stalin's, was owed strictly to ancientsuperstitions and especially to psychological fears--the fears that were sparkedby the mere existence of a minority population that seemed incapable of blendinginto the seamless, blocklike perfect society of the future. The Arab radical andIslamist antipathy to the Jews naturally displays a somewhat different quality,given that, this time, the Jews do have a state of their own. And where there ispower, conflicts are bound to be more than imaginary. No one can doubt thatPalestinians do have grievances and that the grievances are infuriating. Israelhas produced its share of thugs and even mass-murdering terrorists. It has evenmanaged, at this of all moments, to choose as its leader Ariel Sharon, whoseappreciation of Arab and Islamic sensibilities appears to be zero. In these ways,the Israelis have done their share to keep the pot boiling.
Even so, how can it be that, after 120 years of Arab-Zionist conflict and morethan 50 years of a Jewish state, the hostility to Israel seems to have remainedmore or less constant? For Israel's borders have been broad, but have also beennarrow; its leaders have been hawkish and contemptuous, but have also been dovishand courteous; there have been West Bank settlements, and no West Banksettlements; proposals for common projects for mutual benefit, and no proposals.There have even been times, such as the 1980s, before the Russian immigration,when most of Israel's Jewish population consisted of people who had fled to Israelfrom the Arab world itself, instead of from Europe. And not even then, in aperiod when Israel, in its dusky-skinned authenticity, could claim to be agenuinely third-world nation, did the Israelis win any wider or warmeracceptance. Why was that, and why is it still?
It is because the anti-Zionist hostility may rest partly on the hard terrainof negotiable grievances; but mostly it goes floating along on the same airycurrents of myth and dread that proved so irresistible to Nazis in the past. Theanti-Zionist hostility draws on a feeling that Arab and Islamic society has beenpolluted by an impure infestation that needs to be rooted out. The hostilitydraws, that is, on a lethal combination of utopian yearning and superstitiousfear--the yearning for a new society cleansed of ethnic and religious difference,together with a fear of a diabolical minority population. Does that sound like anunfair or tendentious description of Middle Eastern anti-Zionism? The curses ofthe clerics, the earnest remarks of the presidents of Syria and Iraq and othercountries, the man-in-the-street interviews that keep appearing in the press andon radio--these are not pretty to quote. Even now the newspapers in parts of theIslamic world are full of stories claiming that the World Trade Center wasattacked by (of course) a Jewish conspiracy. And so, the Arab and Islamic worldburns with hatred for Israel in part because of issues that are factual, butmostly because of issues that are phantasmagorical.
No one should doubt that hatred for the United States likewise draws, in somedegree, on real-life terrible things that America has done to the Muslim world.But to what degree? The United States is resented for supporting Israel. Thenagain, President Clinton did spend eight years trying to help the Palestiniansnegotiate a state--and hatred for the United States seems to have abated not onebit. Everyone agrees that America is loathed for its 10 years of fighting againstSaddam Hussein. Yet there is reason to suppose that without military oppositionfrom the United States the dictator who slaughtered 200,000 Kurds in northernIraq would go on with his slaughters, as he has promised to do. (And he may yet.)
In any event, America was not always at war with Saddam; and in the antebellumage, anti-Americanism throve even so. America is resented for propping upautocracies such as the one in Saudi Arabia. And yet a Saudi collapse, if such athing occurred, might well bring to power still worse despots whose governmentwould inflict still more pain on the Arab masses. Or perhaps, as is sometimessaid, America is resented because America's power, regardless of our intentions,ends up perpetuating Christendom's attacks on Islam from long ago--the medievalwars of the murderous Crusades. And this resentment is understandable; but it isunderstandable only in the realm of myth. In the Balkans during the 1990s, whenthe Serb nationalists invoked a medieval Christian zeal and set out to massacreand expel the Kosovo Muslims, the United States went to war--on the Muslim side.This seems to have done nothing to improve America's reputation in the world ofthe Islamists and the radical Arab nationalists.
It is because America's crime, its real crime, is to be America herself. Thecrime is to exude the dynamism of an everchanging liberal culture. America islike Israel in that respect, only 50 times larger and infinitely richer and morepowerful. America's crime is to show that liberal society can thrive and thatantiliberal society cannot. This is the whip that drives the antiliberalmovements to their fury. The United States ought to act prudently in the MiddleEast and everywhere else; but no amount of prudence will forestall that kind ofhostility. And this should not be news. For the radical nationalist and Islamistmovements are not, as I say, anything new. Movements of that sort are a realityof modern life. They are the echo that comes bouncing back from the noise made byliberal progress. And this should tell us truths about the struggle that hassuddenly fallen upon us.
One of those truths has to do with the terrorist tactics. In the middle 1960s,when the various groups within the PLO launched their disastrous war onIsrael, the word terrorism by and large connoted the actions of a guerrilla army--small-unit strikes against the Israeli military. But terror evolved, and in recent years the terrorist method among Palestinians has consisted mainly of attacking random groups of civilians, who appear to have been selected because of their numbers and vulnerability. Discos and pizza parlors have replaced the army stations of yore. And this is also true of the Islamist and Arab nationalist terrorists in France and in Argentina, who in the 1980s and 1990s hurled their bombs wherever they could find a large enough crowd of ordinary Jews.
The violent acts that are conventionally described as terrorism againstAmerican targets have followed the same trajectory, starting with targets thatwere strictly military (the 1983 truck-bomb attack in Lebanon on the U.S.Marines, who were trying to protect one group of Lebanese from another; the 1995attack on the U.S. Army base in Saudi Arabia; the attack on the USS Cole in the waters off Yemen last year) and advancing to targets that may have been governmental but were certainly civilian (the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in which large numbers of ordinary people, especially Africans, were killed). But the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, together with the subsequent foiled plan to blow up New York's subways and tunnels and throw bombs in midtown Manhattan, already showed where the trajectory was heading.
Some people have argued that the terrorists chose to attack the WorldTrade Center for a second time because the towers were a symbol of Americanpower. Perhaps so, though it would certainly have been possible, in that case, toattack other symbols with even greater fame--the Statue of Liberty, for instance.But how many people would have been killed at the Statue of Liberty? A mere fewhundred tourists and workers. The Trade Center offered one of the greatestconcentrations of ordinary people to be found anywhere in America. And in thisgrisly fashion, Islamist terror against the United States has ended up outdoing,in the scale of its murders, even the Palestinian terror against Israel. It isworth asking if there is anything genocidal in this kind of terrorist impulse.
Someone might reply that murdering several thousand people in the UnitedStates cannot be compared in sheer numbers to other massacres--Saddam's gassingof the Kurds, for instance. Yet nearly everyone seems to grasp intuitively thatif the anti-American terrorists were to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, theywould use it at once, and may perfectly well be planning such a thing even now.The word genocidal may go too far, but there is nothing excessive in observing that, like Hitler's Nazis and other such groups, these modern movements do seem to be entranced with slaughter for slaughter's sake. Nor do their motives and personal style set them apart from totalitarians of the past. It is not any kind of material desperation that pushes these people forward. It is a species of idealism, even piety. The terrorists in the United States were men with excellent German and American educations--flight-school alumni, no less. Their leader, assuming it is Osama bin Laden, is a multimillionaire. These are not the wretched of the earth. And so, given the strength of their beliefs, we can assume that the struggle will go on for years. Bush was right to make that point in his address to Congress. And if, in their grotesque fashion, the terrorists are idealists, what are we?
We are, to begin with, naïfs, and of the worst sort. That much iscertain, given what we have discovered about our own security arrangements andintelligence. (Even now the Senate has voted up a far-fetched and whollyirrelevant missile defense, instead of, say, voting up 10,000 new securityguards.) And the naïveté goes on from there. It isnaïveté that has already led any number of commentators to go on ahunt for possible ways to minimize the dangers we face. There is an impulse todescribe our enemy as a mere handful of people, perhaps a few dozen--far toosmall a number to merit the kind of opposition that could be called a war. Howreassuring that would be--to learn that our enemy has the dimensions of a smallstreet gang! It may even be true that, at least in regard to the attacks ofSeptember 11, only a few dozen people were involved. But that would be likesaying that Pearl Harbor was attacked by merely a few hundred Japanese pilots.
Some people have emphasized that, so far as we know, not one of the nationalstates in the Middle East or anywhere else seems to have been directlyresponsible for the attacks. Thus it is said that without the involvement of anational state, we cannot properly speak of something as capacious as war (as ifwars can take place only between national states--when the great majority of warsin recent years have been, in fact, civil wars, meaning, conflicts in which onlyone side possesses a state). This is another way of making the same minimizingpoint: that we are not facing any kind of substantial or well-organized enemy,even if we have suffered a disastrous blow. But we are facing a substantial andwell-organized enemy. Our enemy is the combat wing of radical and Islamistmovements that are genuinely enormous.
Those movements are supported by clerics and businessmen. They are protectedby the apologies of the shrewdest of intellectuals. They deploy worldwidenetworks of organizations. They enjoy popular support not just in one or tworemote places--a support that is strong enough to have pushed one state afteranother into an ambiguous attitude toward those movements: not willing toendorse, and not willing to suppress, either. The few dozen people who arethought to be responsible for September 11 could be arrested or killed, and Osamabin Laden could end up captured or strung from a tree--and even so, with popularenthusiasm and political and intellectual structures to back them up, theterrorist assaults would very likely continue. For the assaults were alreadyunder way before bin Laden entered the scene, and there is no reason they couldnot continue without him.
There is a great deal of liberal and left-wing naïveté about thismatter in the United States, and not just there. But there is also a conservativeand right-wing naïveté, which may be still greater and is much graverin its possible consequences. (And I'm not even bothering with the Jerry Falwellsof this world.) It should be remembered that George Bush the Elder was anythingbut astute about the dangers in Arab radicalism. Saddam Hussein would never havebeen able to invade Kuwait in 1990 if Bush the Elder had been on his guard. AndSaddam would never have been able to survive his eventual military defeat if Bushthe Elder had not decided to let him go. I have always wondered why the elderBush was so easily taken in by Saddam. Maybe the Texas oil connection hadsomething to do with it. Perhaps Bush had too many friends in Saudi Arabia,instead of too few, and the Saudi friends (being halfway implicated in thesemovements themselves) advised him to go easy. I don't know; I am speculating.
In any case, the first days after September 11, it seemed that Bush the Youngerwas likewise tempted to view our present conflict through a minimizing lens. Hiscall for bin Laden to be delivered "dead or alive," Wild West-style, struck avery odd note. Dick Cheney, in a similar mood, acknowledged to a televisioninterviewer that he would like to see bin Laden's head "on a platter"--quite asif our enemy were a lone bad guy, someone like Manuel Noriega or a cowboy banditwho ought to be brought in, limply slung across the saddle of a horse. The tonein those comments--a jaunty braggadocio, hinting of Hollywood--was worrisome allby itself. Then Bush delivered his September 20 address to Congress, and thespeech turned out to be serious in presentation, realistic in its account of thecomplex nature of the enemy--an admirable speech. But the remarks about theWanted poster and about bin Laden's head on a platter popped from Bush's andCheney's lips spontaneously, whereas a very clever speechwriter wrote Bush'saddress to Congress. It has been hard to know which set of phrases expresses thetrue thinking of the administration.
The genuine solution to these attacks can come about in only one way, which isby following the same course we pursued against the Fascist Axis and theStalinists. The Arab radical and Islamist movements have to be, in some fashionor other, crushed. Or else they have to be tamed into something civilized andacceptable, the way that some of the old Stalinist parties have agreed to shrinkinto normal political organizations of a democratic sort. The solution, in short,lies in effecting enormous changes in large parts of the political culture of theArab and Islamic world--the sort of transformation that can be achieved, if atall, only after many years or even decades of struggle, and not through anysingle decisive strike. It is a transformation that would require a vast range ofactions on the part of the liberal world--military and commando raids when necessary and possible, constant policing, economic pressure, and much else, allof it conducted under the kind of urgent and relentless mobilization that does gounder the label of "war" and not with the kind of modest activity that might fitunder the mild name of "policing." Is there any serious person who doubts theneed for covert action today?
But what is troubling is the alacrity and even the enthusiasm with which theclandestine measures have lately been discussed, as if the main obstacle standingbetween us and freedom from terrorism consisted of legal inhibitions on theCIA's ability to assassinate its enemies. For neither the most ruthless ofcovert actions nor the most gigantic of military actions, veritable D days inthis or that part of the world, will entirely rid us of terrorism--as theIsraelis, who are greater experts than we, can certainly tell us. A few dozen oreven a few thousand fanatics might conceivably collapse under the weight ofviolent repression. But we are dealing with movements of millions, who can onlybe persuaded, not forced. We need the Arab radicals and Islamists to adopt a newoutlook--not all of them, but enough to discourage the others. And what mightbring about such a change? It would have to be something like the pressure thatencouraged the communists of Eastern Europe to adopt new outlooks of their own:the pressure of a long Cold War (which was sometimes hot), culminating in thepressure of dissidents and critics at home, whose persistent campaigns andsuperior arguments made the Communists lose heart. And the long campaign againstArab radicalism and Islamicism that has now begun will have to resemble the ColdWar in yet another respect. It will have to be a war of ideas--the liberal idealagainst the ideal of a blocklike, unchanging society; the idea of freedom againstthe idea of absolute truth; the idea of diversity against the idea of purity; theidea of change and novelty against the idea of total stability; the idea ofrational lucidity against the instinct of superstitious hatred.
Bush did insist on the importance of ideas in his speech to Congress. It wasastonishing to hear him touch on such a theme (though he didn't mention actuallydoing anything to further our ideas). On one point, he was exceptionallyeloquent, and not for the first time, either. He went out of his way to salute theMuslims of America--even though here and there, in a few reactionary mosques inBrooklyn or in Texas, it would be possible to dig up some of the social bases ofIslamist terror. He honored the overwhelming majority of American Muslims and ofArab Americans who do not share the radical or Islamist ideas, and he spokeagainst ethnic and religious prejudice and praised Islam. And by doing all ofthat, he made clear to our own society and to the world and even to our enemiesthat ours is not a racist or a bigoted fight (which it had better not become). Hetried to show that Islam can survive in a liberal environment and that ferventbelievers do not have to turn in radical directions simply to uphold theirreligious identity--a crucial point.
But this is the same Bush who appointed John Negroponte to be ambassador tothe United Nations--an ambassador who comes to his new post trailing an abysmalrecord of official mendacity and a murky relation to the darkest of deeds. Atleast, that is Negroponte's reputation among some of us who constituted theCentral America press corps back in the 1980s, when he served as ambassador toHonduras. (The New York Review of Books recently published a concise account of Negroponte's Central American career, written by Stephen Kinzer of The NewYork Times.) At the United Nations, we need right now someone who can summon the nations of the world to a principled alliance for liberty and law. Bush has appointed an ambassador whose every speech will make those words seem like lies. It is as if, in his heart of hearts, Bush is a man given to Hollywood jauntiness and a cult of dark adventure, but now and then a wise adviser catches his attention, or a skillful writer hands him a well-considered speech to read aloud, and then a second Bush suddenly speaks up, who turns out to be a man of thoughtful principles.
The Bush administration is likely to go on wavering between thosepoles--sometimes principled and penetrating, other times drawn by the lure of thesimple and by a cowboy romance of ruthlessness. That is our misfortune, and theworld's. Those of us who worry about the administration's instincts anddeficiencies will have to decide how to behave now. Of course, we should criticizethe administration when appropriate, and we will. But the most important thing wecan do is to try to make up for the deficiencies ourselves, to articulate certainpoints in our own voice, and to promote our own idea of what the present war willhave to be about, whether the administration joins us in doing so or not. Weshould say that in putting up a struggle against the terrorists and against themovements that support them, we are defending public safety in the short run,which will have to be everyone's business now. But we should also explain that wewant to defend public safety in the long run, which can only be achieved bysecuring and spreading liberty and democracy. We should explain that one day evensome of our enemies will want a free society in their own part of the world, andon that day those people will be our friends. We ought to acknowledge that in themeantime America may well end up undergoing sufferings on a scale that can neverbe evoked by a modest word like "policing." It is not that we have chosen war; ithas chosen us, and all we can do is behave correctly under the circumstances. Buta glance at the past ought to steady our nerves. For one day the liberty that weenjoy will be enjoyed also in those portions of the Arab and Islamic world thatlack it now, and liberty for them will mean safety for us.
