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 t
stokes our fury to see or read about demonstrations in parts of
the Mideast cheering the devastation of the hijackers. The reality,
which at first brings a measure of human understanding, on reflection
makes things worse. All of us continue to cheer those moments in
movies when we see huge destruction wrought on the historic enemy:
30-seconds-over-Tokyo kind of thing, which three years later graduated
into 30 minutes over Berlin, 1945, with 25 times the deaths of September
11, 2001. The focus makes it understandable that there should be
those who jump for joy at the remarkable coordinated successes of
the hijackers, seeing them as Flying Wallendas executing death-defying
stunts in circus air.
But then we
force ourselves to recognize the perspective from which one cheered
such a thing as Hiroshima. We were at war. Some of the Mideast community
are at war. September 11, for them, was nothing more than a great
theatrical episode.
But, as with
tangos, wars require two parties. And it is time for the reluctant
party to act. But in doing so we need to take stock of our own perspective.
The enemy has one resource primarily, which is craft. Our resource
is: mass. And our problem is: where to direct that mass. The search
for bin Laden from the skies is almost certainly futile. The spectacle
of the United States dropping bombs or firing missiles at miscellaneous
mountain peaks in Afghanistan is appropriately suggested by a search
for Kandahar, where bin Laden occasionally sleeps.
But spokesmen
for the administration have given the correct signal, which is that
we have more in mind, at this moment, than mere retaliation against
co-actors in the New York/Pentagon strikes. The terrorist act of
September 11 was the fruit of a culture nourished by a hatred of
America as an aggressive infidel, and of its ways as incomprehensibly
liberal. The strain that produced Osama bin Laden is perhaps the
most toxic immediately experienced, but it isn't by any means the
whole of the plant. And it isn't a growth that would go away if
Israel ceased to exist. It is a culture fed by religious and imperial
history and by the dogged cultivation of animus. To cope with this
requires, in an age of technological weaponry, a decisive confrontation,
and the theater for this is Iraq.
It is here
and there suggested (for instance, by the writer Mark Helprin) that
what was done in New York can only be viewed as prelude to ultimate
acts of terrorism, e.g., a nuclear bomb or a pint of anthrax. This
is of course speculative, but what isn't speculative is that the
machinery of ultimate acts of terrorism is on the drawing boards
of Saddam Hussein, whose earliest nuclear program was disrupted
by an enterprising Israeli air strike 20 years ago.
We have important
advantages in making Saddam Hussein the target of massive U.S. action.
We've been at war with him, under the sanction of a United Nations
resolution that called for disabling the threat posed by the Iraq
of Saddam Hussein. We know now that we made a serious mistake in
failing to consummate the war we had engaged in under brilliant
political and military leadership. We lost the first round there,
when we called an end to the engagement before uprooting the prime
instigator of the aggression.
And we lost
it again after seven years of desultory efforts to assure that Iraq
was not at work producing atomic/biological/chemical weapons. Those
years seemed endless, and Richard Butler pleaded with the West to
pry from Hussein access to little quarries where A/B/C weapons might
be gestating.
But as with
enforcing economic sanctions against Iraq, the Western will drooped.
The U.N. commission to explore forbidden weaponry more or less folded,
job incomplete.
The approach
now should be very different. The word to Saddam Hussein should
be: We are coming into Baghdad. We will arrive in force, together
with Pakistani and Egyptian and Russian military units. Your aggressive
war of l990 and your shelter of terrorist units ever since make
you an enemy.
From now on,
enemies who are associated with terrorist activity will not cohabit
the globe with the United States of America.
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