|
 hy
is the United States battling some 7,000 miles across the globe,
in a sea of chaos, against terrorists hidden among caves, mosques,
and sympathetic villagers, with unsure friends and few real allies,
at a time of domestic recession — and as global opinion wavers
for and against us, depending upon our relative military success
or failure of the hour?
I.
Survival
The first answer,
of course, is security. No nation can long survive if it cannot
defend its citizenry from attack — which can come at any time
and end the work of centuries in a blink. After 400 years, the Greek
city-states ceased to be autonomous in one afternoon once they were
routed by Philip of Macedon on the plain of Chaeronea. The Confederacy
in days was exposed as a pipe dream when it could not keep William
Tecumseh Sherman out of its heartland. A France that was saved in
ten months of hellish sacrifice at Verdun was later lost in six
weeks in the Ardennes during the spring of 1940.
Unless our
nation proves to Americans that they will not be slaughtered at
work in their greatest cities — and to the terrorists that
a single such attack on the United States is synonymous with their
annihilation — it can no longer be as it once was. Rather than
snickering and triangulating, the elites of Europe should learn
from this present crisis — an intersection of history that
makes the Falklands or a former colony's troubles in Africa look
like child's play. Should bin Laden have blown up the Eiffel Tower
or poisoned the Rhine — and he could still do both yet —
what would, or could, a France or a Germany have done to stop more
of such massacres and to avenge thousands of its dead? Would the
requisite three or four EU aircraft carriers exist — much less
now be in waters off Pakistan with thousands of French and German
youths sending jets off into the night for their 1,000-mile sorties?
Or would there be the necessary hundreds of European bombers to
hit terrorist camps with bunker busters in the caves of Afghanistan?
If yes, exactly how and by what means? If no, why not? The answers
to these embarrassing questions of security in a world suddenly
turned upside down are not mere abstractions, but age-old and very
real issues of nationhood that will not simply disappear in the
months ahead.
Unlike our
past interventions abroad of the last half-century — Korea,
Vietnam, Libya, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf, or Kosovo — Americans
are not engaged in a global chess game to check totalitarianism
or even just to punish dictators and terrorists. Rather for the
first time in 60 years we are trying to prevent evil men from killing
thousands more Americans in unprovoked attacks upon our shores.
In that regard, despite the relative ease in which we have routed
the Taliban, the present struggle marks the most important test
of our national survival since Pearl Harbor.
Either we shall
win and thereby ensure the safety of our citizens working in skyscrapers
in San Francisco, as tourists at the Hoover Dam, or as neighboring
residents of nuclear power plants, or we shall not. And if the terrorists
prevail through the disruption of American transportation, tourism,
and the postal system, the paralysis of our government, and a general
descent of psychological uncertainty and fear among our citizenry,
then we will soon resemble the chaos of a third-word country with
only a technological veneer of civilization. Or — through concessions
such as disengagement from Israel and a withdrawal of troops from
the Middle East — perhaps at best we can salvage ourselves
as a Switzerland, at worst a Vichy France.
II.
The Departed
In an age of
sophistication and affluence it is easy to ridicule notions of revenge
as Old Testament absolutism or simple unenlightened Neanderthalism.
In truth, a pledge to the murdered that we shall avenge their deaths
is the age-old currency of civilization, security that human life
is deemed precious and violators of that most basic creed liable
for the ultimate payment for their barbarity.
Socrates reminds us that true evil is not punishing wrongdoers,
but instead failing to do so. For all the controversy over the death
penalty, both supporters and critics can at least agree that the
elimination of murderers keeps them out of the public mind and allows
some attention to return properly to their victims. For many months
now we have not had to watch any more special reports about Timothy
McVeigh, hear his family and friends swear that he was really a
decent individual, learn of movie deals, magazine articles, or memoirs,
or suffer further televised nonsense about his supposed psychological,
behavioral, or developmental problems. No, he is now at last gone
to meet a greater and final justice elsewhere, and we can properly
at last return to a humane remembrance of the poor innocent men,
women, and children he murdered.
So it will
soon be with al Qaeda. With bin Laden and his henchmen dispatched,
there shall be no more inane debates about the cover of Time
magazine, televised trials, or speculations about what set him off.
Instead, he shall join the rubbish heap of the past, along with
the so-called Great Mahdi, the Japanese militarist General Cho,
Pablo Escobar, and all the other assorted killers, fanatics, and
perverts who constitute the F-troop of history's obscure and unsavory
battalions. We can then turn to better times and better things for
our energies, such as memorials for the dead, plans to rebuild what
has been lost, and mechanisms to ensure that no such further travesty
reoccurs.
III.
Civilization
Third, we fight
for our civilization, which is apparently as misunderstood as it
is so unfairly attacked. We practice constitutional government through
the consent of the citizenry, resulting in a freedom that is not
merely the de facto result of sparse demography or open spaces such
as the nomadic Zulu or Sioux once enjoyed, but rather arises from
rights and responsibilities that are spelled out, voted upon, and
self-enforced. Such freedoms derive from the careful work of the
ages and are not mere transitory accidents of population density,
geography, germs, or fleeting custom. Americans are thus free to
worship, to pursue economic liberty apart from government, and,
most importantly, to speak, write, and think without constraint,
which in practical terms means to criticize authority — or,
as Aristotle says, "to do as you please." Our military
is run by civilians; American society is three-tiered, not pyramidal
with a small elite tottering over impoverished helots below; in
the West science and education are secular, not embedded within
or audited by the mosque, temple, or church.
Western society
at its worst has also suffered from the same age-old sins of human
nature prevalent everywhere and at every age — racism, sexism,
tyranny, economic exploitation, and the like. But unlike the Native-American,
Asian, or African traditions, the West has at its core the vital
salvation of self-criticism — an introspective rational inquiry,
ensuring that the extent of freedom is always an evolving and debated,
rather than a static, idea. The West ended slavery; it still exists
in parts of Africa. It gave political and social parity to women;
a half-billion Muslims mostly lack it. It sought to redress ethnic,
religious, and racial strife; thousands each month are tortured
and die from it across the globe.
Because of
that very strength of our civilization, Americans are concerned
with gender bias in hiring, not suttee or arranged marriages; of
investigations into police excess, not Rwandan genocide; of possible
effects from second-hand smoke, not epidemics of malaria, intestinal
parasites, or hookworms. Americans are of any hue; yet it would
be hard for a blond to become accepted as a real citizen of China.
Women are not secluded, murdered with impunity in acts of "male
honor‚" or with state sanction singled out for death at
infancy. We offer heart-bypasses to our citizens, not allow them
to perish from tetanus. Americans debate the propriety of the pledge
of allegiance and school prayer, rather than have presidents in
uniforms with chests of cheap medals and a Congress of lash-bearing
preachers and priests who brawl in the aisles.
Even our critics
silently acknowledge all this, and so as novelists, journalists,
and academics vote with their feet to gravitate to or reside in
the West. South Korea is ten times wealthier than North Korea; Hong
Kong was once far freer than Peking. Mexicans, not freezing Canadians,
flee into the United States. And Muslims wait patiently to get into
England; rarely do Europeans queue up for resident visas at the
Algerian embassy.
So for all
the popular invective at Western establishments, no radical feminist
wishes to live among the Taliban. Al Sharpton would find the racial
politics too rough in Zimbabwe. The Princeton English faculty could
not take it at the University of Teheran. Gays would not last long
as such in Saudi Arabia; nor would campus Marxists find their Starbucks
in Hanoi or Havana. And would community activists feel all that
safe being pulled over by police in rural Mexico or urban Singapore?
Such liberality
and a 2,500 year-old respect for the individual are what we seek
to protect in this war — and not only for ourselves. The West
also offers hope to shrouded women in Afghanistan, talented novelists
in Iraq, and religious reformers in Iran, all of whom have had their
freedom curtailed and their dreams crushed by their own local bullies,
cranks, and illiterate thought police. This promise of the West
is an idea specific to no race, sex, or religion — and so is
precisely what bin Laden hates and would surely like to destroy.
IV.
Sense of Self
Finally, this
struggle reminds us that we have been liberated from indifference
about what it means to be American. Our enemies despise us not merely
out of purported grievance and envy, but in large part because they
have no respect for either our past modesty or predictable expressions
of guilt over our success. Far from being ugly chauvinists, we have,
in fact, for years been overly apologetic Americans — afraid
to tell even our worst foreign critics that there are real reasons
why millions seek to emigrate here and why few Americans —
or anyone else — wish to move over there.
In the nick
of time, we are at last making it clear not merely to the terrorists,
but to the world as well, who we are and who we are not. By our
actions we are showing to the world exactly what we are going to
sacrifice in defense of the culture we have created — a rare
gift from Athens and Rome, Jerusalem, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
and the Founding Fathers that we will not dare barter or parley
away to a gang of medieval killers. And if neutrals in the Middle
East, if allies in Europe, and if internationalists at the U.N.
cannot see what is at stake, then so be it, and we shall and must
go it alone — but history will show thereby that the shame
is on them, not us.
|
