What Are We Fighting For?
Reasons to go on.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
January 7, 2002 8:30 a.m.

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.