States of Mind

”Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I…should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way---but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!” Henry James, 1914.


Once the initial anguish and anger over the 9/11 attacks have lost their immediacy, if they have not already, our nation’s responses to those attacks will be seen as having immeasurably more historic weight than the attacks themselves. This, it seems fair to surmise, is exactly how the terrorists would have it; if a single horrific attack on the American mainland would lead to a reaction that would perhaps fatally undermine America’s standing in the world, the barbarity and moral bankruptcy of the attacks themselves would, fairly or not, fade into the chloroform.
This is jiu-jitsu in its most elemental form; when attacking a superior enemy, goad him into using his own weight and inertia to bring himself down, since you could not possibly achieve such a result directly through your own comparable weakness.

In the 1970’s Chou Enlai was asked what he thought the historical ramifications of the French Revolution of 1789 had proven to be. He responded that, “it is too soon to tell”. After only five years, it is obviously far to early to glean the ramifications of 9/11, but at this admittedly myopic vantage point of 2007, it appears to have been a textbook jiu-jitsu strike by al-Qaeda. Joshua Walker put it best when he said that bin Laden’s strategic goal was not the fanciful destruction of the United States and the Pax Americana, but simply “to get the ball rolling.”

We should all take great stock in the recent revelations that, prior to 9/11, there were rifts within al-Qaeda over the strategic wisdom of the planned assaults. One faction, which in our paradigm would be termed “realist” or “pragmatic” or “conservative”, included one of bin Laden’s sons. This group felt that the 9/11 attacks would deliver short-term spectacle and long-term misery. The true target, they held, should be the “near enemy”, namely the despotic secular regimes of the Islamic, and especially Arab, world. According to this school, attacking the American mainland would ensure the destruction of al-Qaeda’s Afghan safe havens at the hands of the American military.

The other, ultimately victorious, faction held that the group’s best interests would be served by a catastrophic attack in the very bosom of the “far enemy”, the United States. In our paradigm, these terrorists would be “internationalist liberals” or “romantic” or “naïve” or, perhaps, “neo-conservative”. “Forget fighting them here”, this group said, “let’s fight them over there”. This group, headed by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, won the internal battle.

It seems clear that for the organization known as al-Qaeda, as it existed on 9/10, the 9/11 attacks were a tactical masterpiece and a strategic train wreck; the 9/10 al-Qaeda is no more. The people personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks were for the most part dead or in American custody before 2001 was out, and al-Qaeda no longer had a sanctuary in Afghanistan. However, just as the individual hijackers gave their lives on 9/11 for what they considered to be an honorable cause, so did al-Qaeda. It seems to me that we must entertain the idea that al-Qaeda knowingly committed institutional suicide on 9/11, with the calculated gamble that the American response to the attacks, or the lack of the same, would somehow give their ideology, if not their physical organization, a new lease on life.

So, the 9/11 attacks were carried out, after al-Qaeda engaged in more internal introspection than did the United States Congress before invading Iraq. Our reaction against its infrastructure and support networks in Afghanistan was the most morally unambiguous use of violence that this country has engaged in for at least 60 years. The long-term strategic mistake by the United States government, however, arose before the war in Afghanistan. The Global War on Terrorism, as defined, is inherently unwinnable.

Such an ambitious declaration was, in a way, inevitable. Americans are given to ambition and zealotry; it is our greatest strength, but is also sometimes employed in cynical attempts to obscure the fact that we are not omnipotent; we are good, not perfect. Winning the Global War on Terrorism, a world war against a tactic, rather than a political institution, would require perfection. This is one way for a power to fatally undermine itself; set out an impossible goal, inevitably fail at it, and compromise your own standards and credibility in the process.

The beautiful thing about being an American is that, with relatively rare exceptions, I need not ask which side is “right” in war. While war itself is inherently wrong, it is just as surely prevalent. The United States, since 9/11, has invaded two nations with governments that could not be argued by any rational person to be in any way comparable to the government of the United States. The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq were murderous, despotic, medieval, and genuinely revolting to all standards of secular humanism as well as any modern interpretation of morality. In other words, the wars that the United States waged against Afghanistan and Iraq were never about which government was more just.

This was the crippling obstacle to the anti-war movement in America during the run up to the war in Iraq. The enemy was so inarguably vile that other, far more important concerns were obscured in the long and dark shadow of this fact. The fundamental question that was obscured before the invasion of Iraq was not whether the condemned government was worth defending, but whether our own motives and strategy were sound. The evil of Saddam Hussein should have been seen as completely inconsequential to whether the invasion of Iraq made any sense for the United States. Saddam would last weeks; how long would Iraq last?

Counselors for patience in Iraq, as well as proponents of the invasion who turned against the occupation, have all constructed their analyses around an incredibly weak assumption. All policy has been formulated with the assumption that people who live in Iraqi territory consider themselves to be Iraqis first and foremost, if at all. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the 20th century history of the Middle East knows that said assumption is far from safe.

The original rationale for the war has long since fallen apart. The Bush administration’s rationale for war was presented as being a terrorist / weapons of mass destruction nexus in Ba’athist Iraq. The vision held that removal of the dictatorship would lead to democracy and an absence of terrorists and WMD in Iraq.

When the Bush administration presented its evidence of terrorists in Iraq, it cited 1 or 2 retired thugs. How many international terrorists are now in Iraq? To be conservative, thousands. Not even the most passionate supporter of the policy in Iraq can possibly argue that the invasion of Iraq resulted in a decrease of terrorists in Iraq.

The WMD didn’t exist, so that’s off the board. Would that it were all so easy.
As for democracy, the American military, which was never trained to do the job they have found themselves tasked with doing in Iraq, has done a commendable job in guiding a process in which several legitimate elections with high voter turnout were conducted in a relatively brief period of time. This triumph has been overshadowed by the fact that, although elections were held, trash was not picked up. Lights and air conditioners and incubators and refrigerators did not work.
People were murdered in broad daylight for selling ice, which was deemed a betrayal of the faith since ice did not exist in the time of Mohammed.

The abject failure of providing security surely has been, in large part, the fault of the US occupation. It has been in larger part, however, the fault of Iraqis. Political correctness and insipid relativism should not hide the truth about the violence in Iraq. However many Iraqis have died since the US invasion, it is clear that most of them were killed by other Iraqis.
Does anyone actually think that if all forms of American law enforcement disappeared tomorrow that Americans would start carrying out suicide bombings and beheadings against other Americans? I don’t really believe that “Iraqis” are any more inherently violent than anyone else. They just really, really, really don’t like each other. Remember when Americans really, really, really didn’t like each other? 1860-ish? What did we call that?

To construct a frame of reference for what has happened in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, the most recent relevant precedents took place in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia. Out of the ashes of the Soviet Union, many newly sovereign nations emerged. Why was this transition relatively bloodless, while the aftermath of equally cataclysmic regime changes in Yugoslavia and Iraq were marked by spasms of the worst imaginable manifestations of violence?

We would do well to consider the unprecedented moral bravery exhibited by the Soviet leadership upon the demise of the Soviet Union. The USSR was immeasurably larger and more powerful than Yugoslavia or Iraq, to say the very least. It was a global superpower that held the means to destroy the vast majority of humanity in minutes. Not only was it unprecedented in the annals of history for such a power to voluntarily allow its government to be overthrow by peaceful, democratic means, but there was another, equally important decision taken. That decision was to dissolve the USSR itself as a political entity.

The leadership understood that the state itself was a political fiction that could not possibly be maintained in a democratic system. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Byelorussians, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Georgians, Albanians, and Lithuanians had never voluntarily chosen to live in the Soviet Union, nor would they ever do so. Therefore, rather than face the inevitable bloodletting that would have resulted from an attempt at coercive unions with mother Russia, the satellite states were given independence. Not only did the communist party cede control over the Soviet Union, they ceded the very idea of the Soviet Union itself as a political entity.

After the end of communism in Yugoslavia, which was not subject to direct Soviet rule, an attempt was made to preserve the political fiction of the Yugoslav state. Yugoslavia can be seen as a microcosm of the USSR. Rather than Uzbeks and Ukrainians suffering under Russian dominance, Yugoslavia was characterized by Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims dominated by Serbs. Unlike their Russian counterparts, the Serb overlords insisted on preserving the artificial union by force.

When addressing the situation in Iraq, all policies proffered so far by the American government are fundamentally insufficient due to one inescapable fact. It is possible, if not probable, that Iraq, like Yugoslavia, existed on the map but not in the hearts and minds of the center of gravity, which is the population of the country in question.