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 LIKE
PRESIDENT BUSH and the vast majority of the country, I’m for a targeted
war that tries hard to avoid civilian casualties, Islamic blowback and
other unintended consequences. And I’ll defend forever the right of anyone
to say any stupid thing without being fired or hassled by the authorities.
But some of what’s being said can truly try one’s patience, and I’m not
just talking about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s “Blame Homosexuality
First” approach to explaining the attack.
The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly
artist analyzing politics. The New Republic’s “Idiocy Watch,” which is
cataloging the fatuities, is full of the musings of novelists.
Best-selling writer Barbara Kingsolver, confused by the patriotism around
her, asked in the San Francisco Chronicle whether the “flag stands for
intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and
shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Whom are we calling
terrorists here?” |
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Talk about
ironic: the same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape
cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it.
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This mindless moral equivalency is the nub of what lefties mean when they
talk about “the chickens coming home to roost,” or “reaping what you sow.”
Talk about ironic: the same people always urging us to not blame the
victim in rape cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked
for it. A haughty Susan Sontag made it sound as if we were the ones
being thickheaded for not seeing that Sept. 11 was a perfectly
understandable response to years of American policy.
Obviously, some policies—like the United States’ stationing
troops in Saudi Arabia—have contributed to Osama bin Laden’s rage. But
there’s a big difference between understanding Islam and the history of
the region, which we need much more of, and understanding evil, which is
not just offensive but impossible.
Sad to
say, the line between explaining terrorism and rationalizing it has been
repeatedly breached by a shallow left stuck in a deep anti-American rut.
For certain (fortunately powerless) tenured radicals and antiwar vets,
this post-Vietnam reflex seems as comfortable as an old sandal. |
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While most Americans view history through a “Greatest Generation”
World War II prism, this remnant remembers how wrong that analogy was for
Vietnam. The left was on target then: for years the United States refused
to negotiate much with the communists out of a misplaced fear of seeming
to be Neville Chamberlain-style appeasers.
But history moves on, even for aging ideologues heavily invested in the
past. “National security” is not a government cover story anymore, but a
genuine problem. The terrorists we’re looking for aren’t pathetic little
pamphleteers, like the American communists targeted in the Red Scare.
Reactionary left-wingers are still so busy thinking the CIA is malevolent
that they forget to notice it’s incompetent; so busy nursing stale
resentments that they forget to notice someone is trying to kill them.
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“The causal business is really pernicious,” says Peter Awn, a
professor of Islamic religion at Columbia who says it results from
ignorance of the complexities of the region. “People are going back to the
one area they know something about—the Israeli-Palestinian struggle—and
that’s a shame. It shows their ability to understand the rest of the
Islamic world is minimal.”
The trick is to
learn some lessons from the past without implying that we had it coming.
We’ve done that before. After World War II our leaders saw that the
punitive Versailles peace treaty following World War I had helped pave the
way for Hitler. So we tried the generous Marshall Plan instead and it
worked. But that came later. Only a fool would have given credence to
Hitler’s grievances, however legitimate a few of them were, while we were
fighting him. |
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And none but a fool would say, as the novelist Alice Walker did in
The Village Voice, that “the only punishment that works is love.” We’ve
tried turning the other cheek. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
we held our fire and treated the attack as a law-enforcement matter. The
terrorists struck again anyway. This time the Munich analogy is right:
appeasement is doomed.
America Firsters
grasped this point after Pearl Harbor and the isolationists ran off to
enlist. So why can’t Blame America Firsters grasp it now? Al Qaeda was
planning its attack at exactly the time the United States was offering a
Mideast peace deal favorable to the Palestinians. Nothing from us would
have satisfied the fanatics, and nothing ever will. Peace won’t be with
you, brother. It’s kill or be killed.
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© 2001 Newsweek,
Inc.
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