Americans were killed, not because
the attack was "cowardly" or "senseless".
Granted, we had not declared war with any
parties in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, but our
soldiers were present on foreign soil and -
regardless of the accuracy of the local assessment
- many Lebanese and Saudis saw no distinction
between peacekeeping and occupation. In fact, a
crucial factor explaining why we viewed these two
attacks as terrorism is that the idea of "going to
war" with the whole of Lebanon or Saudi Arabia was
absurd.
So the soldiers and their patrons
in America did not view their presence in Saudi
Arabia and Lebanon as an "occupation"
and
certainly
not as domination. After all, "we were asked" to
help Lebanon and Saudi Arabia by their own
governments, Americans always insist.
Unfortunately, this comment also reflects the
American cultural assumption that a government has
the support of its people, but most nations in the
Middle East are plagued by painfully clear fault
lines that are seldom straddled by their
governments. And regardless of an obvious
intercultural clash about what constitutes
terrorism, even within our American culture, if
terrorists are repulsive to us, then it is not
because they target civilians.
The fact
that we are still shocked when our soldiers die in
inhospitable environments is a frightening
testament to our ease with warfare and to our
belief that war need not (and should not) burden
Americans with any costs. War has become so normal
and mundane to us that we call these attacks
terrorism because we do not feel like we are at
war, and so we naturally believe that the attack
"came out of nowhere".
Under such
conditions, we could never be prepared to make
sacrifices in the name of a war we do not even
know about. In an interview with the Hebrew daily
Ma'ariv, Salah Arouri, the founder of Hamas in the
West Bank, recently argued that Israelis - whose
resentment of terrorism bears significant
resemblance to our own - tout equally inconsistent
rules of war:
The entire Israeli nation asks how
[a captured Israeli soldier] feels, how he
lives, what his problems are. [They] ask how we
can hold him. [But] he is a soldier. He was
taken from a tank. He was not a tourist. He sat
in the tank with his gun aimed at Gaza. So
what's all the excitement about?
Contextualizing the
boilerplate There are several reasons why
many terrorists might insist that what they are
doing is actually brave, honorable, and deserving
of negotiation, but their reasons are less
important to this analysis. Nevertheless, the
differences between the divergent cultural
approaches as to what constitutes fair warfare
illuminate how the American approach developed and
continues to solidify today, especially within the
context of the wider "war on terror".
Like
many other cultural traits, the American outlook
on fair methods of warfare is both a cause and
effect of America's ascendance to the top of the
geopolitical food chain. Even before 9/11,
Americans had a very precise resentment of terror
methods, and the current "war on terror" only
cemented that resentment in a historical
framework.
Since the end of World War II,
the only perceived and genuine threat to American
national security has been the Soviet Union. It
became impossible to talk about strategic defense
without also talking about space-based missile
defenses, intricate spy networks within the
Kremlin, and covert operations to keep Soviet
expansion at bay.
To defeat the communist
giant, we employed our inherent virtues of freedom
and hope, which we honed so well during our moral
triumph over Nazi Germany, when we saved the world
from a thousand years of misery.
After
four decades of adding nuclear deterrence and
proxy wars to our moral and ideological momentum,
our resilience finally paid off in 1991. High from
our victory, not only did we start to believe that
we could defeat anything, but far more worrisome,
we believed that we could do so with conventional
means. Why continue tweaking a method that worked
well enough to defeat our only strategic threat?
Few of these observations are original,
but among many smaller factors, our vast
experience facing a truly overwhelming threat
molded our perception of what warfare is supposed
to look like, and what it does look like. More
importantly, we excelled at this global game of
chess. We adapted to threats, and like most
victors in war, we prided ourselves on the skills
that we acquired in order to defeat the enemy.
Granted, most of the elements in American (and
Western) culture regarding warfare predate the
Cold War, which helped shape - and was also shaped
by - these cultural attitudes.
And rather
harmoniously, our modern concepts of courage and
honor echo their ideological ancestors, embodied,
for instance, in the fearsome warriors of Sparta,
the chivalrous knights of Europe, and American
generals literally leading their men on the front
lines of our Civil War. It was our bravery and
honor - we seem to believe - that have brought us
to where we are today, against all odds and
enemies.
Yet these disparate influences on
our concept of warfare have now culminated in a
period of our cultural history that does not fit
particularly well with our geopolitical fortune.
Most cultures view their forebears as underdogs
who miraculously prevailed because of a long list
of virtues. But when that underdog finds itself
alone at the top of the junkyard heap, narratives
often change considerably. And we were no
different. Not only are we having trouble
reconciling our own dominance with our underdog
rhetoric (from a theoretical point of view), but
we are therefore jumping even greater hurdles in
our attempts to apply this contradictory outlook
to our national interests throughout the world.
One way, for instance, that we reconcile
our power with our morality can be seen in the
change in our narrative - throughout the last
century - from being the underdog to defending the
underdogs across the globe who cannot defend
themselves against the oppression of tyranny.
As the world's "lonely superpower",
America's strategic threats during the 1990s were
so minimal that we could afford to examine
frightening (though hardly existential) threats,
like terrorism, which ironically is far more
difficult to prevent than a mighty Soviet
invasion. The events of 9/11 were a stark
awakening to a nation whose concept of power had
been left behind in the dust. After nearly a
half-century of staving off a nuclear holocaust at
the hands of an enigmatic and sophisticated enemy,
how could our unchallenged grasp of global power -
and our very sanity - be leveled to its
foundations by a motley crew of cave-dwellers from
some god-forsaken land in central Asia?
Only adding to this overwhelming sense of
impotence, the absence of any centralized
retaliation target left us drooling for blood,
only to be told that our skies were falling
because of an enemy that was paradoxically nowhere
and everywhere at the same time. And so began the
"war on terror", which has since targeted a
particular method of warfare because there has
been no credible strategic enemy for the US to
oppose.
Even if al-Qaeda destroyed
Manhattan with a dirty or sophisticated nuclear
weapon, our civilization would continue.
Undoubtedly, such an event would be disastrous and
terrifying; it would traumatize much of the
country for decades, and we should do everything
in our power to prevent it from happening. But
this is nothing compared to the threat of nuclear
holocaust (with the Soviets) or even a focused
holocaust like that of World War II.
Absent the threat of such an endgame, the
only rhetorical basis for a war would be the
perpetrators' means of attack, namely terrorism.
For perspective, consider how bizarre it would
have been for the French in 1940 to beg the
invading Nazi army to humanely refrain from
attacking at night, as the French children were
having trouble sleeping. If Charles De Gaulle had
proposed that idea to the other members of the
French Resistance, they would have probably
reminded him that they have significantly larger
problems to worry about than peaceful sleep, like
survival.
No one cared how Germany
invaded; that they invaded at all was terrifying
enough. As traumatic and devastating as 9/11 was,
it did not come close to threatening the very
survival of our civilization. Because the endgame
was not a worry in 2001, it was reasonable for us
to focus on the means our enemies employed. But
even still, we do not recognize that we are
warring against a form of war itself, not some
credible threat to our existence.
Without
question, however, 9/11 stoked a legitimate fire
in us all, and it continues to blaze. But without
an enemy who rivaled our power - and with all that
rage boiling over - we had to attack something,
and to fill the void, that something needed to be
broad and ambitious. The invasion of Afghanistan
only weeks later sated our thirst for retribution,
but it hardly alleviated the incessant sense of
doom and vulnerability from another 9/11-style
attack, which had been so low-maintenance that it
passed under the radar screen.
The
unsophisticated nature of our enemy's methods on
9/11 was another source of humiliation and
frustration for Americans. We hated the idea that
our enemies could take advantage of our
technological prowess, and then use it against us.
We were so far ahead of the enemy's curve that we
could not anticipate its primitive nature, for
whatever reasons. Al-Qaeda mocked us with its
reliance on a technology that we had invented, and
nearly a century ago, no less.
While
Americans shared a precise concept of terrorism
long before 9/11, there was a distinct shift in
the paradigm: until that day, terrorism was
dismissed as a "despicable" means of achieving
political goals, but one that would never pose a
threat to our psychological state of mind - one
that was supposed to plague distant war zones, not
America's skylines. Now, however, despite the
absence of a credible threat - and no follow-up
attacks on our homeland - terrorism is still
perceived as the primary threat to our way of
life.
With a broader perspective, even if
America's sense of strategic vulnerability has
shifted focus from a Soviet escalation to Islamist
infiltration and terrorism, neither our attitudes
nor our tactics have caught up to the perceived
threats, and without a balance between the two,
the "war on terror" will continue to fail. We will
always be vulnerable as long as we fool ourselves
into thinking that we hate - and have declared war
on - terrorism for its methods. Put bluntly, we
hate terrorism because we are exceptionally
vulnerable to it, and naturally this prospect is
rather terrifying to a nation that considers
itself both invulnerable and morally deserving of
invulnerability.
NEXT:
The star-spangled delusion
David Young is a fellow at
Abraham's Vision and graduate student at the
Institute for Conflict Resolution at George Mason
University in Arlington, Virginia. He has studied
and participated in conflict resolution and
peace-building projects in the Balkans, the
Caucasus, Israel/Palestine, West Africa, Northern
Ireland and Kashmir. He can be contacted at (Copyright
2008 David Young.)
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