The Enemy At Home (6 page)

I WANT TO
begin by discussing the mainstream conservative view of 9/11 that formed the basis for the Bush administration’s war against terrorism. This view is sometimes called the “neoconservative” approach, although I believe it is wrongly labeled as such. Some neoconservative strategists may have helped to devise it, but ultimately it is President Bush who adopted it and it is the Bush position that enjoys general support on the right and in the Republican Party. I recognize of course that there are dissident factions on the right, primarily the Buchanan wing of the “old right” and the libertarian critics. I will address their views later. Here I outline the central principles of Bush’s conservative understanding of 9/11.

Terrorism is the problem.
The first premise is that there is a new kind of warfare in today’s world that is substantively different from earlier types of war. The new type of war is terrorism, reflecting what President Bush called “the very worst of human nature.” What makes the new kind of war especially dangerous is that it targets civilians rather than military targets. Consequently terrorism is immoral in itself. As Bush told the United Nations General Assembly on November 10, 2001, “There is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspirations, no remembered wrong, can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent.”
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Conservatives recognize that the main perpetrators of terrorism are not nation states but independent groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas that operate across formal boundaries. Since terrorist groups often collaborate with one another, there is an international network of terrorism that poses a threat to America, to Europe, to Israel, indeed to civilization itself. “This is civilization’s fight,” President Bush told a Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. “Every nation now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Bush pledged that America would lead a “war against terrorism” to eradicate the threat posed by this international network of terrorist groups.

They hate us for our freedom.
A second key notion in Bush’s conservative understanding is that America stands for freedom and it is freedom that the terrorists envy and despise. “America was targeted for attack,” President Bush said in his first televised address after 9/11, “because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” In his speech to Congress a few days later, Bush explained the motives of bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers: “They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” One line of conservative analysis holds that many in the Muslim world lack the blessings of freedom and blame America for the self-inflicted problems of their own society. Author Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Rather than looking to itself—by emancipating women, holding free elections, opening markets, drafting constitutions, outlawing polygamy, curbing fundamentalism, insisting on secular education, and ending tribalism—the Islamic world has more often cursed others.”
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This is World War IV against a new evil empire.
The Cold War was, in fact, World War III. Now the West is engaged in World War IV, and the enemy, although different, bears a close resemblance to Nazis and Communists. Conservative commentators like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Pipes have sounded this theme, and the Bush administration has echoed it. The new adversary is, in President Bush’s view, “the heir of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century.” Here, then, is another possible explanation for why the terrorists hate freedom: like the Nazis and the Soviets before them, they are partisans of despotism and totalitarianism. Conservatives often describe the enemy as “Islamo-fascism” or, as the
American Enterprise
recently called it, “Bolshevism in a headdress.” Recalling Reagan’s “evil empire” description of Soviet communism, Bush discovered in nations like Iraq and Iran an “axis of evil” in the modern world.
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The remedy, naturally, is to defeat Islamic totalitarianism and leave it on the ash heap of history, to bring about what Richard Perle and David Frum termed (in the title of their book) “an end to evil.”

The “radicals” and “extremists” are our true enemy.
The Islamic world is divided into “extremists” and “moderates.” As conservatives like Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Pipes insist, the extremists are the ones who are against modernity. Scorning science, capitalism, and democracy, they seek to impose Islamic law across the Middle East, if not on the whole world. One version of this argument is that extremism springs out of an especially virulent religious fanaticism deriving from the Wahhabi strain in contemporary Islam. No wonder, writes Fox News anchor John Gibson, that so many of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabi Islam is officially practiced and promoted by the Saudi royal family. Others on the right maintain that power, rather than religion, is the true motivation of the extremists. The power-hungry mullahs achieve their goals by conning and manipulating young people through incentives such as the promise of an eternity in paradise attended by seventy-two virgins. Now we see why the 9/11 hijackers went so willingly to their deaths! Conservatives disagree about the degree of support enjoyed by the extremists. Bush, however, seems convinced that they are a tiny minority who “practice a fringe form of Islam.” Bush argues that the majority of Muslims in the world are moderates who follow “the peaceful teachings of Islam” and embrace “progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”
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Force is a necessary response.
Since the terrorists oppose us for who we are, not for what we do, there is no appeasing them. As British prime minister Tony Blair said shortly after 9/11, “There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror.”
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The only solution is to attack the Al Qaeda training camps, and to destroy the wider network of international terrorist groups. Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah—they should all renounce violence, or face annihilation. Even more, the war against terrorism means toppling and transforming regimes that support terrorists. The magnitude of the task suggests a long war, perhaps an unending war. While America should seek international support for this enterprise, allying with countries like Russia and Israel that are also fighting terrorism, there are cases like Iraq where America should be willing to fight the battle by itself.

Liberals simply don’t understand the threat.
Conservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration seem puzzled that liberals, who regularly profess their allegiance to the values of liberalism and democracy, seem unenthusiastic about fighting a two-fisted war against terrorism. The reason for this, conservatives surmise, is that liberals are reflexively anti-American, or that liberals simply don’t comprehend the threat. In his writings, David Horowitz has hammered unceasingly on the gullibility of liberals, and on their alleged hatred of their own country. A few right-wingers have gone even further, suggesting that liberals are traitors. Most conservatives do not share this view. Conservatives generally agree, however, that liberals are dangerously naïve in placing their hopes for peace in unending mutual dialogue, or in the procedures of the United Nations. Liberals seem to think that if America leaves the Muslims alone, the Muslims will leave America alone. Finally, liberals don’t understand the need for comprehensive programs of homeland security such as are provided for by the Patriot Act. In this analysis, liberals are so concerned with protecting our civil liberty that they are unwittingly jeopardizing our security.

The goal is a liberal, democratic Middle East.
The Bush administration is resolved that, with or without a national consensus, the war against terrorism must go on. Terrorism is seen as arising out of the dysfunctional culture of the Middle East, a culture that the Islamic radicals exploit. Therefore the ultimate answer is for the West to take up what Daniel Pipes terms the “burden of bringing Islam into harmony with modernity.” The Bush administration has adopted the view that America should work to advance the two institutions that the Islamic radicals fear most, namely liberalism and democracy. In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered on January 20, 2005, Bush declared the promotion of liberal democracy the centerpiece of American foreign policy. Every nation, Bush said, must have either “oppression, which is always wrong,” or “freedom, which is eternally right.” Bush also insisted that “the best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in the entire world.” Therefore, he concluded, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”
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Bush is convinced that it is especially important for America to promote freedom and democracy in the Muslim world. In some cases, this was to be accomplished through the use of force. In others, Bush and his allies intend to use diplomacy, economic sanctions, and other forms of pressure or persuasion. Some conservatives even seek to compel American allies like Saudi Arabia to move away from Wahhabi extremism toward liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the best remedy for terrorism, in this view, because when Muslims discover the benefits of self-government and freedom they will not be attracted to extremist groups that promote suicide bombings and violence. When that happens, Bush said in 2005, “The flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end.”
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As prosecuted by the Bush administration, America’s long-term strategy is to undermine support for extremists by converting Muslims into liberals, and autocratic states into democratic states. The conservative hope is that if this strategy shows signs of working, the vast majority of Americans will unite behind the project to promote liberal democracy abroad.

THERE ARE ELEMENTS
of truth in the conservative account, but it contains serious flaws that have inhibited understanding and helped produce a confused policy that has failed to win broad public support. Here I examine three of these flaws, although others will emerge in the course of this book. If the war against terrorism is lost, it will be because the Bush administration and its conservative allies never really understood what they were up against, and therefore never carried out the strategy necessary to defeat the adversary.

First,
terrorism is not the enemy.
In the previous chapter I noted that terrorism is not an adversary; terrorism is a tactic that is sometimes used by the adversary. Even Al Qaeda should not be understood exclusively as a terror group or franchise. Primarily it is a combat training enterprise whose training camps in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere were used to develop paramilitary fighters. Several of Al Qaeda’s attacks, such as the bombing of the U.S.S.
Cole,
were clearly aimed at military targets and can hardly be called “terrorism” in any meaningful sense. Even on 9/11, bin Laden’s goal was not to kill civilians per se but to strike out at the symbols of America’s economy (World Trade Center), America’s government (the White House or the Capitol), and America’s military (the Pentagon). Although 9/11 is routinely described as a terrorist attack, can anyone seriously maintain that the Pentagon was not a military target? Yes, there were civilians on the planes but the purpose of hijacking planes was not to kill the civilians on board but to use the winged juggernauts as flaming projectiles to destroy the intended symbolic targets. Whether those who happened to be in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon happened to be civilian or military seems incidental to the planners. Moreover, would 9/11 have been less an act of war had the World Trade Center been unoccupied at the time of the attacks?

I do not deny that bin Laden wanted to kill noncombatants. We saw him on the videotape rejoice over the large number of civilian deaths. Undoubtedly he would have been even more delighted had thirty thousand rather than three thousand perished in those attacks. So I am not objecting to the characterization of 9/11 as terrorism. I am simply drawing attention to the wider scope of Al Qaeda, and to the fact that terrorism is simply one feature of its declared war against America. This is also true of the insurgency in Iraq. While it is quite willing to kill civilians, mostly Shia, the insurgents would prefer to kill American soldiers. Their strategy is not terrorism for its own sake but to make Iraq ungovernable and to push the country toward civil war. The objective is to topple the elected government, and drive America out of Iraq.

A further problem with the notion of a war against terrorism is that it provides a misleading framework for understanding the post-9/11 world. In particular, this framework has encouraged the Bush administration and many conservatives to describe as “terrorist” causes that cannot be dismissed in this way, and thus to make enemies of people who pose no real danger to the United States. Since 9/11, whenever there is trouble in the world—the Bali bombing, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Madrid bombing, the Chechen uprising, the Kashmir conflict, the London bombing—the Bush administration recalls 9/11 and cries out, “Terrorism!” Now some of these episodes—the Bali bombing, the Madrid bombing, and the London bombing—are terrorism in the classic sense. But there is a crucial distinction between those cases, on the one hand, and the conflicts in Palestine, Chechnya, and Kashmir, on the other. These latter cases involve wars of self-determination, disputes over legitimate title to land and rule. In these situations it is preposterous to dismiss the merits of one side’s claims by simply chanting “terrorism.” No one can deny the horror of Palestinian and Chechen attacks on civilians, but these have to be measured against the state-sponsored terror on the other side: the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the shooting of stone-throwing teenagers, the obliteration of the Chechen capital of Grozny (involving innumerable civilian casualties) by Russian troops. The issue here is not merely one of moral symmetry, or the need to assess the culpability of both sides. It is that the Bush administration is making deadly foes of groups that have no reason to seek to harm America, until they discover that America is taking sides against them.