Before September 11, we were one country. Now we are
another. In the old America, we were self-assuredly
embarking on what was actually a very strange and forked
road. On the one hand, our new administration was
promoting globalism and free trade. On the other, it was
pursuing a policy of isolation and disengagement. It had
more-or-less withdrawn from the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Our national defense was being refocused on two things: a
massive reduction in our conventional armed forces, and the
creation of an anti-missile shield. We were in the process of
simultaneously encouraging open borders while at the same
time withdrawing from our foreign military commitments.
Now the administration has changed direction, at least to a
degree. It still professes not to be in the business of nation-
building, but the notion of essentially dismantling the US
military appears to have been tabled for the time being.
The Attorney General has asked for unprecedented new
powers of surveillance. Freedoms that we have enjoyed since
the beginning of our contry promise to be compromised in
order to make the country safe from terrorism. The cost of
these programs is going to be so enormous that it is going to
return the United States, once again, to the kind of deficit
financing that we knew during the years of the cold war.
But is there a better way? Is there anything we can do to
avoide what would appear to be a sad sort of a future for
Americans: living in constant fear of terrorist attack,
surrounded by all sorts of security measures--waiting, quite
frankly, for the inevitable time when irresponsible parties
gain the ability to deliver nuclear weapons by stealth into our
cities.
Unless we act against the root causes of terrorism, further
outrages are inevitable, and along with them an ever more
draconian security system. What is worse, so much nuclear
material has disappeared from various great powers over the
last few years that it is probably inevitable that people
desperate enough to use the bomb are going to get it.
They will not deliver it via ICBM. It will come in a van, or a
doomed airliner, or some black ship stealing into an innocent
harbor. If its owners are very lucky, the bomb will destroy
Washington, in an instant changing history, possibly
bringing about the ruin of our republic.
I don't think that this is likely to happen tomorrow. If
terrorists had the bomb available to them, they would not
have been taking the risk of trying to comandeer airplanes
and destroy the World Trade Center, or attempting to buy
crop dusters and such in an effort to deliver biological and
chemical weapons.
Of course, I could be wrong. One of the unfortunate things
about the current situation is that there just isn't any way to
tell where we stand in all of this. It could be that we will
receive a nuclear ultimatum tomorrow.
Even if we don't however, unless we address the root-cause
of terrorism, which is despair, we will never be able to be
secure again, not ever, and with each passing year, the
danger will get worse.
We have been made less free by this attack. If we are ever
able to regain those freedoms, we must do our part to relieve
the despair that brought it about. There were suicide
bombers on those planes, just as there are suicide bombers
stalking the streets of Jerusalem, because it no longer
matters to them when they will die. They have traded
hopeless, worthless lives for brief moments of pain, and what
they believe will be an enternity of happiness. What kind of
trade is that? Of course there will be more people willing to
give their lives to the terrorist cause.
As long as that cause exists, we will continue to be attacked,
our freedoms will continue to be eroded in defense of our
safety, and one way or another, we will eventually suffer
even more grevious harm than we have so far experienced.
One's tendency is to attempt to place blame, to find culprits,
to set out to redress wrongs. A great nation is horribly
maimed. It fixes on a particular individual and sets out to
eliminate him as a threat. And it will, most certainly, in the
end. But today's Osama bin Laden is yesterday's Abu Nidal is
tomorrow's Abdul from Gaza.
The question is, where does the despair that drives this
whole machine come from, and what can we do to alleviate
it. We do not need to remake the world. But we do need to
create hope. The wealthy countries of the world sail a vast,
unfathomable ocean of poverty. From the Philippines to
Thailand to Bangladesh to Palestine to Paraguay, the average
human life is short, painful and hopeless.
Over the past two hundred years, the west developed out of
a feudal system that encouraged small enterpreneurs and
guilds, a vast and incredibly efficient system of capitalism
that now provides us with wealth so great that it is beyond
comprehension to most of our fellow human beings, and so
far out of their grasp that it might as well be unfolding on
another planet.
What is worse, we react to them with contempt and anger
and fear. Above all, we fear them. And why shouldn't we?
They are armed and starving, and we are right to think of
that as a volatile combination. We are right to react to them
with fear. In their desperation, they have created a new
religion of suicide, so that they might have powerful
weapons against us. I call their Islam a new religion because
that is exactly what it is, a new faith founded in what
ambiguities they have been able to seize on from the Koran
to justify and inspire their soldiers.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, European powers armed
with new technologies and far more efficent economic
systems spread out across the world in search of raw
materials. Where they encountered resistance or found what
they wanted undefended, they established colonies. They
super-charged development in their colonies by the use of
slaves.
These colonial systems were a world-historical catastrophe,
because of the way they disestablished and invalidated the
cultures they invaded, and shattered whatever local
economic development might have been taking place. It was
also true, of course, that the tribal economies involved were
mostly primitive by western standards, and that the local
cultures were scarcely able to respond to western economic
demands without extensive intervention.
This intervention took the form of enslaving people,
dragooning them for work, building an economic
infrastructure in their midst without training them to run it
or including them in its benefits except in the most menial
ways. And then, when changing economic and political
conditions made the colonies unprofitable, the colonial
powers simply withdrew, leaving the abandoned
infrastructure to rot along with the people.
They didn't do it this way because they wanted to. Indeed,
they strove to leave something worthwhile behind. But they
had been sapped by the Great Twentieth Century War, and
had only the most minimal ability to do this. So, far the most
part, they retreated pell-mell, leaving behind them a
confused welter of inappropriately constituted states and an
economic infrastructure that the locals could neither
understand nor use. (I view World Wars One and Two and
the Cold War as a single conflict that lasted from the
assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo to the
toppling of the Berlin Wall, and I believe that history will
also
view these deeply connected conflicts in this way.)
As the colonial powers withdrew, a world population
explosion also took place, resulting in the situation we have
now: a world divided between crushing poverty and
extraordinary wealth...much as France was divided in about
1750 between an aristocracy of vast wealth and a general
population of great poverty. In Paris in 1750, an aristocrat's
hat might cost more than the income of an average Parisian
for an entire year.
In France at that time, there had been a hundred years of
slowly improving living standards. By 1780, there was even
a small middle class. But then a series of bad harvests led to
price inflation and the destitution of millions. The monarchy
reacted by raising taxes. The French revolution was the
result.
The entire planet is in a similar situation now, and it is just
as volatile worldwide as it was in France in about 1785.
What's more, the have-nots have just discovered that the
one weapon they have in plenty--human beings--can be
used to fantastic effect. It cost the terrorists perhaps two
million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center. It will cost
us, in the end, amost incalculable wealth to redress the
situation.
To save ourselves the few billion dollars and--above all--the
little bit of compassion it would take to become a genuine
part of the solution to the world's problems, we have ended
up in a situation where we are going to have to reduce our
freedoms, live for years in constant fear, and spend an
absolute minimum of two hundred billion dollars to possibly--
just possibly--extricate ourselves from this mess.
And if a terrorist ever gets nuclear weapons aboard the good
ship America, it chills my soul to think what will happen.
We must recover our national conscience and find a way to
help destitute peoples and nations find hope, and begin to
enjoy some sort of prosperity. Otherwise, we are going to
pay not just with a few billion dollars for refusing to do what
is in any case moral and right, we are going to pay with our
whole nation, and our way of life.
Related Entries:
28-Oct-2001: Bin Laden's Objective
13-Oct-2001: Conspiracy Theories: Should We Listen Now?
10-Feb-2003: Official Terror Worse than 'Night and Fog'
12-Sep-2001: What Next?
