11.2.2001
by Salman Rushdie
[From today's NYT -- the whole piece can be read here. Thanks to Debbie for suggesting it.]
"This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.
The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?
Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the talk about American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents?
Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that mean?
11.1.2001
By William Saletan Salon On-line
Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT
There will never be another Sept. 11. A few more days of bombing, and the Taliban will collapse. We'll hunt down Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. We'll tear his network out by the roots. The world is rallying to the banner of the United States and its ideals. We're building a global alliance for peace and freedom. No villain can defeat or escape us. Our children will live in a world free of terror.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? The more we read about collateral damage, Pakistani mobs, invisible al-Qaida cells, and anthrax, the further we retreat toward the opposite outlook: We'll never be safe. We'll never catch Bin Laden. If we do, others will take his place. Afghanistan is a quagmire. Our bombs are useless. We can't hide, but the enemy can. We can't scare fanatics. We'll lose soldiers. We'll kill civilians. The Muslim world is turning against us. Nobody trusts us. We have no real friends. We can't win.
Today, the second outlook is gaining currency because the first strains credulity. That's a shame and a fallacy. Just because the rosiest picture is false doesn't mean the gloomiest is true. There's a third way to think about terrorism, a middle ground between idealism and skepticism. It starts with this postulate: Everything the optimists say about the war is true, but only in the negative.
Negativism differs from the skepticism that pervades criticism of the war. Skepticism doubts anything is true or right. Negativism says that even if we don't know exactly what's true or right, we know that some things are false or wrong. This makes negativism a belief system with teeth. When somebody lies, you have to call him on it. When somebody commits grave wrongs, you have to stop him.
Start with the morality of the war. President Bush represents the naive view. He says we're fighting for "progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom." Critics of U.S. foreign policy point out that this can't be true: We're cutting wink-wink deals with dictatorships, theocracies, and human rights violators from Iran to Pakistan to Uzbekistan to Russia. Does this mean the war is immoral? No. Even if we're not leading our allies toward progress, pluralism, and freedom, we're leading them to war against the most urgent threat to those principles, and that's good enough.
This kind of thinking isn't always appropriate, but it's well suited to grim situations like the present one. It clears your head of moral and practical aspirations that exceed what you can reasonably do. Your job right now isn't to make the world better but to limit the ability of others to make it worse. The first rule of negativism is that things can always get worse. The second rule is that if you act as though they can't get worse, they will. From a negativist standpoint, the constant whining about negativity in American politics over the past two decades underscores how easy we've had it. The world is full of very bad things and very bad people. Fighting them is both noble and necessary.
As you're fighting the good fight (or, as a negativist would put it, fighting the people who are fighting the bad fight), negativism narrows your tasks to manageable proportions. You don't have to destroy the enemy, though that would be nice. You just have to negate its ability to hurt you and your people. In the days after Sept. 11, Bush talked brashly about rooting out and rounding up all the terrorists. Critics pointed out that he'd never be able to fulfill those promises. From this, many concluded that it was pointless to go after the enemy militarily. Gradually, Bush retreated to the negativist case for military action. Operation Infinite Justice became Operation Enduring Freedom. Yes, the terrorists can lie low. Yes, they can move their training camps, hideouts, and financial supply lines. Yes, if we kill some, others will replace them. But we don't have to wipe them out. We just have to keep them on the run and disrupt their ability to organize attacks on us.
We don't have to make such attacks impossible. Naming a price we can't bear to pay-50 children in an American elementary school, 5,000 workers in the World Trade Center, 50,000 casualties in an anthrax attack, 5 million deaths in a nuclear catastrophe-puts the power of blackmail in the enemy's hands. Until you can negate the enemy's ability to inflict these horrors, you have to negate his ability to get what he wants from them. You have to endure them, as Londoners did during the Nazi blitz, while your government works to make the war more horrible for him and his protectors than it is for you.
Negativism also solves the problem of asymmetry. Terrorists, unlike states, don't convey precise collective responsibility for their acts of war and don't offer obvious targets against which to retaliate. This confounds traditional doctrines of war and deterrence. Idealists expect us to prove the guilt of each terrorist, track him down, and bring him to justice without harming others. Skeptics argue that this can't be done, and therefore a war against terrorists can't be won. Negativism says we don't have to throw out the old rules of state warfare; we just have to negate the deviation terrorists have taken from it. How? By declaring, as Bush did on Sept. 11, that states will be held responsible for terrorists who operate within them. If we can't make an example of Bin Laden, we can make an example of the regime that harbors him. It's not exactly fair, but it's effective.
This is just one of many moral compromises we're making. Strictly speaking, governments aren't necessarily responsible for what terrorists within their borders do. Likewise, before we bomb a country for harboring a fugitive, we really ought to hand over enough evidence to warrant an indictment. In this case, we've withheld evidence on the grounds that it would expose our intelligence sources and methods. Idealism says such compromises are unacceptable. Skeptical realism says no principle is absolute, and therefore any compromise in pursuit of our interests is acceptable. Negativism says that while no principle is absolute, one relative standard must limit all of our compromises: Negating the enemy makes no sense unless your goals and methods remain better than his.
This standard is hardly meaningless. Bin Laden killed about 200 people in the Pentagon and about 5,000 in the World Trade Center. If we kill 5,000 Taliban soldiers and 200 Afghan civilians, there shouldn't be any doubt as to which of us is the bad guy, particularly if the civilian deaths we cause, unlike those he caused, are accidental. Is it wrong to kill Taliban soldiers for the deeds of al-Qaida? Not when they protect an organization that, according to its own boasts, kills American janitors and secretaries for the deeds of Israeli soldiers. Our standard of culpability is vastly more precise than the enemy's. As for the Taliban's refusal to give up Bin Laden without clearer proof of his guilt, imagine how many executed Afghans would be alive today if the Taliban had been required to supply as much evidence against them as we've supplied against him.
The core postulate of this philosophy-that everything the optimists say is true, but only in the negative-pertains most acutely to theories about necessary and sufficient conditions. Optimists believe that if you follow certain steps or principles, you'll succeed. Skeptics argue that people who follow these steps often fail, and therefore they're a waste of time. Negativists take the middle view: Such steps, while insufficient, are necessary. This insight applies to left-wing pacifism as well as right-wing unilateralism. Doves say violence alone can't win the war. Yes, says the negativist, but the renunciation of violence will lose the war. Hawks say multilateralism makes victory difficult. Yes, says the negativist, but unilateralism makes victory impossible.
The same upside-down relativist logic applies to human nature. Idealists posit that we're strong and brave and that these virtues will lead us to victory. Cynics posit that we're weak and cowardly and that these vices will lead us to defeat. Negativists posit that we're weak and cowardly, but so is the enemy. We don't have to be stronger or braver than the Taliban. We just have to subject them to more pain and stress than we could withstand if we were in their shoes.
If the Taliban surrenders and Bin Laden is killed or captured, idealists will declare victory. Negativists won't. Negativists don't believe in happy endings. There is always a new threat. That's why we haven't bombed the Taliban troops who stand between the Northern Alliance rebels and the Afghan capital. We don't want another tribal militia full of shady characters reigning over multiethnic Afghanistan. We want a balance of power, even if that means keeping the old villains around to hold the new ones in check.
The same cold calculus applies to us. As long as we're at war, negativism countenances compromises of our civil liberties. Lower standards for deportation? Sure. Broader surveillance of phone calls and e-mail? Fine. Detaining people who have associated with terrorists, on the chance that this will disrupt imminent strikes? OK. But no expansions of government authority without limits or a sunset clause. Because once this war is over-or rather, once terrorists are no longer the worst threat out there-there's a good chance that the new worst threat will be the people to whom we gave the power to win the war. Maybe virtue will keep them from abusing that power. But I'm not counting on it.
Stay God's Hand
BY PEGGY NOONAN New York, November 30, 1998
I suppose it is commonplace to say it, but it's true: there is no such thing as time. The past is gone and no longer exists, the future is an assumption that has not yet come, all you have is the moment - this one - but it too has passed . . . just now. The moment we are having is an awfully good one, though. History has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of man. It has handed us a wave of wealth so broad and deep that it would be almost disorientating if we thought about it a lot, which we don't.
But: we know such comfort! We sleep on beds that are soft and supporting, eat food that is both good and plentiful. We touch small levers and heat our homes to exactly the degree we desire; the pores of our bare arms are open and relaxed as we read The Times in our T-shirts, while two feet away, on the other side of the plate-glass window, a blizzard rages. We turn levers and get clean water, push a button for hot coffee, open doors and get ice-cream, take short car trips to places where planes wait before whisking us across continents as we nap. It is all so fantastically fine.
Lately this leaves me uneasy. Does it you? Do you wonder how and why exactly we have it so different, so nice compared with thousands of years of peasants eating rocks? Is it possible that we, the people of the world, are being given a last great gift before everything changes? To me it feels like a gift. Only three generations ago, my family had to sweat in the sun to pull food from the ground.
Another thing. The marvels that are part of our everyday lives - computers, machines that can look into your body and see everything but your soul - are so astounding that most of us who use them don't really understand exactly what they're doing or how they do it. This too is strange. The day the wheel was invented, the crowd watching understood immediately what it was and how it worked. But I cannot explain with any true command how the MRI that finds a tumour works. Or how, for that matter, the fax machine works.
We would feel amazement, or even, again, a mild disorientation, if we were busy feeling and thinking long thoughts instead of doing - planning the next meeting, appointment, consultation, presentation, vacation. We are too busy doing these things to take time to see, feel, parse and explain amazement.
Which gets me to time.
We have no time! Is it that way for you? Everyone seems so busy. Once, a few years ago, I sat on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Suddenly I realised that everyone, all the people going up and down the steps, was hurrying along on his or her way somewhere. I thought, everyone is doing something. On the streets of Manhattan, they hurry along and I think, everyone is busy. I don't think I've seen anyone amble, except at a summer place, in a long time. I am thinking here of a man I saw four years ago at a little pier in Martha's Vineyard. He had plaid shorts and white legs, and he was walking sort of stiffly, jerkily. Maybe he had mild Parkinson's disease, but I think: maybe he has just arrived and is trying to get out of his sprint and into a stroll.
All our splendour, our comfort, takes time to pay for. And affluence wants to increase; it carries within it an unspoken command: more! Affluence is like nature, which always moves toward new life. Nature does its job; affluence enlists us to do it. We hear the command for "More!" with immigrant ears that also hear "Do better!" or old American ears that hear "Sutter is rich, there's gold in them thar hills, onward to California!" We carry California within us; that is what it is to be human, and American.
So we work. The more you have, the more you need, the more you work and plan. This is odd in part because of all the spare time we should have. We don't, after all, have to haul water from the "crick". We don't have to kill an antelope for dinner. I can microwave a Lean Cuisine meal in four minutes and eat it in five. I should have a lot of extra time - more, say, than a cavewoman. And yet I feel I do not. And I think: that cavewoman watching the antelope turn on the spit, she was probably happily day-dreaming about how shadows played on the walls of her cave. She had time.
It's not just work. We all know the applications of Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time allotted to complete it. This isn't new. But this is: so many of us feel we have no time to cook and serve a lovely three-course dinner, to write the long, thoughtful letter, to tutor ever so patiently the child. But other generations, not so long ago, did. And we have more time-saving devices than they did. We invented new technologies so that work could be done more efficiently and quickly. We wished it done more quickly so we could have more leisure time. (Wasn't that the plan? Or was it to increase our productivity?) But we have less leisure time, it seems, because these technologies encroach on our leisure time.
You can be beeped on safari! Be faxed while riding an elephant and receive e-mail while being menaced by a tiger. And if you can be beeped on safari, you will be beeped on safari. This gives you less time to enjoy being away from the demands of time.
Twenty years ago, when I was starting out at CBS on the radio desk, we would try each day to track down our roving foreign correspondents and get them to file on the phone for our morning news broadcasts. I would go to the daily log to see who was where. And not infrequently it would say that Smith, in Beirut, is "out of pocket", ie, unreachable, unfindable for a few days. The official implication was that Smith was out in the field travelling with the guerrillas. But I thought it was code for "Smith is drunk", or "Smith is on deep background with a really cute source". I'd think, Oh, to be an out-of-pocket correspondent on the loose in Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris - what a thing.
But now there is no "out of pocket". Now everyone can be reached and found, anywhere, anytime. Now there is no hiding place. We are "in the pocket".
What are we in the pocket of? An illusion, perhaps, or rather many illusions: that we must know the latest, that we must have a say, that we are players, are needed, that the next score will change things, that through work we can quench our thirst, that, as they said in the sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, "Work Brings Freedom". That we must bow to "More!" and pay homage to California. I live a life of only average intensity, and yet by 9pm I am quite stupid, struck dumb with stimuli fatigue. I am tired from ten hours of the unconscious strain of planning, meeting, talking, thinking. If you clench your fist for ten hours and then let go, your hand will jerk and tremble. My brain trembles.
I sit on the couch at night with my son. He watches TV as I read the National Enquirer and the Star. This is wicked of me, I know, but the Enquirer and the Star have almost more pictures than words; there are bright pictures of movie stars, of television anchors, of the woman who almost choked to death when, in a state of morning confusion, she accidentally put spermicidal jelly on her toast. These stories are just right for the mind that wants to be diverted by something that makes no demands.
I have time at nine. But I am so flat-lined that I find it hard to make the heartening phone call to the nephew, to write the long letter. Often I feel guilty and treat myself with H�agen-Dazs therapy. I will join a gym if I get time.
When a man can work while at home, he will work while at home. When a man works at home, the wall between workplace and living place, between colleague and family, is lowered or removed. Does family life spill over into work life? No. Work life spills over into family life. You do not wind up taking your son for a walk at work, you wind up teleconferencing during softball practice. This is not progress. It is not more time but less. Maybe our kids will remember us as there but not there, physically present but carrying the faces of men and women who are strategising the sale.
I often think how much I'd like to have a horse. Not that I ride, but I often think I'd like to learn. But if I had a horse, I would be making room for the one hour a day in which I would ride. I would be losing hours seeing to Flicka's feeding and housing and cleaning and loving and overall wellbeing. This would cost money. I would have to work hard to get it. I would have less time.
Who could do this? The rich. The rich have time because they buy it. They buy the grooms and stable keepers and accountants and bill payers and negotiators for the price of oats. Do they enjoy it? Do they think, it's great to be rich, I get to ride a horse? Oh, I hope so! If you can buy time, you should buy it. This year I am going to work very hard to get some.
DURING the summer, when you were a kid, your dad worked a few towns away and left at 8:30; your mum stayed home smoking and talking and ironing. You biked to the local schoolyard for summer activities - twirling, lanyard-making, dodgeball - until afternoon. Then you'd go home and play in the street. At 5:30 Dad was home and at six there was dinner - meatloaf, mashed potatoes and tinned corn. Then TV and lights out.
Now it's more like this: Dad goes to work at 6:15, to the city, where he is an executive; Mum goes to work at the bank, where she's a vice-president, but not before giving the sitter the keys and bundling the kids into the car to go to, respectively, soccer camp, arts camp, Chinese lessons, therapy, the swim meet, computer camp, a birthday party, a play date. Then home for an impromptu barbecue of turkey burgers and a salad with fresh Parmesan cheese followed by summer homework, Nintendo and TV - the kids lying splayed on the couch, dead eyed, like denizens of a Chinese opium den - followed by "Hi Mum", "Hi, Dad", and bed.
Life is so much more interesting now! It's not boring, like 1957. There are things to do: the culture is broader, more sophisticated; there's more wit and creativity to be witnessed and enjoyed. Mums, kids and dads have more options, more possibilities. This is good. The bad news is that our options leave us exhausted when we pursue them and embarrassed when we don't.
Good news: mothers do not become secret Valium addicts out of boredom and loneliness, as they did 30 and 40 years ago. And Dad's conversation is more interesting than his father's. He knows how Michael Jordan acted on the Nike shoot, and tells us. The other night Dad worked late and then they all went to a celebratory dinner at Rao's, where they sat in a booth next to Warren Beatty, who was discussing with his publicist the media campaign for Bulworth. Beatty looked great, had a certain watchful dignity, ordered the vodka penne.
Bad news: Mum hasn't noticed but she's half mad from stress. Her face is older than her mother's, less innocent, because she has burnt through her facial subcutaneous fat and because she unconsciously holds her jaw muscles in a tense way. But it's OK because the collagen, the Botox, the Retin-A and alpha hydroxy, and a better diet than her mother's (Grandma lived on starch, it was the all-carbo diet) leave her looking more . . . fit. She does not have her mother's soft, maternal weight. The kids do not feel a pillowy yielding when they hug her; they feel muscles and smell Chanel body moisturiser.
When Mother makes fund-raising calls for the school, she does not know it but she barks: "Yeah, this is Claire Marietta on the cookie drive we need your cookies tomorrow at three in the gym if you're late the office is open till four or you can write a check for $12 any questions call me." Click.
Mum never wanted to be Barbara Billingsley (who played a sitcom mother in the Fifties and Sixties). Mum got her wish.
WHAT WILL happen? How will the future play out? Well, we're going to get more time. But it's not pretty how it will happen, so if you're in a good mood, stop reading here and go hug the kids and relax and have a drink and a nice pointless conversation with your spouse.
Here goes: it has been said that when an idea's time has come a lot of people are likely to get it at the same time. In the same way, when something begins to flicker out there in the cosmos a number of people, a small group at first, begin to pick up the signals. They start to see what's coming.
Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.
This is not new: in the 1950s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in The Day the Earth Stood Still that if we don't become more peaceful, our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren't coming close, they're hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.
Something's up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn't even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything's wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.
I don't mean "Uh-oh, there's a depression coming", I mean "We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads; it's a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same."
Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.
What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: what are the odds it will not? Low. Non-existent, I think.
When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense, ten-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological centre of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hardshouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.
If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won't be working so well any more. And thus a lot more . . . time. Something tells me we won't be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.
The psychic blow - and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes - will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side-benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.
Maybe, of course, I'm wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere: "If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I'll know to gather the kids and go." I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States Government. His face turned grim. I apologised for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks that it will happen in a matter of months.
So now I have frightened you. But we must not sit around and be depressed. "Don't cry," Jimmy Cagney once said. "There's enough water in the goulash already."
We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven't focused on it because there's no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and defence systems, and press local, state and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defence and emergency management.
The other thing we must do is the most important.
I once talked to a man who had a friend who had done something that took his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard, and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became, in fact, the kind of person who could and did help others. Twelve years later, at the girl's high-school graduation, she won the award for best all-round student. She played the piano for the recessional. Now she's at college.
The man's eyes grew moist. He had just been to the graduation. "These are the things that stay God's hand," he told me. I didn't know what that meant. He explained: these are the things that keep God from letting us kill us all.
So be good. Do good. Stay His hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary makes her visitations - she has never made so many in all of recorded history as she has in this century - she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly! I myself don't, but I think about it a lot and sometimes pray when I think. But you don't have to be Roman Catholic to take this advice. Pray. Unceasingly. Take the time.
WSJ Oct. 16
By Fouad Ajami. Mr. Ajami, author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999), teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
We should be under no illusions about our struggle against Osama bin Laden and the cultists and terrorists arrayed around him. Although we control the sea lanes and skies of that Arab-Muslim world, he appears to hold sway over the streets of a thwarted civilization, one that sees him as an avenger for the sad, cruel lot that has been its fate in recent years.
A terrible war was fought between rulers and Islamists; the regimes in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt won, but the insurgents took to the road, and vowed to return as triumphant conquerors after the dynasties and the despots were sacked. Rich, famous, free and young, bin Laden taunts the rulers of a silent, frightened Arab world seething with resentments of every kind. He and his lieutenants cannot overthrow the Arab ruling order, so they have turned their resentments on us.
Consider the three men who taunted us in the video that came our way on Oct. 7, courtesy of the Qatari satellite channel, Al-Jazeera. In it, bin Laden is flanked by two lieutenants. The older one, a man of 50 years, is an Egyptian physician, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a sworn enemy of the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Twenty years ago, he had been picked up in the dragnet that followed the assassination of Anwar Sadat. He was tortured, and imprisoned for three years. He drifted to Pakistan, then made his way to the Sudan and Afghanistan, and took to the life of terror. The younger man, spokesman for bin Laden, is a Kuwaiti theocratic activist by the name of Sleiman Abu Gheith, who hails from a quaint, stable principality, with generous welfare subsidies and an American trip-wire to protect it against a predatory Saddam. Abu Gheith had been an employee of the Kuwaiti state, an imam of a government-sponsored mosque, and a teacher of Islamic studies. Those who know him tell of a man who had become fanatical in his view of Islam's role in political and social life.
A foul wind had been blowing in Arab lands. The rulers had snuffed out endless rebellions and the populace had succumbed to a malignant, sullen silence. It prayed and waited for the rulers' demise. It dreamt of an avenger and a band of merciless followers who would do for it what it could not do for itself.
It is no mystery that reporters from Arab shores tell us of affluent men and women, some with years of education in American universities behind them, celebrating the cruel deed of Mohamed Atta and his hijackers. The cult of the bandit taunting the powerful has always been seductive in broken societies. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Abu Gheith and Atta did not descend from the sky: They are the angry sons of a failed Arab generation. They are direct heirs of two generations of Arabs that have seen all the high dreams of Asr al Nahda (the era of enlightenment and secular nationalism) issue in sterility, dictatorship and misery. The secular fathers begot this strange breed of holy warriors.
A suffocating hate separates the ruler from the ruled in Arab lands. The former own those lands, they have closed up the universe, and their dominion stretches as far as the eye can see. Their scions stand at the ready to claim the good things of the earth. Imagine the way Arabs read the ascendancy of the sons of the dictators of Syria, Egypt and Iraq in public life; a trick has been played on them. Under their eyes, the republics have metamorphosed into monarchies in all but name. Alone, in God's broad lands, it seems to them, they are to be excluded from a share of today's democratic inheritance. The rulers can't deliver to us these sullen, resentful populations and -- shrewd men -- the rulers know it. They have ducked for cover as America blew in asking them to choose between the terrorists' world and ours.
We were "walk-ons" in this political and generational struggle playing out in Araby. America and Americans have a hard time coming to terms with those unfathomable furies of a distant, impenetrable world. In truth, Atta struck at us because he could not take down Mr. Mubarak's world, because in the burdened, crowded land of the Egyptian dictator there is very little offered younger Egyptians save for the steady narcotic of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. The attack on the North Tower of the World Trade Center was Atta's "rite of passage."
In the same vein, bin Laden and Abu Gheith can't sack the dynastic order of the Gulf. (Were they to do so, they would replace it with a cruel reign of terror that would make the yuppies of Jeddah who have been whispering sweet things in the ears of foreign reporters about bin Laden yearn for the days of Al Saud). So the avengers come our way. Our shadow, faint and mediated through hated rulers and middlemen, has fallen across their world. They struck at the shadow, but it is the order that reigns in their lands that fuels their righteousness. And it is the sense of approval they see in the eyes of ordinary men and women in their societies that tells them to press on.
The military campaign against bin Laden is prosecuted, and will surely be won, by the U.S. But the redemption of the Arab political condition, and the weaning of that world away from its ruinous habits and temptations, are matters for the Arabs themselves.
A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs. Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to their most malignant hatreds. Something is amiss in an Arab world that besieges American embassies for visas and at the same time celebrates America's calamities. Something has gone terribly wrong in a world where young men strap themselves with explosives, only to be hailed as "martyrs" and avengers. No military campaign by a foreign power can give modern-day Arabs a way out of the cruel, blind alley of their own history.
Tom Kershaw, founder of the Bull and Finch Pub in Boston, the bar depicted on "Cheers" on television, says he believes he is entitled to low-interest loans and other economic support because the tourism business, upon which his business relies, has softened. Mr. Kershaw said that before Sept. 11, his business was off 11 percent from the same time the previous year. "Now, it's about 50 percent," he said. He attributes the dropoff directly to the attack.
Asked why he feels entitled to the same relief from public money as, say, someone whose business was physically destroyed at the World Trade Center, Mr. Kershaw said: "It's my money. I can tell you about years when I gave the government a hell of a lot of money in taxes, and I'd like it back now, thank you very much."
Read the whole sordid tale here.
> >Memo from the Office of the President:
> >
> >Date: September 14, 2001
> >
> >TO: Albert Gore
> >
> >Dear Al,
> >We found some more votes. You won. When do you want to take over?
> >
> >Sincerely,
> >George W. Bush
10.30.2001
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear, the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed."
-- Abraham Lincoln, letter to William Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 (just after the passage of the National Banking Act, right before assasination)
Bill Moyers' keynote address to the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference last week is reprinted here. He talks movingly about the 11th, and fiercefully about the war is giving corporations greater power:
The predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.
Would you like to know the memorial they would offer the almost six thousand people who died in the attacks? Or the legacy they would provide the ten thousand children who lost a parent in the horror? How do they propose to fight the long and costly war on terrorism America must now undertake?
Why, restore the three-martini lunch; that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I'm kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington right now. There are members of Congress who believe you should sacrifice in this time of crisis by paying for lobbyists' long lunches. And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally, that's America's patriotic duty, too. And while we're at it, don't forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don't just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed.
You look incredulous. But that's taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning. What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone's distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of PCBs. Don't worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they're all in the GE family.
It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say, "This was their finest hour?" That's easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling, that's something to remember the11th of September for. And while the red, white, and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave, why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It's happening as we meet. It's happening right now.
(Props to Ethel for the pointer.)
Another article forwarded by Prof. Mike Watkins, this one from Stratfor
Global Implications of U.S. Anti-Terrorism Law: Summary
In an effort to dismantle the financial underpinnings of international terrorism, the United States is cracking down on global money laundering. But stricter international controls on banking and greater scrutiny in the financial sector could backfire, triggering corruption scandals around the globe. Greater transparency and enforcement will also prompt terrorist groups, drug traffickers and criminal organizations to strengthen cooperation and establish more informal laundering networks.
Read the entire article here.
10.29.2001
The new Texas director of homeland security is running for lieutenant governor. So how better to bolster his campaign than a glossy ad featuring an Air Force officer and the American flag? The only problem: it's a Luftwaffe officer. Is it me, or have the folks who provide stock photos become especially lazy? They must have used the same guys who put Bert on the bin Laden poster.
Props to Metafilter for the story.
We are all at a wake. The funeral has ended, and we're trying to eat potato salad, drink whatever helps. Some of us are making small talk, others still visibly shaken with grief. Somehow, we're all trying to seem like this is normal.
