The Earth Times | Posted October 1, 2002

WORLD IN CHALLENGE
A strange new war
> BY TOM WICKER
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved>

The only needed justification for air strikes on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan is provided by his network's sneak attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, causing the murders of thousands of innocent Americans. But most of the Afghan refugees for whom those aid kits are being dropped also are innocent.

The causes of this unusual war are clear and convincing to most of the world-including some Arab and Muslim nations. But if Americans are therefore united in a just cause, that doesn't yet provide real escape or much knowledge about a world that bodes so little good for anyone-only the possibility of new terrorist attacks, more retaliation, heightened insecurity everywhere.

Nor is there a silver lining to this dark cloud of uncertainty and fear, which seems likely to hover over the nation perhaps for years. Only two faint rays of light are immediately visible:

Those millions of Americans who were not alive on Pearl Harbor day in 1941, and the millions more who don't even remember Vietnam, who had reason to believe the Gulf War the worst that could be expected, have been rudely but usefully disabused of whatever naiveté the economic decline may have left them.

Americans of all ages who until September 11 shared a basic isolationism, taking little interest in other peoples and places, save vacation destinations, have been forced into a sort of "crash course" in comparative cultures, histories and especially religions-notably Islam.

Now that war actually is under way, it's imperative that the American people should know all that is being done in their name, what risks are being run, which expectations that may have been raised actually can be met. Just as one example of such expectations, President Bush would be on safer ground if he stopped talking about eliminating "evil" and eradicating "evil-doers" from the world.

All the godly leaders and nations of the millennia have not achieved such a lofty goal, and it's unlikely that even Americans, or any President, can or will. Besides, not all evil is terrorism, after all; and all terrorism is not necessarily "evil"-the kind, for example, practiced by partisans against Nazi invaders in World War II. The terrorism that murders innocents for an abstract cause is indeed "evil" within Bush's meaning; but can even that really be "eliminated" from what Kofi Annan rightly called a "messy world"?

To his credit, the President has been painfully candid about the difficulties the nation surely faces: finding Osama bin Laden, for instance, and how long actual hostilities might have to be maintained. No longer can anyone be under the illusion that quick and relatively painless "victory," as in the Gulf War a decade ago, can be achieved in this "war on terrorism."

The administration's customary restraint has slipped, however, at least twice: once when Bush tried to limit essential information to designated members of Congress, a co-equal branch of government-an effort from which he quickly retreated-and again when his national security assistant asked the television networks to censor any future tapes of remarks by Osama bin Laden.

The networks unwisely agreed, on ostensibly patriotic grounds, thus assuring that the rest of the world will hear exactly what the master terrorist says while his American targets will get only a sanitized version-and suggesting that the Bush administration is all too willing to limit information when citizens at war need to know their enemy, not to be frightened of him or them, or encouraged by Washington in such fear.

Network acquiescence was an early symptom of the kind of "wartime mentality" of which Americans, even in such an unprecedented war as this, should be wary. In wartime, whether against Japanese or Germans or Koreans or Viet Cong or Saddam Hussein or terrorists-in wartime, even without the usual rationing, blackouts, shortages and conscription, it's easy to believe that "anything goes" in the national effort to defeat a villainous enemy before he can defeat us. Lawbreaking, suspensions of rights, secrecy, internal spying-virtually any outrage unthinkable in peacetime can be accepted in wartime, in the belief that it's necessary to save the nation, or perhaps one's own family.

Sometimes it may be. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in some areas. He also freed the slaves, which many Americans thought he had no constitutional power to do. It's a citizen's duty-and pre-eminently a government's and a President's-even in wartime to judge whether any such extreme procedure really is necessary for victory. Was it necessary during World War II, for the most notorious example, to intern the American Nisei in what amounted to concentration camps?

A wartime mentality can generate extreme individual beliefs as well as extreme government procedures. Reports already are surfacing about vigilante actions, in one case including murder, against people assumed to be Arabs or Muslims-or anyway non-Americans or non-Christians-and who just might be, in vigilante fantasy, terrorists, traitors or Osama bin Laden sympathizers.

Such vigilantism is to be deplored and usually will be prosecuted. But it's obviously possible that a general, non-criminal American hostility now could arise toward anyone or everyone with a Middle Eastern passport, or wearing a turban, or entering a mosque, or sporting a long Osama-like beard, or having an "el" or an "al" in his or her name, or reading the Koran. That would be more than unfortunate because, no matter what militant Islamists in other countries may claim, this is not a war against Islam. Washington is not holding Islam responsible for terrorism, nor is Islam an enemy-certainly not an adversary the American people should stereotype, then hate or condemn or deride.

In a conventional war against a nation-state, patriotic and family sentiment can build into hatred, stimulated or at least aided by official propaganda and intemperate media-just as, during the 1940s, Americans and Japanese were easily aroused or goaded into almost pathological hatred for each other, and Americans of the time made little distinction between Germans and Nazis.

That probably will not be the case in this highly unconventional war, with no specific nation as "the enemy." Poverty-stricken Afghanistan hardly qualifies, and might not at all, as the President has made clear, if it stops harboring Osama bin Laden's terrorists.

At the same time, the bizarre nature of a war not focused on a specific country may provoke generalized but unwarranted hatreds, or even lead to a long-term East-West division, or to Christian-Muslim enmity, or-what was already too likely even before September 11-to hostile relations between industrialized and less-advanced societies, affluent and poor peoples, "modern" and "traditional" cultures.

Americans must be careful, in these circumstances, not to let their well known "exceptionalism" become mere arrogance. For many people of other countries, other cultures-probably including the kamikaze terrorists of September 11-what they already consider American arrogance is among the reasons they hate America, however irrationally.

Sheltered for so long by its oceans, blessed still with an abundance of resources, inhabited by an industrious and ingenious people, the United States indeed has been fortunate, and largely worthy of its good fortune. A major response to the cataclysmic events of September 11 has been the outpouring of generosity, resolve and a new sense of unity-but also a flood of self-praise: orotund tributes to "this great and good people" and ringing rhetoric about the "aroused giant" who will "come back stronger than ever," combined with dire threats about punishment of the misguided persons who foolishly stirred up the blameless giant.

This was expectable, after the shattering blows of September 11, and no doubt what most Americans wanted and needed to hear-fulsome reassurances to counter fears, restore morale and spark national determination. Like any other people, Americans needed "bucking up" in a severe and unexpected crisis. That suggests, however, that they are not quite so exceptional as they sometimes claim but are instead, much like many other peoples-Londoners in the World War II blitz, for example, or any number of populations that have bravely dealt with floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters in a spirit of community.

Perhaps the primary question Americans ought to be putting to themselves is this: What do we do after we capture or kill Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for harboring him?

Many would say-including, apparently, some in the administration-that the US should then, or sooner, go on to pulverize Iraq and Iran, maybe even turn its missiles on Syria and Libya, and any other country that hides what Washington believes are terrorists. Certainly, if any other nation is reasonably considered responsible for overt acts as horrendous as those of September 11, perhaps no President could restrain, if he would, public outrage and pressures to respond.

Without evidence of such acts, however, the justification Americans can rightly feel for striking back at Osama bin Laden would be greatly diminished, if it did not disappear, by expansion of the war. Such attacks would be much like "racial profiling." What's the difference, after all, between "they probably harbor terrorists so let's hit them before they hit us," on the one hand, and "theyíre black so let's arrest them before they can commit crimes," on the other?

So far, beyond expansive claims for the "war on terrorism," the Bush administration has been careful not to suggest specifics on how or whether it might carry the war to suspected countries. Nor does the President's general restraint since September 11 suggest that, absent convincing evidence of responsibility for overt acts, he would order an extended war.

That would be contrary to the best of American history and would sharpen the already widespread Islamic belief that the war on terrorism really is a war on Islam. Also, in the eyes of much of the world and of many Americans, a "preventive" war, even based on solid suspicion, would confound the rule of law-the belief in and the upholding of which is a vital element of the American values the US expounds to the nations. As George W. Bush ponders a frightening new world and how best, beyond Afghanistan, to cope with it, he could take a cue from President Dwight Eisenhower. Recalling for his memoirs a decade later why he had not ordered US intervention in the French war in Vietnam in 1954, "Ike" wrote that he had tried to preserve "an asset of incalculable value-essential to our position of leadership in the world-the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded than the Tonkin Delta, indeed than all of Indochina."

Unfortunately, the US "moral position" had begun to be tarnished long before Eisenhower wrote those words. But in 1945, at the end of World War II (the "good war" in which Eisenhower had done so much to establish US "leadership in the world"), his country was undoubtedly the most respected of nations. Its "moral position," the basis of that respect, was the world's idea of America-a powerful idea based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, observance of the rule of law and the freedom and rights of men, the writings of Jefferson and Lincoln, FDR's promotion of "the Four Freedoms." America at mid-century, with all its flaws, was the foremost exponent of democratic values, the pre-eminent spokesman for independence and national self-determination, for justice under law; America was the "last best hope of earth," in Lincoln's phrase, with which much of the rest of the world agreed.

The cold war chipped away at that idea of America, perhaps inevitably, as Presidents beginning with Harry Truman-and including Eisenhower-thought they had to turn to power, and did, to enforce a position that had been achieved by an idea. It was a difficult choice, but one with which, over the decades, few Americans disagreed, believing-as the times seemed to indicate-that only fire could fight fire, only power meet power. In the end, the "free world" stayed mostly free-but at the immense cost of that "moral position" so nearly lost, that idea of America that the uses of power could neither project nor sustain.

Now the cold war is over and, as our politicians endlessly remind us, there's only one "superpower." Once it has "eliminated" Osama bin Laden and his network, therefore, the Bush administration-instead of making new wars on more countries-will have an opportunity to rebuild America's "moral position," to make her once again the world's symbol of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. That cannot be done by holding hands with repressive regimes, ignoring the plight of exploited peoples, flaunting a tinsel prosperity or aiming missiles at a threatening world. A restored idea of America as the land of the free-not the power of its military-will most effectively prevent the kind of evil that struck the nation on September 11.