At the turn of the millennium, the
world was braced for terrible things. Most "rational"
worries were tied to an anticipated computer glitch, the
Y2K problem, and even the most scientifically oriented
of people seemed temporarily at the mercy of powerful
mythic forces. Imagined hobgoblins leapt from hard
drives directly into nightmares. Airlines canceled
flights scheduled for the first day of the new year
(2000), citing fears that the computers for the
traffic-control system would not work. The calendar as
such had not previously been a source of dread, but all
at once, time itself held a new danger. As the year 2000
approached, I bought bottled water and extra cans of
tuna fish. I even withdrew a large amount of cash from
the bank. Friends mocked me, then admitted to having
done similar things. There were no dances-of-death or
outbreaks of flagellant cults, but a millennial fever
worthy of medieval superstition infected the most
secular of cultures. Of course, the mystical date came
and went, the computers did fine, airplanes flew and the
world went back to normal.
Then came September
11, 2001, the millennial catastrophe - just a little
late. Airplanes fell from the sky, thousands died and an
entirely new kind of horror gripped the human
imagination. Time, too, played its role, but time as
warped by television, which created a global
simultaneity, turning the whole human race into a
witness, as the awful events were endlessly replayed, as
if those bodies leaping from the Twin Towers would never
hit the ground. Nightmare in broad daylight. New York's
World Trade Center collapsed not just on to the
surrounding streets but into the hearts of every person
with access to CNN. Hundreds of millions of people
instinctively reached out to those they loved, grateful
to be alive. Death had shown itself in a new way. But if
a vast throng experienced the terrible events of
September 11 as one, only one man, the president of the
United States, bore a unique responsibility for finding
a way to respond to them.
George W Bush plumbed
the deepest place in himself, looking for a simple
expression of what the assaults of September 11
required. It was his role to lead the nation, and the
very world. In the United States the president, at a
moment of crisis, defines the communal response. A few
days after the assault, George W Bush did this. Speaking
spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or
speechwriters, he put a word on the new US purpose that
both shaped it and gave it meaning. "This crusade," he
said, "this war on terrorism."
"Crusade". I
remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the
president's use of that word, the outrageous ineptitude
of it. The vertigo lifted, and what I felt then was
fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude. My thoughts
went to the elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must
have been, Bush already reading from his script. I am a
Roman Catholic with a feeling for history, and strong
regrets, therefore, over what went wrong in my own
tradition once the Crusades were launched. Contrary to
schoolboy romances, Hollywood fantasies and the
nostalgia of royalty, the Crusades were a set of
world-historic crimes. I hear the word with a third ear,
alert to its dangers, and I see through its legends to
its warnings. For example, in Iraq "insurgents" have
lately shocked the world by decapitating hostages,
turning the most taboo of acts into a military tactic.
But a thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the
severed heads of Muslim fighters as missiles,
catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities
under siege. Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade
or jihad.
For George W Bush, "crusade" was an
offhand reference. But all the more powerfully for that,
it was an accidental probing of unintended but
nevertheless real meaning. That the president used the
word inadvertently suggests how it expressed his exact
truth, an unmasking of his most deeply felt purpose.
"Crusade," he said. Later, his embarrassed aides
suggested that he had meant to use the word only as a
synonym for struggle, but Bush's own syntax belied that.
He defined "crusade" as "war". Even offhandedly, he had
said exactly what he meant.
Osama bin Laden was
already understood to be trying to spark a "clash of
civilizations" that would set the West against the whole
House of Islam. After September 11, agitated voices on
all sides insisted that no such clash was inevitable.
But crusade was a match for jihad, and such words
threatened nothing less than apocalyptic conflict
between irreconcilable cultures. Indeed, the president's
reference flashed through the Arab news media. Its
resonance went deeper, even, than the embarrassed aides
expected - and not only among Muslims. After all, the
word refers to a long series of military campaigns,
which, taken together, were the defining event in the
shaping of what we call Western civilization. A coherent
set of political, economic, social and even mythological
traditions of the Eurasian continent, from the British
Isles to the far side of Arabia, grew out of the
transformations wrought by the Crusades. And it is far
from incidental still, both that those campaigns were
conducted by Christians against Muslims, and that they,
too, were attached to the irrationalities of millennial
fever.
If the US president was the person
carrying the main burden of shaping a response to the
catastrophe of September 11, his predecessor in such a
grave role, nearly a thousand years earlier, was the
Catholic pope. Seeking to overcome the century-long
dislocations of a post-millennial Christendom, he
rallied both its leaders and commoners with a rousing
call to holy war. Muslims were the infidel people who
had taken the Holy Land hundreds of years before. Now,
that occupation was defined as an intolerable blasphemy.
The Holy Land must be redeemed. Within months of the
pope's call, 100,000 people had "taken the cross" to
reclaim the Holy Land for Christ. As a proportion of the
population of Europe, a comparable movement today would
involve more than a million people, dropping everything
to go to war.
In the name of Jesus, and certain
of God's blessing, crusaders launched what might be
called "shock and awe" attacks everywhere they went. In
Jerusalem they savagely slaughtered Muslims and Jews
alike - practically the whole city. Eventually, Latin
crusaders would turn on Eastern Christians, and then on
Christian heretics, as blood lust outran the initial
"holy" impulse. That trail of violence scars the Earth
and human memory even to this day - especially in the
places where the crusaders wreaked their havoc. And the
mental map of the Crusades, with Jerusalem at the center
of the Earth, still defines world politics. But the main
point, in relation to Bush's instinctive response to
September 11, is that those religious invasions and wars
of long ago established a cohesive Western identity
precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that
survives to this day.
With the Crusades, the
violent theology of the killer God came into its own. To
save the world, in this understanding, God willed the
violent death of God's only beloved son. Here is the
relevance of that mental map, for the crusaders were
going to war to rescue the site of the salvific death of
Jesus, and they displayed their devotion to the cross on
which Jesus died by wearing it on their breasts. When
Bush's remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast
throughout the Middle East, the word "crusade" was
rendered as "war of the cross". (ATol note: the word
"crusade" derives from Medieval Latin cruciada,
"marked with a cross".)
Before the Crusades,
Christian theology had given central emphasis to the
resurrection of Jesus, and to the idea of incarnation
itself, but with the war of the cross, the bloody
crucifixion began to dominate the Latin Christian
imagination. A theology narrowly focused on the brutal
death of Jesus reinforced the primitive notion that
violence can be a sacred act. The cult of martyrdom,
even to the point of suicidal valor, was
institutionalized in the Crusades, and it is not
incidental to the events of September 11 that a culture
of sacred self-destruction took equally firm hold among
Muslims. The suicide-murderers of the World Trade
Center, like the suicide-bombers from the West Bank and
Gaza, exploit a perverse link between the willingness to
die for a cause and the willingness to kill for it.
Crusaders, thinking of heaven, honored that link too.
Here is the deeper significance of Bush's
inadvertent reference to the Crusades: instead of being
a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence was
established then as the perfectly appropriate, even
chivalrous, first response to what is wrong in the
world. George W Bush is a Christian for whom this
particular theology lives. While he identified Jesus as
his favorite "political philosopher" when running for
president in 2000, the Jesus of this evangelical
president is not the "turn the other cheek" one. Bush's
savior is the Jesus whose cross is wielded as a sword.
George W Bush, having cheerfully accepted responsibility
for the executions of 152 death-row inmates in Texas,
had already shown himself to be entirely at home with
divinely sanctioned violence. After September 11, no
wonder it defined his deepest urge.
But sacred
violence, once unleashed in 1096, as in 2001, had a
momentum of its own. The urgent purpose of war against
the "enemy outside" - what some today call the "clash of
civilizations" - led quickly to the discovery of an
"enemy inside". The crusaders, en route from
northwestern Europe to attack the infidel far away,
first fell upon, as they said, "the infidel near at
hand" - Jews. For the first time in Europe, large
numbers of Jews were murdered for being Jews. A
crucifixion-obsessed theology saw God as willing the
death of Jesus, but in the bifurcated evangelical
imagination, Jews could be blamed for it, and the
offense the crusaders took was mortal.
The same
dynamic - war against an enemy outside leading to war
against an enemy inside - can be seen at work today. It
is a more complex dynamic now, with immigrant Muslims
and people of Arabic descent coming under heavy pressure
in the West. In Europe, Muslims are routinely demonized.
In the United States, they are "profiled", even to the
point of being deprived of basic rights. But at the same
time, once again, Jews are targeted. The broad
resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the tendency to
scapegoat Israel as the primary source of the new
discord, reflect an old tidal pull. This is true
notwithstanding the harsh fact that Ariel Sharon's
government took up the Bush "dead or alive" credo with
enthusiasm and used the "war on terrorism" to fuel
self-defeating overreactions to Palestinian
provocations. But some of Israel's critics fall into the
old pattern of measuring Jews against standards to which
no one else is held, not even the US president. That the
"war on terrorism" is the context within which violence
in Israel and Jerusalem has intensified should be no
surprise. It wasn't "Israel" then, but conflict over
Jerusalem played exactly such a flashpoint role a
thousand years ago.
The Crusades proved to have
other destructive dynamics as well. The medieval war
against Islam, having also targeted Europe's Jews, soon
enough became a war against all forms of cultural and
religious dissent, a war against heresy. As it hadn't
been in hundreds of years, doctrine now became rigidly
defined in the Latin West, and those who did not affirm
dominant interpretations - Cathars, Albigensians,
Eastern Orthodox - were attacked. Doctrinal uniformity,
too, could be enforced with sacred violence. When the US
attorney general defines criticism of the administration
in wartime as treason, or when Congress enacts
legislation that justifies the erosion of civil
liberties with appeals to patriotism, they are enacting
a Crusades script.
All of this is implicit in
the word that President Bush first used, which came to
him as naturally as a baseball reference, to define the
"war on terrorism". That such a dark, seething religious
history of sacred violence remains largely unspoken in
our world does not defuse it as an explosive force in
the human unconscious. In the world of Islam, of course,
its meaning could not be more explicit, or closer to
consciousness. The full historical and cultural
significance of "crusade" is instantly obvious, which is
why a howl of protest from the Middle East drove Bush
into instant verbal retreat. Yet the very inadvertence
of his use of the word is the revelation: Americans do
not know what fire they are playing with. Osama bin
Laden, however, knows all too well, and in his periodic
pronouncements, he uses the word "crusade" to this day,
as a flamethrower.
Religious war is the danger
here, and it is a graver one than Americans think.
Despite its much-vaunted separation of church and state,
the United States has always had a quasi-religious
understanding of itself, reflected in the messianism of
Puritan founder John Winthrop, the Deist optimism of
Thomas Jefferson, the embrace of redemptive suffering
that marked Abraham Lincoln and, for that matter, the
conviction of president Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of
state, John Foster Dulles, that communism had to be
opposed on a global scale if only because of its
atheism. But never before has the US been brought deeper
into a dynamite-wired holy of holies than in President
Bush's "war on terrorism". Despite the post-Iraq toning
down of Washington's rhetoric of empire, and the
rejection of further crusader references - although
Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word this past
March - Bush's war openly remains a cosmic battle
between nothing less than the transcendent forces of
good and evil. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited
and open-ended, and so justifies radical actions - the
abandonment, for example, of established notions of
civic justice at home and of traditional alliances
abroad.
A cosmic moral-religious battle
justifies, equally, risks of world-historic proportioned
disaster, since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict
is to be measured not by actual consequences on this
Earth but by the Earth-transcending will of God.
America's "war on terrorism", before it is anything
else, is thus an imagined conflict, taking place
primarily in a mythic realm beyond history.
In
waging such a "war", the enemy is to be engaged
everywhere and nowhere, not just because the actual
nihilists who threaten the social order are faceless and
deracinated but because each fanatical suicide-bomber is
only an instance of the transcendent enemy - and so the
other face of us. Each terrorist is, in effect, a
sacrament of the larger reality, which is "terrorism".
Instead of perceiving unconnected centers of inhuman
violence - tribal warlords, Mafia chieftains,
nationalist fighters, xenophobic Luddites - President
Bush projects the grandest and most interlocking
strategies of conspiracy, belief and organization. By
the canonization of the "war on terrorism", petty
nihilists are elevated to the status of world-historic
warriors, exactly the fate they might have wished for.
This is why the conflict readily bleeds from one locus
to another - Afghanistan then, Iraq now, Iran or some
other land of evil soon - and why, for that matter, the
targeted enemies are entirely interchangeable - here
Osama bin Laden, there Saddam Hussein, here the leader
of Iran, there of North Korea. They are all in essence
one enemy - one "axis" - despite their differences from
one another, or even hatred of one another.
Hard-boiled men and women who may not share
Bush's fervent spirituality can nonetheless support his
purpose because, undergirding the new ideology, there is
an authentic global crisis that requires an urgent
response. New technologies are now making it possible
for small groups of nihilists, or even single
individuals, to wreak havoc on a scale unprecedented in
history. This is the ultimate "asymmetric threat". The
attacks of September 11, amplified by the murderous echo
of the anthrax mailer, the as-yet-unapprehended
psychopath who sent deadly letters to journalists and
government officials in the weeks after September 11,
put that new condition on display for all the world to
see. Innovations in physics, biology, chemistry and
information technology - and soon, possibly, in
nanotechnology and genetic engineering - have had the
unforeseen effect of threatening to put in a few hands
the destructive power that, in former times, could be
exercised only by sizable armies. This is the real
condition to which the Bush administration is
responding. The problem is actual, if not yet fully
present.
So, to put the best face on the Bush
agenda (leaving aside questions of oil, global market
control and economic or military hegemony), a humane
project of anti-proliferation can be seen at its core.
Yet a nation that was trying to promote the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD),
especially nuclear weapons, would behave precisely as
the Bush administration has behaved over the past three
years. The Pentagon's chest-thumping concept of "full
spectrum dominance" itself motivates other nations to
seek sources of countervailing power, and when the
United States actually goes to war to impose its widely
disputed notion of order on some states, but not others,
nations - friendly as well as unfriendly - find
themselves with an urgent reason to acquire some means
of deterring such intervention.
The odd and
tragic thing is that the world before Bush was actually
nearing consensus on how to manage the problem of the
proliferation of WMD, and had begun to put in place
promising structures designed to prevent such spread.
Centrally embodied in the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty of 1968, which had successfully and amazingly
kept the number of nuclear powers, actual as well as
admitted, relatively low, that consensus gave primacy to
treaty obligations, international cooperation and a
serious commitment by existing nuclear powers to move
toward ultimate nuclear abolition. All of that has been
trashed by Bush. "International law?" he smirked last
December. "I better call my lawyer."
Now
indications are that nations all over the globe - Japan,
Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, Australia - have begun
re-evaluating their rejections of nukes, and some are
positively rushing to acquire them. Iran and North Korea
are likely to be only the tip of this radioactive
iceberg. Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India are a grim
forecast of the future on every continent. And the Bush
administration - by declaring its own nuclear arsenal
permanent, by threatening nuclear first-strikes against
other nations, by "warehousing" treaty-defused warheads
instead of destroying them, by developing a new line of
"usable" nukes, by moving to weaponize the "high
frontier" of outer space, by doing little to help Russia
get rid of its rotting nuclear stockpile, by embracing
"preventive war" - is enabling this trend instead of
discouraging it. How can this be?
The problem
has its roots in a long-term American forgetfulness,
going back to the acid fog in which the United States
ended World War II. There was never a complete moral
reckoning with the harsh momentum of that conflict's
denouement - how US leaders embraced a strategy of
terror bombing, slaughtering whole urban populations,
and how, finally, they ushered in the atomic age with
the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars have
debated those questions, but politicians have avoided
them, and most citizens have pretended they aren't
really questions at all. America's enduring assumptions
about its own moral supremacy, its own altruism, its own
exceptionalism, have hardly been punctured by
consideration of the possibility that we Americans, too,
are capable of grave mistakes, terrible crimes. Such
awareness, drawn from a fuller reckoning with days gone
by - with August 6 and 9, 1945, above all - would
inhibit America's present claim to moral grandeur, which
is simultaneously a claim, of course, to economic and
political grandiosity. The indispensable nation must
dispense with what went before.
"The past is
never dead," William Faulkner said. "It isn't even
past." How Americans remember their country's use of
terror bombing affects how they think of terrorism; how
they remember the first use of nuclear weapons has
profound relevance for how the United States behaves in
relation to nuclear weapons today. If the long US
embrace of nuclear "mutual assured destruction" is
unexamined; if the Pentagon's treaty-violating rejection
of the ideal of eventual nuclear abolition is
unquestioned - then the Bush administration's embrace of
nukes as normal, usable weapons will not seem offensive.
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the
handmaiden of tyranny. The Bush administration is fully
committed to maintaining what the historian Marc
Trachtenberg calls America's "nuclear amnesia" even as
the administration seeks to impose a unilateral
structure of control on the world. As it pursues a
world-threatening campaign against other people's
weapons of mass destruction, that is, the Bush
administration refuses to confront the moral meaning of
America's own weapons of mass destruction, not to
mention their viral character, as other nations seek
smaller versions of the US arsenal, if only to deter
Bush's next "preventive" war. The United States' own
arsenal, in other words, remains the primordial cause of
the WMD plague.
"Memory," the novelist Paul
Auster has written, is "the space in which a thing
happens for the second time." No one wants the terrible
events that came after the rising of the sun on
September 11, 2001, to happen for a second time except
in the realm of remembrance, leading to understanding
and commitment. But all the ways George Bush exploited
those events, betraying the memory of those who died in
them, must be lifted up and examined again, so that the
outrageousness of his political purpose can be felt in
its fullness. Exactly how the "war on terrorism"
unfolded; how it bled into the wars against Afghanistan,
then Iraq; how US fears were exacerbated by
administration alarms; how civil rights were undermined,
treaties broken, alliances abandoned, coarseness
embraced - none of this should be forgotten.
Given how they have been so dramatically
unfulfilled, Washington's initial hubristic impulses
toward a new imperial dominance should not be forgotten.
That the first purpose of the war - Osama "dead or
alive" - changed when al-Qaeda proved elusive should not
be forgotten. That the early justification for the war
against Iraq - Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -
changed when they proved non-existent should not be
forgotten. That in former times the US government
behaved as if facts mattered, as if evidence informed
policy, should not be forgotten. That Afghanistan and
Iraq are a shambles, with thousands dead and hundreds of
thousands at risk from disease, disorder and despair,
should not be forgotten. That a now-disdainful world
gave itself in unbridled love to the United States on
September 11, 2001, should not be forgotten.
Nor, given Bush's reference, should the most
relevant fact about the Crusades be forgotten - that, on
their own terms and notwithstanding the romance of
history, they were, in the end, an overwhelming failure.
The 1096 campaign, the "First Crusade", finally
"succeeded" in 1099, when a remnant army fell upon
Jerusalem, slaughtering much of its population. But
armies under Saladin reasserted Islamic control in 1187,
and subsequent Crusades never succeeded in
re-establishing Latin dominance in the Holy Land. The
reconquista Crusades reclaimed Spain and Portugal
for Christian Europe, but in the process destroyed the
glorious Iberian convivencia, a high civilization
never to be matched below the Pyrenees again.
Meanwhile, intra-Christian crusades, wars
against heresy, only made permanent the East-West split
between Latin Catholicism and "schismatic" Eastern
Orthodoxy, and made inevitable the eventual break, in
the Reformation, between a Protestant north and a
Catholic south. The Crusades, one could argue,
established basic structures of Western civilization,
while undermining the possibility that their grandest
ideals would ever be realized.
Will such
consequences - new global structures of an American
imperium, hollowed-out hopes for a humane and just
internationalism - follow in the train of George W
Bush's crusade? This question will be answered in
smaller part by anonymous, ad hoc armies of
on-the-ground human beings in foreign lands, many of
whom will resist Washington to the death. In larger
part, the question will be answered by those privileged
to be citizens of the United States. To us falls the
ultimate power over the US moral and political agenda.
As has never been true of any empire before, because
this one is still a democracy, such power belongs to
citizens absolutely. If the power is ours, so is the
responsibility.
James Carroll, a
columnist for the Boston Globe, is at work on a
television documentary based on his best-selling
book Constantine's Sword. This article is adapted
from the introduction to his new book Crusade,
Chronicles of an Unjust War, a collection of his
columns since September 11, 2001. Used by permission
ofTomdispatch, where it was
reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books.
