Page 2 of 4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Words in a time of
war By Mark Danner
prevailed 5-4, making Bush the
first president in more than a century to come to
the White House with fewer votes than those of his
opponent.
In this singular condition, and
with a Senate precisely divided between parties,
Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an
overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts
greater and more regressive than those he had
outlined in the campaign. And
despite what would seem to
have been debilitating political weakness, the
president shortly achieved this first success in
"creating his own reality". To act as if he had
overwhelming political power would mean he had
overwhelming political power.
This,
however, was only the overture of the vast
symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the
huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of September 11,
2001. We are so embedded in its age that it is
easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of
it: 19 young men with box cutters seized enormous
transcontinental airliners and brought those
towers down. In an age in which we have become
accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide
attacks in a single day - often these multiple
attacks from Baghdad don't even make the front
pages of our papers - it is easy to forget the
blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image
of the second airliner disappearing into the great
office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and
emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red
blossom of flame, on the other side; and then,
half an hour later, the astonishing flowering
collapse of the 100-story structure, transforming
itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to
great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.
The image remains, will always remain,
with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box
cutters in the hands of 19 young men, nor
airliners at their command. The weapon that day
was the television set. It was the television set
that made the image possible, and
inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way
of talking - the propaganda of the deed, indeed -
then that day the television was the indispensable
conveyer of the conversation: the recruitment
poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena
in which America's weakness and vulnerability
could be dramatized on an adequate scale.
Terror - as Menachem Begin, the late
Israeli prime minister and the successful
terrorist who drove the British from Mandate
Palestine, remarked in his memoirs - terror is
about destroying the prestige of the imperial
regime; terror is about "dirtying the face of
power".
Bush and his lieutenants surely
realized this and it is in that knowledge, I
believe, that we can find the beginning of the
answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of
these past few years: What exactly lay at the root
of the almost fanatical determination of
administration officials to attack and occupy
Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic
"over-determined" decision, a tangle of fear, in
the form of those infamous weapons of mass
destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of
the neo-conservative project to "remake the Middle
East"; and of realpolitik, in the form of the
"vital interest" of securing the industrial
world's oil supplies.
In the beginning,
though, was the felt need on the part of our
nation's leaders, men and women so worshipful of
the idea of power and its ability to remake
reality itself, to restore the nation's prestige,
to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger,
a confidant of the president, when asked by Bush's
speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq war,
responded: "Because Afghanistan was not enough."
The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate
us. "And we need to humiliate them." In other
words, the presiding image of the "war on terror"
- the burning towers collapsing on the television
screen - had to be supplanted by another, the
image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a
vanquished Arab capital.
It is no accident
that then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, at
the first "war cabinet" meeting at Camp David the
Saturday after the attacks, fretted over the "lack
of targets" in Afghanistan and wondered whether we
"shouldn't do Iraq first". He wanted to see those
advancing tanks marching across our television
screens, and soon.
In the end, of course,
the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks,
though they were perfectly happy to have us do so,
the better to destroy these multimillion-dollar
anachronisms with so-called IEDs, improvised
explosive devices, worth a few hundred bucks
apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare, and
one should note here with some astonishment how
successful it has been these past half-dozen
years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as
one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly
after September 11, the United States was enjoying
a rare "unipolar moment". It deployed the greatest
military and economic power the world has ever
seen. It spent more on its weapons, its army, navy
and air force, than the rest of the world
combined.
It was the assumption of this
so-called preponderance that lay behind the
philosophy of power enunciated by "Bush's Brain"
and that led to an attitude toward international
law and alliances that is, in my view, quite
unprecedented in American history. That radical
attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single
sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy
of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a
nation-state will continue to be challenged by
those who employ a strategy of the weak using
international fora, judicial processes and
terrorism."
Let me repeat that little
troika of "weapons of the weak": international
fora (meaning the United Nations and like
institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts,
domestic and international), and ... terrorism.
This strange gathering, put forward by the
government of the United States, stems from the
idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a
world, courts - indeed, law itself - can only
limit the power of the most powerful state.
Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for
law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon
of the weak. The most powerful state, after all,
makes reality.
Asymmetric warfare and
dumb luck Now, here's an astonishing fact:
fewer than half a dozen years into this "unipolar
moment", the greatest military power in the
history of the world stands on the brink of defeat
in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and all-powerful
military has been humbled by a congeries of secret
organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide
vests, car bombs and improvised explosive devices
- all of them cheap, simple and effective, indeed
so effective that these techniques now comprise a
kind of ready-made insurgency kit freely available
on the Internet and spreading in popularity around
the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that
land of few targets.
As I stand here, one
of our two major political parties advocates the
withdrawal - gradual, or otherwise - of American
combat forces from Iraq and many in the other
party are feeling the increasing urge to go along.
As for the Bush administration's broader "war on
terror", as the State Department detailed recently
in its annual report on the subject, the number of
terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher,
nor more effective. True, al-Qaeda has not
attacked again within the United States. They do
not need to. They are alive and flourishing.
Indeed, it might even be said that they are
winning. For their goal, despite the rhetoric of
the Bush administration, was not simply to kill
Americans but, by challenging the United States in
this spectacular fashion, to recruit great numbers
to their cause and to move their insurgency into
the heart of the Middle East. And all these things
they have done.
How could such a thing
have happened? In their choice of enemy, one might
say that the terrorists of al-Qaeda had a great
deal of dumb luck, for they attacked a country run
by an administration that had a radical conception
of the potency of power. At the heart of the
principle of asymmetric warfare - al-Qaeda's kind
of warfare - is the notion of using your
opponents' power against him. How does a small
group of insurgents without an army, or even heavy
weapons, defeat the greatest conventional military
force the world has ever known? How do you defeat
such an army if you don't have an army? Well, you
borrow your enemy's. And this is precisely what
al-Qaeda did.
Using the classic strategy
of provocation, the group tried to tempt the
superpower into its adopted homeland. The original
strategy behind the September 11 attacks - apart
from humbling the superpower and creating the
greatest recruiting poster the world had ever seen
- was to lure the United States into a ground war
in Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower
(like the Soviet Union before it) was to be
trapped, stranded and destroyed. It was to prepare
for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the
assassination, two days before September 11 - via
bombs
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