have no qualms going to war
with an enemy whose aggression "makes sense" to us
- that is, aggression directed toward those its
perpetrator views as responsible for its
grievances. But we are simply lost when trying to
understand the concept of (what we could only
call) unrestricted warfare, to say nothing of its
application.
Our love of rules governing
the chaos of warfare are both a cause and an
effect of a particular psychological process.
Specifically, one of the most effective means of
reconciling our love of violence with our love of
morality is that - rather creatively - we moralize
our violence, especially in war. We insist that
warring parties should kill each other in certain
ways and avoid other ways that are
dishonorable, cowardly, and
ultimately, downright senseless.
To
Americans, the act of targeting civilians seems
like the saddest case of misplaced rage. We often
wonder: "What possible reason could a person have
for taking out their grievances on an undeserving
target in a calculated ritual, again and again?
They must enjoy it, or they must not be interested
in justice, myopic or otherwise. Whatever their
differences, surely any two warring parties can
agree that innocent bystanders should be spared if
possible, right?"
In the end, because we
cannot conceive of any basis for targeting
civilians, we frame such methods in moral terms:
"Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" -
that is, someone who has a chance of fighting
back. Otherwise, we believe, the fight leaves the
realm of warfare, poisons the concept of
freedom-fighting, and embraces nearly
indiscriminate mayhem. Even if terrorism is an
effective strategy - which merits a separate
analysis of its own - we resent that effectiveness
because we regard it as cheating a noble system of
warfare. We are repulsed by the implications of
what terrorists demand of us, especially how their
tactic of hiding among civilians forces us to
inflict (against our more humane wishes)
significant collateral damage.
It is very
painful for us to watch as terrorists use our own
humanity against us: we are vulnerable to terror
because we are moral and thus accept whatever
costs might accompany abiding by the rules that
terrorists dishonorably exploit. If it were not
for our morality, we say, an endless civilian
death toll would be the last thing to stop us.
No gun at the head Given our
resentment of terrorism for its methods, it should
be no surprise that we regard any attempt to
negotiate with terrorists as the single worst
course of action available to any aggrieved party.
"It would only encourage more terrorism," the
reasoning goes, with all of its various spin-offs
and modifications: "that would embolden the
enemy", "they would learn that terror works", and
so on.
And while these tactical
considerations often suffice as a basis for making
policy recommendations, there is, nevertheless,
something rhetorical and emotional at work here,
as well. Something must take us from the impartial
suggestion that "negotiation would be unwise" to a
recommendation loaded with emotional content like,
"negotiation with terrorism is no different than
unconditional surrender".
Specifically
regarding Americans, the idea of negotiating with
terrorists or hostage-takers is abhorrent due to
the dreaded connotations of being forced into a
corner that has only one, very uncomfortable exit.
As poster-children of a nation usually obsessed
with negotiation, Americans are firm believers in
contracts as a "meeting of the minds", and insist
that any subsequent agreement should be signed out
of affirmative yearning to obtain something
desirable, but unnecessary.
Americans do
not want to feel as though they "have to"
negotiate; they would much prefer to enter
negotiations because they "want to" do so. In
other words, no sense of coercion, and no sense of
impending doom if an agreement is not signed -
these should be the conditions for a fair and
honorable negotiation.
Otherwise, we view
the process leading to the agreement not as
negotiation, but instead as simple extortion.
Whether dealing with legitimate nation-states like
Iran (and its nuclear ambitions) or non-state
actors/terrorists like Hezbollah, America and much
of the West cannot tolerate being put in a
situation where the only rational choice is to
give in to the demands of its enemies, who are
essentially holding "a gun to our heads" while
they pretend to be reasonable.
Pressure-washing the
boilerplate Without question, there are a
number of holes in the American rhetoric
condemning terrorism, even beyond the standard
(and accurate) claim that America has supported
and continues to support terrorists all over the
world for their own strategic purposes - from the
contras in Nicaragua to the peshmerga in Iraqi
Kurdistan, and countless others. But even within
the American cultural and linguistic framework
that condemns terrorism, there exists a number of
problems that together point to an unsurprising
but compelling conclusion: Americans hate
terrorism because they are vulnerable to it,
nothing more.
In the early 1980s, a
nascent group of Shi'ite militants in Lebanon
began a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli
forces and American/French peacekeepers - all of
whom occupied Lebanon at the time. On October 23,
1983, two Hezbollah suicide bombers simultaneously
killed 241 American and 58 French soldiers as they
slept in their military barracks in Beirut. US
President Reagan called it a "despicable act", and
urged Americans to resist "the bestial nature of
those who would assume power".
US vice
president George H W Bush toured the collapsed US
Marine Corps barracks and insisted that the US
"would not be cowed by terrorists". Pope John Paul
II and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir both
called the attack a "despicable crime". French
president Francois Mitterrand called it a
"despicable attack". Canadian prime minister
Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, "These brutal and
criminal actions cannot be excused."
Every
Western leader (and most Middle East tyrants)
publicly condemned the attack. Headlines about the
attack dominated the news for weeks. Americans
were devastated, and our leaders echoed these
emotions with their mourning and their fury. But
imagine how Americans might have reacted the next
day if Reagan, Bush or secretary of state George
Schultz had said, "Today, we mourn the loss of
many good men to a cunning enemy, but we must
remain steadfast in our mission, and grateful that
our enemy did not target civilians."
Without question, we would have been
outraged that our leader was asking us to look on
the bright side of tallying America's greatest
one-day loss of marines since the Battle of Iwo
Jima. We did not want to be grateful to our enemy
for obeying the rules of war; we wanted blood. It
did not matter that Hezbollah targeted our
military infrastructure - not that day, nor on any
other day when American military targets were
attacked in Lebanon.
On November 13, 1995, an al-Qaeda-affiliated
militant remote-detonated a car bomb outside the
US-operated National Guard Training facility in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans.
President Clinton called the bombing "an outrage",
and he insisted that the US and Saudi Arabia would
work together to identify "those responsible for
this cowardly act". Raymond E Mabus Jr, the
American ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time,
described the bombing as "a desperate act, a
horrible act, the work of cowards".
On June 26, 1996, a truck bomb killed 19
Americans at a US Air Force complex at the Khobar
Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden
and Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
have been linked to the attack, which US president
Clinton said, at the time, "appears to be the work
of terrorists". He went on to say that if the
explosion was the work of terrorists, "I am
outraged by it ... The cowards who committed this
murderous act must not go unpunished ... Anyone
who attacks one American attacks every American,
and we protect and defend our own."
On October 12, 2000, 17 American soldiers were
killed by a suicide boat-bomb attack on the USS
Cole as it refueled in a Yemeni port. Again,
President Clinton said that "if, as it now
appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a
despicable and cowardly act". Likewise, Admiral
Vern Clark, the US Chief of Naval Operations,
noted that "I have no reason to think that this
was anything but a senseless act of terrorism."
Secretary of Defense William Cohen called the
attack a "vicious and cowardly act".
Again, consider how offensive it would
have been (in the aftermath of each of these three
attacks) for Clinton to commend the bombers for
not targeting civilians. In fact, it would have
even been offensive for Clinton to describe this
bombing as anything but a terrorist attack. This
should be more than enough evidence that, in the
end - regardless of whatever principled moral
arguments we might make in a classroom - our
disgust with terrorism actually has nothing to do
with targeting choices.
It is crucial to
note that the appropriate conclusion from this
evidence is not that, deep down, we actually love
when our military is attacked. Far from it, we
should recognize that - contrary to our talking
points about honor - we actually value our
soldiers' lives just as much as we value our
citizens' lives. It hurts when we lose civilians,
and it hurts when we lose soldiers. The fact that
American civilians did not die in these four
attacks does not detract from the devastation
wrought on the victims' families, nor does it
mitigate our nation's sense of loss.
In
our eyes - and those are the eyes under scrutiny
here - were our fallen soldiers in Beirut any more
or less "innocent" than the American civilians who
died in the Twin Towers? Strangely, our first
tendency is to say "yes," even though the Beirut,
Riyadh, Dhahran and USS Cole attacks fall well
outside the oft-cited civilian argument condemning
terrorism: no civilians died, only soldiers; it
was an attack on our military, and it stung
because
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