Since the end of World War II, no US
administration has indulged American idealism to
the degree - and with the recklessness - that
President George W Bush has. Previous presidents
were better able to balance our raw idealism with
our realist objectives, even though they often
spoke the language of morality to the American
people - telling us that we were the planet's
moral beacon - while quietly ensuring that our
impulses be checked by a cold dose of caution and
realism. For better or worse, it was inevitable
that our own idealism (or more cynically, our
self-righteousness) would lead us to overreach.
Ascribing moral content to our policies is
hardly new, but this has
become particularly difficult
as America has risen to superpower status and
pursued its strategic interests like any other
superpower. While most burgeoning hegemonies
abandon morality when they become powerful, we
have merely integrated our morality with textbook
superpower behavior. By insisting that doing
"what's right" is the basis for our most important
decisions, we become particularly vulnerable to
self-delusion in a rough world.
For the
same reason, these enemies find our demands
perplexing: given their agenda, should we expect
terrorists to fight us with methods that will
ensure their defeat? Our response, naturally,
would be, "if you cannot fight fairly, then you
should not fight at all", while the terrorists
insist that "if we cannot fight fairly, then we
will fight unfairly, as our cause is too important
to be hindered by talk of methods".
And
could we expect anything less from our enemies? Is
this not why they are our enemies, because they
see the world through a lens that is
incomprehensible to us? Consider, for example,
that our insistence that our enemies "come out and
fight like men" is really only a ploy to get our
enemies to play by rules under which we are sure
to obliterate them. In the end, insisting on the
moral high ground has tremendous strategic
benefits for the more powerful party wedded to the
status quo.
No superpower can resist the
temptation to take advantage of its advantages,
nor would any reasonable beneficiary of that
superpower argue in favor of resisting such a
temptation. It is important to note, however, that
as a nation entrenched in the Judeo-Christian
moral tradition, America can and often does
capitalize on this power to do wonderful and
uncontroversial work all over the world. Like
American security and prosperity, our morality and
strategic interests are not mutually exclusive; we
merely have a tendency to frame those strategic
interests in the language of morality, for various
reasons.
American leaders, for instance,
almost always speak the language of morality -
sometimes manipulating their constituencies for
political purposes, and other times because they
genuinely believe in a particular moral
imperative. Debate over the American intervention
in the first Gulf War in 1991, for instance, was
framed in moral terms, but many believed - with
reasonable grounds - that our government's
decision to intervene was founded on the need to
protect our interest in the region's crude oil,
and that the first President Bush only spoke of
"liberating the Kuwaitis" to garner support that
would have disappeared had the explicit agenda
been protecting our oil supplies.
Either
way, despite being at the top of the geopolitical
food chain, we continue to use morality to
identify ourselves as the eternal underdog who
sticks to its principles, while simultaneously
(and bizarrely) we believe that if we are on top,
it is only because we are morally superior and
deserve to be there. The ascendance of American
power-according to this line of logic-is not
merely the result, but also the reward, for our
moral integrity.
So, it should come as no
surprise that we view terrorism through a similar
moralistic lens. Yet this hardly mitigates its
detrimental effect: if we believe terrorism is
terrible for its methods, we cannot recognize that
terrorism is just another form of leverage - one
that we correctly regard as frightening and
dangerous, but hardly monolithic. To understand
this dynamic better, it is helpful to consider how
other nations regard terrorism and hostage taking
- specifically, as a normal form of exerting
leverage in negotiations or even high-context
"engagement".
Neither approach is "better"
or "worse" than the other, but such a comparison
is important if only to illustrate that we can
exert greater control over our visceral reactions
than we might think. We also have greater control
over undesirable outcomes than we might think.
Armed with such an understanding, we can build a
more nuanced approach to the "war on terror", one
that acknowledges that victory, in any
conventional sense, is utterly impossible in this
case.
The two typically moral, American
arguments against negotiating or engaging with
terrorists are often met with perplexity in
non-Western cultures. The first argument is that
terrorism (including hostage-taking) is morally
wrong because it is an evasive, cowardly form of
aggression, and thus not worthy of our engagement.
The second American argument is that negotiating
with terrorists (sometimes over hostages) is even
more offensive because such a negotiation corrupts
the integrity of an honorable contractual process.
"Bartering in human lives" or "negotiating with a
gun to their heads" is the best way to infuriate
an American in a negotiation, or even in an
argument about the prospect of negotiation. In
fact, bartering under duress is so repugnant to
Americans that their most common reaction is some
form of moral boycott.
Yet while we
boycott negotiations with terrorists in the name
of morality, the rest of the world negotiates
under duress every day. Again, for Americans, a
"fair" negotiation is one that is desirable but
not necessary, as both parties want to improve
their lots in some way; whereas people in other
(often developing) countries, who are accustomed
to disappointment, settle for merely preventing a
worse outcome - having recognized that in times of
duress, avoiding disaster is more than enough
incentive to negotiate. In fact, many less
powerful parties would say that times of duress
are the only times in which negotiating
compromises is absolutely imperative. After all,
if you are not "over a barrel", then you have
excellent reason to avoid the negotiating table.
Without a doubt, a party that is
accustomed to disappointment in negotiations will
often view moral boycotts as luxuries they cannot
afford - and that any American refusal to
negotiate with certain players is a direct and
enviable testament to its unsurpassed power and
expectations. In other words, the more powerful
party to a conflict is often faced with the
question: why should I bother negotiating when I
can just take what I want? Ultimately, Americans
are just as likely to take (as is the nature of
power), for better or worse. Yet the tense
dissonance in this dynamic lies not in the
hypocrisy of double standards when fighting
terrorism, but rather in our inability to see past
the moral rhetoric to even determine if terrorist
groups like al-Qaeda actually pose enough of a
threat to warrant negotiations, or if they are
just a severe nuisance that that found good
fortune on 9/11.
For Americans, the mere
act of "going to war" on anything or with anyone
is interpreted as an unequivocal sign that we must
be facing a serious threat, and when that paradigm
is thrown into upheaval, we simply cannot
function. That the presence of a threat is - to
most nations - a basis for both negotiation and
war (depending on the situation) only confuses
Americans even more. We seem to ask, how can
negotiation exist on the same behavior continuum
as war and peace? That is, if aggression is the
name of the game, then to us, war is the only
rational choice - a view, again, reflecting our
reliance on, and expectation of, hegemony.
Ultimately, our cultural lens clouds our
judgment and prevents us from seeing the more
nuanced reality that terrorists have frightening,
earth-shaking power but nevertheless pose no
strategic threat to us. Put differently, because
of this cultural lens (which fuses our morality
with our foreign policy to ensure our supremacy),
it is hard for us to distinguish between an
enemy's power to make us afraid, and the same
enemy's power to actually bring about our
destruction. In the post-Cold War era, the two
types of power are no longer synonymous, and it is
hard for us to imagine our fears are anything but
the result of a dire and very real threat.
Until 9/11, the Cold War was the last time
we had felt genuinely terrified about the security
of our existence. Yet in our standoff with the
Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear holocaust
was infinitely more credible than any threat that
al-Qaeda could ever muster. We merely saw on 9/11,
for the first time, how truly terrifying terrorism
can be. Yet while it might seem depressingly
inevitable, our cultural response to terrorism -
reaching its apex that September day - was
actually the result of factors that can only
dictate our fate when we fail to recognize them.
Our culture has often inspired us to bring
freedom and justice to millions across the globe,
but if we cannot recognize when the seeds of our
cultural blessings sprout hemlock, our wars will
give us a sense of retribution, but little
strategic advantage or humanitarian appeal.
Defining the world in black-and-white terms, we
will only become more vulnerable, perhaps enough
even to bring an end to America's supremacy,
though still not enough to threaten our culture
and civilization. Nevertheless, the fact that we
ignore our culture's inconsistencies (and behave
accordingly) means that we see our vulnerability
as a fluke. The idea of being vulnerable on a
consistent basis is as foreign to us as viewing
ourselves as immoral.
In light of our
passion and particular breed of morality, our
staggering margins of supremacy over our
competitors will prevent us from considering that
we might need to conserve our power - militarily,
politically and culturally - as part of a
long-term strategy to ensure that very supremacy.
Nothing brings seemingly omnipotent empires to a
grinding halt as quickly or dramatically as
overreach. At this rate, our cultural expectations
will lead us into more battlefields than it will
lead us out of. We were shocked by 9/11 and we
will be shocked by its sequel, as well. Having
already declared a "war on terror", when we endure
another terrifying disaster, we will all expect
the war on terror to be escalated, no matter who
leads our government.
But when we turn to
our arsenal of weapons and morale - even if
successfully adapted for asymmetric warfare - we
will find our resources either nursing civil wars
abroad or licking their wounds at home, almost
certainly humiliated by the same can-do attitude
that inspired their deployment. Sadly for us, our
vulnerability is no coincidence of the moment. It
is no fluke. We face a dire threat, but not from
terrorism. We are our own threat, and not because
of overreaction as much as "misreaction".
Ultimately, in a world where the brushfire of
hatred is no passing fad, our wisest course of
action would be to acknowledge our vulnerability
and hedge our bets accordingly. This means that we
have to radically alter our negotiation paradigm
and the acceptable identities of the parties on
the other side of the table.
Negotiating honesty As many are
quick to note, negotiating under duress does
encourage our enemies to put us under duress more
often, and this is certainly an important
consideration. Yet despite endless insistence by
our government that we do not and should not
legitimize and reward terrorism through
negotiations, Bush nevertheless implicitly
negotiates and often capitulates with terrorists
on a nearly consistent basis.
Every day in
Iraq and Afghanistan, our armed forces, defense
contractors and our civilian allies in President
Hamid Karzai's government and Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki's coalition all negotiate with
people who our president calls "terrorists",
"extremists", "islamo-fascists" and worse. We also
negotiate with
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