Dealing with the preliminaries

Well, it looks as if we’re going to have a war of some sort. We don’t yet know who the enemy really is, we don’t know where the enemy is, we don’t know how to neutralize or defeat the enemy, but we’re going to war. It is probably inevitable and, in light of the horrific terrorist destruction wreaked on New York and the Pentagon, the agonizing loss of American lives, the destruction of American buildings and infrastructure, necessary.

As we move toward war, however, we should have a few questions in mind and at least raise them, even if we don’t expect our leaders to deal with them seriously.

The question of who the enemy is will be extremely difficult but is perhaps the most important key to an effective response.

I have been extremely critical of the FBI and I trust I will be so again when they venture into areas that are not federal responsibilities or target American citizens. But they seem to be operating in a fairly intelligent way, on the kind of problem they should be handling, following leads with grinding shoe-leather work and analysis, tracking what they know about the terrorists who hijacked the airliners back to where they were last week, then the week before, then the week before that. With any luck – although it’s hardly inevitable given that the Osama bin Laden consortium, for example, is reasonably well known to operate on the basis of relatively autonomous and loosely connected cells – the trail will eventually lead to the paymasters and masterminds behind these unspeakable acts. Then will come the perhaps more difficult question of how to take them out.

But the question of who the enemy is will almost certainly turn out to be broader than the question of which particular people were behind this outrage. While it seems likely at this juncture – though it is especially important to follow the evidence rather than preconceived ideas or hunches, no matter how apparently logical – that Osama bin Laden was at least involved, it also appears that people from a number of Middle Eastern countries were involved. Were they simply members of dissident groups or terrorist organizations, or did any get help, overt or covert, from governments or what passes for nation-states? If so, what does the United States do about that?

President Bush showed a certain understanding of the problem when he talked about the new kind of warfare of the 21st century. Traditionally, wars have been ways to confront and destroy nation-states – though you can find examples in history of essentially tribal or even free-lance or gang wars that have been thoroughly brutal. But now the largest and most developed nation-state in the world (arguably at least) faces an enemy that is not an identifiable nation-state pending further information, but a loose, decentralized band of desperate people organized and perhaps exploited by ruthless and obviously capable leaders. How does a nation-state confront such a shadowy foe? I hope the president and his advisers have a better idea than they have let us in on so far, but I rather doubt it. Expect plenty of mistakes, false starts and blind alleys.

Most of us are aware, in a vague sort of way, that millions of people around the world hate America with an intensity most of us can barely imagine. How many of those people will be “inspired” by the terror this week to think about doing something similar and even to take action? Is there any way to figure out who these would-be perpetrators might be? Perhaps even more important, is there a way to take action against perpetrators and immediate threats without creating more dangers for the future?

This is hardly an idle question given our recent history. Osama bin Laden, for example, can be said to be at least partly a creation of the CIA. He earned his spurs and got his guerrilla training and experience during the U.S.-financed Islamic resistance to the Soviet attempt to occupy Afghanistan. Then, for reasons I don’t claim to understand completely, he came to believe that the United States had abandoned the cause and had become the enemy. (The CIA also had a hand in creating Noriega and various other people who became troublesome.)

There’s a CIA term for the phenomenon: “blowback,” an intended (though not necessarily unpredictable) and extremely negative consequence of an aggressive operation. In his 2000 book, “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,” political scientist and Japan expert Chalmers Johnson predicted that the casual way the United States does empire would precipitate terrorist acts chillingly similar to what we have experienced this week. Get it and read it.

After the “wag the dog” attacks on what turned out to be mostly abandoned camps of bin Laden’s in Afghanistan, along with the missiles aimed at an aspirin factory during the Clinton administration, bin Laden became a bigger and more respected figure in the Arab world. A number of Arab moderates who oppose what bin Laden stands for and would have a great deal to lose if he were successful began to see him as a romantic, even admirable figure after the U.S. targeted him unsuccessfully.

But go beyond Osama bin Laden and the recent attack. The United States has acted, in a rather desultory and even careless fashion, as something of a policeman of the world, but for various reasons this country is unsuited for the role – even beyond the fact that trying to run an empire inevitably means curtailing the freedoms that make this country worth defending. Most Americans care little about foreign affairs and international news, and our leaders, even – or perhaps especially – our foreign policy “experts” know or care little about the countries they try to pacify or manipulate.

In a recent piece, Jon Basil Utley put it very well:

The other reason for silence [about the mysterious and untouchable question of why so many foreigners might want to do us harm] is that American foreign policy is based almost entirely upon domestic political concerns, with little thought or concern for long-run consequences. NATO expansion was promised by Clinton during the last election just to gain Midwestern votes from Americans of central European ancestry. When Madeleine Albright ordered the bombing of Serbia, neither she nor Clinton thought about how Russia would react.

In fact, knowledgeable Russian experts believe that NATO expansion and the bombing of Serbia were the turning point, after which Russia started arming China with its latest weaponry, helping Iran and Iraq, and moving back to nationalist policies.

Russia’s military budget has now nearly doubled (to $8 billion) from what it was before the attack. Similarly, with intervention in Colombia, there is no thought of the new, possibly deadly, combination of Arab terrorists willing to do suicide missions, and Colombian drug smugglers who know how to bribe or blackmail their way into smuggling weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the U.S. The drug war in Colombia is, again, being fought to satisfy another domestic constituency, with no thought about possible wider consequences.

Americans don’t like to hear or talk about such things. Americans, after all, are for the most part decent people who do their part to make the country productive and prosperous. Most Americans don’t think of themselves or their country as the center of a world empire. They will rally behind a president if something really upsets them, but they still want to conduct whatever military actions might be deemed desirable overseas quickly, cleanly, decisively – “surgically” – and get out and come home.

The trouble is that our leaders – or at least a significant portion of them – do think of themselves as the world’s policemen, but hardly any of them know enough (or care to know enough) to think beyond the short term about the long-term consequences of their actions. Thus they are constantly creating enemies – sometimes among people who would be inclined to hate or envy the United States anyway – but often enough among people who, without such meddling, would view the United States as an example to be emulated rather than an 800-pound gorilla to be harassed or destroyed.

As Jon Utley put it:

Half a million dead children in Iraq, Palestinian teenagers raging against American-supplied tanks, Serbs without electricity and running water or diseased or ruined and jobless from our bombing, assorted Moslems who blame America for their dictatorships and misery, Colombians with relatives killed by those aided by America. The list of potential enemies grows and grows. Even Basque terrorists now look at America as their enemy after President Bush, during his recent visit, casually promised to aid Spain’s government with electronic surveillance. They all now have reason to do us harm, they all want America out of their countries, “out of their faces,” in street language. It’s not rocket science.

To understand this is hardly to condone that hatred, let alone to apologize for the unspeakable brutality with which some ruthless people attacked our country this week. But it is important to begin to understand it in order to minimize the potential for creating more ruthless enemies with whatever steps are undertaken in the coming weeks and months.

We have liked to think we were invulnerable to the hatreds of the rest of the world. This week has demonstrated that we are not.

A few more questions for this week. Is it possible that the strikingly successful terrorist attacks this week amounted to the maximum the terrorist organization behind them is able to pull off? Or is it likely that more attacks will come? If this was meant as something more than a symbolic act of destruction designed to frighten and cow the American people – which it doesn’t seem to have accomplished – one would expect some follow-up violence or, at least, attempts to perpetrate more outrages.

One more, which might lead to a rare optimistic note: I wonder if the strike on the World Trade Center was intended as an angry, but largely symbolic, gesture against “globalization” or whether the terrorists really thought that destroying or maiming those two buildings would actually cripple the U.S. economy? For those who think in hierarchical, top-down ways, it might seem feasible, given that so many corporate headquarters and so many top people work in those buildings.

But I suspect that the largely decentralized market system that we still have in the United States (despite the decades-long efforts of governments of both parties to centralize it and manage it from the top) will prove much more resilient than most observers expect. And sure enough, on Thursday, despite the markets having been closed since Tuesday, more than $2 billion in venture capital was raised for various ventures, while Main Street continued to function remarkably well in the absence of Wall Street.

As radio commentator and host Lowell Ponte pointed out in his recent column for frontpage.com, decentralization is likely to turn out to be one of our most effective defenses against terrorism. He notes that people used to cluster in castles for defense in the old days, but with the invention of gunpowder and cannon this became counterproductive. Large cities, in this era, are similarly tempting targets.

“The modern metaphor we should look to is not the castle but the Internet,” writes Lowell. “Originally created by the military as Darpanet, it was designed to be a decentralized communications system that could not be shut down by military or terrorist attack on any one central point.” Thus “sprawl” is not only the way most Americans prefer to live, it is a safety factor. Our best defense against the wars of the 21st century might turn out to be further decentralization of our society, perhaps by using fuel cell technologies to get more people off the grid and dispersing water supplies.

As the war progresses, it is virtually inevitable that we will be asked to give up more and more of our freedoms to a centralized state. It is important that at least some of us continually remind our would-be leaders that decentralization, independence and freedom are not only what make this country worth fighting for, but a positive form of defense against foreign domination.