Like President Bush and the vast majority of the country, I’m for a targeted war that tries hard to avoid civilian casualties, Islamic blowback and other unintended consequences. And I’ll defend forever the right of anyone to say any stupid thing without being fired or hassled by the authorities. But some of what’s being said can truly try one’s patience, and I’m not just talking about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s “Blame Homosexuality First” approach to explaining the attack.
The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics. The New Republic’s “Idiocy Watch,” which is cataloging the fatuities, is full of the musings of novelists. Best-selling writer Barbara Kingsolver, confused by the patriotism around her, asked in the San Francisco Chronicle whether the “flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Whom are we calling terrorists here?”
This mindless moral equivalency is the nub of what lefties mean when they talk about “the chickens coming home to roost,” or “reaping what you sow.” Talk about ironic: the same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it. A haughty Susan Sontag made it sound as if we were the ones being thickheaded for not seeing that Sept. 11 was a perfectly understandable response to years of American policy.
Obviously, some policies–like the United States’ stationing troops in Saudi Arabia–have contributed to Osama bin Laden’s rage. But there’s a big difference between understanding Islam and the history of the region, which we need much more of, and understanding evil, which is not just offensive but impossible.
Sad to say, the line between explaining terrorism and rationalizing it has been repeatedly breached by a shallow left stuck in a deep anti-American rut. For certain (fortunately powerless) tenured radicals and antiwar vets, this post-Vietnam reflex seems as comfortable as an old sandal.
While most Americans view history through a “Greatest Generation” World War II prism, this remnant remembers how wrong that analogy was for Vietnam. The left was on target then: for years the United States refused to negotiate much with the communists out of a misplaced fear of seeming to be Neville Chamberlain-style appeasers.
But history moves on, even for aging ideologues heavily invested in the past. “National security” is not a government cover story anymore, but a genuine problem. The terrorists we’re looking for aren’t pathetic little pamphleteers, like the American communists targeted in the Red Scare. Reactionary left-wingers are still so busy thinking the CIA is malevolent that they forget to notice it’s incompetent; so busy nursing stale resentments that they forget to notice someone is trying to kill them.
“The causal business is really pernicious,” says Peter Awn, a professor of Islamic religion at Columbia who says it results from ignorance of the complexities of the region. “People are going back to the one area they know something about–the Israeli-Palestinian struggle–and that’s a shame. It shows their ability to understand the rest of the Islamic world is minimal.”
The trick is to learn some lessons from the past without implying that we had it coming. We’ve done that before. After World War II our leaders saw that the punitive Versailles peace treaty following World War I had helped pave the way for Hitler. So we tried the generous Marshall Plan instead and it worked. But that came later. Only a fool would have given credence to Hitler’s grievances, however legitimate a few of them were, while we were fighting him.
And none but a fool would say, as the novelist Alice Walker did in The Village Voice, that “the only punishment that works is love.” We’ve tried turning the other cheek. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing we held our fire and treated the attack as a law-enforcement matter. The terrorists struck again anyway. This time the Munich analogy is right: appeasement is doomed.
America Firsters grasped this point after Pearl Harbor and the isolationists ran off to enlist. So why can’t Blame America Firsters grasp it now? Al Qaeda was planning its attack at exactly the time the United States was offering a Mideast peace deal favorable to the Palestinians. Nothing from us would have satisfied the fanatics, and nothing ever will. Peace won’t be with you, brother. It’s kill or be killed.
