On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I heard the news on my car radio and I thought: There will be nothing left of Baghdad but a greasy yellow spot.
We had been attacked, as at Pearl Harbor, by people who had grievances we could not fathom, people from another continent, another culture, from another world. It was a War of the Worlds. But the aliens did not use space ships; they used our own airplanes. It was more like the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." They infiltrated us, and they looked like us and they destroyed us.
As Jim Lehrer asked a guest on his program, "Why do they hate us so?"
Well, we now have a better idea who "they" are and why they hate us.
George W. Bush is not a very bright man, but he did reflect a gut reaction which burned in many of his fellow countrymen: Let's go kick some ass, somewhere--doesn't matter if we kick all the right asses, we'll kick some of the right asses.
His father, who was brighter, had the option of doing the same thing, during the first Gulf War, when Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf, his commanding general, said, on his way to Kuwait, "I can turn left and there's nothing between me and Baghdad." But George H.W. Bush, who had flown airplanes off carriers in WWII, said, no, if we do that--then what?
President Obama opposed the war against Iraq, calling it the wrong war. But he did buy into the idea of denying Islamic extremists "sanctuaries" in places like Afghanistan, and, at first, that seemed to be effective--the Taliban was routed, temporarily, and fled across the border to Pakistan and things seemed to settle down, for a while.
But, as Richard Russell once pointed out to Lyndon Johnson, those Vietcong knew we didn't want to stay in Vietnam, and all they had to do was to wait us out.
So, we make plans to pack up and come home, and the rats crawl out of their nests and take over.
So it is, apparently, with ISIS in Syria, Iraq and who knows where else?
And I say "apparently" because we do not know anything more than what war correspondents can tell us. The reporters are peculiarly brave people and as James Foley, from Rochester, NH now knows, they pay the ultimate price for trying to tell us what is happening in obscure and, in many ways, unknowable places.
The beheading of an American, complete with video, has, of course outraged most people in this country. It was a spit in the eye, a kick in the teeth. It seems to encapsulate everything we hate about Islamic fundamentalists: Their bogey-man -under-the-bed-viciousness, their taunting. It makes your blood boil.
Of course, head lopping has been going on a long time. English kings do it. The French made a special instrument for it.
But, what Mad Dog argues is: do not get sucked in. Do not be George W. Be more like George H.W. Pick your time and place, the way Mr. Obama did in Pakistan with Osama Bin Laden. Or let the drones do the work. That is what really must frustrate ISIS (I am guessing) and all those who travel with them. We can hit them from a secure room in Langley, Virginia and not even get our hands dirty.
They've been lopping off heads weekly in Saudi Arabia for decades. Hands, too, in the public squares in Riyadh and other Saudi cities. The Taliban did it in Afghanistan. Drove up to a school where a teacher had the audacity to try to teach girls and marched all the kids outside, thrust the teacher to his knees and whap: off with his head.
What do we make of this sort of public violence?
Ask the grinning white boys as the black youth dangled above their heads in Mississippi. He whistled at a white woman. String him up.
It's a nasty, brutal world we try to protect our women and children from seeing.
For the most part, we in the United States cannot and do not know whether intervention in foreign lands is a good idea until after we have done it. In World War I, we were all aflame and anti German, but was the Kaiser really any worse than the King of the British Empire? As for WWII, It was only after we defeated Hitler and opened up his concentration camps we knew about those, for sure. Until then, who could be sure whether reports of concentration camps were real or just propaganda?
But consider our other interventions: The Spanish American War--a bogus war based on false claims of Spanish atrocities, rapes which was Mr. Hearst's war, a war designed to sell newspapers. The War in Vietnam, based on the essentially ignorant, false and foolish claim that if we let Communism gain a foothold in Southeast Asia, India, the rest of Asia, South America would fall like so many dominoes and we'd be surrounded and ultimately defeated. Oh, all the experts agreed. All wrong. Now Red China and Vietnam are out capitalist-ing us. All that wasted effort, all those lives destroyed because we had no understanding of the cultures we were trying to destroy.
Then the wars in the Middle East, which have not extirpated and destroyed radical Islam or denied terrorists safe haven because it's like whack a mole--hit them one place and they pop up somewhere else around the planet.
The 9/11 bombers lived in Berlin, then Florida. Somalia, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia all harbor large Islamic populations, not to mention Canada, France, Detroit and London. What are we going to do? Drone bomb all those places?
We do, it appears, have a problem with radical Islam, all around the globe. To deny this is an exercise in politics, not thought. We do not want to ship off all our Muslims to concentration camps for the duration of the war because: A/ We did that to Japanese Americans and we should still feel guilty about that B/ It wouldn't make us any safer and in fact would likely alienate a lot of otherwise loyal, productive, and valuable Muslims who live in this country and like America C/ Likely, if you are trying to police a community, the best source of information is from people in that community who have a stake in that community D/The "duration" is an illusion. There is no "War on Terrorism" any more than there is a "War on Crime" or a "War on Cancer." Wars end. This effort will never end.
During the Civil War, there were Southern spies and sympathizers throughout the North. It was like Cylons on Battlestar Galactica. It's always a problem when your enemies live among your own people and cannot be identified as harboring ill will and harmful intent. It means living with suspicion based on group identity.
But the great strength of this country has and continues to be our diversity, and our inclination to welcome all sorts of people. Nothing can cement loyalty more than decency and open arms, in short, love.
We have to be humble, and recognize we do not know enough about other cultures to ship our young men and women abroad to try to win hearts and minds. All we can do is to sweep in, blast a few people and get out with all dispatch.
The English learned this during the long years of their Empire, as, I am told, "Follow the Drum" vividly describes. The problem for the Brits is they wanted Empire. They wanted to rob local peoples and take the spoils of war home to London.
Americans have not been enamored of empire. We'd rather stay home in the shire, and simply send ships and trade and buy and sell things and bring home what we want.
But now we have to establish some sort of defense of the homeland against people who will smile and shave and then board our airplanes and slit throats, or bring a nuclear bomb into a port and try to blow up Washington or New York.
This will not be easy, but better a muscular and active police force than a stupid mission doomed to failure in some foreign country.
We do not have the choice of fighting them in the Middle East rather than in the streets of New York.
They will come here, while we are in Baghdad, Mosul, Jakarta, Somalia, Libya, you name it.
We will not prevent every attack, but we will have to keep trying.
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