Since the fateful events of the morning of September 11, we have been considering what should be done. It has generally been assumed that when we discovered the identities of the perpetrators, we would make some effort to bring them before our courts, and that when that failed, we would bring the full force of our military to bear on them, and on those who harbor them. If we, as a nation, are to show true leadership in the fight against terrorism, we must indeed be forceful. But if our fight is to have any hope of success, we must also be creative. We must think outside Hammurabi's box in our pursuit of justice, and peace.
Our tremendous ingenuity as a species seems strangely absent when it comes to confronting threats from each other. Failed strategies are repeated, and repeated, though history has demonstrated their futility. Athenian treatment of the Melians did not win them the Peloponnesian War. The American Civil War was won before Sherman's torching of Atlanta, not because of it. Our Israeli friends have gained nothing from their policy of collective punishment--not only have they failed to make peace with their neighbors, or even to guarantee their own safety, they have implicated their allies. The efforts of Palestinian militants now seem less likely than ever to win for their families the safe and secure hearths we all desire.
Our reactions to violence are repeated with such dismal regularity because they are instinctive. But we are not, or not exclusively, creatures of instinct. Can we do better? Perhaps. First we must ask what we hope to gain from our response to Tuesday's attacks. What we want, it seems, is to end the threat of terrorism, to restore our feelings of safety, to assert our national self-confidence, and yes, to impress upon the world the extent of our wealth and power. The following proposal has, I believe, a good chance of helping to achieve all of these goals. It provides no guarantee of an end to the violence--and the only such guarantee within our power is the complete destruction of humanity--but it offers some hope of relief from the cyclic destruction of the past.
Like other solutions now being contemplated, this proposal will be massive, expensive, and dangerous for the service personnel whose task it will be to implement it. It will involve harnessing the full resources of our military, and the vast riches of our civilian economy. It will take some time to prepare.
Once preparations are complete, here is how I envision it working: our bombers fly low over Kabul, Qandahar, Gaza, Aman, Khartoum, Bagdad, Beirut, over all the surrounding countryside, over villages and refugee camps. They will be in harm's way, but we will not ask them to linger.
Their bomb bays open, jettisoning their cargo, and our planes return swiftly to base for reloading. Below their fading contrails, parachutes appear, each supporting a crate. When these touch ground, there will perhaps be some panic. But when the crates fail to explode, the daring and curious approach, ready to prize them open. Here is what they willfind: water purifiers, iodine tablets, baby formula, portable generators, machine tools, farm implements, olives, salt, shoes, cloth, school books, copies of the Koran, antibiotics, antimalarials, antiseptics, rice, radios, kerosene heaters, power cable, sewing machines, calculators, batteries, solar panels, diapers, safety pins, hair pins, bicycles, candy, toothbrushes, sunscreen, saffron, dried apricots, notebooks, ledgers, ball-point pens, refrigerators, baby bottles, stoves, art supplies, soccer balls, tents, telescopes, and blankets.
There will be some who, in anger or disdain, incite their neighbors to gather our gifts and burn them. In the end, though, as wave after wave of cargo arrives, more practical voices will prevail. Consumables will not, of course, last forever. But the other things may make a difference for years to come, especially if, like the Berlin Airlift, they are followed with a Marshall Plan.
In recent years, in our strategic bombardments of Iraq or Serbia, we have talked about "sending a message," to Saddam Hussein, or to Milosevic. The truth is, a bomb casing is a poor housing for any message worth listening to. We must tell those who despise us more than merely, if you cross us, we will destroy you. We must tell them that, if the world order from which we profit is oppressive to them, that was never our intention, that what we desire for them is nothing less than the liberty and prosperity we ourselves enjoy.
It is also true that people with nothing left to lose will always, inevitably behave like people with nothing left to lose. Force and the threat of force have no hold over them. It is within our power to do with our largesse what can never be done with arms.
No political leader who follows this course of action will ever be accused of weakness, or failure to act decisively. Indeed it strikes me as demanding courage of the highest order.
It is possible that, given the title of this proposal, or its contents, or the admitted and unabashed sentimentality of its tone, it will be taken in the spirit of jest. If so, that is not a bad thing. In times like these, we all need something to laugh about. But if there are those who find in this notion, or others like it, something more than a melancholy joke, then that is a better thing. To lose hope for a better world is to live in a worse one.
by Alex Levine, Philosophy Department, Lehigh University
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years
I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they havethe means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
When I boarded the Midwest Express plane to Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 at 8:00 am (Central Time), I had no idea that the definition of power on planet earth would be re- written within the hour. I read the paper, enjoyed a nice breakfast, and felt quite secure. Why not! I was a citizen of the "world's last remaining superpower." This "superpower" was pouring into its "Defense" budget some thirty million dollars an hour, nine thousand dollars a second to keep me safe. As we neared Washington, the pilot announced that the Washington airport was closed and we would be heading back to Milwaukee. Within minutes he reported that the Airport in Milwaukee was also closed and we were to land at the closest airport, Columbus, Ohio.
Cell phones and television at the Columbus airport told us the news, that our superpower status was a myth. In a superpower, the president would not have to hide out in Louisiana and Nebraska because of "credible evidence" that he could not return to the Capital; the congress would not be running from the Capitol Building; schools and businesses throughout a superpower could not be forced shut; I would not suddenly be looking up into a sky where no airplane could dare fly. These were the facts of this new world order. The Defense Department could not defend us--or its main temple, the Pentagon-- from a hatred and a mode of power that we had never before known.
It was not Pearl Harbor revisited. The bombers had left no return address. The instinct to retaliate with bombing is an anachronism. Fewer than twenty men had brought us to our national knees and raised the biggest question facing us in the twenty-first century, posed by a little girl and reported in the press: "why are they killing themselves and killing all those people?"
The governments answer was that we are good and lovefreedom and these people are bad and hate it. That vapid answer came from an arrogant national culture that has lost its talent for healthy guilt. The hatred that could so easily paralyze our nation has a history, and as Teilhard de Chardin said, "nothing is intelligible outside of its history."
Why do the deprived of the world hate us so?
To give an honest answer to the little girl's question, to start some meaningful reflection and move out of the morass of American jingoism, I look to some thoughtful witnesses and diagnosticians of humankind. The first is J. Glenn Gray, an intelligence officer with the army in World War Two. In his book The Warriors, Gray wrote: "If guilt is not experienced deeply enough to cut into us, our future may well be lost."
Next, Robert Heilbroner, the political economist, who peeked behind the veils of our self- image and concluded: "There is a barbarism hidden beneath the superficial amenities of life." Close to Heilbroner is Abraham Heschel, the Jewish theologian. He cited "the secret obscenity, the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference."
Gerd Theissen the biblical scholar joins the chorus. He noted the century long quest for "the missing link' between apes and "true humanity." Call off the search, he said. The missing link is us. True humanity could not do what we have done to one another and to this generous host of an earth.
Frances Moor Lappe is our next witness: "Historically people have tried to deny their own culpability for mass human suffering by assigning responsibility to external forces beyond their control."
And next I dare turn to words I wrote in 1993: "The absence of pity is the root of all evil." I continued: "Can we sit now in our First World comfort at a table with a view of the golf course, and ignore starvation in the Third World and joblessness and homelessness in our cities? The prophets of Israel would answer 'no.' In Jeremiah's words,there is no hiding from the effects of guilt and morally malignant neglect: 'Do you think that you can be exempt? No, you cannot be exempt.' (Jer. 25) Injustice will come home to roost, whether in wars of redistibution (the most likely military threat of the future), or in crime and terrorism, or in far-reaching economic shock waves. The planet will not forever endure our insults. If the prophets' law is correct--and the facts of history endorse it--we will not be exempt."
And finally, Count Cavour of Italy said that if we did for ourselves what we allow our country to do in our name, we would be jailed and hung as scoundrels.
These were not the voices heard in The National Cathedral on September 14. Jeremiah was not invited to say to the leaders of "the most powerful nation in the world:" "Acknowedge your guilt!" (Jer. 3:12)
Affluence and comfort dull the optic nerve. The poor world sees us differently. Draw a circle and cut me out of it and I will see sharply what goes on there. The attackers pinpointed the reasons for their outrage. They struck at what they saw as the twin towers of our indifference and at our haughty military heart. They see our nation as an arrogant, spoiled five hundred pound gorilla that pollutes and then scorns treaties to end pollution, that was built on slavery and practices racism and yet shuns the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. They noticed that the genocide of black people in Rwanda did not stir us to action. They believe we would have acted differently if Swedes or Irish were having their throats cut. Those outside the affluent circle are stunned at our ability to lock into caricatures of others. We don't say that Timothy McVeigh represents Irish Catholics but the Taliban and Bin Laden somehow symbolize Islam. When they see us getting ready to repeat the Soviet madness in Afghanistan, a writer from that land agrees that Bin Laden is properly compared to Adolph Hitler and the Taliban are well compared to Nazis, but the people of Afghanistan, with a huge proportion of widowed women are best compared to the Jews in concentration camps. They would love to be free of that tyranny. Those outside our world hate us for ignoring this and threatening slaughter, to be masked as "collateral damage."
Very relevant to September 11, many Muslims see us as incapable of an even-handed policy in the Middle East, a policy that would defend with equal vigor and equal financial aid, the existence of a safe and secure Israeli state and an equally safeand secure Palestinian state, each with territorial integrity. There is no other solution, but those who hate us see that our leaders do not know that.
The Muslim world has a nation-transcending unity that we little understand. The UMMAH, the community of believing Muslims melts borders between races and nations. That is why so many African Americans were drawn to Islam. All Muslims feel the pain of the reported half million innocent children deadin Iraq due to our sanctions. I see it as the surest principle in all of ethics that what is good for kids is good and what is bad for kids is ungodly." They grieve over those children--sacrificed to what end?-- as we grieve over our dead in New York and Washington. They marvel at our ability tokill as many as a quarter million young Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War--young people like the students I teach at Marquette University--while leaving our announced target in control. (Surely "the mob" would have been more kind and effective. If Saddam were the problem, they would have "whacked" him rather than slaughtering his children.)
Our hubris shines through our imperfectly disguised attitudes toward Islam, attitudes that befoul our policies in the Middle East. It is asked: "How can we deal with these people?" As professor Huston Smith wrote: "During Europe's Dark Ages, Muslim philosophers and scientists kept the lamp of learning bright, ready to spark the Western mind when it roused from its long sleep." Muslims like Avicenna taught medicine to the backward Europeans. Arab states like Jordan and Egypt have shown the possibility of peaceful progress in the Middle East. These are not savages who can be calmed only by occupation. The solution is much simpler and it is found in the prophets of Israel. As Isaiah saw it, it is only if you plant justice that you will have peace. (Isa. 32) And occupation of another people is not justice.
The problem goes beyond Islam. The poor of the world see an absence of pity in our economic policies. 1.3 billion are inabsolute poverty, 70% of those being women. And poverty kills. 40 million people die yearly from hunger and hunger-related causes. This is like 320 jumbo jets planes crashing every day with half the passengers being children, as Clive Ponting points out in his monumental book A Green History of the World. The poor of the world are not dumb. They notice, as the United Nations points out, that 82.7 percent of the world's income goes to the top 20 percent, leaving 17.3 percent for the rest of humanity. The poor notice that this does not engage U.S. politics or economics. We are the biggest actor on the world scene at the moment and they note a cold absence of pity, and they hate us for all of this.
George Kennan once compared large nations to dinosaurs with brains the size of a pea. When struck they thrash out, destroying much and helping little. The Bush administration seems intent in living out this image. Bombing the victims of the Taliban will do not more good than bombing the children of Iraq who had been forced into the army. Building a new Maginot line of missile defense is tragically comedic. Tightening up security at the airlines as we should have done years ago is as late as it is inadequate. (Biological, chemical, and small atomic weapons are probably already in preparation.) All these are efforts to plug the spigot. What is needed is to turn off the faucet. The faucet is perceived injustice in the Middle East, the need for separate states for Israel and for the Palestinians. The faucet is the disastrous maldistribution of wealth in the world and the proliferation of starvation.
Solving this maldistribution is not beyond our fiscal reach though it seems to be beyond our moral grasp. James Tobin, the Nobel prize-winning economist, suggested a 0.5 percent tax on all spot transactions in foreign exchange, including futures contracts and options. As economist David Kortin says: "The 0.5 percent Tobin tax on foreignexchange transactions would help dampen speculative international financial movements but would be too small to deter commodity trade or serious international investment commitments." The money could be used to retire those debts of poor countries that cannot be easily forgiven and it could finance the efforts of the United Nations and other agencies and non-governmental organizations to bring education, soil conservation, water-purification, micro-loans for cottage industries, family planning, and improved communications throughout the world.
The Religions of the world need to rise to the occasion as they have not done so far. Religion is a powerful motivator. John Henry Cardinal Newman said that people will die for a dogma who will not stir for a conclusion. Nothing so stirs the will as the tincture of the sacred. Religions so far in this exploding crisis have mainly fulfilled their Prozak function of soothing the pain. This is good and all religions are into the purveying of comfort and hope. But the challenge of prophetic religion in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and increasingly in "engaged" Buddhism and Hinduism is to "speak truth to power" to "conscientize" power, and to discomfort power. This they have not done.
We can pretend that we are purely innocent and that the hatredof us is "unfathomable." But the fact remains that the solution to the problems of poor, enslaved, or occupied people is not nuclear physics. All that is needed is the moral and political will. The poetic author of Deuteronomy put this exasperated plea into the mouth of God. "I have set before you life and I have set before you death, and I have begged you to choose life for the sake of your children." We can't seem to do it. The hope now is that with our military power embarrassed and our vulnerability terrifyingly clear, fear might be the penumbra of wisdom.
Something extraordinary is happening to us as a nation. We've experienced both our vulnerability and our unity as never before. Out of the horrible death and destruction of last week have come powerful acts of compassion, courage, and heroism. Thousands of us have been killed, and the whole nation feels deeply connected to the lives lost. While our grief will go on for months and years, the days of official mourning will soon be past.
Now comes the question of our response, and that response will become a "test of our national character," according to a recently released statement by more than 2,000 leaders from America's largest religious communities - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist (read the statement and add your signature at http://www.sojo.net/response).
Most every American demands a strong response to the terror that has been visited upon us. But two paths are emerging. One speaks the language of justice and invokes the rule of law in promising to bring the perpetrators of such evil to accountability. Those who so violated the standards of civilized life, and the human values we hold most dear, must never be allowed to escape judgment and punishment, and the danger of even more terror must be prevented.
The other path uses the language of war and invokes a spirit of retribution, and even vengeance - quite frankly, emotions we can all understand at the moment. A "war against terrorism" summons up the strength and resolve to stop these horrific acts and prevent their cancerous spread. But the war language fails to provide moral and practical boundaries for that response. It could lead to indiscriminate retaliation, out of anger and vengeance, that would result in even more loss of innocent life.
Americans have seldom seen up close and felt the pain that comes from the deliberate destruction of innocent life on such a scale. Until now, it has only been in foreign lands where we have observed the horrible loss that accompanies the massive and violent rending of families and relationships in unspeakable events. Now we understand what many people who inhabit this planet with us have been forced to live with.
But it is just that collective experience of terrible pain that may now help shape our response. As one woman put it in a radio interview: "Mr. President, don't spread our pain." A rising sentiment in the country wants our nation's response to be born of our best values, and not our worst impulses. We are hearing more voices asserting that we must not become the evil we loathe in our response to it - we should respond out of our deepest values, not those of the terrorists.
All of our religious traditions call us to community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life. This attack offers us a stark view of the world terrorism would create, where the remedy to every human grievance and injustice is a resort to the random violence of revenge - even against the most innocent. They have taken thousands of our lives, attacked our national symbols, forced our political leaders to flee their chambers of governance, disrupted our work and families, and struck fear into the hearts of our children. They and the world they represent must be soundly defeated. The question we now face is how to do that. We can deny them a victory by refusing to submit to a world created in their image.
A Gallup poll says that 73 percent of the American people believe our response must be targeted "only against those responsible" for last week's attack on America. I believe such public opinion is motivated not only by moral considerations, but also by pragmatic concerns. Bombing the children of Kabul would create utter glee among the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who would finally be able to raise the armies of terror they've always dreamed of. It would also deprive us of the moral high ground the United States holds in world opinion since the attack - for the first time in some years.
A more courageous response on our part is now required. Discipline, patience, and perseverance in vanquishing the networks, assets, and capabilities of violent terrorists is a path more likely to be effective than merely cathartic. An even more courageous national commitment would be to honestly face the grievances and injustices that breed rage and vengeance, and are continually exploited by terrorists to recruit the angry and desperate.
The debate about which path to take - justice or vengeance - is taking place in conversations across America and, I trust, at the highest levels of political power. The outcome of that debate will shape our future even more than the terrorists can. We can make the right choices in this crisis, and in so doing, point the way to a better world.
Location: http://www.ppjr.org/sept11.htm