[It's long, so pull up a chair! Let me preface this article by saying I'm tired of all the "nothing can be done" talk the journalistic media have been pushing over the past few days. It's probably due to the sudden infusion of academics into the media's coverage — so that now we're being told the best ways to fight terrorism are to be nice and to shuffle papers. Mind, I'm behind Colin Powell's philosphy all the way: the diplomatic groundwork must be done before any international enforcement action is taken. But once that foundation of law is in place, there needs to be punishment meted out to those responsible for murdering upwards of 5,000 people.
[Also, I know the message board has a lot of threads about this recent terrorism; and I wish people would post relevant messages at the "Plane just crashed into the world trade center" thread, but I'm not doing it because hardly anybody goes to that thread anymore! Hopefully, Anne will consolidate all these threads into that one thread.]
The Times
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 20 2001
Anatole Kaletsky: Our pathological need to talk up the enemy
We all know that truth is the first casualty in every war. But the “war against terrorism†declared last week by President Bush has given an unfamiliar, and potentially very dangerous, twist to this old clichÃ[emoji]169[/emoji].
During the past ten days, emotion, hysteria and misinformation have pushed facts, figures and calm calculations almost completely out of the newspapers and airwaves. This outbreak of irrationality was to be expected, not only in the normal pattern of warfare, but especially because of the psychological trauma so many of us suffered in watching the living nightmare of September 11. What is more surprising — and far more alarming — is the direction in which the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s collective unconscious has begun to move.
Instead of the boastful overconfidence and defiant patriotism that would normally distort political language in this early stage of a serious military confrontation, most news and analysis about the looming conflict has been been twisting public opinion in exactly the opposite way — with defeatist misinformation, morally dubious self-flagellation, exaggerations of the enemyâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s invincibility and glamorised accounts of his methods and goals.
Watching TV and reading the papers since the start of this crisis, I have been increasingly reminded of the strange mental pathology known as Stockholm syndrome, whose most famous victim was the American heiress Patty Hearst. This is the chilling psychological reversal whereby victims of brutality and hostages of murderous gangsters sometimes become fanatical supporters of the people who terrorised them — or even, in the case of the Ottoman janissaries, massacred their families before their eyes.
How else can one explain what has now become the standard analysis of the confrontation that lies ahead? This analysis consists of a series of profoundly defeatist propositions that are taken as given even by the most ardent advocates of military retaliation. Yet each of these propositions is at most only half true. Consider how the standard argument goes:
First, the enemy in this war is said to be invisible and therefore impossible to defeat. Secondly, the sinister invisibility of the terrorist threat is said to have filled America with a paranoid fury. Since it cannot “get†the terrorists, America is now bent on a racist anti-Islamic retribution that will kill thousands of poor and defenceless people. This irrational lashing out will inevitably breed more terror and will therefore advance the terroristsâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji] evil goals.
If the retribution is directed at Afghanistan, the reasoning goes, the result will be even worse. The Afghans are the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s most vicious fighters and they have never been defeated in war. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperial powers since Alexander the Great. Moreover, an attack on Afghanistan would achieve nothing, even if a bloody disaster could be averted.
Obviously, there is a grain of truth in each of these statements. But then, there was also a grain of truth in Hitlerâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s claims that Jewish bankers had enriched themselves at the expense of German workers or in Stalinâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s belief that kulak peasants were hoarding their bread. These grains of truth did not justify the extermination of the Jews or the slaughter and starvation of untold millions of Ukrainian peasants. And propagandist half-truths about the battle that lies ahead should not be allowed to justify a spineless policy that could prove almost as dangerous and destructive of humanitarian values as the appeasement of the 1930s.
So let us consider the defeatist case, point by point. There is nothing invisible or invincible about the enemies in this war. The suicidal hijackers have already been identified, several dozen suspected accomplices have been arrested around the world and Osama bin Ladenâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s direct involvement in the previous attacks on American targets, including the World Trade Centre, has already been established. Of course, there might well be other atrocities in the future, even if these particular terrorists could be captured and their network broken. But nobody would suggest that the police should stop bothering to pursue murderers on the ground that some will inevitably get away, while other potential killers are born every day.
Turning to Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s response, far from lashing out, threatening thousands of defenceless people or betraying irrational fury, the Bush Administration has focused on a very reasonable and potentially achievable task. There is no indication that the US plans to bomb civilians in Afghanistan or in any other country to “retaliate†against the massacre in New York. Instead of retaliation or retribution, the US appears to have set two positive and precise goals: to capture or kill bin Laden and other known terrorists; and to “end states†that are known to sponsor or support terrorists.
No reasonable person would object to the first aspiration, although it may be difficult to achieve. It is the second aim of “ending†terrorist states that seems to have sent a chill round the globe. The phrase “ending statesâ€, which was deliberately used on Monday by Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, may indeed inspire apocalyptic fears of mass civilian casualties and Dresden-style carpet bombing.
But is this really what America intends? It seems much more likely that Mr Wolfowitz was choosing his words very carefully when he spoke of ending terrorist states, rather than nations or countries. Far from planning to liquidate countries or subdue entire peoples, the US has a much narrower and more legitimate target. It wants to eliminate terrorist regimes, not the people who live in their countries.
In a conventional war, the distinction between a state and the people it rules might appear just a hypocritical diversion. But in a confrontation with Afghanistan, the distinction between the wretched, impoverished Afghan people and their monstrous Taleban oppressors could not be more clear. To me, the most amazing feature of the phoney war which has been raging for the past ten days in the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s media has been the lack of attention to the horrors which the sadistic Taleban fanatics have inflicted upon the people of Afghanistan.
What the Taleban have done in the past five years to the people of Afghanistan — above all to the women, but also to the large ethnic minorities, to millions of now landless peasants and to smaller non-Muslim groups — ranks as one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity. If any government in the world attempted to crush a racial group such as Africans or Jews with the sort of oppressive, humiliating and murderous laws imposed on all Afghan women by the Taleban, the civilised world would long since have taken the most extreme measures — quite possibly including military action — to eliminate this regime.
But even if the moral case for eliminating the Taleban is irrefutable, how could this possibly be achieved? Surely Afghanistan is an impossible military target, with an unbroken record of defeating mighty foreign powers? This widespread belief seems, again, to be based on a series of half-truths. If Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s goal were permanently to conquer Afghanistan and subdue its people, then history, geography and the ferocity of the Afghan fighters might indeed militate against it. But if the objective is merely to destabilise and topple the Taleban regime, history and geography are very much on Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s side. The country has always been ethnically divided and has rarely had a stable central government, with much of it ruled by robber barons, motivated more by booty and money rather than national pride or religious zeal. Afghanistanâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s history consists of an endless series of struggles between warlords, internal rebellions, government coups and periods of vassalage to neighbouring powers.
Given the unprecedented misery which the Taleban have inflicted on the country (there are more refugees from Afghanistan than from any other country, including even Congo and Rwanda), it is distinctly possible that many Afghans would welcome a carefully targeted strike by American and European paratroops as a potential liberation, not an invasion by a conquering power.
Terrorism may be a mental disease which can never be fully defeated, but America and the civilised world could surely topple the Taleban. That would send an unforgettable message to the leaders of other terrorist regimes.
[email protected]
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
=^..^=
[Also, I know the message board has a lot of threads about this recent terrorism; and I wish people would post relevant messages at the "Plane just crashed into the world trade center" thread, but I'm not doing it because hardly anybody goes to that thread anymore! Hopefully, Anne will consolidate all these threads into that one thread.]
The Times
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 20 2001
Anatole Kaletsky: Our pathological need to talk up the enemy
We all know that truth is the first casualty in every war. But the “war against terrorism†declared last week by President Bush has given an unfamiliar, and potentially very dangerous, twist to this old clichÃ[emoji]169[/emoji].
During the past ten days, emotion, hysteria and misinformation have pushed facts, figures and calm calculations almost completely out of the newspapers and airwaves. This outbreak of irrationality was to be expected, not only in the normal pattern of warfare, but especially because of the psychological trauma so many of us suffered in watching the living nightmare of September 11. What is more surprising — and far more alarming — is the direction in which the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s collective unconscious has begun to move.
Instead of the boastful overconfidence and defiant patriotism that would normally distort political language in this early stage of a serious military confrontation, most news and analysis about the looming conflict has been been twisting public opinion in exactly the opposite way — with defeatist misinformation, morally dubious self-flagellation, exaggerations of the enemyâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s invincibility and glamorised accounts of his methods and goals.
Watching TV and reading the papers since the start of this crisis, I have been increasingly reminded of the strange mental pathology known as Stockholm syndrome, whose most famous victim was the American heiress Patty Hearst. This is the chilling psychological reversal whereby victims of brutality and hostages of murderous gangsters sometimes become fanatical supporters of the people who terrorised them — or even, in the case of the Ottoman janissaries, massacred their families before their eyes.
How else can one explain what has now become the standard analysis of the confrontation that lies ahead? This analysis consists of a series of profoundly defeatist propositions that are taken as given even by the most ardent advocates of military retaliation. Yet each of these propositions is at most only half true. Consider how the standard argument goes:
First, the enemy in this war is said to be invisible and therefore impossible to defeat. Secondly, the sinister invisibility of the terrorist threat is said to have filled America with a paranoid fury. Since it cannot “get†the terrorists, America is now bent on a racist anti-Islamic retribution that will kill thousands of poor and defenceless people. This irrational lashing out will inevitably breed more terror and will therefore advance the terroristsâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji] evil goals.
If the retribution is directed at Afghanistan, the reasoning goes, the result will be even worse. The Afghans are the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s most vicious fighters and they have never been defeated in war. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperial powers since Alexander the Great. Moreover, an attack on Afghanistan would achieve nothing, even if a bloody disaster could be averted.
Obviously, there is a grain of truth in each of these statements. But then, there was also a grain of truth in Hitlerâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s claims that Jewish bankers had enriched themselves at the expense of German workers or in Stalinâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s belief that kulak peasants were hoarding their bread. These grains of truth did not justify the extermination of the Jews or the slaughter and starvation of untold millions of Ukrainian peasants. And propagandist half-truths about the battle that lies ahead should not be allowed to justify a spineless policy that could prove almost as dangerous and destructive of humanitarian values as the appeasement of the 1930s.
So let us consider the defeatist case, point by point. There is nothing invisible or invincible about the enemies in this war. The suicidal hijackers have already been identified, several dozen suspected accomplices have been arrested around the world and Osama bin Ladenâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s direct involvement in the previous attacks on American targets, including the World Trade Centre, has already been established. Of course, there might well be other atrocities in the future, even if these particular terrorists could be captured and their network broken. But nobody would suggest that the police should stop bothering to pursue murderers on the ground that some will inevitably get away, while other potential killers are born every day.
Turning to Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s response, far from lashing out, threatening thousands of defenceless people or betraying irrational fury, the Bush Administration has focused on a very reasonable and potentially achievable task. There is no indication that the US plans to bomb civilians in Afghanistan or in any other country to “retaliate†against the massacre in New York. Instead of retaliation or retribution, the US appears to have set two positive and precise goals: to capture or kill bin Laden and other known terrorists; and to “end states†that are known to sponsor or support terrorists.
No reasonable person would object to the first aspiration, although it may be difficult to achieve. It is the second aim of “ending†terrorist states that seems to have sent a chill round the globe. The phrase “ending statesâ€, which was deliberately used on Monday by Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, may indeed inspire apocalyptic fears of mass civilian casualties and Dresden-style carpet bombing.
But is this really what America intends? It seems much more likely that Mr Wolfowitz was choosing his words very carefully when he spoke of ending terrorist states, rather than nations or countries. Far from planning to liquidate countries or subdue entire peoples, the US has a much narrower and more legitimate target. It wants to eliminate terrorist regimes, not the people who live in their countries.
In a conventional war, the distinction between a state and the people it rules might appear just a hypocritical diversion. But in a confrontation with Afghanistan, the distinction between the wretched, impoverished Afghan people and their monstrous Taleban oppressors could not be more clear. To me, the most amazing feature of the phoney war which has been raging for the past ten days in the worldâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s media has been the lack of attention to the horrors which the sadistic Taleban fanatics have inflicted upon the people of Afghanistan.
What the Taleban have done in the past five years to the people of Afghanistan — above all to the women, but also to the large ethnic minorities, to millions of now landless peasants and to smaller non-Muslim groups — ranks as one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity. If any government in the world attempted to crush a racial group such as Africans or Jews with the sort of oppressive, humiliating and murderous laws imposed on all Afghan women by the Taleban, the civilised world would long since have taken the most extreme measures — quite possibly including military action — to eliminate this regime.
But even if the moral case for eliminating the Taleban is irrefutable, how could this possibly be achieved? Surely Afghanistan is an impossible military target, with an unbroken record of defeating mighty foreign powers? This widespread belief seems, again, to be based on a series of half-truths. If Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s goal were permanently to conquer Afghanistan and subdue its people, then history, geography and the ferocity of the Afghan fighters might indeed militate against it. But if the objective is merely to destabilise and topple the Taleban regime, history and geography are very much on Americaâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s side. The country has always been ethnically divided and has rarely had a stable central government, with much of it ruled by robber barons, motivated more by booty and money rather than national pride or religious zeal. Afghanistanâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s history consists of an endless series of struggles between warlords, internal rebellions, government coups and periods of vassalage to neighbouring powers.
Given the unprecedented misery which the Taleban have inflicted on the country (there are more refugees from Afghanistan than from any other country, including even Congo and Rwanda), it is distinctly possible that many Afghans would welcome a carefully targeted strike by American and European paratroops as a potential liberation, not an invasion by a conquering power.
Terrorism may be a mental disease which can never be fully defeated, but America and the civilised world could surely topple the Taleban. That would send an unforgettable message to the leaders of other terrorist regimes.
[email protected]
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
=^..^=