Page 2 of
2 TERROR THROUGH A MORAL LENS, Part
2 The
star-spangled
delusion By David
Young
countries that - whether by
lack of desire or capacity - enable militant
groups to attack soft and hard targets of the US
and its allies abroad. We negotiate and are
explicitly allied with Pakistan's dictator
President Pervez Musharraf, who consistently
strikes deals with Pashtun militants (some
Taliban, some not) promising them free reign to
smuggle copious amounts of opium out of
Afghanistan and attack North Atlantic Treaty
Organization forces there.
In exchange,
Musharraf solicits empty assurances that his own
regime will not be the target of their aggression.
These assurances have proven useless to a crippled
Musharraf, but
regardless, these assurances
were and are, in fact, negotiated. More
importantly, in the weeks after 9/11, because we
zeroed in on Osama bin Laden and his sponsoring
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, we had no choice
but to buy Musharraf's cooperation - as limited as
it certainly has been.
Likewise, we
negotiate oil prices with Near East tyrants
because we are "addicted to oil", as Bush has
said, even though the greatest beneficiaries to
these deals often dedicate their wealth to
terrorizing Americans and our allies in the
region. Now, after nearly five years of stubborn
self-delusion, we have decided to initiate the
early stages of a very quiet and important
negotiation with the Islamic regime in Iran over
the stability of Iraq and Iran's nuclear weapons
program.
In fact, even if our government
did not negotiate with terrorists and their
respective sponsors on a regular basis, the
American government negotiates under countless
other types of severe duress, which we strangely
regard as benign "diplomacy". We negotiate with
China about import-export tariffs that cost
Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs because we
believe that this benefits our nation in the long
run. We negotiate with Mexico over illegal
immigrants because we are worried about Latino
contributions to America's melting pot.
When the Soviet Union inserted
nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles into Cuba, we
negotiated with them (though in secret) because,
in order for us to pose an effective nuclear
deterrence, we had to have more warning than the
few seconds it would take for those missiles to
reach Miami some 140 kilometers away. Under
unfathomable duress, we eagerly negotiated during
these 13 incomparable days.
Countless
nations would add terrorism and kidnapping to the
above list of obviously worrisome but normal forms
of "leverage" - exceptionally persuasive leverage,
but leverage nonetheless. In contrast, we see
kidnapping and terrorism as extortion, and
(ironically) our elected leaders actually feed
into this delusion for the same reason that they
negotiate with our enemies: they have to. Grounded
in reality, they are compelled by a landscape that
offers no other way to keep themselves and America
at the head of the table.
Compromise is
not a moral imperative, but rather a distinctly
political one. So if we are repulsed by foreign
insistence that we negotiate under duress, then
this repulsion has nothing to do with morality,
but is instead the standard and understandable
reaction of any party facing a tactical
disadvantage in negotiations. Employing moral
rhetoric enables us to cope with feelings of utter
impotence. Yet even if our resolve was, in fact,
based on moral considerations, then we would be
fooling ourselves to think we are able to measure
up to these standards in a world that is already
brimming with compromise at every turn.
Furthermore, the fact that the above
negotiations with the Soviet Union, Pakistan,
Mexico and Cuba were with "legitimate" governments
is entirely irrelevant. It is not the
statelessness of terrorists that repulses us, if
only because there are countless transnational
entities that have our endless admiration, like
Amnesty International and the Red Cross. Instead,
it is our vulnerability to their methods that
terrifies us - a fear, no less, that is magnified
by our inability to conquer our enemies or even
overcome the fears they inspire.
Yet
rather than come to terms with our fears, we
continue lusting for assurances that our moral
virtue compels us not to negotiate with
terrorists, and simultaneously, that these very
virtues also make our wholesale victory
inevitable. Like every other person on the planet,
Americans prefer not to negotiate under duress,
and we are right to dread it; the world can be
exceedingly erratic and unstable.
Yet even
if it was the illegitimacy or statelessness of
terrorists that bothered us, and even if we really
managed to boycott every negotiation with every
party that has ever expressed contempt for the US,
then every other country in the world would
continue to negotiate with their respective
enemies, much as they do now, because they
recognize that a country can have no power if it
boycotts any negotiation where it is at more of a
disadvantage than it would prefer to be.
Granted, if we are the only ones who
suddenly refuse to negotiate with terrorists -
assuming we can pull off such a feat - then the
terrorists that America is determined to punish
for their behavior will certainly learn that
terrorizing Americans does not work. But because
everyone else would still negotiate with them,
America could only sustain such a boycott as long
as it maintained a completely isolationist policy.
If we are the only ones not negotiating,
terrorists will not be cut off. In fact, America
will be cut off. Like any superpower, we Americans
succeed at minding our own business only when we
generously define everyone else's home as "our
business". Regardless, cutting ourselves off would
be far worse than capitulating to terrorism, but
thankfully, those are not the only two choices, as
the nations accustomed to negotiated
disappointments can attest. Again, the point is
not simply that we should negotiate with
terrorists, but rather, that we already do, and
rightly so.
Accusations of American
inconsistency and double standards
notwithstanding, an equally consequential
dissonance among the American people brews
unscrutinized. That is, more important than how
the US government treats other nations is how that
government relates to us, its constituency. Our
government openly negotiates with our enemies but
then tells us that we Americans refuse to "bow
down to terrorism" because we are just and moral
people. And naturally, we love hearing this. Both
as Westerners and as members of the most powerful
nation in history, how could we not enjoy hearing
this?
Yet regardless of whether Americans
are righteous or not, insisting that we are makes
it impossible for our government to tell us what
we must hear: sometimes, despite our unprecedented
power, we still have to make uncomfortable
sacrifices to get what we want; and even worse,
sometimes we will not be able to get what we want,
no matter the sacrifices we might be willing to
make. If we are not prepared to admit this, then
surely our elected leaders will never do so,
because they know that Americans do not like being
reminded that it takes a lot more work to remain
the most powerful nation than it does to become
the most powerful nation.
Consider, for
instance, the American public's bitter reaction to
Jimmy Carter's infamous "malaise" speech, when he
told Americans, "In a nation that was proud of
hard work, strong families, close-knit communities
and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to
worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human
identity is no longer defined by what one does but
by what one owns." And contrast this speech and
its backfire with the glee we felt when Bush
insisted after 9/11 that the best thing we could
do for our country would be to go shopping.
If we were powerful enough not to have to
negotiate with our enemies while under duress,
then rest assured, we never would. In fact, if we
were that powerful (by nearly any definition of
power) then we would never negotiate at all. We
would just take. But we are not that powerful, and
we need the willing assistance of millions across
the globe to ensure our safety and prosperity. We
hate weakness, and we hate dependence. But we also
hate expensive gasoline, and we hate watching a
genocide unfold on CNN.
Unaccustomed to
fear and vulnerability, we have been unable to
recognize that all of us, all over the world, have
always been and will forever be more vulnerable
than we would like. Absent this self-awareness, we
could only paint the "war on terror" as
all-or-nothing, as unequivocally brave or
cowardly. And as a result, we cannot end this war
touting anything less than the unconditional
surrender of our enemy - an obviously misguided
goal in asymmetrical warfare, especially if our
enemies are so diffuse that they could never agree
on anything, and certainly not their terms for
surrender. Hoping to avoid the eternal scorn of
history books, Bush will stay at war indefinitely,
and long after his successor withdraws our troops,
when we feel another "flukish" sense of
vulnerability in the future, our leaders will have
exactly the same response, and the cycle will
repeat itself.
But there is simply no need
to view this so-called "war on terror" as an
all-or-nothing battle. In fact, the only thing
worse than not winning the war on terror would be
not losing the war on terror, either. Like the
wars on poverty and drugs, the best we can hope
for is a vain fizzle for this war, far from the
spotlight.
We have to make compromises, we
have to negotiate with our enemies because they
captured our soldier, and we want their oil; or
because they killed our soldier, and they burned
our oil. On 9/11, our culture framed the familiar
debate around morality so that any US president in
Bush's position would have been incapable of
considering his choices outside the Manichean
dynamic of cowardice (doing nothing, tolerating
evil) and unleashing hell (doing everything, over
and again). Without a middle ground, we will
return to this battle, as though our sanity
depended on it, again and again.
Whatever
else America might need to win the "war on
terror," what we need most is humility - and not
because we are moral people who should care about
how we treat others, although that is true, as
well. No, we need humility for the simple reason
that we cannot defeat terrorism by any definition
of "defeat" and any definition of "terrorism".
We cannot defeat terrorism any more than
we can defeat hatred or vulgarity. It is simply
out of our league, out of anyone's league. And the
longer we tell ourselves that we are that powerful
- that we are essentially invulnerable because we
morally deserve to be invulnerable - the longer we
will find ourselves hopelessly watching replays of
our crumbling foundations, staring at the face of
an enemy we don't understand, and worse, locked in
a battle with our own reflection, which we
understand even less.
David
Young is a fellow at Abraham's Vision and a
graduate student at the Institute for Conflict
Resolution at George Mason University in
Arlington, Virginia. He has studied and
participated in conflict resolution and
peacebuilding projects in the Balkans, the
Caucasus, Israel/Palestine, West Africa, Northern
Ireland and Kashmir. He can be contacted at
(Copyright
2008 David Young.)
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