Bush and Bin Laden
Had one sought in the past two weeks to understand the nature of the hatred of America that motivated men to take their own lives in order to kill thousands of others, one would have searched the news media largely in vain. The explanations offered ranged from the height of banality offered by our president ("they hate freedom") to stories gingerly half-told by reporters ("they object to our support of Israel..."). In the environment of the moment, it seems we may explore the sources of anti-Americanism, so long as the investigation does not lead us down any path that might puncture our claim to moral purity. The notion that the policies of our own government might have set in motion a process that led to terrorist acts is apparently unsuitable for Americans to hear. It is no doubt thought that to make such an argument would be to somehow justify the crimes of September 11, to take the terrorists' side.
Those who would banish any discussion of the results of American foreign policy commit the same mistake as the terrorists: they equate a nation's policies with its people. To say that our country's actions led to the attacks, they argue, would somehow excuse the barbarous crime, would be to say that the victims whose lives were stolen were not innocent, would be to justify their murder. The terrorists, after all, say that there are no innocents, that every citizen of a country is responsible for his or her government's policies and may therefore be punished for them. But by insisting that our government's policies are beyond reproach, we support this despicable argument, used so often to justify murder. Bin Laden is wrong, and so is Bush. American citizens are not to blame for what our government has done. The people who were killed at the World Trade Center did not bomb a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, or deprive Iraqi children of food and medicine, or prop up one murderous regime after another around the globe. They did not deserve to die for those crimes, and acknowledging those crimes makes their murder no less tragic or unforgivable.
Just as Bin Laden justifies the murder of civilians by blaming them for their government's actions, Bush would rest the certainty that their murder was unjust on their government's moral purity. It is not, he argues, that killing civilians is a crime against humanity, only that killing civilians ruled by a morally pure government is such a crime. He must argue this, for as we speak he plans killings of his own. B-52 bombers, instruments by which we have so often before rained down death from the sky on the innocent and guilty alike, are making their way toward Afghanistan. When he gives the order to destroy the Taliban — without doubt one of the most vile dictatorships on the planet — there will be plenty of "collateral damage," ordinary people killed because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The civilian deaths will be justified on the basis of the actions of the government under which those civilians live and suffer. In such a system of justification it is essential to maintain the illusion that the United States government has never had anything but the purest motives, never harmed anyone who didn't deserve it, killed only the guilty. Bush claims that "the US respects the people of Afghanistan," just as his father averred that he had no argument with the people of Iraq. After those reassuring words, Bush pere initiated and continued a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, while Saddam Hussein lives in comfort.
In an article about just war theory, Saturday's New York Times described the situation this way: "On one side is a modern superpower with a full arsenal of weapons restrained by popular moral revulsion at the prospect of inflicting unintended damage on innocent bystanders. On the other is a shadowy network of conspirators who may lack modern weapons but have no qualms about killing thousands of victims." We may debate the degree of American popular revulsion at killing innocent bystanders — pardon, "inflicting unintended damage" on them; notice how even in the hypothetical the Paper of Record can not bring itself to describe the US "killing" innocents — but the revulsion that exists is sustained by the belief that killing innocents is not in fact something the United States does, or at the very least something it does not do on purpose. Since the bombing, a number of people with whom I have spoken have asked, "Why do they hate us so much?" For most Americans, this hatred is mysterious, bizarre, inexplicable. Their leaders tell them that those who despise America are simply insane, or that they hate freedom. In his speech, Bush said, "They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms." To American ears, this notion sounds like a form of insanity. The idea that anti-Americanism — even that so intense it gives rise to horrific acts of murder — might be rooted in substantial part in immoral acts committed by the American government is alien to most Americans simply because they have never been presented with it. A month ago the thousands of Iraqis who die each month as a direct result of the United States-led sanctions was a non-story; it was not news. Today it is something too inconvenient to mention, as journalists struggle to reflect and reconstitute on a daily basis the national unity that has emerged from the rubble in New York. When the cover of Newsweek proclaims "God Bless America" and CBS affixes the slogan "America Strikes Back" to its coverage (Fox News, the home of objective reporting, is going with "America Stands United"), there is little desire evident for critical questioning or inconvenient facts.
How is it that American foreign policy can be so brutal so often and yet Americans remain so convinced of our moral perfection, not simply in this conflict but in every one our government undertakes? The answer lies in the care and attention given to the maintenance of our supremacist ideology. We rule the world not simply because we can, but because we deserve to, because our moral beacon shines brightest, because God has chosen us to. If a poor desperate people somewhere can't see the self-evident truth of that, well, sometimes we just have to kill enough of them until they understand. If we have to destroy Afghanistan in order to save it, so be it. John McCain told Jay Leno that no country in the world would have reacted the way Americans did to the bombing of the World Trade Center; one supposes that if terrorists had murdered six thousand Swedes or Hondurans or Japanese, their countrymen would have simply turned their backs on the victims and gone about their business. Despite the lack of any particular evidence to support it, the idea that not only is America the greatest country in the world but that Americans are morally superior to all other humans comes bursting to the fore at times of crisis.
Many now say that at a time like this we should be rallying behind our president, not examining his every action and word with a critical eye. I contend that the truth is just the opposite: it is in a time of crisis, when the American people are angry and our government prepares to unleash its extraordinary machinery of violence, with a power to effect death and destruction on a scale unparalleled in human history, that we should be the most critical. Now more than ever we should question everything our government does, demand the truth with a clear voice, and insist that we earn with our actions the moral superiority we claim by virtue of victimization. When we do so there are those who will call us unpatriotic, even imply that we are aiding the enemy. These are accusations liberals have endured before, and will again.
A simple question: is murdering civilians wrong, or is the question answered only by evaluating their nation as a whole to judge whether they are worthy of life? On this, Bin Laden and Bush seem to agree. Bin Laden decries the murder of Palestinians, of Iraqis, of Afghanis, but finds in the actions of the American government moral justification for the murder of Americans.
Bush has no problem with those deaths, or with the deaths he now orders, but finds the murder of Americans abhorrent not because they are human but because they reside in the country that God has blessed. As Bush said in his address, "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." In other words, God is on our side. Our actions, however many they kill, cannot be wrong if this is the case. Now who does that sound like?
- September 24, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by The Waldman Political Report. All rights reserved.