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Anti-Terrorism

By William SaletanPosted Thursday, Sept. 27, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

In the war on terrorism, what are we fighting for?

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President Bush says we're fighting for democracy, pluralism, and civil liberties. Terrorists "hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government," he declared in his speech to Congress last week. "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan." Bush concluded, "This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom."

It sounds good, but it doesn't add up. A coalition of governments that believe in all these principles can't include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan. According to the U.S. State Department's latest Human Rights Report, all three countries restrict freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, and movement. Jordan is a monarchy propped up by security forces that have committed "extrajudicial killings." The Saudi royal family "prohibits the establishment of political parties" and enforces "a rigorously conservative form of Islam" through "religious police." Egyptians "do not have a meaningful ability to change their Government." Egyptian security forces "arbitrarily arrest" and "torture" people in the name of "combating terrorism."

Are you passionate enough about freedom and democracy to exclude these countries from an anti-terrorism coalition? Are you willing to give up Saudi cooperation in the detection and destruction of Osama Bin Laden's financial network? Are you willing to give up Egyptian intelligence, which informed us of Bin Laden's plot to kill Bush in Europe two months ago? Are you willing to sever ties with Jordanian security forces, who thwarted Bin Laden's plans to massacre tourists in the Middle East two years ago?

No? Would you rather have the help of those countries against Bin Laden than push freedom and democracy on them? Then let's take a harder case. According to the State Department, Pakistan harbors and supports Muslim extremists associated with hijackings and suicide bombings against India. A few years ago, we slapped sanctions on Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons. In 1999, Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized control of the country in a coup. But now that we need Pakistan's help to stage operations in neighboring Afghanistan, we're lifting the sanctions and offering substantial economic aid. Is that OK with you? Are you willing to tolerate military dictatorship, nuclear proliferation, and a faraway proxy terror campaign in order to get Pakistan's assistance against Bin Laden?

Does it bother you that 62 percent of Pakistanis, according to a Gallup Poll, oppose their dictator's decision to support the United States in this conflict—or that only 9 percent of people surveyed by Gallup in 27 Muslim nations favor airstrikes against Afghanistan? Does it bother you that the Pakistani and Saudi regimes are keeping their collaboration with us as secret as possible in order to avoid angering their citizens? We're not just ignoring democracy as a goal. We're deliberately circumventing it. Is that OK with you?

Maybe we can justify these compromises, and maybe we can't. But we can't even have that debate until we stop deceiving ourselves about what we're doing. We're not building an alliance for democracy, pluralism, or freedom of speech and religion. We're setting aside those principles in order to build the broadest possible alliance against terrorism.

We've been here before. Pearl Harbor drove us into an alliance with the murderous Josef Stalin against Hitler. The Iron Curtain drove us into an alliance against communism. To contain and defeat the Soviet Union, we compromised human rights, pluralism, and democracy wherever we thought it necessary. We propped up right-wing dictators. We tolerated torture. We armed Pakistan. We armed Afghanistan. We armed Bin Laden.

Then communism collapsed, and all the principles we had suppressed while fighting it rose to the surface. We sanctioned Pakistan. We denounced Afghanistan's religious intolerance. We started talking about human rights and the treatment of women.

Then came Sept. 11. A new global menace commanded our attention. Suddenly, democracy in Pakistan and women's rights in Saudi Arabia seem expendable. The concentrated fear that drove us to anti-fascism and anti-communism is driving us to anti-terrorism.

Anti-terrorism, like its predecessors, can't easily be dismissed as immoral. Were we wrong to help Stalin defeat Hitler? Were we wrong to help the Afghans defeat the Soviets? Such compromises seem clearly worth making when one menace gets big enough to outweigh the others and when the others can be dealt with once the big one is dead.

The trouble with this kind of absolutism is that it's bounded only by itself. Everything hinges on the definition of a single enemy. Once you distort the scope or nature of that enemy, your campaign against it runs off the rails. Start calling liberals Communists, and anti-communism becomes a totalitarian monster. Start calling conservatives fascists, and anti-fascism becomes a pretext for purging them from universities.

Anti-terrorism faces the same problem. What counts as terrorism, and what doesn't? The question isn't just theoretical. It's on the table right now, as the United States weighs the price of adding two new wings to the coalition against Bin Laden.

The first wing consists of Iran and Syria, who sponsor terrorist organizations other than Bin Laden's. Iran borders Afghanistan and hates the Afghan regime. Yesterday, according to the New York Times, a senior Bush administration official "suggested that Iran could provide information and perhaps crack down on border traffic and any financing that helps Mr. bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda. The official added that the United States had not asked Iran to take any specific action like halting the flow of weapons and other support to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and material support to militant Palestinian groups like Hamas." Is that deal kosher? Are you willing to look the other way while Iran funds Hezbollah? Are you willing to narrow the definition of the enemy to terrorists who have directly attacked the United States?

The other wing consists of Russia and China. While Iran and Syria want to narrow the definition of terrorism, Russia and China want to broaden it. A few days ago, China's foreign ministry suggested that the campaign against terrorism should address "separatists" in Tibet and Taiwan. Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a "mutual understanding in the sphere of fighting international terrorism"—in other words, a free hand for Russia to crush rebels in Chechnya. What about the atrocities Russia has committed in that war? Never mind, says a senior member of Germany's ruling party: "Silence on Chechnya is the price for this new solidarity. And I don't think Germany will be the only country to pay it." Will the United States pay that price? Will you?

Terrorists are "the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20^th century," Bush argued in his speech to Congress. "By abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends, in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

Bush is half right. There is a grave, but there is no path. There is only anti-fascism and anti-communism, which themselves prevailed by abandoning, at crucial moments, every value except the enemy's defeat. With that singular focus comes a singular responsibility.

If anti-terrorists twist the definition of terrorism so that they can continue to use it while slaughtering civilians in the name of fighting it, they'll be the ones who have obliterated every value except the will to power. Like Joe McCarthy, they'll become the enemy they set out to defeat. They'll be the ones who end up in history's grave. Or worse, they won't.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: The first post below, from RonK, was particularly recommended by William Saletan himself. A neat thread on U.S. money going to Afghanistan starts here with a post from Tony Adragna. Tom R, here, looks at historical parallels with World War II and started another good thread. And Cato's and Yukon's posts, below, were part of yet another recommended discussion. Jake gave his theory as to why America likes to deal with non-democracies: "We love Kings as long as they are on the backs of other people."]

One flaw in Saletan's analogy is that anticommunism identified a real opponent--a more-or-less cohesive, durable, principled alliance of worldly powers united by a system of thought (a competing vision of "the good") and consequent concrete contestable interests antithetical to ours. Terrorism, by contrast, is not a system of thought, a way of life, a vision of the good, is not confined to a particular set of worldly powers, and does not lead to definition of specific antithetical interests…

We could combat communism (or communism's adherents), or contain it, or defeat it by particular action in particular theaters of conflict. Terrorism is not exclusively associated with the actors behind the acts of 9/11. Whatever alliance we construct, we will find terrorists--including actors who have used terror against each other--within the fold. In the Cold War, did we forge alliances with "good" communists as firestops against "evil" communists? Rarely.

If "terrorism" is our enemy, if our objective is to eliminate terror as a tactic of states, movements, corporations or individuals, we might look to historic precedents for eliminating objectionable tools of state policy: the war against marine piracy/privateering, and the generally observed international compacts against airline hijacking.

If "terrorism" is not our enemy, what is? The answer seems to be "Islamism", suitably qualified: "fundamentalist Islamism" or "violently aggressive fundamentalist Islamism." But this treads uncomfortably on the threshold of religious warfare.

If it's dangerous to choose "Islamism" as the enemy, why not simply "those who trespassed against us on 9/11"? It lacks the high gloss of "ridding the world of evil-doers", but it is better-defined and less susceptible to mission-creep and coalition-decay--and it is potentially achievable

--RonK

(To reply, click here.)

A lot of people are telling me or making me feel as though I'm anti-American and anti-patriotism. I'm not. I, too, simply understand that getting in bed with less than savory partners for political gain is hypocritical in it of itself. After the consummation of the relationship and the common enemy is destroyed, we still have to deal with the person who we've slept with and deal with the consequences. It's a pattern that has been repeating itself over and over and over again, without, to my dismay, a protest that we should learn from history and mistakes in the past.

All I know is that we're not really fighting for democracy. We're not really fighting for freedom. We're not hated because of our elected bodies in congress. We're not hated because we're the shiniest beacon of liberty and progress. No. We're hated for the actions that we are now taking today. We're building a coalition against terrorism at the expense of everything good we stand for. That is why we're hated. I think that the rest of the world can see this hypocrisy and that's why 62% of Pakistan and many other brave, but impotent countries are protesting this new war. Is it really righteous to go and subjugate a people that have not the political sophistication to understand world events? Is it justice when a war-torn innocent lot that did not have anything to do with whomever attacked the U.S. is bombed to quench the thirst of blind rage?

We won't get our pride back by bombing Afghanistan. We won't feel better by unearthing the rubble that we created the last time we created craters in Afghan soil. We won't be able to breathe back life into those corpses that lay underneath the tons of mortar and steel. And, we won't be able to salvage the impression that the United States is slowly losing power.

--Piat Orendain

(To reply, click here.)

I don't like Egypt's human rights record, or Iran's and Pakistan's involvement with terrorists. But in opening dialogue and building a coalition we can move toward those goals of ridding ourselves of the terrorists, it's in our common interest. In breaking the ice in this way we can start to provide incentives to improve human rights, convince Iran that support the Hamas is the wrong approach to solving the Palestinian plight, work with Pakistan and India to resolve the Kashmir conflict, and show Egypt it's in their own best interest to not oppress their own people. But we need to do these things within the framework of their cultures and not impose American culture on them. We actually have a wonderful opportunity, but we'll ruin it if we don't recognize our own foibles.

--Timothy Whitehill

(To reply, click here.)

My axiom in the debate [on past U.S. involvement in Afghanistan] is that the Soviet Union was a power that above all, had to be defeated; if I question that, everything starts to fall apart. But I feel we've been corrupted by that struggle, by our support of dictators, and I fear that the interests of big business have gotten entangled with the interests of the people. (How legitimate a dichotomy is that, anyway?)

I want a simple feedback loop, where the government acts, the media reports, the people question, the government retorts, and the people decide. Did it ever exist?

--Larry Edelstein

(To reply, click here.)

Bush didn't get it half right--he was right. When he said that we're fighting for democracy, pluralism, and civil liberties, he was talking only about America's democracy, pluralism and civil liberties. And rightly so. When he mentioned the terrorists' desire to overthrow the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, he was referring to the impact such coups would have on us. While none of these nations are democratic or liberal, these governments are as friendly as Islamic countries get toward the U.S. Even more importantly, Saudi Arabia keeps the oil spigots open.

The U.S. has never fought foreign wars solely for the sake of maintaining or establishing a democracy. On the other hand, we have often sabotaged democracies. (Of course, we provided substantial help in establishing democracies in Germany and Japan, but that was also based on enlightened self-interest.) We fight for our own purposes. I think that is the only policy we can possibly have. I think that every decision should be based upon its effect upon our democracy. We should encourage democracy, and help it where we can. However, we should not do so where such support may have deleterious effects upon us.

--Cato the Censor

(To reply, click here.)

To Cato: You seem to recognize only "hard" national interests--money, military power, diplomatic coercion. You don't seem to be concerned with why Americans should seek or have such power, merely with whether or not they do have it. If you are assuming that American power is necessarily benign, I envy your childlike faith. If you know as well as I do that it is not always benign, but support it merely because it is American, I pity your cyncism.

--Yukon

(To reply, click here.)

(9/27)

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