Bush's Quest, and What We Found Out
At this point, he had everything it seemed possible to have in life, but despite all this affluence, Siddhartha in his early twenties, became discontent. The basis for this is a famous legend of the four encounters, or passing sights. If Siddhartha went out of the palace, the king had always first ordered that all those with any disability be hidden from view. The story is told that, one day, Siddhartha saw an old man, bent and trembling, and discovered old age. On the second encounter, he saw a sick man suffering from disease, and on the third journey, he witnessed a funeral procession and a corpse. Finally, on the fourth journey, he met a wandering monk who had an inner tranquillity despite living an austere life, suggesting to Siddhartha that he had come to terms with old age, sickness and death.
-- The Legend of Siddhartha
Then suddenly, the shadows of the past got their vengeance.
The twin towers of the World Trade Center were symbols. As steeples loomed over European capitals built in Christian ages, the WTC towers were the steeple to Wall Street, the temple of capitalism. With the towers fell the illusion of our invulnerability. The charmed citadel was violated.
We were strangely incurious, after 9/11, about why we had been attacked. To many, especially in the Arab world but including Noam Chomsky at MIT, it seemed we were strangely incurious about who had attacked us, rushing to blame bin Laden when there was no proof. I don't go along with this line; bin Laden seems to me a clear guilty party. Three years after September 11th, Governor George Pataki told the Republican National Convention that "I thank God that on September 11th, we had a president who didn't wring his hands and wonder what America had done wrong to deserve this attack. I thank God we had a president who understood that America was attacked, not for what we had done wrong, but for what we do right." (My italics.) What he said was conventional wisdom by then, but it is not very logical. Why should someone be angry at us for something we did right? We remained incurious about bin Laden's motives.
I read about those motives three years earlier in a letter published in Foreign Affairs. Bin Laden had three principal motives for rage against America: 1) our troops were stationed on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, 2) we supported Israel against the Palestinians, and 3) we were enforcing cruel sanctions against, and regularly bombing, Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. On all three counts, he was right. US forces, the forces of a democracy, should not have been serving as the bodyguard for a regime as despotic and medieval as that of the House of Saud. The Palestinians have been getting a raw deal for many years, and the Oslo peace process in the 1990s was conducted in bad faith on the Israeli side, since Prime Minister Netanyahu was expanding the settlements, making the problems worse under cover of the peace process. And the sanctions on Iraq were an iniquitous policy which caused the deaths (or so it has been reported, and I have found no contradiction of the claim) of hundreds of thousands of children due to lack of medicines. Of these three reasons, the strongest, for bin Laden, was the Palestinian cause. He wanted to show support for the second intifada.
The anti-globalization movement had other reasons to be angry at America, which were not part of bin Laden’s reason to attack us. We were not attacked because we refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty. We were not attacked because we refused to join the International Criminal Court. We were not attacked because we are the world's biggest polluter, or because our corporations run sweatshops in Vietnam and Indonesia, or because we are the host nation of the IMF, which has forced government to cut budgets for fuel oil and basic foodstuffs. And yet global economic inequality, the main force behind the anti-globalization movement’s anger, may have contributed to bin Laden’s wrath. The reason George Pataki's illogical explanation of the terrorists' motives continues to appeal to Americans is that we cannot understand why so many people are embracing militant Islam when freedom and democracy and capitalism seem to us so obviously preferable. But American travelers in Arab lands discover soon enough the contradictory attitude that people there have towards America: they resent it, and admire it; they fulminate against it and see it as an enemy, yet they would love to come here if they had the chance. Immigration restrictions shut them out. Democratic capitalism does appeal to them, but they are excluded from participating in it. Militant Islam offers a worldview, a movement, into which they are welcomed and embraced.
Since 9/11, Bush has addressed two of bin Laden's three grievances, and tried to address the third. US troops were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia. The sanctions on Iraq were lifted (of course, along with regime change). Bush is not in charge of Israel, but he has called for a Palestinian state and has sometimes tried to restrain Sharon. I do not know whether this was by design. Bush has performed the paradoxical trick of removing bin Laden's just causes for attacking the US without seeming in the least to reward terrorism.
In the war in Afghanistan, a taboo that had lasted since Mogadishu was broken. US soldiers were exposed to real risks, and some of them died. Because we were no longer cripplingly casualty-averse, we could pioneer highly effective new tactics of cooperation between ground troops and air power, with ground troops communicating the coordinates of targets to bombers that could hit them. The Afghan campaign was a stunning achievement, both military and diplomatic. We won a swift victory against one of the world's most totalitarian states, on one of the world's most difficult battlefields, where the Soviets had been the last of several mighty empires to meet humiliating defeat. And we effectively deployed the diplomatic capital we had acquired from 9/11: the Russians tolerated US bases in formerly Soviet Uzbekistan, China tolerated US troops in a country on their western border, Pakistan turned against a regime that their own Inter Services Intelligence had helped to train and bring to power, and Iran was cooperative while American and allied troops occupied one of their neighbors. Our prestige was riding high.
The conflict of Afghanistan resembled the interventions and crises of the Clinton years. During Clinton’s term of office, there was an abortive intervention in Somalia (1993), a crisis in Rwanda in which we failed to intervene (1994), a belated intervention in Bosnia where a genocide took place (1995), a war in Kosovo against ethnic cleansing (1999), and an intervention to support the independence in East Timor (1999). In these crises, as in Afghanistan, a conflict that had local roots and was underway well before we intervened took place on the fringes of civilization. In each of these crises, our opponents were weak, being among the poorest and most primitive peoples in the world. In each case, we had local allies and UN cover which diminished our sense of responsibility for the outcome. Each conflict took us by surprise, got the global spotlight for a few weeks or months and then was forgotten. Afghanistan was executed more brilliantly than the 1990s interventions, and was more difficult and consequential. There were also more casualties, but we were de-sensitized to casualties, first by 9/11, then by Iraq, so they did not seem like so many.
Iraq was different. We were well prepared, with the build-up to the war lasting over a year. We were familiar with the battlefield and the enemy, because of the 1991 Gulf War. This took place in the ancient heart of civilization, in a middle-income, reasonably educated country. It took place, too, in the heart of the Arab world, the region from which the 9/11 attackers had sprung, the epicenter of radical Islam. Because we defied much international opposition, and because we had neither UN cover nor, as in Kosovo, NATO cover, we felt more responsible for the outcome. We did not fight this war with proxies but with our own ground troops, and casualties were correspondingly higher. Where the Taliban had gained an embattled and brief hold over the country, the Baathist regime had utterly dominated the country for thirty-five years. The Taliban were beaten back into the mountains but kept fighting. The Baathist leviathan evaporated, like the velvet revolutions in eastern Europe.
When the TV showed the Baathist regime fall in April 2003, it was the most amazing glimpse of history in my adult life. I was a well-traveled backpacker by then. I had been all over Europe, including European Russia, and had been to Hong Kong, China, Korea and Uzbekistan. I knew the difference between much-frequented destinations, where the locals were accustomed to and annoyed by tourists, where tourists avoided each other if they could, and remote destinations, where locals were fascinated to meet an American, where Americans were so few and far between that when they met, they were automatically friends. I knew the informal code of backpackers, the way they kept track of places seen like trophies, and the more dangerous and remote the place, the more honor was to be had by having been there. Lonely Planet covered most of the surface of the world, with some destinations more well-trodden, naturally, and some more obscure, but Iraq. Iraq was off-limits to backpackers. It was the unattainable. You couldn’t get there to find out what it was like. And now, all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of our boys had backpacked their way into Baghdad, just in time to see a world-historic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall! And while the humble backpacker stashes some stories to tell his friends and relatives on his return, he’s unlikely to make much of a dent in people’s ignorance. But this time the attention of the whole American public was engaged. The Iraq war had the effect, surely unintended, of making Americans see how the other half lives.
Because our boys were in Baghdad, and because our government was responsible for post-war reconstruction, we heard on the news about frequent power outages during the hot summer. Blackouts, brownouts, and erratic electricity supply are problems all over the developing world. They reflect not a resource shortage, since any given amount of electricity can be priced high enough to hold down demand and prevent outages, but rather an institutional failure: the authorities often subsidize electricity and lower prices, unwilling to face down public pressure or special interests, and blackouts emerge as a way of rationing. The damage is diffuse but large. Firms are less productive. Households are inconvenienced.
Because our boys were in Baghdad, we saw first-hand on the news how many clerics promoted fanaticism and bigotry. All over the world, many parents, schoolteachers, religious leaders, media outlets, and public figures disseminate to children narrow-minded dogmatism and hatred and suspicion of those who are different. Old traditions are often at odds with the modern world, and people find themselves in a confusing limbo as the beliefs by which their parents and grandparents lived their lives are challenged and rendered untenable. This can result in complete abandonment of traditions, in partial abandonment and adaptation, or in brilliant syntheses of tradition and modernity which then become contributions to modernity; but often, they generate obscurantist reactions, to irrationalism, or to nihilism. Meanwhile, old-new ethnic tensions and enmities haunt many countries in this world. The embrace of toleration, towards modernity, towards those of other faiths, races and ethnicities, towards differences of opinion and free speech, towards interactions with foreigners and with global culture, is a difficult and a gradual process, incomplete even in America perhaps, but far advanced here compared to most other places.
Because our boys were in Baghdad, because Iraqi freedom was a declared war objective, and because an Iraqi state had to emerge so our troops could leave, we had to come to grips with the challenges of state formation. It is a problem all over the world. In the 20th century, most of the world's nations have experienced revolutions, coups, and other forms of regime change, and only a handful of countries finished the 20th century with the same regime they started with. Most of the Third World has experienced some form of collectivist rule, and many countries have experienced totalitarian regimes which have committed atrocities and become hated by their subjects. When traditional authority gives way, it is unclear how new forms of legitimacy can be established. "Democracy" is not an adequate answer, because it is only a form of government; the substance of democratic governance includes courts with judges and laws to enforce, political parties with platforms and organizations, politicians with name recognition and well-known biographies, written constitutions and unwritten procedural norms. Voting is problematic without some or all of these things in place. But how can they be put in place—legitimately? Such is the problem faced by post-totalitarian and post-conflict societies all over the world.
The most shocking thing we faced in Baghdad was premature death, whether from hunger or lack of medicines, induced by our own sanctions in the late Saddam years, or by Zarqawi's bombs and beheadings of hostages. Such horrors led many to doubt whether the invasion had been worthwhile. Clinton, after a frightening episode in Mogadishu in 1993, made sure that no more American soldiers met with premature death on his watch. And yet premature death is another phenomenon that characterizes the vast expanses of the developed world—as with the girl in the intensive care ward in Cambodia. In sub-Saharan Africa, the AIDS epidemic continues to take its terrible toll. Tens of millions of children have been orphaned by AIDS. Schools are losing teachers, clinics are losing doctors, trucking lines are losing drivers. Life expectancies in sub-Saharan Africa have fallen from 50 to 46, a statistic that dilutes the many millions who die in the very prime of life. Of course, a girl dying of tuberculosis in a rural intensive care ward will never attract the same attention as an American businessman beheaded by Zarqawi's Monotheism and Jihad. But is her life less important?
It is perhaps worth insisting on the difference between premature death due to violence and that due to malnutrition or disease. The former is more horrible because it has an author; it is not merely a tragedy but also a crime. But crime, terrorism, and guerrilla insurgency are also problems all over the developing world. Colombia, Sri Lanka, Russia, and the Philippines all suffer from guerrilla insurgencies that regularly resort to terror. South Africa has been ravaged by crime, particularly in the ten years since the end of apartheid—or rather, crime became high-profile when whites became its victims more often. In Brazil, rich people drive in armored cars and live in gated communities. India has been the scene of large-scale communal violence, and many criminals have clawed their way to power. Turkey and Spain have all been victims of al-Qaeda terrorism in the past year; but the separatist Kurds and Basques, respectively, have practiced terrorism against these states much longer. The state of Israel has faced an existential threat from terror throughout its fifty-six-year existence.
Some Americans have the impression from their TV screens that what is happening in Iraq is some kind of unique horror that we have unleashed. Not so. The problems we have encountered there—the difficulty of delivering public services, the challenge of state formation and of the transition to democracy, dangerous currents of fanaticism and bigotry, crime and terrorism and guerrilla insurgency, ethnic tensions, poverty—is a cross-section of problems that each characterize many poor countries. These are Robert Kaplan's world. In the usual hierarchy of our concerns, we ache for our family but we do not ache for the Cambodian girl dying of tuberculosis in a rural intensive care unit. The Iraq war, for a moment, twisted the kaleidoscope, and suddenly the development problems of a distant country were front-page news, and an issue of pressing importance for Americans.
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