these original architects of the Open Door believed they had found a way to reduce the role of militaries in the articulation of foreign policies and the conduct of international relations. They believed they had found a way to ease the inevitable passage of the seat of empire, perhaps even dispensing with war as its spastic, deadly accompaniment. So conceived, the American Century was a postimperialist design for a world accustomed to colonialism, racism, and war. Ending it will not be easy, then, because it contains real hope for a world free of fear and want and violence, a world in which freedom just is development. Still, we must ask in our own time, in this third stage of globalization, has the Open Door now been adjourned as an intellectual agenda? Is the ending of the American Century already accomplished?
“Virtual Sanctuaries”:
Globalization and the New Terrorist Movements
There is of course another way to read for that ending. This alternative reading would place the rise of terrorism at the center of the story we tell about the new global realities that changed the relation between America and the world—between the inside and the outside of what came to be called “the homeland.” This reading would probably treat the formal declaration of a “war on terror” in 2001 as the inevitable result of the irrational (read: ethnic and religious) forces that gathered at the end of the twentieth century in furious opposition to modernity as exemplified and purveyed by the United States. American foreign policy was militarized, in other words, by the nature of the new threat to peaceful economic development on a global scale. It is a plausible reading because after the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorism did become the principal threat to orderly development as sponsored by the last remaining superpower (or the “hyperpower,” according to French observers)—
as early as 1994, soon after the first attack on the World Trade Center was carried out by Islamic militants, the State Department had defined terror as the central concern of U.S. foreign policy.
So let us revisit the late-twentieth-century scene of discussion on the rise of terrorism, particularly as this discussion was recast by later interpretations of 9/11. There was (and is) a rough consensus among analysts and policymakers on the salient features of the phenomenon. This background agreement remained even in view of serious disagreements on the origins, implications, and prevention of terrorism. To begin with, everyone agreed that the third stage of globalization was the medium and the method of new terrorist movements, in two related senses. First, their leaders often had cosmopolitan educations that made them citizens of a world without borders, while their rank-and-file members invariably understood how to use the most advanced communication technologies, including computers. The nine-year insurgency in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion of 1979, for example, was the context in which Islamic militants from around the world first exchanged notes on how to divert or neutralize (not destroy) an overextended superpower. There they learned how to make the Internet their base—so that when the United States finally destroyed the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan (long before 9/11), jihadists found “virtual sanctuaries” in cyberspace, on hundreds of websites where they could teach each other how to use mobile phones as effective detonators, to fire rocket-propelled grenades, and to conduct a proper beheading.
Second, and more importantly, the typical terrorist movements of the late twentieth century were substate actors that refused to fight an old-fashioned war of maneuver in which the goal is to conquer a state and its territory; they chose instead to fight a newfangled war of position in which the goal is to discredit the enemy’s legitimacy in the court of world opinion. This substate status and this strategic choice challenged the sovereignty of nation-
states, a founding principle of modern law—at any rate they enacted a dispersal of power from states to society by ending the state’s exclusive claim on the means of mass destruction and by merging the theater of combat with civil(ian) society. As John Yoo, the fierce critic of the Geneva Conventions who served in George Bush’s Justice Department, explained, “Once, only nation-states had the resources to wage war. [Now] Al Qaeda is able to finance its jihad outside the traditional structure of the nation-state, and this may well extend to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.” In enacting this dispersal of power, terrorist movements resembled the multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations that were meanwhile challenging the regulatory reach and the moral standing of states. They also embodied the “decentering” of power from the core to the periphery of the modern world system which found its academic analog under the rubric of “postcolonial” studies.
Here is how Lawrence Freedman, an influential British authority on the subject, summarizes the linkages between the third stage of globalization and the rise of the new terrorism in the very late twentieth century: “Terrorism appeared as part of the underside of globalization. It was already becoming apparent that the consequence of the openness in the international system, economically as much as politically, was taking certain things out of control. The result of globalization was the reduced power of states, the movement of capital and people around the world as governments opened up their borders. This created new opportunities for those who wished to inflict harm on the established [world] order.”
Kurt Campbell and Michelle Flournoy more usefully emphasize that the terrorist groups brought together under al Qaeda’s ideological umbrella were themselves components of the new world order convened by globalization: “By redirecting much of the energies of these groups from unsuccessful efforts to cause upheaval in their home countries into a broader assault on the West, bin Laden has created a genuine strategic threat. . . . By operating transnationally, [these] groups have found a way to get out of the box of facing off solely against national police in isolated theaters—conflicts they usually lose.” Meanwhile Philip Bobbitt, the most important contemporary analyst of terrorism, reminds us that “when the boundaries between domestic and foreign threats were being erased” by globalization, maintaining the distinction between law (crime) and strategy (war) in addressing terrorism became difficult if not impossible.
The background agreement on the salient features of terrorism also included acknowledgment of its standing as a weapon of the weak, its willingness to target civilians with weapons of mass destruction, and its ideological cohesion around anti-Western, postliberal principles. Terrorism, whether practiced by Russian anarchists, Irish nationalists, diasporic Zionists, or Palestinian refugees, has always been the recourse of those who lack the mass support and the weaponry to wage conventional war against a modern nation-state. They have meant instead to sap the will of the enemy state by bringing the carnage of war to its civilian population—by making everyday life the theater of battle, thus erasing the distinction between combatant and noncombatant or, in a larger sense, between the public and the private, the outside and the inside. “The whole point is for the psychological impact to be greater than the actual physical act,” Louis Richardson, the Harvard-based authority, explains. “Terrorism is indeed a weapon of the weak.”
But the terrorists of the very late twentieth century were quite different from their predecessors among, say, the Irgun, the Zionist group led by Menachim Begin in the 1940s, or its mirror image, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasir Arafat from the 1960s until his death in 2004. Both of these groups targeted civilians in the hope of removing them and their armed representatives from territory they claimed as their ancestral homeland. Even so, neither would have considered, let alone undertaken, the annihilation of an entire city by means of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The terrorist movements of the very late twentieth century did consider such a project. That is the big difference between, say, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and al Qaeda: the latter, for example, killed almost as many innocent civilians in one day, September 11, 2001, as the IRA had in thirty years of trying.
Bobbitt illustrates the difference with a hypothetical scenario comparing the IRA, the PLO, and
al Qaeda.
Fearing popular revulsion, international disapproval, local repression, and threats to their own cohesion, and facing active dissuasion by those states that monopolized WMD even when they were willing to arm terrorists with other weapons, [the IRA and the PLO] turned away from such acquisitions. If someone had said to either Gerry Adams or Yasir Arafat, “I can get you a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon,” one can imagine the reaction. A cautious gasp, a quick turning away—reflecting the apprehension that one has met an agent provocateur. But suppose such an offer were made to bin Laden? He would say, “What will it cost?”
The difference of scale between the old and the new terrorism is often explained by the ideological cohesion of the latter—the order-of-magnitude increase in the carnage caused by terrorist groups is an index of their religious intensity, many analysts say. They typically go on to say that this intensity magnifies an anti-Western, postliberal attitude toward the evidence of modernity. The special contribution of al Qaeda, in these terms, has been its graft of a renewed Islamic doctrine, on the one hand, and a variety of political grievances already forged by Muslims’ resistance to Western imperialism—by Afghans, Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians—on the other.
Western observers often complain that Muslims never experienced a Reformation akin to the European upheaval that produced a separation of church and state and so allowed the emergence of political movements that required no religious support or justification. What these observers forget is that neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin, the Reformation’s founding fathers, favored such a separation: the statutory distance between the sacred and the secular took three centuries to establish, and its measurement still changes as the result of political debate and judicial review. The intellectual renewal of Islam in the late twentieth century through the restatement and revision of original texts—particularly but not only the Koran—has, in fact, amounted to a reformation, but like the Christian precursor, it reinstates the refusal of a separation between holy writ and statutory law. Its inventors have insisted that the rules and prohibitions we can derive from the Koran (and, of course, from its acknowledged antecedents in the Old and New Testaments) are sufficient to the demands of modern governance.
Now, we may ridicule this position as an antimodern deviation from the secular example of the West. We may want, accordingly, to prescribe more economic development as the treatment needed to wake these backward fundamentalists from their benighted dream of a global Caliphate ruled from Mecca. But look more closely. There is nothing notably antimodern about either the religious fervor that would reintegrate the sacred and the secular—
transcendent truth and mundane reality—or the political opposition to the liberal distinction between state and society. Indeed, all the successful revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, which occasionally used terrorism as an adjunct to their guerilla wars, tried to dismantle this liberal distinction on the grounds that it no longer made a difference. These movements, from fascism to communism, were uniformly anticapitalist and antiliberal, but they were also committed to the most strenuous versions of industrialized modernity. So we can say that the intellectual renewal of Islam carried out by the spiritual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s (among them, Sayyid Qutb) and appropriated by al Qaeda in the 1990s does urge the erasure of the liberal distinction between state and society; but we should not conclude—as do Paul Berman from the Left and Norman Podhoretz from the Right—that this urge is the symptom of a nihilist sensibility which requires the obliteration of Western civilization.
If we do reach that conclusion, we will continue to mistake a postliberal doctrine for an antimodern ideology, and we will, as a result, continue to ignore the specific political grievances al Qaeda files on behalf of Muslims everywhere. We will continue, accordingly, to say that “they [the terrorists] hate us not because of what we do, but for the way we live” or that they are the moral equivalent of the Nazis. President Bush put it this way nine days after the towers fell: “They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” Thus, we will understand that there can be no political discussion or compromise with such brutes—we will realize that we must wage a borderless, endless war on terror, with all that implies for the militarization of U.S. foreign policy as such.
Bush and the liberal intellectuals who gathered under the banner of a war on terror were emphatic in claiming that the enemy has no political agenda except a “cult of death and irrationality,” which somehow entails the end of the world as we know it. Here is Bush on October 6, 2005: “In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed [sic] and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers—and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.” Here is Berman at an even more delirious and incomprehensible pitch of prophetic dread in 2003: “The successes of the Islamist revolution were going to take place on the plane of the dead, or nowhere. Lived experience pronounced that sentence on the Islamist revolution—the lived experience of Europe, where each of the totalitarian movements [fascism and communism] proposed a total renovation of life, and each was driven to create the total renovation in death.”
Sympathy for the Devil: The Rationality of Terrorism
But in fact, al Qaeda, like every other terrorist movement before it, has a legible political agenda that flows directly from its specific grievances against the West—especially against the United States, the exemplar of Western, liberal, imperialist capitalism. To be sure, this agenda is often animated by the religious vernacular that shapes public discourse in Muslim countries, but in essence it is a set of political goals with little room for the imagery of Armageddon. Osama bin Laden insisted in 2003, for example, that the American way of life was neither his personal concern nor the object of Islamic jihad: “Their leader, who is a fool whom all obey, was claiming that we were jealous of their way of life, while the truth—which the Pharaoh of our generation conceals—is that we strike at them because of the way they oppress us in the Muslim world, especially in Palestine and Iraq.” Before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, moreover, he consistently listed three examples of such “oppression”: the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula; the U.S.-sponsored economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Iraq after the first Gulf war (which, according to a UNICEF report, killed five hundred thousand Iraqi children under the age of five between 1991 and 1998); and the unwavering American support for Israel during its ill-fated invasion of Lebanon and during its ongoing settlement of Palestinian territory.
Now, we may say that each of these three strategic positions was, or is, an important element in the national security of the United States, and with it the global order over which it presides. But in doing so, we must understand that none is a permanent or even a long-standing fixture of U.S. foreign policy—for all date from the very late twentieth century (the consummation and militarization of the U.S.-Israeli relation, for example, dates from Reagan’s second term). We must also understand that each was, and is, a matter of choice by policymakers; alternatives to all three positions were, and are, presumably available, especially in view of the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan and its subsequent dissolution, both of which reduced Russian power in the Middle East. Finally, we must understand that the adoption of alternatives to these strategic positions does not entail any disruption in the American way of life.
So, regardless of what we think about, say, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian claims—whether we think it is just or unjust—we can acknowledge that what we do (and support) in the Muslim precincts of the Middle East is far more significant than the way we live in North America. By the same token, we can acknowledge that wha
t we do in that world elsewhere is subject to reconsideration and revision. Once we have made these acknowledgments, we can see that our approach to al Qaeda and related threats need not take the form of a borderless, endless “war on terror.” We can see that this approach might well take the form of diplomacy, perhaps even changes in U.S. strategic positions. At least we can conclude that the militarization of American foreign policy is not the inevitable result of the terrorist threat to peaceful economic development on a global scale.
To boil this conclusion down to its essentials, let us ask an impertinent question: What if it had informed the U.S. response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? We know, from our brief study of pragmatism and poststructuralism in chapter 3, that past events are effects of interpretation because real events just happen; they do not in their happening possess the formal qualities of narrative, which makes them significant—that is, actionable and thus consequential—by giving coherence to what is random, or at least meaningless, sequence. As William James once put it, “Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them.”
He might have added that the truth of what we say about the contents of any sequence, whether natural like the sunrise or artificial like the start of a war, is divisible or debatable; in other words, the truth we discover is always plural because our purposes in narrating, in speaking the truth about the sequence in question, are different. In the case at hand, for example, the narrative that determined a military rather than a diplomatic response to al Qaeda was the story told by George W. Bush soon after 9/11, then fleshed out by Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, David Frum, and Richard Perle, among many others—a story that portrayed bin Laden and his lieutenants as members of the same “cult of death and irrationality” that had turned Europe into a charnel house in the 1940s. Like the fascists before them, these were bizarre, evil, inexplicable men with whom there could be no bargaining. The consequence of this narrative was, and is, a borderless, endless “war on terror.”
The World Turned Inside Out Page 20