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Sending this to the list as it is certainly worth reading.
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To: ariel@xxxxxxxx
Subject: article
From: "Roy Feld" <royfeld3@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 23:22:20 -0400
>Truth or Consequences
>By William Saletan
>
>Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT
>
>Why do they hate us?
>
>That's the question many people are asking about the terrorists who struck
>the Pentagon and the World Trade Center last week. At first, the question
>was raised simply to make sense of the tragedy. Then it was posed for
>investigative reasons, to understand who was involved in the crime and what
>they might do next. Now the purpose of the question is changing again.
>Commentators are wondering how we made the terrorists angry enough to hurt
>us and how we might change our behavior to avoid further attacks.
>
>These writers don't exactly fault the United States. They simply argue that
>the attacks were a consequence of American behavior. "The suicide attacks
>in
>Israel—and now in the United States—are reactions to specific actions and
>policies," writes The Nation's David Corn. In The New Yorker, Susan Sontag
>says the terrorist strikes were "undertaken as a consequence of specific
>American alliances and actions." Salon Executive Editor Gary Kamiya
>concludes that "our only real defense will be winning the hearts and minds
>of those who hate us. … We must pressure Israel to take the concrete steps
>necessary to provide justice for the Palestinian people."
>
>The practical point made by these consequentialists is that we can't stop
>terrorism without addressing its causes. A diagnostic approach, they argue,
>is wiser than simply lashing out in anger. They're right about that. But
>their wisdom falls short of the next insight: Consequentialism is a two-way
>street. It's true that terrorists can impose consequences on us. But it's
>just as true that we can impose consequences on terrorists.
>
>Superficially, it's empowering to analyze every situation in terms of the
>consequences of our own acts. Understanding how we can change the enemy's
>behavior by changing our own appears to put control in our hands. It also
>gratifies our egos by preserving our sense of free will while interpreting
>the enemy's conduct as causally determined. We're the subjects; they're the
>objects. But the empowerment and the ego gratification are illusory. By
>accepting as a mechanical fact the enemy's aggressive response to our
>offending behavior, we surrender control of the most important part of the
>sequence.
>
>Imagine yourself as a rat in a behavioral experiment. You're put in a cage
>with three levers. When you press the first lever, you get food. When you
>press the second, you get water. When you press the third, you get an
>electric shock. You quickly learn to press the first two levers and not the
>third. You think you're in control because you're choosing the levers that
>get you what you want. But the real power belongs to the scientists who
>built the cage and run the experiment, because they determine which acts
>produce which consequences.
>
>Now imagine yourself as a battered wife. Every so often, your husband gets
>angry and hits you. Why? You struggle to understand the connection between
>your behavior and his response. What are you doing that causes him to react
>this way? You hope that by identifying and avoiding the offending behavior,
>you can regain domestic peace and a sense of control. You're deluding
>yourself. As long as your husband decides which of your acts will earn you
>a
>beating, he's the master, and you're the slave.
>
>This is the problem with the consequentialist argument for revising U.S.
>policy in the Middle East. Maybe it's true, for other reasons, that we
>should rethink our position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, withdraw
>our troops from Saudi Arabia, or ease sanctions on Iraq. But if we do these
>things to avoid further attacks on our cities, we're granting terrorists
>the
>power to dictate our acts by dictating the consequences.
>
>The consequentialists present themselves as humanitarians and idealists.
>They purport to speak up for the plights, principles, and aspirations of
>people who are driven to commit acts of terror. But their mechanistic
>analysis dehumanizes these people. Terrorists aren't animals. No law of
>nature compels them to blow up buildings when they're angry. We don't have
>to accept their violent reactions to our policies. We can break that causal
>chain.
>
>How? By turning consequentialism on its head. We can dictate what happens
>to
>people who attack us. Suicidal terrorists may be impervious to this logic,
>but their commanders and sponsors aren't. Launder money for a man who
>destroys the World Trade Center, and your assets will be confiscated.
>Shelter an organization that crashes a plane into the Pentagon, and your
>government buildings will be leveled. Expel terrorists from your country,
>freeze their bank accounts, and you'll be liberated from sanctions and
>debt.
>
>Will this approach succeed? We don't know how each would-be terrorist or
>sponsor will respond. It's an open question. But that's the point. As long
>as we view it the other way around—ourselves as the actors, and our enemies
>as the imposers of consequences—the question is closed. Our enemies'
>reactions, and therefore our options, are rigidly defined. We can have
>troops in Saudi Arabia, or we can have peace at home, but we can't have
>both.
>
>Challenging the false objectivity of these dilemmas doesn't require us to
>ignore the potential consequences of our acts. Some of our Middle East
>policies do anger many Arabs or Muslims. We ought to worry when others
>don't
>like our behavior. But just as surely, they ought to worry when we don't
>like theirs.
>
>Two years ago, when President Clinton waged war against ethnic cleansing in
>Kosovo, consequentialists on the American right blamed him for the
>bloodshed. His aggression, they argued, had provoked the Serbs to violence.
>Now that President Bush is girding for war, consequentialism has broken out
>on the left. To his credit, Bush is defying it with equal vigor. The
>terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center "are clearly
>determined to try to force the United States of America and our values to
>withdraw from the world," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed
>yesterday. "We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is
>unacceptable; or to change the way that they live. And we chose the
>latter."
>Amen.
>
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