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Try watching the BBC. They have been presenting a much more objective
assessment of U.S. capabilities. That should be sobering for all those
gung ho cowboys on CNN who think it is going to be a cake walk.
Once this issue snowballs into a Christianity vs Muslim thing, which it
surely will given the irresponsible nonsense being bandied about, not
only in the U.S.( by all and sundry excepting the senior levels of the
U.S. administration) but in the muslim world as well, then the
disruptions in the global energy supplies and the consequences are going
to be unimaginable. The only saving grace here is the presence of the
Euorpeans who have more experience in statecraft and have been much
more restrained in their utterances and reactions.
Already Pakistan is witnessing riots on the issue of support to the U.S.
. While it is the fringe element that is creating problems right now, the
refusal of the West to provide conclusive evidence is only making a hero
of bin laden and making the vast majority wonder what do the western
nations want to hide. The efforts to impose the puppet king Zahir Shah
(deposed in a popular uprising decades ago) on Afghanistan by the U.S.,
racist attacks on South Asians and Arabs in North America and U.K. ,
offloading South Asian passengers from flights in the U.S. , insulting
South Asian women , albeit by a few extreme right wing imbeciles,
prohibiting mercantile vessels from most muslim origin ports entering the
U.S. ports, are all playing into the hands of the people who orchestrated
this damn nonsense.
This response of "we are going to change the way they live" is
nonsense. If the energy supplies dry up due to popular disaffection in
the middle east, what will the west do, recolonize the gulf?
All those in the United States who think they are going to do a Grenada
here(the only notable victory the U.S has had in an engagement on the
ground after world War 2 or maybe Panama - please do correct me if I am
wrong ) are going to get a rude jolt. The only problem is it might be too
bloody late for the rest of us that live in the region.
Rakesh
At 08:11 AM 9/22/01 -0400, you wrote:
Sending this to the list as it is
certainly worth reading.
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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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