Nation And Narration

Like the deadly particulate matter floating in the air of lower Manhattan, the political fallout fromSeptember's terrorist attacks will have immeasurable toxic effects for decades. The narrative of that falloutremains to be written--indeed, it remains to be lived and experienced. But it's already becoming possible tosee several important story lines taking shape in U.S. political culture.

The early days now seem like days of hysteria: there was the justifiable hysteria of New Yorkers who fearedthat the bridges and tunnels were the next targets, and there was the ugly hysteria of right-wing pundits forwhom the attacks changed nothing but the volume of their daily screeds.

One unwittingly ludicrous example wasprovided by the celebrated hack Shelby Steele, who was writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journaldenouncing the UN conference on racism when the planes hit, and merely tweaked it into a September 17 columndenouncing global crybabies in general--some of whom were apparently flying those planes, although theconnection wasn't made quite clear. (News flash: advocates of reparations for slavery kill 6000 in New York!!)

More dangerous were the early responses of people like Andrew Sullivan--and Ann Coulter and Rich Lowry of the NationalReview; Coulter went so far as to lose her job at the Review, less for the content of her writtenwork (according to editor Jonah Goldberg's October 3 column) than for her public demeanor after her incoherentfollow–up essay was spiked.

And Goldberg's postmortem has the ring of truth, for Coulter's now-infamousline, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," wasafter all not terribly different from Lowry's plan for "identifying the one or two nations most closelyassociated with our enemies, giving them 24 hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping with ourdesire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically destroying every significant piece ofmilitary, financial, and political infrastructure in those cities."

This is strong stuff--so strong, in fact, that in response to Sullivan's vile suggestion that Gore voterswould form a "fifth column" of decadent leftists in university towns and on the coasts (you know,where a lot of those decadent Oscar Wilde types live), any rational person could've replied that throughoutSeptember and October, you couldn't do better recruiting work for Al Qaeda in Muslim nations than todistribute free copies of the National Review.

Of course, some of the right's hysteria was understandable: remember, they excoriated Arab terrorists fordays after the bombing in Oklahoma City, only to be compelled to swallow hard once the white kid with thecrewcut emerged as the perp. Think of their tension, their long-unfulfilled desires to rage, rage against thebackward cultures of Islam: by September 11, 2001, the right had been waiting more than six years to vent, andsome of them simply lost control.

Interestingly, though--and devastatingly for the left--they reined themselves in; after the first fewqueasy weeks, there would be no more talk of crusades and conversions and infinite justice. For who knew,until September 11, that Grover Norquist, longtime tax nut and conservative organizer extraordinaire, had beencultivating Arab-American voters for the GOP? (So assiduously, it turned out, that he'd had his Presidentlunching with some Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, as Franklin Foer pointed out in the New Republic.)

And who knew that the hard right would scotch its plans for systematically destroying the capitals of Muslimnations the minute they realized that they couldn't get to Afghanistan without going through Pakistan?

Prevented by their own President from conducting a hate campaign against Arabs, the harpies of theculture-war right turned to a safer domestic target--students and professors. In a remarkably crude,incompetent pamphlet, the Joe Lieberman-Lynne Cheney outfit, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,combed college campuses for seditious statements like "ignorance breeds hate," "hate breedshate," "our grief is not a cry for war," "an eye for an eye leaves the world blind,""knowledge is good," and "if Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the UnitedStates should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity."

(All butone of these are actual statements cited by ACTA as evidence of insufficient patriotism on U.S. campuses.Afficionados and adepts will recognize the last item as the words of Joel Beinin, the antepenultimate item asthe words of Mahatma Gandhi, and the penultimate item as the motto of Faber College in Animal House.)Lynne Cheney has not commented on the pamphlet, and may in fact be in a secure undisclosed location for all Iknow; Lieberman's office has issued one of those "distancing" statements that stops short of takingthe Senator's name off the letterhead.

Meanwhile, even as the New Republic continued to publish the work of liberal writers, the editorialstaff collectively staged what Stuart Hall once called the Great Moving Right Show, and kept right on movinguntil they passed the National Review. Think I'm kidding? Count the number of times each magazine hascriticized Ariel Sharon since September 11, and you'll get some sense of why I respect the National Review'sMiddle East coverage more.

Or read every post-9/11 editorial signed by the editors, like the October 29clarion call to "weaponize" our courage. (In his bunker in Baghdad, a shaken Saddam Hussein looks upfrom his copy of TNR: "Nothing would please me more than to fight American armed forces in thedaughter of the mother of all battles--but I cannot face the fearsome senior editors of this weeklymagazine.")

Or look at their vicious attacks on Colin Powell, who is apparently unfit to run the StateDepartment and should be replaced by someone wiser, someone with a firmer grasp of the perfidy of Arabs,perhaps someone who has attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, like editorLawrence F. Kaplan.

The narrative of the left is more tangled and more somber. But before I remark on the ways the Chomskianleft has consigned itself to the dustbin of history, let me go back to those early days of hysteria and say afew words in defense of people I now disagree with: it was entirely plausible, in those first few days, tothink that the United States had received some kind of global comeuppance.

Bless their hearts, the diehards ofthe anti-imperialist left had always had the integrity and the conscience to say publicly that the UnitedStates had too often acted unilaterally and unethically in the post-1945 world, often against its ownrealpolitik interests as well as against its own democratic ideals.

The anti-imperialists were right aboutVietnam, they were right about Chile, they were right about El Salvador and Nicaragua, they were right aboutIndonesia in 1975 and they were right about Iran in 1953. It was not initially unreasonable for any of them tothink, as the World Trade Center collapsed five blocks from my best friend's apartment, son of a bitch,someone's gotten to us at last. Such a sentiment, despite the vitriol heaped upon it by the right, impliedno sympathy with the attackers; the anti-imperialist left, at its best, despised anti–democratic forces nomatter where they came from. It merely registered the sorry fact that the United States had, indeed, too oftengiven the wretched of the earth cause to hate us.

But when the narrative of the attacks became more complex, the Chomskian left did not. Slowly it becameclear that for all its past crimes, the U.S. government wasn't nearly as proximate a cause of the attack aswere, say, the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, U.S. "allies" who'd been dancing a dicey pasde deux with their own Islamist radicals for twenty years in order to keep the lid on the domestic unrestcreated in part by their own corruption.

And slowly it became clear that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were notanimated by any of the causes dear to American leftists: the attacks on the World Trade Center and thePentagon were not, it seemed, symbolic strikes against U.S. unilateralism with regard to missile defense,post-Kyoto energy policy, landmine treaties, or the rights of children. They were not cosmic payback for oursupport of Suharto or Pinochet or Marcos or Rios Montt or Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. They were not aimed atKatherine Harris or Kenneth Starr or William Rehnquist.

Indeed, the more the West learned about bin Laden, themore we were led down strange narrative byways we hadn't even considered as tangents to the main event: he wasconvinced by the Somalia expedition that the U.S. was a paper tiger? He wants American soldiers, especiallywomen, to stop desecrating the land of the two holy mosques? He speaks of "eighty years" of Arababasement, harking back to the end of World War I?

Well, that should have given anyone pause for thought. Maybe if bin Laden had denounced the CIA's overthrowof Mossadeq, maybe if he'd jeered at our futile attempts to play Iran off Iraq and vice versa throughoutReagan's presidency, and maybe if he wasn't carrying around one of those theories about the global Jewishconspiracy, he'd have had a shred of credibility with me.

But Somalia? Somalia really was an attempt atliberal-internationalist humanitarianism, and as for the eighty-year-old Sykes-Picot agreement divvying upArab provinces after World War I, there aren't that many American leftists committed to the restoration of thecaliphate, so it's hard for me to see the appeal on that count as well.

In fact, as Chris Suellentrop of Slateobserved, the U.S. doesn't even deserve any grief about the end of the caliphate: "It would benice," he wrote, "if bin Laden would note that the United States objected to the Sykes-Picotagreement as a betrayal of the principle of self-determination, but that's probably asking for too much."There's no doubt that our government has committed crimes against humanity in our name. But Somalia andSykes-Picot aren't among them.

So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable as bin Laden, much of the left checked theman's policy positions on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly backed out of theroom. They didn't move right, as so many Chomskian leftists have charged; they simply decided that theSeptember 11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable point of contact with anythingidentifiable as a left project save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against Iraq. As Marxhimself observed, there are a number of social systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda andthe Taliban are good cases in point.

For almost a month, the dispute between the Chomsky left and the Hitchens left was largely a theoreticalaffair, featuring a sweetly pointless debate in the Nation over whose condemnation of Clinton's 1998cruise-missile strike against the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was more thorough and/orcourageous; then the bombs started dropping on Afghanistan, and the camps hardened into place, with leftistswho'd denounced the Taliban steadily for five years now denouncing a military action designed to remove theTaliban from power.

This is perhaps the most important episode in the many narratives of September 11, becauseit represented the earthquake that had been building along a fault line in the U.S. left dating back to thefirst Bush Administration's operations in Panama and Kuwait, and because it has ramifications for the futureof U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.

A large part of the split had to do with the simple fact that bombs were dropping. For U.S. leftistsschooled in the lessons of Cambodia, Libya, and the School of the Americas, all U.S. bombing actions aresuspect: they are announced by cadaverous white guys with bad hair, they are covered by seven cable channelscompeting with one another for the catchiest "New War" slogan and Emmy awards for creative flagdisplay, and they invariably kill civilians, the poor, the wretched, the disabled. Surely, there is much tohate about any bombing campaign.

Yet who would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right to respond with military force, and whoseriously believes that anyone could undertake any "nation-building" enterprise in Afghanistanwithout driving the Taliban from power first? Very well, some of my post-September interlocutors said, theTaliban must go, but not by force. A curious answer: for why would any clear-thinking leftist believe that theTaliban could be removed by persuasion alone, as if, like Al Gore after the Supreme Court's supremely corruptdecision in Bush v. Gore, they would smile wryly into the cameras and say, "It's time for us togo"?

The arguments against military force started flooding the left-leaning listservs.

• One, the link between theattacks and the Taliban was not strong enough to justify bombing.
  
  
• Two, we had supported bin Laden indirectlyback when he was one of the mujahedeen fighting the USSR.
  
  
• Three, the terrain and the enemy would quickly leadus into a quagmire.
  
  
• Four, the bombing of Afghanistan was the moral equivalent of the September 11 attacks--oreven worse, since the U.S. was attacking from a position of wealth and strength.
  
  
• Five, there would be no"nation-building" after the ouster of the Taliban--just more bombing, this time in some otherimpoverished nation.
  
  
• Six, the U.S. had been a global aggressor for so long and with such impunity that it hadno moral ground from which to operate even after being directly attacked.
  

These are the arguments that have insured the Chomskian left's irrelevance to foreign policy debate for theforeseeable future, and I confess I am not always sure why anyone would make them in any case. Arguments threeand five are relatively innocuous, being merely predictive, but the rest range from merely illogical (one,two, six) to morally odious (four).

For instance: the fact that a U.S. government was once foolish enough--orZbigniew Brzezinski was once cavalier enough--to fund the Arab "Afghanis" in the 1980s does not meanthat a U.S. government is barred from opposing any of their progeny now.

The Chomskian left has been playingthis tune for some time now--today's public enemy was yesterday's CIA darling--and while it does servea heuristic function, in that it reminds amnesiac Americans that baddies such as Saddam and Noriega andSuharto didn't appear on the world stage out of nowhere, it doesn't serve any substantive function exceptobfuscation. Would the Chomskian left seriously prefer that the U.S. stick by its totalitarian ex-clients nomatter what, as the Cold Warriors of the right once urged us to do?

The argument about our past dealings with bin Laden is thus a smokescreen, as was Chomsky's argument in1999 that our intervention against Milosevic in Kosovo could not be motivated by "humanitarian"concerns because if we were serious about humanitarianism we would also have intervened in East Timor.

EvenChomsky's fans will recall that this argument was not a clarion call for wider U.S. interventions around theworld beginning in East Timor; it was an argument designed to obfuscate the issue at hand in Kosovo, namely,allegations that the Serbs were engaged in genocide.

Similarly, in addressing the question of whether the U.S.had the right to respond militarily after September 11, Chomsky offered more smoke: "Congress hasauthorized the use of force against any individuals or countries the President determines to be involved inthe attacks, a doctrine that every supporter regards as ultra-criminal. That is easily demonstrated. Simplyask how the same people would have reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the U.S. had rejectedthe orders of the World Court to terminate its 'unlawful use of force' against Nicaragua and had vetoed aSecurity Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law."

Very well; with regardto Reagan's contra war and the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, Nicaragua and the World Court were in the right,and the U.S. acted like a rogue nation. How exactly does this prove that "every supporter" regardsthe use of force as "ultra-criminal" with regard to September 11?

The fissure on the left that began in 1989-90 and became visible in Kosovo is now a chasm. In retrospect,Kosovo didn't have quite the impact on the left it might have, partly because conservatives alsoopposed that operation on the grounds that Clinton had ordered it (by 1999, Clinton could have launched acampaign against childhood diseases and House Republicans would've responded by declaring measles a vegetableand bundling it into school breakfast programs), partly because of Monica, and partly because it was shroudedin murk from Srebrenica to Rambouillet.

But many of the most vocal opponents of the U.S.–led NATOintervention in Kosovo are now the most vocal opponents to the U.S.–led intervention in Afghanistan, whichsuggests two things: first, that the fact of civilian deaths on U.S. soil is in an important sense immaterialto their position on U.S. policy, and second, that on the grounds they offer today, they will never supportanother American military action of any kind. Permanently alienated by Vietnam, by Chile, by Indonesia, or byReagan's deadly adventures in Central America, they're gone and they're not coming back, not even if hijackersplow planes into towers in downtown Manhattan.