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It is with a heavy heart I write these words, but grief should not cloud
reality. Many terms and phrases and analogies are currently being bandied
about in attempts to make sense out of the mindless terrorist attacks of
September 11. Most of these are deliberately false at worst and
misleading at best.
The most common myth is the comparison to Pearl
Harbor or to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Neither in true,
except in the most general sense that U.S. domestic and foreign policy
changed dramatically in the wake of both. Although Pearl Harbor was
American territory, it represented an attack on a U.S. military
installation with an identifiable enemy which resulted in a logical
declaration of war. Kennedy's death represented a personal tragedy for
most Americans because this young, vibrant president had not yet reached
his full potential.
Neither compares to the unprecedented violence taken
last Tuesday by anonymous, stateless terrorists against private American
citizens. No greater loss of life has taken place on our soil except
during battles of the Civil War. Another myth is that the terrorist
attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. were against civilization,
or freedom, or the world as we are being told by administration officials
and pundits. If this were true these actions could have just as easily
been conducted against western cities in Europe. They were very
specifically targeted against the economic power (as represented by the
World Trade Center towers) and the military might (as represented by the
Pentagon) of the United States and the United States alone.
If anything
we are more disliked in the post-Cold War world than we were during the
Cold War. Why? As a nation we squandered the last dozen years of the
post-Cold War world by not discussing new ideas for resolving ethnic and
religious conflict, or redefining national security, citizenship,
sovereignty, or international cooperation. Until American foreign policy
experts and politicians address such ethical questions as why the United
States continues to refuse to sign five major UN human rights
conventions, including the latest one affecting women and children, or to
join the International Criminal Court, we will not devise a new foreign
policy suited for the twenty-first century. Instead of acting
magnanimously as the last remaining superpower in the world, our
unilateral actions during this time period have looked arrogant and
triumphal, as has our insistence that unregulated global capitalism will
benefit the world as it has us when there is little historical evidence
for this claim.
Moreover, Americans were not told truth about how we won
the Cold War. The United States assumed an unethical foreign policy by
adopting the tactics of the enemy in order to win that conflict against
communism. Since then, it and then adopted an equally unethical economic
policy of unregulated world capitalism during the last decade of the
post-Cold War era which has increased rather than decreased world
poverty. Now it has ironically become the victim of a most unethical
terrorist attack on American civilians in New York City and Washington,
D.C.
What lessons can be drawn from this string of unethical actions? To
begin with, it will be short-sighted if the United States decides to
fight terrorism with more terrorism. While the Taliban may be harboring
Osama bin Laden, it should not be forgotten that this country supported
the extreme fundamentalist mullahs in Afghanistan when that country was
occupied by the Soviet Union. Once the Taliban became a safe haven for
Osama bin Laden, that regime became a target of U.S. anti-terrorist
rhetoric again without any indication of the U.S. Cold War policy
helped that spawned that government and its terrorist tendencies. No
democratic nation can fight terrorism with more terrorism without
sacrificing its most basic values at home. Moreover, if the United States
adopts this course it will not resolve or mitigate the hatred and
contempt that it faces in the world as the most powerful and prosperous
nation on the globe.
Substituting terrorism for communism will condemn us
to another open-ended Cold War. There is also much talk about how these
terrorist actions have resulted in a loss of American innocence. We have
repeated this mantra so often, it has become an almost meaningless
phrase. We said that we lost our innocence over of Vietnam; when we
became the first (and last to date) country to use atomic weapons;
because of Pearl Harbor; during the Great Depression; and during the
Civil War or American Revolution. In fact, we lost our innocence when we
first imported and then institutionalized slavery, when we committed
genocide against Native Americans, and when we viciously put down
rebellions against our rule in the Philippines after the Spanish American
War.
The reason we can continue to "lose" our innocence so often, a
friend reminded me the other night, is that we have never matured as a
nation. We are, in essence, an immature giant in part because we have
become an empire in a little over fifty years. No empire or hegemonic
power in history has ever imposed itself on the known world as rapidly as
has the United States. After all, we know that Rome wasn't build in a day
and neither was the Roman empire or the British empire or any other
dominant world power of the past. But for all intents and purposes, in
terms of the history of the world the United States was built in a day.
We didn't learn to crawl before walked as a hegemon suddenly finding
ourselves astride the globe. We have to ask ourselves what this means
about the psyche of the nation? Has it doomed us to be an immature giant
forever trapped within our youth and callowness?
Perhaps all hegemons act
this way regardless of the time it took to created them. After all, Spain
and England both promised to be kinder and better empires than those
before them without much success. It is conceivable that an ethical
hegemon is an oxymoron. W. H.. Auden wrote a poem in September, 1939,
about the onset of World War II in which he said: "Those to whom evil is
done do evil in return." Let this not be true of the United States as it
struggles to find a just response to the events of September 11, 2001. We
must recognize that the first victims of an endless war against terrorism
will be domestic reform and freedom of expression and movement at home
just as they were during all of our other declared and undeclared wars.
Most importantly, it would not represent a humane reaction to the tragedy
we have just experienced.
We have been viciously attacked. If the United
States responds out of anger and not justice, we will not improve our
standing in the world or ultimately preserve at home the unique liberty
and democracy which we so proudly symbolize to the rest of the world.
Joan Hoff, Research Professor of History at Montana State University, is
a presidential scholar and foreign policy specialist who has written
books on Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. She is currently finishing a
book for Harvard University Press entitled, Did the United States Sell
Its Soul to Win the Cold War? P.O. Box 160806, Big Sky Montana, 59716
(406) 995-4256
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