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THE OBSERVATORY Both Sides Now 11/29/2001 |
| This piece ought to be outdated, since I originally wrote it for the local Democratic Broadside newsletter on October 10. But reading it over, only minor changes are needed, so I'll simply insert them in italicized square brackets. The main points remain quite unchanged ... |
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We are at war, or at any rate something
every bit as deadly as war, only more elusive. [After looking very much like an
ordinary war a week or two ago, it is now getting elusive again as we hunt for bin Laden.]
As a people, we have strengths that even our friends do not always recognize, much
less our enemies. However, we are not particularly good at murky - and now we are neck
deep in the murkiest part of the world. So we have to learn how to be good at murky ...
and fast. So far, and to my relieved surprise, the Bush administration has shown far more good sense than I would have expected. Rather than immediately bomb all sorts of people who may not like us but have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden , the administration has so far gone into this carefully and with sensible restraint. In fact, they have conducted this thing just about the way Bill Clinton or Al Gore would have [though now they are ginning up war talk against Saddam]. All the go-it-alone nonsense of the last nine months was abandoned overnight - even our long-overdue United Nations dues finally got paid. Apparently, nothing so encourages some people to pay a library fine as realizing they need to check out a book. Home front policy has not shown as much good sense. As I write this, Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail to prevent "federalizing" airport security. Someone needs to answer the clue phone. [They finally passed, with a token sop to GOP privatization theology.] More worrisome, there have been signs that the White House wants to stifle information. [Civil liberties are taking a beating as well - more on that in a future posting!] Most worrisome of all is the chorus of pundits who want to stifle dissent. Never mind, for the moment, all the moral reasons for accepting dissent, and concentrate on the practical one: Truth is the daughter of debate. One side of the current argument is that, once a war begins, it is useless to ponder or critique earlier decisions that may have led to it. Once the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor it was much too late to argue over the oil embargo of Japan, or whether the Versailles Treaty helped push Germany toward extremism. Whatever the answers to those questions, they did nothing to change what had to be done next - namely crushing the Axis. Which is what we did. This time we have to crush the fundamentalists who have hijacked Islam. The other side replies that the past is always prelude. You can't respond to a threat without understanding it, including what brought it about. Even more, ignoring past blunders is an invitation to new ones. By now, everyone has learned the CIA-speak term "blowback," for unexpected - often disastrous - consequences of a policy. Sometime in the next few days or weeks, American planes or helicopters are likely to be shot down by American-made Stinger missiles, provided to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels during the 1980s. That is blowback. In this debate, both sides are right. The Arab and Islamic worlds have legitimate grievances about American policies, but Osama bin Laden and his followers are still murderous fanatics. They will no more listen to sweet reason than Adolf Hitler would have. To put it bluntly, the only way to stop them is to eliminate them. At the same time (not just "on the other hand"), if we do not look back at what led to this with a clear head - and that includes hearing criticism of our own actions - we may end up producing still more murderous fanatics to take their place. This is not a matter of nodding and saying it would be a nice thing for us to consider both perspectives. We do not have a choice. It is a simple fact of life that anything and everything we do to take out the terrorists is likely to have two effects: It will take some of them out, and it will also create more of them. We just have to make sure that, whatever we do, it does the first more than it does the second. That is a narrow and tricky path, and only frank and open debate will guide us along it.
-- Rick Robinson
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