Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism

Chapter 1

WAR'S APPEAL

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
--Carl Sandburg

When the first plane hit, we thought it was an accident. We did not anticipate an attack. We could not even muster fighter planes fast enough to protect the second World Trade Center tower or the Pentagon. If the passengers on the fourth hijacked jet had not been courageous, we might have suffered even more serious harm in Washington, D.C. But not only our military was caught by surprise. Our minds were also asleep.

We had received all the clues necessary to know that we were in danger. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists had already tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda had attacked the battleship USS Cole and the American embassy in Nairobi. We were put on notice that a dramatic attack was in the offing: We ignored it.

Experts rarely know what is going to happen tomorrow. The sovietologists did not foresee the collapse of the Communist empire in 1989. The market watchers--with few exceptions--did not expect the NASDAQ crash that hit investors in March 2000. September 11 was no more visible to the eye than these other world-shaking events.

But I am less concerned with the ability of military experts to predict specific events than with our general ability to think clearly about the aftermath, about the life-and-death questions that have tormented us since we sat stunned in front of our television sets. We may have been unprepared for that morning, but there is no reason to muddle the meaning of that event and to accept our military and legal responses without serious reflection. We must ask ourselves how we justify our use of force to the rest of the world and, more importantly, to ourselves. Is this war? Are we engaged in self-defense, in the pursuit of justice, in establishing a "new world order?" Who is the enemy? These are not easy questions.

I write in an effort to bring some clarity to these issues. This is a book about going to war, about war's appeal to us and to our enemy, about honor, about crimes that are committed in the name of war, and about the guilt of those who collectively commit crimes. In the face of a military attack, we all see our lives and our futures on the line. Without a firm understanding of the miliary actions taken in our name, we cannot be at ease; we cannot allow others to risk their lives and allow our opponents to die without knowing why.

Let us think first about the language we use. One word is on everybody's lips--terrorism--but what does it mean? The concept eludes easy definition. Were the American revolutionaries not terrorists? Did they not fight without wearing uniforms? Did they not conduct unorthodox raids against English regulars marching in uniform? Were we engaged in an act of terror when we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? There are too many questions and too few easy answers.

We know that terrorism is about violence. But there is good violence and bad violence. Is every violent crime an act of terror? Hardly. It is not clear, when we use the word today, whether we mean to refer to haphazard violence--something like the terror that descended on the French with Robespierre and the guillotine--or we mean to talk about terror as an instrument of national policy, with clear objectives of intimidating and manipulating civilian populations. Dropping the A-bomb in Japan was not haphazard, but it may have had the purpose of scaring the public into a posture of surrender. It is not clear whether the use of violence is worse when it is helter-skelter (`a la Charles Manson) or when its purpose is to intimidate.

Fighting terrorism is not like going to war against Germany or Japan. We knew what Germany was, where it was. Not only do we not know where the terrorists are; we would not know them if we saw them. We are fighting with the most modern instruments, but we are flying in the dark.

War and Justice

If the use of the word "terrorist" is problematic, what about "war"? We have been in a state of armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but does this conflict amount to a "war"? Not every shootout at the OK Corral qualifies. Perhaps the United States is just acting like the sheriff bringing the culprits to justice. From the very beginning, President George W. Bush and his administration used the language of both war and justice--as though these two ways of thinking about violence were compatible. Bush has said repeatedly that the attack was "an act of war." That makes it sound like Pearl Harbor. Yet the early mantra of the war was: "We have to bring them to justice." That makes it sound like the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh.

War and justice are radically different ideas. War is about pursuing and protecting our national interests--in this case, the security of our own territory. We have the right to go to war without having any cause greater than survival. So why do we hear so much talk about justice?

The Pentagon initially labeled the military campaign "Infinite Justice," and from the beginning of the military campaign the focus was on Osama bin Laden as the master criminal, the ringleader of the whole operation. The bombing of Afghanistan--and the relentless search of the caves in Tora Bora--had the style of an episode in the hit television series Law and Order. Are we serious? Is bombing a foreign country merely a case of doing justice by more violent means? If so, it is justice by violent reprisal.

Justice is about giving every person his or her due, about restoring moral order in the universe. Seeking to correct the balance leads to thinking about the interests of victims and the importance of reintegrating them into society. The government must prosecute criminals in order to do justice for the victims. The Latin Americans have bequeathed to the international community the term impunidad (impunity) to capture the particular corruption of governments that fail to prosecute. Abandoned victims, it is argued, suffer twice: first from the crime, and second from the failure of others to express solidarity with them by hunting down the culprits and punishing them.

The search for justice leads to the moral equation of an "eye for an eye"--the biblical principle of comparing the numbers of victims who have suffered with the number of offenders to be punished. If we lost three thousand people in the collapse of the World Trade Center, the theory goes, those responsible for the attacks should also lose three thousand lives.

Justifying war demands less of our moral sensitivities. Abraham Lincoln insisted on war against the eleven rebellious states not because the Union was a righteous cause but simply because it existed. The logic was simple: The Union was and it must be. As president he was committed to preserving the United States as a single nation. This was not a cause of rectitude but of survival. Later in the war, with the Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which liberated the slaves still under the control of the Confederacy, the "great emancipator" began to think of the Civil War as a moral cause. But even emancipation had a military purpose: the slaves so liberated would rise up as a fifth column and fight their former overlords. Other wars of national unity, fought at roughly the same time in Germany and slightly later in Italy, made no claim to being causes of justice at all. These were wars fought to realize the needs of the nation. The yearning of the culture to consolidate under a single government was all that was required to go to war. Lincoln was clear about the difference between a pragmatic war to preserve the Union and a moral war to abolish slavery. Would that we were so clear today.