10/7/2001
Got a call maybe forty minutes ago, my friend Justen, telling me to turn the radio on. So we're attacking. And we're doing it exactly wrong.
The best strategic summation of this situation I've yet seen is this essay by Tamim Ansary, which stresses that the Afghani people are the most miserable victims of the Taliban, that their nation has already been reduced to rubble by the Soviets and by civil war, and that bin Laden's agenda is precisely to goad us into a war upon nations, in the hope of fomenting a war between US and all Islamic nations. Also it makes the harrowing recommendation that only ground troops can hope to hit the right targets, that bombs will only hurt civilians.
This attack is being conducted precisely wrong. We're bombing. We're bombing Al-Quaeda camps (do we believe this? Do we believe they even know?) and military bases and airports and--this is always in the litany--electrical systems. Why? That hits civilians. Terrorists living in Afghanistan are probably far better able to carry on their daily lives without electricity than the civilians are. This is a recipe for turning civilians into terrorists, if anything. It is precisely what bin Laden wants us to do.
Blair speaking now. They let him go on for ten minutes, Rebecca points out, while Bush has been held to three-second soundbytes.
So. We drop bombs. But bombs cannot serve. Odds of hitting bin Laden or any substantial portion of his network with them are middling to low. The idea of "destabilizing" (this weak term is the strongest I've yet heard) the Taliban with bombs is a fantasy. Ground troops could roust them out. And the people, lately forced to veil and suffer the harshest sorts of old-school Islamic criminal justice, would probably be happy to see them go. But bombs will only fall on those people.
And anyway how stable do you have to be to muster a force of twenty-odd men with knives? They did this with knives. What do we think we're shooting at?
Here's why we're bombing: habit. This is what President Bush did ten years ago in Iraq, and very few of our soldiers got killed that way, so it's awfully popular at home. And frankly, if you're at war with a nation-state and you're sufficiently strong to fight it from above without getting hurt, it's a good choice.
But we're making a lot of noise about not being at war with Afghanistan. We're trying to apprehend a criminal, essentially, and we may or may not want to unseat an evil regime along the way, though we're not ready to say so (and the one thing President Bush never did in Iraq was unseat the evil regime). For these things--and I believe that these are in fact more or less our aims--bombs make no sense. These targets are a fairly small number of individuals, and they have not arrayed themselves in tight clusters in the desert for the benefit of our munitions.
The former governor has been saying for weeks that this is a whole new kind of war. And yet he's fighting it in the same old way. Doesn't he hear himself?
Here's what's more bothersome. Since Vietnam the Powell Doctrine, of overwhelming assaults concluded quickly, has held sway, to the advantage of our military. Now we may be departing from that; from President Bush's son on down, we are hearing that this will be a long conflict, likened to the Cold War. And we are told that we will seek out terrorists in this military fashion in every country on the globe, and hold responsible any governments who may harbor them. Every effort is being made to increase the power of the military and of intelligence agencies, foreign and domestic, and to remove any governmental checks that may exist on those agencies. Suspect immigrants may be detained indefinitely without trial. E-mail will be subject to government monitors--any communication at any time.
What does that have to do with the attack, exactly? The only theory which could connect the two is this: to hijack all these planes and crash them into buildings, the terrorists must at some point have made a plan, which probably involved communicating, possibly by e-mail. If we had read every e-mail, we would inevitably have found those communications and discovered the plan. Therefore, if we begin to read all communications beginning now, no one will ever be able to make a plan in secret again.
So, no more fourth amendment. But of course the FBI cannot read all communications. So which will they choose to read? Perhaps they will read a random sampling. Or maybe it's just as realistic, or more so, to suppose that they will disproportionately read the communications of people whose political leanings do not suit them.
My generation has grown up hearing only occasionally about the McCarthy era, rarely hearing those stories within any context to speak of. It's easy to feel like that is all in the past, like we're all different somehow. Except that the one person who dared to vote against giving the ex-president's son a massive package of undeclared-war powers has received a flurry of death threats. Somehow the first atrocity suffered by this country has been turned into an unqualified mandate for our most notoriously illegitimate administration.
This is what he wants, the younger Bush who sits unelected in the Oval Office. This is exactly what it takes to justify and enlarge him. He wants a Cold War. Since the attack--despite the buffoonish simplicity of nearly every word he's said--people have begun to recognize him as the President, to feel that unifying under him is necessary for our safety as a nation, to accord him with respect--for what? For responding in a way they can understand.
Well, it's easy to respond to terrorism. One deplores it. And even this muttonhead impersonating a President can dope that out. For this, we rally behind him. After all, we've found some common ground with him; neither he nor we can approve of killing thousands of New Yorkers.
If that's all it takes, almost anyone might be President right now. But in fact nobody is, there's just this one ongoing occupation of the office by a charming, insincere, unintelligent, unelected rich man who can suddenly do no wrong--even though he's done everything wrong since he seized office, and is now handling this terrifyingly dangerous situation wrong.
Meanwhile, the consortium of papers who formed last year to count the uncounted votes has decided to delay revealing the outcome of the election. Indefinitely.