Being a good neighbour is the strategy the United Statess should embrace, writes David Le Page
The rhetoric of war arrived within minutes, though war of any kind is unlikely to make Americans much safer.
“We will hunt down and punish those responsible,” said United States President George Bush shortly after Tuesday’s attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
The US media turned quickly to the military for its soundbites, which obliged reflexively, if sometimes uncertainly, with the rhetoric of counter-attack and revenge.
It is probably not churlish to suggest that in the death and oblivion that has engulfed lower Manhattan many of those defence apparatchiks who watched miserably as their budgets withered during the Clinton years must see a chance for their interests to prevail again.
In the short term their preferred responses to terrorism will certainly prevail, though these responses will not suffice. The formidable resources of the US of the West and many other nations will be directed at first to discovering and then punishing, by means fair and foul, those who planned the attacks.
Having somehow inspired martyrs to drag whole planefuls of souls into oblivion, those who planned the acts of terrorism are likely themselves to quickly meet death or justice.
They are unlikely, however, to be praised as martyrs even hardened haters of the US will provide little of the required sympathy.
Not even the so-called rogue nations will resist the wrath of the world’s most powerful country riding a wave of understandable self-righteousness the speed with which Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers leaped to distance themselves from the attack demonstrated how quickly realpolitik can inject a respectable facsimile of condemnation into hardened thugs.
In fact, Bush, the US military and the outraged politicians of the West are correct. The US must eliminate its enemies, must aim to wipe them totally from the face of the Earth.
But to do so will require a strategy that it is probably far from willing to accept, or even able to consider. It is not a military strategy. It will not be based on building new clusters of anti-ballistic missiles, other innovative weaponry or unprecedented surveillance and intelligence gathering (the last an inevitable threat to civil liberties in democracies).
Rather, if it is to eliminate its enemies, the US must cease to inspire them.
The sins of the US over the past half-century have been many, and the suffering it has caused very great.
From Vietnam and sponsored killings in Nicaragua to militarily unjustifiable missile attacks against targets in Sudan (in response to the 1998 bombings of US embassies), there is no shortage of perfectly good reasons to hate it, if one is looking for such reasons.
This is not to say that the US is uniquely evil. There are few, if any, other nations in the world that conduct themselves much differently within their own spheres of influence. The US simply happens to have the greatest power to pursue its selfishness, and displays a certain lack of self-consciousness in doing so.
How, now, can this wounded behemoth take the steam from the sails of those busy indoctrinating fanatical killers in remote corners of isolated nations?
The US must revolutionise its relations with much of the world.
In the Middle East it must show as much intolerance for the excesses of Israel as it currently reserves for those of Palestinians.
It must seek fair-trade policies with developing nations, pay its United Nations dues and show visibly greater respect for the opinions of the community of nations.
Its foreign policy must demonstrate true respect for human rights, rather than their cynical use as a bargaining chip to be deployed against the weak and waived for the strong.
It needs domestic policies abolishing the death penalty and reducing its prison population that demonstrate compassion, and not brutality, when handling its own citizens.
It must take responsibility for its contributions to the global destruction of the environment and sign the Kyoto Treaty.
Some will argue that these are hopelessly idealistic or even irrelevant suggestions. But they will all work in different ways to end the conditions that make people ready to be recruited as terrorists, or ready to turn a blind eye to their work.
The unemployment resulting from fairer or more principled trade would be a small price to pay for greater security, as would the costs of working to reduce pollution.
Certainly, these measures would never eliminate the need for a competent, unflinching military. They will take decades, perhaps lifetimes, to bear full fruit.
But they could reduce, dramatically, the need to deploy the machinery of death against those whom the world has alienated somehow to the point of seeing their own lives as disposable.
Being a very good neighbour to the global community is the strategy that the US must somehow find its way to embracing if its citizens are ever again to feel truly secure in the world and in their own country. It is, unfortunately, the policy it is least likely to pursue.