To suggest the US was at fault is illogical
analysis
Robert Mattes
Living in a country protected by two oceans, enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and so large that you can travel for days in any direction and never cross a border, much less encounter a different culture, surely breeds among Americans an insensitivity to world opinion and a distaste for international obligation. But it must also be equally true that living in a remote and insular country at the tip of Africa, and undergoing decades of single-minded focus on its internal problems has engendered South Africans with their own myopic view of international relations.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in listening to and reading South Africans’ views of last Tuesday’s atrocities, ranging from the calls to Tim Modise to the pages of the Mail & Guardian. Laced between and below the expressions of shock and distaste in last week’s edition were three recurring themes: ”They should realise how disliked they are”, ”they should realise that they can’t control the entire world”, and finally, ”they had it coming”.
The supposed reasons took the form of a litany of policy ”sins” ranging from United States support for Israel (and Israel’s actions in the occupied territories), to its military strikes on the Sudan and Afghanistan, United Nations embargoes on Iraq and Afghanistan, its failure to apologise for accidentally downing an Iranian jetliner, its opposition to the International Court and Kyoto treaty, its Cold War-era support for authoritarian but anti-communist dictatorships, its trade policies with developing nations, its lack of respect for international opinion, its interventions in Yugoslavia, its failure to intervene in the Great Lakes, its support for mujahadin and the contras, Vietnam, domestic policies like the death penalty and crowded prisons, the fact that it’s just plain too big and powerful, and even to its actions at the UN racism conference.
Yet far from an ignorance of how they are seen in the world, Americans have been all too acutely aware of the depths to which their country is reviled. They have known this at least since that fateful morning when Japanese dive-bombers screamed out of the clear blue Hawaiian sky to send the US Pacific fleet to the bottom of Pearl Harbour. They were well aware of the identity of their enemies through three decades of living with 10 000 Soviet nuclear warheads aimed at them. They experienced the shape and depth of anti-American hostility when US citizens were singled out from hijacked passengers for execution.
And Americans have been quite aware of the limitations of their own military power and abilities to manage the world at least since 500 000 ground troops and countless B-52 sorties ceased to persuade the Vietcong to desist in the 1960s, or aircraft carriers and air power proved of limited utility in extracting illegally held diplomatic hostages from Tehran in the 1970s.
Perhaps it can be traced to a desperate attempt to give some sort of instrumental or expressive rationality to what appears to be totally irrational. But to suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that any list of objectionable US policies could be responsible for last week’s atrocities is an extraordinary leap of analytical logic and a frightening failure of moral reasoning.
Morally, connecting the recitation of various policy ”sins” with flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers implies that, deep down, there is some sort of justification for such acts. Remove the ”sins” and there would have been no need to resort to such unpleasant tactics. Yet this appeals to the same specious moral reasoning that blames rape victims for bringing on their attacks through loose living. It is quite simply an intellectual version of the same frightening reasoning advanced by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who reportedly chalked the event up to God’s anger with American liberals, feminists and homosexuals.
Analytically, the arguments rest on the most fanciful logic. To be sure, the history of US foreign policy since World War II yields much to criticise or even condemn, especially the first six months of the new Bush administration. But it is highly doubtful that had a Gore administration placed more effective pressure on the Israelis to negotiate, these outrages would have been averted. And this is probably the most credible of the implied arguments lodged in last weeks pages of the M&G. Can anyone seriously believe that if the US had signed the Kyoto treaty it would be less hated and thus less likely to have been bombed? Would effective US intervention in Rwanda and the Congo have sufficiently sedated the minds of those who carried out last week’s bombings? In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: ”Good grief!”
If terrorism is a considered response to objectionable policies, perhaps these writers could explain to US officials what they could have learned through greater ”introspection” that would have sufficiently consoled Timothy McVeigh to keep him out of Oklahoma City. Similarly, what policy ”sins” could South Africa have avoided in order to mollify the St Elmo’s bombers? Which offensive elements of modernity, do tell, might we have changed in order to placate the Unabomber?
No, actions such as these are not responses by the aggrieved of the world, produced by Great Power injustice. Rather, this type of mass terrorism is an attack on the idea of the open society: on individual security, liberty, and freedom, the very concepts fundamental to the survival of democratic government.
It would be far more useful to ask what it is about those ideas that terrorism so reviles.
Robert Mattes is associate professor in political studies at the University of Cape Town