David Rieff
Love-bombing bin Laden
The peace-loving people of Berkeley believe that fighting evil makes one evil.
On Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, near the Sather Gate entrance to the University of California campus, hawkers sell a T-Shirt adorned with a hammer and sickle and with the legend, “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” In the past, that seemed like a joke — an ironic reference to the kind of fanatical 1960s radicalism that no longer held sway even in Berkeley. But apparently, the T-shirt is a more accurate description of reality in the nation’s premier university town than anyone could have imagined. It is a satirist’s dream and must be any sensible Berkeleyite’s nightmare: Five weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and little more than a week after the United States began its retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, the Berkeley City Council called for the United States to stop fighting.
Enough ill can never be said about the depraved rationalizations of the antiwar faction with regard to the Sept. 11 attacks — rationalizations that can be summed up as arguing that while the U.S. did not deserve to be struck so horribly by terrorism, the complaints that terrorists have about U.S. policy are absolutely correct. The movie director Oliver Stone spoke for far too many American leftists at a recent New York Film Festival panel when he referred to Sept. 11 as a “revolt,” and suggested that the anti-globalization movement would soon make common cause with it.
But the gleeful reaction of this hard left is at least not masquerading as something else, or trying to assume a pained air of virtue and good intentions. The same cannot be said for the soft left. That left insists that it grieves for the victims of Sept. 11 but nonetheless sticks to, well, its ploughshares, I suppose — it can hardly be expected to stick to its guns — and opines that violence never solves anything. As a poster one sees often in Berkeley windows these days puts it, “Let us not become the evil we deplore.”
The word deplore is perfect in this fuzzy-headed context — prissy, mild, without any real sting or real feeling for that matter. Nannies used to deplore unruly children’s table manners; colleagues used to deplore one another’s opinions, while, of course, upholding their right to hold these “deplorable” views. So already the idea that what happened on Sept. 11 was something to be deplored should give the game away. Because anyone with any sense knows that evil is not something one deplores, it is something one fights.
But here, too, Berkeley is on another wavelength. For in Berkeley, the presumption is that in fighting evil, one becomes evil. It is hard to know whether the Berkeleyites who subscribe to this view really believe it or just feel that any use of American power is so monstrous — indeed that the country itself is the real evildoer in the world — that it must be avoided at any cost.
Perhaps this is why another popular poster in Berkeley these days insists “An eye for an eye makes us all blind.” The problem with this neatly phrased bromide is that no one in the U.S. government has ever suggested doing to innocent people in Afghanistan what the terrorists did to innocent people in New York and Washington on Sept. 11. Had the American government wanted to, it could have carpet-bombed Kabul and Kandahar, when, as the bombing campaign started, the left insisted that it would. But in fact even the Taliban claim that only 300 civilians have died in the bombing and they have every reason in the world to exaggerate the casualty figures.
But Berkeley knows otherwise. It knows that violence solves nothing; it is sure, as a student I met on campus put it to me, that the only proper response to the terrorist attacks would be to build, as she put it, “bridges of love” to the future. And it is resolute in its cheap Buddhist certainties that the problem is one of the anger that resides in all of us, when in reality the essential fact is that the United States has been attacked, continues to be attacked with biological weapons, and has every right in both international law and commonplace morality to defend itself against the terrorists.
But then it appears that some Berkeleyites at least are unsure of whether the terrorists are Osama bin Laden’s people or the U.S. government. One Berkeley city councilwoman, Dona Spring, was quoted in a campus newspaper as claiming that the U.S. was the terrorist, though she later insisted she had only said that this was the way many Afghans viewed America. Whatever she actually said, it is clear that engrained habits of viewing the U.S. as the root of evil in the world are so well-entrenched in college towns like Berkeley that it is not all that easy to separate the political program of Osama bin Laden — U.S. withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, an end to the embargo on Iraq, and a pro-Palestinian rather than a pro-Israeli American stance — from those of many influential, or at least noisy Berkeleyites. Again, they deplore the terrorism, but in the matter of their analysis of the world there is much they have in common with al-Qaida.
In such a context, it is hardly surprising that the Berkeley City Council passed its resolution calling on the U.S. to stop attacking Afghanistan “as soon as possible.” You cannot demonize your own country for several generations and then switch gears when your country is attacked. Better, or at least more comfortable, to keep hewing to your old patterns of thought and feeling.
Would the Berkeley City Council have passed a similar resolution after Germany declared war on the United States in 1941? And would ordinary Berkeleyites who felt themselves to be highly moral people have insisted with equal confidence that violence solved nothing and that, by fighting the Nazis we would become Nazis … sorry, “the evil we deplore?” It seems unlikely. But then again, perhaps they would have. After all, there were plenty of good Communists in America in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact who derided the British declaration of war on Germany as ushering in a conflict in which no good leftist need take sides.
That is more or less the Berkeley position today: a plague on bin Laden and a plague on the United States. One can only wonder how Berkeley and other ideologically similar college towns around the U.S. would react if it were their neighbors who were being murdered and their landmarks destroyed. What if it’s not Manhattan or Washington next time, but the Shattuck Avenue BART station, where sarin gas is suddenly spewed on Berkeley’s unsuspecting and peace-loving citizens. That is when the pacifist mettle of that little left-wing Brigadoon by the Bay will get a proper test.
There is no alternative to war
Blame-the-U.S. pacifism misses the point. Bin Laden wants to eradicate Western modernity, not liberate Palestine, and the U.S. has no choice but to fight him.
We will resume our normal lives, but the fear will not go away. The airliner as bomb, the bomb in the stadium, the sarin gas in the subway: These are the prospects that will haunt us. Such thoughts will be paranoid, of course, and somewhat self-indulgent. Obviously most people will live out their lives with no more contact with terrorism than the horrific images they see on their television sets. But it will be enough.
The terrorists chose their targets well when they struck on Sept. 11, 2001. By destroying the symbolic center of international capitalism — the World Trade Center; what name could be more alluring if your aim was to bring globalization to its knees? — and the military command center of the most powerful nation in the world, the reality that no person, no place and no institution is beyond the terrorists’ reach was driven. It will not be forgotten in the lifetime of anyone alive when the towers fell, whatever the outcome of the war against terrorism to which the United States has committed itself.
Continue Reading CloseCongo needs help, not Western posturing
A feud between Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright shadows what will likely be useless U.N. aid to war-torn Central Africa.
Washington has taken not one but several contradictory approaches to the interrelated crises now unfolding in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo — that tragedy masquerading as a country that was formerly known as Zaire. Policymakers agree that something needs to be done about the first general war in Africa since decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but none of the approaches that have been proposed seems very promising. Most seem like the triumph of hope over experience.
Continue Reading CloseWho will save Albania?
The poorest country in Europe may be hardest hit by the Balkans war.
The Kosovo crisis is proof, as if proof were needed, of the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whatever the outcome of the NATO bombing campaign, post-war Kosovo will have been left in ruins, its people murdered by the thousands and deported by the hundreds of thousands, and the entire south Balkans region will be both economically devastated and in political turmoil. And of all the countries that are going to need global help to recover from this crisis, Albania may be worst off.
Continue Reading CloseWill Macedonia unravel?
Imagine 26 million Cuban refugees on the shores of Miami, and you'll understand how NATO's mission in Kosovo has destabilized the region.
Throughout the Bosnian war, European and American policy makers trying to resolve the conflict were at least as worried about the possibility of the fighting spreading south to Kosovo and Macedonia as they were about securing a peace agreement. I remember at the height of the siege of Sarajevo in 1993 being told by a senior American official that “what’s going on here is going to look like a walk in the park if things blow up down there.”
It seemed like a callous remark at the time, and no doubt in human terms it was. But Slobodan Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo, and NATO’s sluggish and ham-fisted response to it, has shown how well-founded the anxieties of Western diplomats were. The long-anticipated slide into general war in the south Balkans, that chronicle of death foretold, could not only destroy what is left of the former Yugoslavia, but destabilize Greece and Turkey as well. We are moving rapidly from human catastrophe — first of the Bosnian Muslims and now of the Albanian Kosovars — toward political apocalypse. And nowhere is this clearer than in Macedonia.
Continue Reading CloseThe bleak gets bleaker
The Kosovo crisis will almost certainly be succeeded by a crisis in Macedonia, in Montenegro, in Albania and, finally, in Serbia itself.
Few operations in modern military history have produced so many unintended and, in some instances at least, disastrous consequences so quickly as Operation Allied Force, NATO’s long-overdue attempt to confront and subdue Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, this should not have come as a surprise. If ever there was a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, it is Operation Allied Force. In the name of preventing a great crime — the mass murder and forcible expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians — the West has given an extraordinary demonstration of its own impotence. And there is no end, at least no good end, in sight.
Continue Reading Close