What Happens Next? Six options beyond war and peace

from - http://reason.com/hod/jw092101.html

By Jesse Walker

When the military prepares for action, the public debate is usually a simple
either/or: Will there be peace, or will there be war? Not so now. Fresh from
the bloody assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there are at
least six choices before us, each with its own subgenres and mutant
variations. None is perfect, and one is actually insane. But each is worth
examining, if only to understand what people actually mean when they call
for war, peace, or some other path they can't quite articulate.

Here, then, are our choices, beginning with the least violent and ending
with the most:

1. The Gandhi Option

Some favor no military response to the attacks at all. In its flaky form,
this position involves wishing really hard, perhaps while holding someone's
hand, that hatred and violence will disappear from the world. Not every
pacifist is so naive, though, and there is a more sophisticated case for
military inaction.

This argument points out that terrorists do not come from nowhere. They
respond to particular policies of the country under attack. If, as the
evidence suggests, the assault was masterminded by Osama bin Laden or
hisallies, then it may well be easier to adjust our foreign policy than to
hunt down every terrorist in the Middle East,especially since that hunt
might inspire yet more Middle Easterners to turn to terrorism. Wouldn't it
make more sense just to stop these clumsy interventions into other people's
battles? Why make ourselves a target for every tin-pot maniac in the Third
World?

A variation on this argument notes that many of our present foes--including
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein--were originally built up by the United
States to fight the enemies of an earlier day. One can only wonder what our
allies in a new war might do to us several years later.

There are two problems with the Gandhi option. The first relates not so much
to the position itself as to some of the people who have been advancing it.
Obsessed with finding what "we" might have done to "deserve" this--as though
anyone deserves to die this way--the hairshirt faction has conjured a list
of sins far removed from anything that could have inspired the attacks. When
the filmmaker Michael Moore speculated about the terrorists' motives, for
example, his rambling ruminations touched on missile defense, America's
withdrawal from the Durban conference on racism, and even our rejection of
the Kyoto accords on global warming. Evidently, Moore believes that we are
being attacked by European diplomats.

In the real world, we are being attacked by a group that--judging from the
fatwah issued by Osama bin Laden in 1998--objects to America's military
presence in Saudi Arabia, to its sanctions against Iraq, and to its support
for Israel. The point of reexamining U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the
attacks is not to find everything about it that you might want to change,
from Star Wars to Kyoto. It is to find the parts that might be putting us in
danger, even if you've supported them until now. In the next few months, a
lot of Israel's American supporters will be wrestling with a difficult
choice: Israel's security, or their own? Many will choose the latter.

The other problem with Gandhianism goes deeper. Watching the World Trade
Center towers collapse last week, desperately aware that thousands of people
were inside them, most Americans did not merely crave greater security. They
wanted justice. If nothing is done to capture the people responsible for
that atrocity, it will be hard to claim that justice has been done.

2. The Kojak Option

And so we come to option two. A terrible crime has been committed. The
immediate perps are now dead, but the conspirators behind them are alive and
free. They may be plotting further, even worse assaults. We still aren't
sure who they are or where they are, but we have some significant leads. So
it's time for some expert policework, to track down and capture the people
who did this.

The advantage to this approach is that it meets the demand for a response
while keeping that response targeted at the criminals. As such, it upholds
justice in two ways: by meting it out to the murderers who killed 5,000
people in one day, and by refusing to replicate their crime by killing
anyone unfortunate enough to live in the same country as the terrorists.

There are two disadvantages. One of them I'll describe later, as it
undermines the next two alternatives as well. The other is that, in tracking
terrorists through the mountains of central Asia, it won't be easy to stick
to all the legal niceties that policemen are supposed to observe. And if it
comes down to letting the likely culprits escape or abandoning due process,
most Americans will choose the latter. At the very least, they will say, let
us consider response three:

3. The Bronson Option

If we cannot be policemen, let us be vigilantes. We could still limit
ourselves to hunting the perpetrators, taking care to leave innocent
civilians out of the fight. But we won't have to prove their guilt to a jury
beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, we could combine the goals of a
policeman with rules more akin to those of war. (Some on this idea call for
literal vigilantism, with privateers rather than soldiers leading the
fight.)

If a foreign government turns out to be involved in plotting the attack,
then it isn't merely the rules of war that might be invoked. A violent
attack on the U.S. by another state would land us in response four:

4. The Bugs Bunny Option

This one's named for the great American who, when attacked, routinely
remarks, "Of course you realize this means war."

This would be a limited war, aimed not at "rooting out terrorism" but at
treating those terrorists who are affiliated with foreign governments the
same as those who are independent agents. As with Bronsonism and Kojakism,
it limits its fire to the conspirators and their henchmen, leaving civilians
spared. If you're looking to bomb cities or occupy Afghanistan, you'll have
to go well beyond Bugs.

These last three responses share a problem. If the Gandhi option addresses
the question of security while leaving justice undone, the others aim for
justice but leave us insecure. Arrest or kill Osama bin Laden, and his
lieutenants will take over his war. Capture them, and other branches of his
very loose network will step into the breach. Bring down a government, and
heaven knows what might take its place.

And that brings us to the biggest decision. Do we defend ourselves against
this attack, whatever that entails, and then withdraw from the Middle East,
fusing a rigorous and vigorous self-defense with non-intervention in other
nations' affairs? Or do we dig in for a long fight against the social
landscape of the Mideast? Do we, in the words of The New York Times' Thomas
Friedman, fight "a long, long war" against "all the super-empowered angry
men and women out there"?

5. The Caesar Option

If you prefer this alternative--if you favor a long war against a ubiquitous
enemy--then be aware of the likely consequences:

• The war will not merely be long. It will be perpetual. We will not be
fighting an army, after all, but a tactic--terrorism--that can be adopted by
small cells anywhere in the world. More: We will be fighting a mindset, one
which will probably be inflamed still further by the battle against it. We
will never know when the war is over, or when we're finally safe. Innocent
civilians will die--not just abroad, but here (as if we needed to be
reminded) in America.

• The U.S. will become a garrison state. When you're fighting a perpetual
war against an enemy that operates without borders, citizens will become
suspects. Privacy, due process, freedom of association, and freedom of
movement will be curtailed. Given politicians' predilections, the same fate
will likely befall free speech and the right to bear arms.

• Whatever authoritarian measures afflict us domestically will be meted out
several times over to states abroad, since that will be where most of the
actual terrorists live. Dictatorship, of course, is nothing new in the
Middle East. But now the governments will be answering to the United States,
which can scarcely trust the Taliban to do its terrorist-hunting for it.
America will have to act forthrightly as an empire.

In short, the Caesar option will probably fail to bring us security or
justice. The only way around this would be not just to dominate the
potential terrorists of the Middle East, but to wipe them out. Incredibly,
there are those who are proposing just this.

6. The Strangelove Option

Not long after the attacks, Sam Donaldson asked the Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, whether we can "rule out" the use of nuclear weapons. He
received this response:

"We have an amazing accomplishment that's been achieved on the part of human
beings. We've had this unbelievably powerful weapon, nuclear weapons, since,
what, 55 years now plus, and it's not been fired in anger since 1945. That's
an amazing accomplishment. I think it reflects a sensitivity on the part of
successive presidents that they ought to find as many other ways to deal
with problems as is possible."

"I'll have to think about your answer," said Donaldson. "I don't think the
answer was no."

"The answer was that that we ought to be very proud of the record of
humanity that we have not used those weapons for 55 years," replied
Rumsfeld. "And we have to find as many ways possible to deal with this
serious problem of terrorism."

Where Rumsfeld weasels, others step boldly. "At a bare minimum, tactical
nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the
desert of Afghanistan," Thomas Woodrow, formerly of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, declared in The Washington Times. In the pundit class the talk is
even nastier, with Col. David Hackworth among others suggesting that
portions of the Middle East should "glow" with radiation.

Maybe they're just bluffing. Maybe they're just trying to convince the world
that Americans are batshit crazywhen we're mad, and that the terrorists damn
well better be scared. The trouble is, they're scaring me too.

* * *

So which path do we take?

I've long opposed American intervention abroad. Self-defense, however, is an
entirely different matter. Obviously, the Kojak model is ideal, but I can
live with Bronson or Bugs. The important point is to aim our fire at the
murderers, not at civilians or at anyone who merely happens to be a usual
suspect--and to limit ourselves to a well-defined mission, rather than a
vague, all-encompassing "war on terrorism." The Caesar option would lead to
further tragedy; the Strangelove path, to utter disaster.

At the same time, we will have to take a hard look at what the pacifists are
saying, even if we reject absolute nonviolence. Do we really want to defend
a fundamentalist dictatorship in Saudi Arabia? Do we really need to maintain
sanctions that have had no effect on Saddam's dictatorship, but have brought
death to thousands of Iraqi children? And in that most contentious of
Mideastern conflicts, must we tilt so strongly toward Israel, even when it
treats Palestinians like second-class citizens or winks at those who steal
their water and land? (Spare me your angry e-mails, Israeli partisans: I
don't think much of Arafat's brutal Palestinian National Authority either.)
This isn't just an issue to grapple with after bin Laden has been captured
or killed. It's something to look at now, as we figure out how to fight the
terrorists without alienating the Middle Eastern public.

Never before has America's involvement in the Mideast's tribal politics
seemed more foolhardy. Now that we're stuck in this tarbaby, we're going to
have to fight our way out. But we should think twice before punching any
more tarbabies down the road.

Jesse Walker (jwalker@reason.com) is an associate editor of REASON and the
author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History
of Radio in America (NYU Press)