Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism - Rilegato

Bennett, William J.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0385506805 ISBN 13: 9780385506809

Casa editrice: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2002

Riassunto

Examines how the events of September 11 unified most Americans and analyzes how a small number of intellectuals, writers, members of the media, and academics questioned the U.S. response to the attacks and America's own culpability.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

WILLIAM J. BENNETT is co-director of Empower America and founder and chairman of K12, an Internet-based elementary and secondary school. He is the editor of The Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass and the author of several books, including the bestsellers The Death of Outrage and, most recently, The Educated Child: A Parent’s Guide. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with his wife, Elayne, and their two sons.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Chapter 1
The Morality of Anger

The ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking, ash and soot lingered in the air, the odor of death lay everywhere. It was early October 2001, and one army--an army of police and firefighters and rescue workers and volunteers of every stripe--was hard at work clearing, searching, burying, shifting mortar, ministering to mortals. Another army, under the direction of the president and the secretary of defense, was readying itself to move against our attackers. The land was full of grief and full of anger, full of opinion.

What had happened to us? What could we do about it? What should we do about it?

We were not the only ones asking. In the days after September 11, the whole world caught its breath, waiting to see how we would respond. Ordinary people everywhere shared our shock and astonishment, sympathized with our grief, understood our anger, were moved by our unity and solidarity. But both at home and abroad there was also uncertainty, even apprehension, as to what we were going to do about this assault. Would our response be measured and appropriate, or would we strike out blindly, thereby confirming the lowest expectations of both foreign and domestic elite opinion? Long before we responded, the nature of our response had become, for many, a test of our national character.

From where I sat, the quality of both the grief and the anger--fierce, aroused, yet deeply thoughtful--was a sign of everything that is instinctually grand about the American national character. I had agonized for years about what was happening to this American character as our educational standards spiraled ever downward, our elites presided over an unprecedented coarsening of our culture, and our people seemed to be showing clear signs of self-doubt and moral confusion. The truth is that I would rather have gone on agonizing forever than have had my questions answered by a national calamity, but when the calamity occurred on September 11, the overwhelming and immediate reaction of our people--not the grief and anger in themselves but the quality of the grief and anger--certainly helped to answer them.

As for the quality of the post-September 11 opinion, on the whole it, too, bespoke the settled maturity of the American people, tending as it did to coalesce around a consensus view that retaliation had to be swift and uncompromising, adequate to the outrage, and in keeping with the dictates of our moral and political traditions. But there were other opinions as well, motivated, primarily, by the fear that we would overreact, that September 11 would trigger our supposed tendency to blind rage and rash action. Suddenly the name of Curtis LeMay, the American general who was alleged to have recommended that we "bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age," was in the air again, a code word for what was assumed to be the "default" mode of American military thinking.

In fact, those among us who espoused the LeMay position were scarcely to be heard from. By contrast, what might be called the Ghandi position--the position of nonviolence--was treated with exceptional seriousness by the media, and was amplified accordingly. It was also amazingly quick to materialize. Indeed, the operations of our domestic "peace party" gave fresh meaning to the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus. Without benefit of a central command, without training manuals, without field exercises, it was able to deploy its forces with lightning speed, to seize the attention of the press, and to read from a single script. Its tactics--and its instincts--were models of rapid mobilization.

"I don't think the solution to violence is more violence," opined a Columbia University sophomore to a reporter as she held up a sign--"Amerika! Get a Clue!"--at an antiwar rally in Washington in late September. Said a mother in Kennebunk, Maine, around the same time: "Killing people won't prove anything. It's just more of the same." At a protest demonstration in early October in New York City, just blocks away from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, Ronald Daniels of the Center for Constitutional Rights asserted with confidence that "war cannot be the only answer" and pleaded for an "alternative policy." In San Francisco, an advocate of women's rights blamed the media for "whipp[ing] up to a great extent the call for vengeance for war." In Wisconsin, a protestor lamented "all the flags out supporting the slaughter."

Most of these events were held long prior to anything we had done or even talked about doing in response to September 11. They reflected, rather, a deeply held prejudice about the proper way to deal with conflict and aggression, and an equally deep mistrust of the good faith of the American government.

Some in the peace party were already going farther, shifting the subject away from the attack itself and onto the behavior--past, present, or future--of the United States. At the New York City demonstration, a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against War told the crowd he did not "want to see more Americans die because of a militarist cowboy"--the militarist he had in mind was not Osama bin Laden but the president of the United States. A professor at Brown University instructed his audience that if "what happened on September 11 was terrorism,"what America had done "during the Gulf war was also terrorism." Such sentiments were echoed around the world, in places as diverse as Canada ("shut down the American war machine") and Athens, Greece, where four thousand people marched in opposition to an "imperialist war" started by "Americans, murderers of peoples."

As the weeks wore on, admittedly, pronouncements of this kind did tend to wane in intensity. How could they not? The military campaign in Afghanistan was planned so scrupulously and conducted with such care, achieved such a stunning success so quickly, with so little loss of innocent life, and moreover to such unmixed joy among the Afghan people, that the edge of protest was blunted. Even on university campuses, antiwar sentiment faded and pro-war and pro-American sentiment became tolerable if perhaps not yet fully respectable. Many students, though many fewer professors, actually discovered the morality of military action.

If, then, the nature of our response was a test of our national character, it was one we would seem to have passed with flying colors. Or so things stood at the turn of the year 2002. But even then, in the interlude of the fall of the Taliban, it was clear that all this could change once more. For the larger, global war against terrorism was far from over, and from here on in, things were only likely to get more complicated. India and Pakistan, two of our partners, were already at each other's throats. The great question of whether we were going to go after Saddam Hussein hung before us. No solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict seemed in sight, and to some it was beginning to seem that Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority should itself be placed on the list of terror suspects.

In short, military campaigns were almost certainly bound to become tougher and more protracted in the period ahead. This in turn suggested that coalition partners might break away, and world opinion might shift. American forces could begin to take significant casualities; there might be mounting concerns about civil liberties at home; the domestic consensus might weaken, thus endangering success in the war.

Weakening that consensus, sowing and reinforcing doubt about our purposes and our methods, was in fact the goal of the peace party. Its favored means: casting a shadow of moral doubt over our righteous and justified anger, promoting the idea that our tendency to jingoistic aggression could only be checked by a countercommitment to nonviolence. The celerity with which it proved able to mobilize and make itself felt, in the face of an unambiguous and monstrous aggression on our soil, suggests not only the deeprootedness of its own attitudes but the potentially wider effect those attitudes might yet have on national morale.

In later chapters we will deal with the workings of some of these same attitudes in relation to such issues as cultural confidence and love of country. Here I want to focus more narrowly on war and peace, force and pacifism. By looking at the national debate over these matters in the early days of phase one of our war, we can learn important lessons for phase two and all the phases to come. For the arguments are not going to go away.

I mentioned the word pacifism, and right away I need to make a distinction. There is such a thing as a genuine predisposition against violence in human affairs, and it has roots in very old traditions of thought. There is also a particular version of this orientation that has its origins in more recent doctrines, including certain psychological theories about the role of "aggression" in men and boys. And then there is a form of pacifism that is disposed not so much against the use of military force in general as against the use of miltary force by one particular actor, the United States of America. This last-named type of pacifism derives from a negative view of the ends for which American force has allegedly been exercised in the past, or from a more free-floating hostility to America as a society--or both.

The strands are also often conjoined, with a seemingly principled pacifism serving as a "cover" for anti-Americanism. Thus, the Columbia University student who declared that violence is no solution was holding a sign on which the sixties-style spelling "Amerika" was meant to suggest a parallel between this country and Nazi Germany. Or take the instruction imparted to its young charges by the Mount Rainier Elementary School just outside Washington, D.C., which sees its "most impo...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0385506805
• ISBN 13: 9780385506809
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 170