Post-9/11 World

Let's talk a little now about 9/11. Did the 9/11 attack in some way bring us back to the Greeks and what they had to tell us?

I think so. Most people had thought that we were at the "end of history," that globalization or Westernization had created a uniformly affluent interconnected world. In the United States during the nineties we had a booming economy, we were like a dog that was asleep and every time we heard of these strange places like Khobar Towers, or Tanzania, or First World Trade, or U.S.S. Cole, it was kind of like swatting a fly. The idea was almost, "Well, they're military people, or they're diplomats. They can harvest a few. That's not serious." And then suddenly, the worst attack on America as a precursor to war in our history, more than Lexington, Concord, Sumner, Havana Bay, Pearl Harbor. It really shook us up.

The question is, what are you doing to do about it? Well, we talked about a coalition government in Afghanistan, we talked about Pakistani/UN peacekeepers. And, suddenly, our of the past, we started to hear voices that said, "No, these people want to kill you, and they're going to keep killing you until you stop them. Now, you either stop them or give up." A majority, not a great majority, but a majority of people in the United States understood that, in a way that maybe Europe didn't.

You wrote "Awful men cannot be cajoled, bought off, counseled, reasoned with, or reported to the authorities, but rather must be hit and knocked hard to cease their evildoing if the blameless and vulnerable are to survive."

We should keep in mind with all this is that there were thousands of Afghans that were killed, hung, tortured. Half of our species -- all the women -- in Afghanistan were relegated to medieval status. The same thing in Iraq.

Every time a Westerner has embraced utopianism and the idealism of reason as the ultimate arbiter of disagreement, somebody else less affluent, less privileged, pays for it with his life. So, actually, the use of force, if it's done in a legitimate way and it's done carefully and it's thought out, can save far more lives than will be lost.

I was appalled when I heard people in the United States making predictions that millions of people would die in Afghanistan, and the United States is culpable, when we had watched this horrific regime destroy an entire country and had done nothing about it. Finally, when we woke up belatedly and were doing something about it, people didn't understand.

One of the ideas that had developed after the Vietnam War was the notion that as a democracy we couldn't allow one American solder to be killed. If we lost one solder, the politicians had to run for cover because the people would turn on them. I would like for you to talk a little about the synergy between democracy and war, because the fact of the matter is it often can cut the other way. When you have a functioning democracy that confronts a situation like 9/11, not only can it marshall the technology and the resources, but it can rally forces for a war against the adversary.

There's a pro and a con about democracy at war, and it's discussed at length in Thucydides' history, especially the Sicilian campaign. That's one place. Polybius talks about it in association with the Romans. In times of peace, because of the success of the rule of law, and usually there's a better economy in a democracy than a non-democracy, life is pretty good. Because people run their own government, they have a tendency to (a) vote themselves entitlements, and (b) try to avoid risk to any one person. That can be fatal, as we saw in France in 1940, or we saw in Athens in 340 BC when they were threatened by Philip.

That being said, if a democracy wakes up and is attacked, and mobilizes all of its resources, and has a majority vote, there's no ultimate appeal, no second guessing. You don't say, "Franco made us do this." "It wasn't me, it was Hitler." "Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait." No: the democracy, the people themselves have a stake in it, and they're constantly auditing the conduct of the war. The ultimate check on that is their own sense of fairness. So if you attack a democracy and you kill a lot of people in a democracy, human nature being what it is, they're going to vote to take reprisal. And democracies, when they're aroused, make war like no other type of government.

I get the sense from your writings after 9/11 that the other thing that resulted from the "battle" of that day when we were attacked was that we had to rethink or be reminded of what it is we stand for.

What has happened to us since Vietnam is that because of our success, whether it's civil rights, or the environment, or equality of the sexes, we have created even increased appetite for greater success. If we once wanted to ensure an equality of opportunity, with freedom and liberty being the objects for everybody, now what we want is almost an equality of results; egalitarianism and equality are more important. That is hard to do. Human nature, again, to use that hackneyed phrase, tells us that we're not all born into this world equal, and that coercion [can] make us equal. Once you have that mentality, and you have a vibrant economy and you have a leisured society, then you can lose touch with reality very quickly. We have this hyper-criticism that if we're not utopian, if we're not perfect, then we're utter failures.

So immediately after 9/11 there were people whose voices were heard. "Well, wasn't Afghanistan part of the British Empire?" It was either cultural pessimism -- "the [mountain] peaks are too high, the Northern Alliance is unreliable, our hands aren't clean, the British never won, the Russians never won" -- it was either pessimism, or it was hyper-criticism, "Well, didn't we withdraw after we got the Soviets out? And didn't somebody give aid to Osama bin Laden?" Without any knowledge that that's the stuff of history, that nobody in 1944 would say, "Wait a minute, we gave 375,000 GMC trucks to Stalin. We gave him probably 30,000 P-39 Air Cobras. This was a man who butchered 30 million of his own people, and we used him cynically to fight the Nazis." No, they didn't think like that. They said, "For now, at this time in this place, Hitler is worse. When Hitler is gone, we'll turn our attention to Stalin. But we're not going to judge ourselves tainted or fouled because we're helping people who are mass murderers to kill a greater mass murderer."

It's important that Americans get out of their cocoon and wake up and realize that they don't have the ability to demand or achieve perfection, not in this world.

Do you believe that we confront a clash of civilizations?

Oh, I do. What I am absolutely astounded by is the clear-cut clash of civilizations. We're talking about a group, a minority group of perhaps 1 to 3 million people of the larger Middle East who are Islamic fundamentalists, and all of the Western traditions and liberalism they hate. Take your pick: Homosexuals? Kill them. Women? No rights. Polygamy. Clitoridectomy. Consensual government? No. Tolerance for Jews and Christians? No. Hindus? No. Buddhists? No. Patriarchy? Absolutely.

How are they successful? Because whether it was colonialism, or anti-communism, or realpolitik, or just endemic tribalism, the Middle East is not "with it." And so when it can't feed its people, it can't house them, it can't educate them, and it won't make these reforms, they turn their animus, their frustration, and their state-controlled media to America and the Jews. The conduit from the frustration to the media is often these Islamicists, and the only way to rectify that is to defeat them and to humiliate them, and to offer the people who follow them an alternative, and get away from supporting the Saudi royal family or the Kuwaiti royal family and try to do something that would lead to integration within a larger world community, as we have done in Latin America and Asia.

Do you think that the United States, with the erosion of values that has occurred in the last couple of decades, is able to muster the wherewithal to engage in this conflict and succeed? I know we have the military resources, and we have a very talented and trained military that can win the military victory. But the question is, can we stay for the long war in the context of what we've become at home because of affluence?

I think we can. But to be frank with you, if it's a question of New York, and Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and Seattle winning this war, I don't think we can.

But there are people who get up in the morning and they wait tables, or they drive a tractor, or they [arrest] a criminal; they live in a real world, and they understand that there's a thin line between civilization and barbarism. And they've seen Saddam Hussein, and they've seen Osama bin Laden in their own world, and they have no compunction about eliminating him.

[As I was] driving up today to talk to you, NPR had [a story of] a man who was just killed, 41 years old, Army Major, who left a 6-year-old son. He was a surgeon. He had just e-mailed his parents that on his time off from battle surgery he was doing free appendectomies for Iraqis. And they blew him up and killed him, murdered him. They knew that he was there not to take their oil. They knew he was there to try to institute a liberal regime. I listened to his parents, they were from rural Wisconsin. Did they want to sue the government? No. Did they blame the military? No. What did they say? They said the world lost a wonderful person, the United States lost a great patriot. He had no regrets; he knew what he was doing. It's a tragedy.

That is what America is all about, but you wouldn't hear that in many places.

We're in a war for the hearts and minds of America. We'll see how many Americans are confident and proud of what the United States is, and how many are ashamed of it and think it's the source of evil in the world today. If the latter group is larger, then we'll lose, like every other society that eroded and drifted away.

What is the challenge of leadership, that is, American leadership, in the context of this dilemma?

The president is very, very good ... it reminds me of Archilochus' metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog: Bill Clinton could think of a thousand things, and express himself wonderfully, and not come to a decision. Bush is not glib, he's not sophisticated. He sees right and wrong. And that's what you need in war.

The only problem that I have is that he needs to remind America this is not about weapons of mass destruction, this is not about the world's oil supply, this is not just about 9/11. This is a war with a type of enemy who, if its agenda was realized, would end all the things that we think are dear. He needs to remind the American people that the Japanese like to import oil so that the world can have Hondas; or Toyota, with Priuses, is trying to deal with the environment. The Europeans like to trade and sell farm equipment to the Middle East. There is a sophisticated world: people like to go study at Harvard from Jordan. That whole system is based on certain trusts, certain protections that these people, these terrorists and Islamicists, would destroy; as we see in Spain, as we see in Turkey, as we see in Morocco. This is the face of barbarism, and it will either win or lose.

Beyond the military victory, how do you win the battle of ideas?

I think we should give ourselves some credit. We realize it can't be won with ideas and it can't be won with force, it has to be won with both. Militarily, we're going to defeat autocratic fascistic governments, who either now or in the past sponsored, aided, abetted terrorists. At the same time, we're offering them the carrot and saying, "This is a new United States. Look at Panama. Look at Milosevic. Look at the Taliban. We're not just, say, "pump oil; keep out the Russians; the Shah of Iran; the Saudi royal family." We're doing something different, and we're spending blood and treasure to give you an alternative to bin Laden. If you don't want it, you don't have to; but we're going to get rid of bin Laden, and we're going to get rid of what he stands for." That's all we can do. We did it with the German people, we did it with the Japanese, we did it with less success in Korea, we did it with no success in Vietnam, but we're going to try to do it, and we'll give them the alternative.

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