Al-Qaeda then overreached as badly as the Bush administration had, however, and as the organization’s violence against other Muslims escalated — something for which the leader of the affiliate in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was upbraided by Ayman al-Zawahiri — the prospect of setting off an anti-Western chain reaction across the Islamic world vanished. As a brilliant new book by Jason Burke,The 9/11 Wars, shows, local factors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere trumped the region-remaking agendas of the neoconservatives and al-Qaeda alike. The Arab Spring, triggered by neither bin Laden nor Washington, is an ironic bookend to the wars of 9/11.

Goading Us Into War

The terrorist’s most effective weapons are not bombs and guns or even the knives and airplanes that were used in Tuesday’s attack. The terrorist’s real arsenal is fear, confusion, anger, and paranoia. Effective terrorists know psychology and sociology — human nature — even better than they know ordnance. Tuesday’s atrocities have been called an act of war and compared to Pearl Harbor. It is a comparison which the perpetrators of the attack must have anticipated.

Anyone tactically brilliant enough to hijack four planes simultaneously and turn them into living bombs is going to be equally brilliant strategically and will understand what the reaction to his actions will be. The strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not intended to get America out of the Middle East, they were intended to get America into war.

Whenever Americans have been attacked abroad a familiar pattern has emerged. The American people will not accept casualties. Vietnam demonstrated this, as did Somalia, as did NATO’s operations in Serbia which were designed to avoid American casualties at all costs. When Americans are killed abroad, Americans at home respond by demanding to “bring our boys back home” and by questioning the propriety of our activities abroad.

The American character has always been deeply skeptical of foreign entanglements. Just consider George Washington’s famous farewell address. So great is this popular “isolationism” that there’s only one reliable way to defeat it — attack America at home. Pearl Harbor is the proof. America would not have entered World War II without being attacked first. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelet, who greatly wanted to enter the war, had had to promise during his 1940 campaign that America would not get in, unless attacked at home.

Is it reasonable to think that Osama bin Laden or anyone else would kill thousands of Americans on American soil without considering the consequences? Terrorists look at a big picture. They have to understand how their actions, which serve no immediate military purpose, can affect their enemy. The terrorists behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday knew what the reaction would be. They were too smart not to.

The Islamic world is sharply divided along several lines, between “moderates” and “extremists” as well as Sunnis and Shi’ites. On top of that the usual internal power plays go on behind the scenes of Islamic countries as much as anywhere else. There’s good reason to think that lust for power is at work here at least as much as ideology. There is, for example, a faction of the Saudi royal family which is more hard-line than King Fahd and would like to replace him. Whether this faction is really ideologically anti-American or simply sees anti-Americanism as a tool to use against Fahd is irrelevant. It’s worth remembering that Osama bin Laden, for all the talk about his ties to the Taliban, has ties to his native Saudi Arabia too.

The Taliban have good reason not to provoke the U.S. They are still fighting a civil war for control of Afghanistan. They stand to lose everything if the U.S. and our “friends” the Russians get involved. But it’s easier to shoot a more cruise missiles at Kabul than to risk antagonizing “friends” like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

If Osama bin Laden is behind this — and really it must go far beyond one man, however wealthy he may be — then what he expects to accomplish is clear. He wants to polarize the Islamic world, and indeed the whole world. Whoever is behind this wants America to react by going to war, which will put pressure on hard-line factions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia to side with the anti-Americans, even if they would prefer to remain neutral.

War will exert pressure on regimes like Kin[g] Fahd’s to distance themselves from America, in trade as much as militarily, and to become more amenable to hard-line factions within their borders or else face internal revolt. By polarizing the Islamic [community] what the Osama bin Ladens of the world really achieve is to enhance their factional power. In order [for that] to work, however, America must act precipitously against the Islamic world in general, and one or two scapegoats in particular. The bigger America’s reaction the better chance bin Laden has of succeeding, and of course to provoke a really big reaction he had to commit an extraordinarily great atrocity. He has done his part and now he expects us to do ours.

We must not let the terrorists outsmart us. We must not react the way they want us to. Let’s think before we react. How would bringing back the draft, as Stanley Kurtz has opportunistically urged, prevent this? How will beefing up airport security stop terrorists armed only with razors and the bluff of having a bomb? How will “troops on the ground,” presumably in Afghanistan, solve anything — did it work for the Soviets in 1979?

A committed terrorist will always be able to kill innocent people, to fulfill his tactical objective. But terrorism will fail in its strategic objective if we do not react as expected. If we do not do what the terrorists want they will have failed in their mission and will have that much less reason to expect terrorism to work in the future.

The terrorists behind Tuesday’s attack want war. By all means we should punish those directly involved, but we must not give them the war they want. These terrorists have attempted to discredit the peace party in the Islamic world, to polarize that civilization for the advantage of the war party. The peace party in America must stand firm in the face of both the terror and of accusations of disloyalty from our own countrymen. That is what will foil the ambitions of the terrorists whose real goal is war and the power that war always brings to the wicked.

This essay originally appeared here on 9/14/2001.

One point I was about to make just as the closing music was playing is that elections only indirectly affect foreign policy. Indeed, they only indirectly effect domestic policy, too, in the sense that what politicians do may be quite different from what voters want. But in foreign policy the distance between the electorate’s intent and what actually happens is much greater, since the public accepts a more passive role and politicians themselves defer to a policy elite. This need not be dispiriting for people who want a more down-to-earth or irenic foreign policy — but it does mean that rather than always putting one’s hopes in mass uprising that “throw the bums out,” one should devote great resources toward building a counter-elite that can a.) provide the expertise even the “good guys” may feel they need, and b.) perhaps provide expertise that even the “bad guys” have to recognize as sound. It’s not entirely true that foreign policy operates independently of elections, but it’s truer than the converse belief that elections determine foreign policy. To change the policy, one has to change the policy minds, not just the politicians or the attitudes of voters.

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Referring to Ernest Hemingway and the poet Robinson Jeffers, DeVoto argued that while some of the coterie made a fetish of American inadequacy—businessmen, for instance, were viewed as impotent, barely able to reproduce—another branch, led by Jeffers, went so far as to describe them as inferior to animals. “It is a short step,” DeVoto asserts, “from thinking of the mob to thinking of the wolf pack, from the praise of instinct to war against reason, from art’s vision of man as contemptible to dictatorship’s vision of men as slaves.”

Of course, just because DeVoto “asserts” something hardly makes it true. Were the great dictators of the 20th century really outspoken critics of the masses? Or were they more likely to flatter the volk and the proletariat?

DeVoto deserves some credit for recognizing the genius of Mark Twain (then again, Mencken led the way on that), but from what Siegel writes, it sounds as if DeVoto believes cultural mediocrity is redeemed by violence:

“War,” DeVoto observed, “provided an appeal of judgment. The typist and the clerk had fortitude, sacrifice, fellowship; they were willing to die as an act of faith for the preservation of hope.”

DeVoto insisted on “the democratic view of life . . . that holds quite simply that the dignity of man is unalienable.” What the courage and sacrifice of World War II demonstrated was that the word bankruptcy best described not the lives of most Americans but rather the ideas of the literary culture that had so cavalierly pronounced judgment on the freedoms of modernity. It was ordinary men and women steeped in a way of life supposedly not worth saving who stepped forward to defend the freedoms on which the literary men depended.

What strikes me about a mindset like this is how it mirrors the thing it criticizes. If intellectuals scorn ordinary folks, DeVoto turns around and scorns intellectuals. Somebody has to be “bankrupt.” The idea that maybe the unpatriotic authors are right about a few things, even if they’re too sour overall about their countrymen, doesn’t emerge as a possibility. Does rejecting one folly have to mean embracing another?

I don’t know about Siegel or DeVoto, but I’d like to live in a country distinguished by something other than its clerks’ and typists’ aptitude for killing.

As big as CPAC was this year, particularly with Ron Paul’s stunning straw-poll win, for me the biggest event of the weekend was a 40-person conference I attended on Saturday, a gathering of progressives, libertarians, conservatives, and radicals opposed to militarism. Some of the other attendees have already blogged about their impressions (vide Jesse Walker, Michael McPhearson, Sam Smith, David Henderson, and co-organizer Kevin Zeese). For my part, I’ve been sanguine about the prospects for Left-Right cooperation against the warfare state since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002. Subsequently it’s only become more obvious that the old political-cultural divisions established during the 1960s are now moot. Neither the Cold War nor the culture war tells us much about what needs to be done in a world wracked by terror, hot wars, and teetering financial systems. These crises are not novel in the abstract, but their manifestations today — under conditions of U.S. hegemony and the rise of nonstate actors — are profoundly different from what Americans experienced in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Moreover, the strategic and economic crises confronting the U.S. are not entirely separate beasts. One theme that emerged at the conference from both Left and Right was the recognition that we cannot afford the foreign policy we have. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives would all like to have that “peace dividend” we were promised after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if we might put it to different uses. Almost any use would be better than perpetuating our self-destabilizing attempts to manage the globe, from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus to Latin America.

Surprisingly, the shift from the previous Left-Right spectrum to a new continuum has already had practical consequences. Ron Paul and Barack Obama both attest to this, albeit in radically different ways: Paul was sidelined in the old Left-Right fights, as a strict constitutionalist whose interests in monetary policy and noninterventionism seemed out of place in the era of identity politics. Yet suddenly he’s become a timely figure, a hero not only to libertarians and Old Right conservatives, but to a fair number of progressives. Obama also received support from some unexpected quarters, including conservative dissidents like Jeffrey Hart and Christopher Buckley and others not accustomed to voting Democratic (or at all all), though Obama swiftly betrayed whatever hopes his new supporters had for him. The Democrats’ meteoric descent illustrates just how poorly Obama and the congressional majority understood the forces that had elected them.

Ralph Nader, by contrast, who spoke at Saturday’s gathering, has a pretty firm grasp on what’s going on. His talk impressed me on a number of scores. At times, in emphasizing the primacy of Congress in the constitutional system and the importance of localism, he sounded almost like Willmoore Kendall. Even his anti-corporate philosophy is not something conservatives or libertarians ought to dismiss too readily. His objections to corporate personhood are very much in line with Felix Morley’s objections. Morley didn’t want to attack corporations, but he understood that the abuse of the 14th Amendment was giving the federal government and corporations together power to steamroll over the states and individuals. (See Morley’s Freedom and Federalism for more on this.)

Nader’s views on campaign-finance restrictions, on the other hand, I find quite unpalatable. David Henderson has some notes on that here. I don’t think it’s too much of a barrier to cooperation on other issues. (What’s more, there is some very quiet pro-campaign-finance-reform sentiment on the Right, though I’m in the anti camp myself.)

I’m skeptical of what under-funded advocacy groups can achieve in politics, but there are at least a few steps a Left-Right coalition can take toward cracking the ideological ice of contemporary politics. There are significant differences of principle among the journalists, intellectuals, and activists who attended the meeting, but that doesn’t mean cooperation has to be unprincipled. As my headline suggests, I think Carl Oglesby was on to something when he suggested that the Old Right and New Left have (some) common ground. Oglesby’s 1967 thoughts on the topic (from Containment and Change) were included in the conference’s reading packet, and they’re worth quoting at length:

It would be a piece of great good fortune for America and the world if the libertarian right could be reminded that besides the debased Republicanism of the Knowlands and the Judds there is another tradition available to them—their own: the tradition of Congressman Howard Buffett, Senator Taft’s midwestern campaign manager in 1952, who attacked the Truman Doctrine with the words: “Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns…We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.” There is the right of Frank Chodorov, whose response to the domestic Red Menace was abruptly to the point: “The way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to abolish the jobs.” And of Dean Russell, who wrote in 1955: “Those who advocate the ‘temporary loss’ of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty…We are rapidly becoming a caricature of the thing we profess to hate.” Most engaging, there is the right of the tough-minded Garet Garrett, who produced in 1952 a short analysis of the totalitarian impulse of imperialism which the events of the intervening years have reverified over and again. Beginning with the words, “We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,” Garrett’s pamphlet unerringly names the features of the imperial pathology: dominance of the national executive over Congress, court, and Constitution; subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy; ascendency of the military influence; the creation of political and military satellites; a complex of arrogance and fearfulness toward the “barbarian”; and, most insidiously, casting off the national identity—the republic is free; the empire is history’s hostage.

This style of political thought, rootedly American, is carried forward today by the Negro freedom movement and the student movement against Great Society-Free World imperialism. That these movements are called leftist means nothing. They are of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action; and it is only through them that the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.

Yet their intersection can be missed. Their potentially redemptive union can go unattempted and unmade. On both sides, vision can be cut off by habituated responses to passe’ labels. The New Left can lose itself in the imported left-wing debates of the thirties, wondering what it ought to say about technocracy and Stalin. The libertarian right can remain hypnotically charmed by the authoritarian imperialists whose only ultimate love is the subhuman brownshirted power of the jingo state militant, the state rampant, the iron state possessed of its own clanking glory.

Should we [i.e., Britain] have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when he declared war on Germany? Despite all our efforts, the loss of a great many brave lives and the destruction of our cities, Poland was rapidly overrun by the Germans and became the greatest slaughterhouse in history. Should Britain and France have waited a few years, until the Russians had broken the back of German military power? And, most important from my point of view, would the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor if they had known that they faced not only the Americans but the French, British and Dutch armies, navies and air forces? the sight of the three colonial powers defeated or neutralised by the Germans must have tipped the balance in Japanese calculations.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and along with his family was interned by the Japanese in 1943. Empire of the Sun is a semi-fictionalized account of his experiences. Ballard died last April. He’s well memorialized by The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, which came out in September, but Miracles of Life has yet to be published in the U.S. It’s worth tracking down the UK edition.

Then came two letters from the same person. The first is dated September 10 and explains that after years of malaise over having been in the Special Forces in the late ’60s but not having gone to Vietnam, he is volunteering, at age thirty-six, for the Airborne Rangers.

The second letter is dated November 15. It begins, “Whatever guilt I might have felt by my not participating in the Vietnam War has all been erased by recent adventures in Grenada. … Unfortunately, we lost three killed and six seriously wounded in three helicopter crashes on our last raid before pulling out.” It ends, “Please continue doing whatever you can to further the cause of Vietnam vets.”

Here’s Southern Avenger Jack Hunter’s three-part radio interview with Conley:

Part 2. Part 3.