In the wake of Tuesday's apocalyptic suicide attacks, skepticism is the better part of patriotism.
by Steve Perry
POSTED SEPTEMBER 15, 2001--
BY DAY FOUR following the suicide attacks in New York and Washington D.C.,
the air was thick with reports of additional terrorist plots. As I write
this on Friday night, "reliable sources" have lately indicated that the
targets included the White House and Air Force One; that as many as 50
people inside U.S. borders participated in the planning of the attacks; that
the Atlanta airport, one of the busiest hubs of domestic air travel, had
been a target as well.
Well, who knows? All of the above may be true, or some of it, or very little. It seems clear enough the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was bound for a target in Washington; it had already filed a revised flight plan to that effect. For the rest we have only the word of a government eager to garner the broadest possible mandate for war, and to assure a furious, frightened populace it can foil any more such perils going forward.
"The first casualty when war comes is truth," said Hiram Johnson, a little-remembered progressive Republican from California who served in the United States Senate for nearly 30 years, beginning in the midst of World War I and concluding with his death in 1945--as it happens, on the same day the U.S. dropped its first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This week, inevitably, Johnson's lament was oft-misquoted and seldom heeded. Amid the rage and bloodlust engendered by Tuesday's atrocities, no one has dared to counsel critical inquiry into the government's account of events or the appropriate scale of the promised military response. The endless invocation of Pearl Harbor is apt only in the most obvious sense; it misses the heart of the matter. We lurch toward a war of untold proportions with an enemy who is, apparently, whosoever George W. Bush and his advisers choose to say he is.
This is, in its own way, equally as frightening as Tuesday's surprise attack, because it suggests the possibility of a protracted war--or wars--on Islamic antagonists of the United States that could make Vietnam seem tidy by comparison. Said Bush on Wednesday: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." (Not to split hairs, but that characterization could be said to include every country in the Middle East, depending how one chooses to understand who is and who isn't a presumptive terrorist's "associate.") The administration and the media underscored their point by trotting out a variety of present and former military officials to attest that only a state-sponsored terror operation could pull off such a coordinated attack. By Thursday former CIA director James Woolsey was telling CBS that Osama bin Laden--the Saudi construction magnate tabbed as the presumptive mastermind in most official scenarios--could not have managed Tuesday's onslaught; the more likely culprit was Saddam Hussein.
Meantime there was little discussion of exactly why it was a relatively small cadre could not have done the deed, with or without the assistance of a bin Laden or a Saddam. The premise that it must have been an operation of massive scale started on Tuesday morning from the supposition that the hijackers had accomplices in the employ of the airlines, but it quickly became evident that the weapons they used--small utility knives and box cutters, mostly--could be carried legally onto commercial airlines with ease. In fact, nothing that has yet come to light concerning the suicide squads themselves suggests an operation beyond the ken of a small-to-middling entrepreneurial venture. It required a capacity for long-range planning, and beyond that only the usual costs of doing business: living expenses, travel, the training of personnel.
There is, in short, no prima facie reason why the attacks could not have been carried out by a relative handful of people, operating inconspicuously well below the radar of the intelligence agencies. This may or may not be what happened, but one thing is sure: Even if this version of events were correct, it would never pass muster as the official version. There is no mandate for all-out war to be had from it, and perhaps more important, there is the chilling implication that the United States government really can do nothing to anticipate and prevent every future act of broad-scale terror. Tightening airport security is a relatively simple matter compared to thwarting other manners of bombs and chemical/biological agents.
Assume for the sake of argument that bin Laden was indeed the financier and architect of Bloody Tuesday. Assume that the United States succeeds in killing him and his principal associates, as it surely will. (Only the degree of "collateral damage" remains to be determined.) What will have been accomplished? Americans would like to believe that bin Laden, like Saddam before him, is a fount of evil and aberration. Cut off the head and the beast will die.
To think along these lines is to misconstrue not only the grounds of Arab hostility toward the U.S. but the nature of his "organization." Bin Laden is not CEO to a company of dedicated suicide bombers in his employ. He is, as the website Salon.com aptly put it, a "venture capitalist for terrorists." His is by most accounts a loose-knit network. He finances guerrilla entrepreneurial endeavors that come to him from all over. Eliminating him will cut off one source of capital and direction, but it will not dampen the anti-U.S. energies of the countless groups who court him. It will only strengthen them by creating a martyr, with lots of civilian casualties along the way. And so far as patrons go, there is likely to be no shortage of wealthy Middle Easterners who despise the United States and its client state, Israel. In other words, the rage and desperation that spawned these acts can only grow as a result of any war waged against real or claimed perpetrators. Cut off the head and two will grow back in its place.
We will be a long time counting all the things changed irrevocably this past Tuesday. First and most emphatically, our exemption from history is over. For the first time in nearly a century and a half, war is no longer something that happens exclusively "over there." But that's the least of it. Until this week the notion that the United States could be brought low by acts of guerrilla warfare was only that--a notion. Once an idea, any idea, is made flesh, everything changes; what had seemed unthinkable becomes not only conceivable but in a sense inevitable. Whether the United States makes bin Laden its principal target, or Saddam, whether it mounts another push-button air war or opts for something more grisly and prolonged, what comes next will not be the final word that Bush et al. promise. It's only the beginning.
Steve Perry is a writer and critic. He lives in Minneapolis, where he was the editor of City Pages from 1989 to 1997.
More by Steve Perry:
Grumpy Old Archetypes: An Interview With James Hillman
The Seduction of Paul Wellstone
City Pages Archive