"The death of Osama bin Laden is something we could have accomplished without getting involved in two no-win wars," said Terry Smith Thursday in the Athens News, suggesting an alternative future for a nation reacting to the 9-11 attack.
I'm eager to supply the details, starting with a West Wing conference the next week. "OK, who's the enemy?" President Bush asks his advisers.
"The people who attacked us, Al Qaeda. "
"Where are they?"
"We don't know. They're mixed up with civilians. We need intelligence and probably will have to act covertly."
"A job for the CIA then, with cooperation by our allies. I'll get started on that and you people give me some speeches making diplomats and spies the new heroes. The Secretary of State will be putting together what will have to be a new kind of alliance." I see the nation dedicating itself fully to the task and reducing Al Qaeda at the same time it stays alert to specific threats from other groups.
The future Smith has opened up for me is beautiful: no invasions, no regime-changes, no democracy-building, no use of guns except against the people identified as the enemy, no talk of a worldwide clash of religions, no setting of East against West. Just concentration on our security, the thing that had been violated.
How can President Bush have departed so radically from what Smith makes so obvious (in a small-town newspaper, and a throwaway at that)? I want to put a lot of blame on the words he chose. "War on terror." It's a conceptual mess. You can't make war on an abstraction, not with guns. If he'd listened to his English teacher ("Have something clearly in mind when you use a word") maybe he'd have realized that.
When our words don't refer to the cause-and-effect world we're trying to do something in we're very likely to make a mess. "Terror," to most people at that time, referred to the bad feeling they had when they saw a terrorist doing horrible things to other people on television. They wanted to get rid of that feeling, and would be grateful to a President who helped them. President Bush wanted to assure them of his help. But when he used the word "war" ("I'm really going to go all out for you") he moved himself into an unreal world. "War" is something you do with guns. The real world comes back and tells him (and maybe history) that he's trying to do the impossible. You can't shoot images off a TV screen.
I laugh (or cry) at Bush, but I do so forgetting that Presidents don't have to believe what they say in public. We can trust them because when they speak to themselves or to their advisers they speak the language of the real world — as those in my fantasy did. Was that the case with Bush and his advisers? We don't know but their actions suggest that they did not.
Just think. If the US had made its Afgan operation a CIA operation instead of a military operation, the future of the US/world would be one in which there would be "no invasions, no regime-changes, no democracy-building, no use of guns except against the people identified as the enemy, no talk of a worldwide clash of religions, no setting of East against West. Just concentration on our security, the thing that had been violated."
ReplyDeleteA little history:
ReplyDeleteFriday, September 28, 2001
THE WASHINGTON POST -- ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
The Bush administration has demanded that the Taliban, which has harbored bin Laden for five years, surrender the wealthy Islamic extremist. But Taliban leaders have so far refused, insisting bin Laden was under their control and could not have orchestrated any international terrorist act.
......
Officials in Washington have said repeatedly that it’s too late for any negotiation concerning bin Laden and that the Taliban would face a U.S. assault if they don’t turn him over. Taliban officials have demanded that the United States provide them with solid evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism, but Washington hasn’t done so.
The U.S. position was reluctantly echoed here Thursday by U.N. officials. Francesc Vendrell, the U.N. political envoy for Afghanistan, said, “I’m afraid when it comes to Osama bin Laden and al Qaida, the time for negotiations on these issues is past.” Al Qaeda is the terrorist network affiliated with bin Laden.
Richard, you remind me that the Bush administration did have a pretty good case for invading Afghanistan, and I shouldn't criticize their thinking at the time. But since the invasion produced no bin Laden and the CIA operation did, without adding all the other grief, I think Smith is where I want to be, on the side of parsimony.
ReplyDeleteLet's not make covert activities sound like a piece of cake, either. They often don't accomplish their goal, accomplish the wrong goal, are embarrassingly uncovered and used for the wrong purposes by the wrong people. If it were that easy to snip bin Laden out covertly we would have done it years before.
ReplyDelete