Excerpts
Mass-casualty terrorists and civil liberties:
It is not simply the physical and psychological security of Western peoples that is threatened. In addition, the liberties and the norms and institutions embodying and protecting those liberties, norms and institutions painfully constructed over the bloody millennia of Western history, are also at risk precisely because of the insecurities stemming from the threat of catastrophic terrorism. Civil liberties have never thrived in menacing times. Threatened peoples tend to endow the authorities with extraordinary powers to make them safe, an endowment invariably accepted. In Republican Rome the concentration of extraordinary power was formalized in the Senate’s appointment of a temporary “Dictator” with, as the title implies, almost unlimited power to commit mayhem for the public good.
Most modern constitutions, as well as human rights treaties, authorize declarations of emergency and coincident suspension of many liberties. But they set substantive and, by implication at least, temporal limits to executive discretion, thus working to reconcile demands for protection with the preservation of rights deemed basic for the survival of liberal democratic government and also with prevention of irremediable injury to the innocent. However, even democratic leaders may find restraint galling and, with or without popular invitation, may and have decided for themselves what values to sacrifice on the altar of “necessity.”
Liberalism:
Liberalism, as I interpret it, stems at one level from the normative premise that the good society is one that enables each individual to shape continuously a personal identity and a life plan in light of her or his understanding of the meaning and value and possibilities of human existence. We can see in that premise both a canonical statement about what it means to be truly or most fully human – the human being as creator of meaning out of the mute raw materials and experiences of life – and a prudential recipe for maintaining a relatively stable and largely voluntary association of people organized as a political community.
[L]iberalism is not simply a . . . less dangerous way than tyranny of escaping the Hobbesian dilemma. If that were all it is, liberalism would be a dry account of everyday life, hardly comparable to the operatic narratives of the Abrahamic and pagan faiths. But that is not all it is. Liberalism has its own high drama, except its tragic hero is the Promethian individual, creator of meaings and things, illuminator of reality through the application of reason, restless searcher if only for what George Bernard Shaw, speaking of metaphysics, described as the black cat in an unlit cellar who is, in fact, not there.
Community being the essential medium within which the individual strives, liberalism has to be more than a norm of mutual non-interference. It cannot be a mere . . . declaration of rights limited only by the negative duty not to interfere with the lonely exercise by others of the same rights. . . . A community is not a cluster of guarded compounds linked by the juxtaposition of their barbed wire walls. A community has common spaces and public goods and rules for allocating responsibility to fund and maintain them. If it is liberal, the community’s members will participate in the creation, application and change of those rules. But decisions need not be unanimous. And they are binding. Thus liberalism inhibits perfect freedom in order to produce community and public goods.
Human Rights:
“Man is born free,” Jean Jacques Rousseau announced more than two centuries ago, “but everywhere he is in chains.” “All human rights are universal [and] indivisible,” delegates to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights announced sonorously in their final consensus Declaration; perhaps because most of them lacked the French instinct for irony they did not add that those rights are violated on the same universal scale. They did, however, manage to imply as much by calling for continuing efforts and new measures of defense and promotion.
Neo-Conservatism:
In order to grasp the world view of Neo-Conservatives, it helps to compare them with conservative realists like Henry Kissinger and James Baker, foreign policy stalwarts in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush For figures like Kissinger and Baker, the purpose of statecraft is to advance US power and material interests in a dangerously competitive and structurally anarchic world; the promotion of democracy and the defense of human rights is incidental and will sometimes prove inconvenient and hence dispensable. One result of this worldview is a readiness to strike deals with regimes seemingly of any ideological stripe or level of brutality in the treatment of their own people so long as those deals appear to advance immediate, largely material national interests. Another is a certain measure of restraint in the exercise of power because of the judgment that the United States should not slay dragons that have no capacity or incentive to threaten the country materially.
For [neo-conservatives], the Realpolitik statecraft of Kissinger and Baker is too limited in its goals and too restrained in its means. The United States, for them, is not simply a great power but also a cluster of ideals. And by a marvelous even divine coincidence, pursuit of those ideals can only enhance the country’s power, wealth, and security.
But nothing in the premises and values of neo-conservatism precludes [new preventive wars]. . . . Neo-conservatives are prepared to make war not simply for the immediate purpose of installing elected governments, but also for the more general one of maintaining US hegemony indefinitely, a position now enshrined in the National Security Strategy Doctrine issued by the Government in September 2002. A hegemonic United States will assure, or is at least the best means of assuring, the long-term triumph of liberal democracy and hence the greater good of humanity, they argue. Of course for traditional conservatives, hegemony needs no justification beyond the influence and wealth and presumably the security brought to one’s own country. For them the tribal good does not have to be wrapped in the politically correct colors of the general good.
Even before the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, persons identified with the neo-conservative movement in the United States were disparaging international law’s restraint on the use of force, both for its supposed failure to restrain bad nations, that is nations unfriendly to American projects and associates, and for the way it threatened to trammel the use of American power to make a better world. In the eyes of these neo-con publicists, international law is a kind of conspiracy of the bad and the weak to restrain the good and the strong. And since the strong at this remarkable historical moment is preeminently the United States, a country dedicated to the advancement of liberty of the person and of trade, such restraint is inconsistent with the human no less than the national interest. The supposed imperatives of the post 9/11 “war” against terrorism serve only to heighten neo-con concern that the hordes of Lilliput will use the cords of law to hamper the just exercise of American might.
There is here, moreover, not really a question of sincerity but rather of moral instincts profoundly in conflict. The valuation of means is not simply a function of their contested efficiency in promoting ends. Idealistic Marxists imagined a blessed time after the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat when, as a result of the Proletarian revolution and the resulting overthrow of the tyranny of capitalist production, the human condition would be marked by unprecedented freedom of choice. The cause of conflict having been removed, people could live in peace. And with goods and services made abundant through technological progress and distributed to each according to their need, people could work in the morning, fish in the afternoon and write in the evening. Arguably a liberal paradise. But the means, a cruel class war followed by dictatorship of unclear temporal limits, were unacceptable to liberals, devotees of a political philosophy centered on human freedom not at some indefinite point in the future but in the here and now.
Just as in the liberal value system there are limits to what present majorities can demand for the general good, there are even greater limits to the demands that can be made on basic individual rights for the arguable benefit of generations yet to be conceived, even if one believes that the demanded sacrifice is more likely than not to achieve the hypothesized millennium. In their readiness to loose the dogs of war and the national security state to the end of building a more perfect liberal world, in their means, that is, neo-conservatism bears the same incompatible relationship to liberalism as did Marxism.
Torture and the ‘ticking-bomb case’
[T]he ticking bomb case is really just a rhetorical device, a debater’s fantasy. You could run torture operations for a century without encountering the smirking sociopath who credibly assures you that he’s planted a small atomic device which will incinerate the population of lower Manhattan in three hours. That is not the real world. The real world is Algiers, 1958. The resistance owns the Casbah by night. By day they are teens on street corners, shopkeepers, shoe-shine boys, vendors, students. But at night they own the Casbah. So one night you begin.
You cordon off a block and grab every male between the ages of 16 (or at least who look 16) and 40. You blindfold and shackle them and take them to some improvised detention center. You strip them and you let them sit naked on the stone floor. If they doze off, you kick them awake. After a while, maybe a long while, you bring them to the interrogation room. Maybe you begin softly, ask if they would like some water or a cigarette or to use the toilet. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you start off as if you did not care what they have to say, as if you did not want answers to questions, you just want to experience the pleasure of hurting them. Silent colleagues strap them to the water-board or attach electrodes to their gums and ears and testicles and pour water on them. And you begin. And after a time, most will beg for questions to answer. And eventually they will get their wish. You will give them questions. And sooner or later they will give you answers, names and addresses; they will give them fulsomely, almost with pleasure. Finally, when you can’t think of any more questions and they can’t think of any more answers, you may just send them back to the bare room and the crawling vermin who share it with them or you may become soft, paternal, concerned, rueful, offer them some tea. Then you go and seize the people they named and search the houses and collect more names. And you discover that some lied, but others told the truth, because you find a pistol or a grenade or a pamphlet in the closet or under a floorboard. You continue, day after day, deliberately sorting through the cornucopia of screamed names, distinguishing the militants from the sympathizers from the innocent until you have unpeeled the onion and the Casbah belongs to the parachutists and the Legion. Mission accomplished, sir. The battle of Algiers was won, but of course the French lost the war.
Terrorism and Communal Conflict:
The main driver of terrorism in the post-Marxist age will be communal rather than class conflict. The fault lines of class may overlap and thereby aggravate communal ones. And in some cases, the reduction of the overlap–for instance by affirmative action to produce much greater equality of opportunity and outcome for the group producing armed challengers of the status quo–may reduce inter-communal animosity, particularly at the level of elites. But not in all. For many people, communal ties respond to a deep hunger for a kind of organic, almost familial identity (and often for a corresponding Satanic “other”) that often trumps a merely material calculus. Before the First World War, many Socialists cheerfully predicted that the proletarians of the great powers would, in their transnational class solidarity, refuse to serve as the cannon fodder of bourgeois and aristocratic governments appealing to them in the name of La Patria. Ten million deaths managed to dispel that optimism.
[S]tating the terrorist problem in terms of communal conflict risks creating an insidiously misleadingly set of caricatures that will be taken, by some, as a mirror of reality. On the one hand is the caricature of the liberal democratic descendants of families resident in the West from time immemorial, heirs of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. On the other is the caricature of the fundamentalist Muslims of the first or second generation living rigidly in a pre-modern epistemological and normative universe. Yet within the ranks of the notional heirs of the Enlightenment are, among others, murderous skinheads who swarm to cripple persons of darker hues in various European cities and the drunken, foul-mouthed hooligans who haunt European and particularly British football and the sweet-tempered Volk who parade to the polls to vote for Le Pen and the polished gentlemen who collude with the Italian Mafia, to name but some. Meanwhile the ranks of European Muslims contain distinguished intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan of Switzerland, Parisians in haute couture, and tens of thousands of families living quiet bourgeois and working class lives informed by a range of views on education, democracy, and the organization of family life and moved by worldly aspirations hardly distinguishable from those of their Christian neighbors.
Still, detailed inquiries into the diurnal reality of Muslim minorities in Europe (including their treatment of women) and the bombings and murders (like that of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and the young Muslim woman in Berlin who broke away from her family in the hope of living an independent life) carried out in the name of Islamic family values, and the furious denunciation by some Islamic religious teachers of majority culture, indicted for its sensuality and tolerance of practices and relationships proscribed by traditional Islamic principles, testify collectively to deep estrangement between significant elements within the immigrant communities and the generality of West Europeans. Caricature, after all, exaggerates, often grossly, but generally it does not invent.
What are the generic features of the cultures I refer to as “illiberal” or “traditional”? They idealize and organize family life along patriarchal lines with women of any age in a subordinate (traditionalists might say “protected”) and constrained position insofar as legal rights, decisional power, and relations with the larger society are concerned. They assume that identify is inherited and permanent, not individually constructed. The moral life is defined by iron tradition; it is not a matter of personal choice. Virtue consists of adherence to received tradition and loyalty is owed first to the extended family and then to the community, the latter being constituted by co-adherents to the received tradition. Internal challenge to tenets of the tradition is punishable heresy. Voluntary departure is punishable apostasy. External criticism, satire, or insult is punishable blasphemy.
Liberals and Communalism:
If, as I suggest, communalism has an impulse toward cultural isolation (or, where possible, cultural monopoly) and if communalism has a corresponding susceptibility to the cultivation of intolerance by ambitious political adventurers, why would anyone who resonates to the liberal tradition in political philosophy find anything positive about it? One answer to that question is that communalism’s vices are the other side of its considerable virtues. It sustains a sense of fraternity among a host of strangers. In the framework of a sovereign state, it is an emotional adhesive that fosters domestic peace and, by clothing governmental institutions in an aura normally associated with the warm intimacy of kinship ties, it enables these strangers to do more justice to each other and to cooperate more in the production of public goods than would be plausible without this sense of deep connection.
Multiculturalists:
For all the variety of their differences over public policy, I think they can usefully even if somewhat artificially be divided into two groups. One group sees multiculturalism as a program for renegotiating the terms of integration into what is conceded to be the majority culture. The object of that renegotiation is to achieve access to opportunity for members of the minority without wholesale sacrifice of its cultural values and hence the individual and collective sense of self-worth and self-respect. The other group proposes instead of integration on more favorable terms something like a confederation of cultures constantly re-negotiating the terms of their coexistence.
The iconic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:
For almost six decades Israel’s conflict with Arabic-speaking peoples around and inside its domain has been squeezing a slow poison into international relations and now, as a result of the massive and continuing migration of people away from poverty toward centers of opulence and opportunity, it poisons the relations of communities within many Western states. As the conflict envenoms communal relations, it inevitably enlarges both the pool of potential recruits to terrorist groups and the larger number of sympathizers. The latter, if they do nothing else, psychologically enable violent militants and thin the flow of information about terrorist organizations and operations to the police and intelligence agencies.
The debate over the question of whether Israeli policy contributes to the terrorist phenomenon, being neurotic in its ferocity, is marked as such debates always are by attribution of fantastical claims. The one most relevant to this chapter is that those who assign a measure of responsibility to Israeli policy are alleging that a settlement of the Israeli conflict principally with the Palestinian people would transform the Middle East into The Peaceable Kingdom where lion and lamb lie down and gently nuzzle each other.
. . . Perhaps there exist some crackpot writings, unknown to most of us, that evidence the presence somewhere of such an hallucination. Be that as it may, I at least propose only the following: First that Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinian people living in the Gaza strip and the West bank contributes to a widespread perception among people of the Islamic faith that Islam is under brutal assault not simply by Israel, but also by the United States and to some degree by the “West” in general; Arabs most intensely, but Muslims in general experience, as it were, pain and humiliation by proxy which in turn enlarges the pool of recruits and sympathizers for jihad against the West. My second hypothesis is that the means by which Israel seeks to maintain its freedom of action also contributes to Islamic rage, but, in addition, they help to undermine the distinction, so vital to the struggle against terrorism, between legitimate and illegitimate methods for employing force even in a just struggle.
The Israeli government may also have influenced the American government’s relationship to the Arab and wider Islamic world by providing a model for visualizing and defining terrorism and for fighting it. Among countries seen by friends and enemies as a part of the West, Israel either pioneered or has rationalized and sought to legitimize such practices as assassination (both within territories it controls and abroad) of suspected terrorists and terrorist facilitators, the use of torture and other cruel forms of interrogation, arrest and indefinite detention without trial, trial by special tribunals, collective punishment, use of deadly force where order could be restored by milder means, and the employment of aerial and artillery assault under conditions where heavy collateral damage to innocent civilians is foreseeable. More generally, it has championed the view that groups and governments employing terrorist means either have non-negotiable ends or should at least be treated as if they had them, the view that negotiation or even the examination of the substantive claims such groups make merely feeds the terrorist appetite. So the response to terrorist methods should be force alone rather than force coincident with a declared readiness to pursue reasonable compromises of material differences in defined interests, the approach ultimately adopted, for instance, by the British government in its dealings with groups using terrorist methods in Northern Ireland. In the later stages of that conflict, essays in repression coincided with the beginning of negotiation.
A sustainable settlement of any bitter and broadly resonant conflict must be seen not only by the immediate parties to it but also by their friends and sympathizers, really by the generality of the international community of consequential actors, as just. It will not be so seen if the vastly stronger party to the conflict extracts it like fingernails from the weak one. Hence, unlike the case where two more-or-less evenly matched adversaries negotiate, where the parties to a negotiation are hugely unequal in bargaining leverage, the mere fact that a signed text emerges from such a negotiating process does not attest to the agreement’s “justness.” Rather it is seen to have all the value a legitimate court would impute to a confession obtained by torture.
As I noted above, where parties are roughly equal in negotiating leverage, legitimacy is generally a function of the process. The parties are deemed to be the best and rightful judges of whether, on balance, an agreement to end a conflict is more in their respective interests than a decision to let it continue. But where because of the inequality of the parties, the process itself cannot confer legitimacy, then it must arise from the agreement’s substance, that is from the coincidence of its terms with external criteria of justness or fairness. Where do we find those criteria? The most obvious place is in the norms of international law. For those norms are the historical moment’s synthesis of ideas of justness and shared national interests that, unlike the Bible or the Koran or any other text commanding the loyalty of only one community, transcends the fault lines of culture and faith.
In the past sixty years, the years in which universal human rights took root in the soil of international law and grew into the principal idiom of moral discourse, only two countries have been sites of the following phenomenon. One group of people enjoying all the freedoms and the opulent comforts that characterize life in West European and North American states exists cheek-by-jowl with and controls the life chances of another group of people among whom none enjoy the most basic freedoms and most endure conditions of Third World poverty. Members of one group participate in a vibrant political process and set the parameters of government policies, above all its treatment of the other group’s members. The latter’s members can elect officials theoretically entitled to govern them, but in fact those elected officials cannot prevent their constituents either from being detained indefinitely without judicial review or assassinated, cannot assure them due process in the event they are accused, and cannot secure them the opportunity to move freely within the national territory. And finally, in neither case can members of the subordinate group as a practical matter migrate to membership in the dominant group, because each dominant group has defined its identity in a way that permanently excludes members of the minority. Minority persons can acquire or possess what qualities they will: Wealth, superior education, excellence of intellect, musical virtuosity, it makes no difference. They remain “the other.”
In both cases it would be fair to say that the subordinate group lives in a collection of concentration camps with their only means of exit being exodus from the land of their birth. These concentration camps are not duplicates of Auschwitz: Their inhabitants are not slated for extermination, although individual members are from time to time exterminated if they are suspected of plotting against the dominant social group. In one case the possibility of mass expatriation to a neighboring state is mooted in the majority’s political discourse, but it is not yet a settled aim. Among the different historical analogies perhaps the closest is the reservation system used by the United States [in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries] to isolate the surviving members of Native American tribes at low cost in what could fairly be described as spatially extensive, largely open-air prisons in which the inmates enjoy[ed] a certain degree of quotidian self-administration.
In both of the principal cases I am describing, the dominators [have imagined themselves] as part of Western civilization, as the forward edge of that civilization in a nasty part of the world and [have invoked] the West’s support in terms of their common values. And in both cases the dominators [have justified] the arrangements I have described as compelled by an extreme and permanent necessity, namely the existential threat they face in the form of the subordinate group. In one country the camps or reservations, as you will, were called Bantustans. In the other, they are generally referred to by outsiders as the “occupied territories.”
The framework of a liberal grand strategy:
[A precondition for an effective grand strategy] is to cease thinking and speaking of the terrorist challenge in terms of a “war.” Calling it “war” associates terrorists with the titanic clash of peoples, history-changing battles, and storied feats of arms by half-mythic figures like the great Muslim general Saladin who defeated the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem. Thus it plays into the hands of the terrorists by allowing them to achieve a key objective, which is glory and renown. It empowers them psychologically and, by enhancing their stature, it is bound to facilitate their efforts to recruit new members. Moreover, calling it “war” fosters a political environment in the United States supportive of increased investment in military instruments when a central principle of counter-insurgent doctrine, and insurgency is the closest analogy to the present threat, is the primacy of political and economic measures and information operations designed to isolate the violent. Calling it war activates what the historian Walter Russell Mead calls the “Jacksonian” side of the American foreign policy culture, the side marked by wrath and blind hatred, an impulse to exterminate, a ferocious xenophobia, all-in-all a set of emotions not exactly conducive to the search . . . for political solutions to grievances that, if aggravated, can give the relatively few terrorists a whole sea of sympathizers in which to hide: Empathy, after all, is one of war’s first casualties. And calling it war, and if war it is one that promises to be perpetual, will surely mean that at home we will have fewer freedoms to defend.
Rejecting the rhetoric of war, cold or hot, does not entail declaring that we do not have a serious challenge to our security. Even small groups now have the capacity to make catastrophes and both their numbers and their capacities could grow. Liberal strategists need to act on the assumption that a sound majority of the American people are not infantile, that they can grasp and accept the proposition that we face a substantial danger which is too dispersed and resilient to be exterminated, but which can be limited in its capacity to affect our lives if we address it resolutely and creatively, in close and respectful cooperation with other states and peoples, at considerable expense, and with a mix of means unlike the mix required to wage inter-state wars.
Measured by its share of government revenues and its influence on US foreign policy, the effort to influence hearts and minds never played more than a bit part in the historical drama of the Cold War. In the context of the new terrorist threat to US national security, the most prospectively effective grand strategy requires the former bit player to assume a leading role. It can only play that role, however, if the substance as well as the idiom of the strategy is liberal. Of course it is substance, the quotidian acts and omissions of the many arms of a powerful and complicated government, that matters most. But the inevitably freighted language in which a president sets the general thrust and character of national policy influences that quotidian output, as it also influences the ways in which the acts and omissions of the United States and of its democratic allies are understood and assessed. . . . The neo-conservative language and policy of American universalism adopted by Bush the younger, the declared intent and at least the notional attempt to advance freedom on the end of American bayonets, with such allies as are willing to conform to American tactical and strategic judgments, was hardly calculated to have much appeal beyond the borders of the United States.
Multilateralism is not an anodyne synonym for the United Nations. After World War II, inspired by liberal values the United States acted as the principal architect of multilateral institutions—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Organization of American States, NATO, the World Trade organization, to name some—institutions that structured a global order in which the United States has thrived. Addressing the festering grievances that feed recruits into terrorist networks and provide them with a social base and restraining the spread of weapons of mass destruction and, indeed, addressing all of the main Twenty-first Century threats to national and human security will in the longer term require close and systematic cooperation between the United States and other consequential countries including China, Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, as well as our traditional NATO allies.
By virtue of the attitudes that help define their place on the political spectrum—chauvinism, suspicion of the foreign, a rigid conception of sovereignty, the masculinization of honor and the related valorization of force—the constituencies and elites occupying the Right are disabled from multilateral institutional building. Liberalism, conversely, by virtue of its cosmopolitanism, that is its commitment to the idea of rights shared by all peoples and its corresponding dictation of limits on privileging one’s own community, and its related view of coercion as at best a lesser evil, inspires a search for cooperative mechanisms. After all, dominating power unrestrained by norms and institutionalized obligations to consult is bound to be coercive, is bound to make claims for itself that it will deny to others, is bound, that is, to reject the Kantian dictum to take only such actions as you are prepared to generalize into rules for all.
A country like a single human being communicates principally by what it does, not what it says. When the United States claims to be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it does not pass the laugh test and even if we invested half of the Pentagon budget in promoting that claim, if US policy remains the same, every cent would be wasted. No communications program no matter how lavishly funded and artfully designed could hide the reality of Abu Ghraib or the museums and libraries we consigned to the looters at the beginning of our Marx Brothers occupation of Iraq. The implicit message to Muslims had to be that we did not care enough about the patrimony of the Iraqi people to save it. At the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan, senior American officials assured the world that in contrast to our abandonment of the country after the Soviet withdrawal, this time we would stay the course; we would rebuild this shattered place. Yet within months the resources and attention shifted to Iraq and Afghanistan was left largely to rot. There are few propositions you can utter with absolute certainty about their truth, but there is at least one: public diplomacy cannot conceal the real substance of public policy.
