From LexisNexis
Copyright 2001 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)
September 12, 2001, Wednesday
SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1153 words
HEADLINE: ANGER IS THE FIRST RESPONSE, BUT UNDERSTANDING IS BETTER
BYLINE: David Aaronovitch
BODY:
THIS, AS James Rubin, America's former State Department spokesman, said yesterday, was the terrorist's Pearl Harbor, and any horror ever dreamed up by the most imaginative Hollywood script-writer now seems tame. A slow-motion airliner flies tilted, silhouetted against the blue Manhattan sky, on a mission to destroy thousands of lives. The plume of smoke issuing from the towers of the World Trade Centre mocks the torch held by the Statue of Liberty; before they fall, the dome of the Capitol in Washington amidst the smoke echoes St Paul's during the blitz. A great city is covered in white ash. In 20 years these will be the images that define the year 2001. They also define a terrible failure.
In a London afternoon, turning on the television, your first feeling might be one of simple incredulity, and your second anxiety for friends in America. The third could be to listen out for the sounds of sirens in your own streets, and the fourth to speculate on who could conceivably have been sufficiently devoid of conscience, and sufficiently brilliant, to co-ordinate these acts of total war. And then you want to rub them out, these monsters who could organise to have passengers on airliners - people like you and your kids - smashed (can we even guess at how those last seconds felt?) against the buildings of New York. Then the numbers are counted and some of the dead are named.
These suicide pilots used our technology of peace against us. Our planes, which unite families and carry travellers, were used to destroy our buildings, which house clerks and executives and IT specialists and traders. Psychologically, though, it was barbarism in the age of the Internet, with men and women who you could contact by e-mail obliterated in an undiscriminating blast.
All of a sudden we feel more vulnerable than ever, even here in Britain. More vulnerable than at the height of the IRA's London campaign, because the emerald "volunteers" would always make strenuous efforts to preserve themselves, and usually some effort to preserve others. Today it feels as though sophisticated and free societies have little real chance of protecting themselves against such complete ruthlessness.
Well, if we can't protect ourselves from attack, perhaps we can destroy those who would attack us? We have war planes with smart bombs, we have the SAS, the CIA, the Deuxieme Bureau; Vladimir Putin (Chechnya in mind) will surely want to lend us the expertise of the Russian intelligence and armed forces. And if it was Osama Bin Laden, why don't we take Afghanistan out? Especially since, with this week's suicide-assassination of the one remaining anti-Taliban leader in that cratered country, there is no one else there to prevent their total victory. If, of course, it was hard- line Iranians (as one pundit speculated yesterday), then that is more tricky. But hell, this is war. The stakes have been raised beyond a point that any have imagined possible.
I would love to do this. I want to see cross-haired pictures of cruise missiles smacking into terrorist bunkers; I want to see A10 gunships blast camps; I want to see mad mullahs and fanatic sheikhs dragged from their bunkers to trial in the United States and Europe. This is, after all, war. And as ever there are voices saying that we know who committed these crimes and that we know where they are. There are always such voices, and I suppose they could be right. It's just that their track record isn't that good.
In the middle of this great desire for revenge, we have a duty to the dead - and to those who will otherwise die - to remember that, even in the post- modern world, terrorism (and especially terrorism like this) always requires a context. We have a responsibility, despite the intolerable provocation, to be intelligent.
Much of the period since 1989 has been a time of hope for peace. The end of the Cold War made possible the Oslo agreement and the handshake (previously completely unimaginable) between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Apartheid ended in South Africa and a proxy insurgency ended in Mozambique. By the middle of this year, Slobadan Milosevic was standing in a court in The Hague and Sinn Fein sat in the Northern Ireland assembly. The business of making peace was, as ever, hard, tortuous, often reviled and punctuated by attacks on the peacemakers.
But people forget quickly. They lose sight of just how bad war is when compared to peace. They fail to repeat Erasmus's words that there is nearly no peace which is not better than any war. Peacemaking has been replaced, in the Middle East at least, by fiddling, foot-dragging, obstinacy and name-calling, and - ultimately - by frustration and violence. Meanwhile the American administration has, since the end of the Clinton presidency, been more interested in selling the son of Star Wars to its allies than in forcing the Israelis to reflect on what they have to do to help end the intifada.We have watched the peace crumble, and known something would result from it. We simply couldn't imagine that it would be so bad.
The greatest possible mistake now would be to replace complacency with battle -rage. What, after all, did the suicide-mass murderers want? Other than an entry into the Paradise of mad young men, they wanted a massive and blunt-edged retaliation for their crimes, a retaliation that would turn innocent Muslims into victims and thousands into suicide radicals like themselves. They wanted all-out war between the US and its allies and the whole of the Muslim world. That's what their evil geniuses, probably still alive, will want.
It may be possible that renewed international co-operation will allow the precise targeting and the "surgical" removal of those who planned the events of 11 September 2001. If so I would not care in the least if they were all vaporised. But the best chance of preventing anything like this terrible day ever happening again lies in recalling the words of W B Yeats. "Too long a sacrifice," he wrote, "can make a stone of the heart."
When some Palestinians celebrated the attacks (long before, it has to be said, they knew quite what had happened) you could see the water that those who recruited the bombers had found to swim in. Do we really want to create more of the kind of people who can feel that it is a virtuous act to crash four planes full of fellow human beings into office buildings?
Our world is strangely small and dangerous. Peace is hard to get and requires compromises that, initially at least, are loathed. But if we don't act to solve the problems of the Middle East and other places, we too will eventually suffer. Today's stone-throwers will want to kill our sons and daughters. We've had the picture now. We know what it looks like. Smoke rising, not above Gaza or the wreckage of a Jerusalem pizzeria, but above Manhattan.
David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com