Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

Maj. Christopher Miller lay awake on a cot in a filthy room, no larger than a prison cell and cluttered with weapons and ammunition. He couldn’t sleep. It was a cold January night at the Special Forces base in Kandahar, and Miller was on the verge of commanding an assault against six Qaeda fighters barricaded inside a nearby Afghan hospital. So many things could go wrong, Miller realized, and it could be disastrous if any of them did. For the first time in his life, Miller would be engaging in C.Q.B. — a military abbreviation for ”close-quarters battle.” After years of training, he would finally become, as he told me recently, a ”manager of violence.” An eight-year veteran of the Special Forces, he had never killed before, had never given an order to kill, had not even seen a dead soldier. All that would change at dawn, because men would surely die in an attack he would initiate with a one-word command: execute.

”That was the first time when I really thought of the human dimension of it,” Miller recalled. ”At first, it’s an intellectual challenge. Then you go, ‘We’re really going to do this.’ All of a sudden it dawned on me, Those bastards are in there right now and they don’t have a clue what’s fixing to come their way. It was the oddest damn thing.”

I first met Miller last December in Kandahar. We had several conversations, but he was under strict orders not to discuss his job. Yet his job — that of a new kind of soldier — interested me. The Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan looked different, with their thick beards, fleece jackets, wraparound sunglasses and high-tech weaponry. Did they think and feel differently than the traditional foot soldier? Earlier this fall, I caught up with Miller at Fort Campbell, Ky., where the Special Forces Fifth Group is based. Safely back from battle, Miller was allowed to discuss his brand of warfare — and how he was built to carry it out.

Miller’s dawn assault on the Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, I learned, was but one step away from hand-to-hand combat. It involved grenade exchanges from a distance of just a few feet, and it finished with Miller and his men standing amid their dead and bloodied foes. ”They fought to the last minute,” he recalled. ”For these guys, surrender was not an option.” He later added, ”It was amazing to see the carnage.”

The attack was the kind of urban warfare American soldiers will be engaged in should the United States have to shoot its way into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. When the Cold War ended, many thought that C.Q.B. would become a thing of the past. Conflicts would be fewer, and any interventions undertaken would rely on overwhelming force and precision munitions, not house-to-house fighting. Yet since 9/11 we have begun a war that may draw our soldiers into many battles involving intimate killing. What will that mean for Miller and his men?

The last time this kind of fighting occurred on a grand scale, in Vietnam, 50,000 Americans died, and many survivors had injuries that were not just physical but emotional. The clunky phrase ”post-traumatic stress disorder” entered the national lexicon. Today, the military believes, the United States is fighting an intimate war in the right way, because soldiers have been prepared and equipped in a manner that increases the prospect of their victory and decreases the prospect of their injury — whether physical or psychological. Just as smart bombs are less likely to go astray, 21st-century warriors are more lethal than before, yet less likely to suffer P.T.S.D., according to military instructors and psychologists. Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and West Point professor of psychology, refers to this phenomenon as ”the bulletproof mind.”

Such confident assertions may seem surprising, considering what happened this summer at Fort Bragg, N.C. Four soldiers there murdered their wives; three of the soldiers had Special Forces training and had served in Afghanistan. The news media rushed to link the murders to post-combat stress, although there is little proof and investigations continue. Military officers, not surprisingly, doubt the idea that P.T.S.D. played a significant role, and they may have a point. Fatal spouse abuse, sadly, plagues the military even in peacetime. As they see it, the furor over this incident has obscured a broader truth. Today’s Special Forces soldiers, they claim, have been unusually well trained to succeed not only at war — but also after war.

Chris Miller, the son of an Iowa cop, joined the Army Reserve after high school in 1983. He attended George Washington University on an R.O.T.C. scholarship and became, after graduation, an infantry officer. But it wasn’t long before Miller became bored with his life in the Army.

”All you have to be is physically strong,” Miller, who is the size of a linebacker, told me, sitting in his ramshackle Fort Campbell office. ”Infantry’s brain-dead. It has nothing to do with mental agility. I wanted to try the Special Forces because I was driven by the challenge, man.”

The Special Forces are a highly trained elite within the Army, specializing in unconventional warfare, which is anything from operating behind enemy lines to fighting with guerrillas in the jungle. There are about 10,000 soldiers in the Special Forces, who are also known as Green Berets. They are the core of the military’s Special Operations community, which includes what are believed to be hundreds in Delta Force, a secretive unit that performs classified counterterrorism missions, as well as Navy Seals and Special Operations units in the Air Force.

Special Forces soldiers are trained principally in North Carolina, at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. Known informally as the Schoolhouse, it’s the nerve center for an arduous two- to three-year training course. Skills taught to Special Forces soldiers include how to survive in jungles and deserts, how to leap from a plane in the jet stream and wait until the last second to open your parachute, how to stage ambushes behind enemy lines, how to escape a P.O.W. camp, how to speak foreign languages and how to kill with rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired rockets and your bare hands.

When I stopped by the Schoolhouse in September, about 200 soldiers were starting their third day of training. In a dirt pit, they were hoisting logs over their heads, then shifting the logs from one shoulder to the other, then crawling through the dirt, then carrying one another on their shoulders, then doing push-ups and cartwheels, then hoisting the logs again — over and over, until some began weeping.

It was boot-camp misery multiplied by 10. Yet there was a twist, because physical misery was not the end point, as it might be in the infantry, but the starting point. I realized this as I talked beside the pit with Captain Smith, who assesses aspiring Special Forces soldiers (and insisted that I not use his first name). Smith wants to find out who can endure pain and sleep deprivation and situational uncertainty — and still make the right choices. ”We never inform them what they’re going to do, how long it’s going to go on,” he said. ”We set the conditions for ambiguity from the start. A lot of these guys are not comfortable not knowing what they’re going to do next. But a lot of times on our operations, there’s no way that you can know exactly what you’ll be doing. Strength must be combined with intelligence.”

Miller recalls his experience at the Schoolhouse vividly. ”It was the most outrageous thing,” he said, laughing loudly. ”You’re smoked, you’re physically and mentally drained, and then, boom, there’s a decision you have to make. Do I go left or right? And there’s only one right answer.”

Because Special Forces work requires nerves of steel, training never really ends. After graduating from the Schoolhouse, active soldiers on operational teams train regularly in urban environments. Every 18 months they must complete a course established at Fort Bragg called Advanced Urban Combat — that is, the storming of buildings. Of course, all Army units train for battle, but the Special Forces say they do it with far greater frequency and under conditions that are a good deal more realistic. They use live ammunition much more often. And instead of being shown once or twice how to, say, clear a room without firing guns, the Special Forces do it again and again and again, firing real bullets, until every move they might need to make in a Baghdad-type scenario becomes a reflex.

”It’s so instantaneous,” explained Master Sgt. Danny Leonard, who joined the Special Forces in 1989 and engaged in urban warfare in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan. ”You don’t even realize you did it.”

American soldiers have not always pulled the trigger with such reliability. During World War II, according to the military historian S.L.A. Marshall, as many as 80 percent of the American infantrymen he interviewed failed to fire their weapons in combat. Marshall attributed the low ”fire ratio” to a mixture of poor training and a natural reluctance to kill. Even though his methodology has come under attack — critics say his numbers are exaggerated — his premise is generally accepted, and his book, ”Men Against Fire,” is read throughout the military establishment. After it was published in 1947, the military revamped its training to make G.I.’s more comfortable firing at humans; soldiers shot at targets shaped like people rather than at bull’s-eyes, for example. Today, Special Forces units make their training as realistic as possible, using pop-up targets with human faces, and setting off smoke bombs and small explosions to simulate the battlefield experience.

Dave Grossman, who spoke to me about ”the bulletproof mind,” has written about the hidden logic behind military training. In his controversial book ”On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” he writes: ”It is entirely possible that no one intentionally sat down to use operant conditioning or behavior modification techniques to train soldiers in this area. But from the standpoint of a psychologist who is also a historian and a career soldier, it has become increasingly obvious to me that this is exactly what has been achieved.” Grossman interprets the process of a target popping up, a soldier’s shooting the target and the soldier being praised or criticized for accuracy, as a classic conditioning model. ”What makes this training process work is the same thing that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate and B. F. Skinner’s rats push their bars,” he writes. ”What makes it work is the single most powerful and reliable behavior modification process yet discovered by the field of psychology, and now applied to the field of warfare: operant conditioning.”

Indeed, Special Forces officers openly discuss the use of ”stress inoculation” — in which they are exposed to heartbeat-racing drills that raise their threshold for staying calm. It doesn’t mean Special Forces soldiers are immune to stress or the mistakes that stress causes, but it takes a lot more to rattle one of them than an old-time draftee.

An important dose of stress inoculation occurs during a three-week training nightmare that comes at the end of the Schoolhouse course. It goes by the acronym SERE, which stands for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. SERE teaches Special Forces soldiers how to avoid and endure capture by the enemy. The exercise places them in a ”resistance-training laboratory” that is, essentially, a prisoner-of-war camp, with guard towers, barbed-wire fences, blindfolds, putrid food, irregular sleep intervals, abusive guards and brutal interrogations. Details about SERE, such as the types of punishment inflicted on the ”prisoners,” are classified; Special Forces officers told me that torture is not practiced, though they did not deny that physical pressure is applied. The unpleasantness apparently includes being buried in wood barrels. When I asked Miller about SERE, he shook his head and said, ”It is imprinted on my brain.”

Making a soldier stronger and better through stress inoculation and operant conditioning seems a bit Kubrickian — and unsettling. I wasn’t sure what to think when Col. Charles King, who commands the First Special Warfare Training Group at Fort Bragg, told me that he trains his soldiers in negotiation and combat — and that they can turn from one to the other in a split second. ”These guys have got to be able not only to work with you but to shoot you, if necessary,” he said. We laughed awkwardly, and he quickly added that Special Forces soldiers would never shoot a journalist. We laughed again, awkwardly, and I chose not to mention that a U.S. military commander had threatened to shoot a Washington Post journalist who was trying to visit a site in Afghanistan where an American airstrike appeared to have killed civilians.

Of course, the commander hadn’t actually fired his weapon. Special Forces soldiers may develop cold-blooded reflexes, but they are also trained to know when not to kill. Targets that pop up during shooting drills include women and children who are not supposed to be shot. Being able to remain steady in combat doesn’t just mean you will be a quick draw; it also means that you will do a better job of deciding when to hold your fire. As Grossman writes of the calibration of aggression: ”This is a delicate and dangerous process. Too much, and you end up with a My Lai. . . . Too little, and your soldiers will be defeated and killed by someone who is more aggressively disposed.” Colonel King put it like this: ”Our guys have got to be confident in their ability to use lethal force. But they’ve got to be principled enough to know when not to use it. We’re not training pirates.”

In Kandahar last January, the Special Forces tried to avoid a head-on clash with the Qaeda holdouts at Mirwais Hospital. A small group of Qaeda soldiers, wounded before the city fell to American-backed forces, were left behind when their fellow fighters headed for the hills. The men barricaded themselves inside a wing of the hospital and vowed a fight to the death if challenged. For more than a month, the Special Forces detachment, of which Miller was third in command, patiently waited for them to surrender.

Then one night in mid-January, one of the Qaeda fighters slipped out of the hospital, only to be surrounded by Afghan guards. He blew himself up with a grenade. Soon after, senior officers decided that any members of Al Qaeda who were in Kandahar should be in custody or dead. The Special Forces contingent was ordered to attack the six men who remained.

The Americans didn’t consider an airstrike on the building or using rocket-propelled grenades; those would have been loud and messy solutions, which the Special Forces, who refer to themselves as ”the quiet professionals,” disdain. Miller, who has a master’s degree in national security studies from the Naval War College, relishes devising fresh solutions.

During a meeting at their base in Kandahar, the Special Forces brain trust, which was led by Lt. Col. Dave Fox and included Miller and several other officers, didn’t consider a brute American assault on an Afghan hospital. Instead, the decision was made to train a squad of local Afghan soldiers to do the job, backed by the Special Forces. Miller would be the ”ground tactical commander” — that is, the manager of violence.

On the outskirts of Kandahar, at the former residence of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, an ”A team” — a 12-man group that is the core fighting unit of the Special Forces — began training 25 Afghan soldiers in the finer points of storming a hostile building. A mock-up of the hospital wing was built, and the Afghans were taught to rush through the hole — the fatal funnel” — that would be blasted through a wall. They were taught to stay away from doors and windows, to clear rooms one by one before moving down a corridor and so on. Language was a problem, but translators were used and the Americans picked up essential Pashto words, such as ”shoot,” ”stop shooting” and ”grenade.”

Just before dawn on Jan. 28, everything was set. Capt. Matthew Peaks, leader of the A team that trained the Afghans, was ready. Using his code name, Python 33, he got on the radio to Miller, code-named Rambo 70, who was at a command post 150 feet away. Miller gave the order to execute the assault. The explosives blasted a hole in the wall, and a wave of Afghan soldiers rushed inside, tossing grenades down a corridor leading to the Qaeda room. The Afghans were promptly halted by an explosion, most likely of their own doing; in their eagerness to attack, they had run over their own grenades. The injured men were dragged out.

”We’ve got a bit of a problem,” Peaks radioed to Miller. ”We’ve got six guys down. The assault has stalled.”

One of Miller’s favorite words is ”knucklehead,” which he applies to most anyone he is talking about — the Taliban, his commanders, himself. When the assault stalled, Miller said he felt like the knucklehead of the moment.

A military axiom says a plan of attack rarely survives its first contact with the enemy, and it is particularly true for unconventional warfare. This is what the Special Forces are taught to expect, as I learned from Colonel King. ”You can sit people down and teach them that in situation A you do B, but what do you do when you get into a situation you never anticipated?” he said. That pretty much describes the predicament Miller was in. The first assault had failed. The Qaeda soldiers were riled up. Moreover, the grenade explosions had inadvertently started a fire inside the building. This was a problem because a building that was torched courtesy of the Special Forces would not look good on CNN.

Then something unexpected happened. Smoke prompted two Qaeda fighters to stand next to a window for fresh air. Miller had placed snipers at nearby vantage points, and one of them, just a few feet away from him, leaned over and said, ”Sir, I’ve got a guy who keeps poking his head up.”

Miller immediately told him to fire. He got on the radio and told the other sniper to shoot. One Qaeda soldier was dropped, then another. Miller gave the order for smoke grenades to be thrown inside the building, to encourage window visits by the others. But the remaining Qaeda men realized the cost of fresh air and stayed put.

They were given a final warning. ”We can end this right now!” a Special Forces soldier shouted to them in Arabic. ”We promise you won’t be mistreated.” Arabic curses were shouted back.

Miller ordered another Afghan assault. A squad of Afghans rushed inside the building but rushed out after a small explosion was heard. Peaks, who enjoys an absurd moment as much as Miller, told me, with a good laugh, what happened: ”These Afghan guys come running back to us with big wide eyes going, ‘They got grenades!’ We said, ‘Well, yes.’ ”

That’s when the decision was made for the Special Forces to go inside. This would be the real thing, C.Q.B., against an enemy eager to kill Americans. Three Special Forces fighters moved down the main corridor with three Afghans, closing in on the room where the Qaeda fighters were barricaded. The Special Forces tossed several grenades into the room, but the Qaeda men scooped them up and tossed them back. It was a lethal game of hot potato. The American team dove for cover. Staff Sgt. Joe Haralson was one of the grenade dodgers. I met him at Fort Campbell, and we talked under a gazebo as he calmly cleaned an M-4 assault rifle. He explained that before throwing the next grenade, he held onto it after releasing the pin, so that the enemy wouldn’t have time to toss it back.

”We started cookin’ them off,” Haralson said. ”Pop the pin, wait a second or two, then throw them in.”

I asked, ”The delay is how long on the grenade?”

”About three or four seconds.”

”Not much margin for error.”

”Yeah,” he replied.

Haralson’s training — or, as Grossman might describe it, his operant conditioning — helps explain why he had the presence of mind to instantly fling himself to the ground when his grenades were thrown back at him. Ordinary soldiers might freeze for a split second, and this could cost them their lives. Then Haralson, amid the violence, was able to calmly figure out, as though fine-tuning a tennis stroke, that he needed to hold a live grenade in his hand for a couple of seconds before throwing it, and then do just that.

The battle was won and months later I asked Haralson how he felt about the mission. ”Nobody is acting out of anger,” he said. ”He’s the bad guy, we’re the good guy. It’s just the way it is.”

As Sergeant Leonard told me, ”We understand the importance of what we’re doing, so if we’ve got to cap a guy, we’ll do it.” He continued: ”You’re in a zone. You’re trying to keep your people safe. So there’s a sense of elation: ‘I got him before he got me.’ I never felt sad for any of those guys. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

It’s possible that these men were more disturbed by the killing than they let on; then again, if they were haunted by what they did, they probably would not have talked so openly about the violence they engaged in. And in general, the soldiers did not hide the after-effects of spending time in combat zones. Leonard told me that upon returning from the Gulf War, he woke up one night and noticed a red beam; thinking it was a laser, he rolled out of bed and reached for a weapon. The beam was his stereo’s power light.

The issue of post-combat stress was widely discussed after the three Special Operations soldiers returned from Afghanistan to Fort Bragg and killed their wives last summer. Those killings, and our military’s latest involvement in C.Q.B., have resurrected an old debate: is it possible to be an efficient killer one day and a good citizen the next?

”The theory that interspecies homicide is unnatural — go watch ‘Animal Planet’ for a while,” said Maj. Gary Hazlett, a psychologist at Fort Bragg. ”It’s common. We sent millions of people into combat situations in World War II and we didn’t have busloads of Charlie Mansons coming back. We had people who had gone out and done this grisly job, done it extremely well and then came back and now we’re calling them the greatest generation.” That may be true, but Vietnam veterans are a different story. It was a nastier conflict than World War II or Afghanistan: G.I.’s were killed in grisly ways by men, women and even children who did not wear uniforms, and at the same time, many Vietnamese who didn’t wear uniforms were killed. Psychologists believe that the likelihood of being haunted by killing is greatly increased when the carnage a soldier sees or engages in is hard to justify.

A recent article in Military Review, a magazine published every other month by the Army, warned that reflex-quick killing can be a psychological time bomb. ”Training soldiers to kill efficiently is good for them because it helps them survive on the battlefield,” wrote Maj. Peter Kilner, who teaches philosophy at West Point. ”However, training soldiers to kill without explaining to them why it is morally permissible to kill in combat is harmful. . . . When soldiers kill reflexively — when military training has effectively undermined their moral autonomy — they morally deliberate their actions only after the fact. If they are unable to justify what they have done, they often suffer guilt and psychological trauma.”

Miller says his sleepless night before the assault in Kandahar was his way of confronting the ethics of his actions. He zeroed in on two things — the targets were terrorists, and they had been given ample opportunity to surrender. Killing them, if it came to that, was justified. ”I needed to go through the moral calculus,” he told me. ”Once I did, I was steeled for combat. But I felt I owed it to myself to consider the implications of what was about to happen.”

Miller let out a knucklehead laugh as he said this; for him, it was a foolishly obvious point. Indeed, when the Kandahar assault was completed and he left his command post to survey the carnage he had managed, he said he did not feel horror or regret — just a grim awareness that there will be a lot more C.Q.B. for American soldiers in coming years. ”We’re going to have to hunt ’em down,” Miller said.

Miller remained in Afghanistan for almost four months and did everything he trained for: combat, patrols, surveillance, negotiations. For several crucial days, he was even in charge of security for the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. He completed his duties and returned home in March to his wife and three children.

That said, the experience has left its marks on Miller. North of Kandahar, before the Taliban fled, a Special Forces team was hit accidentally by a misguided smart bomb. Three men were killed, and two of them were good friends of his. ”If I could have those guys back, I would gladly give it all up,” Miller said as we sat in a planning room at his battalion headquarters, which is a surprisingly unimpressive place, with leaking pipes and mold growing on the ceiling tiles. The United States military is a $355-billion-a-year outfit, but few of those dollars are lavished on the aged cinder block buildings housing the Fifth Group. Miller continued: ”There’s probably a little guilt, like, Jesus, I wanted to see action so bad. . . . ”

Suddenly he stopped talking. He took several deep breaths, looking down at the floor. Then he hurriedly got up and headed for the bathroom. Through tears, he said, ”I promised I wasn’t going to do this.”

Several minutes elapsed. I poured myself some coffee as I waited for him to return. I was not terribly surprised by his lapse into sadness. I spent three days with him at Fort Campbell, grabbing meals with him and his Special Forces colleagues, going on a five-mile run with him in the Kentucky backwoods. I heard him laugh at himself and his commanders and the absurdity of the world around him. But I also heard him turn cold serious when the phone rang in his office and he answered with his usual greeting, ”Hello, this is not a secure line.” His temperament was adaptive, exquisitely calibrated to the moment. And here was a moment where Miller was allowing himself to be reflective.

In Special Forces training, flexibility is sought out and reinforced in recruits. Respond to the situation, they are taught; don’t be rigid, stay aware of your environment. In the model Special Forces soldier — and not all of them are, not by a long shot — those maxims apply to emotions too. Block them out in combat, but don’t ignore them afterward.

Miller emerged from the bathroom and said: ”I don’t feel guilty for wanting to do something. We wanted to go, hell, yeah. Everybody wanted to. The big lesson I took was, Be careful what you ask for, because it’s a horribly costly business. I don’t have any doubt about the value of the sacrifice. I’m not sitting here gnashing my teeth like Vietnam or something, going, ‘God, it’s such a waste, the flower of our youth.’ I mean, it was necessary. A friendly-fire accident — that happens. It’s the nature of war.” Miller had a logical argument, but emotions don’t always respond to logic.

Miller talked about other difficulties he had faced in Afghanistan. In January, Special Forces soldiers discovered a series of Taliban ammunition depots. The decision was made to blow up the dumps so that fugitive Taliban or Qaeda fighters could not sneak back and re-arm. Two ordnance experts and a medic were assigned to the job. They were all blown up doing it; either they mishandled the explosives or were killed by a booby trap.

”The most wonderful guys in the world,” Miller told me. ”We could have waited and handed it off to an engineer unit and said, ‘It’s your problem.’ We made the decision to do it ourselves right away. It was the wrong thing to do. We should have just left it. Two guys I knew really well. It shows the seriousness of the business, which I had never fully internalized. I would just laugh when my bosses would say, ‘This is a serious business.’ Well, guess what? Now I’m the moron going, ‘This is serious business.’ ”

The Special Forces are well trained, but that does not mean they will come back alive or sound, especially if they fight a war that should not be fought or embark on missions that are poorly planned. Their bodies are not bulletproof, nor are their minds. The discipline that is driven into them in training and at their bases can wear down if a war is long enough or murky enough or if they see too many of their comrades killed or injured. The ousting of the Taliban (though not what followed it) had the merit of being well executed and mercifully brief, yet still there was a price to pay.

I stayed in touch with Miller after my visit to Fort Campbell. We had developed a running joke, because he couldn’t talk to me about his next mission, which I knew was Iraq, and which he knew I knew was Iraq. The soldiers of the Fifth Group specialize in the Middle East, and they wear desert fatigues even at Fort Campbell, with their names printed above their breast pockets in Arabic. I would ask, when I called Miller, how things were going, and as September became October and Congress passed a resolution authorizing war, his responses went from ”not doing much” to ”it’s getting busier” to ”real busy.”

”If there’s going to be a fight, we want to be in it,” he said last month. ”But it’s more deliberate this time. Last time, it really was naivete.” He mentioned that the widows and children of his fallen friends still live in his close community; he is reminded of their sacrifice every day. ”The cost is huge and it requires serious deliberation. I’m privileged and truly want to be a part of it, but it’s not cheap. It’s not a big laugh.”

Peter Maass is the author of ”Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War,” his memoir of the conflict in Bosnia. He is a contributing writer for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/ 10SPECIAL.html?ex37967029&ei=1&enb40f3dd2e6d3e11 .

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

———–

It is rare to see such a disturbing piece of isolationist fluff these days, mostly because I don’t usually take the time to read deeply conservative, revisionist rags like the “National Review”. It occurs to me that if I searched thru the archives of the American press in 1939 I might see similar rhetoric to this article.

One advantage of living in Canada (granted it’s not Victor Hanson’s hobby farm) is the exposure to a number of different media and a plethora of opinions and “facts”, rather than the CNN/CNBC/ABC/CBS unfiltered Bush/Cheney viewpoint. It’s clear, having watched the limited spectrum of information being spoon-fed to right-wing bastards like Hanson, that he wouldn’t have the foggiest clue what is really happening in the middle east, thus exonerating his banal inquiries.

Now granted, it’s 3:30 AM and these are simply my views, based upon an education in this field, an open mind, and no substantial bias in any direction, but they might help Hanson in his quest for answers. Someone had better forward them to him. I know he’ll be willing to listen to my arguments and reflect objectively on the issues.

>”Why does Mr. Mubarak lecture us to become intimately engaged in the
>Middle East Peace process, when Mr. Clinton, who was very recently
>intimately engaged, got the intifada for his efforts?”

Well, Sharon made the intifada by marginalizing the PLO by committing brutal, violent attacks on innocent Palestinians while Arafat was suing for peace. As a result the Palestinians lost faith in Arafat’s ability to win through peace what intifada promised to win through war. Mr. Clinton was a marginal player at best. The same ruthless, greedy bastards that supported Sharon’s campaign financially in the US voted for Bush. So Clinton doesn’t have much to do with it at all.

>”And why does Mr. Mubarak seek to advise us about our proper diplomatic
>role, rather than explain to us why an Egyptian masterminded the deaths
>of 3,000 of our citizens and others of his countrymen are top lieutenants
>of Mr. Bin Laden and are now killing Americans in Afghanistan?”

Because Mr. Mubarak can no longer appeal to the UN because it is a benign bureaucracy, usurped by the US. The fact that several culprits were Egyptian is simply not relevant. Several were also British and American (Walker), so does that mean we should blame those countries because of the fact that 1 person out of tens of millions decided to fly a fucking 767 into the World Trade Center?

>”And why, instead of warning about rising anti-Americanism in his
>country ‹ itself the dividend of the virulent propaganda of his own
>state-run presses ‹ does he not ponder another recent poll, one showing
>that 76 percent of Americans themselves have an unfavorable view of the
>Arab world?”

First of all, show me that there’s any difference between the State-Run media in Egypt and the free press in the US right now (in terms of their unrepentant affirmation of government policy) and I will buy you a beer. Second, those people living in the third world have every reason to be hateful of the US, given their exploitation by US multinationals, the pervasiveness (particularly in Egypt) of rude US tourists, and the cultural imperialism which imprints a Leo DiCaprio/Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys aura upon every society in the world. Thirdly, American isolationism is not a new concept. That 76% of Americans don’t trust the Arab world is surprisingly low, given historical statistics.

>”Why do Middle Easterners become excited and haughty as they gloat to
>you that Americans are unpopular in their countries, but suddenly grow
>shocked, silent, and hurt when you politely and calmly explain why the
>feeling is becoming ‹ and perhaps should be ‹ mutual?”

The fact is that America, as a first world nation and our world’s only true superpower, can and must be held to a higher standard. As PLATO once said, the best form of government is a Benevolent Despot. As the governor of the planet earth in this decade, America must display convicted benevolence. Americans (and anyone) have an innate distrust of that which is unknown to them. The US media have done almost nothing to bridge that gap in helping Americans to understand that which opposes them.

>”Why do so many from the Middle East come here to find freedom, security,
>and safety ‹ and then criticize the country that they would never lea
>as they praise the country that they would never return to?”

As a Canadian who lived in the US for three years only to return home to Vancouver I must wonder aloud what could possibly be wrong with trying to amend a society’s behaviour to include that which you think is morally correct. That is how American Democracy was founded in the first place, and that is a fundamental tenet of a democratic society. America offers opportunities which are obvious however one need not ascribe to the entire ideology to benefit from its stronger points.

>”Why did we incur only anger from Eastern Europeans and Orthodox Christians
>for saving the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia from Milosevic, but no
>praise at all from the Islamic world itself?”

You incurred anger from those few who were displaced from their homes in Bosnia — their anger had little to do with religion. And the Islamic world, I certainly shouldn’t need to point our, is as fractious as Christianty and so one shouldn’t expect tacit support for every small deed. Frankly, I wasn’t aware that America’s participation in such events was strategically designed to win praise.

>”If the West Bank is the linchpin of the current Middle East crisis,
>what were wars #1, #2, and #3 there about, when it was entirely in Arab
>hands?”

The Middle East hasn’t been “entirely in Arab hands” for more than two centuries. In fact, in World Wars #1 and #2, the Arabs and Palestinians as well as other Muslims were promised self-rule and the withdrawal of imperialism in exchange for helping us with our war efforts in Europe. Go rent “Lawrence of Arabia”, dumbass.

>”Is there a difference between Palestinians preferring to kill
>Israeli civilians rather than soldiers, and Israelis preferring to
>kill Palestinian fighters rather than civilians?”

I know that I will get an emotional reaction to this statement in the wake of 9/11 but Terrorism is a tool of war for those who cannot fight wars. Israel must be held to a higher standard because they are clearly an army of occupation. Despite that, Isreali forces have shown no qualms, especially under Sharon’s leadership throughout the years, regarding the targeting of civilians. In the 1950s, then General Sharon burned entire villages and towns to rubble to make a highway safe for the passage of Israeli tanks, thus leading to his current legal troubles battling a Belgian war crimes tribunal.

>”Would the world be angry if a Jewish terrorist forced a captured
>Muslim to admit to his race and faith as he executed and beheaded
>him on film?”

Sadly this is the type of incident that has frequently occurred on both sides of the 50 years war. No one’s hands are clean here. I remind you that war is a brutal, savage thing and atrocities are committed on both sides. The correct question is: if an American special forces colonel captured an Al Quaeda soldier and tortured him, would we even hear about it on CNN?

>”Why do not Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, who overtly and
>stealthily war along side the Palestinians, simply all join with
>the former to gang up and declare war openly on Israel and then
>settle the issue on the battlefield?”

Because they themselves cannot get along with each other. Just like in Catholicism there are many sects within the Islamic faith, differing widely on cultural and political issues. The US has had a policy over the last 50 years of maintaining a delicate balance between the Sunnis, Shi’ites, and other more moderate groups in order to prevent Pan-Arabism from threatening not only Israel, but also the worldwide oil supply.

>”If we remove the fascist regime in Iraq and help institute
>consensual government there, why would we need troops any
>longer next door in Saudi Arabia? What and from whom would we
>then be there to protect?”

Since Saddam Hussein represents the Sunni minority in Iraq, if you removed him and held an election you would install a Shi’ite government which, when it aligned with the Iranian Shi’ites, would threaten the region in ways never before conceived of. The result would be a permanent and massively mechanized US presence in Saudi Arabia.

>”Has any American in any live broadcast on television ever
>asked a Saudi prince, the king of Jordan, the President of
>Egypt, or the royalty of Kuwait, whether they plan on allowing
>a free press or democratic government? If not, why not?”

American foreign policy is not focused on the global acceptance of democracy. American foreign policy seeks to support those governments which are favourable to US interests, and that will maintain a free-flowing supply of oil.

>”If 19 Americans incinerated 3,000 Muslims in Mecca or Medina,
>and blew up 20 acres in either of those cities with a two-kiloton
>explosion, would the Saudis or the Egyptians a few weeks later
>politely listen to admonitions from the American government about
>their incorrect Islamic policies in the Middle East?”

In 1991, American B-52s carpet bombed and killed somewhere between 125,000 – 200,000 Shi’ite conscripts who were herded out into the Kuwaiti desert by the Iraqi Republican Guard and were essentially starving to death and running out of ammunition and who were effectively waiting to surrender. At issue here is the fact that the incident was the most under-reported atrocity of the war, estimates of the numbers of dead varying so widely because not a single Western journalist chased down the story.

>”If the Eiffel Tower had been wrecked by an al Qaeda hijacked
>airliner, would the French have gone into Afghanistan after the
>terrorists? And if so, how and why? And would they have asked our
>help? And would we have given it?”

Since the French cannot effectively project power into the region, they would have sought the support of NATO. America would have used this as an excuse to do exactly what they’re doing today. If you think that the US is in the region solely to fight a war on terrorism then I have a bridge to sell you. It would have been much more difficult of course to sell the war to the American public, which traditionally turns a blind eye to deaths in foreign countries. Most Americans, including Joe Kennedy, thought that Hitler was a progressive leader while he was slaughtering jews by the tens of thousands in 1939.

>”Why in the last decade have we seen a succession of Israeli prime
>ministers and opposition figures but only Mr. Arafat alone?”

Last time I checked, Palestine isn’t even a country and the PLO isn’t a government. How can one have a democracy without borders?

>”Why do Middle Easterners become far more enraged at Israelis for
>shooting hundreds of Muslims than at Iranians, Iraqis, Jordanians,
>Syrians, Indians, Algerians, Russians, Somalis, and Serbians for
>liquidating tens of thousands?”

Israeli jeeps regularly pull up to taunt the inhabitants of Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where Muslims live in poverty without running water, plagued by disease, and walled in by the lack of education. Understandably, the occupants of the camps (young boys mostly) vent their frustration by throwing rocks at these jeeps. The Isrealis return fire with rockets. Does that not deserve criticism? All murder is worthy of examination and analysis — for instance, how many times more people have the US killed in Afghanistan than were killed at the WTC?

>”Will Palestinians cheer when Saddam Hussein launches chemical-laden
>missiles against Israel when we invade his country?”

Yes. Why shouldn’t they? I keep getting this feeling they’re at war… Oh yes, that’s right! THEY ARE.

>”If someone blew up another 3,000 Americans, would the EU do anything?”

Did America declare a war on Terrorism after the hostage disaster at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where the Isreali athletes were held hostage and subsequently killed by Palestinian terrorists? Did they declare a war on Terrorism when the US-supported IRA bombed a hotel during a wedding at Enneskillen in 1981?

>”Has anyone made an inventory of the all the goods, services, and
>equipment that France has sold to Iraq since 1991?”

Has anyone inventoried the military hardware sold by the US over the last 30 years to Iran, one of the most prominent members of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”?

The point of my selective responses to this profoundly disturbing article is to illustrate that hypocrisy is everywhere and that America, as imperialists, are necessarily held to a higher standard than third world countries. America is plagued by the difficulty of being “reluctant imperialists”, wherein American foreign policy requires the projection of power and influence worldwide to keep the economy moving but the citizens of the US are largely isolationists.

-Ian.

On 3/16/02 7:20 PM, “John Hall” wrote:

> http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson031502.shtml
>
>
>
> Some of the better ones:
>
>
>
> If the West Bank is the linchpin of the current Middle East crisis, what were
> wars #1, #2, and #3 there about, when it was entirely in Arab hands?
>
>
>
> Is there a difference between Palestinians preferring to kill Israeli
> civilians rather than soldiers, and Israelis preferring to kill Palestinian
> fighters rather than civilians?
>
>
>
> If the Eiffel Tower had been wrecked by an al Qaeda hijacked airliner, would
> the French have gone into Afghanistan after the terrorists? And if so, how and
> why? And would they have asked our help? And would we have given it?
>
>
>
> What would the world think if Mr. Sharon displayed a revolver and then
> attempted to strike one of his ministers at a Cabinet meeting?
>
>
>
> Why do Palestinians shoot machine-guns up into the air at funerals and
> Israelis do not?
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> If nearly two-thirds of the Arabic world believe that Arabs were not involved
> in September 11, why should any American believe anything that two out of
> three people from that region say?
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> Has anyone heard a Muslim in the United States condemn September 11 without
> employing the word “but?”
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VANCOUVER – Five days after the horrific attacks of September 11, US President George W. Bush announced that he wanted to receive Bin Laden “Dead Or Alive” in a grisly murmur that explicitly recalled the brutality of the American wild west [1]. This was again confirmed more recently by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, though he appeared to be speaking for himself and not on behalf of the nation, in a 60 Minutes interview [2]. Again the White House PR department cringes.

As the hunt goes on, through various channels the US has asserted its intent to hold Bin Laden accountable before a military court rather than within the American criminal justice system or in an international tribunal, if by some miracle he is caught alive. [3] As though he realizes what humiliation an appearance in any court would provide, Bin Laden has instructed his aides to kill him themselves if he is in jeopardy of being captured by the US. [2]

Regardless, the US and UK [4] are busily preparing cases to substantiate their allegations that Bin Laden is the culprit behind the September 11th bombings. American TV viewers have of course known this all along — after all, barely minutes after the attacks on September 11, what would soon become well-known photos of Osama Bin Laden began to hover over the shoulder of Peter Jennings and every other news anchor in the Western world.

But half a world away, many are worried about what in fact will happen once Bin Laden is caught — and it seems that America doesn’t have enough faith in her own criminal justice system to allow it to weigh the evidence and assert justice fairly. Most of the rhetoric seems to imply that it is a more fitting vengeance to see Osama’s pale, twisted body ravaged in a macabre street demonstration like that of his friend, Ayatollah Khomeini. [5]

There is little doubt that this is the form of closure that most Americans would like to see in beginning the healing process from September 11th. At this point the suspicions and gossip and the clear and consistent message from America’s President that their evil villain is in fact Osama Bin Laden is more than enough proof to make him the target of their hatred. This blood lust has grown so extreme that America’s tainted criminal justice system seems too soft for such a demon. His actual guilt or innocence is now an arbitrary concern.

That his incarceration in Federal prison would not be luxurious compared to his present lifestyle, presumably hopping through bitterly cold mountain caves with billions of dollars in weaponry bearing down on him, is an obvious fallacy.

That the agony of his subsequent appeals, his book publishing deal, the jailhouse interview with Geraldo, the Osama “Death Row Inmates” trading card from O-Pee-Chee [6], and all of the other signal noise associated with the other notables among America’s great nemeses would not bleed the soul of every patriotic American is an understatement.

On an even more chilling note, with his financial depth and notoriety, Bin Laden’s defense in the US Court System by the best attorneys available would be assured, which poses a disturbing notion. That he could be within the grasp of the US Government and yet slip through their fingers in a spectacular acquittal is an unconscionable thought to most Americans — who would be Bin Laden’s Mark Fuhrman?

As tends to be a very American strategy, rather than address the problem of a barren criminal justice system which has so clearly lost the confidence of those it is designed to protect, the US Leadership are electing to route around the problem. Simply grab the bad guy and, if you’re unfortunate enough that he survives, put him in the only place where you can be assured of vengeance — er…. justice: a Military Court. They would most assuredly tear him to shreds, and as a bonus, could order a firing squad to end him along with his lieutenants.

So can they do that?

Actually, there isn’t a lot of precedent here to guide what SHOULD happen to a defeated and captured suspected international terrorist such as Bin Laden. The US government has stopped just short of — but has cautiously been alluding to — Osama Bin Laden as a War Criminal. If this allegory is taken along its full course then the fate of Bin Laden and al Qaeda could become a hot issue of international law.

War Crimes have been addressed by International tribunals only four times in our history: After World War II for the Japanese and German leadership (in Tokyo and Nuremburg respectively), for Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s, and for Rwandan Hutus after they slaughtered more than 500,000 Tutsis over a four-month period in 1994.

The Nuremburg Trials were run by the so-called “International Military Tribunal”, which coincidentally was set-up by World War II’s victors: France, USSR, the USA, and Great Britain. [7] The focus of the trials were charges of Conspiracy, which were then uncharted waters for most courts of law (and which will now likely constitute the bulk of any case against Bin Laden). Nuremburg saw all 22 of its accused indicted (including Martin Borrman, who was never apprehended) and prosecuted.

More recently the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY for short) [8] was set up by the UN Security Council — whose five permanent members are the UK, France, USA, Russia, and recently China (see a pattern?). This was a fairly standard operation to prosecute more than 100 Bosnian Serbs (incl. Slobodan Milosevic) who were involved in Serbian “Ethnic Cleansing” during that war.

Under this tribunal, British troops actually entered Bosnia to capture and arrest two previously indicted Serbs (one was killed and the other apprehended). This was the first time that foreign troops mandated by the UN have infiltrated a country to capture and arrest war criminals. Unfortunately, though, the ICTY trials have had very limited success, with only 10 of 78 indicted war criminals currently in custody.

The UN Security Council also set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994 under similar circumstances. In Rwanda, 21 of the two dozen men indicted have been seized. [9]

Outside of specific tribunals, the legality of grabbing a person from one country and shipping them to another to stand trial is more than a little bit hazy.

In any normal situation, governments resort to extradition treaties made between two countries. Of course, in this case no such treaty exists between the United States and Afghanistan [10], though Pakistan [11] does have treaties with both the US and UK. Regardless, this is no simple case of a drug smuggler or a run-of-the-mill murderer.

Some specific resolutions made by the UN have attempted to address this grander sort of crime.

According to the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, [12] adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 15 December 1997, “The offences referred to in [this] Convention are deemed to be extraditable offences between States Parties under existing extradition treaties, and under the Convention itself.” This seems to lead one to believe that states now have the right to prosecute terrorists as criminals who operate outside their borders.

But the text here specifically refers to “existing extradition treaties”. Beyond this, it is non-specific and does not bind Afghanistan to extradite Bin Laden (which would require them to have already taken him into legal custody), and even makes allowances for them placing him on trial themselves for bombings abroad.

To add to the confusion, the UN ratified in December 1973 a treaty called “Principles of international co-operation in the detection, arrest, extradition and punishment of persons guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity”. [13] This resolution allows states to try their own citizens for war crimes against humanity, wherever they are committed. Given that Bush himself refers to Bin Laden as a war criminal, perhaps Saudi Arabia would, by the letter of international law, have the right to punish its most famous dissident citizen.

International law seems to allow any country’s court to try another country’s citizen as a War Criminal, with some restrictions: A person cannot be extradited “to a country which cannot assure that any trial on such charges meets international standards for fairness and does not result in the imposition of the death penalty or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.” [14] Once again, the key is extradition. Without extradition, the trial may go on without the presence of the accused, and the result may be the inconvenience of an indicted war criminal not being able to visit that particular country anymore.

In the wake of the September 11th Bombings, the UN itself has done very little, aside from “strong resolutions condemning acts of terrorism” [15] and the heartfelt condolences of Kofi Annan, to address these concerns. The lack of effective pre-existing resolutions contending with terrorism and its legal aftermath, the lack of an effective committee on terrorism within the UN, and the lack of an operative court of tribunal which could hold jurisdiction over any accused terrorists or war criminals has clearly left a vacuum.

The Bush administration, which would probably prefer for the UN to mind its own business anyway, has charged into this vacuum full-steam ahead, with guns blazing. According to Senator Bob Leahy, head of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Bush’s order says that “it is acceptable to hold secret trials and summary executions, without the possibility of judicial review, at least when the defendant is a foreign national” [16].

Terrorism has become an American problem and, as such, it has very recently acquired a very American solution: massive and invasive military force. The desperate hunt for one man and his fledgling organization has resulted in the further destruction of a nation already battered by decades of sinister and brutal warfare.

The “New World Order” [17] envisioned by Bush (George Sr., that is) in a 1990 speech seems to be closer and closer to becoming reality with each and every bomb that strikes an Afghani hamlet suspected of housing members of the al Qaeda network. The new Emperor is another George Bush, and he appears to have taken this incident as his opportunity both to secure his own place in history as well as his nation’s place as the de facto superpower controlling the world. Somewhere in his coat-tails the UN has once again squandered an opportunity to serve as an effective policing agent on the international scene, further sparking questions as to its relevance in the New World.

To tie the war in Afghanistan to the hunt for terrorism is ludicrous. That the oppression of women by the Taliban is abhorrent to the Junior Bush administration while the atrocities of more favorable trading nations such as Indonesia and others is ignored portrays the true danger of justice being administered so arbitrarily.

This war, as well as its predecessor Operation Desert Storm, together underscore the need for a truly authoritative International organization — one that is not so easily swayed by the interests of a single nation, and one that is not so encumbered by its own bureaucracy as to be completely ineffective. But, alas, it is most likely too late for this chapter.

Our own confused behaviour through the twentieth century leaves us with a few questions:

– Is terrorism really just another form of warfare? – What separates a war hero from a war criminal? – Is warfare a domain that should be exclusively adjudicated before the eyes of the entire world?

-Ian.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

– Martin Luther King

[1] – http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/WTC_MAIN010917.html [2] – http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011121/ts/attack_dc_840.html [3] – http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=topnews&StoryID87727 [4] – http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2001/11/ukreport.html [5] – http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/699/baindp28.htm [6] – http://www.laweekly.com/ink/99/24/news-cromer.shtml [7] – http://www.nara.gov/iwg/papers/imt.html [8] – http://www.un.org/icty/ [9] – http://www.ictr.org/ [10] – http://www.uncjin.org/Laws/extradit/afghan.pdf [11] – http://www.uncjin.org/Laws/extradit/pakista.pdf [12] – http://untreaty.un.org/English/Terrorism/Conv11.pdf [13] – http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/x5picoda.htm [15] – http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID”30 [14] – http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/10/2/205314.shtml [16] – http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011116/pl/congress_bin_laden_4.html [17] – http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research/ay1997/acsc/97-0389.htm