Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: September 13, 2001
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
"World War III"
[J] ERUSALEM
As I restlessly lay awake early
yesterday, with CNN on my TV and dawn breaking over the holy places of
Jerusalem, my ear somehow latched onto a statement made by the U.S. transportation
secretary, Norman Mineta, about the new precautions that would be put in
place at U.S. airports in the wake of Tuesday's unspeakable terrorist attacks:
There will be no more curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a
group of terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee,
also watching CNN and laughing hysterically: "Hey boss, did you hear that?
We just blew up Wall Street and the Pentagon and their response is no more
curbside check- in?"
I don't mean to criticize Mr. Mineta.
He is doing what he can. And I have absolutely no doubt that the Bush team,
when it identifies the perpetrators, will make them pay dearly. Yet there
was something so absurdly futile and American about the curbside ban that
I couldn't help but wonder: Does my country really understand that this
is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War
III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.
And this Third World War does not
pit us against another superpower. It pits us ? the world's only superpower
and quintessential symbol of liberal, free-market, Western values ? against
all the super-empowered angry men and women out there. Many of these super-empowered
angry people hail from failing states in the Muslim and third world. They
do not share our values, they resent America's influence over their lives,
politics and children, not to mention our support for Israel, and they
often blame America for the failure of their societies to master modernity.
What makes them super-empowered,
though, is their genius at using the networked world, the Internet and
the very high technology they hate, to attack us. Think about it: They
turned our most advanced civilian planes into human- directed, precision-guided
cruise missiles ? a diabolical melding of their fanaticism and our technology.
Jihad Online. And think of what they hit: The World Trade Center ? the
beacon of American-led capitalism that both tempts and repels them, and
the Pentagon, the embodiment of American military superiority.
And think about what places in Israel
the Palestinian suicide bombers have targeted most. "They never hit synagogues
or settlements or Israeli religious zealots," said the Haaretz columnist
Ari Shavit. "They hit the Sbarro pizza parlor, the Netanya shopping mall.
The Dolphinarium disco. They hit the yuppie Israel, not the yeshiva Israel."
So what is required to fight a war
against such people in such a world? To start with, we as Americans will
never be able to penetrate such small groups, often based on family ties,
who live in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or Lebanon's wild Bekaa
Valley. The only people who can penetrate these shadowy and ever-mutating
groups, and deter them, are their own societies. And even they can't do
it consistently. So give the C.I.A. a break.
Israeli officials will tell you
that the only time they have had real quiet and real control over the suicide
bombers and radical Palestinian groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad,
is when Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority tracked them, jailed
them or deterred them.
So then the question becomes, What
does it take for us to get the societies that host terrorist groups to
truly act against them?
First we have to prove that we are
serious, and that we understand that many of these terrorists hate our
existence, not just our policies. In June I wrote a column about the fact
that a few cell-phone threats from Osama bin Laden had prompted President
Bush to withdraw the F.B.I. from Yemen, a U.S. Marine contingent from Jordan
and the U.S. Fifth Fleet from its home base in the Persian Gulf. This U.S.
retreat was noticed all over the region, but it did not merit a headline
in any major U.S. paper. That must have encouraged the terrorists. Forget
about our civilians, we didn't even want to risk our soldiers to face their
threats.
The people who planned Tuesday's
bombings combined world- class evil with world-class genius to devastating
effect. And unless we are ready to put our best minds to work combating
them ? the World War III Manhattan Project ? in an equally daring, unconventional
and unremitting fashion, we're in trouble. Because while this may have
been the first major battle of World War III, it may be the last one that
involves only conventional, non-nuclear weapons.
Second, we have been allowing a
double game to go on with our Middle East allies for years, and that has
to stop. A country like Syria has to decide: Does it want a Hezbollah embassy
in Damascus or an American one? If it wants a U.S. embassy, then it cannot
play host to a rogue's gallery of terrorist groups.
Does that mean the U.S. must ignore
Palestinian concerns and Muslim economic grievances? No. Many in this part
of the world crave the best of America, and we cannot forget that we are
their ray of hope. But apropos of the Palestinians, the U.S. put on the
table at Camp David a plan that would have gotten Yasir Arafat much of
what he now claims to be fighting for. That U.S. plan may not be sufficient
for Palestinians, but to say that the justifiable response to it is suicide
terrorism is utterly sick.
Third, we need to have a serious
and respectful dialogue with the Muslim world and its political leaders
about why many of its people are falling behind. The fact is, no region
in the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, has fewer freely elected governments
than the Arab-Muslim world, which has none. Why? Egypt went through a whole
period of self- criticism after the 1967 war, which produced a stronger
country. Why is such self-criticism not tolerated today by any Arab leader?
Where are the Muslim leaders who
will tell their sons to resist the Israelis ? but not to kill themselves
or innocent non-combatants? No matter how bad, your life is sacred. Surely
Islam, a grand religion that never perpetrated the sort of Holocaust against
the Jews in its midst that Europe did, is being distorted when it is treated
as a guidebook for suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim
leader will say that?
These are some of the issues we
will have to address as we fight World War III. It will be a long war against
a brilliant and motivated foe. When I remarked to an Israeli military official
what an amazing technological feat it was for the terrorists to hijack
the planes and then fly them directly into the most vulnerable spot in
each building, he pooh-poohed me.
"It's not that difficult to learn
how to fly a plane once it's up in the air," he said. "And remember, they
never had to learn how to land."
No, they didn't. They only had to
destroy. We, by contrast, have to fight in a way that is effective without
destroying the very open society we are trying to protect. We have to fight
hard and land safely. We have to fight the terrorists as if there were
no rules, and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists.
It won't be easy. It will require our best strategists, our most creative
diplomats and our bravest soldiers. Semper Fi.
