Hitch: we must learn to become more ruthless
[I’m awaiting Hitch’s offer to volunteer in Iraq, in accordance with
his lovely coda about on-the-job training in ruthlessness.]
Wall Street Journal - September 11, 2006
Solidarity
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
September 11, 2006; Page A14
Never mind where I was standing or what I was doing this time five
years ago. (Because really, what could be less pertinent?) Except
that I do remember wondering, with apparent irrelevance, how soon I
would be hearing one familiar cliché. And that I do remember hearing,
with annoyance, one other observation that I believe started the
whole post-9/11 epoch on the wrong foot.
The cliché, from which we have been generally but not completely
spared, was the one about American “loss of innocence.” Nobody, or
nobody serious, thought that this store-bought phrase would quite
rise to the occasion of the incineration of downtown Manhattan and
3,000 of its workers. It might have done for the Kennedy
assassination or Watergate, but partly for that very reason it was
redundant or pathetic by mid-day on September 11, 2001. Indeed, I
believe that the expression, with its concomitant naïve self-regard,
may have become superseded for all time. If so, good. The beginning
of wisdom is to recognize that the U.S. was assaulted for what it
really is, and what it understands as the center of modernity, and
not for its unworldliness.
But here I am, writing that it was “the United States” that was
assaulted. And there was the president, and most of the media,
speaking about “an attack on America.” True as this was and is, it is
not quite the truth. I deliberately declined, for example, an
invitation to attend a memorial for the many hundreds of my fellow-
Englishmen who had perished in the inferno. I could have done the
same if I was Armenian or Zanzibari — more than 80 nationalities
could count their dead on that day. It would have been far better if
President Bush had characterized the atrocity as an attack on
civilization itself, and it would be preferable if we observed the
anniversary in the same spirit.
In the past five years, I have either registered or witnessed or
protested at or simply “observed” the following:
(1) The reopening of a restaurant in Bali, where several dozen
Australian holidaymakers and many Indonesian civilians had earlier
been torn to shreds. (2) The explosion of a bomb at a Tube station in
London which is regularly used by two of my children. (3) The murder
of a senior Shiite cleric outside his place of worship in Iraq. (4)
The attempt to destroy the Danish economy — and to torch Danish
embassies and civilians — as a consequence of the publication of a
few caricatures in the Danish press. (5) The murder of the U.N. envoy
to Baghdad: a heroic Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello, as
vengeance (according to his murderers) for his role in shepherding
East Timor to independence. (6) The near-successful attempt to blow
up the Indian parliament in New Delhi, and two successful attempts to
disrupt the commerce and society of Mumbai. (7) The destruction of
the Golden Dome in Samara: a place of aesthetic as well as devotional
importance. (8) The bombing of ancient synagogues in Tunisia, Turkey
and Morocco. (9) The evisceration in the street of a Dutch filmmaker,
Theo van Gogh, and the lethal threats that drove his Somali-born
colleague, a duly elected member of the Dutch parliament, into hiding
and then exile. (10) The ritual slaughter on video of a Jewish
reporter for this newspaper.
This list is not exhaustive or in any special order, and it does not
include any of the depredations undertaken by the votaries of the
Iranian version of Islamic fundamentalism. I shall just say that I
have stood, alone or in company, with Hindus, Jews, Shiites and
secularists (my own non-sectarian group) in the face of a cult of
death that worships suicide and exalts murder and desecration. This
has not dimmed, for me, the importance of what happened in New York
and Washington and Pennsylvania. But it has made me slightly bored
with those who continue to wonder, fruitlessly so far, in what
fashion “we” should commemorate it.
The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials
are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on
the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused –
not just overseas but in this country also — of making or at least
of implying a “partisan” point. I debate with the “antiwar” types
almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and
I can tell you that they have been “war-weary” ever since the sun
first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics
are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far
off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan
and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all
nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the
bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is
“the war” that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of
thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is
produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest,
and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban
and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of
murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit
that they were not “antiwar” at all.
One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed
question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we
have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo
on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet
incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-
coding of the “threat level,” is the way in which most Americans
actually experience the “war on terror.”) Anyone who lost their
“innocence” on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to
begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known
already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which
can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and
many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing
(and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud,
leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that
an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable
to “us”? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-
Ladenism’s other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.
The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We” — and
our allies — simply have to become more ruthless and more
experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in
Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our
young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain,
and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate
and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we
shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend
our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day
ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was
giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and “we” did not even know
that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were
a bit “innocent” after all.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is
“Thomas Jefferson: Author of America” (HarperCollins, 2006).