A Geopolitical New Deal: Realism Means Helping the World
 
Flora Lewis Flora Lewis
Friday, November 9, 2001
PARIS The U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, talks of "asymmetrical warfare," by which he means such a difference in hardware that low-tech (caves) can render high-tech (B-52s) of little use. The offense-defense equation doesn't work in the way classical military planners expect.
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The same asymmetry is true of war aims in Afghanistan. The United States and its allies are fighting to maintain a certain order in the world, to eliminate the destructive capacity of a relatively small but passionate set of believers.
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President George W. Bush seems to confer a rhetorical equivalence when he says the terrorists threaten civilization itself with their "mad global ambitions," their "brutal determination to control every life and all of life." But this gives an unearned psychological power to the foe, an escalated status that multiplies its menace, which is exactly what the use of terror as a weapon is meant to do.
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Mr. Bush is right, however, in saying that people must refuse to succumb to the demoralization of panic. The possibility of panic is part of the advantage that Qaida has in prosecuting its cause.
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The Qaida network is not really trying to achieve anything except to frighten and humiliate, unlike the Basque and Irish republican and Palestinian terrorists who seek to advance a nationalist goal.
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Qaida types have an edge because they can claim to be winning by simply existing, by compelling Americans to react with behavior we really dislike, bombing civilians by accident, imposing secrecy and intrusion for needs of security, supporting distasteful leaders or regimes that we are ready to bribe to support us.
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A quote from one of the Qaida documents which found its way into reports from Pakistan lately said, "We love death as much as you love life, so we will win." That is indeed a devastating attitude that permits no competition, no compromise, no concession. It is idle to debate about some kind of dialogue, some offer to win favor or diminish hatred.
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America has to resist, even though it means in fact enhancing the enemy by accepting the challenge. But it does not mean that we have to resist in the way they expect, on their terms, with our apparently rather ineffective if hugely explosive "asymmetrical" weapons.
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The proposal for a bombing pause must be decided on the basis of just what difference it would make to our objectives of dismantling Osama bin Laden's organization and its ability to attack - not on the basis of whether it would allow his backers to feel they have won another round and be encouraged, and not to show Afghans and other Muslims that we are sorry they are getting hurt.
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We don't know much about this terror on which we have angrily declared war, so we have to know better about ourselves, what we want out of this fight, where it should lead, how to judge whether we are on the right track.
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The best measure, since success against terrorism will be made evident only by an absence of more disasters and not by some kind of surrender, will be if we are doing things that we want to do anyway, that we can feel are useful. Many voices have urged that the anti-terror coalition must go to "the roots of terrorism." That is a pointless illusion. Those roots may be in sick societies, in suffering that could be avoided, in history, in human nature itself. It would be perversely self-defeating to recognize at last a shared responsibility for the pains of this world because that might help prevent new terrorists from attacking. That would just be admitting some effectiveness in terror.
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We must show that the action we want to offer is for life - not because we want to undermine the appeal of terrorists whose main offer is release from frustration through action and death, but because we do have constructive goals and believe in universal values that can be promoted by education, health care, a fight against hunger.
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There has been an acidulous debate for some time among American foreign policy advisers on whether priority should be given to "realism" or to "idealism." Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, scorns what he calls "Wilsonian idealism" and argues that it is pernicious.
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His school asserts that "realism" requires defining the "national interest" and putting it ahead of everything. This fails to perceive that the world has changed. While the United States feels that it has the right, like every other country, to pursue its national interest, it is no longer like every other country and doesn't want to be.
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There is a kind of arrogance in claiming such a right and exercising super-power according to which application suits best at a given moment. For much of the world, if the United States is not clearly a part of the solution to a widespread problem, it is part of the problem, because with its vast power others are convinced it would be able to promote a solution if it really wanted to.
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And so it is no longer realistic to think that America can ignore the needs, hopes and contributions of others. It is realistic to see that its participation in the world does not depend only on it. Terrorists prove that Americans live in the same world as they do, whether we like it or not. It is realistic to see that we can help it become a better world, and they cannot.

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