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(revised 11/7/01)
Unintended Consequences
John Tirman, AlterNet
October 24, 2001
All wars have unintended consequences. No matter how cautious generals and political leaders are, war sets in motion waves of change that can alter the currents of history. More often, generals and political leaders are not troubled by long-term side effects; they are sharply focused on achieving a victory and war's aims. The result is that the unseen and unintended occur, at times as a bitter riptide which overwhelms the original rationales for engaging in armed combat.
This unpredictable cycle of action and reaction has thwarted U.S. policy in southwestern Asia for 50 years. It began with attempts to contain the Soviet Union and control the oil-rich fields of the Persian Gulf, and continues today in the popular assault in Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qa'ida terrorist network. In that half century, nearly every major initiative led to an unexpected and sometimes catastrophic reaction, for which new military remedies were devised, only again to stir unforeseen problems. The cycle, regrettably, may be repeating again.
The half-century history begins with CIA intrigue in Iran. The original spigot of Middle Eastern oil, Iran was long dominated by Britain and its oil company, British Petroleum. During World War II, strongman Reza Kahn, a Nazi sympathizer, was deposed by the British in favor of his son, Reza Shah, who in turn was shunted aside by the increasingly assertive parliament, the Majlis. In 1951, the Majlis elected as premier Mohammed Mossedegh, a nationalist reformer, who quickly sought control over Iran's oil wealth. The British, aghast at seeing 50 percent of BP's stake in Iran nationalized, sought his ouster, which the CIA provided in 1953. The Shah was reinstated and ruled with an iron fist, enabled by lavish American military aid.
The overthrow of Mossedegh remains a bitter memory for Iranians, and for Muslims more widely. While he was mainly a secular nationalist, even Islamic militants bewail his fate as another instance of Western interference and violence. In the years of the Shah's rule, many of the beleaguered reformers gravitated toward the ulama, the clerical class, who were relatively independent of the regime. So U.S. policy, which targeted the left as possible Soviet sympathizers or threats to oil interests, had the unintended effect of strengthening the political power and sophistication of the ulama.
By the 1970s, the Shah had become a self-styled regional power, flush with an unfettered flow of weaponry from the United States. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, neither a wallflower when it came to arming allies against perceived Soviet expansionism, had bluntly dismissed the Shah's pleas for military supremacy, but President Nixon embraced the Shah without restraint. Not only were the newest jet fighters and other advanced weaponry made available, but endless commercial ties were created, bringing thousands of Americans to Teheran. In 1971, the Shah's oil minister launched a cascade of price increases that rocked the American economy for nearly a decade, but it was American guns and products that the ever-richer Shah and his cohort really sought. A widely perceived decadence eroded whatever support the regime maintained, and by the late 1970s, the Shah was struggling against the now-familiar Muslim "street" that detested the Westernized elite and resented their fabulous oil riches in the midst of poverty. In 1979, the Shah abdicated and left Iran in a stew of disarray. It was only a matter of months before the Islamic Revolution came to full flower.
The Devastating Aftermath
Apart from the war in Vietnam, where millions died, the U.S. role in imposing and sustaining the Shah in Iran is perhaps the most invidious episode in America's foreign policy. The consequences are colossal, and malignancies continue to appear. Among the first of these was the change in Soviet policy toward the region, and specifically in Afghanistan.
The Soviets had meddled in Afghanistan for years, supporting its on-again, off-again communist party. A mildly pro-Soviet regime in Kabul was under intense pressure from Islamic radicals in the late 1970s, however, and Moscow kept a wary eye on the chaotic events in neighboring Iran. As Islamic militancy gained in the post-Shah governments in Teheran, the Kabul regime became less and less tenable. In the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership opposed intervention until the Afghan regime was in complete turmoil. A high-level Russian, Georgy Kornienko, notes it was Defense Minister D.F. Ustinov who finally convinced the others to intervene: "The push to change his former point of view," he recalls in a memoir, "came from the stationing of American military ships in the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1979, and the incoming information about preparations for a possible American invasion of Iran, which threatened to cardinally change the military-strategic situation in the region to the detriment of the interests of the Soviet Union. If the United States can allow itself such things tens of thousands of kilometers away from their territory in the immediate proximity from the USSR borders, why then should we be afraid to defend our positions in the neighboring Afghanistan? -- this was approximately Ustinov's reasoning."
Politburo minutes from the entire previous year, now available, make clear the Soviet leaders' view that the Islamic militants were responsible for major attacks on government forces in Herat and elsewhere, and posed a threat, particularly with the active aid of the new Khomeini regime in Iran. The USSR, after all, included five Central Asia republics that were predominantly Muslim and bordered both Afghanistan and Iran. So the Shah's decades-long brutality gave rise to a broad Islamic movement in the region that, once in power in Teheran, not only alarmed Washington but also worried the much nearer Moscow.
The U.S. response to the collapse of the Shah, the triumph of Khomeini, and the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to be played out tragically over the coming dozen years. Beginning with the Carter administration in the summer of 1979 -- months before the Soviets invaded -- the CIA provided arms and training to the Afghan opposition, the now infamous mujaheddin, first to provoke the Soviets to ill-considered action (as Carter advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski has since revealed), and, after the December 1979 invasion, to make the Soviet stay in Afghanistan as inhospitable as possible. The large flow of arms and high-tech weapons like shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles did not come until 1986, by which time the Soviet leadership was firmly committed to departure. But a steady supply of Chinese-made AK-47s and Soviet-made weapons sent via Egypt provided the Islamic rebels with ample firepower to cripple the Soviets' aims in Afghanistan. It was, at the time, heralded as the wondrous victory of the "Reagan Doctrine," the strategy to arm "freedom fighters" against Soviet-leaning regimes in places like Angola and Nicaragua.
In all its venues and applications, the Reagan Doctrine had no qualms about the human costs of fomenting warfare, and most important for the present predicament, had no post-conflict strategy. The wages of war were high for all. Angola is still in a civil war more than 20 years later, with the Reagan-backed Savimbi fueling a self-aggrandizing conflict. Nicaragua is devastated, impoverished; the Contras, who battled the Sandinista regime, engaged in a drug trade that now swamps the region.
So, too, with Afghanistan: the Soviets left in 1989, defeated, but their departure also left Afghanistan a political minefield (to go along with the 10 million real land mines left by both sides in the war). Warlords battled with each other for nearly a decade until the most extreme faction, the Taliban, gained ascendency in the late 1990s and provided the home to the terrorists the United States now seeks to rout. In the meantime, the 3 million AK-47s sent to the mujaheddin have been located as far away as Liberia and Mozambique, the fodder for other wars and misery. Professor Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics wrote at the end of the 1980s: "The most striking feature of the Reagan Doctrine was the way in which Washington itself came to be a promoter and organizer of terrorist actions. The mujaheddin in Afghanistan, UNITA in Angola and the Nicaraguan Contras were all responsible for abominable actions in their pursuit of "freedom" -- massacring civilians, torturing and raping captives, destroying schools, hospitals and economic installations, killing and mutilating prisoners ... Reagan was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people through terrorism."
At about the same time the Afghan resistance was being organized with U.S. aid, the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein launched an attack on Iran to gain the oil fields on the gulf. This unprovoked act of war followed a period of quiet rapprochement with Washington (Bzrezinski again), and throughout the ensuing eight years of carnage -- in which one million people died -- the U.S. government increasingly helped Iraq, supplying it with more than $5 billion in financial credits, intelligence data, heavy equipment like trucks and political respectability. In most estimates, the U.S. "tilt" toward Baghdad was indispensable in saving Saddam from defeat.
The reason for the "tilt" was to frustrate the Islamic radicals in Teheran. This counter-Khomeini strategy extended beyond Iraq to countries like Turkey (where the U.S. approved a military coup in 1980 and suppression of Kurds, resulting in a civil war that has taken 30,000 lives) and Saudi Arabia (the keystone of U.S. oil policy, which led the U.S. to cast a blind eye on Saudi corruption and human-rights abuses). But Iraq, during the 1980s, was the centerpiece of this gambit.
After the catastrophic war of 1980-88, the new president, George Bush, embraced a policy of accommodation with Iraq. Within a few months of taking office, National Security Directive (NSD) 26 set the policy: "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area" were the two rationales of a strategy that would "pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy ... Also, as a means of developing access and influence with the Iraqi defense establishment, the United States should consider sales of non-lethal forms of military assistance." Said a senior official of NSD 26: "The concern over Iranian fundamentalism was a given." The Reagan-Bush accommodationist policy toward Iraq meant that Saddam received only a slap on the wrist for the murder, with chemical weapons, of 5,000 Kurds in the north at the end of the war with Iran.
But when Iraq occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the tilt fell over. The anti-Iran strategy, itself a response to the ruinous policy of supporting the Shah, now had unavoidable consequences: the long and devastating war in Afghanistan; intensified bloodshed in the Iran-Iraq war; the Kurdish massacres in Turkey and Iraq; an acceleration of Islamic militancy in Pakistan and civil war in Kashmir; and the subjugation of Kuwait and the threat to oil fields of Saudi Arabia. It has had other corollary effects, such as a tolerance of Syrian misdeeds, as well as devotion to the perversely corrupt and fragile House of Saud, as Seymour Hersh so chillingly reports in the Oct. 22 issue of the New Yorker. One must ask, in the wake of such an astounding set of catastrophes, if leaving Khomeini's Iran alone after 1980 would not have been less devastating in human terms, or whether Soviet "hegemony" over Afghanistan would not have been far better for Afghans, than 20 years of war, displacement and impoverishment.
The Next Catastrophe?
What will be next in this series of haunting mistakes? If this 50-year history teaches us anything, it is that aggressive military actions surely will earn a violent reaction, and that the pattern consistently displays three characteristics: large-scale human misery; the "involvement" of neighboring countries; and the amplification of militant Islamic sentiment around the world. In just a matter of weeks, all characteristics are now visible in the "war on terrorism."
While the responsibility for hundreds of thousands of starving or displaced Afghans cannot directly be laid at the feet of President Bush, the U.S. bombing campaign is the proximate cause. Panicky refugee flows are beginning to swell; on Oct. 19, the responsible U.N. agency said there are now refugees in the thousands and that conditions on the border with Pakistan are "chaotic." This steady stream of hungry and homeless is likely to enlarge if the bombing continues, civil war worsens or on-the-ground U.S. action escalates. By mid-November, food supplies will be harder to convey to "our" Afghans as winter sets in; shelter is also a desperate need. Some truly horrifying predictions of freezing and starvation have been aired -- up to one million -- which is improbable, but even thousands would be a sad ordeal.
The refugee situation is more complex, because it is not only a continuing misery for millions (already 3.5 million Afghans live in either Pakistan or Iran, a vast number in squalor), but because it strains the host communities, and is an incubator for militancy and violence. The 900,000 internally displaced Afghans will get far less international attention, even though their material circumstances may be desperate and their political vulnerability perilous.
In the idiom of international relations, the most worrisome consequence is the perilous state of Pakistan. Coerced to cooperate with the United States, the military government is risking a revolt from below. Tensions with India are escalating over terrorist attacks in Kashmir, orchestrated perhaps by the same Pakistani military establishment we are now utilizing to attack Afghanistan. The worries about collapse or gradual disintegration of secular rule in Pakistan are punctuated by its possession of nuclear weapons. It is conceivable that within a few years the same sort of criminals who attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 will have weapons of considerably greater power than four commercial jets. If one is comforted by the denigration of such scenarios by American officials, recall that they are the same group that engineered the accommodationist policy toward Iraq and the embrace of the mujaheddin. The eventual takeover of Islamabad by politically noxious "Islamicists" is a near certainty, if the war escalates or is prolonged, or if an equally dangerous clique gains control in Kabul. It is difficult to see how Pakistan can readily stabilize under circumstances that have nearly come to this fruition as of mid-October.
The refugee flows and the anti-American sentiment among even moderate Muslims in the region also may destabilize Iran. The advances of moderation via civil society and the two electoral victories of President Khatemi could be reversed as a result of the war in Afghanistan and the American right wing's demands to antagonize Teheran as a "sponsor" of terrorism, along with the Taliban and Saddam. Internal political struggles in Iran were slowly being won by the forces of civility and democracy, but the "war on terrorism" may soon claim them as victims.
The calls to mount a campaign against Saddam, which is supported by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the pundits at the Washington Post, is nearly beyond the pale of predictability if the administration is foolish enough to try it. Such a move, which would require a colossal military effort, would stir the Muslim street to threaten not only Pakistan and Iran, but Saudi Arabia and possibly other countries. These episodes of unrest in the region always reveal the decrepit state of the Saudi royal family, its immense debt from high living and corruption and the devil's bargain the U.S. has struck to preserve control of oil. There have been sizable, bloody riots even as far away as Nigeria and Indonesia.
The "war of terrorism," now conducted mainly on Afghan soil, is enough to stir these anti-American sentiments, although perhaps a short and precise military campaign is necessary and we will simply have to cope with the fallout. But a long bombing campaign, a lengthy American search-and-destroy mission in the Afghan countryside, a bloody assault on the Taliban and siege of Kabul -- these unwarranted tactics, coupled with a refugee crisis, could inflame the tinderbox of Muslim sentiments. Invading Iraq would then only confirm their worst suspicions, that is, that Washington is intent upon destroying not just terrorists, but regimes in Muslim societies.
The roots of Muslim rage are not well understood, though surely the history of American (and, it must be said, British and French) actions in the region stretching from Algeria to Pakistan is a source. Justified or not, Muslim grievances center on the perception that America wields its power carelessly without a thought for the value of Muslim lives, whether Palestinians in the desperate refugee camps, Iraqis gunned down in the "turkey shoot" of Desert Storm, Kurds manipulated by one U.S. government after another or the millions who endure the savage rule of despots propped up by Washington. The ravages of globalized capitalism, while a more indirect burden, are also at work, because it is a system that, intentionally or not, undermines traditional ways of life, while failing to provide the satisfactions of modernity to any but a very few. If the search and seizure of bin Laden is not accomplished very quickly, and with unambiguous evidence of his guilt, he will become -- if he hasn't already -- a legend to tens of millions and a model for further action against the West.
Steps Toward a Different Strategy
The goal of neutralizing or eliminating bin Laden and the al-Qa'ida network is laudable. Critics of American foreign policy should not mistake this network for folk heroes along the lines of Che Guevara or Franz Fanon. Al-Qa'ida is promoting a different order altogether, one that is violent at its core, not only in its complete rejection of pluralism and openness in Muslim societies, but in its repression of women and others. It is a dangerous and reactionary ideology in all respects. Christopher Hitchens has labeled it a form of fascism, which is not historically accurate, but the emotional meaning is resonant.
So how should the United States and its European allies deal with this danger? A detailed strategy is not something most of us are prepared to put forward, but some criteria are comprehensible. The first is to see this form of terrorism as acts of criminals rather than acts of warriors. (Hendrick Hertzberg in the New Yorker made this useful contrast right after the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that it ennobles the hijackers to call this a war; they are criminals.) Law enforcement, enhanced by the full throttle of intelligence services -- including cooperation with allies -- is the most likely way to foil al-Qa'ida over the long haul.
Aggressive investigations, detainment of plausible suspects, freezing financial assets and the like keep terrorists on the move, harassed and disrupted. Counter-communications strategies and pressure on thugs like the Saudi princes who fund al-Qa'ida will further immobilize them. This does mean a very long effort, stretching out over years; it is, in fact, one that has already been underway for years, but devalued and made inept by successive American presidents. A "law enforcement plus" strategy does involve some diplomatic resources and military actions that go beyond, for example, the longtime struggle against the mafia. One should not underestimate the disruptive power of killing bin Laden, if it can be quickly administered. But the longer term strategy is essentially one of old-fashioned techniques that require constant vigilance, cooperation across many borders and respect for law and its institutions, including an international criminal court, to bring the terrorists to justice.
At the same time, coping with underlying causes of this terrorism and American vulnerabilities must be a priority. Here the Bush administration is especially weak or dissembling. The control of oil remains the linchpin of U.S. security policy in the region, and, indeed, the immediate reason for bin Laden's rage is the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia since Desert Shield began in August 1990. American officials and opinion elites insist that we are there to protect our "access" to oil, but everyone in the world has access to oil; it's control over oil, and particularly the pricing of oil, which are at stake. There has been no energy policy for years, and the Bush energy proposals are not addressing the problem of gulf oil dependency at all. In part this is because American companies that do business there are close to the Bush administration (Halliburton, Dick Cheney's last employer, is one such firm), but it is also because to devise and implement an effective national strategy to reduce dependency on oil would require an enormous leap in fuel efficiency standards, a BTU tax, and a sharp increase in use of conservation and other fuels (possibly including nuclear energy). These measures have been so devalued by conventional wisdom and resisted by pampered consumers they are simply unpalatable. Sacrifices may go as far as one-hour waits at airport security lines, but not to using a 75-mile-per-gallon small car or paying for big improvements in mass transit.
The problem of Muslim "rage" and the like is far more complex, of course, but certainly there are steps that can be taken. It is commonplace nowadays to hear that we don't explain ourselves well to the Muslim world, that we are represented mainly by MTV and "Melrose Place" (occasionally it's also acknowledged that it was a bad idea to decimate the foreign service and the U.S. Information Agency). While this view has some merit, it misses a much larger point: it's not just that we must tell our story better, we must begin to listen to what the concerns of the Muslim world actually are. This doesn't mean tuning in to the cacophony of the "street"; an enormous number of Western-oriented Muslim intellectuals are disenchanted with U.S. policies and can eloquently articulate the various critiques. That they have little sympathy for the U.S., despite Sept. 11, and see only further alienation as a result of the military assaults on Afghanistan, is alarming. In the broad U.S. political culture, we are not listening to such critiques, which is what is often meant by American arrogance: what we have to tell others is more important than what others have to tell us.
These kinds of approaches to the politics and security challenges of southwestern Asia and north Africa are just that -- steps in what should be a much richer and complex national debate. That so many in the political and opinion establishment have resisted and even denounced such notions is a distressing sign of how uphill such steps will be. If we do care to absorb the lessons of the last 50 years in that region, however, we can do so only by engaging the history of policy failures (which beset all great powers) as well as the glory of the American dream. So much of that history is one of tragic and even catastrophic consequences, most of them unforeseen and unintended. We need now -- immediately -- to consider and act on those lessons both to honor the dead of Sept. 11 and to prevent more tragedy in the future.
John Tirman is program director at the Social Science Research Council, and author of "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade."
Inspirational & Informative Thoughts after September 11, 2001
"Philip A. Kratzer" Sat, 20 Oct 2001
Dear Friends:
I would like to share with you a something I heard the Dalai Lama say in
Los Angeles a couple of years ago.
The stage was set for his appearance. There was a Tibetan rug on the
floor, a beautiful flower arrangement and a grand Louis XIV chair. The
Dalai Lama entered, blessed us and sat down. The chair was so big that his feet did not quite touch the ground. He looked down and began to swing his legs. He looked up at us and sat there grinning and swinging his legs for a few minutes.
At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked him, "Why didn't you fight back against the Chinese:"
The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, "Well, war is obsolete you know." Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, "Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back... but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you."
At that moment I understood what darshan is. These words entered into my
very being. I understood the Dalai Lama to be saying to us that whether or
not we knew it we have progressed, individually and collectively, in
capacity in being conscious to a degree that we are capable of responding
in new ways. It seems to me that he knew then the long arc of import those
prescient words would have. And it seems to me that that is what is calling
us now and in every moment of our lives as human beings... to observe and
reconcile both heart and mind lest we be moved to action without heart.
Stephen and Ondrea Levine speak of learning to "keep your heart open in
hell." For me that means learning to face the external challenge and its
internal impact as well as the capacity to keep my heart open to the truth
of my internal disorder and its impact on the external. I have faltered
again and again when it is time to fully accept that I am what I reject. I
know without doubt that I can find every quality in myself to some degree
if I will but look deeply... it may be active or passive but it is my very
self. Yet in any given moment I can slip into a void of righteousness
filled with justifiable reasons to avoid the heartache of that knowledge. I
look now to a deeper awareness that will move no faster than feeling can
follow and so to be guided by what the heart knows and understands.
If on our way to living into this wisdom, we find by majority that must go
to war let us consider these tales: A samurai had for many years been
searching for the assassin of his warlord. Finally, he found the man,
cornered him in the barn and disarmed him. As he was about to plunge the
sword into his heart, the assassin spit in the samurai's face. The samurai
sheathed his sword, walked to his horse, mounted and rode away. As they
rode away his aide asked him why he had not killed the man he had spent so
much of his life to find. The samurai replied, "When he spit in my face I
felt my anger rise. I cannot kill in anger."
I think it was Epictus who said that only a man who hates war should lead
the battle because only he knows what is enough. If our nation goes to war
at least we might go with a heart that is humble and not filled with
righteousness. A heart that knows that this is a world of mirrors, that
here we see our own destructive mistaken certainties inflated to gigantic,
horrible proportions. And may we find sufficient compassion to bear the
pain knowing the part we played...... that we have contributed to the wound
that feeds the rage that can beget such righteousness that it overrides the
heart and justifies such inhumane acts.
Lastly, I remember that Ghandi said, "I am willing to die for the
independence of India, but there is no cause for which I am willing to kill."
May we heed the heart that does not understand war that it might instruct the mind in what to do... and what not to do.
With Love and Light,
Bobbie Rose
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Keynote Address by Bill Moyers to the Environmental Grantmakers
Association, Brainerd, MN October 16, 2001
This isn't the speech I expected to give today. I intended something
else.
For the last several years I've been taking every possible opportunity
to talk about the soul of democracy. 'Something is deeply wrong with
politics today,' I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn't referring
to the partisan mudslinging, or the negative TV ads, the excessive
polling or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper,
something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy - the
essence of the word itself - is government of, by, and for the people.
And the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of
big money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has
betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government.
This wasn't something I came to casually, by the way. It's the big
political story of the last quarter century, and I started reporting it
as a journalist in the late 70s with the first television documentary about
political action committees. More recently, at the Florence and John
Schumann Foundation, working with my colleague and son, John
Moyers, we saw how environmental causes were being overwhelmed
by the private funding of elections that gives big donors unequal and
undeserved political influence. That's why over the past five years the
Schumann brothers - Robert and Ford - and our board have poured
both income and principle into political reform through the Clean
Money Initiative - the public funding of elections. I intended to talk
about this - about the soul of democracy - and then connect it to my
television efforts and your environmental work. That was my
intention. That's the speech I was working on six weeks ago.
But I'm not the same man I was six weeks ago. And you're not the
same audience for whom I was preparing those remarks.
We've all been changed by what happened on September 11. My
friend, Thomas Hearne, the president of Wake Forest University,
reminded me recently that while the clock and the calendar make it
seem as if our lives unfold hour by hour, day by day, our passage is
marked by events - of celebration and crisis. We share those in
common. They create the memories which make of us a history, and
make of us a people, a nation.
Pearl Harbor was that event for my parents' generation. It changed
their world, and it changed them. They never forgot the moment
when the news reached them. For my generation it was the
assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the dogs and fire hose in Alabama.
Those events broke our hearts. We healed, but scars remain.
For this generation, that moment will be September 11th, 2001 - the
worst act of terrorism in our nation's history. It has changed the
country. It has changed us.
That's what terrorists intend. Terrorists don't want to own our land,
wealth, monuments, buildings, fields, or streams. They're not after
tangible property. Sure, they aim to annihilate the targets they
strike. But their real goal is to get inside our heads, our psyche, and to
deprive us - the survivors - of peace of mind, of trust, of faith; they aim to
prevent us from believing again in a world of mercy, justice, and love,
or working to bring that better world to pass.
This is their real target, to turn our imaginations into Afghanistans,
where they can rule by fear. Once they possess us, they are hard to
exorcise.
This summer our daughter and son-in-law adopted a baby boy. On
September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the
World Trade Center to his office up the block. He got there in time to
see the eruption of fire and smoke. He saw the falling bodies. He saw
the people jumping to their deaths. His building was evacuated and
for long awful moments he couldn't reach his wife, our daughter, to
say he was okay. She was in agony until he finally got through - and
even then he couldn't get home to his family until the next morning.
It took him several days fully to get his legs back. Now, in a
matter-of-fact voice, our daughter tells us how she often lies awake at night, wondering where and when it might happen again, going to the
computer at three in the morning - her baby asleep in the next room -
to check out what she can about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax,
and the vulnerability of children. Beyond the carnage left by the
sneak attack terrorists create another kind of havoc, invading and despoiling a new mother's deepest space, holding her imagination hostage to the most dreadful possibilities.
None of us is spared. The building where my wife and I produce our
television programs is in midtown Manhattan, just over a mile from
ground zero. It was evacuated immediately after the disaster although
the two of us remained with other colleagues to help keep the station
on the air. Our building was evacuated again late in the evening a day
later because of a bomb scare at the Empire State building nearby. We
had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when the security officers swept
through and ordered everyone out of the building. As we were
making our way down the stairs I took Judith's arm and was suddenly
struck by the thought: is this the last time I'll touch her? Could our
marriage of almost fifty years end here, on this dim and bare staircase?
I ejected the thought forcibly from my mind, like a bouncer removing a
rude intruder; I shoved it out of my consciousness by sheer force of
will. But in the first hours of morning, it crept back.
Returning from Washington on the train last week, I looked up and
for the first time in days saw a plane in the sky. And then another,
and another - not nearly as many as I used to on that same journey. But so
help me, every plane I saw, and every plane I see today, invokes
unwelcome images and terrifying thoughts. Unwelcome images,
terrifying thoughts - time bombs planted in our heads by terrorists.
I wish I could find the wisdom in this. Then our time together this
morning might have been more profitable for you. But wisdom is a
very elusive thing. Someone told me once that we often have the
experience but miss the wisdom. Wisdom comes, if at all, slowly,
painfully, and only after deep reflection. Perhaps when we gather next
year the wisdom will have arranged itself like the beautiful colors of a
stilled kaleidoscope, and we will look back on September 11 and see it
differently. But I haven't been ready for reflection. I have wanted to
stay busy, on the go, or on the run, perhaps, from the need to cope with
the reality that just a few subway stops south of where I get off at
Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, five thousand people died in a matter
of minutes. One minute they're pulling off their jackets, shaking
Sweet 'n Low into their coffee, adjusting the picture of a child or
sweetheart or spouse in a frame on their desk, booting up their
computer - and in the next, it's all over for them.
I've been collecting obituaries of the victims. Practically every day
the New York Times runs compelling little profiles of the dead and
missing, and I've been keeping them. Not out of some macabre desire
to stare at death, but to see if I might recognize a face, a name, some
old acquaintance, a former colleague, even a stranger I might have seen
occasionally on the subway or street. That was my original purpose.
But as the file has grown I realize what an amazing montage it is of
life, an unforgettable portrait of the America those terrorists wanted to
shatter. I study each little story for its contribution to the mosaic of
my country, its particular revelation about the nature of democracy, the
people with whom we share it.
Luis Bautista was one. It was his birthday, and he had the day off from
Windows on the World, the restaurant high atop the World Trade
Center. But back home in Peru his family depended on Luis for the
money he had been sending them since he arrived in New York two
years ago speaking only Spanish, and there was the tuition he would
soon be paying to study at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. So on
the eleventh of September Luis Bautista was putting in overtime. He
was 24.
William Steckman was 56. For thirty five of those years he took care of
NBC's transmitter at One World Trade Center, working the night shift
because it let him spend time during the day with his five children and
to fix things up around the house. His shift ended at six a.m. but this
morning his boss asked him to stay on to help install some new
equipment, and William Steckman said sure.
Elizabeth Holmes lived in Harlem with her son and jogged every
morning around Central Park where I often go walking, and I have
been wondering if Elizabeth Holmes and I perhaps crossed paths some
morning. I figure we were kindred souls. She too, was a Baptist, and
sang in the choir at the Canaan Baptist church. She was expecting a
ring from her fiancé at Christmas.
Linda Luzzicone and Ralph Gerhardt were planning their wedding,
too. They had both sets of parents come to New York in August to meet
for the first time and talk about the plans. They had discovered each
other in nearby cubicles on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center
and fell in love. They were working there when the terrorists struck.
Mon Jahn-bul-lie came here from Albania. Because his name was hard
to pronounce his friends called him by the Cajun "Jambalay" and he
grew to like it. He lived with his three sons in the Bronx and was
supposed to have retired when he turned 65 last year, but he was so
attached to the building and so enjoyed the company of the other
janitors that he often showed up an hour before work just to shoot the
bull. In my mind's eye I can see him that morning, horsing around
with his buddies.
Fred Scheffold liked his job, too - Chief of the 12th battalion in
Harlem. He loved going into fires and he loved his men. But he never told his daughters in the suburbs about the bad stuff in all the fires he had
fought over the years. He didn't want to worry them. This morning,
his shift had just ended and he was starting home when the alarm
rang. He jumped into the truck with the others and at One World
Trade Center he pushed through the crowds to the staircase heading for
the top. The last time anyone saw him alive he was heading for the
top. While hundreds poured past him going down through the flames
and smoke, Fred Scheffold just kept going up.
Now you know why I can't give the speech I was working on. Talking
about my work in television would be too parochial. And what's
happened since the attacks would seem to put the lie to my fears about
the soul of democracy. Americans have rallied together in a way that I
cannot remember since World War Two. In real and instinctive ways
we have felt touched - singed - by the fires that brought down those
buildings, even those of us who did not directly lose a loved one.
Great and low alike, we have been humbled by a renewed sense of our
common mortality. Those planes the terrorists turned into suicide
bombers cut through a complete cross-section of America - stockbrokers
and dishwashers, bankers and secretaries, lawyers and janitors,
Hollywood producers and new immigrants, urbanites and suburbanites
alike. One community near where I live in New Jersey lost twenty-
three residents. A single church near our home lost eleven members
of the congregation. Eighty nations are represented among the dead.
This catastrophe has reminded us of a basic truth at the heart of our
democracy: no matter our wealth or status or faith, we are all equal
before the law, in the voting booth, and when death rains down from
the sky.
We have also been reminded that despite years of scandals and political
corruption, despite the stream of stories of personal greed and pirates
in Gucci's scamming the treasury, despite the retreat from the public
sphere and the turn toward private privilege, despite squalor for the
poor and gated communities for the rich, we have been reminded that
the great mass of Americans have not yet given up on the idea of 'We,
the People.' and they have refused to accept the notion, promoted so
diligently by our friends at the Heritage Foundation and by Grover
Norquist and his right-wing ilk, that government - the public service -
should be shrunk to a size where they can drown it in the bathtub
(that's what Norquist said is their goal.) These right-wingers at
Heritage and elsewhere, by the way, earlier this year teamed up with
the deep-pocket bankers who finance them, to stop the United States
from cracking down on terrorist money havens. As TIME Magazine
reports, thirty industrial nations were ready to tighten the screws on
offshore financial centers whose banks have the potential to hide and
often help launder billions of dollars for drug cartels, global crime
syndicates - and groups like Osama bin Laden's Al-Quaeda
organization. Not all off-shore money is linked to crime or terrorism;
much of it comes from wealthy people who are hiding money to avoid
taxation. And right-wingers believe in nothing if not in avoiding
taxation. So they and the bankers' lobbyists went to work to stop the
American government from participating in the crackdown on dirty
money, arguing that closing down tax havens in effect leads to higher
taxes on the poor people trying to hide their money. I am not kidding;
it's all on the record. The president of the Heritage Foundation spent
an hour, according to the New York Tiimes, with Treasury Secretary
O'Neill, and Texas bankers pulled their strings at the White House,
and presto, the Bush administration folded and pulled out of the
international campaign against tax havens.
How about that for patriotism? Better terrorists get their dirty money
than tax cheaters be prevented from hiding their money. And that
from people who wrap themselves in the flag and sing the Star
Spangled Banner with gusto. These true believers in the god of the
market would leave us to the ruthless cruelty of unfettered
monopolistic capital where even the law of the jungle breaks down.
But listen: today's heroes are public servants. The twenty-year-old
dot.com instant millionaries and the pugnacious pundits of tabloid
television and the crafty celebrity stock pickers on the cable channels
have all been exposed for what they are - barnacles on the hulk of the
great ship of state. In their stead we have those brave firefighters
and policemen and Port Authority workers and emergency rescue
personnel - public employees all, most of them drawing a modest
middle-class income for extremely dangerous work. They have caught
our imaginations not only for their heroic deeds but because we know
so many people like them, people we took for granted. For once, our
TV screens have been filled with the modest declarations of average
Americans coming to each other's aid.
I find this good, and thrilling, and sobering. It could offer a new
beginning, a renewal of civil values that could leave our society
stronger and more together than ever, working on common goals for
the public good. The playwright Tony Kushner wrote more than a
decade ago: 'There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday
life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for
incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world
they're living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the
bad, or some mixture of the two.'
He's right. This could go either way. Here's one sighting: in the wake
of September 11th ; there's been a heartening change in how
Americans view their government. For the first time in more than
thirty years a majority of people say we trust the Federal Government
to do the right thing 'just about always' or at least 'most of the
time.' It's as if the clock has been rolled back to the early sixties, before
Vietnam and Watergate took such a toll on the gross national
psychology. This newfound hope for public collaboration is based in
part on how people view what the government has done in response
to the attacks. I have to say that overall President Bush has acted with
commendable resolve and restraint. But this is a case where yet again
the people are ahead of the politicians. They're expressing greater
faith in government right now because the long-standing gap between our
ruling elites and ordinary citizens has seemingly disappeared. To most
Americans, government right now doesn't mean a faceless bureaucrat
or a politician auctioning access to the highest bidder. It means a
courageous rescuer or brave soldier. Instead of representatives
spending their evenings clinking glasses with fat cats, they are out
walking among the wounded. In Washington it seemed momentarily
possible that the political class had been jolted out of old habits.
Some old partisan rivalries and arguments fell by the wayside as our
representatives acted decisively on a forty billion dollar fund to
rebuild New York. Adversaries like Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt were
linking arms. There was even a ten-day moratorium on political
fundraisers. I was beginning to be optimistic that the mercenary culture
of Washington might finally be on its knees. But I once asked a friend
on Wall Street what he thought about the market. "I'm optimistic," he
said. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because
I'm not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. There are, alas, other sightings to report. It didn't take long for the war time opportunists - the mercenaries of Washington,
the lobbyists, lawyers, and political fundraisers - to crawl out of
their offices on K street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services for
firemen and police, while everywhere Americans' cheeks are still
stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers
and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the
pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful
tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.
Would you like to know the memorial they would offer the almost six
thousand people who died in the attacks? Or the legacy they would
provide the ten thousand children who lost a parent in the horror?
How do they propose to fight the long and costly war on terrorism
America must now undertake?
Why, restore the three-martini lunch - that will surely strike fear in
the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I'm kidding, but bringing back
the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in
Washington right now. There are members of Congress who believe
you should sacrifice in this time of crisis by paying for lobbyists'
long lunches.
And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally - that's America's
patriotic duty, too. And while we're at it don't forget to eliminate
the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to
prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that
they owed little if any taxes. But don't just repeal their minimum tax;
give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have
ever been assessed. You look incredulous. But that's taking place in
Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning.
What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a
special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the
Environmental Protection Agency while everyone's distracted and
torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of PCBs. Don't
worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they're all in the GE
family.
It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So how would this crowd
assure that future generations will look back and say 'This was their
finest hour'? That's easy. Give those coal producers freedom to
pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy
companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling - that's
something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red,
white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the
home of the brave - why, give the President the power to discard
democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade
agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local
communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It's
happening as we meet. It's happening right now.
If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the President rightly
appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these mercenaries sacrifice is for
suckers.So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was they who declared class war twenty years ago and it was they who won. They're on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if ever they were going to
practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the moment. To hide now
behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis fatally separates
them from the common course of American life.
Some things just don't change. Once again the Republican Party has
lived down to Harry Truman's description of the GOP as guardians of
privilege. And as for Truman's Democratic Party - the party of the New
Deal and the fair deal - well, it breaks my heart to report that the
Democratic National Committee has used the terrorist attacks to call
for widening the soft money loophole in our election laws. How
about that for a patriotic response to terrorism? Mencken got it right
- the journalist H. L. Mencken, who said that when you hear some men
talk about their love of country, it's a sign they expect to be paid for
it.
Understandably, in the hours after the attacks many environmental
organizations stepped down from aggressively pressing their issues.
Greenpeace canceled its 30th anniversary celebration. The Sierra Club
stopped all advertising, phone banks and mailing. The Environmental
Working Group and the PIRG's postponed a national report on
chlorination in drinking water. That was the proper way to observe a
period of mourning. Furthermore, in work like this you have to read
and respect the mood of a country in crisis, or a misspoken word, even
a modest misstep, could lose you the public's ear for years to come.
But the polluters and their political cronies accepted no such
constraints. Just one day after the attack, one day into the maelstrom
of horror, loss, and grief, Republican senators called for prompt
consideration of the President's proposal to subsidize the country's
largest and richest energy companies. While America was mourning
they were marauding. One congressman even suggested that eco-
terrorists might be behind the attacks. And with that smear he and his
kind went on the offensive in Congress, attempting to attach to a
defense bill massive subsidies for the oil, coal, gas and nuclear
companies.
To a defense bill! What a shameless insult to patriotism! What a
slander on the sacrifice of our armed forces! To pile corporate welfare
totaling billions of dollars onto a defense bill in an emergency like
this is repugnant to the nostrils and a scandal against democracy!
But this is their game. They're counting on your patriotism to
distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to be standing at
attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the
flag, while they pick your pocket!
Let's face it: they present citizens with no options but to climb back
in the ring. We are in what educators call "a teachable moment." And
we'll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What's at stake is democracy.
Democracy wasn't cancelled on the 11th of September, but democracy
won't survive if citizens turn into lemmings. Yes, the President is our
Commander-in-chief, and in hunting down and destroying the
terrorists who are trying to destroy us, we are "all the President's
men" - as Henry Kissinger put it after the bombing of Cambodia. But we are
not the President's minions. If in the name of the war on terrorism
President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it's every
patriot's duty to join the local opposition. Even in war, politics is
about who gets what and who doesn't. If the mercenaries in
Washington try to exploit the emergency and America's good faith to
grab what they wouldn't get through open debate in peace time, the
disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our subservience. The
greatest sedition would be our silence.
Yes, there's a fight going on - against terrorists around the globe, but
just as certainly there's a fight going on here at home, to decide the
kind of country this will be during and after the war on terrorism. To
the Irishman's question - 'Is this a private fight or can anyone get in
it?" - the answer has to be: "Come on in. It's our economy, our
environment, our country, and our future. If we don't fight, who
will?"
What should our strategy be? Here are a couple of suggestions. During
two trips to Washington in the last ten days I heard people talking
mostly about two big issues of policy: economic stimulus and the
national security. How do we renew our economy and safeguard our
nation? Guess what? Those are your issues, and you are uniquely
equipped to address them with powerful language and persuasive
argument.
For example: if you want to fight for the environment, don't hug a
tree; hug an economist. Hug the economist who tells you that fossil
fuels are not only the third most heavily subsidized economic sector
after road transportation and agriculture - they also promote vast
inefficiencies. Hug the economist who tells you that the most efficient
investment of a dollar is not in fossil fuels but in renewable energy
sources that not only provide new jobs but cost less over time. Hug the
economist who tells you that the price system matters; it's potentially
the most potent tool of all for creating social change. Look what
California did this summer in responding to its recent energy crisis
with a price structure that rewards those who conserve and punishes
those who don't. Californians cut their electric consumption by up
to15%.
Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for conservation. Go
for clean, home-grown energy. And go for public health. If we reduce
emissions from fossil fuel, we will cut the rate of asthma among
children. Healthier children and a healthier economy - how about
that as a response to terrorism?
As for national security, well, it's time to expose the energy plan
before Congress for the dinosaur it is. Everyone knows America needs to
reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more of
the same: more subsidies for the rich, more pollution, more waste, more
inefficiency. Let's get the message out.
Start with John Adams' wakeup call. The head of NRDC says the
terrorist attacks spell out in frightful terms that America's unchecked
consumption of oil has become our Achilles heel. It constrains our
military options in the face of terror. It leaves our economy
dangerously vulnerable to price shocks. It invites environmental
degradation, ecological disasters, and potentially catastrophic climate
change.
Go to Tompaine.com and you will find the two simple facts we need to
get to the American people: first, the money we pay at the gasoline
pump helps prop up oil-rich sponsors of terrorism like Saddam
Hussein and Muammar al-Quaddifi. Second, a big reason we spend so
much money policing the Middle East - $30 billion every year, by one
reckoning - has to do with our dependence on the oil there. So John
Adams got it right - the single most important thing environmentalists
can do to ensure America's national security is to fight to reduce our
nation's dependence on oil, whether imported or domestic.
But don't stop there.
Before the 11th of September the nuclear power industry was salivating
at the prospect of the government giving it limited liability for the
risks of the meltdown or other nuclear accident. We were told by Vice
President Cheney that nuclear power was a "safe technology" that
could help alleviate energy shortages and not contribute to greenhouse
gases.
But when Dick Cheney invited the energy companies and their
lobbyists to write his energy plan, he didn't reckon on terrorism or the
advice of Harvey Wassermann. Harvey Wassermann has spent years
studying these issues and writing about America's experience with
atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes that crashed
into the World Trade Center could easily have obliterated the two atomic
reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson
River. Regulations put out by the nuclear regulatory commission
regarding plant safety don't address that sort of event, and neither
plant was designed to withstand such crashes. Until now Harvey
Wassermann's scenario was unthinkable. Had one or both of those
jets hit one or both of the operating reactors at Indian Point, the
ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. At the very least the
massive impact and hellish jet fuel fire would destroy the human
ability to control the plants' functions. Vital cooling systems,
back-up power generators and communications networks would crumble. The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based
weapons, truck bombs or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at
the operating work force. Dozens of US reactors have repeatedly failed
even modest security tests over the years. And even heightened
wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely
sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continuous
monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of
radioactive roads in the cores and the thousands more stored in those
fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of
lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately,
the Hudson. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of
horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. The radioactive
clouds would then enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England,
and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to
Europe and around the globe again and again.
The immediate damage would render thousands of the world's most
populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All
five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. All
real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive
throughout the entire region. Who knows how many people would
die?
As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals
died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life
have been hopelessly irradiated, natural ecosystems on which human
and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably
destroyed; spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our
nation would never recover. This is what we missed by a mere forty
miles near New York City on September 11th. And remember - there
are 103 of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now operating in the
United States. 103.
I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what
we're up against. I know you get it - the work that we must do. It's
why you mustn't lose heart. Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic
for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear
you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will
ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: "In
the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future." Those words were
written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer
dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average
people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an
energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they
must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as
seriously as its interest in entertaining us.
My own personal response to Osama bin Laden is not grand, or
rousing, or dramatic. All I know to do is to keep doing as best I can
the craft that has been my calling now for most of my adult life. My
colleagues and I have rededicated ourselves to the production of
several environmental reports that were in progress before September
11. As a result of our two specials this year - Trade Secrets and Earth
on Edge - PBS is asking all of public television's production teams to
focus on the environment for two weeks around Earth Day next April. Our
documentaries will anchor that endeavor. One will report on how an
obscure provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) can turn the rule of law upside down and undermine a
community's health and environment. Our four-part series on
America's First River looks at how the Hudson River shaped
America's conservation movement a century ago and, more recently,
the modern environmental movement. We're producing another
documentary on the search for alternative energy sources, another on
children and the environment - the questions scientists, researchers
and pediatricians are asking about children's vulnerability to hazards
in the environment - and we are also making a stab at updating the
health of the global environment that we launched last June with
Earth on Edge.
What does Osama bin Laden have to do with these? He has given me
not one but five thousand and more reasons for journalism to signify
on issues that matter. I began this talk with the names of some of them - the victims who died on the 11th of September. I did so because I
never want to forget the humanity lost in the horror. I never want to
forget the e-mail Forrester Church told me about - sent by a doomed
employee in the World Trade Center who, just before his life was over,
wrote: "Thank you for being such a great friend." I never want to
forget the man and woman holding hands as they leap together to their
death. I never want to forget those firemen who just kept going up;
they just kept going up. And I never want to forget what Forrester said
of this disaster - that the very worst of which human beings are capable
can bring ou |
