America at war; And the world trembles

Any day now, death and destruction will rain on either Afghanistan or Iraq or both as an angry America and an angrier George W. Bush seek to flush out and kill the terrorists and their supporters who brought down the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in that "day of infamy" last Tuesday, Sept. 11. They will not stop until they get Osama bin Laden by his black and flowing beard, either slash him to pieces or try him in court as they did Herman Goehring, Hideki Tojo, Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Eichmann. The same fate, it seems, awaits Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s bloodthirsty gauleiter.

The way I see it, however, Bin Laden and Hussein, like Herr Adolph Hitler, will commit suicide and will never be caught or captured alive. The Western world will be dancing on their graves.

These will be only the first steps of an "America at war." President Bush and his reborn Cold War camarilla of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, including National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, have put together "all the necessary and appropriate force" to retaliate against the Islamic terrorists who brought down Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

I write these words with bated breath. For the whole thing scares me as the bombing of Pearl Harbor scared me in 1941. Like the flip of a coin from heads to tails, our world is suddenly another world, shadow endlessly chasing shadow over still empty graves that await the thousands who will die in this new and gruesome war without borders, without geographical boundaries.

The cold war between the US and the Soviet Union may have ended 1989-91 and it was a war we could understand and put our fingers on. But the end didn’t usher in the long peace Francis Fukuyama rashly predicted in his book The End of History. He said ideology had vanished from the scene and human existence in a way would be boring. The cold war between capitalism and communism had the former triumphant. Marxism-Leninism had cracked up into the desolate masonry that false gods are heir to. But this one? This new war that America is against is an enemy that is largely faceless with no national territory, is on the whole nameless, like a war against an ill and malevolent wind, a war against Satan if you will, against elusive demons called terrorists. America will have to wrestle them to the ground.

Outside of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein – who?

The leaders of the US mention for the "short war" the terrorists who downed Twin Towers and the Pentagon and for the "long war" the world-wide net of international terrorism and nations that protect terrorists. The latter war against Islamic terrorism will take years. The problem: The nations of Araby as a whole have pledged support of the US like the rich oil countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Kuwait and even Libya. And yet it is no secret they have helped finance the vast network of Islamic terrorism. Particularly in the Middle East where the intifada finds Palestine warriors up in bloody arms against Israel. Will America then invade these countries who produce the bulk of the worlds’s oil needs? Or enfeeble, emaciate or degrade their military and defense establishments and institutions? I hardly think so.

Will America know how to differentiate among fanatical, militant, fundamentalist, moderate, secular Muslim nations? Or given present American anger, is the best Muslim a dead Muslim?

A wounded bull lashes in all directions. America is a wounded bull, indignant, livid, outraged. No longer is Fortress America protected from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. In North America’s vast, fertile and almost endless plains, America has nestled in relative peace and security during two world wars and other conflagrations as the nation of Europe and the world warred on and devasted each other. Not one inch of America was invaded. Indeed she was the New World, an America that spread out, an America eventually people by her core 54 million European immigrants, an America that swept its greetings inward with the Statue of Liberty, an America that was soon the Arsenal of Democracy, soon incredibly rich and prosperous, soon holding up the skies with its "universal truths", soon model and preacher to the world, soon an indestructible Pax Americana that sought to impose its culture and civilization everywhere the Yankee could unfurl the US flag, unload a Microsoft computer and set up a McDonald outlet. Until just three planes wrought untold disaster.

Or was Jerry Falwell right? This right-wing preacher just hours after Twin Towers and the Pentagon were demolished said a great part of America’s humiliation was its image of corruption and decadence projected by gays and lesbians, drug addicts and prostitutes, single parents, guns and violence, consumerism and Hollywood-style entertainment gone mad. Does this herald the decline of America?

* * *

But let’s get back on track. To quote the philospher Jacques Barzun (Dawn to Decadence), "The shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone’s power to define." You don’t see anything but threadbare patches.

So what about Pakistan? As you read this, it is possible, US troops are air-borne for Pakistan there to establish the base for an assault by US ground troops on Afghanistan and the hidden lairs of Osama bin Laden. Okay, so General Pervez Musharraf is all for allowing US troops entry. But his hold on the Pakistani citizenry is tenuous, a citizenry that is almost a resurgent Islam to the core, a citizenry that could whip back like a dozen alligators tails and bloody Musharraf’s regime. And what about the Taleban?

Chief Taleban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutamaen warns that if US troops invade Afhan soil from Pakistan, Taleban warriors will invade Pakistan. He wasn’t joking. Muslims will "not stand handcuffed and blindfolded while other Muslims, their brothers, are being attacked," he said Remember the Taleban. Almost all by their lonesome, helped of course by Pakistan which provided logistics and training grounds, the Taleban threw back the Soviet invasion. For thousands of years, no invader has succeeded in occupying Afghanistan. The Taleban are considered today the best guerrilla fighters in the world (they trained the leaders of Abu Sayyaf). In this sense, US troops in Pakistan and Afghanistan might dig themselves a quagmire as they did in Vietnam. Afghanistan is unknown, foreign, terribly rugged territory with a labyrinth of caves and underground stone shelters. Missiles and Stealth bombers have a very limited application. And what happens should General Musharraf be overthrown in an Islamic backlash?

Will Bethlehem break loose? Will hell unshirt itself? And as the innocents die – and they will die – will America have the resolve to stay the course? In fighting international terrorism, will America herself not resort to terrorist tactics and mirror the enemy’s ugly face? So aren’t we entering a world of wars without end, of enemies without end, of wrath, bitterness and mud-slinging without end, of the dead strewn in endless ditches, of taking up the gun to get rid of the gun, as Mao Zedong said, of opening up the veins that lead nations to death as Thomas Paine said, of institutionalizing madness and with madness ugliness and cruelty as Elie Wiesel said.

And so we are back to Samuel P. Huntington’s classic Clash of Civilizations.

Huntington goes deep, deeper than any other historian or social scientist analyzing the world in which we live and the world we are presently entering. The clash of civilizations he predicted in 1993 has happened. Today it is the West against a militant, fanatical Islam, tomorrow against an Islam-China combine, mid-tomorrow against other Asian civilizations including Japan and India. America, Europe, the West are ascendant "modern" civilizations belonging to a common Christian heritage which forged the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance, the Atlantic Charter, later the Atlantic Alliance, now the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). They too were the colonizing white nations of the 15th and 16th centuries that "discovered" and conquered the rest of the world.

A resurgent Islam is new, as is a resurgent China, coupled with Japan which was resurgent in the mid-19th century. They have a commonality in the sense that they reject a universe dominated by America and the West. They are proud of their own cultures and civilizations, their spiritual values, and they now proudly ride the stalking horses of the West, science and technology. They can produce and manufacture anything the West can manufacture, including nuclear arms. And so today, even as George Bush talks like Mike Tyson ("I’ll moider him! I’ll break every bone in his body!"), America will have to tread carefully.

On this, Huntington states with a bluntness that must ring hard across the walls of Harvard where he is professor emeritus: "In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: It is false. It is immoral. And it is dangerous." He adds: "European globalism is no more. American hegemony is receding…In addition, as maturing civilization, the West no longer has the economic or demographic dynamism required to impose its will on other societies."

In New York, in Washington, I espied Huntington’s handwriting.