The blustering holy murderers of the Taliban and Al Qaeda have
had a bad two weeks. After the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, they began fleeing their
positions pell-mell. Some of their remnants holed up in two towns, Kunduz and Kandahar,
hoping perhaps to use the wretched civilians as human shields against American
bombs. Escaping turncoats report that the foreign gunmen of Al Qaeda were
shooting their Afghan Taliban allies who planned to defect. So the damned in
Dante berate, attack and even eat each other. Other Taliban and Al Qaeda units
were reportedly hoping to escape to Pakistan
or into the mountainous interior of Afghanistan,
there to wage guerrilla warfare. Truly, their courage is matched only by their
piety.
In their wake, their former
subjects enjoyed formerly forbidden pleasures. It is a measure of Taliban
rigidity and Al Qaeda ruthlessness how simple these pleasures were. Women
sunned their faces in public. Men traded cards of Indian movie stars. People
listened to music, or dug out old TV’s and VCR’s. Barbershops worked overtime.
My favorite comment came from the man interviewed by The New York Times who
said he had nothing against beards; he’d even kept his mustache. But he didn’t
like being told what he had to wear. Another dream of purity and power goes
down in a heap of trimmings.
We were terrorists, remember? We were arrogant, remember that
one, too? The world hated us for our terrorism and our arrogance-you know the
spiel, it’s on a loop, all set to play the next time we think of doing anything
in the world. Remember this: We just wanted to kill our enemies and avenge our
dead. As a result, women in Kabul
can walk outside.
What next? We must hunt down the Al Qaeda operation with the
thoroughness of
exterminators. “Mr. bin Laden,” as The
Times , faithful to its style book,
calls him, must be found and shot, or vice versa. His agents must be rolled up
worldwide, from the Philippines
to Spain to the
United States.
The complaints over the possibility of using military tribunals to try
suspected soldiers of terror here are unwarranted. Combatants have always
gotten special treatment. What was Nuremberg-night
court?
We also need to defeat or
disarm Al Qaeda’s sponsors. Iraq, with its evident grudge and its chemical, germ
and atomic-research programs, is the obvious suspect. If the source of the
anthrax letters turns out to be domestic, Iraq may still be involved: It would be clever
intelligence work to join forces with America’s McVeighites, in the common purpose of bringing
down ZOG. Beyond Iraq, with its military know-how, stands Saudi Arabia, with its irresponsible reserves of cash. The
Saudis, who have built enough palaces and paid off enough gambling debts even
for the 7,000 princes of their royal family, have sent their surplus money into
the world to subsidize crude anti-American educational systems that produce the
potential recruits for “Mr. bin Laden,” Saudi Arabia’s favorite son. Colin
Powell must let them know that this must stop; if it doesn’t, we have the
address of the Hashemite family, the previous guardians of Mecca and Medina.
Will President Bush see his war through to its end? During the
2000 election cycle, each candidate was asked what his favorite book was. Al
Gore, as I recall, picked The Red and the
Black , Stendhal’s study of the bright young man who must lead an inauthentic
life-an interesting choice. Mr. Bush picked an even more interesting book -The Raven , by Marquis James, a 1929
biography of Sam Houston. I had never known anything about Sam Houston; what I
learned from The Raven was that he
went through a period of his life when, after being a successful Tennessee
politician, the bottom fell out. The woman he loved wouldn’t marry him; he took
to drink and moved to Indian territory, becoming an
honorary Cherokee. Then something caused him to move to Texas,
where he found his mission and his identity. The story of Houston’s
struggle with drink must have obvious resonance to President Bush, who’s had
the same struggle; Houston, unlike
Mr. Bush’s spotless father, could be a flawed but triumphant paternal figure.
After Sept. 11, one read that Mr. Bush believes the terror war has given him
his mission in life; perhaps it is his Texas.
The images of the celebrating Afghans raise even deeper
questions: Is there a human nature? If so, what is it worth? Extreme
relativists posit a multiplicity of solitudes-cultural others that cannot
understand or judge anything beyond their own borders. A strain in most major
religions acknowledges a common humanity, but asserts that it is radically
corrupt. Jonathan Edwards told his parishioners that they were as disgusting in
God’s eyes as spiders, and deserved hell flames.
It is always a temptation, when fighting foreign enemies, to
imagine them sunk in the toils of their systems. Culture colors much, and
politics can color a lot more. But all things being equal, people would rather
not be brutalized. When we think of the Islamist other, we must remember the
women who looked at the sun.
It is equally natural, though,
to lash out at repeated frustrations. To the anti-American frog chorus which
says we have brought this all on ourselves, we can truthfully
answer that we have, in one respect: We have paid too much deference to
dictators and traditional despots in the Middle East. It was convenient for us, of course, and we
assumed that was all their people were good for. Our own convenience should be
consulted; it is not our business to run, or to instruct, the world. The world
will not sit still for it in any case. But when our interests cause us to
intervene, then we must accept the responsibilities that come with
intervention. We fought a war to liberate Kuwait, then let Saddam Hussein remain in power, to
threaten us and to terrorize his own citizens. We subsidized the Afghan
resistance to the Soviet
Union, then left them to
the mischievous and bungling hands of Pakistani intelligence, and to the
struggles of their own warlords. A decade and thousands of dead Americans
later, we must leave the neighborhood in better shape than we found it.
