THE NEW NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY published by the White House in September
2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character
of our nation. Its central and most significant statement is this:
While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists... (p. 6)
A democratic citizen must deal here first of all with the question, Who is this "we"? It is not the "we" of the Declaration of Independence, which referred to a small group of signatories bound by the conviction that "governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed." And it is not the "we" of the Constitution, which refers to "the people [my emphasis] of the United States."
THE ALLEGED JUSTIFICATION for this new strategy is the recent emergence in the United States of international terrorism. But why the events of September 11, 2001, horrifying as they were, should have called for a radical new investiture of power in the executive branch is not clear.
The National Security
Strategy defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence
perpetrated against innocents" (p. 5). This is truly a distinct kind of
violence, but to imply by the word "terrorism" that this sort of terror
is the work exclusively of "terrorists" is misleading. The "legitimate"
warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically
motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the
intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in "terrorism,"
and the willingness to do so, as in "war," is not a source of comfort.
Supposedly, if a nation perpetrates violence officially -- whether to bomb an
enemy airfield or a hospital it is not guilty of "terrorism." But
there is no need to hesitate over the difference between "terrorism"
and any violence or threat of violence that is terrifying. The National Security
Strategy wishes to cause "terrorism" to be seen "in the same
light as slavery, piracy, or genocide" (p. 6) but not in the same light
as war. It accepts and affirms the legitimacy of war.
THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM is not, strictly speaking, a war against nations,
even though it has already involved international war in Afghanistan and presidential
threats against other nations. This is a war against "the embittered few"
"thousands of trained terrorists" -- who are "at large"
(p. 5) among many millions of others who are, in the language of this document,
"innocents," and thus are deserving of our protection.
Unless we are willing to kill innocents in order to kill the guilty, the need
to be lethal will be impeded constantly by the need to be careful. Because we
must suppose a new supply of villains to be always in the making, we can expect
the war on terrorism to be more or less endless, endlessly costly and endlessly
supportive of a thriving bureaucracy.
Unless, that is, we should become willing to ask why, and to do something about the causes. Why do people become terrorists? Such questions arise from the recognition that problems have causes. There is, however, no acknowledgement in The National Security Strategy that terrorism might have a cause that could possibly be discovered and possibly remedied. "The embittered few," it seems, are merely "evil."
II.
MUCH OF THE OBSCURITY of our effort so far against terrorism originates in this now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.
The epigraph of Part III of The National Security Strategy contains this sentence from President Bush's speech at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001: "But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." A government, committing its nation to rid the world of evil, is assuming necessarily that it and its nation are good.
But the proposition that anything so multiple and large as a nation can be "good" is an insult to common sense. It is also dangerous, because it precludes any attempt at self criticism or self correction; it precludes public dialogue. It leads us far indeed from the traditions of religion and democracy that are intended to measure and so to sustain our efforts to be good. Christ said. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." And Thomas Jefferson justified general education by the obligation of citizens to be critical of their government: "for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful [my emphasis] superintendence." An inescapable requirement of true patriotism, love for one's land, is a vigilant distrust of any determinative power, elected or unelected, that may preside over it.
AND SO IT IS NOT
WITHOUT REASON or precedent that a citizen should point out that, in addition
to evils originating abroad and supposedly correctable by catastrophic technologies
in "legitimate" hands, we have an agenda of domestic evils, not only
those that properly self aware humans can find in their own hearts, but also
several that are indigenous to our history as a nation: issues of economic and
social justice, and issues related to the continuing and worsening maladjustment
between our economy and our land.
There are kinds of violence that have nothing directly to do with unofficial
or official warfare. I mean such things as toxic pollution, land destruction,
soil erosion, the destruction of biological diversity and of the ecological
supports of agriculture. To anybody with a normal concern for health and sanity,
these "externalized costs" are terrible and are terrifying.
I don't wish to make light of the threats and dangers that now confront us. But frightening as these are, they do not relieve us of the responsibility to be as intelligent, principled, and practical as we can be. To rouse the public's anxiety about foreign terror while ignoring domestic terror, and to fail to ask if these terrors are in any way related, is wrong.
IT IS UNDERSTANDABLE that we should have reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by curtailment of civil rights, by defiance of laws, and by resort to overwhelming force, for those things are the ready products of fear and hasty thought. But they cannot protect us against the destruction of our own land by ourselves. They cannot protect us against the selfishness, wastefulness, and greed that we have legitimized here as economic virtues, and have taught to the world. They cannot protect us against our government's long standing disdain for any form of self sufficiency or thrift, or against the consequent dependence, which for the present at least is inescapable, on foreign supplies, such as oil from the Middle East.
IT IS NO WONDER that the National Security Strategy, growing as it does out of unresolved contradictions in our domestic life, should attempt to compound a foreign policy out of contradictory principles.
There is, first of all, the contradiction of peace and war, or of war as the means of achieving and preserving peace This document affirms peace; it also affirms peace as the justification of war and war as the means of peace and thus perpetuates a hallowed absurdity. But implicit in its assertion of this (and, by implication, any other) nation's right to act alone in its own interest is an acceptance of war as a permanent condition. Either way, it is cynical to invoke the ideas of cooperation, community, peace, freedom, justice, dignity, and the rule of law (as this document repeatedly does), and then proceed to assert one's intention to act alone in making war. One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.
This is a contradiction not reconcilable except by a self righteousness almost inconceivably naive. The authors of the strategy seem now and then to be glimmeringly conscious of the difficulty. Their implicit definition of "rogue state," for example, is any nation pursuing national greatness by advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors -- except our nation.
If you think our
displeasure with "rogue states" might have any underpinning in international
law, then you will be disappointed to learn on page 31 that
We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global
security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential
for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court
(ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.
The rule of law
in the world, then, is to be upheld by a nation that has declared itself to
be above the law. A childish hypocrisy here assumes the dignity of a nation's
foreign policy.
III.
FURTHER CONTRADICTION is that between war and commerce. This issue arises first
of all in the war economy, which unsurprisingly regards war as a business and
weapons as merchandise. However nationalistic may be the doctrine of the National
Security Strategy, the fact is that the internationalization of the weapons
trade is a result inherent in international trade itself. It is a part of globalization.
Mr. Bush's addition of this Security Strategy to the previous bipartisan commitment
to globalization exposes an American dementia that has not been so plainly displayed
before.
The America Whose Business is Business has been internationalizing its economy
in haste (for bad reasons, and with little foresight), looking everywhere for
"trading partners," cheap labor, and tax shelters. Meanwhile, the
America Whose Business is National Defense is withdrawing from the world in
haste (for bad reasons, with little foresight), threatening left and right,
repudiating agreements, and angering friends. The problem of participating in
the Global Economy for the benefit of Washington's corporate sponsors while
maintaining a nationalist belligerence and an isolationist morality calls for
superhuman intelligence in the secretary of commerce. The problem of "acting
alone" in an international war while maintaining simultaneously our ability
to import the foreign goods (for instance, oil) on which we have become dependent
even militarily will call, likewise, for overtopping genius in the secretary
of defense.
After World War II, we hoped the world might be united for the sake of peacemaking.
Now the world is being "globalized" for the sake of trade and the
so-called free market -- for the sake, that is, of plundering the world for
cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap materials. How nations, let alone regions
and communities, are to shape and protect themselves within this "global
economy" is far from clear. Nor is it clear how the global economy can
hope to survive the wars of nations.
OR A NATION TO BE, in the truest sense, patriotic, its citizens must love their
land with a knowing, intelligent, sustaining, and protective love. They must
not, for any price, destroy its health, its beauty, or its productivity. And
they must not allow their patriotism to be degraded to a mere loyalty to symbols
or any present set of officials.
One might reasonably assume, therefore, that a policy of national security would
advocate from the start various practical measures to conserve and to use frugally
the nation's resources, the objects of this husbandry being a reduction in the
nation's dependence on imports and a reduction in the competition between nations
for necessary goods.
Agriculture, which is the economic activity most clearly and directly related
to national security -- if one grants that we all must eat -- receives such
scant and superficial treatment as to amount to a dismissal. The document proposes
only:
1. "a global effort to address new technology, science, and health regulations
that needlessly impede farm exports and improved agriculture" (p. 19).
This refers, without saying so, to the growing consumer resistance to genetically
modified food. A global effort to overcome this resistance would help, not farmers
and not consumers, but global agribusiness corporations.
2. "transitional safeguards which we have used in the agricultural sector
" (p. 19). This refers to government subsidies, which ultimately help the
agribusiness corporations, not farmers.
3. Promotion of "new technologies, including biotechnology, [which] have
enormous potential to improve crop yields in developing countries while using
fewer pesticides and less water" (p. 23). This is offered (as usual and
questionably) as the solution to hunger, but its immediate benefit would be
to the corporate suppliers.
This is not an agriculture policy, let alone a national security strategy. It
has the blindness, arrogance, and foolishness that are characteristic of top
down thinking by politicians and academic experts, assuming that "improved
agriculture" would inevitably be the result of catering to the agribusiness
corporations, and that national food security can be achieved merely by going
on as before. It does not address any agricultural problem as such, and it ignores
the vulnerability of our present food system dependent as it is on genetically
impoverished monocultures, cheap petroleum, cheap long-distance transportation,
and cheap farm labor to many kinds of disruption by "the embittered few,"
who, in the event of such disruption, would quickly become the embittered many.
On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by
failing or subsidy dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we
have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers
and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining
its own foundations.
IV.
SINCE THE END of World War II, when the terrors of industrial warfare had been
fully revealed, many people and, by fits and starts, many governments have recognized
that peace is not just a desirable condition, as was thought before, but a practical
necessity. But we have not yet learned to think of peace apart from war. We
wait, still, until we face terrifying dangers and the necessity to choose among
bad alternatives, and then we think again of peace, and again we fight a war
to secure it.
At the end of the war, if we have won it, we declare peace; we congratulate
ourselves on our victory; we marvel at the newly-proved efficiency of our latest
weapons; we ignore the cost in lives, materials, and property, in suffering
and disease, in damage to the natural world; we ignore the inevitable residue
of resentment and hatred; and we go on as before, having, as we think, successfully
defended our way of life.
That is pretty much the story of our victory in the Gulf War of 1991. In the
years between that victory and September 11, 2001, we did not alter our thinking
about peace and war -- that is, we thought much about war and little about peace;
we continued to punish the defeated people of Iraq and their children; we made
no effort to reduce our dependence on the oil we import from other, potentially
belligerent countries; we made no improvement in our charity toward the rest
of the world; we made no motion toward greater economic self-reliance; and we
continued our extensive and often irreversible damages to our own land. We appear
to have assumed merely that our victory confirmed our manifest destiny to be
the richest, most powerful, most wasteful nation in the world. After the catastrophe
of September 11, it again became clear to us how good it would be to be at peace,
to have no enemies, to have no more needless deaths to mourn. And then, our
need for war following with the customary swift and deadly logic our need for
peace, we took up the customary obsession with the evil of other people.
It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started
it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity
and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if
we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again
by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal
danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
We can no longer afford to confuse peaceability with passivity. Authentic peace
is no more passive than war. Like war, it calls for discipline and intelligence
and strength of character, though it calls also for higher principles and aims.
If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously,
continuously, carefully, and bravely as we now prepare for war.
Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry is the author of more than
thirty books including, most recently, In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays
for a Changed World.
This essay, an abridged version of one appearing in the current issue of Orion,
appeared in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on February 9th,
2003, made possible by contributions to Orion's Thoughts on America Fund, which
supports the widest public dissemination of writing that directly and artfully
engages the historic challenges of our time, and that offers an alternative
vision for a sane, sustainable, and peaceful existence.