[Discussion] Failures of Nerve

[Paksoy, Hb]

Failures of Nerve 
by Roger Kimball 
However tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. 
-Mary Beard, about September 11 
... the greatest source of terrorism on earth. 
-Harold Pinter, about the United States 
The real matter is the extinction of America, and God willing, it will fall
to the ground. 
-Mullah Mohammed Omar, Taliban leader 
We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to
eliminate you. 
-Hussein Massawi, former Hezbollah leader 
The first thing to note about these statements by the classicist Mary Beard,
the playwright Harold Pinter, and the Islamofascists Mohammed Omar and
Hussein Massawi is that they could quickly be multiplied tenfold. You will
find similar statements circulating at almost any American or European
university, throughout the American and European (and Arabic) press, in
mosques and madrassahs-almost anywhere, in fact, that intellectual elites,
or Islamic terrorists, congregate. Anti-Americanism, in both its patently
murderous and fatuously sophisticated forms, is a growth industry. 
Is there a connection between the Mary Beards and what Mark Steyn has aptly
dubbed the weird beards of the world?-between the prattling intellectuals
and the pragmatic terrorists? In an important sense the answer is Yes.
"Ideas," the political philosopher Richard Weaver observed in his signature
phrase, "have consequences," even bad ideas, even silly ideas, even ideas
that could only come from the mind of a privileged Western intellectual too
infatuated with his own importance to notice fundamental political
realities. This is not to suggest that Harold Pinter (say) is responsible
for Mullah Omar; it is to suggest that he helps create a climate of opinion
where Mullah Omars have a better chance of thriving. 
Pinterism (if I may thus eponymize this brand of intellectualizing
self-hatred) is not a new phenomenon. George Orwell noted something similar
in his anatomy of the pacifism that was rampant in English intellectual
circles before and during World War II. The "unadmitted motive" of pacifism,
Orwell wrote, was "hatred of Western democracy and admiration of
totalitarianism." Harold Pinter is no John Walker Lindh. You won't find him
joining up with the Taliban. But you will find him in sympathy with his
spiritual colleague-in-rhetoric Susan Sontag, who explained that the assualt
of September 11 was "not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty'
or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's
self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American
alliances and actions... . [W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of
[September 11's] slaughter, they were not cowards." Does she say, then, that
they were murderous fanatics? Hardly. Sontag (like Pinter) is at once too
ambivalent and too admiring for that: too ambivalent about the "world's
self-proclaimed superpower" (or "rogue state," as Pinter put it) and too
admiring of the insurrectionists. In this context, it is worth remembering
Orwell's observation about the "processes by which pacifists who have
started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency
to be fascinated by the successes and power of Nazism." 
Orwell noted that pacifism was "objectively pro-Nazi" because it inculcated
an attitude that aided England's enemies. Just so, anti-Americanism is
objectively pro-terrorist. It was not surprising that the Nazis did all they
could to encourage pacifism among the English (just as the Soviets actively
aided the anti-War movement in America in the 1960s and 1970s). Similarly,
anti-Americanism helps to create a climate where terrorism is excused,
rationalized, explained-explained away. We deserved it; we had it coming;
arrogance; poverty; the environment; root causes ... 
Pacifism was built around phrases that sounded pleasant (peace, love,
non-violence) but that were essentially deceptive because they were
unrealistic-that is, untrue to the nature of reality, to the way the world
actually works (as distinct from the way we might wish that it did). "To
abjure violence," Orwell noted, "it is necessary to have no experience of
it." Looking back on the Spanish civil war in 1942, Orwell criticized "the
sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most
fear never really happens." 
	Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right
invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that
evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism ... is founded largely
on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But
why should it? What evidence is there that it does? 
While pondering that question, let us also step back and ask what America's
role in the world has been over the course of the last century. The British
journalist Brian Appleyard, writing in the London Times on September 23,
2001, registered his amazement at the orgy of anti-Americanism that greeted
the terrorist attacks of Septmber 11. In one sense, he noted, there was
nothing new about anti-Americanism. 
	I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage
anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the
apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans.
In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and
intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud-indeed, my
contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as
they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now
weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes. 
But the access of anti-Americanism that followed al Qaeda's attacks
proceeded in a shriller, more virulent register than most earlier examples.
It also seemed less rational. Appleyard duly noted that America was far from
a perfect society. But what role had Americans actually played in "that most
awful of all centuries," the twentieth? 
	They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second
world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and
peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised
by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling-we hope-of Chinese
communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from
Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped
the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered. 
Does it all come under the heading of "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished"? In
part. There is a sense in which anti-Americanism -certain aspects of it,
anyway-is the predictable function of envy, a phenomenon pointed to by the
authors of 1066 and All That when they noted that since the time of the
First World War America has been the world's Top Nation. As political
thinkers since Pericles have noticed, distinction breeds envy, envy breeds
resentment, and, unchecked, resentment breeds hatred. But that sort of
animus-lavished on Athens in her day, on Rome in hers, and on Great Britain
in hers-is not by itself the sort of "anti" sentiment with which we need to
concern ourselves. 
Walter Bagehot came closer when he noted, in Physics and Politics (1872),
that the enormous benefits that the English had conferred upon
India-education, hygiene, the rule of law-were received with distinct
ambivalence by the native population. The benefits were real, but, Bagehot
apostrophized, 
	What puzzles them is your constant disposition to change, or as you
call it, improvement. Their own life in every detail being regulated by
ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a policy which is always bringing
something new; they do not a bit believe that the desire to make them
comfortable and happy is the root of it; they believe, on the contrary, that
you are aiming at something which they do not understand-that you mean to
"take away their religion"; in a word, that the end and object of all these
continual changes is to make Indians not what they are and what they like to
be, but something new and different from what they are, and what they would
not like to be. 
The journalist Henry Fairlie made a cognate point in 1975 in his essay
"Anti-Americanism at Home and Abroad." "The energy of the American presence
in the world," Fairlie wrote, 
	is both welcomed and feared, both a cause of hope and a source of
anxiety, because with its idea it keeps unsettling the established forms of
the past. Not merely old but ancient customs are surrendering to a presence
that is not imposed and yet seems irresistible, to an idea that appears to
be more powerful than the slogans of any revolution. 
The unsettling of what Bagehot called "fixity" is a great source of cultural
anxiety. It is, I suspect, a much larger ingredient in foreign complaints
about the baneful influence of "vulgar" American culture than is usually
acknowledged. (Not, I hasten to add, that those complaints are without
merit: it is a curious irony, though, that the most effective criticisms of
American culture have tended to come from conservative pro-American sources
rather than from the anti-American Left.) But explanations, however
accurate, however deep, can take us only so far. They always bring with them
a tendency to dismiss the thing being explained-"tout comprendre, c'est tout
pardonner." It is wise to take account of illuminating explanations. But it
is a mistake-a mistake to which well-meaning liberals are especially
prone-to believe that by understanding why a vicious character came to be
that way we thereby purchase immunity from the effects of viciousness. 
It has been suggested that the current outbreak of anti-Americanism,
although broad, is not necessarily deep. There may be some truth in that, at
least in so far as it applies to European and American anti-Americanism.
(The Arab version is a more resilient strain.) Certainly, anti-Americanism
comes in several versions and in differing levels of toxicity. But there is
not a lot of comfort to be gleaned from that fact. For anti-Americanism is
like certain infections: it can begin as a minor nuisance and, if untreated,
blossom into a life-threatening condition. 
Nor is there much comfort to be had from the contention that
anti-Americanism in its home-grown versions is synonymous with political
dissent: that it is merely a vigorous form of self-criticism. In the first
place, it isn't true. Dissent is one thing; anti-Americanism is closer to
its opposite. Indeed, anti-Americanism, because of its adversarial moralism,
tends to short-circuit self-criticism. This was a point that Henry Fairlie
underscored when he observed that the expression of anti-Americanism is "not
criticism of one's own society; in fact it prohibits just and effective
criticism" by substituting utopian fantasies for political realities. 
One of those realities concerns the responsibility that accrues to those
states that wield great power. It is a lesson that liberal regimes are
continuously tempted to forget, to their own peril and the peril of the
societies they influence. The dissolution of the British Empire-one of the
most beneficient and enlightened political forces in history-took place for
many reasons, including, it pains me to say, pressure from the United
States. But part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty,
weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century Britain no
longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked. The promiscuous desire to be
liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw.
It signals a faltering of courage, what Pericles castigated as malakia,
"effeminacy," and a dangerous loss of self-confidence. At the height of the
Cold War, the political commentator James Burnham observed that "Americans
have not yet learned the tragic lesson that the most powerful cannot be
loved-hated, envied, feared, obeyed, respected, even honored perhaps, but
not loved." Have we now, some forty years on, finally learned that lesson? 
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington, we saw plenty of deplorable outbursts of anti-Americanism: the
dancing "Death to America" multitudes in the Middle East as well as the
predictable responses of the Chomsky-Sontag-Pinter brigade. But we also
witnessed a vast outpouring of sympathy. Some of the sympathy no doubt was
genuine; much of it was oleaginous and depended on the novel spectacle of
America appearing as a victim. The trouble was that America was not content
to remain a victim. And when a victim fights back, he may earn respect but
he forfeits sympathy and kindred sentimentalizing emotions. 
When Susan Sontag said that the terrorist assaults on the United States were
"undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions,"
she offered that observation as a partial justification or extenuation of
the attacks, which it most certainly was not. But there is, I believe,
another sense in which growing anti-Americanism, together with a growing
climate of terrorism, can be seen as a predictable result of American
actions or, more to the point, of American inaction. I am not offering a
candidate for the "cause"-much less the "root cause"-of terrorism.
Determining the cause of terrorism is not a difficult hermeneutical problem.
Jonathan Rauch had it essentially right when he argued that the cause of
terrorism is terrorists. Nevertheless, when we ask what nurtures terrorists,
what may be counted on to allow them to flourish and multiply, one important
answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to
the responsibilities of power. 
In the course of his reflections on anti-Americanism, Henry Fairlie observed
that "Anti-Americanism abroad tends to be strongest when America itself
seems to have lost confidence in its own idea." Some such loss of confidence
has repeatedly afflicted the American spirit at least since the end of the
Vietnam conflict. It is by now a familiar litany, but is nonetheless worth
reviewing. From the mid-1970s, the United States has vacillated in
discharging its responsibilities to power. Whatever the wisdom of our
involvement in Vietnam, our way of extricating ourselves was ignominious and
an incitement to further violence. The image of that U.S. helicopter
evacuating people from our embassy in Saigon is a badge of failure, not so
much of military strategy as of nerve. 
Even worse was our response to the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 and 1980.
Our hesitation to act decisively was duly noted and found contemptible by
our enemies. And the fiasco of President Carter's botched rescue attempt,
when a transport vehicle and one of our helicopters collided on the sands of
the Iranian desert, was a national humiliation. President Reagan did
effectively face down the Soviet Union, but his halfhearted response to the
terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 contributed
to the tattered reputation of America as (in Mao's phrase) "a paper tiger." 
The Clinton administration sharply exacerbated the problem. From 1993
through 2000, the United States again and again demonstrated its lack of
resolve even as it let its military infrastructure decay. In Somalia at the
end of 1992, two U.S. helicopters were shot down, several Americans were
killed, the body of one was dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu.
We did nothing-an action, or lack of action, that prompted Osama bin Laden
way back then to reflect that his followers were "surprised at the low
morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the
American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat." 
It was the same in 1993, when terrorists bombed the World Trade Center,
killing six people and wounding scores. It was the same in June 1996, when a
truck bomb exploded outside a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia,
killing nineteen Americans. There were some anguished words but we
did-nothing. It was the same in 1998 when our embassies were bombed in Kenya
and Tanzania, killing hundreds. The response was to rearrange some rocks in
the Afghan desert with a few cruise missiles. 
It was the same in October 2000, when suicide terrorists blew a gigantic
hole in USS Cole, killing seventeen sailors and almost sinking one of the
U.S. Navy's most advanced ships. Like Hamlet, we responded with "words,
words, words," and only token military gestures. The harvest was an increase
in contempt and a corresponding increase in terrorist outrage,
culminating-this time around-in the terrible events of September 11. 
My own judgment is that the current orgy of anti-Americanism, fanned to a
fever pitch by talk of war with Iraq, will dissipate in proportion to the
resoluteness demonstrated by the United States. If America acts decisively
and successfully in Iraq, with or without the support of the United Nations,
if it topples Saddam Hussein and establishes a reasonably benevolent
alternative, there will, I predict, be a corresponding diminution in the
fury of anti-American sentiment. I do not expect it will end the mad drivel
of fantasists like Harold Pinter or connoisseurs of contempt like Susan
Sontag. Nothing could do that. But I am confident that it would help move
anti-Americanism off the agenda. 
In his much-maligned poem "The White Man's Burden," Rudyard Kipling makes a
dour prediction. "Take up the White Man's burden" of helping to civilize
uncivilized parts of the world and you will, he warns, "reap his old
reward": 

	The blame of those ye better, 
	The hate of those ye guard. 
Kipling was on to something. But I wonder whether he did not overstate the
case. Part of the white man's burden (let's be less politically incorrect
and call it the "West's burden") he says elsewhere in that poem is
conducting the "savage wars of peace." And the result of these wars is to 

	Fill full the mouth of Famine 
	And bid the sickness cease. 
Blame? Maybe. Hate? Perhaps. But time and again history has shown that
strength legitimately exercised has a sedative effect. It instills a sense
of security, backed up by an attitude of respect. And in that atmosphere
anti-Americanism ceases being a threat to world stability and recedes to its
proper role as the pastime of cranks and impotent malcontents. 
Notes
Go to the top of the document. 
	The essays in this special section are adapted from papers presented
at a conference on anti-Americanism that was held in Tunbridge Wells,
England, October 3-4. The conference was sponsored jointly by The Social
Affairs Unit and The New Criterion. Go back to the text. 

>From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 3, November 2002 
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