We can't count very much on what is being said and done by the Administration. They have three main flaws: 1) excess of ambition and arrogance; 2) the tendency to work out of an ideology; and, 3) fear of the truth. In addition, they are led by a man who is very much over his head in about as many ways as it is possible to be over your head. It is a crime perpetrated on our People, and on the World, that this man was elected (manipulated by lies and outright thievery) President. I'd feel sorry for him, as he is so out of his depth, except for the fact that he was vain enough to think he could do the job, which then makes this clearly his own choice.
Some progressive thinkers (for good reasons of heart) want to bring our troops home. Unfortunately, we are past this choice. Bush and Company have committed us, and we having been so asleep as to put them in power, we are now obligated to face the consequences, however terrible. We've made our bed and now we'll have to sleep in it.
There are alternatives to what is being done, and these should be expressed at least for their instructional value, whether or not the current President applies them in practice.
First off we have to elaborate some general principles regarding terrorism. Always in seeking for the statesmen-like way, we have to have some sense of underlying realities, outside of dogma, party politics and ideology. There are some truths, and these need to first be recognized and stated.
Terrorism is an abberation of the psyche. It comes strongly in our Age, because there is a breakdown between individual moral autonomy and the values of a community (see my writings about social life on my website Shapes in the Fire). This breakdown leads to an end to civilization, such that the honor of the warrior can no longer root itself in the soul of the individual. A warrior's honor really only came into the individual through the community, as a shared ideal, but now the community is too weak, and warriors no longer understand the nature of their calling in its ideal sense. The result of this is that the individual, overwhelmed with rage over the trials of their own People, pours that rage on the innocent - the women and children and other non-combatants.
As was elaborated on the television show the West Wing, the terrorist doesn't succeed in a political sense. All terrorism fails. Nothing in the psyche of the terrorist is rooted in a reasoned effort to succeed in forcing the will of those being terrorized. It is all impassioned rage, with its own mindless overwhelming of all potential wisdom and intelligence.
The madness is infectious. Politicians, for seeming reasons of state, sponsor terrorism, thinking that this insanity is a tool that can be used in the furtherance of political goals (just think of the Palestinians, and the Israelis). Obviously from that example we can see how such thinking completely fails to do anything but let one vent one's passions. Terrorism doesn't work.
Clearly then a War on Terrorism (which again is an abberation of the psyche) is of no better worth than the War on Drugs was, or the previously failed War on Poverty. All these things fail because they spring from ideological principles, and not from any real knowledge of human psychology or the true nature of social and political existence.
Once we recognize that terrorism is a kind of madness, then we can begin to realize that our approach to it has to take account of this reality. The terrorist has stepped outside of rationality, and allowed themselves to become something with more kinship to a force of nature, than to an understandable human action. Someone willing to blow themselves up, while killing all manner of innocents (non-combatants), is not any longer a warrior, but rather simply an animalized former human being - functioning as some kind of chaos in social existence, not unlike a hurricane or a tornado.
The threat of punishment is meaningless to such lost souls. Neither is political argument. What the rest of us have to do is to understand that through such lost souls blind forces of Nature sweep into human affairs in the same way as floods and earthquakes. It is all quite beyond any conception of good and evil.
Once we arrive at this point, then the way to react becomes more clear. In the same way we master our fear in the face of natural disaster, so we learn to master the fear the lost soul terrorist seeks to inflict. Oh, certainly, if we can catch them we should stop them, and put them away, and do all the things we are already doing. But at the same time, we can't imagine to ourselves that we can rid the world of the death and destruction authored by this chaos in human souls, anymore than we can rid the world of death by heart attack, or cancer, or drunk drivers.
Now this madness in human beings is nothing new. Throughout history there have been various forms of this madness, this loss of the human. The difference today is that through modern Media, we now know about these things directly, and with a kind of immediacy that is far too intimate for most of us. Through that electronic eye in our living and bedrooms, we see the dark of the world, and its terrible pain and suffering. But we delude ourselves seriously if we think we can eliminate madness and chaos from human affairs.
Its time to grow up, and face the reality that people die, and sometimes people die because of the actions of madmen.
Now just as societies learn to cope with madmen, so we have to learn to cope with the damaged abberrant psyche of the terrorist. How we go about doing this in specific situations depends a lot on the context of each specific situation. Let's look at Iraq then in the light of this understanding of the madness currently being manifested there.
Having introduced political chaos into Iraq, by removing from power the dominant force that previously controlled through terror the various factions, we created a situation into which those with anti-American political ideologies could insert their own State-sponsored terror. So the country is now flooded with individual madmen, acting out their own political ideologies, whose only goal is chaos and destruction.
In this situation, it is the Iraqi People themselves who most possess the ability to identify and apprehend these terrorists. The American armed forces are ill-equipped, and far too mistrusted. What this means is that more and more the future of these People needs to be in their hands, and that the more we trust them to do for themselves what we basically cannot do for them, the more they will step into the intelligence breach, and identify and eliminate the flood of terrorist madmen currently making their home in Iraq.
We also, from the outside, cannot resolve the conflicts between the various factions into which the political reality of Iraq has decayed. They must be allowed to solve these problems themselves, and in their own way. This means that the grip on political processes in Iraq must be let go, and our only reason for being there in the future is dependent upon what the emerging government asks of us. Our ideological control actually interferes with the necessary healthy social processes that need to arise. We are like a bystander interfering in the coming of age process of someone else's adult children.
The more they do for themselves, the more they will find a way to meet and defeat the current escalating acts of terror. We step back, and let them learn to run the country on their own, doing only for them what they ask of us. We trust the mothers and the fathers there to wish to be free of the terrorists as much as we wish to be free of such in our own land. What can be done, they will do. And, what they would do, we cannot do, for we are incapable of doing it.
This will also have the effect of isolating the ideological justifications for the terror, and thereby undercut the reasons for State-sponsored terror. It (the leaving it to them) is also an example of a larger principle that can be applied world-wide with regard to the problem of terrorism. For the fact is that in leaving it to them, we also stand near by, ready to help and also clearly stating our expectation that they carry their part of the mutual burden. Terrorism harms us all, and we have to work together.
This principle then can fold over into a wider international relations approach, which will have to wait for another day, before being elaborated. written October 29th, 2003.
