The Question looming large in the air above Washington DC these days is "what do we do?" People are rapidly coming round to the conclusion that George W. Bush doesn't have a damn clue how to help anyone but his cronies prosper. Worse, it's beginning to seem like they're just going to squeeze the nation for what its got and go back to living in gated communities, privatized world without end. This generally gets the thumbs-down from most thinking people. However, in spite of this, or maybe because of it, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what kinds of policies should be pursued.
I think total war is a bad idea, and I'm not the only one. Matt Yglesias, who I haven't read much before, but since I met in DC I felt I should check out, neatly skewers the Jingoistic vision of Imperial Hubris.
September 11 was a terrible thing, but preventing a future 3,000 casualty incident doesn't come close to justifying the sort of large-scale civilian-killing that the author is advocating. The only sort of threat sufficiently grave to contemplate these sorts of measures is the risk of nuclear terrorism. But a brutal total war hardly seems like the optimum means of avoiding this.
I find the prospect of a nuclear 9-11 literally terrifying (I lived in New York through the original), but the course of action it pushes me towards is to make peace, a strategy you won't hear many pundits or talking heads discussing. Peace is how we won the cold-war incidentally, but it seems inconceivable to most of the political class that we might actually have the will to go about the work of doing it again.
One of the reasons peace seems so, well, outlandish these days is that our modern way of life rests heavily on many root causes of current (and larger brewing) conflicts around the world. We can't really go for peace without some degree of sacrifice and hard work, and that's not what a consumer society likes to do. Yet if we do not sacrifice and work hard, if this "clash of civilizations" is allowed to occur, based on the current fragmentary distribution of power among our supposed enemy it seems impossible to avoid at least one or more incidents of mass death over the course of a multi-year larger conflict.
This larger conflict must be avoided. That means bringing our role in the current conflict (Iraq) to a swift conclusion and rapidly, tangibly, working to address the larger root causes of our beef with the people of the middle east.
So we have to change our modern way of life. We have to wean ourself from their oil so we can withdraw our military footprint. They don't hate us because we're free. They hate us because they believe we prevent them from being so as well, because they believe we prop up corrupt and unresponsive governments, intimidate others, and generally oppress their part of the world. While some of this is a product of propaganda, a lot of it is true too. We don't have the trust of very many people in the Islamic world, and it's not terribly difficult to see why.
The only way to truly demonstrate our good faith is to remove our garrisons and the acrid smell of imperialism they bring with them. We can still maintain our alliances and obligations; there's no need for bases in Saudi Arabia (or any long-term presence in Iraq) to insure the safety of the region.
More importantly, there's no need to coddle dictators in Uzbeckistan and no need to turn our backs on a growing pro-democracy movement in Iran. As much as we need to get our guys with guns out of there, we also need the diplomatic mobility to do what's right.
Changing our way of life will allow us to take the economic, military and diplomatic steps we need for peace, but that's not all we have to do. We must re-engage the world in a rigorous attempt to spread the actually valuable values people have associated with our nation in the past, things like the equality of the sexes and races and the belief in the right of people to determine what they believe and how they live their lives.
We must engage the Muslim world culturally. From what I hear, the only thing popping with the youth (which means the young men, essentially) is radical Islam. That's bad. The Taliban started as a student movement. Osama bin Laden's face appears on cell phone screens in the hand of teenagers in Morocco. This is us heading face first into a clash of civilizations.
What do we do? I think all of the above is a good idea, and I think taking exclusive power out of the hands of men is a great guerilla tactic. As Barbara Erinreich suggests, the killer app for dealing with Al-Qaeda is probably feminism.
