Chris Hedges is a former long-time war reporter and Arabic speaker who has covered the Middle East and was in New York for 9/11. He also covered the First Iraq War, was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard, and in fact says jokingly, "I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard." Like Robert Fisk, he's a major journalist for the region.
He recently spoke about the death of Osama bin Laden. These are just a few of his reflections:
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.Three comments:
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. ...
So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. ... And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are. [But we] responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence.
(1) I'm afraid of a certain dynamic. It's easy to become locked in combat with someone, a person in your life, say. Their goal is to keep you engaged, to keep you from breaking free. And your goal is to win. They are using your goal to achieve their goal.
The way to beat these small groups of so-called "terrorists" is to keep them small, to isolate them, to dis-aggrandize them. Turning the whole machinery of state against them in permanent combat gives them the credibility of being our equal. A tragic mistake, in my view. There is no way for us to win without breaking away — by making this a police action, sending in the international version of the cops, and relegating them back to their small world.
(For a local comparison, imagine how grand the Western Idaho Hyper-Jesus Poobah Militia would feel if the whole security apparatus of the U.S., all of it, were focused on them; and all they had to do to keep the glory alive was leave the occasional hand grenade in a shopping mall. We'd dance to their tune forever.)
(2) When you are locked in combat with an enemy, you mirror the enemy over time and become him. You become twins fighting. ("But don't you see? He's white on the right side of his face!")
(3) And finally, there's always a winner in the Games People Play version of "Let's you and him fight." And it's not the combatants. The people we're really locked in combat with ... is them, the real winners. Often it's the person selling tickets to the fight, for example, or the guy who owns the concession stand. Maybe we should turn our focus that way.
Chris Hedges understands all this. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a must-read, as is this short article.
GP
