This essay by the editor of The New Republic argues that the honeymoon after the attacks may be over, and political fault lines are reopening around the question, “Does America have the moral authority to go to war?” Widening the cracks, he immediately goes after The Nation for claiming that the attacks were about the U.S.’s support for Israel (“…downright bizarre”) or the sanctions against Iraq (“Longtime bin Laden watchers know he has never been especially concerned with the plight of the Palestinians… Nor has bin Laden been a big supporter of Saddam.”):
In bin Laden’s mind, America’s greatest offense–by far–is its military presence in his home country of Saudi Arabia. (The bin Laden-sponsored attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam occurred on the eighth anniversary of the dispatch of U.S. troops to the Gulf.) And that’s a harder line for Western leftists to peddle. Because bin Laden isn’t upset at the United States for bolstering Riyadh’s oppressive policies–after all, the Saudi government’s views on individual freedom and the status of women roughly mirror his own. Bin Laden is upset simply because non-Muslims live in the Holy Land around Mecca and Medina. His first priority is banishing Christians and Jews from Saudi Arabia. And his second priority is banishing Christians and Jews from every other Muslim country…
Bin Laden, after all, is an ethnic cleanser. And the United States is the only powerful country on Earth willing to take up arms to make sure that people of different religions and races can live together. The main difference between September 11 and what came before is that bin Laden desires ethnic cleansing on a scale far greater than the Hutus and the Serbs, a scale that has only one true twentieth century parallel.
If Fisk and The Nation really want to argue that America brought the World Trade Center attack on itself, they shouldn’t delude themselves. They are not defending the Palestinians’ right to a state or the Iraqis’ right to medicine. They are defending a Muslim’s right not to live with a non-Muslim. And in so doing they are renouncing this country’s most sacred principles–principles that saved countless Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s…
The Spinsanity site (“countering rhetoric with reason”) singles out malignant conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan for calling dissenting leftists a “fifth column”. For those who don’t know, this scurrilous term has connoted domestic traitors who covertly aid their country’s attackers or occupiers.
On the other hand, it occurs to me, some would say that, in automatically linking dissent to the cause of the enemy, Sullivan may be the true “fifth columnist” [grin]. The message that the terrorists have won if their attack prompts us to dismantle X or Y that is best about America has been bandied about this week. Of course, it ignores the fact that it was almost certainly not merely begrudging the U.S. its ‘best’ attributes like freedom and affluence (the closest Dubya’s speechwriters came in his address to the nation last night to offering any explanation) that motivated the carnage. As much or more, of course, it is some of our unacknowledged baser aspects — our bullying arrogance, our interventionism, our perceived support for corrupt oppressive regimes — that give the fanatics an axe to grind against us.
In another sign of the intolerance of dissent, the President of the University of Texas felt compelled to criticize the expression of just such sentiments by a UT journalism professor who had written an antiwar column in the Houston Chronicle.
Faulkner’s letter begins by stating Jensen made his remarks entirely in his
capacity as a free citizen of the United States, but that “no aspect of his
remarks is supported, condoned or officially recognized by the University of
Texas at Austin.”Faulkner’s letter then turned to a more personal note.
“Jensen is not only misguided, but has become a fountain of undiluted foolishness
on issues of public policy,” Faulkner wrote in his letter. “Students must learn
that there is a good deal of foolish opinion in the popular media, and they must
become skilled at recognizing and discounting it,”
says Texas coverage of the controversy.
