We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans, including a middle school friend of mine, and altered the landscape of American politics. I plan a longer take on this timed to the anniversary.
Today, however, I want to point to a column I wrote in September 2001, which I think was prescient and remains timely, given the end of our nearly 20-year disaster in Afghanistan. It is a column written by a pacifist who is ambivalent about the likely response to come, by someone who clearly sees the dangers of military involvement but who also is struggling to find other ways to address what had happened.
I post this not to pat myself on the back, but to remind readers and the broader public that not everyone reacted to 9/11 with bloodlust and a desire for revenge or war, that many of us either were ambivalent or opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan, and who have struggled with the damage we have done to that nation in the intervening years.
The column ran in both the South Brunswick Post and the Cranbury Press, which I edited at the time, and probably in a few other Princeton Packet papers.
DISPATCHES: A call for peace at a time of war
A pacifist calls for restraint.
I went to synagogue Tuesday for Rosh Hashana for the first time in nearly two decades.
I felt I had no choice. I needed to be a part of a tradition, to remind myself of the temporary nature of our lives here and the vastness of the universe. And I needed to pray.
I needed to pray for the hundreds who have been confirmed dead, killed in the terror attacks on New York and Washington, for the thousands more who are still missing, for the lost sense of security and safety.
And I needed to pray for peace, for the hope that the terrible events of Sept. 11 will not breed more bloodshed and violence.
We live in a different world than we did before Sept. 11 and how we react to these new circumstances will go a long way to determine what kind of people we are and what kind of nation we will live in once the dust literally clears.
Are we to be the peaceful nation we pride ourselves in being? Or are we to allow our emotions to control our actions? That’s a tough call, given the push in the country now for military action.
But we need to remember and understand the difficulties we face if we travel that road. We have no real idea who our enemy is or exactly where it is. We apparently have intelligence that links the hijackings to a band of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan led by Osama bin Laden, but we can’t be sure that killing off Mr. bin Laden and his immediate followers won’t spawn other bin Ladens and other followers in other nations and that sending in the bombers and the Marines won’t trigger a massive backlash across the Arab and Muslim world.
And there is the difficult terrain of Afghanistan, which helped to defeat the British in the 19th century and the Russians more recently.
These are pragmatic concerns. The question we need to answer before we move forward is will military action create a safer world?
Probably not.
So why engage the military?
Good question.
I am a pacifist. I abhor violence and am critical of military solutions and the military mindset.
I oppose the death penalty on both moral and civil libertarian grounds. I do not believe trading one life for another evens the score or balances the ledger. I don’t see it as a deterrent and I have grave doubts that we can ever be sure that we are not sending innocents to death.
I come to war using the same logic. The use of military force always results in the deaths of innocent civilians which fails the simplest of moral tests. There is no way around it. Granted, the terrorists had no regard for the innocent people working in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, but we should not use that rationale as an excuse to disregard a basic human right the right to live.
And yet, I’m having difficulty arguing against military action, primarily because the other options seem unlikely to work. And to do nothing would leave what is being called the worst terror attack in the history of the world unpunished. To see the devastation wrought on New York’s financial district, to hear the stories of those who escaped, of those searching through the rubble, of those who have lost loved ones, leaves a heaviness in the pit of my stomach, an aching in my joints and in my heart. The act demands that justice be done.
But what does this mean? How can we bring the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to justice without violating the philosophy that underlies the freedoms we hold dear?
There is no simple answer to this and perhaps there is no answer at all. Simple police methods will have limited effectiveness the trail linking the terrorists is murky at best and too many governments appear complicit in the terror trade.
The diplomatic route faces the same roadblocks. While we may be able to lean on some countries that have been tolerant of terrorists by using economic and military sticks and carrots, we have to understand that these national governments have very little real control over the terror organizations and are, to some degree, at their mercy because of the support the terrorists have among large segments of the population.
Does this mean we should abandon these approaches and move forward with military action? No. It only means that we face a difficult task.
We must find a way to bring the terrorists and their supporting organizations to justice without sinking to their level, without killing innocent Afghans. We need to work with other nations to address the causes of terrorism and attack the disease at its roots. That means both finding and arresting the terrorist cells and leaders before they can spread their terror and eradicating the dire poverty and hopelessness around the globe that allows extremist views to fester.
Going in with guns ablaze is only going to make things worse.