Author: Thomas Friedman
Publication: Akron Beacon Journal
Date: January 9, 2004
URL: http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/editorial/7668624.htm
Airline flights into the United
States are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put
onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi
Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left
on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of
5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National
Guard troops are posted at key bridges and tunnels. Happy New Year.
What you are witnessing is why Sept.
11 amounts to World War III -- the third great totalitarian challenge to
open societies in the past 100 years.
As the longtime Middle East analyst
Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using
the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the
Aryan race. The Cold War was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet
Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class.
And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing
to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam.
OK, you say, but how can one possibly
compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with al-Qaeda?
Here's how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable
with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end
of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our
differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization.
With the Islamist militant groups,
we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large
numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making
themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily
life -- an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cell phone, fertilizer,
a tennis shoe -- you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable
and inexhaustible.
This poses a much more serious threat
than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential
element of an open society: trust.
Trust is built into every aspect,
every building and every interaction in our increasingly hyperconnected
world. We trust that when we board a plane, the person next to us isn't
going to blow up his shoes. Without trust, there's no open society because
there aren't enough police to guard every opening in an open society.
Which is why suicidal Islamist militants
have the potential to erode our lifestyle. Because the only way to deter
a suicidal enemy ready to use the instruments of daily life to kill us
is by gradually taking away trust.
We start by stripping airline passengers,
then we go to fingerprinting all visitors and we will end up removing cherished
civil liberties.
So what to do? There are only three
things we can do: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists
before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our
open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where
these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their
own, and only they really can restrain their extremists.
As my friend Dov Seidman, whose
company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The Cold War
ended the way it did because at some bedrock level, we and the Soviets
``agreed on what is shameful.'' And shame, more than any laws or police,
is how a village, a society or a culture expresses approval and disapproval
and applies restraints.
But today, alas, there is no bedrock
agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized
world.
Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamist
terrorists are neither a state subject to conventional deterrence or international
rules, nor individuals deterred by the fear of death. And their home societies,
in too many cases, have not stigmatized their acts as ``shameful.''
In too many cases, their spiritual
leaders have provided them with religious cover, and their local charities
have provided them with money. That is why suicide bombing is spreading.
We cannot change other societies
and cultures on our own. But we also can't just do nothing in the face
of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation
within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas.
Because ultimately, this is a struggle
within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just
as we did in World Wars I and II.
Friedman is a New York Times columnist.
