A few months back, a terrible earthquake rattled a portion of Iran. Entire villages were erased. The immediate death toll was 500. Thousands were injured. A radio account of people trapped and dying beneath a collapsed mosque had me riveted. Later that day, President Bush said, "Human suffering knows no political boundaries." The pope prayed. A U.N. relief agency sent some tents.
When the news moved on to something else, I fell into a waking dream. I do this a lot lately. It begins with some other president, or at least another version of George W. Bush. My imaginary president reacted differently to 9-11. He listened to opinion outside the gamut the real president normally hears — the one running from Donald Rumsfeld's worldview clear on over to Dick Cheney's worldview. This president realized right away that Al Qaeda's attacks were conducted on two fronts. One was old-style terrorism, killing people in unexpected ways. The other front is new — the medium formed by the global reach and speed of television and computer screens that now bind the world into a tight infosphere.
On this second front, the actions of the first are amplified in such a way that every violent act by Al Qaeda provokes global fear, and every military maneuver by the United States is seen as imperialism.
My president not only would have mounted a strong ground effort to bust Al Qaeda; he also would have realized what bin Laden has known all along: In the infosphere, you can no longer address "America" without also talking to the world.
And so this doppelganger Bush would have seen the advantage —oh, about a year ago, when half the world seemed to be wearing NYFD caps — in stationing a fleet of C-5 cargo planes at Kennedy Airport. When an Iranian earthquake or a Bali bomb blast occurred, 200 of New York's bravest and all that rescue paraphernalia for which we are famous — Jaws of Life cutters, search dogs, remote cameras — would immediately be dispatched. In my dream, I see the New York Fire Department pulling trapped Persian grandmothers out of that collapsed mosque. And the fantasy plays on out, with the president — Bush would be especially great at this part — taking to a podium and saying, "Al Qaeda blows up buildings and kills people. We dig through rubble and save human lives. This is what America does."
Okay, get former Bush speechwriter David Frum to tweak the nouns into something gruffer. Still, you've got one of Bush's trademark thin-lipped, nostril-flaring, mad-cowboy speeches — but one that could pull double duty by showcasing American bravery and humanitarianism in the service of decent Muslims.
These fantasies plague me because in the nearly two years since 9-11, the U.S. government has gone about responding to bin Laden all wrong. They've deployed soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq with ill-defined missions, while bin Laden has waged most of his war in the infosphere.America has failed to engage on this second front because Bush aims his tough-guy rhetoric exclusively at the domestic Nielsens. By sending out into the world only soldiers and threats, the U.S. managed to unite its enemies and fracture its alliances. In just a year, America burned off the world's sympathy without earning an ounce of national security in return. On this second front — which, it should be said, America invented — the terrorists have won, practically without a fight.
For instance, right after 9-11, the only metaphor one heard at the White House was "a new kind of war" against "terrorism." It made perfect, almost literary, sense. America was launched on another of its wars on abstractions. We battled domestic communism this way, and poverty. Nixon declared a war on cancer, and Carter called energy reliance "the moral equivalent of war." Then, of course, there was the war on drugs.
The problem with war as a metaphor is that you can't ever win. You just have to move on to another metaphorical war, which is why you weren't invited to the victory parade celebrating the defeat of drugs.
Other metaphors besides war were never considered, probably because they felt too Clintonian or liberal. One was "policing." The difference between hunting down a few hundred "terrorist outlaws" and declaring a "war on terrorism" should be obvious in the terms that used to matter when we deployed America's military muscle: defining the mission, knowing the endgame, worrying a little about cost. One reason our alliances are strained is that, unlike us, our allies are pursuing Al Qaeda as a law-enforcement matter. International police cooperation has led to numerous arrests in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and, most notably, Pakistan. It should be noted that while John Ashcroft has panicked thousands of innocent Muslims, he has yet to collar a single known Al Qaeda member here at home.
Instead, Bush signed on for the biggest open-ended mission in American history. We will "rid the world of evil," he said on Sept. 14, 2001. The last world leader to attempt such a thing — Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade of 1095 — never figured out a good exit strategy either.
The law-enforcement model would allow America to scale down its ambition while accomplishing something that might actually lower the threat of terrorism. The task of capturing the head guy — especially a charismatic leader of an outlaw band — is the historically proven way to demoralize and vanquish such an enemy.
Remember the Shining Path in Peru? It was an '80s terrorist group with distinctly Al Qaeda features. They butchered people in mind-numbing ways, and they were inspired by their strangely charismatic leader, a lunatic college professor named Abimael Guzman. The Peruvians caught him through good intelligence. They learned he was in a certain house, and in the subsequent siege went to great efforts to catch Guzman alive. Soon thereafter he was paraded in front of cameras wearing only his underpants. The charismatic leader, it turned out, had a paunch and spindly legs and a sagging face. The pictures were unforgettable. Shining Path all but withered away.
When 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in early March, he was whisked away without the satisfaction of a perp walk. The media ran an old glamour shot of him looking like a young Cat Stevens in aviator glasses. After three days the authorities must have noticed, but even then they released only a still shot — albeit a good one. He looked bloated and drunk, like every New Yorker's first landlord.
I hope that by the time the U.S. catches bin Laden, even President Bush will have realized the value of parading him in an orange jumper and what jailers call the three-piece suit (hand, leg, and hip irons) on the way to his military tribunal.
Hawks will howl, "So wimpy! Kill the bastard!"
But death, by bin Laden's own description, is what he expects. Being busted back to mere mortal is what he fears. As a fighter executed by America, he's a martyr for future terrorists. As a gaunt captive in end-stage renal failure (as has been reported), he's simply a feeble madman sitting in his cell, waiting for the end.
Americans have reacted to 9-11 as if it were a security breach, when it was obviously much more an intelligence failure. The attempt at mending the security side — fortifying borders, increasing domestic wiretaps, etc. — has de-evolved, it now seems clear, into a campaign against Muslim Americans. For a brief moment, Bush urged Americans not to blame all Muslims. But that's all fallen away. Jerry Falwell recently denounced the prophet Muhammad as a "terrorist." And Jimmy Swaggart, once caught masturbating in front of prostitutes, called upon his inside expertise to denounce Muhammad as a "sex deviant." The president no longer silences the ravings of his own Christian Taliban, and instead has permitted the worst among us to blur a few hundred Al Qaeda terrorists into the world's 1.5-billion Muslims and anyone wearing a turban. Our attorney general recently detained several hundred Iranian Jews — many of whom fled the Ayatollah in 1979 at American encouragement. If Al Qaeda has natural enemies, let it be said, they are probably Iranian and Jewish.
Needless to say, a president who publicly led the country away from anti-Muslim prejudice — and who even appointed a Muslim to high office — not only would be doing the right thing but would confound bin Laden's strategy. Bin Laden's war with his own faith is between his radical medievalism and Islam's emerging sense of its place in a pluralist world. Creating a space for cool modern Islam within our wild hilarious diversity is precisely what he fears most. And the media could play its part too: Think what The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Bill Cosby's programs did for mainstreaming the basics of female equality and the emergence of a black middle class. (Note to Hollywood: Call Tony Shalhoub already.)
America shouldn't be hassling patriotic Americans of Middle Eastern extraction. It should be recruiting them for our intelligence and highlighting their existence to other Muslims abroad.
Recently I was in England, and a Brit asked me why no one in America attended any of the funerals of the British who died on Sept. 11. It's a good question. Of the several hundred victims of 9-11 who were not American, 67 were British, 24 Japanese, 17 Mexican and so on. People from 91 countries died in the World Trade Center and yet a president who talks only to his domestic audience ignored the others so that, in time, all the sorrow of 9-11 seemed to be selfishly American.Consider what attending those funerals around the world would have done: Forged an emotional bond among 91 nations that might have served us this year. For once, funeral attendance wouldn't have been a vice-presidential curse but a national-security priority.
Instead our counterstrategy was to appoint Charlotte Beers, an advertising executive famous for peddling dandruff shampoo, as the undersecretary of state in charge of "selling" liberty around the world. After a year on the job, Beers resigned. She left behind a legacy of treating foreign countries to 30-second commercial spots boosting liberty as what she called one of the world's most exciting "brands."
Since Bush doesn't like to travel and cement relations with our allies, he stays at home and talks a lot about 9-11. I wish he wouldn't. In the aftermath of 9-11, President Bush told Americans to "go shopping" and try to get back to normal. It was good advice.
Unfortunately, he was the only American who didn't take it. His post-9-11 obsession with constantly repeating his swaggering threats and expressing deep concern for our liberty and pronouncing his blazing vigilance for our safety has pretty much kept every citizen wired at near-panic voltage for 18 months.
Worse, the constant fretting (via press conferences) appears to be informing our enemies of our actual weaknesses. Every other day, it seems, some press-hungry bureaucrat has channeled his inner Stephen King to announce some new horror: Water supplies could be contaminated; a radioactive dirty bomb could kill thousands; a little mad cow disease could decimate our food supply; a smallpox epidemic could be set off by one suicide carrier; a nuke could arrive in a container ship; a crop duster could spray us with toxins; or subways could become death chambers of poisonous gas.
We are all hardwired into this hyperfast infosphere now, and actions can be amplified in ways that we are only beginning to understand. The infosphere's global speed and range, and its easy customization (watch what you want, when you want), makes its cultural memory even more shallow than that of old-fashioned television. This infosphere is changing the way we process news and understand crises, and more than that, it's changing what becomes a crisis.
For example, why are there no Columbine-style killings anymore? Did those gun-prone teenagers get counseling? Has everybody reverted to pre-shooting sanity? Or is it that such shooters know they'd have a harder time lighting up the infosphere? Remember Charles Bishop, the disturbed 15-year-old honor student? Only four months after 9-11, he chose not to mow down his friends at recess. Astonishingly, he crashed a small plane into the 28th floor of a downtown Tampa bank. Why? Maybe because, like all of us, he knew that the infosphere had, um, moved on.
I know this sounds almost absurd right now, but one critical part of winning this fight with terrorism is to change the subject.
If you want to know the real turning point in the fight with terrorism, I suspect it occurred when Roger Ailes of Fox News sent over his memo explaining to Bush how to handle the crisis. The message, according to Bob Woodward's new book, advised the president that the only reaction the public might admire would be "the harshest measures possible."Of course, this is not true. The public was open to many different "measures." The only people guaranteed to admire the "harshest measures possible" were television producers.
Television is like a mood organ that, depending on which emotional stops you're playing, has an easy fondness for visually cued emotions such as anger or sorrow. Terrorism evokes as many fresh horrors as the imagination can conceive. As long as these doomsday scenarios are aimed at a domestic audience, they seem to be a boon for both television ratings and presidential-popularity numbers — two statistics hard to separate nowadays. Maybe that's why no American bigwig attended any funerals abroad.
Television shut down its foreign bureaus years ago because overseas news scored poorly among test audiences. Now that the president takes his lead from ratings mongers, why bother to dispatch even an undersecretary of state to attend a single funeral? No one in the domestic audience would notice. The problem is, the rest of the world did.
The president has nationalized and privatized our mourning and our rage, because it works so well as programming back home. The alarm blares constantly at us, yet we fire nothing back into the infosphere but taunts and 30-second spots about the warm feeling occasioned by the lifestyle brand called Lady Liberty. America is not fighting the war on the front that matters.
All the information flowing on this second front is moving in one direction — at the U.S.
Americans are terrified. Bin Laden periodically steps up to the microphone (or some good impostor does) to send Tom Ridge scrambling for his color decoder. But bin Laden scarcely has to bother. Bush's refusal to fight for the hearts and minds of others has kept the war focused right where bin Laden wants it. The U.S. has become unwitting collaborators in Al Qaeda's primary goal, the emotional electrification of the American people.
Jack Hitt, a contributing editor at Harper's magazine, has written for such publications as Lingua Franca, The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones.
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2003.