Endless Wars

The arrest of a suspected al-Qaeda agent, another U.S. citizen who was born Catholic but converted to Islam, is more unnerving than comforting. How many of these guys are out there? Can the government’s security forces stop them all before even one of them succeeds?

We already have our answer. Some of our top officials have told us that it’s “inevitable” that one or more of the terrorists will carry out his mission successfully.

In other words, the government’s “war on terrorism” will be just as triumphant and conclusive as its “war on drugs.” Since the first President Bush declared war on the drug trade more than a decade ago, with the same fierce determination as his son has shown in making war on terror, have you noticed the elimination of illegal drugs?

I’m no expert, but my impression is that you can still readily buy controlled substances within blocks of the White House. The government won’t admit that the war on drugs is good and lost, even at the very heart of the government’s power. And it won’t even admit that this war is still raging, lest it call attention to its own futility.

Yet we’re expected to believe that this government will somehow put an end to terrorism. How reassuring that our former “drug czar,” William Bennett, unblushingly endorses the war on terror! When it comes to government, hope springs eternal — the triumph of hope over experience, as Dr. Johnson put it.

Never fear: the cause of the problem, having aggravated the problem, will solve the problem. All it needs is more power — that is, more power over the people it’s protecting — which it is rapidly amassing.

Meanwhile, another suicide bomber has struck in Israel. Now Israel has been fighting terrorism with great determination for three decades. Its government, having no written constitution, is much less hampered by civil rights and civil liberties than ours is. It has some of the world’s most intelligent, sophisticated, and experienced anti-terrorism experts. A few weeks ago it launched a furious campaign to root out “the infrastructure of terrorism.”

Has Israel come within shouting distance of “eliminating” terrorism? Clearly not. So why should this country follow its example?

All we seem to learn from our mistakes is that we should keep making them, but with ever greater effort, expense, and sacrifice of our freedoms. We seek assurance that we are on the right course by citing irrelevant precedents and analogies from the Civil War and World War II, even though we know that the “war on terrorism” is a wholly new kind of war. At the same time, we allow our rulers to insist that its efforts, both in conventional warfare abroad and in security measures at home, are making “progress” — though “progress” against terrorism, by the nature of the case, can’t be measured. How do we know that killing Afghans makes us the least bit safer here?

All the bombs, bluff, and bluster are meaningless. They may only intensify the hatred we face. The enemy will never surrender, because there are too many of him and nobody can surrender for all of them.

This is not so much a war as a condition — a condition that threatens to become permanent. Maybe we can come to terms with it if we stop thinking of it as a war. We can start by asking how we got into this mess, and whether we can retrace our steps.

There should be an immediate halt to self-congratulatory slogans: “They hate us because we’re good.” Obviously “they” don’t think we’re good. In their frame of reference, we’re the forces of evil. That doesn’t mean “they” are right about “us,” only that “we” may have to seek an accommodation “they” can accept.

Appeasement? Surrender? The enemy has no authoritative leader to appease or surrender to. Besides, our rulers don’t know when they’re beaten. As in the war on drugs, no amount of failure, frustration, and futility will teach them the meaning of defeat. As long as they can bomb foreigners and crack down on Americans, they will persuade themselves that victory is within their grasp.

The prospect, then, is that the “war on terrorism” will be endless. The U.S. Government will never win it, but the American people have already lost it.

Joseph Sobran