THE WANDERER, JANUARY 13, 2005

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

The War in Proportion

     The disaster that has struck southern Asia should 
not only make us count our blessings; it offers us an 
occasion to view our own troubles with a refreshed sense 
of proportion. Millions of poor people have lost even the 
little they had; meanwhile, millions of rich Americans 
are worrying about the phantom enemy of terrorism, on 
which we've spent many, many times the amount of money 
that has gone to Asia for disaster relief.

     Advocates of the War on Terrorism have inflated both 
the intentions and the danger of the enemy. They insist 
that al-Qaeda wants to destroy our freedoms, even destroy 
all of us physically, and that it poses a threat 
comparable to those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. 
The more extreme among them, such as Norman Podhoretz, 
say we are engaged in "World War IV." In Podhoretz's 
words, the enemy's "objective is not merely to murder as 
many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the 
Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the 
destruction of everything good for which America stands."

     By now we are so used to such talk -- you can hear 
the same sort of thing from Rush Limbaugh any day of the 
week -- that we hardly notice what it means or how far it 
exceeds the reality we know. Osama bin Laden has indeed 
pronounced a death sentence on "Jews and Crusaders." And 
so far this has been executed on a few, most of them in 
one day three years ago. But after this rather small 
start -- small in relation to the total number of "Jews 
and Crusaders" -- he has managed only scattered and 
sporadic violence.

     Does he want to "conquer our land"? How on earth 
would he do that? A Muslim occupation of the United 
States? Bin Laden has never suggested such a thing; even 
his fantasies don't go that far. As for "the destruction 
of everything good for which America stands," this too is 
a rather perfervid projection, for which there is no 
evidence at all. Bin Laden has told us his three chief 
grievances, none of which has to do with America's 
intrinsic goodness: the U.S.-enforced sanctions against 
Iraq, the U.S. military presence in the holy land of 
Saudi Arabia, and U.S. support for the Israeli oppression 
of Palestinians.

     These are pretty sharply defined (many would even 
say reasonable) complaints, and they don't imply a 
megalomaniac mission of world conquest. Hitler, ruling a 
large and powerful nation, couldn't even conquer England. 
Bin Laden simply isn't deluded enough to entertain the 
ambitions attributed to him. At most he dreams of 
restoring the ancient Muslim caliphate, and he has hinted 
that this would include Spain -- which once again has a 
large and fast-growing Muslim population.

     Bin Laden, in a sense, is bluffing. And after the 
shock of 9/11, he can afford to do a lot of bluffing. He 
is helped by the very fact that we know so little about 
him and al-Qaeda. In the name of security, our government 
has adopted the practice of treating all of us as 
suspected terrorists, spending, as he himself has noted, 
a million dollars (of our money) for every dollar he puts 
up. You have to respect a man who can get his enemy to 
pick up virtually the entire tab for the war, while he 
remains in hiding and on the run. His real triumph has 
been to make us lose all sense of proportion about him.

     Against bin Laden's supposed dream of world conquest 
we may set President Bush's very real dream of spreading 
democracy, American-style, throughout the Middle East. 
Which one is the delusion?

     Bush would at least seem to have an advantage when 
it comes to realizing his dream. He commands military 
power and other resources that dwarf Nazi German and the 
Soviet Union combined. What does al-Qaeda have? Nobody 
knows, but in material terms it's comparatively meager. 
It doesn't even have the base of a sovereign nation where 
it can consolidate whatever strength it possesses. Its 
actual membership may be only a few thousand volunteers. 
It can't attack at will, and it has lost the element of 
surprise it had on 9/11. It must bide its time, waiting 
for the U.S. to overreach its power at the hostile 
margins of empire.

     Al-Qaeda will claim a victory over the U.S. if the 
January 30 elections in Iraq can be disrupted; but that 
will be a pretty small step toward killing all of us, 
conquering our land, and destroying everything good we 
stand for. In short, al-Qaeda is something less than a 
tsunami.

     The Bush administration, meanwhile, continues to 
insist that we must fight "the terrorists" over there so 
we won't have to fight them at home. But who are these 
terrorists we are now fighting "over there"? Sometimes we 
are told they are remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime; 
sometimes that they are Islamists aligned with al-Qaeda. 
Either way, this has long since ceased being the war we 
were told we were fighting and has become something else. 
We all know now that Saddam never posed a threat to the 
U.S., and nobody still talks about those "weapons of mass 
destruction," but the war, like any other federal 
program, goes on endlessly anyway. Santayana defined a 
fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts when he has 
forgotten his aims.

     Bush has been more confident than ever since his 
re-election. "I have won what I call political capital," 
he has said, "and now I intend to spend it." But it's 
only our capital that the government can spend. And this 
is what is really meant when Bush reiterates our 
"resolve" to prosecute the war to the end. 

     Besides, Bush may be overestimating the meaning of 
his victory. He is the fifth Republican president to be 
re-elected over the past century, and he won by the 
smallest margin by far. Theodore Roosevelt won by 17 per 
cent of the popular vote; Eisenhower by 16 per cent; 
Nixon by 23 per cent; Reagan by 18 per cent. Bush won by 
only 2 per cent -- against a weak opponent, and with more 
voters disapproving than supporting the war.

     So Bush may have less political capital than he 
thinks. The war on terror has become a burden on all 
Americans; the Vietnam war was far bloodier, but it 
didn't impose daily restrictions on our freedom at home 
as this one has. Even anti-war protestors weren't treated 
as suspected Viet Cong; but even supporters of this war 
are regarded as potential terrorists, like everyone else. 
Sooner or later people are going to ask what we have to 
show for all this. How will Bush answer?

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