World
War III
By
Thomas L. Friedman
September 13, 2001
www.nytimes.com
JERUSALEM
-- As I restlessly lay awake early yesterday, with CNN on my TV and dawn
breaking over the holy places of Jerusalem, my ear somehow latched onto
a statement made by the U.S. transportation secretary, Norman Mineta,
about the new precautions that would be put in place at U.S. airports in
the wake of Tuesday's unspeakable terrorist attacks: There will be no
more curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a group of
terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee, also
watching CNN and laughing hysterically: "Hey boss, did you hear
that? We just blew up Wall Street and the Pentagon and their response is
no more curbside check-in?"
I
don't mean to criticize Mr. Mineta. He is doing what he can. And I have
absolutely no doubt that the Bush team, when it identifies the
perpetrators, will make them pay dearly. Yet there was something so
absurdly futile and American about the curbside ban that I couldn't help
but wonder: Does my country really understand that this is World War
III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means
there is a long, long war ahead.
And
this Third World War does not pit us against another superpower. It pits
us - the world's only superpower and quintessential symbol of liberal,
free-market, Western values - against all the super-empowered angry men
and women out there. Many of these super-empowered angry people hail
from failing states in the Muslim and third world. They do not share our
values, they resent America's influence over their lives, politics and
children, not to mention our support for Israel, and they often blame
America for the failure of their societies to master modernity.
What
makes them super-empowered, though, is their genius at using the
networked world, the Internet and the very high technology they hate to
attack us. Think about it: They turned our most advanced civilian planes
into human-directed, precision-guided cruise missiles - a diabolical
melding of their fanaticism and our technology. Jihad Online. And think
of what they hit: The World Trade Center - the beacon of American-led
capitalism that both tempts and repels them, and the Pentagon, the
embodiment of American military superiority.
And
think about what places in Israel the Palestinian suicide bombers have
targeted most. "They never hit synagogues or settlements or Israeli
religious zealots," said the Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit.
"They hit the Sbarro pizza parlor, the Netanya shopping mall. The
Dolphinarium disco. They hit the yuppie Israel, not the yeshiva
Israel."
So
what is required to fight a war against such people in such a world? To
start with, we as Americans will never be able to penetrate such small
groups, often based on family ties, who live in places such as
Afghanistan, Pakistan or Lebanon's wild Bekaa Valley. The only people
who can penetrate these shadowy and ever-mutating groups, and deter
them, are their own societies. And even they can't do it consistently.
So give the C.I.A. a break.
Israeli
officials will tell you that the only time they have had real quiet and
real control over the suicide bombers and radical Palestinian groups,
such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is when Yasir Arafat and his
Palestinian Authority tracked them, jailed them or deterred them.
So
then the question becomes, What does it take for us to get the societies
that host terrorist groups to truly act against them?
First
we have to prove that we are serious, and that we understand that many
of these terrorists hate our existence, not just our policies. In June I
wrote a column about the fact that a few cell-phone threats from Osama
bin Laden had prompted President Bush to withdraw the F.B.I. from Yemen,
a U.S. Marine contingent from Jordan and the U.S. Fifth Fleet from its
home base in the Persian Gulf. This U.S. retreat was noticed all over
the region, but it did not merit a headline in any major U.S. paper.
That must have encouraged the terrorists. Forget about our civilians, we
didn't even want to risk our soldiers to face their threats.
The
people who planned Tuesday's bombings combined world-class evil with
world-class genius to devastating effect. And unless we are ready to put
our best minds to work combating them - the World War III Manhattan
project - in an equally daring, unconventional and unremitting fashion,
we're in trouble. Because while this may have been the first major
battle of World War III, it may be the last one that involves only
conventional, non-nuclear weapons.
Second,
we have been allowing a double game to go on with our Middle East allies
for years, and that has to stop. A country like Syria has to decide:
Does it want a Hezbollah embassy in Damascus or an American one? If it
wants a U.S. embassy, then it cannot play host to a rogue's gallery of
terrorist groups.
Does
that mean the U.S. must ignore Palestinian concerns and Muslim economic
grievances? No. Many in this part of the world crave the best of
America, and we cannot forget that we are their ray of hope. But apropos
of the Palestinians, the U.S. put on the table at Camp David a plan that
would have gotten Yasir Arafat much of what he now claims to be fighting
for. That U.S. plan may not be sufficient for Palestinians, but to say
that the justifiable response to it is suicide terrorism is utterly
sick.
Third,
we need to have a serious and respectful dialogue with the Muslim world
and its political leaders about why many of its people are falling
behind. The fact is, no region in the world, including sub-Saharan
Africa, has fewer freely elected governments than the Arab-Muslim world,
which has none. Why? Egypt went through a whole period of self-criticism
after the 1967 war, which produced a stronger country. Why is such
self-criticism not tolerated today by any Arab leader?
Where
are the Muslim leaders who will tell their sons to resist the Israelis -
but not to kill themselves or innocent non-combatants? No matter how
bad, your life is sacred. Surely Islam, a grand religion that never
perpetrated the sort of Holocaust against the Jews in its midst that
Europe did, is being distorted when it is treated as a guidebook for
suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim leader will say
that?
These
are some of the issues we will have to address as we fight World War
III. It will be a long war against a brilliant and motivated foe. When I
remarked to an Israeli military official what an amazing technological
feat it was for the terrorists to hijack the planes and then fly them
directly into the most vulnerable spot in each building, he pooh-poohed
me.
"It's
not that difficult to learn how to fly a plane once it's up in the
air," he said. "And remember, they never had to learn how to
land."
No,
they didn't. They only had to destroy. We, by contrast, have to fight in
a way that is effective without destroying the very open society we are
trying to protect. We have to fight hard and land safely. We have to
fight the terrorists as if there were no rules, and preserve our open
society as if there were no terrorists. It won't be easy. It will
require our best strategists, our most creative diplomats and our
bravest soldiers. Semper Fi.
