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Continued from the previous page
The
events of that tragic Tuesday should force us to rethink old and set
ways of looking at the world. In the war against fundamentalist terrorism,
past enemies can be today's allies. The concert of democracies must
cooperate politically and coordinate responses with one another's law-enforcement
and military forces. They must forge alliances if necessary to work
around the institutionalized reluctance of global organizations to respond
effectively and in time to real threats instead of posturing over imaginary
grievances.
Security experts will examine closely the procedural and organizational
flaws that allowed the planes to be hijacked and the intelligence failures
that enabled it all to be plotted without detection. Other security
measures will also be put in place. But in the end there can be no guaranteed
security against suicide terrorists who know no limits to their audacity,
imagination and inhumanity. We must not privilege security and order
to such an extent as to destroy our most cherished values of liberty
and justice in the search for an unattainable absolute security. As
Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of American independence, said,
those who would sacrifice essential liberty to temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety.
In looking for underlying causes, Americans should ask why they arouse
such fanatic hatred in would-be terrorists. Is all of it the price they
have to pay for being the world's most successful, powerful and wealthy
nation? Or can some of it at least be muted by adopting policies that
are more measured and tempered in dispensing justice more evenly? Fanaticism
feeds on grievance, and grievance is nurtured by deeply felt injustice.
Terror is the weapon of choice of those who harbour the sense of having
been wronged, who are too weak to do anything about it through conventional
means, and who are motivated to seek vengeance by other means.
Whatever else they may have been, the suicide terrorists responsible
for that Tuesday's attacks were not cowards. On the contrary, they were
exceptional in their steel of resolve, even if it was harnessed to an
evil end. Random acts by individual terrorists can be sourced to the
politics of collective grievance: dehumanizing poverty and spirit-sapping
inequality, as well as group injustice.
President Bush spoke of an "unyielding anger" in his first
broadcast to the nation. Such human emotions are not exceptional to
one people but common to the human race. The fury and vengeance of others
fester in deeply wounded collective psyche: if we wrong them, shall
they not revenge? Anger is a bad guide to policy, for Governments as
for terrorists: revenge is indeed a dish best served cold.
Terrorism cannot be contained by expensive space-based shields against
missile attacks. Modern military forces and security policies should
be configured for threats rooted in the new security agenda, but bearing
in mind that at the end of the day, it is simply not possible to construct
and keep in place indefinitely foolproof protective shields against
every threat.
If isolationism is not an option in today's interconnected world, unilateralism
cannot be the strategy of choice either. Just as America is a nation
of laws that find expression in institutions, so Americans should work
to construct a world of laws functioning through international institutions.
That is why the concert of democracies to combat terrorism cannot be
a closed circle, but must embrace all those willing to join in the fight
against threats to a civilized community of nations. A global coalition
formed to combat terrorism must not be restricted to punitive and retributive
goals, but must instead be transformed into the larger cause of rooting
security worldwide in enduring structures of cooperation for the longer
term. The supremacy of the rule of law has to be established at the
national, regional and global levels. The principles of equity and justice
must pervade all institutions of governance.
Americans rightly reject moral equivalence between their own "virtuous"
power and their "evil" enemies. They should now reflect on
their own propensity toward political ambivalence between the perpetrators
of terrorism and the efforts of legitimate governments to maintain national
security and assure public safety.
The end of complacency about terrorism in the American heartland should
encourage Washington to view other countries' parallel wars against
terrorism through the prism of a fellow-government facing agonizing
policy choices in the real world, rather than single-issue non-governmental
organizations, whose vision is not anchored in any responsibility for
policy decisions. Some Governments have been at the receiving end of
moral and political judgment about robust responses to violent threats
posed to their authority and order from armed dissidents. They are entitled
to and should now expect not a free hand but a more mature understanding-an
understanding forged in the crucible of shared suffering.
This does not give any Government a license to kill. To defeat the terrorists,
it is absolutely critical that the symbolism of America-not just the
home of the free and the land of the brave, but also the bastion of
liberty, freedom, equality between citizens and rulers, democracy and
nation of laws-be kept alive. That is a shared vision. That is why we
were all the symbolic target of the attacks, why we were all Americans
that Tuesday, and why we must join forces with the Americans to rid
succeeding generations of the scourge of terrorism-not blinded by hatred
and a lust for revenge, nor driven by the calculus of geopolitical interests,
but ennobled by the vision of a just order and empowered by the majesty
of laws.
For the sake of our common future, we must not allow reason to be overwhelmed
by grief and fear, judgment to be drowned in shock and anger at the
terrorist action-as President Bush has affirmed, we must not brand all
followers of any particular faith our common enemy. Just as there coexist
many ways of thinking and many different value systems within the "West",
so are there many who daily honour Islam against the tiny minority who
sometimes dishonour it or any other religion.
In the immediate aftermath of the assaults, some have sought to resurrect
the vacuous and discredited thesis of the clash of civilizations. Incidents
have been reported where members of particular ethnic or religious groups
going about their daily lives-shop owners, passers-by-were randomly
accused of being responsible for the devastation in New York and Washington,
and sometimes assaulted with deadly violence, simply because of their
race, colour, religion or attire.
Individual terrorism should not provoke mass intolerance. The victims
of the hijacked planes and the World Trade Center destruction, along
with the rescuers, reflect modern American society in all its glorious
diversity. The best way to honour victims is to recognize our common
humanity and work for peace in and through justice. Islamic terrorists
are no more representative of Islam than any fundamentalist terrorists
are of their broader community: the Irish terrorists (or for that matter
some United States-based reverends) of Christianity, or the fanatics
who in 1992 destroyed the centuries-old mosque in Ayodhya of Hinduism.
The world will fall into a permanent state of suspicion, fear, perhaps
even war, if we fail to make a distinction between fanatics, with a
total disregard for life, who pose a threat to all of humankind-irrespective
of religion, culture or ethnicity-and those who simply have different
ways of organizing their lives or different cultural preferences, but
share the same basic goals and aspirations of all mankind: the pursuit
of life, liberty and happiness.
The need for a dialogue among civilizations is now greater than before,
not less. Those whose vision rises above the obvious differences between
ethnic, religious, cultural and social groups, and embraces so much
that we all have in common, will not judge a human being simply on a
person's looks, language and faith. This is what the dialogue among
civilizations is about.
It will take time and effort to bear fruit and certainly, in the short
term, will not be able to prevent atrocities like the ones just witnessed.
In the long run, however, dialogue might do just that: by uniting those
who strive for a common future, and thereby isolating those who want
to generate ineradicable rifts between the peoples of the world. America
has called on all to stand up and be counted in the war against global
terrorism. We do indeed need a worldwide coalition against such horrors.
However, it is just as important to stand up and resist all who would
spread the message of hate and sow the seeds of discord.
The fight against terrorism is a war with no frontiers, against enemies
who know no borders and have no scruples. If we abandon our scruples,
we descend to their level. The dialogue of civilizations is a discourse
across all frontiers, embracing communities who profess and practice
different faiths, but have scruples about imposing their values on others.
We must talk to and welcome into the concert of civilized communities
believers in moral values from all continents, cultures and faiths.
The need of the hour is for discourse among the civilized, not a dialogue
of the uncivilized deafened by the drumbeats of war.
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