Cowboy Nation

Robert Kagan, author of the recent book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf 2008), writes a monthly column on world affairs for the Washington Post and is a contributing editor at both the Weekly Standard and the New Republic.

(B.A., Yale University; M.P.P., John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Ph.D., American University)



This article was published on October 17, 2006 in THE NEW REPUBLIC ONLINE.

These days, we are having a national debate over the direction of foreign policy. Beyond the obvious difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a broader sense that our nation has gone astray. We have become too militaristic, too idealistic, too arrogant; we have become an "empire." Much of the world views us as dangerous. In response, many call for the United States to return to its foreign policy traditions, as if that would provide the answer.

What exactly are those traditions? One tradition is this kind of debate, which we've been having ever since the birth of the nation, when Patrick Henry accused supporters of the Constitution of conspiring to turn the young republic into a "great and mighty empire." Today, we are mightier than Henry could have ever imagined. Yet we prefer to see ourselves in modest terms--as a reluctant hegemon, a status quo power that seeks only ordered stability in the international arena. James Schlesinger captured this perspective several years ago, when he said that Americans have "been thrust into a position of lonely preeminence." The United States, he added, is "a most unusual, not to say odd, country to serve as international leader." If, at times, we venture forth and embroil ourselves in the affairs of others, it is either because we have been attacked or because of the emergence of some dangerous revolutionary force--German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, Soviet communism, radical Islamism. Americans do not choose war; war is thrust upon us. As a recent presidential candidate put it, "The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation."

But that self-image, with its yearning for some imagined lost innocence, is based on myth. Far from the modest republic that history books often portray, the early United States was an expansionist power from the moment the first pilgrim set foot on the continent; and it did not stop expanding--territorially, commercially, culturally, and geopolitically--over the next four centuries. The United States has never been a status quo power; it has always been a revolutionary one, consistently expanding its participation and influence in the world in ever-widening arcs. The impulse to involve ourselves in the affairs of others is neither a modern phenomenon nor a deviation from the American spirit. It is embedded in the American DNA.

Long before the country's founding, British colonists were busy driving the Native American population off millions of acres of land and almost out of existence. From the 1740s through the 1820s, and then in another burst in the 1840s, Americans expanded relentlessly westward from the Alleghenies to the Ohio Valley and on past the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, southward into Mexico and Florida, and northward toward Canada--eventually pushing off the continent not only Indians, but the great empires of France, Spain, and Russia as well. (The United Kingdom alone barely managed to defend its foothold in North America.) This often violent territorial expansion was directed not by redneck "Jacksonians" but by eastern gentlemen expansionists like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams.

It would have been extraordinary had early Americans amassed all this territory and power without really wishing for it. But they did wish for it. With 20 years of peace, Washington predicted in his valedictory, the United States would acquire the power to "bid defiance, in a just cause, to any earthly power whatsoever." Jefferson foresaw a vast "empire of liberty" spreading west, north, and south across the continent. Hamilton believed the United States would, "erelong, assume an attitude correspondent with its great destinies--majestic, efficient, and operative of great things. A noble career lies before it." John Quincy Adams considered the United States "destined by God and nature to be the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact." And Americans' aspirations only grew in intensity over the decades, as national power and influence increased. In the 1850s, William Seward predicted that the United States would become the world's dominant power, "the greatest of existing states, greater than any that has ever existed." A century later, Dean Acheson, present at the creation of a U.S.-dominated world order, would describe the United States as "the locomotive at the head of mankind" and the rest of the world as "the caboose." More recently, Bill Clinton labeled the United States "the world's indispensable nation."

From the beginning, others have seen Americans not as a people who sought ordered stability but as persistent disturbers of the status quo. As the ancient Corinthians said of the Athenians, they were "incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." Nineteenth-century Americans were, in the words of French diplomats, "numerous," "warlike," and an "enemy to be feared." In 1817, John Quincy Adams reported from London, "The universal feeling of Europe in witnessing the gigantic growth of our population and power is that we shall, if united, become a very dangerous member of the society of nations." The United States was dangerous not only because it was expansionist, but also because its liberal republicanism threatened the established conservative order of that era. Austria's Prince Metternich rightly feared what would happen to the "moral force" of Europe's conservative monarchies when "this flood of evil doctrines" was married to the military, economic, and political power Americans seemed destined to acquire.

What Metternich understood, and what others would learn, was that the United States was a nation with almost boundless ambition and a potent sense of national honor, for which it was willing to go to war. It exhibited the kind of spiritedness, and even fierceness, in defense of home, hearth, and belief that the ancient Greeks called thumos. It was an uncommonly impatient nation, often dissatisfied with the way things were, almost always convinced of the possibility of beneficial change and of its own role as a catalyst. It was also a nation with a strong martial tradition. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans loved peace, but they also believed in the potentially salutary effects of war. "No man in the nation desires peace more than I," Henry Clay declared before the war with Great Britain in 1812. "But I prefer the troubled ocean of war, demanded by the honor and independence of the country, with all its calamities, and desolations, to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace." Decades later, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the famed jurist who had fought--and been wounded three times--in the Civil War, observed, "War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine."

Modern Americans don't talk this way anymore, but it is not obvious that we are very different in our attitudes toward war. Our martial tradition has remained remarkably durable, especially when compared with most other democracies in the post-World War II era. From 1989 to 2003, a 14-year period spanning three very different presidencies, the United States deployed large numbers of combat troops or engaged in extended campaigns of aerial bombing and missile attacks on nine different occasions: in Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995-1996), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003). That is an average of one significant military intervention every 19 months--a greater frequency than at any time in our history. Americans stand almost alone in believing in the utility and even necessity of war as a means of obtaining justice. Surveys commissioned by the German Marshall Fund consistently show that 80 percent of Americans agree with the proposition that "[u]nder some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice." In France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, less than one-third of the population agrees.

How do we reconcile the gap between our preferred self-image and this historical reality? With difficulty. We are, and have always been, uncomfortable with our power, our ambition, and our willingness to use force to achieve our objectives. What the historian Gordon Wood has called our deeply rooted "republicanism" has always made us suspicious of power, even our own. Our enlightenment liberalism, with its belief in universal rights and self-determination, makes us uncomfortable using our influence, even in what we regard as a good cause, to deprive others of their freedom of action. Our religious conscience makes us look disapprovingly on ambition--both personal and national. Our modern democratic worldview conceives of "honor" as something antiquated and undemocratic. These misgivings rarely stop us from pursuing our goals, any more than our suspicion of wealth stops us from trying to accumulate it. But they do make us reluctant to see ourselves as others see us. Instead, we construct more comforting narratives of our past. Or we create some idealized foreign policy against which to measure our present behavior. We hope that we can either return to the policies of that imagined past or approximate some imagined ideal to recapture our innocence. It is easier than facing the hard truth: America's expansiveness, intrusiveness, and tendency toward political, economic, and strategic dominance are not some aberration from our true nature. That is our nature.

Why are we this way? In many respects, we share characteristics common to all peoples through history. Like others, Americans have sought power to achieve prosperity, independence, and security as well as less tangible goals. As American power increased, so, too, did American ambitions, both noble and venal. Growing power changes nations, just as it changes people. It changes their perceptions of the world and their place in it. It increases their sense of entitlement and reduces their tolerance for obstacles that stand in their way. Power also increases ambition. When Americans acquired the unimaginably vast territory of Louisiana at the dawn of the nineteenth century, doubling the size of their young nation with lands that would take decades to settle, they did not rest content but immediately looked for still more territory beyond their new borders. As one foreign diplomat observed, "Since the Americans have acquired Louisiana, they appear unable to bear any barriers round them."

But, in addition to the common human tendency to seek greater power and influence over one's surroundings, Americans have been driven outward into the world by something else: the potent, revolutionary ideology of liberalism that they adopted at the nation's birth. Indeed, it is probably liberalism, more than any other factor, that has made the United States so energetic, expansive, and intrusive over the course of its history.

Liberalism fueled the prodigious territorial and commercial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that made the United States, first, the dominant power in North America and, then, a world power. It did so by elevating the rights of the individual over the state--by declaring that all people had a right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness and by insisting it was the government's primary job to safeguard those rights. American political leaders had little choice but to permit, and sometimes support, territorial and commercial claims made by their citizens, even when those claims encroached on the lands or waters of foreigners. Other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments, ruled by absolute monarchs, permitted national expansion when it served personal or dynastic interests--and, like Napoleon in the New World, blocked it when it did not. When the king of England tried to curtail the territorial and commercial expansionism of his Anglo-American subjects, they rebelled and established a government that would not hold them back. In this respect, the most important foreign policy statement in U.S. history was not George Washington's farewell address or the Monroe Doctrine but the Declaration of Independence and the enlightenment ideals it placed at the heart of American nationhood. Putting those ideals into practice was a radical new departure in government, and it inevitably produced a new kind of foreign policy.

Liberalism not only drove territorial and commercial expansion; it also provided an overarching ideological justification for such expansion. By expanding territorially, commercially, politically, and culturally, Americans believed that they were bringing both modern civilization and the "blessings of liberty" to whichever nations they touched in their search for opportunity. As Jefferson told one Indian leader: "We desire above all things, brother, to instruct you in whatever we know ourselves. We wish to learn you all our arts and to make you wise and wealthy." In one form or another, Americans have been making that offer of instruction to peoples around the world ever since.

Americans, from the beginning, measured the world exclusively according to the assumptions of liberalism. These included, above all, a belief in what the Declaration of Independence called the "self-evident" universality of certain basic truths--not only that all men were created equal and endowed by God with inalienable rights, but also that the only legitimate and just governments were those that derived their powers "from the consent of the governed." According to the Declaration, "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." Such a worldview does not admit the possibility of alternative truths. Americans, over the centuries, accepted the existence of cultural distinctions that influenced other peoples to rule themselves differently. But they never really accepted the legitimacy of despotic governments, no matter how deeply rooted in culture. As a result, they viewed them as transitory. And so, wherever Americans looked in the world, they saw the possibility and the desirability of change.

The notion of progress is a central tenet of liberalism. More than any other people, Americans have taken a progressive view of history, evaluating other nations according to where they stood on the continuum of progress. The Russians, Theodore Roosevelt believed, were "below the Germans just as the Germans are below us ... [but] we are all treading the same path, some faster, some slower." If Roosevelt's language sounds antiquated, our modern perspective is scarcely different. Although we may disagree among ourselves about the pace of progress, almost all Americans believe that it is both inevitable and desirable. We generally agree on the need to assist other nations in their political and economic development. But development toward what, if not toward the liberal democratic ideal that defines our nationalism? The "great struggle of the epoch," Madison declared in the 1820s, is "between liberty and despotism." Because the rights of man were written "by the hand of the divinity itself," as Hamilton put it, that struggle could ultimately have only one outcome.

It was a short step from that conviction to the belief that the interests of the United States were practically indistinguishable from the interests of the world. "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind," Thomas Paine argued at the time of the revolution. Herman Melville would later write that, for Americans, "national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world." It was another short step to the belief that the United States had a special, even unique, role to play in serving as a catalyst for the evolution of mankind. "The rights asserted by our forefathers were not peculiar to themselves," Seward declared, "they were the common rights of mankind." Therefore, he said, the United States had a duty "to renovate the condition of mankind" and lead the way to "the universal restoration of power to the governed" everywhere in the world. Decades earlier, John Quincy Adams had noted with pride that the United States was the source of ideas that made "the throne of every European monarch rock under him as with the throes of an earthquake." Praising the American Revolution, he exhorted "every individual among the sceptered lords of mankind: 'Go thou and do likewise!'"

A Russian minister, appalled at this "appeal to the nations of Europe to rise against their Governments," noted the hypocrisy of Adams's message, asking, "How about your two million black slaves?" Indeed. The same United States that called for global revolution on behalf of freedom was, throughout its first eight decades, also the world's great defender of racial despotism. The slaveholding South was itself a brutal tyranny, almost totalitarian in its efforts to control the speech and personal behavior of whites as well as blacks. Much of the U.S. territorial expansion in the nineteenth century--including the Mexican War, which garnered today's American Southwest and California--was driven by slaveholders, insisting on new lands to which they could spread their despotic system.

In the end, the violent abolition of slavery in the United States was a defining moment in the country's foreign policy: It strengthened the American tendency toward liberal moralism in foreign affairs. The Northern struggle against slavery, culminating in the Civil War, was America's first moral crusade. The military defeat of the Southern slaveholders was America's first war of ideological conquest. And what followed was America's first attempt at occupation and democratic nation-building (with the same mixed results as later efforts). The effect of the whole struggle was to intensify the American dedication to the universality of rights and to reaffirm the Declaration of Independence, rather than the Constitution with its tacit acceptance of slavery, as the central document of American nationhood. The Civil War fixed in the American mind, or at least in the Northern mind, the idea of the just war--a battle, fought for moral reasons, whose objectives can be achieved only through military action.

Such thinking led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. One of the most popular wars in U.S. history, it enjoyed the support of both political parties, of William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Carnegie, of eastern Brahmin Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge, radical prairie populists, and labor leaders. Although one would not know it from reading most histories today, the war was motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns. Civil strife in Cuba and the brutal policies of the Spanish government--in particular the herding of the civilian population into "reconcentration" camps--had caused some 300,000 deaths, one-fifth of Cuba's population. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly. Lodge and many others argued that the United States had a responsibility to defend the Cuban people against Spanish oppression precisely because it had the power to do so. "Here we stand motionless, a great and powerful country not six hours away from these scenes of useless bloodshed and destruction," he said, imploring that, if the United States "stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence." The overwhelming majority of the nation agreed. The U.S. intervention put an end to that suffering and saved untold thousands of lives. When John Hay called it a "splendid little war," it was not because of the smashing military victory--Hay was no militarist. It was the lofty purposes and accomplishments of the war that were splendid.

It was also true that the United States had self-interested reasons for going to war: commercial interests in Cuba, as well as the desire to remove Spain from the hemisphere and establish our preeminence in the region. Most of Europe condemned the United States as selfish and aggressive, failing to credit it with humanitarian impulses. Moreover, the war produced some unintended and, for many who idealistically supported it, disillusioning consequences. It led to the acquisition of the Philippines and a most unsplendid war against independence-minded Filipinos. It also produced a well-intentioned, but ultimately disappointing, multiyear occupation of Cuba that would haunt Americans for another century. And it reignited an old debate over the course of U.S. foreign policy--similar to the one that consumes us today.

Now, as then, the projection of U.S. power for liberal purposes faces its share of domestic criticism--warnings against arrogance, hubris, excessive idealism, and "imperialism." Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conservatives in the republican tradition of Patrick Henry worried about the effect at home of expansive policies abroad. They predicted, correctly, that a big foreign policy generally meant a big federal government, which--in their eyes--meant impingements on the rights and freedoms of the individual. The conservatives of the slaveholding South were the great realists of the nineteenth century. They opposed moralism, rightly fearing it would be turned against the institution of slavery. As Jefferson Davis put it, "We are not engaged in a Quixotic fight for the rights of man. Our struggle is for inherited rights. ... We are conservative." At the end of the century, when Americans were enthusiastically pushing across the Pacific, critics like Grover Cleveland's long-forgotten secretary of state, Walter Q. Gresham, warned that "[e]very nation, and especially every strong nation, must sometimes be conscious of an impulse to rush into difficulties that do not concern it, except in a highly imaginary way. To restrain the indulgence of such a propensity is not only the part of wisdom, but a duty we owe to the world as an example of the strength, the moderation, and the beneficence of popular government."

But, just as progressivism and big government have generally triumphed in domestic affairs, so, too, has the liberal approach to the world beyond our shores. Henry failed to defeat the Constitution. Southern realism lost to Northern idealism. The critics of liberal foreign policy--whether conservative, realist, or leftist--have rarely managed to steer the United States on a different course.

The result has been some accomplishments of great historical importance--the defeat of German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism--as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the disappointments, derived from the very qualities that often make us queasy: our willingness to accumulate and use power; our ambition and sense of honor; our spiritedness in defense of both our interests and our principles; our dissatisfaction with the status quo; our belief in the possibility of change. And, throughout, whether succeeding or failing, we have remained a "dangerous" nation in many senses--dangerous to tyrannies, dangerous to those who do not want our particular brand of liberalism, dangerous to those who fear our martial spirit and our thumos, dangerous to those, including Americans, who would prefer an international order not built around a dominant and often domineering United States.

Whether a different kind of international system or a different kind of America would be preferable is a debate worth having. But let us have this debate about our future without illusions about our past.

Who are the Global Terrorists?

By Noam Chomsky

After the atrocities of 11 September, the victim declared a "war on terrorism," targeting not just the suspected perpetrators, but the country in which they were located, and others charged with terrorism worldwide. President Bush pledged to "rid the world of evildoers" and "not let evil stand," echoing Ronald Reagan's denunciation of the "evil scourge of terrorism" in 1985 -- specifically, state-supported international terrorism, which had been declared to be the core issue of US foreign policy as his administration came into office.NOTE{_New York Times_, Oct. 18, 1985.} The focal points of the first war on terror were the Middle East and Central America, where Honduras was the major base for US operations. The military component of the re-declared war is led by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Reagan's special representative to the Middle East; the diplomatic efforts at the UN by John Negroponte, Reagan's Ambassador to Honduras. Planning is largely in the hands of other leading figures of the Reagan-Bush (I) administrations.

The condemnations of terrorism are sound, but leave some questions unanswered. The first is: What do we mean by "terrorism"? Second: What is the proper response to the crime? Whatever the answer, it must at least satisfy a moral truism: If we propose some principle that is to be applied to antagonists, then we must agree -- in fact, strenuously insist -- that the principle apply to us as well. Those who do not rise even to this minimal level of integrity plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of right and wrong, good and evil.

The problem of definition is held to be vexing and complex. There are, however, proposals that seem straightforward, for example, in US Army manuals, which define terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." NOTE{_US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction_ (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37), 1984.} That definition carries additional authority because of the timing: it was offered as the Reagan administration was intensifying its war on terrorism. The world has changed little enough so that these recent precedents should be instructive, even apart from the continuity of leadership from the first war on terrorism to its recent reincarnation.

The first war received strong endorsement. The UN General Assembly condemned international terrorism two months after Reagan's denunciation, again in much stronger and more explicit terms in 1987. NOTE{GA Res. 40/61, 9 Dec. 1985; Res. 42/159, 7 Dec. 1987.} Support was not unanimous, however. The 1987 resolution passed 153-2, Honduras abstaining. Explaining their negative vote, the US and Israel identified the fatal flaw: the statement that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation..." That was understood to apply to the struggle of the African National Congress against the Apartheid regime of South Africa (a US ally, while the ANC was officially labeled a "terrorist organization"); and to the Israeli military occupation, then in its 20th year, sustained by US military and diplomatic support in virtual international isolation. Presumably because of US opposition, the UN resolution against terrorism was ignored. NOTE{See my _Necessary Illusions_ (Boston: South End, 1989), chap. 4; my essay in Alex George, ed., _Western State Terrorism_ (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 1991).}

Reagan's 1985 condemnation referred specifically to terrorism in the Middle East, selected as the lead story of 1985 in an AP poll. But for Secretary of State George Shultz, the administration moderate, the most "alarming" manifestation of "state-sponsored terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age," was frighteningly close to home. There is "a cancer, right here in our land mass," Shultz informed Congress, threatening to conquer the hemisphere in a "revolution without borders," an interesting fabrication exposed at once but regularly reiterated with appropriate shudders. NOTE{Shultz, "Terrorism: The Challenge to the Democracies," June 24, 1984 (State Dept. Current Policy No. 589); "Terrorism and the Modern World," Oct. 25, 1984 (State Department Current Policy No. 629). Shultz's congressional testimony, 1986, 1983, the former part of a major campaign to gain more funding for the contras; see Jack Spence and Eldon Kenworthy in Thomas Walker, ed., _Reagan versus the Sandinistas_ (Boulder, London: Westview, 1987).}

So severe was the threat that on Law Day (1 May) 1985, the President announced an embargo "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America." He also declared a national emergency, renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."

"The terrorists -- and the other states that aid and abet them -- serve as grim reminders that democracy is fragile and needs to be guarded with vigilance," Shultz warned. We must "cut [the Nicaraguan cancer] out," and not by gentle means: "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table," Shultz declared, condemning those who advocate "utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation." The US was exercising "the power element of the equation" with mercenary forces based in Honduras, under Negroponte's supervision, and successfully blocking the "utopian, legalistic means" pursued by the World Court and the Latin American Contadora nations -- as Washington continued to do until its terrorist wars were won. NOTE{Shultz, "Moral Principles and Strategic Interests," April 14, 1986 (State Department, Current Policy No. 820).}

Reagan's condemnation of the "evil scourge" was issued at a meeting in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who arrived to join in the call to extirpate the evil shortly after he had sent his bombers to attack Tunis, killing 75 people with smart bombs that tore them to shreds among other atrocities recorded by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk on the scene. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way. Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," but drew back when the Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (US abstaining).NOTE{_NYT_, Oct. 17, 18; Kapeliouk, _Yediot Ahronot_, Nov. 15, 1985. Foreknowledge, _Los Angeles Times_, Oct. 3; Geoffrey Jansen, _Middle East International_, Oct 11, 1985. Bernard Gwertzman, _NYT_, Oct. 2, 7, 1985.}

A second candidate for most extreme act of Mideast international terrorism in the peak year of 1985 is a car-bombing in Beirut on March 8 that killed 80 people and wounded 256. The bomb was placed outside a Mosque, timed to explode when worshipers left. "About 250 girls and women in flowing black chadors, pouring out of Friday prayers at the Imam Rida Mosque, took the brunt of the blast," Nora Boustany reported. The bomb also "burned babies in their beds," killed children "as they walked home from the mosque," and "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb. The target was a Shi'ite leader accused of complicity in terrorism, but he escaped. The crime was organized by the CIA and its Saudi clients with the assistance of British intelligence. NOTE{Boustany, _Washington Post Weekly_, March 14, 1988; Bob Woodward, _Veil_ (Simon & Schuster, 1987, 396f.).}

The only other competitor for the prize is the "Iron Fist" operations that Peres directed in March in occupied Lebanon, reaching new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder," a Western diplomat familiar with the area observed, as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shelled villages, carted off the male population, killed dozens of villagers in addition to many massacred by the IDF's paramilitary associates, shelled hospitals and took patients away for "interrogation," along with numerous other atrocities. NOTE{_Guardian_, March 6, 1985. For details and sources, see my "Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System," in _Pirates and Emperors_ (New York: Claremont 1986; Montreal: Black Rose, 1988), reprinted in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., _Blaming the Victims_ (London: Verso, 1988).} The IDF high command described the targets as "terrorist villagers." The operations against them must continue, the military correspondent of the _Jerusalem Post_ (Hirsh Goodman) added, because the IDF must "maintain order and security" in occupied Lebanon despite "the price the inhabitants will have to pay."

Like Israel's invasion of Lebanon 3 years earlier, leaving some 18,000 killed, these actions and others in Lebanon were not undertaken in self-defense but rather for political ends, as recognized at once in Israel. The same was true, almost entirely, of those that followed, up to Peres's murderous invasion of 1996. But all relied crucially on US military and diplomatic support. Accordingly, they too do not enter the annals of international terrorism.

In brief, there was nothing odd about the proclamations of the leading co-conspirators in Mideast international terrorism, which therefore passed without comment at the peak moment of horror at the "return to barbarism."

The well-remembered prize-winner for 1985 is the hijacking of the _Achille Lauro_ and brutal murder of a passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, doubtless a vile terrorist act, and surely not justified by the claim that it was in retaliation for the far worse Tunis atrocities and a pre-emptive effort to deter others. Adopting moral truisms, the same holds of our own acts of retaliation or pre-emption.

Evidently, we have to qualify the definition of "terrorism" given in official sources: the term applies only to terrorism against _us_, not the terrorism we carry out against _them_. The practice is conventional, even among the most extreme mass murderers: the Nazis were protecting the population from terrorist partisans directed from abroad, while the Japanese were laboring selflessly to create an "earthly paradise" as they fought off the "Chinese bandits" terrorizing the peaceful people of Manchuria and their legitimate government. Exceptions would be hard to find.

The same convention applies to the war to exterminate the Nicaraguan cancer. On Law Day 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the US would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice, which went on to condemn his administration for its "unlawful use of force," ordering it to terminate these international terrorist crimes and pay substantial reparations to Nicaragua (June 1986). The Court decision was dismissed with contempt, as was a subsequent Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law (vetoed by the US) and repeated General Assembly resolutions (US and Israel opposed, in one case joined by El Salvador).

As the Court decision was announced, Congress substantially increased funding for the mercenary forces engaged in "the unlawful use of force." Shortly after, the US command directed them to attack "soft targets" -- undefended civilian targets -- and to avoid combat with the Nicaraguan army, as they could do, thanks to US control of the skies and the sophisticated communication equipment provided to the terrorist forces. The tactic was considered reasonable by prominent commentators as long as it satisfied "the test of cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end" -- "democracy" as Western elites understand the term, an interpretation illustrated graphically in the region. NOTE{For details, see my _Culture of Terrorism_ (Boston: South End, 1988), 77f.}

State Department Legal Advisor Abraham Sofaer explained why the US was entitled to reject ICJ jurisdiction. In earlier years, most members of the UN "were aligned with the United States and shared its views regarding world order." But since decolonization a "majority often opposes the United States on important international questions." Accordingly, we must "reserve to ourselves the power to determine" how we will act and which matters fall "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States, as determined by the United States" -- in this case, the terrorist acts against Nicaragua condemned by the Court and the Security Council. For similar reasons, since the 1960s the US has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, Britain second, France a distant third.NOTE{Sofaer, _The United States and the World Court_ (State Dept. Current Policy 769), Dec. 1985.}

Washington waged its "war on terrorism" by creating an international terror network of unprecedented scale, and employing it worldwide, with lethal and long-lasting effects. In Central America, terror guided and supported by the US reached its most extreme levels in countries where the state security forces themselves were the immediate agents of international terrorism. The effects were reviewed in a 1994 conference organized by Salvadoran Jesuits, whose experiences had been particularly gruesome. NOTE{Juan Hern ndez Pico, _Env¡o_ (Universidad Centroamericana, Managua), March 1994.} The conference report takes particular note of the effects of the residual "culture of terror...in domesticating the expectations of the majority vis-a-vis alternatives different to those of the powerful," an important observation on the efficacy of state terror that generalizes broadly. In Latin America, the 11 September atrocities were harshly condemned, but commonly with the observation that they are nothing new. They may be described as "Armageddon," the research journal of the Jesuit university in Managua observed, but Nicaragua has "lived its own Armageddon in excruciating slow motion" under US assault "and is now submerged in its dismal aftermath," and others fared far worse under the vast plague of state terror that swept through the continent from the early 1960s, much of it traceable to Washington. NOTE{_Env¡o_, Oct. 2001. For a judicious review of the aftermath, see Thomas Walker and Ariel Armony, eds., _Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Central America_ (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000).}

It is hardly surprising that Washington's call for support in its war of revenge for 11 Sept. had little resonance in Latin America. An international Gallup poll found that support for military force rather than extradition ranged from 2% (Mexico) to 11% (Venezuela and Colombia). Condemnations of the 11 Sept. terror were regularly accompanied by recollections of their own suffering, for example, the death of perhaps thousands of poor people (Western crimes, therefore unexamined) when George Bush I bombed the barrio Chorillo in Panama in December 1989 in Operation Just Cause, undertaken to kidnap a disobedient thug who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Florida for crimes mostly committed while he was on the CIA payroll. NOTE{_Env¡o_, Oct. 2001; Panamanian journalist Ricardo Stevens, NACLA _Report on the Americas_, Nov/Dec 2001.}

The record continues to the present without essential change, apart from modification of pretexts and tactics. The list of leading recipients of US arms yields ample evidence, familiar to those acquainted with international human rights reports.

It therefore comes as no surprise that President Bush informed Afghans that bombing will continue until they hand over people the US suspects of terrorism (rebuffing requests for evidence and tentative offers of negotiation). Or, when new war aims were added after three weeks of bombing, that Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British Defense Staff, warned Afghans that US-UK attacks will continue "until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed." NOTE {Patrick Tyler and Elisabeth Bumiller, _NYT_, Oct. 12; Michael Gordon, _NYT_, Oct. 28, 2001; both p. 1.} In other words, the US and UK will persist in "the calculated use of violence to attain goals that are political... in nature...": international terrorism in the technical sense, but excluded from the canon by the standard convention. The rationale is essentially that of the US-Israel international terrorist operations in Lebanon. Admiral Boyce is virtually repeating the words of the eminent Israeli statesman Abba Eban, as Reagan declared the first war on terrorism. Replying to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's account of atrocities in Lebanon committed under the Labor government in the style "of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name," Eban acknowledged the accuracy of the account, but added the standard justification: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." NOTE{_Jerusalem Post_, Aug. 16, 1981.}

These concepts are conventional, as is the resort to terrorism when deemed appropriate. Furthermore, its success is openly celebrated. The devastation caused by US terror operations in Nicaragua was described quite frankly, leaving Americans "United in Joy" at their successful outcome, the press proclaimed. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in 1965, mostly landless peasants, was greeted with unconstrained euphoria, along with praise for Washington for concealing its own critical role, which might have embarrassed the "Indonesian moderates" who had cleansed their society in a "staggering mass slaughter" (_New York Times_) that the CIA compared to the crimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. NOTE{For extensive review, see my _Necessary Illusions_ and _Deterring Democracy_ (London: Verso, 1991) (Nicaragua); _Year 501_ (Boston: South End, 1993) (Indonesia).} There are many other examples. One might wonder why Osama bin Laden's disgraceful exultation over the atrocities of 11 Sept. occasioned indignant surprise. But that would be an error, based on failure to distinguish their terror, which is evil, from ours, which is noble, the operative principle throughout history.

If we keep to official definitions, it is a serious error to describe terrorism as the weapon of the weak. Like most weapons, it is wielded to far greater effect by the strong. But then it is not terror; rather, "counter terror," or "low intensity warfare," or "self-defense"; and if successful, "rational" and "pragmatic," and an occasion to be "united in joy."

Let us turn to the question of proper response to the crime, bearing in mind the governing moral truism. If, for example, Admiral Boyce's dictum is legitimate, then victims of Western state terrorism are entitled to act accordingly. That conclusion is, properly, regarded as outrageous. Therefore the principle is outrageous when applied to official enemies, even more so when we recognize that the actions were undertaken with the expectation that they would place huge numbers of people at grave risk. No knowledgeable authority seriously questioned the UN estimate that "7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter -- 2.5 million more than on Sept. 11," NOTE{Elisabeth Bumiller and Elizabeth Becker, _NYT_, Oct. 17, 2001.} a 50% increase as a result of the threat of bombing, then the actuality, with a toll that will never be investigated if history is any guide.

A different proposal, put forth by the Vatican among others, was spelled out by military historian Michael Howard: "a police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations...against a criminal conspiracy whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, be awarded an appropriate sentence." NOTE{_Foreign Affairs_, Jan/Feb 2002; talk of Oct. 30. See Tania Branigan, _Guardian_, Oct. 31, 2001.} Though never contemplated, the proposal seems reasonable. If so, then it would be reasonable if applied to Western state terrorism, something that could also never be contemplated, though for opposite reasons.

The war in Afghanistan has commonly been described as a "just war," indeed evidently so. There have been some attempts to frame a concept of "just war" that might support the judgment. We may therefore ask how these proposals fare when evaluated in terms of the same moral truism. I have yet to see one that does not instantly collapse: application of the proposed concept to Western state terrorism would be considered unthinkable, if not despicable. For example, we might ask how the proposals would apply to the one case that is uncontroversial in the light of the judgments of the highest international authorities, Washington's war against Nicaragua; uncontroversial, that is, among those who have some commitment to international law and treaty obligations. It is an instructive experiment.

Similar questions arise in connection with other aspects of the wars on terrorism. There has been debate over whether the US-UK war in Afghanistan was authorized by ambiguous Security Council resolutions, but it is beside the point. The US surely could have obtained clear and unambiguous authorization, not for attractive reasons (consider why Russia and China eagerly joined the coalition, hardly obscure). But that course was rejected, presumably because it would suggest that there is some higher authority to which the US should defer, a condition that a state with overwhelming power is not likely to accept. There is even a name for that stance in the literature of diplomacy and international relations: establishing "credibility," a standard official justification for the resort to violence, the bombing of Serbia, to mention a recent example. The refusal to consider negotiated transfer of the suspected perpetrators presumably had the same grounds.

The moral truism applies to such matters as well. The US refuses to extradite terrorists even when their guilt has been well established. One current case involves Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the Haitian paramilitary forces that were responsible for thousands of brutal killings in the early 1990s under the military junta, which Washington officially opposed but tacitly supported, publicly undermining the OAS embargo and secretly authorizing oil shipments. Constant was sentenced in absentia by a Haitian court. The elected government has repeatedly called on the US to extradite him, again on September 30, 2001, while Taliban initiatives to negotiate transfer of bin Laden were being dismissed with contempt. Haiti's request was again ignored, probably because of concerns about what Constant might reveal about ties to the US government during the period of the terror. Do we therefore conclude that Haiti has the right to use force to compel his extradition, following as best it can Washington's model in Afghanistan? The very idea is outrageous, yielding another prima facie violation of the moral truism.

It is all too easy to add illustrations. NOTE{For a sample, see George, _op. cit._. Exceptions are rare, and the reactions they elicit are not without interest.} Consider Cuba, probably the main target of international terrorism since 1959, remarkable in scale and character, some of it exposed in declassified documents on Kennedy's Operation Mongoose and continuing to the late 1990s. Cold War pretexts were ritually offered as long as that was possible, but internally the story was the one commonly unearthed on inquiry. It was recounted in secret by Arthur Schlesinger, reporting the conclusions of JFK's Latin American mission to the incoming President: the Cuban threat is "the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands," which might stimulate the "poor and underprivileged" in other countries, who "are now demanding opportunities for a decent living" -- the "virus" or "rotten apple" effect, as it is called in high places The Cold War connection was that "the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." NOTE{_FRUS_, 1961-63, vol. XII, American Republics, 13f., 33.}

True, these exploits of international terrorism -- which were quite serious -- are excluded by the standard convention. But suppose we keep to the official definition. In accord with the theories of "just war" and proper response, how has Cuba been entitled to react?

It is fair enough to denounce international terrorism as a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself." The commitment to "drive the evil from the world" can even be taken seriously, if it satisfies moral truisms -- not, it would seem, an entirely unreasonable thought.

Ken Booth & Tim Dunne (eds.), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Palgrave, Mcmillan, May, 2002