9/11 Symposium: Response to Jim Rule

9/11 Symposium: Response to Jim Rule

9/11 Symposium: Michael Walzer Responds to Jim Rule

Jim Rule gets many things right in his critique of the American response to the 9/11 attacks (?Bringing out the Worst?). And he closes his piece with the useful recommendation that we come up with an alternative ?public philosophy.? But he shows no interest in what that alternative might look like. How should we respond to terrorist attacks? How should we collect information about possible future attacks? If some interrogation methods are barred, as they should be, what methods are permitted? How should we fight against insurgents who murder civilians and then hide in, say, Pakistan? How should we deal with insurgents who fight from civilian cover? Asymmetric warfare raises many hard political and moral questions?perhaps the hardest questions we have had to face since 9/11. Jim doesn?t acknowledge the difficulties, and he doesn?t address the questions. So where is the alternative philosophy?

The attack on Marty Peretz reveals the same refusal to attend to things that require attention. Marty has said some things that Jim and I strongly disagree with, and he has regretted saying them. But he has also stated a fact that Jim doesn?t want to acknowledge or address. In the Muslim world today, Marty wrote, Muslim life is cheap. The phrase was deliberately provocative and not at all helpful politically. But the idea it expresses can also be put this way: too many Muslims are killing too many other Muslims. For that statement, there is a lot of evidence: the Iran-Iraq War, the unrestrained sectarian killing in Algeria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the brutality with which Hamas dealt with the supporters of Fatah in Gaza, the current repression in Syria, and much more. One could make a similar statement about Christians killing Christians during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cruelty of those wars was implicitly acknowledged by Protestant dissidents who rediscovered Christian pacifism. And the cruelty of Muslim and Arab politics today is implicitly acknowledged by those young Egyptians and Palestinians who are trying to develop a discipline of nonviolence. But we can?t understand these attractive projects, historical and contemporary, without talking about a reality that Jim doesn?t want any of us to discuss. Indeed, the discussion is politically incorrect. But what use are public philosophers who cannot speak the truth?

To point out that more Muslims have been killed by other Muslims in the past thirty years than by anyone else (in fact, by everyone else) is not Islamophobic. Religious zealotry lies behind many of the awful things happening in the world today. We see it at work in India and in Israel, but the hard truth is that it?s especially strong right now across the Islamic world. Jim is very worried about Christian zealotry here in the United States, and so am I, both of us with good reason. But Christian zealots in America are positively mild-mannered compared to Muslim zealots in, say, Pakistan today.

Jim seems to think that the historic role of al Qaeda was to provide the Bush administration with an excuse to aggrandize state power. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how anyone could fight terrorism, even if we reject the idea of a ?war? and use only the police, without a strong state and a visible use of its strength. The greatest expansion of state power in U.S. history came during the war against Nazism, and I am sure that there were Americans, on the far right in those days, who thought that Roosevelt had contrived to get us into that war so that he could rule like a dictator. No doubt, some of the things he did required criticism and, no doubt, many of the Bush administration?s actions require criticism. But, maybe, some of them do not. When Obama?s lawyers, good liberals all, repeat some of those actions, Jim responds only with ?consternation.? Wouldn?t it be better to engage their arguments? Again, critical questions need to be asked: How much expansion of state power, in what areas, with what limits, over what span of time? Not easy questions for the Left, but addressing them, worrying about them, is what we need to do. What we don?t need is another exercise in leftist righteousness.