>FYI. Badly titled...but makes some good points. I thought the point about
>pre-emptive war was especially good.
Joanna
>A Plea For Hysteria
>
>The Secret's Out: the US is Weak and it suffers from a distressing lack of
>hysteria. But does it understand that it cannot do without genuinely
>useful allies--not British twits, or Israeli goons who are happy to drag
>it down with them?
>Michael Neumann
>
>US attitudes towards Iraq, both pro-war and anti-war, suffer from a
>distressing lack of hysteria about an event of vastly underestimated
>importance. The event was called 9-11.
>
>9-11 didn't just challenge America's hegemony; it challenged its
>sovereignty. Sovereignty is what defines a state, and political
>philosophers generally agree that it involves at least one hard-nosed
>requirement: a monopoly on the use of force in a geographic area. States
>that meet this requirement may of course be illegitimate--perhaps most
>are--but they are still states.
>
>Naturally the monopoly is never complete: even in Switzerland or Canada,
>there is lots of unauthorized violence. But the monopoly must be
>substantial. Switzerland or Canada could never suppress all the violence
>occurring within their borders, but they could suppress any particular
>instance of it if they tried hard enough: nobody could withstand the
>government authorities. And the basic feeling is that Switzerland or
>Canada can handle any serious violence--riots, mini-insurrections, gang
>wars--unless another state intervenes.
>
>The attempts to portray 9-11 as a crime which the US has inflated into a
>geopolitical excuse are misguided. No crime of the sort judicial systems
>address has ever had such stature. A few more such attacks, and you would
>no longer have a sovereign state. Yet thousands of intelligence chiefs and
>rebel leaders all over the world must have said: "Hell, I could get twenty
>guys together with box cutters... ." And by now, they must be pretty damn
>sure they could get away with it, too. 9-11 raised a faint but distinct
>possibility that the US might, with bad enough luck, collapse, in years
>rather than decades. Even without post-A-bomb style disintegration, one
>wonders whether the economy would withstand three or four or twenty times
>more security and hunkering down.
>
>I suspect everyone knows this, but perhaps they do not know they know it,
>or know that everyone knows it. It adds new meaning to "the whole world is
>watching." Its simple lessons are better understood from the much-scorned
>perspective of adolescents than from the analyses of experts.
>
>Think of America as a strutting street thug, a high-school dropout.
>Someone sneaks up on him, beats the crap out of him, and walks away. Our
>thug has lost respect. He swears up and down the block, to all his friends
>and enemies, that he knows exactly who did this--call them, say, the
>Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden--and he will get them, good. He gets a few
>buddies together and strides into the hostile home turf of his enemies. He
>yells a lot, he talks trash, he breaks down a few doors, stomps through
>some houses, beats on a few scrawny punks and a few bystanders ... but no
>Mullah Omar or Bin Laden.
>
>People are starting to laugh at him, and not only behind his back. Bin
>Laden is taunting him. He has lost respect. Since he has always claimed to
>be the toughest of the tough, and made many enemies, if he doesn't regain
>it, he may get worse than a beating. His survival may be at stake. Respect
>is everything: he cannot fight off all his enemies if they lose their fear
>of him. So he has to do serious damage to someone, anyone--it's not the
>same as getting Bin Laden, but it's the best he can do. How about this
>Saddam Hussein guy?
>
>And that's why the US is invading Iraq. Is it why the US thinks it's
>invading Iraq? I have no idea. People delude themselves even in secret
>meetings.But the US can muscle its way into any oil goodies it wants
>without war, and it does not need to cow an Arab world already cowed
>almost into the ground. It doesn't need to get anything, and it won't;
>Iraq is a can of worms. It needs to prove something, the same thing the
>thug needs to prove; its ferocity and aggressiveness. Iraq is really the
>only place it can do this, because Saddam Hussein is the goldilocks'
>choice of enemies: not too powerful, like North Korea, not too weak, like
>Libya, but just right, and an international pariah to boot.
>
>Much of this is quite reasonable. Why shouldn't the US try to survive? (No
>matter what it has to atone for, it can't do it in pieces.) Why shouldn't
>it do whatever it takes to make all those intelligence chiefs and
>anti-American movements scared again? But it's too reasonable, not nearly
>hysterical enough. The US thinks, consciously or unconsciously, that it
>has room to breathe, that it can put on a show of force and its enemies
>will cower. It thinks, let Bin Laden laugh; his turn will still come.
>
>But our turn may come first. Before 9-11, no one, with the possible
>exception of Bin Laden, dreamed 9-11 was possible. (Personally, I think he
>was stunned: who could count on four planes even taking off on time?) Now
>everyone knows it is. How many people will try to follow it? to top it?
>And what if they succeed? People who worry about the disintegration of
>Iraq should wonder what the disintegration of the United States would look
>like or, short of that, a United States many times more raging and
>desperate than it is today. No one should welcome the prospect.
>
>And that's just why what the US needs right now is more and better
>hysteria. You might be forgiven for thinking that the US is hysterical
>enough already. But it isn't scared enough about the right things. What
>the US really experiences today is structured, petulant paranoia,
>alternating between the vindictive, obviously ineffective persecution of
>minorities and trips to the hardware store. If the US could really face
>the extent of its vulnerability, it wouldn't be playing with its
>color-coded alerts or bullying a basket-case dictatorship. It would
>obsess, day and night, about its real enemies and its really catastrophic
>humiliation. It would be in a veritable panic to make good on its vow to
>get Bin Laden and the Mullah Omar, as well as root out their allies. It
>would realize that the reason it has failed to get them is simply that it
>isn't strong enough.
>
>This is the central fact of the post-9-11 world, and it is only by denying
>it that the US staves off salutary hysteria. A strong country, having
>found that a few white folks with Afghan cannon fodder won't do the job,
>would have sent maybe half a million troops into Afghanistan and, with or
>without permission, into Pakistan. These troops would have had to fight,
>on the ground, and many thousands of them, perhaps, would die. One can
>hardly imagine the US even contemplating such action.
>
>US weakness is also manifest in its strategies, or rather in the
>strategies it pretends to itself it is following. Whatever the
>administration may believe, the push against Iraq does not implement a
>policy of pre-emptive strikes against potential threats, because such a
>policy would focus on the biggest threats first, or at least on
>substantial ones over insubstantial ones. Iraq isn't any substantial
>threat to the United States. And the US, it is clear, would never dare to
>implement such a policy against serious potential threats, like North
>Korea or China. The US is too weak to do that, and it doesn't want to
>admit it, even to itself.
>
>Were the US to realize just how weak it is, it would be scared enough to
>take the measures it really needs to take for its own survival. It would
>understand that it cannot do without genuinely useful allies--not British
>twits, or Israeli goons who are happy to drag America down with them.(*)
>The allies it needs are not simply governments. They are the people, not
>everyone but many of them, who live in predominantly Muslim countries like
>Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan (who first warned the US
>about 9-11-style attacks), the Gulf States, and Turkey. With substantial
>popular support, the governments of these countries could and would
>destroy violently anti-American terrorist organizations; without such
>support they cannot. And for enough people to become inclined to oppose,
>not fundamentalism, but anti-American terrorism, there would of course
>have to be a huge shift of sentiment in the Islamic world. The only thing
>that could bring this about would be an equally huge shift in US policy.
>The only thing that could stop anti-American terrorism would be American
>opposition to Israel.
>
>
>----------
>*Is the US invading Iraq to provide a smokescreen for Israel's expulsion
>of the Palestinians? I'm amazed at the wild optimism of those who think
>Israel is so weak as to need a smokescreen, or indeed help, for anything
>it decides to do to in the occupied territories.
>
>
>----------
><mailto:mneumann at trentu.ca>Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at
>Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Neumann's book
><http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0921149220/>What's Left: Radical
>Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been republished by Broadview Press.
>
>
># You may be missing other accompanying blurbs, related stories, graphics etc.
>Link to this story as it appears on the site :- A Plea For Hysteria
>www.outlookindia.com
>
>
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