|
Friday, September 14, 2001
Instead of a countdown, how about a countup? 
Then what?
| | It is a mistake to assume that killing Bin Laden means killing his movement. It's true that Bin Laden is an iconic leader who inspires his followers and millions of sympathizers in the Muslim world. But eliminating Bin Laden would do nothing to decrease the intensity of the other militant Islamists. The Afghan war created a cadre of warriors and belligerent clerics who are constantly recruiting. Bin Laden has a core of highly trained aides ready to continue his work. His trainees are scattered in two dozen countries. It is hard to imagine how the United States could neutralize all of them. And attacks on Bin Laden have only increased his popularity: Killing him would likely rally many more Muslims to his cause. |
| | (Some pundits have suggested that killing Bin Laden would be effective because it would stanch the flow of cash to terrorists. This may not be so. Bin Laden's groups do get funds from his personal fortune, but they also finance operations by dunning wealthy Gulf Arabs and by siphoning off donations to Muslim charities. And the terror organization is cheap. They don't use heavy weapons, and it costs almost nothing to house and train hundreds of men in Afghanistan.) |
| | Is there anything we can do to persuade Bin Laden to stop? The terror groups Americans are familiar with‹Palestinian bombers and hijackers, IRA hard men‹have desires we understand. They perform acts of terror in order to gain sympathy or sow fear. That sympathy or fear is a means to their end: political recognition, a state, compensation. They seek to participate in our world. |
| | Bin Laden and his followers are alarming because they don't want anything from us. They don't want our sympathy. They want no material thing we can offer them. They don't want to participate in the community of nations. (They don't really believe in the nation-state.) They are motivated by religion, not politics. They answer to no one but their god, so they certainly won't answer to us. |
| | Welcome to the unreal world, Neo. |
Heavy weather
| | While the World Trade Center was still being built around the turn of the 70s, I shared a yard with Roy, a British chap who worked as one of the foremen on the project. My father was also a high steel construction worker in his youth — his most familiar work was on the George Washington Bridge — so I felt a guy2guy kinship with Roy. We often talked deep construction jive. |
| | The most interesting thing about the World Trade Center, Roy explained, was the way it supported each floor. Each tower was built like a box with tabs sticking in, and the floors supported on four sides by the tabs. It wasn't the usual framework of I-beams clad by architectural facia. The facia was the structure of the building. It had an exoskeleton, like an insect. |
| | When flames melted each tower's exoskeleton thirty years later, the structures buckled and the tabs dropped the slabs. Then one slab fell on another, pancaking down inside each box. |
| | Each slab was mostly concrete, Robert Krulwich explained on ABC last night. And each in turn was pulverized by the one above it, until the accumulating mass pounding downward successively reduced each floor to molecules, while the lightest material between them blew out the sides along the way. The result: a blizzard of paper suspended in clouds of floor, leaving a pile of building skeleton on the ground. |
| | Oddly, I've seen no reports of found money, which now consists of bits exchanged by computers. So at least the money was safe. |
Three thumbs up
| | And yet a dear friend — one of the true Wise Ones — says religion and terrorism are both "tarbaby topics": don't-go-there stuff. But here I am. |
| | So: some de-tarring... roughly in the words of Steven Covey's First Habit, I am seeking first to understand, then be understood. |
| | There is so much we clearly don't. |
Furthering improvements
| | No correspondent over the last few days has challenged my thinking and writing more than Mark Frankel. Since his voice, and those of others like (and unlike) him have not been widely heard in the blog community (which self-defines itself anew with every post and link), I strongly encouraged him to start a blog of his own. Which he has. |
| | MRF's first tagline is "Trying to improve." Which I love. I think that's what all of us are doing here, no matter how finished our opinions may sound in any given post. |
A modest proposal
| | I find myself suddenly with correspondents from all over the world. And often I cannot guess their countries, religions, politics, or whatever. |
| | One just wrote to educate me on the word "jihad," and its essentially antique meaning: jihad is now obsolete...it works 1400 years ago, but not now... |
| | Yet English is an accretionary language, always welcoming new words, and new meanings for old ones. And it is far more thick with Arabic origins than we might suspect. Algebra, sugar, zenith, azimuth, orange... |
| | As a lover of astronomy I peruse the stars with an Arabic vocabulary. The three bright stars of the Summer Triangle, directly overhead this evening — Deneb, Vega and Altair — were all named by Arabian astronomers long ago. |
| | Which leads me to a suggestion. |
| | Let's begin, in the West, to take more interest in the deep and rich cultures, languages and faiths in those parts of the world we now say "harbor" America's new and vexatious enemies. In the matter of faith alone, there are surely as many varieties of Muslim as there are of Christianity (for one odd example of wacky fundamentalism, look here) and other great faiths. We shouldn't paint a color portrait with a palate consisting only of red. |
| | (Run down the national origins of those who worked in the World Trade Center. The list reads like a roll call at the U.N.) |
| | Let's invite teachers and friends from those places to teach those of us here who are willing to learn. Regardless of what went down this week, we have an enormous knowledge deficit here in the U.S. (Same with China, another potential enemy we would do well to know better.) |
| | We need more than conversation here, or even understanding. We need relationships. It's a lot harder to make an enemies of those you know. |
Message from Michael
| | I just posted a note from my friend Michael Stern to his circle of friends, which I gladly enlarge. It's titled Note from NYC. |
Invoking the gods
| | Yes, we're angry. We're supposed to be angry. We have a right to be angry. But at the same time, we must be wary of the places to which we allow that anger to bring us. |
Waging Peace
| | I believe there is nothing odd about Pacifism. Peace is where we came from before we were born, and where we wish to go to after we die. It's what we want every day when we sleep or merely seek a little time alone. It's the sacred state we know, standing proxy for the sacred states we don't. |
| | Peace is love. Pacifism does nothing more than advocate love. Jesus says "Love your enemies." (Matthew 5:44.) It's hard to follow, but it's a path to peace. The retributive mathematics of war lead only to more war. |
| | For those of you looking for one Pacifist Christian approach to waging peace (in this case a Catholic one), Check out But I Say To You, Love Your Enemies. On this Day of Prayer & Rememberance, I can't find a more appropriate liturgy. |
More about the Great Disturbance in The Force we felt Tuesday
| | Chris Locke: The Tower. Great piece. Read it. One sample: |
| | For many, the sanctuaries and support systems were removed long ago. The logic is backwards. What creates terrorists is living too long in terror. Until you no longer care. Until you would gladly die to make a difference. Or even just a dent. Their acts may be inconceivable. If we dare to look deeper, their motives are not. |
| | The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. |
| | It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. |
| | Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. |
| | Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. |
| | We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. |
| | This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. |
| | Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy. |
Uncertainties
| | It's nice to open email in the morning and find kind words, some of them public (e.g. here, here and here). It's strange and difficult to be humble, uncertain and a journalist — worse, a columnist — at the same time. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to do here, other than raise questions you won't read elsewhere and try to save some lives. |
| | Stories kill. They killed thousands in the U.S. on Tuesday, and I fear they'll kill thousands in Afghanistan tomorrow, next week or next month. One story versus another. Add casualties and the stories only get bigger, longer, farther from resolution. |
| | When the planes hit the buildings on Tuesday, we didn't have our natinional story yet. Now we do. The polls (see below) make it clear that our government has a mandate to "do what needs to be done." |
| | We may think we're fighting Terrorism. But we're not. We're fighting people who believe in a cause and are willing to kill and die for it. And they're a lot more willing to do that than we are. |
| | Our real choice here is much, much deeper. It's a choice of the heart. |
| | Is it too late to open ours? We'll do it for our neighbors. But will we do it for the children of Afghanistan, already dying, starving, by the millions? |
| | We can't if we make them the enemy. I fear we're starting to do that, right now. |
Warning: it's a bubble
| | The poll also points to a possible backlash against Arab-Americans. Overall, a majority of respondents 56 percent said their view of Arabs would not change, while 44 percent said the attacks might heighten their suspicions of people who they think are of Arab descent. |
Frontiers of character
| | How's your story holding up? Watching Eric Norlin tell his gives me hope. Two episodes: World War III and The Story. |
| | I say to you William (Defence Secretary) that: These youths love death as you loves life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity, truthfulness and sacrifice from father to father. They are most delivering and steadfast at war. They inherit these values from their ancestors (even from the time of the Jaheliyyah, before Islam). These values were approved and completed by the arriving Islam as stated by the messenger of Allah (Allah's Blessings and Salutations may be on him): "I have been send to perfecting the good values". (Saheeh Al-Jame' As-Sagheer). [Thanks to Monkeyfist for the link.] |
Calibrating the distance from normal
| | I received a remarkable email today from Isabel Walcott, who lives in New York. I asked for her permission to print it and she said yes. Here it is. One excerpt: |
| | Without seeing these things firsthand, I would imagine it's close to impossible to sense the unreality that is going on in this city. The thought of others elsewhere doing their normal workday, talking about anything other than this, or even moving on to thoughts of next steps doesn't make sense to me right now. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
