"We are fighting for God. This is a holy crusade to
kill the infidels. It will be a dream come true to
fight and kill an American. Whatever happens to me
from then on will not matter. I will have lived."
- Jawad Abd Rahman, age 31,
Taliban soldier.
USA Today. 9/21/01.
"Whatever makes a soldier sad will make a killer
smile."
- Leonard Cohen.
"The Captain". 1984.
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said
the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they
think of stone. War was always here. Before man was,
war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its
ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will
be. That way and not some other way
...War is the ultimate game because war is at last a
forcing of the unity of existence. War is god
... Men of god and men of war have strange
affinities."
- Cormac McCarthy.
Blood Meridian. 1985.
He is speaking. Alone at the lectern, he faces a full
chamber. Neither on the floor nor in the gallery is
there an empty seat. All ears are focused on his
words, every head is poised in an expectancy of what
he has to say. It is September 20, 2001, nine days
after the bombing and desolation of the twin towers at
the World Trade Center and the breaching of the
Pentagon. Day by day a crew of thousands, firemen,
police, welders, crane operators, volunteers all have
been digging through the wreckage, hopefully, though
now increasingly with sinking hearts, for of more than
6,000 souls buried therein almost no-one will be
recovered alive. Over and over, endlessly, from this
angle and from that, from sea to shining sea, the
images are beamed around the country, first one plane
then another, a great ball of orange flame, an
immensity of collapse, then a second, billowing clouds
of smoke and debris pouring through the streets,
crowds fleeing before them, leaving behind an
unforgiving mountain of brick and mortar, twisted
steel, broken shards of jagged glass, plumbing
fixtures, torn electric conduits rebuking their
makers, computer fragments, a shoe, a wallet, bodies
and parts of bodies. Smoking and smoldering, sheets of
flame eerily darting up from this vast malevolence of
ashes and of flesh, here certainly was the death pit
of dante’s inferno, a message from hell. Onlookers
bury their heads in their hands, weeping. Photographs
are held up: my husband, my daughter, my brother. The
psyche of a nation has been torn apart.
What will he say? What comfort will he offer, what
direction staked out, what action taken? A nation sits
planted in front of their television sets, hanging on
his every word, and there in the great hall of
congress he is making the speech of his life. Though
in time there may be others, this now is the way
history will remember him. He speaks with muted
certainty, arranging his words in short bursts and
phrases, emphasized with deliberation, punctuated with
carefully measured pauses. His voice modulated to
convey assurance. Everything will be taken care of.
“Make no mistake about it!” Everything will be
alright.
Time and again the entire chamber rises to applaud,
greeting his words with accolades of approval,
enthusiastically rendered, vigorously sustained.
Congressmen, senators, generals, admirals, a fireman
in uniform, a policemen, supreme court justices in
their black, flowing robes, a gallery jampacked with
Americans from every walk of life. One and all, they
are investing this man’s words with the hopes of their
lives, with a promise of deliverance from a reality
that has proved to be more devastating by far than
their worst nightmares. He is their man. He will lead
them in a war of good against evil.
Two-thirds of the way through his address to the
nation and to the world, the president stops. Glances
up at the balcony, his gaze fixed on the First Lady. A
sideways smirk of self-satisfaction, that annoying
look of overweening self-assurance, from which his
advisers had weaned him in the early days of his
candidacy, has returned to twist the contours of his
mouth. And he winks. In the midst of this most solemn
moment in the history of the nation, an entire people
caught up in the enormity of their terror, and looking
to him for a way, a clue, a solution, in a gesture of
private exultation, the president winks. “I’ve done
it, Laura,” he might as well have been saying. “I’ve
got them now.”
•
Several months previously this man had secured the
presidency through the actions of a mob of
congressional aides who had routed ballot counters
away from their task, his selection thereafter being
confirmed in the blatantly partisan rulings of a
coterie of politically motivated justices. A former
alcoholic and sometime cocaine user, he was said to be
a man who cared little for reading reports, mastering
details or acquainting himself with the intricacy of
issues. When shortly after his inauguration a gunman
was apprehended on the White House lawn, a floor plan
showed him exercising in the salon, with the
vice-president busily at work in his office attending
to the affairs of the nation. On the day of the
bombings, with the vice-president once again occupied
in his office, he was in Florida, preparing to make an
appearance. Appearances here and there, before this
group and that, on one occasion or another, pretty
much summed up his discharge of presidential duties.
Ignoring affairs of state and a seriously faltering
economy, not long before the bombing he treated
himself to a two-week vacation on his ranch in Texas.
Golfing, fishing, riding around on horseback. People
shrugged. He was a man of little consequence, chosen
for the presidency by the political power-brokers who
represented the richest of america’s corporations,
selected for the role he was to play in emulation of a
previous actor who had served their interests so well.
With a boyish grin and an amiable personality, he
would be their man, a president of public relations.
Now he was being cheered by many of the same people
who had earlier rejected him for what they saw him to
be. How is one to penetrate the irony of his
exaltation and their adulation? In truth, his
ceremonial build-up had begun much earlier, almost as
soon as he was sworn into office. One had but to
listen to national public radio. The morning newscast
regularly began with a report of where President Bush
was to be that day. Talking at a girl-scout jamboree,
addressing a veterans luncheon, visiting a home for
the aged, dropping in on the kiddies in a school room,
attending church. With little else to recommend him, a
place at the top of the news was his. The media were
promoting him into a prominence that made eventual
adulation all the easier. Now the adulation was his.
Well on his way to being remembered as having
contributed little other than down-home redundancy
during a rather trying period in American history, his
fortunes had turned abruptly around. The country had
been smitten as never before with an impelling need to
draw together, sharing grief and pooling a resolve to
dig out and rebuild. It was the pivotal moment in a
gathering of the herd. He would not miss it for
anything. Climbing atop a mound of rubble and grabbing
a bullhorn, he assures the assembled crowd of fatigued
and despairing rescuers that he the president has
everything under control. If they can’t hear him, he
can hear them. In response to their hopes and fears
and anger, he offers the largesse of his office. He
will act on their behalf. Make no mistake about it, as
he was impelled often to reiterate, the perpetrators
of this brutal outrage will get theirs. This great
country will not be defeated. He declares War on
Terrorism.
Cheers! Waving of hats and hands and flags. He had
become a great leader, with virtually an entire
country for a following. Six days later his ascension
is ratified by the assembled legates of the land,
applauding as strenuously as a gathering of hardhats
or the party faithful. The First Lady gives him a
forced smile; clapping mechanically, Hilary Clinton
looks about the congressional chambers with a pained
expression. No matter. By universal acclaim, he will
wear the antlers. He, George W. Bush was now
all-American alpha male. It had happened in little
more than a historical instant. In the wink of an eye.
•
Years earlier, far to the east, another herd had been
gathering. Disdaining the urban niceties of prideful
America, they had closeted themselves in a mountain
fastness, sucking arid air in caves and camps. They
will bring true Islam to the globe. Dead or alive,
their souls belong to Allah. Having flocked to the
call, they will follow an antlered head of their own.
With a vaguely bemused expression that rarely changes,
set in a gaunt face, he peers into a visionary future.
“Soft, humble, smooth, he speaks little.” He is a
self-contained man. Carefully maintaining his own
personal security, he is ready to die. He is a living
martyr. “Ever since I was a boy,” he tells us in taped
interviews and video broadcasts, “I felt hatred
towards the Americans and felt that I was at war
against them.” Now, “Every American man is an enemy
whether he is among the fighters who fight us directly
or among those who pay taxes.” The millionaire son of
a billionaire father, he knows the value of money in
recruiting followers. And so, in 1998 he declares a
Holy War, a Fatwa against both the U.S. military and
civilians. Not only Americans. There are other enemies
as well. Invoking the glories of Saladin’s conquests
on behalf of the faith, the war will be waged between
Muslims and “Zionist Crusaders.” “Our goal,” he
announces, “is to liberate the land of Islam from the
infidels and establish the law of Allah.” He will
defeat the “Crusader-Jewish wars” against Islam. “We
cannot leave the house of God,” he tells those who
have joined with him, “to these malicious Jews and
Christians.” Not only Jews and Christians, but the
United Nations itself is an “infidel regime.” His
jihad will drive Americans and all other infidels out
of the “State of Islam,” purify “Islamic lands”
everywhere of their presence. He calls upon Muslims to
“spend their money on jihad and especially on the
movements that have devoted themselves to the killing
of Jews and Crusaders.” The devastation of the U.S.
Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya with their heavy
African casualties, “was a grace from the Almighty,
bringing delight to the Muslim world.” He expresses
“joy and delight” over the bombing of the U.S. Cole.
“Their limbs were scattered everywhere,” he emphasizes
over video shots of the destruction. “The victory of
Yemen will continue,” he promises on a videotape
circulated on September 9, 2001. Nuclear weapons will
be employed: “It is the duty of Muslims to own [them]
... Muslims have acquired such a weapon,” Osama bin
Laden assures us.
The State of Islam, to which he pledges his energies,
has already found a home. “There is now a Muslim state
that enforces God’s laws,” he says of Taliban
Afghanistan. “which destroys falsehoods, and which
does not succumb to the American Infidels - and it is
led by a true believer, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the
commander of the faithful.” The Taliban version of
God’s laws leaves little room to maneuver. Notoriously
less so for women. Not permitted to be treated by male
doctors, neither can women practice medicine
themselves. The efforts of midwives notwithstanding,
deaths at birth in Afghanistan are 161 out of 1000,
twenty-three times the rate in the U.S., itself not
the best in the world. Women of course are not the
only targets of Fundamentalist severity under the
Taliban.
On May 23, 2001 over 100 congressmen and women call on
President Bush to intervene on behalf of Afghanistan’s
Hindu minority. Along with other religious minorities,
the Taliban government, so it was said, was forcing
them to wear labels on their clothes to differentiate
them from Muslim citizens. “The action of the Taliban
toward Afghanistan’s Hindu minority,” congresswoman
Jan Schakowsky observed, “is disturbingly reminiscent
of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.” Under Taliban
rule, Afghanistan surpasses Burma as the world’s
largest producer of opium. However this may be, bin
Laden asserts, the Taliban have built an ideal,
purified Islamic state that provides a perfect base
for a world wide holy war against “infidels.” He urges
Muslims everywhere to come to Afghanistan to support
the Taliban and bin Laden’s own al Qaida as their duty
to God. For fighting men he draws extensively on the
Wahhabis. Founded around 1744 by Muhammad ibn Abd al
Wahhab, as a puritanical, nationalistic,
transcendentalist sect, al Wahhab allied himself with
Muhammad ibn Saud, providing theological inspiration
for the creation of the Saudi Arabian state. Over the
years Wahhabism has devolved into a rabidly
anti-Western religious movement, given to fanaticism
and murder. A decade of wholesale massacres in
Algeria, a bloodbath of German sightseers in Egypt,
the beheading of captive tourists in the Philippines
and Taliban tyranny in Afghanistan are among its
works.
Since the enemy after all is global, the holy war
against it must be fought on all fronts. On October6,
1981, President Anwar el Sadat is assassinated by the
Egyptian Jihad Islami. The head of the Egyptian Jihad,
Ayman al Zawahri, later becomes bin Laden’s second in
command. In Jordan, police foil a bin Laden plot to
mount bombing attacks on pilgrims during millennium
celebrations. In North Afghanistan, two days before
the World Trade Center bombing, a pair of suicide
bombers assassinate Ahmed Shah Massoud, head of the
anti-Taliban Northern Coalition. In mid-July 2001, a
some 200 Taliban fighters, members of bin Laden’s al
Qaida, are reported to have arrived in Irag, to be
given terrorist training in the use of chemical and
biological weapons. Afterwards, 40 of the trainees
transship to Kosovo, 60 to bin Laden’s Central Asian
Command in the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan. The
remainder join bin Laden in Afghanistan, stopping
briefly at Abu Khaban, an al Qaida research,
development and manufacturing center for explosive
material and chemical and biological weapons. The
installation was under the direction of Midhat Mursi,
Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant expert. The bin
Laden-Jihad alliance counts upon as many as 7,500
fighting men in Bosnia, 15,000 in Kosovo, 15,000 in
Albania, 5,000 in Macedonia. 3,000 Chechen rebels
funded by bin Laden are reported dispersed into
Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In addition to
3,500 in Afghanistan, bin Laden’s al Qaida is thought
to retain 6,400 “commanders” in North America, Yemen,
Saudi Arabia, Albania, Kosovo, Algeria, Chechnya,
Tadjikistan and all the former Soviet republics of
Central Asia, the Philippines, Egypt, Ethiopia and
Somalia. Bin Laden maintains ties with the 20,000 man
Moslem Liberation Army that holds a monopoly on the
Arabian-East African arms trade.
On September 9, bin Laden’s runners fan out to the
Islamic madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They
are schools of military training and indoctrination,
where fighters are issued personal weapons from the
central armories serving each cluster of madrasses.
Counting an estimated 40,000 militants in Afghanistan,
70,000 fighters in Pakistan and 100,000 elsewhere, bin
Laden might be able to muster 200,000 fighting men.
This may not seem much against the huge armies of
America and Europe with their immensely greater fire
power. In a war that is conducted on terrorist terms,
however, win, lose or draw, an army of 200,000
suicidal soldiers, even a small fraction of that
number, flying planes, driving trucks, equipped with
explosive, chemical or biological substances, nuclear
suitcase bombs, who knows, perhaps even E-bombs, is
capable of shaking loose the entire world economy and
social cohesion. Bin Laden’s dream for Islam.
The dream is shared by more than a few Muslims. A book
of bin Laden’s sayings is a sell-out all over the
Muslim world. Copies of the 2-hour tape that Bin Laden
films after the bombing of the U.S. Cole proliferate
on Islamic web sites and in mosques and bazaars across
the Muslim world. Upon receiving news of the suicide
bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon,
crowds of Muslims leap up and down in the streets of
Palestine, Beirut and Lebanon, clapping and cheering.
Auto horns blare. The scenes are eerily reminiscent of
Germans cheering on the Storm Troopers during
Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, many of them
joining in to beat and spit upon Jews in the streets.
Over and over again, as in a celebratory mantra, TV
footage runs the scenes of the bombed and collapsing
trade towers. Palestinian radio calls the bombing part
of a “just war of resistance by the peoples against
American hegemony.” In Pakistan, in Palestine,
elsewhere in Islam, giant portraits of bin Laden are
paraded about. He’s the man.
•
The herds are gathering. Our gang against theirs. With
God on our side, with Allah on theirs. Good against
Evil. Once again, the holocaust. Sadly to say, a
holocaustic predisposition in the human species is an
old story, many times told. Armies of Egyptian
pharaohs returning triumphantly with bushel baskets of
severed Nubian foreskins, miles of crucified captives
lining both sides of the Appian Way to decorate the
route of homecoming Roman legionnaires, rows of
impaled bodies serving Assyrian princes as public
notices of valor and conquest, human scalps dangling
from the belts of Americans winning the West and
Indians defending it, waves of Christian crusaders
sweeping mercilessly through friend and foe alike,
Mongolian horsemen spearing their human targets on the
gallop, bodies broken on the wheel for the
Inquisition, burned at the stake in witch hunts,
hanging from tree limbs in the light of hooded
nightrider bonfires, paramilitary death squads, the
killing fields of Cambodia, the Siberian gulag, gas
chambers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are, or at any
rate, have become, a holocaustic species. Perverting
the instinct to survive into a license to kill. And
always, everywhere that we go, maiming, murdering and
destroying, in our minds and in our cries, we imagine
ourselves to be carrying out the will of God. Slaying
righteously. War and religion seem inevitably to go
together. The troops must be blessed. Muslim and
Judeo-Christian. On both sides, this will be a
faith-based war. As usual. Instincts of the herd
appear to demand it.
Where can one look in an effort to comprehend the
triple alliance of war, religion and herding? At the
deer lek, the chicken roost, the chimpanzee troop, in
a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, a flock of sheep?
In so many species herding is an ordinary affair. And
among humans? In clubs, lodges, societies, churches,
unions, parties, corporations, theatrical
performances, rock concerts and sports events, in
ideologies and philosophies, in -isms of every
conceivable variety, each with its following of -ists.
We scarcely feel human, it appears, without belonging
to something. As with deer, and chickens and chimps,
no one of the many herds to which we throng thrives
without the offices of a leader, king of the hill,
head of the roost, alpha male. Be it in the person of
a raj, sahib, sultan, sheik, boss, caesar, kaiser,
czar, monarch, king, president, chairman, marshal,
mogul, nabob, führer, commandant, generalissimo,
governor, liege, lord, sovereign, chief, numero uno,
top honcho, big cheese, big brother, bishop, pope,
guru, by whatever title, we need him. Without him, we
fear, there will be anarchy, chaos. With no one to
show us the way, what will we do? What will become of
the herd? We make an exchange, then: his leadership
for our allegiance. And more: intrusting our spirit to
his authority, we discover ourselves dispirited
without it. Enthusiastically applauding George W.
Bush, we gather together for the defense of democracy
and freedom. Cheering on Osama bin Laden, we join
hands for the liberation of Islam. Followers on both
sides ignore the valuable oil partnerships entered
into by Bush, senior and junior, with the bin Ladens.
Confident of our support, leaders band together in
herds of their own.
Fully tracking the origins of our readiness to make
war, we might ultimately find ourselves exploring the
gut of an amoeba. What impulses move that elegantly
simple, one-celled creature, mother of us all, to a
predatory ingestion of its environment? Ferreting out
the sources of our attraction to herding and guidance
from leaders, a whole host of species offers clues in
addition to our own. In the need for religious
experience, however, our species stands alone. For
thousands of years, these three, war, herding and
religion, have woven their way in mutual support
through human affairs. Triplets sprung from a single
womb, their presence has animated much that we know
about the human psyche.
The stream of human consciousness has run a long
course. For a million years or more it has been
evolving, punctuated by holocausts, radiant in
compassion. Every living human being has poured hopes,
fears, delights and struggle into its evolution. From
the very first nanosecond of the big bang, evolution
may be the only meaning in life we’ll ever find. And
goodness of heart, life’s best reward.
Kapaau, Hawai’i. 10/9/01
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