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cells of all human males. Not one person would suffer untimely death, but the species would, in a lingering scene, be extinguished. And like the Australians in Neville Schute's novel On the Beach, who know that a spreading cloud of radiation from a nuclear war between the Cold War superpowers has destroyed life in the northern hemisphere and await the same fate for themselves as the cloud descends southward, the last generation would know that it was the last generation. And the same fate is of course possible for other species, although they're not capable of knowing it, as when some have in fact become extinct chiefly because their reproductive capacity has been fatally harmed. What's more common, of course, in the natural world, is that the environment that sustains a species is destroyed. Also the particular web or fabric of interdependent species that make up an ecosystem plays much the same role as a genome plays in the life of a single species, and these too are vulnerable. In other words, nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy actually trade on genocide as an aspect of a strategy that has been designed, at least for the superpowers. That is, mutual assured destruction threatens not just individual people in however large numbers, but the order of creation, natural and human, and this is something new. So one large moral question on the table is whether it now seems the case that we should be forbidden to commit genocide by every means but nuclear arms. The other and greater question is, what is the moral significance of a threat to destroy our species?
Here I violently shift gears, or non-violently, if you prefer, and turn to discussion focused on the development of American policies under the administration of George W. Bush, for reasons I hope to make clear. At the end of the Cold War, certainly the public of the US developed the desperate illusion that nuclear weapons and nuclear danger had pretty much disappeared along with the long conflict we'd been involved in. I'd say that that mistake continued really down to about 9/11. At that point we saw, in a way that wasn't sufficiently noticed, a radical change, which included a revolution in the nuclear policies of the US. And I think the reason it wasn't noticed is that it was encompassed in the so-called war on terror; that is, it became a kind of corollary of the war on terror. By designating a war on terror, the President summoned into action the fantastic power of the American military on a global basis. This amounted to a giant escalation. By saying "terror" instead of naming specific groups such as Al-Qaeda and its allies, he expanded our struggle to borders that were so vague that no one could really define what was intended. In the next stage, when he spoke of holding regimes that supported terror equally responsible for terrorism, and Vice-President Cheney put the number of such regimes at 61, another very large expansion occurred in the so-called War on Terror, and put on the potential list of legitimate American targets many, many countries. Then came the expansion of the goals of American policy formulated in the State of the Union address in 2002, where Bush spoke of the axis of evil consisting of countries that allegedly were rogue regimes and that also were seeking WMD's. Those were, of course, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And around the border of that discussion there were other countries that were worth mentioning, such as Syria and Libya. The President said, remember: "The US will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Will not permit. That's really the language of an ultimatum; it signaled that the President meant business. He meant war. Now obviously, if you're going to take the development of WMD's in one country or another as the target of your war plans, then that will have very critical implications because you can't wait till each country actually gets the weapons or develops them, and because then you'd wind up with a nuclear war. So that the logic led to the prime tenet of the Bush policy of preemptive war, or preventive war, which means knocking out the weapons capability before weapons are actually ready to be used. All of this, of course, assumed what the entire policy assumed, that the US possessed military force sufficient to dominate global affairs without any fear or worry of challenge or opposition from any country in the world. The way the President put it was: "America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms race of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." In other words he pictured something I'd never heard any statesman articulate before, though maybe I don't know enough history to be sure. The idea was that there was to be a global division of labor in which the US would assume the globe's military role and everybody else would go to the movies and surf the internet and do other peaceful things, reconciled to other areas of human ambition and life.
So when you put all of this together you arrive at something that was really very interesting, very surprising, and very bold, and it was a policy of what I call disarmament wars with military operations conducted for the very specific purpose of disarming countries. Of course every war is in a sense a disarmament war in the sense that you want to beat the other country and presumably disarm it, but in this case the whole purpose of the enterprise is not victory for some other purpose and disarmament as a more incidental result, but a situation where actually the purpose is simply disarmament. And thus did the President encompass within his War on Terror a radical shift in American policy. This accounted to a switch away from the traditional policies of the US which had been maintained up to that point by all presidents, for many years, of keeping nuclear weapons at the ready on a more or less deterrent basis while addressing proliferation by diplomatic means, notably through the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Now that policy was scrapped, and the militarization of nuclear disarmament was inaugurated and became the putative, at least the prime goal, of the military policies of the US to stop nuclear weapon development and other WMDs by armed force. If there were time I would give you a couple of quotes that show what other presidents in earlier decades had thought when people came to them and proposed plans for preventive strikes against China when they were thought to be developing the bomb, and against Russia. Such people, when they came around, were thrown out of the White House office unceremoniously. But now we have the new policy and there is already a track record, so it's not all just some words on paper. We can see what's actually happened, and very quickly we can summarize:
Iraq: Very simple. We went to war to get the weapons of mass destruction. They weren't there. Lots of killing and destruction.
North Korea: The US drew a whole series of so-called red lines in the sand, North Korea stepped across them, and now by most accounts they are a nuclear power.
Pakistan: Maybe the most surprising of all. An ally in the War on Terror turned out to be the greatest proliferators that the world has ever seen thanks to the efforts of those in that country who opened what the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency has called "a nuclear Wal-Mart." These people actually have a brochure, a nice color brochure showing the components of nuclear weapons and nuclear facilities, so potential buyers might know where to go and buy them. I have seen this brochure.
Libya: That was a success story. There's a great debate that rages on whether they gave up their WMDs, or those components they got from Pakistan, because they were afraid of being treated as Saddam Hussein had been treated, or because they had been seeking to reenter the international community and get sanctions lifted from the last decade and really used this as a means to do that. Whatever it was, Khadaffi got a nice visit and a great big kiss from Tony Blair, and full acceptance into the international community as a good guy, which was in this case prepared to forget about democratization and all the rest of it.
In other words, the record is not very good. And I would say that it really raises the question of whether the policy was sincerely intended to accomplish the announced goals in the first place. Consider the deal with India where the Bush administration most mysteriously has agreed to let India assign certain nuclear reactors to its atomic bomb project and insists on inspecting only specified nuclear reactors, in exchange for which the US will supply nuclear fuels and technology to the peaceful part of the program. The irony there is that the whole point of inspecting nuclear reactors is to make sure that they're not being diverted to bomb use. But if you've already assigned a whole bunch of other nuclear reactors to building a bomb - some of these can make enough material for 50 or 60 bombs a year - it kind of negates the point of inspecting the ones that you have got the right to inspect. In addition, if in order to put that deal through you have to severely weaken the laws enforcing the nuclear nonproliferation regime in the treaty, and that's the case here, you've really dealt a bodyblow to the system. So there is hardly what you'd call consistency in the policy of slowing down proliferation or hopefully stopping it.
But let's not forget that nonproliferation is not the only issue here. There is the actual possession of these weapons to consider. You know, there are 10,000 or so in the US arsenal, and more in the Russian arsenal still, and there's no plan afoot to actually get rid of these. Deployed ones are to be reduced to about 2,000 apiece in 2012, but those that are taken off alert are merely set aside and put in storage. So there's no projected actual reduction in warheads, although it does mean something that they are taken off the rockets and put in storage. Finally, Foreign Affairs magazine gives us an article called "The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy," which reveals very convincingly that the US, as far as its own arsenal is concerned, has now developed a policy of casting off the old restraints of the Cold War that were imposed by the deterrence doctrine, and is taking specific steps to be able to achieve a first strike against Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. These steps include increasing the accuracy of D-5 missiles on submarines, along with a whole variety of other steps designed to create that particular capacity. So we have a kind of nuclear renaissance not only in the proliferation field, but also here at home in the arsenals, at the disposal of the old Cold War powers. The authors of that Foreign Affairs article conclude that "a nuclear war-fighting capability remains a key component of US military doctrine and that nuclear primacy [something that had been given up for about 50 years] remains a goal of the US."
Elshtain: One quick question which you can easily answer, Jonathan, on the targeting strategy you cited: I take it you intended to indicate that the strategy is not targeting civilian populations but targeting weapons.
Schell: Officially, right, not targeting civilians.
Elshtain: That's what I wanted to clarify. I mean, this doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, but it's not a strategy designed to take out cities.
Schell: As you know, Jean, there have been many subtle shifts over the years and during the Cold War. If you look at the requirements of the Mutual Assured Destruction policy, you see that the essence of that was that each side, even after the first strike, would retain the capacity to annihilate the other side. This in effect amounted to an exchange of hostages and a policy of conditional genocide - not a hyperbolic word here. Of course the whole idea of it was that since everybody would die if anyone started anything, then no one would start anything. It had a deeply defensive purpose, and stability was supposed to consist in the possession by each side of this retaliatory capacity. That was the situation from 1960 to the end of the Cold War. But now it seems that the intention is to actually deprive Russia and China of their retaliatory capacity, so the US can start pushing these countries around, knowing that if push comes to shove these countries will have no capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons against the US should the US strike first. Now you can talk at great length about whether that gives the US a practical political advantage or not, but certainly in the mainstream thinking of the nuclear age among strategists, the idea that you will be left exposed is quite drastic. Just imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. If the Russians had developed a capacity to entirely knock out US nuclear forces, what a cry there would be in this country. But that is the situation that we need now to consider.
Elshtain: You're quite right that even with the developments you cite, the worry about nuclear extermination has really fallen off the radar screen of concern. But the upshot is that the kinds of situations that Bernard is talking about are not sufficiently thought about either. And I think you can make a pretty persuasive case that the corruption, or even destruction, of humanity is more likely to come from the proliferation of the kinds of black holes that he's talking about than from some dramatic nuclear exchange.
Schell: Well yes, but what I think is beginning to put the nuclear question back in people's consciousness, is the fear that a terrorist state or group will get hold of a nuclear weapon, so that instead of fearing the great exchange of nuclear weapons, which indeed is exceedingly unlikely, people are starting to worry about another, maybe bigger 9/11, possibly involving a nuclear weapon. But this fear is putting further in the shade these black holes, these so-called meaningless wars: meaningless only in the sense that Bernard explained.
Buyers: For some time now there has been a discernible drumbeat preparing us to at least think the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike against countries which, it is argued, are preparing to do the same to us. The case is made, for example, by citing Iran as a country led by people who hope to prosecute a war against unbelievers. The logic invoked has it that once Iran is in possession of nuclear weapons, its own sense of responsibility will inevitably lead it to attack us even if leaders understand that the country will absorb enormous losses as a result. In a recent issue of the New Republic magazine, historian Daniel Goldhagen argues that Iran and a number of other countries in the Middle East are at present in the hands of persons imbued with a religious sense of mission, so that we must be prepared to think the next step, to ask what we are prepared to do in defense of our civilization against people who are clearly willing to endanger their entire civilization in order to carry out what is required of them. Though Goldhagen himself, in this very lengthy piece, does not quite come out in favor of a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, it's quite clear that this is what he wishes us to seriously consider. We liberals in the West must be willing to think these kinds of previously unthinkable thoughts. So Goldhagen contends. So that I can't help thinking that it is not some remote prospect that Jonathan is describing.
Barber: I agree that there is nothing remote about the sort of nuclear scenario Jonathan has asked us to look at. But I want to go back to Bernard's point. I agree with him that terrorism is not today and has never been a great danger to the US. 9/11, horrendous as it was, was, as I put it earlier, a fleabite on a grizzly bear. I don't want to demean the 3,000 lost, but with respect to the history and the strategic resources and the wealth and power of the US, the event amounted to very little. Not even a dirty bomb or a loose nuke would be in any way a fatal or difficult blow for the US to absorb. The only thing terrorists can do to us is to make us afraid, and of course that they've done brilliantly. Fear has become the real weapon of the terrorist, and the Bush administration does bin Laden's work for him by spreading the fear. We've seen the damage it can do to our rights, to our borders, to our relations with allies, and so forth. Others in smaller countries have much more to fear from terrorism than we do. But by making it the centerpiece of our policy, and also using it to justify preemptive war, we have disturbed our sense of the reality we face.
But I also want to say that though we've been assessing three different levels of problems, they really belong potentially to a coherent scenario. One problem has to do with the black holes, and the western indifference to them. The second has to do with the question of nuclear war, and the third has to do with the various extinction scenarios. I want to suggest there's potentially an important link between the three, a linkage that must make them very dangerous. You know, it's possible to start with a black hole somewhere in Africa, say, where some Muslims and some Christians are murdering one another, and then imagine some Arabs from the Middle East getting involved, and then Iran getting involved in defense of what it sees as Muslim interests in Africa, maybe with a nuclear weapon, and then the Middle East going up in a larger nuclear exchange involving the US. So these are not discreet issues, and one reason to pay attention (aside from powerful moral reasons) is that these little black holes can become triggers for larger conflagrations. That's a powerful argument, a more prudential argument, for paying a lot of attention to these small wars, even if you're not persuaded by the moral reasons Bernard outlines.
Glotzbach: I want to ask what war does to us when we are at war. It turns us from citizens into soldiers, doesn't it? It gives certain implicit and implied powers to the Commander-in-Chief; it imposes constraints on what we can do at home. These consequences we've thought about in the past. The difference in what we're dealing with today is that a war on terror is a war on something that's nebulous and undefined, a war without a perceivable end to it. And when you have a war that is essentially unending, then citizens are placed in a new relationship to their government, with potentially disastrous consequences, where people become the prisoners of the idea that they are permanently at war and can't demand their liberties or demand any serious accountability from their leaders, who are responsible only for protecting them from terror.
Massing: Listening to these recent remarks, I can't help thinking that the War on Terror has had the increasingly paradoxical effect of discrediting the threat of terrorism itself, and I think that's dangerous. I share the concerns about the use of the word terror: the vague open-endedness, the potential assault on civil liberties, and all the rest. But to say that 3,000 people is only a pinprick, not much really, is hard for this one guy who lives in Manhattan and was there on 9/11 to swallow. I mean, suppose the fourth plane had not gone down, the one apparently aimed at either the Capital or the White House. If one of those centers of government had been taken out I think our entire government would have been in a state of crisis. Do we know really what the result would have been if the President and others in the line of succession had been taken out? And when you think that a dirty bomb might decimate an entire city, I don't see how you can be cavalier about the danger.
Schell: Well, dirty bombs don't kill many people at all, but they contaminate large areas. People wouldn't want to live there.
Massing: Yeah, so imagine that we'd have to evacuate New York City; given what happened with Katrina, what would happen if we had to evacuate a city like New York? This is not a small thing, and if it's one possible effect of terrorism, then it does threaten a way of life.
Do I have what you might call a larger point here? I think I do. The danger we live with has at least something to do with the lives people lead in other places, in the Middle East especially. Take, as one example, Egypt, a country with a decent enough educational system and large numbers of high school and college graduates but with few job prospects for the young men who come out. And because they have no job prospects they also have few prospects of getting married, because families will not allow their women to marry them. This also affects, in obvious ways, their prospects for having sex. You look at the male populations in the Middle East and you have some idea of why a virulent form of Islamic fundamentalism has risen. The Middle East is filled with repressive regimes that are not answering the needs of its populations, which is giving rise to an Islamic fundamentalism that is an actual existing threat to us and to others. Our task, to use a word that Bernard has used, is to help the men and women in that part of the world. The black holes aren't the only places that require intervention. And we're going about it in completely hopeless ways. The invasion of Iraq discredited the whole notion of reaching out and politically intervening in that part of the world. When we try to reach out to democrats in Iran they rightly mistrust us. And we shouldn't suppose that things are more or less alright or that terrorism isn't much of a threat because we haven't had a terrorist attack in five years.
Lears: I think that Michael just put his finger on the ambivalence that many of us feel about responding to the so-called War on Terror and about the phrase itself, which certainly provokes me to derision and dismissal, yet there is always that sense that we're not out of genuine danger, that there is an element of genuine danger still, however capricious and unpredictable. And I think Phil was absolutely right to say that even if the threat of terrorism issues in a relatively small attack in terms of casualties, the militarization of the society that would occur as a result is a very palpable threat. So there is that question of what war does to our frame of mind and what it does to us as a polity and a society.
But I wanted to ask Bob to clarify Goldhagen's argument for me. Is he actually saying that the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran are willing to risk the absolute destruction of their society in order to kill a few hundred thousand infidels?
Boyers: He's saying, as I understand him, that the language used to mobilize masses of human beings in Iran would lead you to believe that they're being prepared to accept that possibility. Whether or not that is their long-term intention, to build support in their society for that kind of an event, he doesn't say. To me, the article reads like a trial balloon sent up from a reputable journal - a journal I myself have written for over forty years - which has sponsored this kind of speculative thinking before. Goldhagen, as you know, is a controversial, but thoughtful historian, and I think that his lengthy and detailed essay has to be taken seriously.
Forché: Robert gave me the essay to read the other day. It reports that 37% of British Muslims said that British Jews are legitimate targets as part of the struggle for justice in the Middle East. And I agree with Robert that Danny is building a case here, an implicit case, for a strike against Iran. But his argument is muddied because he's developing a category which he categorizes as Political Islam, and exemplifies in part, quite erroneously, with references to Saddam Hussein, with whom he closes his argument.
But you don't need to rely for evidence of what's building simply on Goldhagen. In the print editions of a recent issue of American Conservative, you can read that the Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice-President Cheney, has tasked the US strategic command with drawing up a contingency plan to be deployed in response to another 9/11 attack. It includes plans for a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are over 450 major strategic targets including numerous suspected nuclear weapon program development sites. Many of these targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case in Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in an act of terrorism against the US. Several senior officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing, that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack, but no one is prepared to damage his career by proposing an objection.
Schell: Let me say, in the first place, that if such events as Bob and Carolyn alert us to were to take place, this might give us the blackest day in human history. If we're talking about massive nuclear strikes, we're talking about many tens of millions of people potentially being killed in a single day, possibly in response to an unprovoked nuclear strike launched by the US. I humbly suggest that we should do almost anything to avoid such a moment. What we're on now is a path that would seem to be leading in that direction. And when I say a path I mean that the entire thrust and framework of American policy, whose larger framework is this idea of primacy, seems designed to allow the US to achieve actual global military supremacy, and to approach global disarmament by military means, through an exercise of our supremacy. You know, the Pentagon has put in place, as reported in the Washington Post, something called the global strike option. This is not just a scenario deposited in a file, but an actual capability which has been ordered and accomplished. What is it exactly? It's an ability of the US to attack any point on the globe within hours using conventional or nuclear weapons.
Elshtain: I want to respond to earlier comments from Phil. He put me in mind of an argument that Reinhold Niebuhr made in the run up to WWII, where Niebuhr was countering those opposed to American entry. And you know, he was rather scornful towards those who were saying that if we fought the fascists we would become just like them, because he didn't think this was going to happen. So I'm always a little wary about these kinds of predictions. I know, Phil, that you weren't saying that exactly, but you did suggest that we are bound to become corrupted if we are involved in a kind of ongoing mobilization to deal with terrorism, which will turn us from citizens into soldiers. The irony is that it doesn't. We don't have conscription, we have an all-volunteer force, and unless you know someone who's in it, that war is never going to touch you. You can go through daily life, especially if you don't read a newspaper, and not be touched at all. And there are ways in which that may be more corrupting than if you had a real price to pay. The vast majority of us can go about our lives, say what we want, do what we want, be with our families, travel and so on and not be touched at all by mobilization. Remember that after 9/11 people were chomping at the bit to do something, but we're so civically bereft at this point that the President told us to just keep traveling, keep shopping, keep doing the things we like to do. The point is, I don't think any administration wants anything like total mobilization, because the War on Terror is not that kind of effort. So we say everyone can be a civilian and lead their ordinary lives, and this is a different situation than what you forecast. Not necessarily better, but different.
Lévy: This part of the discussion has been the most difficult for me, and frankly I am a little confused. And when I'm confused I try to go back to the only thing I can rely on, which is the words. First, the War on Terror. I do believe that the very words, War on Terror, already give a victory to the attackers. We give them half of what they wish, which is the sense that we are terrified. So I think we have to resist that. We have to resist also the word Jonathan used to describe the nightmare scenario of a nuclear strike, which was genocide. These words-extermination, genocide-have a very specific meaning. I'm not sure about this, but I think they can't be used legitimately to describe other things.
But the implicit threat in the Goldhagen essay is something else, and I agree that there is a danger in the argument. But that doesn't mean that he's wrong, about what is happening in Iran and also in Palestine. There are really proponents of the nuclear solution in Iran, and in the Pakistan Islamist movement there are others who say things we should hear. What do they say? Some high-ranking officials in Iran and Pakistan say that if they have the nuclear weapon, it will be not only for themselves, not only for their national security, but for an international cause, for holy battle. They say that the bomb belongs to the whole Umma. And they go on to say, frankly, that the bomb should have an immediate target, which is Israel. If they have the bomb in their hands, they say, it will have this role immediately. They also say if the price is to have an Iranian city destroyed, or a huge disaster in Pakistan, it will be paid. I remind you that the Soviet Nuclear scientists and the Soviet leaders never said that they were willing to sacrifice large numbers of their people, whole cities or regions. There was in the Cold War a sort of sharing of mutual deterrence. It was horrible, but in the madness there was a sort of rationality. Reagan spoke with Gorbachev, they spoke the same language. Today these conditions, that nuclear bombs will belong to the Umma, that they will be used immediately to destroy one state, and that it is no matter if the nuclear action causes a disaster to the nation of Islam, which is anyhow devoted to martyrdom: all these propositions are really new and require a policy -1 don't know which it must be - different from the ones used to confront the Soviet Union.
Glotzbach: I agree with all of the points that have been made about the reality of the threats we're facing, and agree that we can't pretend that the words used by fundamentalist leaders in the Middle East are of little or no consequence. I'm also persuaded by Jean that we can still go about our daily lives, as we haven't yet been asked to make many sacrifices on behalf of the so-called War on Terror. But that's not to say, Jean, that we're not already seeing significant effects. Michael spoke of the chilling effects on the conduct of the press, and others alluded to the consolidation of power within the presidency and potential challenges to the separation of powers. The things we're dealing with right now at the constitutional level in this country are very real political realities that follow from the declared permanent state of war. It's not negligible that we now have to take very seriously the whole question about wiretaps: whether they are anti-terrorist or infringements on the basic rights of Americans. And we do have to look at the abandonment at Guantanamo of a certain moral stance that we've at least tried to maintain with regard to the treatment of prisoners. There are political consequences of this permanent state of war that may not have affected our lives on a present daily basis but may in fact over time seem much more important than they do today.
Barber: I want to disagree with a number of things Bernard said about the difference between the dangers we face in the Middle East today and the dangers we thought we faced from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Back then, at the height of the threat of nuclear winter, I had friends who moved to Australia because they thought this country would become extinct. It was a time of great fear, and one of the things that was said back then was that the other side didn't care about human life. Stalin, after all, had murdered twenty million of his own citizens. You couldn't rely on them, they would sacrifice everything for their goals and so there was a strong ongoing contingent within the government arguing for a first strike. Thank God they lost the battle, but Goldwater and others who ran for the presidency asked us to consider the possibility of first strike logic. So I don't think the present sense of the threat out there is so new. I want also to say to Michael and Jackson: of course there's a real threat with terrorism, and of course there's a danger that terrorists might get bombs, but we don't want to place too much importance on what is mainly political rhetoric, which often has very little to do with reality or with actual intentions. Look, we're as likely to be threatened by a nuclear bomb from within the country as from without. We don't want to forget that the first terrorist episode here was Oklahoma City. And we all started saying here they come now, and we all started looking for which terrorists or Muslims or crazy foreigners had done it, and of course it turned out to be one of us crazy Americans. There are plenty of crazy Americans around, and militias, and hate groups. So yes, there's a danger of terrorism, but it is internal as well as external.
Also: if you believe that the threat is mainly from without, then you have to believe that the most important single thing you can do to reduce it is to get intelligence cooperation. Almost all of our foreign policy since 9/11 has hurt the possibilities of cooperation that were available to us on 9/11, when we had the sympathy of the world. It's clear that we need assistance from other countries if we're going to identify the sources of actual threats. But what do we get instead? You get on a plane and they take your clippers and look you over, while our cargo planes go around uninspected. Anyone want to put a bomb in a cargo plane? No problem. Our reservoirs remain on the whole unsurveiled, uninspected, though a relatively inexpensive system could be set up to handle that. People on both sides of the political aisle say they're really concerned about the threats, but they're mainly focused on throwing fear into the American public and closing down our healthy institutions, while doing virtually nothing about real threats.
Lévy: I think maybe Benjamin is right, that the present situation and, more specifically, the way we think about danger, is not so different from the way it was before. And of course you have to be careful, as Benjamin says, not to exaggerate the importance of political rhetoric. I know, for example, that the civil society of Iran is one of the most advanced in the area and that public opinion there is not monolithic. Culturally speaking you have there one of the most pro-American publics in the region. I mean, the young women who wear the burka sometimes under it wear sexy skins and walk in high-heels and listen to American music and look in a clandestine way at English-speaking television channels and so on. The society is completely open and often seems at the edge of a blooming revolution, a real democratic revolution. I am sure of this. The problem is that this large segment of the population is not in power today. Today in power you have the guys who want a revolutionary guard to assert a sort of terror in the streets of Tehran, and say at least that they believe that the bomb will maybe help them to achieve their ultimate goals. Do I know what to do about this? I can speak about black holes; I can speak about genocide, I can explain to you what is the difference between the Cambodian situation and the genocide of Jews, but about this particular question (what to do with the threat of the fundamentalists in Iran and Pakistan) I don't know.
Session 6: American Empire & The End of Innocence
Jackson Lears : I want here to look at the at the present situation in America through a series of lenses, some of them historical, others informed by the reflections on evil Bernard has given us. We are, in my view, in one of the most serious constitutional crises of our history. In the name of an undeclared war on terror well anatomized by several speakers here, our government has lied us into a disastrous imperial adventure, insisted on its right to torture, to spy on its own citizens without warrants, and to disregard any legislation it deems inconvenient. So far our public discourse seems hopelessly inadequate to deal with this situation. The mainstream media trivializes criticism of the administration's policies as mere partisan bickering or politics as usual in Washington, implying that dangerous departures from American tradition are perfectly legitimate (if controversial) political strategies. Presidential historians on governmentsponsored television ennoble the Bush seizure of power by comparing it to actions of Lincoln and other presidents in times of war, overlooking one fundamental fact: we are not at war but rather in a state of permanent emergency that can be deployed to justify the apparently unlimited expansion of a staggeringly powerful national security state. And finally, what I find viscerally most disturbing: highly credentialed think-tank intellectuals calmly discuss torture as a legitimate instrument of national policy. G.W. Bush has dared critics to let him get away with the unconstitutional expansion of executive power, and so far he's succeeded. Seldom have presidents so flagrantly displayed such insolence in office. How did we get here? I'm going to try to make a long story short, the story of evil and war in American political culture.
I'll begin with those revered founding fathers: the framers of the US Constitution. They had a palpable, dare I say Augustinian, sense of evil. They understood the tendency of power to corrupt the individuals who wielded it. Hence the need for the separation of powers, and hence the great and dramatic and I think genuinely revolutionary transformation that occurred in Philadelphia in 1787. Hence also their fear of standing armies, military ventures and concentrated executive authority. Unlike contemporary leaders they knew the difference between a republic and an empire, and how easily the first could degenerate into the second. The suspicion of militarism and empire persisted through the 19th century, but events were already under way that would undermine it. Some of those events were taking place in the intellectual and cultural history of religious longing and beliefs. And in some ways the most important of those developments was a decline in the belief in original sin. The rise of an enlightenment belief in human goodness, combined with the protestant belief that one could choose personal moral regeneration, led to a kind of evangelical democratic universalism. Sin was no longer inherent in human beings but was the result of human monstrosity, or racial inferiority, or poor environment, or weak character, if one took the reformist point of view. Which led one to the possibility of universal personal and social transformation. If the objects of universalist reform refused these universal human values, that posed a problem. Because if these were universal human values then the people who refused them would not be human, must somehow have to be outside the realm of humanity. This is a key problem in liberal democratic tradition and in the whole tradition of universalist thinking.
So, as belief in original sin declines, it opens the way for the demonization or the reform of the other, as well as the moral regeneration of the self. The moral crusades against sin which proliferated in the 19th century and on into the 20th depended on the projection of evil outward and the assumption that it could be eradicated. This is a far cry from Augustine. These crusades also led by implication to assumptions of individual and also national innocence.
There were other, more palpable changes familiar to economic and political historians. During the decades after the American Civil War, there was rising recognition among policy makers that foreign military ventures could have domestic value, distracting angry workers, locating overseas markets and raw materials, protecting