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CounterPunch
February
28, 2003
A Plea for Hysteria
The Secret's
Out: the US is Weak
By 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 occuring
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 <i>get</i>
anything, and it won't; Iraq is a can of worms. It needs to <i>prove</i>
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 disintegraton 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 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.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Neumann's book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been
republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
*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.
Yesterday's
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February 22
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