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Truth or Consequences

By William SaletanPosted Thursday, Sept. 20, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Why do they hate us?

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That's the question many people are asking about the terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center last week. At first, the question was raised simply to make sense of the tragedy. Then it was posed for investigative reasons, to understand who was involved in the crime and what they might do next. Now the purpose of the question is changing again. Commentators are wondering how we made the terrorists angry enough to hurt us and how we might change our behavior to avoid further attacks.

These writers don't exactly fault the United States. They simply argue that the attacks were a consequence of American behavior. "The suicide attacks in Israel—and now in the United States—are reactions to specific actions and policies," writes The Nation's David Corn. In The New Yorker, Susan Sontag says the terrorist strikes were "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." Salon Executive Editor Gary Kamiya concludes that "our only real defense will be winning the hearts and minds of those who hate us. … We must pressure Israel to take the concrete steps necessary to provide justice for the Palestinian people."

The practical point made by these consequentialists is that we can't stop terrorism without addressing its causes. A diagnostic approach, they argue, is wiser than simply lashing out in anger. They're right about that. But their wisdom falls short of the next insight: Consequentialism is a two-way street. It's true that terrorists can impose consequences on us. But it's just as true that we can impose consequences on terrorists.

Superficially, it's empowering to analyze every situation in terms of the consequences of our own acts. Understanding how we can change the enemy's behavior by changing our own appears to put control in our hands. It also gratifies our egos by preserving our sense of free will while interpreting the enemy's conduct as causally determined. We're the subjects; they're the objects. But the empowerment and the ego gratification are illusory. By accepting as a mechanical fact the enemy's aggressive response to our offending behavior, we surrender control of the most important part of the sequence.

Imagine yourself as a rat in a behavioral experiment. You're put in a cage with three levers. When you press the first lever, you get food. When you press the second, you get water. When you press the third, you get an electric shock. You quickly learn to press the first two levers and not the third. You think you're in control because you're choosing the levers that get you what you want. But the real power belongs to the scientists who built the cage and run the experiment, because they determine which acts produce which consequences.

Now imagine yourself as a battered wife. Every so often, your husband gets angry and hits you. Why? You struggle to understand the connection between your behavior and his response. What are you doing that causes him to react this way? You hope that by identifying and avoiding the offending behavior, you can regain domestic peace and a sense of control. You're deluding yourself. As long as your husband decides which of your acts will earn you a beating, he's the master, and you're the slave.

This is the problem with the consequentialist argument for revising U.S. policy in the Middle East. Maybe it's true, for other reasons, that we should rethink our position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, withdraw our troops from Saudi Arabia, or ease sanctions on Iraq. But if we do these things to avoid further attacks on our cities, we're granting terrorists the power to dictate our acts by dictating the consequences.

The consequentialists present themselves as humanitarians and idealists. They purport to speak up for the plights, principles, and aspirations of people who are driven to commit acts of terror. But their mechanistic analysis dehumanizes these people. Terrorists aren't animals. No law of nature compels them to blow up buildings when they're angry. We don't have to accept their violent reactions to our policies. We can break that causal chain.

How? By turning consequentialism on its head. We can dictate what happens to people who attack us. Suicidal terrorists may be impervious to this logic, but their commanders and sponsors aren't. Launder money for a man who destroys the World Trade Center, and your assets will be confiscated. Shelter an organization that crashes a plane into the Pentagon, and your government buildings will be leveled. Expel terrorists from your country, freeze their bank accounts, and you'll be liberated from sanctions and debt.

Will this approach succeed? We don't know how each would-be terrorist or sponsor will respond. It's an open question. But that's the point. As long as we view it the other way around—ourselves as the actors, and our enemies as the imposers of consequences—the question is closed. Our enemies' reactions, and therefore our options, are rigidly defined. We can have troops in Saudi Arabia, or we can have peace at home, but we can't have both.

Challenging the false objectivity of these dilemmas doesn't require us to ignore the potential consequences of our acts. Some of our Middle East policies do anger many Arabs or Muslims. We ought to worry when others don't like our behavior. But just as surely, they ought to worry when we don't like theirs.

Two years ago, when President Clinton waged war against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, consequentialists on the American right blamed him for the bloodshed. His aggression, they argued, had provoked the Serbs to violence. Now that President Bush is girding for war, consequentialism has broken out on the left. To his credit, Bush is defying it with equal vigor. The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center "are clearly determined to try to force the United States of America and our values to withdraw from the world," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed yesterday. "We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable; or to change the way that they live. And we chose the latter." Amen.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photograph of Osama Bin Laden on Slate's Table of Contents by Ho/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

I wish Saletan had distinguished between two groups of people asking "why do they hate us?"--on the one hand, millions of ordinary Americans who are generally perplexed as to why anyone would want to slaughter 6,000 people like them, and on the other hand, Keepers of the Light That Failed like The Nation, who can be counted on to attack the American government under any circumstances and regardless of the subject.

The second group is just doing what they always do. It's the first group we need to be concerned with. For the American public to have confidence in the government's ability to guide the country thought the difficult years ahead, government policies and the reasons for them will need to be carefully and clearly explained. The necessity to explain them should prove a great incentive to improve the policies themselves.

This is especially important because some of the policy decisions facing us will change the way we live whether we like it or not. Some of them will also change the way we see America; I'm thinking here of the changes in immigration policy and surveillance of certain foreign nationals that should follow in the wake of a mass murder committed by aliens from a small number of Arab countries.

I've thought for some time that the quality of American foreign policy has suffered because public interest was so low that elected officials only occasionally gave it concentrated attention. If that has changed government should be much better able to come up with good answers for all the "why?" questions the public will ask

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)

Saletan cheers Rumsfeld's rejection of the "consequentialist" argument that America should reexamine its foreign policy. But it is worth examining the statement by Rumsfeld in detail before coming to that conclusion. This is the statement:

"The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center 'are clearly determined to try to force the United States of America and our values to withdraw from the world,' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed yesterday. 'We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable; or to change the way that they live. And we chose the latter.'"

Nobody could argue that terrorists do not object to our pluralistic and capitalistic values and that our willingness to assert those values are part of the motivation for the acts. And of course we should never shrink from asserting those values due to a terror attack.

But Rumsfeld's statement pretends that this is the whole story. Bush said the same thing the day of the attacks: "freedom itself was attacked today". But it's not at all that simple. Our foreign policy is not always, or even usually, a function of our concerns about freedom and democracy. Many other things seem to be a lot more important than freedom and democracy, including: (a) domestic political concerns (Cuba, Iraq), (b) economic self-interest (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), (c) the interests of major campaign-contributing corporations (China), (d) the War on Drugs (Colombia), and (d) realpolitik and anticommunism (support for numerous noxious regimes and insurgencies during the Cold War, including Chile, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa, and insurgencies in Nicaragua, Angola, and, yes, Afghanistan).

Further, we sometimes conduct our foreign policy in a very arrogant manner. We insist that Slobodan Milosevic cannot be tried by his fellow Serbs and must be sent to the Hague for trial, but similarly insist that no American soldier may ever be tried by an international criminal tribunal. We sanction other regimes for violating biological weapons conventions while refusing to allow inspection of our facilities. We assert the right to bomb Kosovo from 15,000 feet while prohibiting Iraq from putting its planes in the air. We spy on China from just off its coast and demand that China do nothing to stop those flights, while we would certainly take action against any country that tried to assert the same capability off our coasts.

Our defense rhetoric reflects it too. The Pentagon talks of "projecting power", ie the capability of the U.S. to dictate military conditions in any country all over the world.

In short, we have asserted the power, and the claim of right, to intervene militarily anywhere in the world to protect American interests, even if such interests are completely contrary to the values we claim to stand for. At the same time, we endeavor to deny any other country the right to hold Americans accountable in any way. That may be rational behavior. But it carries a huge cost--many people in the rest of the world, while envious of our way of life and our standard of living, resent our power. In fact, it is hard to conceive of what a country or group of people with a grievance against us, even a legitimate one, could do to stop us from asserting our will if the recognition of that grievance conflicted with our self-interests. Is it any wonder that some in the world turn to covertly supporting, or tacitly approving, terrorist activity?

Despite what Saletan and Rumsfeld say, we should think seriously in this country about whether our behavior, especially since the end of the cold war, has made us more susceptible to a terrorist attack. Perhaps we will conclude that the power we wield is worth the cost. But Saletan and Rumsfeld would preempt us from even discussing the question, on the ground that a nation that can impose consequences need never examine the consequences of its own behavior.

--Dilan Esper

(To reply, click here.)

(9/20)

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