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fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Playing It SafeThe fatuous politics of compromise.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Sept. 25, 2006, at 7:08 PM ET

During the last presidential election in the United States, both candidates commissioned opinion polls on the question of "safety." Voters were asked to say which of the two made them "feel safer." Not, mark you, whether they made them actually safer. Only whether they made them "feel safer." Obviously, nobody is really qualified to say whether they are more secure or less secure under the presidency of one or the other nominee. So, they had to be content with registering what is known in the trade as their "perception." It all worked out fine and was soon played back into the political process. You saw people on-screen, expressing their own opinions. "I'm a Kerry voter," they would say, or a Bush voter, according to taste. "Because he makes me feel safer." If it had gone on much longer, there would have been bumper stickers saying "Feel Safer With Dubya." Or even: "John Kerry. Safely Reporting for Duty."

Or would that have been too ridiculous and pathetic? It's hard to be sure. The last time in history that "safety" was a political slogan was—as far as I know—when Stanley Baldwin led the Conservative campaign in the 1929 general election on the watchword "Safety First." This mantra, which is said to have been taken from a contemporary road-safety campaign, is agreed by most historians to have kept the British people in a fool's paradise for a few extra years while the European dictatorships made ready for a war that would have made the world safe for fascism. (To make the world "safe for democracy" had been the earlier ambition of President Woodrow Wilson, in his "war to end all wars." That didn't work out too well, either.)

Now we are all being asked to consider whether or not we are "safer" than we were five years ago. What this question means in practice is: Has the Bush/Blair foreign policy exposed us to more danger or to less? The answer depends on how you define the threat. You can either believe that Sept. 11, 2001, was the opening shot, or the most shockingly palpable shot, in a long war waged by Islamic fanaticism against "the West." Or you can believe that it was part of a stubborn resistance to an unjust global order largely led and organized by the United States, with Britain as its servile junior partner.

If you take the first view, then "safety" is really a second-order issue. The main priority is to take the war to the enemy and to deny things like "safe havens" to his suicidal warriors. Any risk involved is preferable to continued passivity or inaction. If you take the second view, then every such action undertaken will only incite and justify further acts of "terrorism," thus making us all less safe by definition.

The classic division here was expressed after the London bombs last July and has surfaced since then in the controversy over the High Wycombe arrests. There are those who say that these actual or potential atrocities are to be expected as a reaction to a foreign policy that is "perceived" as "anti-Muslim," and there are those who say that the resort to violence is produced by the preachings of a depraved clerical ideology. Actually, both of these positions are simplistic. There obviously is a connection between our foreign policy and the activities of people who think it their holy duty to commit mass murder. They are doing so in solidarity with other mass murderers, in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, who want to destroy democracy or prevent it from emerging. (One casualty of the King's Cross bombing last July was, aptly enough, a young Afghan who had fled his homeland after many of his family had been killed by the Taliban. He had been under the illusion that in London he would be "safer.")

You may if you choose take the view that resistance to jihadism only makes its supporters more militant and, given the fact that all wars intensify feeling on both sides, there must be some truth to this. But the corollary is a bit disturbing: The most prudent course of action then seems to be compromise or surrender. This is a rather contemptible conclusion. And it also overlooks the unpleasant fact that the jihadists don't seem to be that much interested in compromise. Indonesia and Canada, to take two very different countries, both opposed the Iraq war. But both of them have been targets of vicious terrorist attacks, as have Turkey and Morocco, which likewise opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Speaking of the latter, he only ever made one self-criticism. Speaking after his expulsion from Kuwait, he admitted to his followers that he had made a mistake. He should have built his nuclear bomb first, and only then invaded his neighbor. In 1990, in other words, as the world was celebrating the end of the Cold War, a mad dictator had both a nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha and a plan to occupy another country by force and annex a huge quantity of the world's oil. And we did not know of either contingency. (The nuclear facility was not discovered or disarmed until after the war was over.) So, 1990, in retrospect, was a year of living safely. And if you can believe that, then you can feel blissfully safe cultivating a vineyard on the slopes of Mount Etna.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Daily Mirror.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Hitchens is spot on when he says that asking if we're "safer" today isn't the right question. It's a great start. But then the wrong turn: He creates a false dichotomy between actions demanded by a war with terrorists and the natural consequences of an "unjust social order."

Let's leave aside that, of course, it's entirely possible that both of these theories are right. (After all, there could be a war with Islamofascists that the West needs to win and, at the same time, it could be harder to win that war because the world order is unjust. See? It's not so hard.) Instead, let's focus on the idea that being less safe is a natural consequence of being in the midst of the war and that, therefore, the alternative is surrender.

That's silly.

First, there were many evident alternatives to fighting in Iraq other than surrender. Just imagine if all the troops used in Iraq were sent to Afghanistan. Perhaps there would be a stable government there, and we wouldn't be worrying about the return of the Taliban. Or imagine that we'd spent some of the hundreds of billions of dollars on the recovery of Beirut, or to provide social services in southern Lebanon, lessening the hold of Hezbollah.

Or, for that matter, the U.S. could have devoted the appropriate resources to Iraq from the start, and there'd be at least a better chance that it wouldn't have become a breeding ground for terrorists. It would have been nice if we'd actually had a plan for the occupation, instead of expecting that the invasion would end in showers of rose petals.

Or our government could have told us that sacrifice was going to be necessary and, like a government in a real war, increased taxes to pay for the materiel and troops to fight it, and imposed a draft. (I imagine Hitchens would have approved of that, actually.)

The problem with this Administration's approach to terrorism from the start has been that it has adopted this same kind of black and white thinking - you're with us or against us, it's war or surrender, etc., etc., etc. Well, the world isn't that way. It's filled with shades of grey. If Hitchens could see that, perhaps he'd stop making so many wrong turns.

--randy-khan

(To reply, click here.)

I think it has more to do with how you define the enemy and whether you believe the measures being taken are/will be effective against that enemy. I don't believe the degree of danger is measured by definition of the threat, but in the amount of preparedness, ability and effectiveness of the method of confrontation with the enemy that poses said danger. [...]

The innocent civilian deaths ARE used to recruit by the terrorist organizations and help them grow. There is a better way to fight them.

They must remain hidden in order to operate. They are not in the open where a military attack would be clean and effective. This means that to fight them and be effective we have to go where they are. We have to infiltrate their ranks. This is done by training agents for infiltration operations and getting them recruited into the organization. We DO have agencies that know how to do that. We have, unfortunately, not staffed them well. We are ill prepared for this fight, but that can be fixed. Once al Qaeda has been infiltrated, it can be dismantled from the inside. The same is true of other terrorist organizations. Until we infiltrate and take it apart from within, it will be a growing threat.

--LT-7

(To reply, click here.)

My God, a crazy leader had a plan to forcefully invade another country to annex its oil! That's terrible! Somebody stop him!

Wait...who are we talking about again?

Oh I remember, it was something about Americans feeling safe from attack. [...]

In the interim between the two Gulf Wars, zero casualties were inflicted on the United States by Iraq. None. Nada. Nil. Saddam didn't have the capability to damage the United States if he wanted to, and there's no indication that he wanted to.

Now that's safe.

But since Bush's misbegotten war started, thousands upon thousands have been killed, maimed and wounded. Americans are dying every day. Iraq has been turned into a slaughterhouse, and is on its way to becoming a Muslim theocracy allied with Iran. Every single one of our intelligence agencies agrees that Iraq has become the single greatest recruiting tool and training ground for Islamic terrorists. All for a billion dollars a week, money that could have been used for homeland security, things like inspecting cargo, or securing our power plants. Our finances are in shambles, our reputation is in ruins, our allies are deserting us, our army is falling apart.

Feeling safer now, Hitch?

--Utek1

(To reply, click here.)

(9/25)

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