We need more than a day to reflect on 9/11

Posted By David Rothkopf Friday, September 10, 2010 - 4:12 PM

Update, 9/12/10: In the following post due to a mistake regarding which draft I submitted to be posted, a couple of key words were dropped that have been noted by several commenters. They refer to the paragraph regarding the mosque project in Lower Manhattan. What I intended to write (and had actually written in the draft that I mistakenly did not submit) was not "It is odious..." but instead "It may seem odious to some, but if our freedoms..." I appreciate those who noted the incongruity of the remark given that I was early and strongly on the record supporting the right of those supporting the Islamic Cultural Center to build it wherever they wanted to. As should be clear to anyone who reads this blog, I find the objections and efforts to block the cultural center to be what is really odious and that is the point that I would have made here were it not for my typo. Apologies.

A week ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek entitled "What America Has Lost." It was subtitled "It's clear we overreacted to 9/11." As is typical for Zakaria, it is exceptionally thoughtful and well-argued. Its timely focus is on the enormous costs associated with building up the massive U.S. security apparatus that targeted a terrorist threat that was and is clearly overstated. Zakaria makes reference to the landmark Washington Post "Top Secret America" series that outlined how, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, the United States has "created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate.) That's more than the rest of the world spends put together."

Even today, nine years after 9/11, it took considerable courage for Zakaria to argue that we overreacted to the horrific events of that day. Given their scope and visceral impact on every American, it seemed in the days after the blows were struck that overreaction was impossible. But in the years that followed, the feelings seem hardly to have ebbed at all, and critiques of our national reaction are, with the exception of the near consensus that invading Iraq was wrong, considered almost unpatriotic -- nearly sacrilegious, in fact.

Yet I believe that Zakaria's column understates the problem. I attribute this to its appropriately limited focus rather than any narrowness of his perspective. It was, after all, just a single column in which he focused on making an important point about America's security priorities and the opportunity costs associated with our strategic overreaction. That said, the damage done by letting emotion and adrenaline get the best of us in the months and years after the attacks extends far beyond the distortion of foreign policy priorities or the impact on the U.S. federal budget.

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Out of respect for the families?

Posted By David Rothkopf Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 12:08 PM

It's not just hate-mongers like Newt Gingrich versus champions of constitutional liberties like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg when it comes to the discussion of building that mosque in lower Manhattan. There's a nuanced "middle" position that seems to typically employ the phrase "out of respect for the families."

This phrase is often used in a sentence like, "of course, the Muslims have the right to put this mosque anywhere they want but out of respect for the families, they ought to move it father away from Ground Zero."

It allows the speaker to sound like they have a vague grasp of the liberties championed by America's founding fathers while, at the same time, they can pander to and even stir up the inflamed emotions that 9/11 still evokes...and no doubt will for many years to come. And as is true in any such veil for hypocrisy, the phrase is itself is a pretty pernicious concoction.

First of all, it suggests that the families of 9/11 victims uniformly, as a group, associate the attacks that robbed them of their loved ones not with a small, fringe group of radicalized terrorists but with a religion those terrorists debased and whose teachings they ignored. This doesn't respect but impugns them.

Of course, as has been widely reported, the families of 9/11 victims are not a monolithic group and so to be accurate, the phrase that should be used is "out of respect for some of the families..." But even in that instance, this phrase suggests that it is "respectful" to set aside principles and the law and embrace intolerance and ignorance simply because the wounds associated with a grievous crime are still open.

How can it be respectful to suggest that these families operate to a lower standard than the rest of American society? Or whether some do or not, how can it be respectful to treat them as they do?

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EXPLORE:ISLAM, POLITICS, RELIGION

Women and Islam: The real test of our values

Posted By David Rothkopf Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 3:40 PM

The Wall Street Journal runs a story entitled "TV Host Targets Afghan Women's Shelters." It describes an effort by a 27-year-old Afghan TV personality named Nasto Nadiri to promote shutting down shelters for women, which he argues "are not acceptable for our people who have fought 30 years to put the word 'Islam' in front of Afghanistan." He resents that "some NGOs come and want to make another way for our country." Many of the women are in shelters seeking protection from death threats from their own families, families who condemn their daughters for "immorality" for running away from arranged marriages.

Time magazine a week earlier runs a cover featuring the image of a woman brutalized in the name of Islam and arguing that should we leave Afghanistan, countless other women will suffer her fate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues we will not forget the women of Afghanistan -- that they are one of the reasons we are there. The government of Brazil makes a fumbled effort to offer sanctuary to a woman sentenced to stoning under Islamic law. The same fate and worse affects women across the Islamic world who violate religious precepts and are treated as second-class citizens according to the dictates of local clergy turned lawmakers.

For policymakers and for people who care about the moral and ethical underpinnings of policy, there is a dark and difficult conundrum presented here. If we embrace tolerance, celebrate diversity and promote religious freedom, what do we do when a religion or a subset of its practitioners or a culture promotes a view that is fundamentally inconsistent with the most basic, most universally acknowledged principles of human rights?

To answer this question honestly requires considerable courage. To live by the implications of that answer requires even more.

The fundamental human rights of women trump the teachings of any religion. To denigrate, abuse, or devalue in any way the majority population of the earth -- mothers, daughters and sisters -- is either an affront to God or alternatively, if it is argued that it is the will of God, it is an affront to decency.

For the United States, embroiled in a war in Afghanistan and entangled with allies and others throughout the world who promote or tolerate policies that are unfair or cruel to women, the challenges are great. As Time asks, "Do we leave if by leaving we sentence women to decades or centuries more of enslavement, compromise and debasement in the name of religion and cultural history?" Would we do so if the reasons for the abuse were that they were black or Jewish or Christian?

History suggests that the answer is, sadly, yes. And frankly, a prolonged stay in Afghanistan is neither in the U.S. interest nor, in fact, is it moral on its own because it produces an appalling waste of life and resources and much suffering in pursuit of an unachievable goal. (Regardless of how small the president argues that ever-shrinking goal has become.)

But we cannot leave Afghanistan nor can we continue to pursue our goals in Pakistan or develop our relations with the Saudis or consider the future of our relations with the Iranians...nor can we appropriately contemplate relations with any nation and at the same time turn a blind eye to the systematic abuse of women and its justification by friends, enemies and whatever it is you might call the Afghan or Pakistani governments.

Should we be providing aid of any sort to any nation that doesn't honor the most basic tenets of the universal declaration of human rights? Should we be allied with or, worse still, should we protect with the young men and women of America any society that seeks to treat women as property, sets double-standards for "moral" behavior, punishes violation of those standards with torture, stoning or legalized murder?

Does realpolitik give these societies a pass? Does "honoring Islam"?

The answer should be no and no. What is going on in these countries is a disgrace every bit as grand and incomprehensible and awful as the Holocaust -- only it is much bigger, much more ancient, and if possible, much more evil if only due to the extent of its reach and the breadth of our acceptance of what has happened.

We need a new international understanding on these issues, one that will produce a coalition of nations that will strictly enforce a ban on aid to countries that abuse women -- and one that will introduce sanctions on those countries until they comply with what must be the most basic entry-level rules for participating in global society. No one has been more tireless or vocal in pursuit of these goals than Clinton and one hopes that the experience of Afghanistan and her increased exposure to the region will produce something beyond the heart-felt rhetoric and halfway measures we have seen on these issues.

We can't be a moral society and turn a blind eye to this. Nor can we call ourselves honorable and ally ourselves to those who tolerate or empower the abusers. Our geopolitical objectives in the Middle East are not greater than the rights of women everywhere. Fighting terror is not greater than our obligation to those women. And no religion, nor any government that acts "in the name of religious values" that promotes the abuse of anyone, is worthy of our tolerance.

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COMMENTS (34)

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, ISLAM, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, WOMEN