Manhood and the 'War
on Terrorism'
What I'd like to do here is examine aspects of the
"War on Terrorism" through the lens of ideals of masculinity and
"manly behavior".Ý I don't
claim that this lens necessarily provides us with the best or deepest explanation of what's going on (for example, I
leave entirely untouched questions about geo-strategic goals, etc.)ÝÝ I also don't mean to imply that only the United States has a culture of
masculinity that can pose problems in international relations.Ý But I do claim that a distinctively American
discourse of masculinity plays an at times very important role both in shaping
U.S. policy and in maintaining support for the 'War on Terrorism' among many
Americans. I'd like to start with a quote from E. Anthony Rotundo, a scholar of
American manhood ideals:
[S]ymbols of right and wrong manhood have ... become
lodged in our political consciousness and in the decision-making culture of our
great institutions.Ý These symbols make
certain choices automatically less acceptable, and in doing so they impoverish
the process by which policy is made.Ý We
are biased in favor of options we consider the tough ones and against those we
see as tender; we value toughness as an end in itself.Ý We are disabled in choosing the wise risk from
the unwise, and tend to value risk as its own form of good.Ý In this manner we are hurt by the cultural
configuration of manhood.[1]
Many of what Rotundo here identifies as specifically
'masculine' attitudes and decision-making preferences go completely unnoticed
by most of us, men and women alike.Ý
They are such common ways of thinking that we take them for granted,
think of them (if at all) as "natural", or, in the realm of
international relations, as simply "realistic".Ý My purpose here is (1) to argue that such
attitudes and assumptions are neither "natural" nor, in many cases,
"realistic"; and (2) to show in as much detail as possible how
masculine ideals and assumptions have concretely shaped the response of the
Bush administration and the news media to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th.Ý My hope is that by being clearer about how a
culture of masculinity restricts and distorts current perceptions of the
situation, we can make room forÝ a wider
range of possible responses.
I. American manhood ideals: a brief introduction
The study from which I took the opening quote is
part of a larger development in historical gender studies, a widening of
interests beyond the traditional focus on women and their histories to include
also men and cultures of masculinity.Ý I
don't want to spend much time on this, because I want to focus as much as
possible on concrete aspects of the 'War on Terrorism'.Ý But it is at least necessary here to outline
some of the main points to be drawn from scholarship on American masculinity.Ý Anyone interested in getting into this more
deeply should start with Rotundo's American
Manhood, and with Michael Kimmel's Manhood
in America: A Cultural History.Ý
More difficult going, but also directly relevant to issues of manhood
and patriotism is Dana Nelson's National
Manhood.[2]Ý One basic point of agreement among all
scholars is that in America almost since independence, men have understood and
experienced our manhood as something that needs
to be proven, and proven repeatedly.Ý
Kimmel argues that this imperative emerged during the 19th
century, as the traditional pillars of a sense of manhood, land ownership and
independent artisanry, became available to fewer and fewer American men.Ý The onset of industrialization brought a
widespread perception of new economic opportunities, and gave birth to the
resilient and still-important ideal of the "self-made man".Ý At the same time, the journey of many men
from a familiar rural life, a life led primarily among family, friends
acquaintances (and perhaps known enemies), to a busy life in the newly bursting
urban centers, where most daily contacts were often with strangers, brought
about a new emphasis on external presentation, on impressing others in search
of employers, partners or investors.Ý
The audience here was (and remains) other
men, the coveted commodities in their possession, respect, trust,
confidence.
As the century progressed, however, and as the
American industrial capitalist system matured, it became clearer that the dream
of the self-made man could only be realized by a few. On top of the difficult
economic situation, women were entering traditionally male public life in ever
greater numbers, and insisting on a larger role in the organization of American
society generally. The pressure to prove one's manhood did not abate, but, as
economic proofs were so hard to come by, American men were forced to turn to
other strategies. In the decades surrounding 1900, many of the basic features
of the culture of masculinity that survive to the present day were put in
place.Ý Men turned in large numbers to
sports, to body-building and prize-fighting, they organized and joined
homosocial organizations (joining college fraternities, but also Moose, Elk,
Odd-Fellows lodges, becoming Shriners and Masons, etc., etc.) Since the late
nineteenth century especially, proving one's manhood has also meant proving
that one is not feminine.Ý The intensified stigmatization of gay men,
and actual violence against perceived 'weaklings', became and have remained
part and parcel of an evolving suite of behaviors by which men can signal and
establish their masculinity.
As in many other societies throughout history, fighting a war has a long pedigree in
the US as one very important way to certify masculinity. Teddy Roosevelt played
a crucial role in proposing the outward projection of violence through war as
one response to the contemporary crisis of manhood. In so doing, he tapped into
another extremely important mother-lode of cultural memory, the American myth of the frontier.Ý This myth has been tied up both with ideals
of masculinity and with our national identity since shortly after the
Revolution.Ý According to America's
frontier myth, our national identity was forged out of the hard realities of
conquering, and wresting a living from, the vast, primeval North American
wilderness.Ý Our forefathers ventured
out beyond where it was safe, exposing themselves to danger, fighting Indians
for the right to possess the land, domesticating the natural world (of which
the Indians were only the most dangerous representatives), making the continent
safe for civilization.
In doing all this, American men (until very
recently, women's only acknowledged roles in the story were to bear children,
feed men, and be protected by them)... in doing all this, American men so to
speak "burned off" all the excess frippery and feminine culture
associated with Europe.Ý No longer
"dandies", no longer subtle thinkers, no longer inhabitants of plush,
perfumed sitting room furniture, American men had founded a culture of honesty,
of hard work, of self-reliance, of physical toughness, decisiveness and moral
simplicity.Ý In the nineteenth century,
the special masculinity of our new 'national race' was also thought to be
revealed by high birth rates, especially in rural and frontier areas.Ý From this perspective, the supposedly
feminine characteristics of Europe were still a danger in cities, those nests
of luxury, idleness and decoration where cultural elites held forth in elevated
language about the complex problems of society.Ý But for real American men, there was little that couldn't be
solved by toughness and straightforwardness, no reason to think national or
international problems couldn't be addressed by the same sort of simple wisdom
and forceful action that got the horse through the gate.Ý It should be obvious that there is a lot of
overlap between the image of manhood forged on the frontier and the ideal of
the self-made man.Ý In a sense, the
latter can also be seen as a matter of adapting frontier manhood to the new
realities of industrial capitalism.
A readiness to get violent has been a central
feature of the frontier manhood ideal the whole way along.Ý So, too, has a presumed right to push onward
past legal, official boundaries into 'virgin' territory, to take what can be
taken and the law be damned.Ý Richard
Drinnon argues that this aggressive expansionism did not by any means stop when
our forefathers reached the limits of the North American continent, but also
helped propel American military and economic interventions across the Pacific
and around the globe. The evolution of this myth can be traced from Cooper's
'Leatherstocking' through Custer, Owen Wister's 'Virginian' and Teddy
Roosevelt,Ý to the Lone Ranger, John
Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone.Ý
Here again, a substantial literature exists, and I'll mention only a
couple of the best works: first, Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building,
and second, a truly fine trilogy of studies by the cultural historian Richard
Slotkin (in my opinion some of the best work available on any aspect of American cultural history): Regeneration Through Violence; The Fatal Environment; and Gunfighter Nation.[3]
Pausing for a moment to summarize, one might say
that the evolving American culture of masculinity has been one of perpetual
crisis, in the sense that men cannot very easily cease to worry (at least
subconsciously) about their manhood, and must remain ready at all times to
behave so as to certify and re-certify it in front of other men.Ý In this general context, the
already-powerful frontier myth encourages men to link their individual efforts
at establishing masculinity with national military actions, and thus both to
"masculinize" the meaning of "America" and to
"Americanize" the meaning of "masculinity".Ý No individualÝ man is forced or required
to tap into these patterns, but they are so prevalent in so many of our
cultural institutions (from child-rearing to education to television and
cinema) that they mark out what is certainly the easiest path for many men to
follow.Ý On the other hand, and this is
crucial, all of this quintessentially male behavior remains optional.Ý It is not bred in our bones or hard-wired into our genes, but
historical and contingent. We may certainly question its wisdom, both at an
individual level and with respect to things like foreign policy.Ý Finally, before going any further, I'd like
to make one thing perfectly clear.Ý My
argument is not that traditional
masculine behaviors such as resolve, toughness, physical courage, etc. are
essentially bad or always inappropriate, but rather that, in the realm of
individual behavior as in foreign policy, they
are not appropriate to all situations, and should ideally be only one among a
range of possible approaches to daily life or to international relations.
II. Afghanistan as 'Wild West'; Bush as avenging gunslinger
The kinds of assumptions about manhood sketched
here, and associated elements of the frontier myth, are not difficult to find
in media coverage of Sept. 11th and the Bush administration's 'War
on Terrorism'. The same Richard Slotkin just mentioned was one of a number of
scholars asked to offer their thoughts on Sept. 11th in a special
supplement to the Chronicle of Higher Education
that appeared two weeks later.Ý
According to Slotkin,
[w]hen a society suffers a profound trauma, an event
that upsets its fundamental ideas about what can and should happen and
challenges the authority of its basic values, its people look to their myths
for precedents, invoking past experience - embodied in their myths - as a way
of getting a handle on crisis.
So far, I see two myths being deployed in response
to the terrorist attacks of September 11.Ý
One is the myth of "savage war", based on the oldest U.S.
myth, the myth of the frontier.Ý The
myth represents American history as an Indian war, in which white Christian
civilization is opposed by a "savage" racial enemy: an enemy whose
hostility to civilization is part of its nature or fundamental character; an
enemy who is not just opposed to our interests but to "civilization
itself."Ý The myth also provides a
recipe for countering the threat, a model of heroic action that will bring
victory and resolve the crisis.Ý The
hero of this myth is the wielder of extraordinary violence: He can win only by
fighting fire with fire, evil with evil, and he must fight until the enemy is
exterminated or utterly subjugated.Ý In
war with such an enemy, nothing less than total victory is acceptable.[4]
Slotkin then goes on to discuss the second myth, the
"just war" myth through which Americans were able to understand World
War II, but predicts that circumstances in the present crisis will probably
result in our embracing the first myth, that of the "savage war". It
should help here to identify at least a couple of examples from reporting on
the war in order to see how the stage is being set for the decisions that will
be the subject of more detailed analysis to follow.
On Nov. 9th, an article appeared on the
front page of the New York Times that
could have come straight out of the notebook of an eastern correspondent
visiting the American Great Plains during the mid-nineteenth century Indian
Wars.Ý Entitled "To the stranger, a
wild land, strangely awesome", the piece strings together musings and
experiences dramatizing a rugged, "uncivilized" country, and the
relation between the landscape and its inhabitants.Ý The reporter, Dexter Filkins writes,
The natural world looms large in Afghanistan and its
landscape seems bound up in all its parts.Ý
The faces of its people, now captured in a thousand photographs, seem
merely the human reflection of the country's geography: all crags and fissures,
dessicated and rough.Ý To picture the
war being fought here, imagine fighting in the Grand Canyon or Escalante
National Monument, or perhaps even on the moon.[5]
Such perceptions of non-European peoples as
essentially linked to the features of their environments has a long and ignoble
history in the service of colonialism and imperialism on many different
continents.Ý Viewing the "dusky
natives" as connected to nature has made it a more palatable proposition
to conquer territory than if we viewed them, for example, as world citizens who
happen to live in another place.Ý
Euro-American conquerors have historically found it more comfortable to
understand themselves as subduing an "empty" wilderness than an
inhabited one.Ý If it becomes impossible
to ignore the fact that there are indeed inhabitants there, they can still can
be ideologically assimilated into nature, seen as its extensions, or presumed
to be fundamentally limited by the characteristics nature has forced upon
them.Ý Stressing or suggesting the
timelessness, or what Robert Berkhofer, Jr. terms the
"atemporality"Ý of their culture
and connection to the land serves this purpose, and makes it easier to pursue
one of our two time-honored American expansion policies,
"extermination" ("war" policy) or "civilization"
("peace" policy), with a clearer conscience.[6]Ý Traditionally, the blending of natives into
nature allowed Europeans in the Christian tradition to interpret the
subjugation of both in terms of God's charge to subdue the Earth.Ý Since the rise of evolutionism in the 19th
century, the timeless links between natives and nature has made it easier to
think of their subjugation as an inevitable result of the rise of the less
trammeled, more geographically flexible Caucasian race to its rightful position
of competitive dominance.
These days, of course, extermination is no longer an
option, and even "civilization" is a word that can't be used
indiscriminately.Ý In the Times article, the word
"technology" serves as a substitute.Ý
"Like a desert plant," Filkins claims, "technology clings
to the soil here with shallow roots, struggling to take hold, and then a wind
comes and blows it away."ÝÝ He
writes, "In Farkhar, there is no mail delivery, no streetlights.Ý No telephones, no telephone poles.Ý Farkhar darkens with the sunset; most of the
villagers, lacking anything else to do, go to sleep."Ý But if someone sets up a TV or a satellite
telephone, lines quickly form, life becomes interesting.Ý Much as in descriptions of American Indian
tribes during the 19th century, Afghans are here characterized
fundamentally in terms of lack: it is
difficult to imagine them doing anything but twiddling their thumbs in boredom,
perhaps fighting each other to pass the time (and to express their innate
savagery), but nevertheless remaining inseparable from their craggy landscapes.Ý The paradoxical double construction,
according to which the Afghans are, on the one hand, bound to nature, and on
the other, open to being led out of their timeless natural state by civilizing
technology, mirrors the tension between the two time-honored policy strands of
extermination and assimilation, a tension that remains unresolved today.Ý Filkins's description of the Afghans'
positive attitude toward technology is also notable for its very selective
focus on telephones and TVs rather than laser-guide smart bombs and land mines.
The clear message of the article is that America can
satisfy the natural, maybe even innately human, desire for technology, and
through technology, civilization, on the part of the Afghan people.Ý It is important to stress here that I am not
accusing Filkins or the Times editors
of intentionally promoting such a
complex of associations.Ý But they don't
need to... the associations are already there in American culture, and they
have the cumulative effect of making it easier for many of us to accept an invasion
of Afghanistan as 'natural' or perhaps even beneficial to the Afghans.Ý Although the racialist dimension of this
story is not my main concern, its importance as an influence on American public
opinion immediately becomes clear if we try to imagine America invading, for
example, Ireland, to stop the rampant terrorism there.Ý Even had Irish terrorists executed a
devastating attack in the US, the kind of response we're pursuing in
Afghanistan would never be seriously considered.
An essay in the October 15th number of
the Weekly Standard by Max Boot,
editorial features editor for the Wall
Street Journal, demonstrates that the links drawn here with colonial and
imperial subjugation "for the good of the natives" are not merely
some fictional contrivance. ÝEntitled
"The case for American empire: the most realistic response to terrorism is
for America to embrace its imperial role", the essay argues that we need
to do in Afghanistan what we have failed to do in Vietnam, in Somalia, in Iraq
and in response to the bombing of the USS Cole a year ago: stand by our local
minions, finish the job, unabashedly take over the country after we achieve
military victory, stick around and make sure a robust democratic government is
set in place, and not be afraid to lose some American lives along the way.Ý According to Boot, "Afghanistan and
other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in Jodhpurs and pith
helmets." "The September 11 attack," he asserts, "was a
result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be
more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation."Ý Boot suggests
that the phrase "for the good of the natives" should once again be taken
seriously.Ý The Bush administration has
not embraced anything quite so bold, but it is not surprising to see this theme
enter the public discussion and be taken seriously.
The American manhood to be put to the test in the
wilds of Afghanistan is crystallized and personified by the media in the figure
of President George W. Bush.Ý He it is
who will avenge the savage attack, and in the process prove his own (and our
collective American) manhood to the world at large.Ý Of course Bush will not venture near the front lines in
Afghanistan, but even before we started to bomb the country, this 'War on
Terrorism' was being presented as the crucible in which Bush's masculinity, and
with it, America's, is to be forged.
It is worth noting that, quite apart from the terror
attacks of Sept. 11th, Bush had a very specific manhood
problem.Ý Clinton's had had to do with
his avoidance of military service and objections to the Vietnam War.ÝÝ Before Sept. 11th, the
suspicions about Bush's masculine credentials had at least in part to do with
the perception among significant numbers of Americans that he had not gained
the Presidency by way of a "fair fight".Ý But more important still was the lingering unease about his apparent
dependence on advisors and aides.Ý The
perception of dependency is of course a serious threat to the American image of
proper masculinity, which is supposed to involve self-reliance and independence.Ý It was painfully obvious to Bush supporters as well as detractors
that the President had difficulty speaking or presenting himself to the public
without close adherence to prepared scripts. There were widespread doubts about
the idea that he was a self-made man.
On September 16th, the New York Times ran a front page article
by David Sanger and Don van Natta, Jr. entitled "Four days that
transformed a President, a presidency and a nation, for all time".[7]Ý This article could not have been more
carefully designed to rectify Bush's shaky manhood image, but again, the
intentions of the authors are not the important issue.Ý The title of the article already encourages
us to think of Bush's personal transformation as a transformation of America
more generally.Ý Near the beginning a
before-and-after dualism is set up:
On Monday night, he was laughing over dinner with
his brother Jeb at a seaside Florida resort, posing for pictures with the
restaurant staff and dodging questions from reporters about looming battles
over the vanishing budget surplus.Ý By
this morning, with downtown Washington locked down by the military, he was
conducting a war council at Camp David and demanding that countries around the
world, starting with the Arab world, declare whether they were allies in the
war on terrorism.
As he rode Marine One from Andrews Air Force Base to
the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush watched the smoke billowing from
the jagged gash in the Pentagon and seemed to recognize how profoundly his
young presidency had been transformed.
The young, not yet manly Bush is recognizable in the
unsteadiness of his first couple of public appearances after the disaster, and
in his willingness to let Vice President Cheney and his staff determine where
he would fly to remain safe.Ý But even
while still allowing himself to be ferried about, there are signs of an
emerging hardness, as he reportedly tells Cheney, "That's what we're paid
for, boys. We are going to take care of this.Ý
When we find out who did this, they are not going to like me as
President.Ý Somebody is going to
pay."Ý After a meeting in a bunker
in Nebraska, in which (according to Condoleeza Rice, presumably now an honorary
"boy"), Bush resolves not to allow himself to be kept away from
Washington any longer, he insists that his next address to the nation be made
from the Oval Office.Ý The day after
returning to the White House, Bush then takes further steps toward assuming the
mantle of full manhood, personally making the decision in council to use the
term "war", and then giving a speech at the damaged Pentagon, where
"[i]t was the first time he spoke without notes, and he seemed far more
comfortable."
On the Friday after the attack, Bush was the
featured speaker at a national Day of Remembrance at the Washington
Cathedral.Ý Sanger and Van Natta paint
the scene for us:
Alongside him were his father and mother, and three
former Presidents: Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford.Ý The Pressure was on.Ý This was the kind of event at which Mr.
Clinton had excelled, and the comparisons would be clear to a nation looking
for the right tone from a new President.Ý
Inside the hall, Mr. Bush seemed dwarfed by the massive limestone
columns, but on television he took on a larger presence, and seemed to find his
footing.
By the Saturday morning Camp David war council, the
transformation was complete, with Bush acting and speaking like the real man
America needed him to be.Ý According to
the article,
"[h]e seemed far steadier than he had earlier
in the week.... On Tuesday morning, in his first public statement about the
attacks, the President had called the suicide hijackers "folks".Ý Today, he called them
"barbarians".Ý "This is a
great nation; we're kind and peaceful," Mr. Bush said.Ý "But they have stirred up the might of
the American people, and we're going to get them."
III. Chorus of
the hand-wringing panty-waists
Most of the gender-related stigmatization of the
"other" has not come from the administration itself, but from the
mainstream media, whose conservative wing is clearly in the ascendancy since
Sept. 11th.Ý The accusations
of unmanly weakness have been directed chiefly at domestic critics of
administration policy, most particularly at college students and
professors.Ý John Leo, one of the many
national columnists who busy themselves regularly with the supposedly oppressive
culture of "political correctness" on campuses, deplores what he
calls "campus hand-wringing" and laments the "timid and
content-free statements" of many college presidents after the terror
attacks.[8]Ý Of course, many on campuses and elsewhere
who are against the war are just as staunch and steadfast in their convictions
as are the conservatives at the other end of the political spectrum, giving the
lie to the notion that they are engaged in "handwringing". Lisa De
Pasquale, Program Director of the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, joins Leo
in attributing the anti-war attitudes of many students to their
professors.Ý "The anti-war
protestors [sic] of the 1960s and
1970s are now the tenured professors at America's colleges and
universities.Ý They have traded their
placards and sit-ins for chalkboards and classrooms."[9]
For these two, as for many other columnists, the
anti-war, and more generally leftist beliefs of many students and professors
are not for a minute assumed to come out of a serious engagement with
historical facts or to emerge from deep moral reflection, but rather to be
"knee-jerk", i.e. irrational
reactions.Ý Since the beginning of the
Reagan era, repeated reinforcement of such a view has been part of a most
impressive smoke-and-mirrors rhetorical maneuver executed with much success.Ý It leaves many Americans actually wondering
why it is that institutions of higher learning of all places are hotbeds for critics of American foreign policy...
the possibility that there could be some connection between the real historical
and political knowledge which it is the business of educators to impart, on the
one hand, and leftist critiques of American policy, on the other, would
actually surprise many of our fellow citizens.Ý
As if this masterpiece of collective brainwashing were not enough, a
number of columnists now explicitly reject the usefulness of thought or
understanding more generally as guides to the present situation.Ý Writing in the Washington Post on October 28th, the sociologist Paul Hollander,
after lambasting the left for its "largely irrational, often visceral
aversion to the United States and its government," urges us not to look for root causes of the
attacks.[10]Ý While allowing that it might be worthwhile
investigating the personal histories and psychological problems of the individual
attackers, he angrily equates any wider search for causes in the history of
American foreign policy with expressions of sympathy for the terrorists.Ý This conflation of understanding with excusing
has emerged as a hallmark of the right in the present crisis.Ý Thomas Sowell, too, sees no daylight between
attempting to understand the larger policy history of American involvement in
the Middle East and repeating the admittedly awful mistake of Neville Chamberlain
with regard to Hitler.[11]Ý He can hardly contain his contempt for
"a former ambassador from the weak-kneed Carter administration" and
sneeringly reports this ambassador's claim
that we should look at the "root causes"
behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.Ý We should understand the
"alienation" and "sense of grievance" against us by various
people in the Middle East.
Along the same lines, Charles Krauthammer insists,
"[t]his is no time for obfuscation. Or for agonized relativism.... This is
a time for clarity.Ý At a time like
this, those who search for shades of evil, for root causes, for extenuations
are, to borrow from Lance Morrow, "too philosophical for decent
company"."[12]
Interestingly, it is a conservative woman columnist,
Ann Coulter, who attempts to stigmatize not only anti-war Americans, but even
liberal supporters of the war, as well as "soccer moms", in the most
sharply gendered terms.Ý Her November
1st article, entitled "The eunuchs are whining",[13]
is worth excerpting at length:
With the media suffering from fainting spells, the
country is being run by people who can splice cables and land jets on ships in
the dark of night.Ý These are men, a
subspecies of Americans heretofore invisible to the elites.Ý But now the elites are complaining that the
men aren't working fast enough.
Not exactly smashing stereotypes of liberals as
mincing pantywaists, the left's entire contribution to the war effort thus far
has been to whine.
Men are out in the driving rain trying to change a
tire, while the womenfolk sit in a warm roadside cafe demanding to know what's
taking so long.Ý Just pipe down!Ý The men are working as fast as they can.
In fact, no one is in the "grip of fear"
over anthrax except the media and their most gullible targets, liberal
women.Ý Liberal soccer moms are
precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for
linear thinking.
As Irish playwright Brendan Behan said,
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've
seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves"
Women - and I don't mean to limit that to the
biological sense - always become hysterical at the first sign of trouble.Ý They have no capacity to solve problems, so
instead they fret.Ý But despite the
fearful fifth columnists whiling away the war naysaying America's response, we
will win this war.
You just stay warm, girls... the men are fixing the
car.
It takes nothing away from Coulter's argument to
quote a series of excerpts: the 'argument', such as it is, is essentially
contained in the above passages.Ý One
could devote a whole essay just to Coulter's diatribe.Ý It is, among other things, a classic
illustration of the wider latitude available to dissenting members of a
disadvantaged group in attacking, stigmatizing or stereotyping that group.Ý Here it suffices to highlight once again the
claim that opponents of the war are somehow indecisive or "fretful",
and the related suggestion that the only way to be decisive or practical is in
fact to go to war.Ý Links between
manhood and self-reliance are also clearly drawn.
In the late 19th century, opinion about the proper
course to pursue in U.S. Indian policy was divided into the two broad camps
mentioned earlier: the "war" camp and the "peace"
camp.Ý The former were in most cases
politicians and prominent citizens and military men from the states and
territories of the West; the latter, philanthropists, gentlemen scholars, as
well as a few women, largely from the northeast.Ý These 'Eastern reformers', as they were usually called, came in
for exactly the same sort of gendered stigmatization as do Coulter's ladies
waiting in the warm, dry cafe while the men fixed the tire.Ý A pair of quotes, one from Francis A.
Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the early 1870s, the other from
an editorial in the Cheyenne Daily Leader,
give a taste of this long pedigree:
[I]n
our prosperous and well-ordered communities at the East, a gentleman of leisure
and of native benevolence, whose ears have never rung with the war-whoop, whose
eyes have never witnessed the horrid atrocities of Indian warfare, and who is
only disturbed in his pleasing reveries by the occasional tramp of the
policeman about his house, is apt to dwell exclusively upon the [peaceful] side
of the Indian question.[14]
Let
sniveling Quakers give place to bluff soldiers.[15]
The
point is not that the two sets of policy alternatives, those facing us today
and those which exercised writers 130 years ago, are exactly analogous, but
rather that the gendered dismissal of the supposedly "weaker" option
has a long history in association with American "savage wars".Ý It is also worth noting that in both cases,
the masculinist war hawks feminize their opponents within white society, but
not the "enemy" himself (at least not in any direct way).Ý For it is precisely the savage masculinity
of the enemy that makes him a proper foil for the demonstration of manhood by
tough white Americans.Ý Taken
collectively as a 'race' or a culture, the savage enemy might implicitly be
feminized in the sense that he is doomed to defeat or extinction, but he must
nevertheless be capable of posing a real test for our manhood before succumbing
to the inevitable.
IV. Gender and
public opinion regarding the U.S. 'War on Terrorism'
It is impossible to establish in any precise way
what role such opinion-making has played in cementing the strong pro-war
attitudes of the majority of Americans.Ý
That there is overwhelming support for the 'War on Terrorism' among
Americans, and that pro-war attitudes dominate among women as well as men,
nobody would deny.Ý But a closer look at
public opinion numbers reveals a more interesting story.Ý A Gallup Poll analysis of October 5th bears
the title "Men, women equally likely to support military retaliation for
terrorist attacks ."[16]Ý Men (at 90%) and women (at 88%) are near
parity in support of war, a sharp contrast to a 1965 poll asking whether the US
should pull out of Vietnam (73% of men but only 59% of women supporting a
continued US presence), and to a January 1991 poll in which 60% of men but only
45% of women favored going to war with Iraq.Ý
Gallup analyst Jeffrey Jones notes that the 89% overall support level
can be considered an upper estimate because it is gleaned from a question in
which no reasons to oppose military action are given.Ý The differences between men and women begin to appear when other
information is provided, and to widen as the scenarios grow more serious.Ý If US military action would continue for
several months, the men / women support numbers drop to 89% and 84% (a 5% gap),
respectively; if US ground troops would be used in an invasion, the numbers
sink and the gap widens to 9% (85% vs. 76% in support); contemplating a
reinstitution of the military draft, male support drops to 84%, female to 72%
(a 12% gap); the prospect of US military involvement over a span of years
pushes the numbers down to 74% and 58% support for war, that is, a 16%
gap.Ý Faced with a scenario in which
1,000 American casualties could be expected, male support registers 76% while
female support drops to 55%, a 21% gap.Ý
This gendered pattern jibes with the clear difference in perceptions of
the overall goal of intervention.Ý
Twenty-four percent of the men surveyed thought the US should punish the
groups involved in the Sept. 11th attacks and then pull out; 64% favored
mounting a long-term war against terrorism.Ý
On the same question, women were evenly split between the two options,
42% to 42%.
These numbers indicate a higher sense among women of
potential human costs of war.Ý Perhaps
it is precisely the "liberal soccer moms" pilloried by Ann Coulter
who leave a similar statistical footprint in an October 24th report in a poll
conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press:[17]
[A]mericans have been slow to return to a sense of
normalcy and, as seen in earlier Pew Research Center surveys after the Sept. 11
attacks, women are feeling the emotional impact of the attacks more acutely
than are men.Ý In the current survey,
eight in ten women worry that there will soon be another terrorist attack in
the United States, while only 63% of men have that worry.
Women are also much less likely than men to say
their lives have returned to normal (34% to 48%).Ý In fact, women are among the most likely of all Americans to say
life will never return to normal following the attacks, with fully one in five
expressing this view.Ý And women with
children at home are especially shaken.Ý
Just 28% of mothers say their life [sic]
has returned to normal, and 41% are very worried about an impending attack.
The earlier Pew poll[18]
had documented a gender gap on the issue of which priorities the government
should follow, with men clearly favoring destruction of terrorist networks over
the bolstering of homeland defenses (51% to 25%), while women, overall less
optimistic about military success, favored defense over attack by a slim margin
(39% to 37%).
These numbers can, of course, be read in many
ways.Ý A traditional view on gender
would make it easy to fall into the trap of taking men's positions as standards
or norms, and viewing women's responses as "failing to match" men's
to a greater or lesser degree.Ý But it
is more enlightening not to take
men's response patterns as the norm, and instead to view these patterns as in
need of explanation.Ý The polls may say
more interesting and disturbing things about men than about women.Ý One thing I would suggest they document
might be termed a gender gap in learning
ability.Ý Recall, for example, that
in the Gallup poll cited first, women were much more likely than men to respond
differently to the idea of military action when confronted with new information
on specific potential negative results.Ý
Quite apart from the specifics of the information, and even from the
direction of change in women's attitudes, the mere fact of a stronger response
to information is a sign of reason at work.Ý
But there is nothing biological about men that keeps them wedded, even
in the face of all sorts of negative consequences, to such a stable pro-war attitude.Ý I would instead propose that men are trapped
in their thinking by the culture of masculinity described earlier.Ý What we are seeing here, then, is a concrete
illustration of the claim made by E. Anthony Rotundo which I cited at the very
beginning: that masculine ideals
dangerously narrow the range of individual male behaviors or policy options
available to government leaders.
V.Ý In search of an audience for American
masculinity
One of the most fundamental 'justifications' for the
'War on Terrorism', recycled repeatedly both by the administration and by the
conservative think-tanks and columnists, comes straight out of the core of the
American culture of masculinity.Ý It is
the notion that America (in the person of Bush and through the agency of the
Armed Forces) must prove that it is strong.ÝÝ This idea is so normal, so natural, so
ubiquitous, that we can hardly gain any critical distance from it.Ý But we can begin to see it in a different
light if we ask the simple question, who
was in danger of mistakenly thinking that America is weak or incapable of
acting forcefully?Ý Who in the world
could be naive enough to imagine that such a symbolically and humanly
devastating attack on talismans of US power would not meet with some kind of
aggressive response?Ý Who out there in
the wider world might have been so ignorant of recent history as to hope or
fear (as the case may be) that there would be no violent consequences?Ý One need only recall the bombing of Tripoli,
missiles launched into Afghanistan and Sudan, and larger interventions in
Panama, Grenada, the Gulf War, etc. etc. to begin to suspect that proving we are strong may be an exercise
that lacks an avid audience, that it may instead be a matter of strutting in front of the mirror.Ý But for the sake of argument, it is worth
identifying possible audiences other than ourselves, and examining a bit more
closely the notion that these other audiences are either being reassured or
deterred by our 'War on Terrorism'.
In his widely praised September 20th address to
Congress, Bush claimed that "[t]he civilized world is rallying to
America's side.Ý They understand that if
this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be
next."[19] In an
address to the nation on October 7th, he claimed that in prosecuting the war,
the U.S. was "supported by the collective will of the world."[20]
Three different audiences are implied here, the "civilized world" at
large (already, of course, a problematic term), terrorists and their
supporters.Ý Regarding the first of
these, world opinion on the matter does not support Bush's presumption.Ý A Gallup International poll in October,[21]
surveyingÝ the populations in over
thirty countries in Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East
and Asia, yielded the following results: (1) the overwhelming majority of
respondents in all countries, except the U.S, India and Israel, believe that
instead of attacking the countries out of which the terrorists worked, the U.S.
should extradite them to stand trial.Ý
That is, while most people around the world would like to see the
perpetrators punished, few accept the Bush administration's claim that going to
war is the best way to do this.Ý (2)
According to the poll, only NATO member states, India and Israel showed a
majority of respondents believing their own countries should take part in
U.S.-led military actions against terrorism.Ý
Taken together, these two sets of results reveal not
only the falseness of Bush's claim, but also the fact that in NATO states, it
must be an awareness of treaty obligations, fatalism, or something else other
than personal moral or political conviction regarding the rightness of the war,
which leads people to accept the participation of their own countries in
military reprisals.Ý The stance of the
German government is illustrative of the tension.Ý Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has insisted on demonstrating
complete solidarity with the U.S., and has lobbied vigorously in the German Bundestag to gain support for his
historic decision to send German troops on their firstÝ offensive foreign military mission since the
Nazi era.Ý By contrast, the German
President, Johannes Rau, according to the constitution the official
international spokesperson for Germany, sounds a very different tone.Ý In an address to those gathered for a
demonstration on Friday, September 14th at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, Rau
communicated in no uncertain terms the shock, outrage, sympathy and solidarity
felt by the German people with regard to the U.S.[22]Ý But his comments on possible responses
echoed the documented opinion of the German population, not the assertions of
Bush:
We will not react to the challenge with
powerlessness or with weakness, rather with strength and determination.Ý And with circumspection.Ý Hatred must not lead us into hatred.Ý Hatred blinds.Ý Nothing is so difficult to build and nothing so easy to destroy
as peace....
Whoever wants truly to overcome terrorism must
ensure through political action that the ground is cut out from below the feet
of the prophets of violence.
Poverty and exploitation, misery and lack of rights
drive people to despair.Ý The disregard
of religious feelings and cultural traditions robs people of hope and dignity.
This leads some to violence and terror.Ý This sows hatred even in the hearts of
children.
All people have the right to respect and dignity.
Those who experience respect in their lives and love
their lives will not want to throw [them] away.Ý Those who live in dignity and confidence will hardly become
suicide attacker[s].
Determined action is the order of the day.... [W]e
say the best protection against terror, violence and war is a just
international order.Ý Peace will be the
fruit of justice....
John F. Kennedy remarked in his day, "Our goal
is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right."
So much for the notion that the "civilized
world" wishes to see America conduct a military 'War on Terrorism'.
We do not have access to polls revealing opinions
among terrorists, the second intended audience for Bush's remarks.Ý But it is clear from all public utterances
that the administration intends its 'War on Terrorism' to intimidate any
potential future doers of terrorist deeds whom it does not capture or kill into
deciding against terrorism. Bush's Sept. 20th address can serve as a starting
point.[23]Ý Bush asserts midway through his speech that
"[t]hese terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a
way of life.Ý With every atrocity, they
hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our
friends."Ý Such motivations would
seem to call for proof of our lack of fear, that is, for forceful assertion of
American power.Ý But, as George Will
observed in a column the day after the terror attacks, "[t]errorism is the
tactic of the weak.Ý To keep all this in
perspective, Americans should focus on the fact that such acts as Tuesday's do
not threaten America's social well-being or even its physical strength."[24]Ý Will, like most other commentators, refuses
to see how profound these insights actually are despite their obviousness, and
devotes much of his column to the idea that despite these obvious truths,
America needs once again to prove its
strength.Ý But if terrorism is a tactic
of the weak, terrorists are not trying to prove their strength.Ý It doesn't take a genius or a CIA specialist
to recognize that bin Laden and his associates, or whoever actually pulled off
the attacks, are perfectly well aware of
America's military strength and willingness to use it!Ý Who wouldn't be?!Ý Furthermore, not a single terrorist anywhere
in the world would have expected anything other than a massive military
response by the U.S. after such an attack.
This huge blind spot is closely linked to the
American culture of masculinity, which encourages us to conceive of conflicts
in terms of tests of strength or prowess between two combatants playing by the
same rules, as in the stereotypical western gunfight. If we flip back our
duster-coat to reveal our big, shiny revolver, and stare down the villain with
our steely gaze, he won't make the fatal move for his own weapon.Ý The basic problem with this fantasy is that
the Sept. 11th attacks, like most terrorist attacks, short circuited
the whole logic of the showdown.Ý Much
has been made in the press of the emotional unwillingness of many Americans
truly to accept that things cannot be made right again, that we can't undo what
has been done.Ý The immediate decision
to rebuild the World Trade Center is explained in this light.Ý But I submit that this unwillingness to
accept, and the enraged frustration that often comes with it, can only be fully
explained with reference to specifically masculine myths.Ý The basic structure of the showdown, of
attempts to prove manhood in combat, is one of confrontation, followed by escalation,
followed by a climax either of actual violence or the facing down of the weaker
man by the stronger.Ý It is important in
this mythical scenario that violence not happen right away, because men prove
their manhood not simply in being
violent but also, perhaps more importantly, by demonstrating unflinching
resolve and courage despite the danger of
a violent exchange.Ý In other words,
the showdown has to last a little while so the men have a chance to prove that
they are brave, and for that to be possible, both gunslingers have to be aware of the danger they are in.
Measured against this mythical showdown scenario,
the terrorist would indeed seem to be "a faceless coward", as Bush
put it.[25]Ý But 'cowardice' is not really the right
word: it requires that someone be 'cowed'.Ý
The attackers of Sept. 11th never gave the U.S. military a
chance to 'cow' them.Ý They bypassed the
whole escalation scenario, never appeared for a preliminary confrontation or
gave the warning that would have allowed us to show our fearless resolve.Ý They simply produced horrible violence right
away, horrible violence that will not be erased or made right even if we kill
them all in a bloody war that shows the world once again just how mighty we
are.Ý This, I believe, is one important
factor behind the rage felt especially by many American men.
The third foreign audience implied in Bush's address
is made up of the actual or potential supporters of terrorists (by which the
administration means primarily regimes in the Islamic world). Here, the think
tanks and columnists can be enlisted to flesh out the argument. Kim Holmes,
Vice President of the Heritage Foundation and Director of the Davis Institute
for International Studies, claims
We should be confident that decisive and successful
action by the United States against Bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein
would make a very strong point about the seriousness of U.S. resolve and
determination.... The goal of U.S. policy should be to show countries like
Iran, Syrai, Sudan and Libya that support for terrorism is not only unproductive
and unprofitable, but even potentially dangerous.[26]
Thomas Friedman, globalization guru and columnist
for the New York Times, concurs:
[t]he most important way we win the public relations
war is by first winning the real war - by uprooting the Taliban regime and the
bin Laden network, and sending the message that this is the fate of anyone who
kills 5,000 innocent Americans.Ý Quite
simply, if we win the war and are seen to be winning, we will have friends and
allies in the Arab-Muslim world.Ý If we
are seen as losing the war or wavering, our allies will disappear in a flash.[27]
According to this line of reasoning, actual or
potential supporters of terrorism make decisions about the levels of support
they offer to terrorists based on the demonstrated degree of resolve by the
U.S.Ý The thing is, terrorist-harboring
regimes, like terrorists themselves but perhaps for different reasons, are not
operating according to this logic, a fact which even conservative commentators
admit.Ý In remarks at a NATO conference
in Berlin on the 19th of September, Jim Thomson, President and CEO of the RAND
corporation, noted that "[c]ountries that assist terrorists already know
that the U.S. and its allies could attack them".[28]Ý He must have in mind here the rich history of
U.S. military projections of power around the globe during the last 20 years,
but his admission undermines the larger argument he tries to make, that the
U.S. has not yet adequately demonstrated resolve in protecting its interest
internationally.Ý On this latter point,
Max Boot's pro-imperialism essay takes a particularly extreme line:[29]
After the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998, Clinton sent cruise missiles - not soldiers - to strike a
symbolic blow against bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan and a
pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.Ý Those
attacks were indeed symbolic, though not in the way Clinton intended.Ý They symbolized not U.S. determination but
rather passivity in the face of terrorism.... [Such] displays of weakness
emboldened our enemies to commit greater and more outrageous acts of
aggression...
Stepping back for a moment, it is difficult to
imagine many people in other parts of the world agreeing that our firing
missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan signaled our weakness or lack of resolve! ÝThe norm of international response to terrorist attacks implied in
Boot's claim would have to be something like invasion for bombardment to
appear weak or irresolute.Ý The United
States has been the only nation in the world, at least since the early 1980s,
that has so often and so casually violated the territorial sovereignty of other
nations.Ý But even we have not treated
invasion as a habitual first response
to provocations.Ý Even for us, such a
norm is unrealistic; for all other nations it would be almost unimaginable. If
the international community in general were to behave as if every terrorist
attack called for 'something more than "mere" bombardment' of the
country of origin, we would enter a state of endemic, multilateral world war
that would make current levels of international violence look trivial.Ý
The tack taken by Middle Eastern governments after
the attack offers little evidence to support the administration's insistence on
the need for military action.Ý One
source on this point is the record of the five-day debate on terrorism
conducted by the U.N. General Assembly in early October.Ý On the second day of the debate, a number of
Middle Eastern governments made statements. The general pattern was one of
expressions of outrage and sympathy with Americans in the aftermath of the
attacks, but resignation regarding the inevitability of a retaliatory war,
coupled with expressions of hope that the U.S. would not simply give itself carte blanche to attack any Middle
Eastern nation under cover of overly vague definitions of terrorism.[30]
To sum up this part of my argument, neither
terrorists nor regimes sympathetic to them are going to learn anything new from
this war.Ý If, as documented earlier,
the so-called "civilized world" is also not being reassured by it, we
can conclude that our exercise of
aggression is having its intended effect on none of its audiences.Ý Instead, we are flexing our muscles on the
international stage because our deeply entrenched culture of masculinity has
robbed us of a conception about what else to do.Ý We are simply strutting in front of the mirror.
VI. Masculinity and the impoverishment of decision-making
If we lack a real audience for our masculine
exercises on the international stage, many of the individual features of
America's 'War on Terrorism', many of the concrete decisions about how to
conduct it, can be seen in a different and more critical light.Ý In what follows, a number of important
components of the administration's policy will be critically examined in turn.
A. The
intention not to change any of our foreign policies. The administration's initial insistence that
America not change its foreign policies, the insistence, in Bush's words, that
"this country will define our times, not be defined by them",[31]
was ill-conceived.Ý RAND President and
CEO Jim Thomson is worth quoting at length here, because he simultaneously
spells out the premises behind the refusal to adjust policy and implicitly admits that these
premises are mistaken.Ý The result is a
fundamentally incoherent argument, and although I am excerpting selectively,
the incoherence is not my doing, but afflicts the argument as a whole:
The new terrorists.... have no stated or apparent
political aim other than to cause as much harm as they can inflict on the U.S.
and the West....
Sitting in Europe the past week, I've heard a lot
(mainly on BBC phone-in shows or TV) about how we have to be sympathetic to the
causes of terrorism and to understand that many people have real grievances with
U.S. foreign policy.... But, if my analysis of the enemy is correct, it is not
possible to remedy the causes, because the terrorists' motives are so
fundamental -- mainly cultural, not political.Ý
It may be that there are things we can do to slow the supply of foot
soldiers, however, and this should be the focus of our policy....
But there is nothing the U.S. could do regarding
Israel that would make a difference to the new terrorists, short of abandoning
Israel completely.... In any case, the U.S. is certainly not going to abandon
Israel....
Thus the U.S. (and more importantly its allies)
should not be seduced by the notion that we need to alter our policies
regarding the Middle East and Persian Gulf to bring an end to this
terrorism.Ý There may be reasons to
change, but terrorism isn't one of them.Ý
This is not to say that the U.S. should be callous about the suffering
of the Palestinians or should give Israel a blank check.Ý We need a return to the peace process, which
seems possible now.
The problem is so pervasive and so complex as to
defy solution by the U.S. alone.... Thus diplomacy will be the most important
tool, especially in and with the support and cooperation of Muslim
countries.Ý Our own diplomatic abilities
have generally withered under the yoke of financial stringencies imposed by
Congress....
Poverty, hunger, and poor health, especially when
seen as a consequence of U.S. policy, help sustain the supply of foot
soldiers.Ý The U.S. needs to reverse its
decades-long downward slide in international development assistance.
I don't see how the struggle against terrorism can
be won with military force alone.Ý I
also do not see how it can be won without it.... Military capability backs up
our diplomatic efforts.Ý Countries that
assist terrorists already know that the U.S. and its allies could attack
them.Ý The very existence of our forces
and occasional brandishing of them may be enough to coerce cooperation.Ý If not, we will have to strike....
The political backlash from military attacks will make
our task of draining the sea that terrorists swim in all the harder.[32]
What stands out in these passages is a contrast
between the psychology of fear and intimidation behind the insistence on attack
and the model of rational persuasion behind the recommendations for policy
changes.Ý For policy changes, reasonable ones at that, are exactly what Thomson
is recommending when he urges increased foreign aid, attention to the suffering
of the Palestinians, and renewed funding for an adequate diplomatic corps.Ý Thomson even explicitly acknowledges that
pursuing the military option (and thereby generating fear and resentment) will
interfere with the more constructive attempt to "drain the sea that
terrorists swim in".Ý The assertion
that "military capability backs up our diplomatic efforts" is
directly contradicted by the very next sentence (which I have already quoted in
two different places): "Countries that assist terrorists already know that
the U.S. and its allies could attack them."Ý Reconciling the two lines of this couplet requires re-conceiving
the concept of diplomacy as no longer an exercise in avoiding war but rather a starting point on a scale of potential
escalation toward violence: by 'diplomacy' Thomson might then really mean the
cordial communication of threats and ultimatums.Ý This would match quite well with the way the U.S. government is
actually employing the vestiges of its diplomatic corps, and, not
coincidentally, with the template for policy provided by American manhood
ideals.Ý The limitations of such a
policy are easy to discern.Ý It is
difficult, for example, to imagine how expressions of an intent to address real
problems of poverty and oppression can be taken seriously when the big, bad
American military is pointedly strutting around in the background shooting off
guns and playing war games, or whatever Thomson means by "occasional
brandishing".Ý Observers in the
Middle East can be excused if they expect nothing more from such a policy than
Latin American nations got out of Kennedy's vaunted "Alliance for
Progress" in the 1960s: token development assistance at best, a hasty
abandonment of initial support for any real social reform, and dramatic
increases in military assistance to friendly oppressive regimes.[33]Ý Whenever the U.S. attempts to follow a
'carrot and stick' foreign policy, the stick wins out over the carrot.Ý I suggest that this pattern can be traced
back to our ideals of masculine behavior.
Fortunately, in this case, Colin Powell and others
in the administration clearly recognize that policy changes, particularly
toward Israel, are absolutely necessary.Ý
The difficulty of breaking out of the mold of manly behavior is evident
in the fact that (reproducing the contradiction within Thomson's essay) they
must change policy without admitting that that is what they are doing.Ý The fact of policy changes is far more
important here than the image, and we can be genuinely relieved that Powell and
company are beginning to put more pressure on Israel regarding its settlement
policies in the West Bank and Gaza.[34]Ý However, it would be an even greater service
to peace if the administration would acknowledge and begin to distance itself
from the showdown mentality that hems us in and contributes needlessly to the
danger of international violence.Ý We
need desperately to be able to step out of the logic of escalation toward
violence, and to take alternative policy options seriously instead of merely
using them as expedient window dressing to manage short-term discontent and
then letting them die after the crisis has passed.
B. 'You're
either with us or against us'
Military force is a blunt instrument in the sense
that there are only three different modalities of use: a government either uses
it, threatens to use it, or doesn't do either.Ý
An over-reliance on military force encourages the simplistic division of
the world into two opposing camps: anything in between "friend" and
"enemy" renders military force irrelevant as a tool of foreign
policy.Ý Given our deep investment in a
military response, such irrelevance would be unacceptable.Ý In Bush's Sept. 20th speech, and
then in his October 7th address to the nation and again on Nov. 6th,
, he made this kind of division a cornerstone of the 'War on Terrorism':
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to
make.Ý Either you are with us, or you
are with the terrorists.Ý From this day
forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be
regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.[35]
Every nation has a choice to make.Ý In this conflict, there is no neutral
ground.[36]
I will put every nation on notice that these duties
[in the war on terror] involve more than just sympathy or words.[37]
The imposition of "hostile" vs.
"friendly" categories has a long and distinguished history in
nineteenth century American Indian policy, having its heyday as a pillar of
policy in the late 1870s, after the killing of Custer and his command at Little
Bighorn. In fact, though, the hostile/friendly dichotomy was already inscribed
geographically on the North American landscape by the Indian reservation
system.Ý Tribes or bands identified
themselves as "friendly" by confining themselves to their appointed
reservations; those who left the reservation were understood to have redefined
themselves as "hostile" and thus to be subject to military attack.[38]ÝÝ It is no accident that this policy was
forged and constantly advocated by U.S. Army officers.
The historical parallel to "harboring
terrorists" was the tendency of Indians at war with the U.S. government
periodically to sneak back to the reservations and assume the peaceful demeanor
of "friendlies" in order to collect treaty-mandated rations.Ý This practice was repeatedly decried
throughout the 1870s, for example by the same George A. Custer who would soon
meet his end at the hands of the Lakota.Ý
Custer complained that "[t]he government feeds during the winter
the Indians who make war upon the frontier during the summer."[39]
But the U.S. government never went so far as to attack the population of a
largely peaceful reservation in order to capture, kill or otherwise stop the
hostiles (Wounded Knee in 1890 was perhaps the only exception to this
generalization).Ý Officials understood
that the backlash would have been severe, and they lacked the overwhelming military
superiority the U.S. now enjoys with respect to Afghanistan.Ý Thus they decided be content with the
admittedly imperfect geographical distinction between those on the reservation
and those off it.Ý Today, as Thomson
notes in the passages quoted earlier, the price for killing and injuring
"friendlies" while attacking "hostiles", now known as collateral damage, can be very
high.Ý Now, as then, the pretense that
the U.S. government believes it is dealing with political equals is given the
lie by our brusque dismissal of any suggestion that the sovereignty right of
the Afghans / Indians to preserve the inviolability of their territory should
be taken seriously.Ý Now, as then, all
of the respectful rhetoric we produce to uphold the appearance of an international
community of equals is revealed by our actions as transparent bullshit.
By forcing a 'for us or against us' choice on all
nations, and giving notice that 'harboring terrorists' makes a nation our
enemy, the U.S. also unwittingly highlights the global economic disparities it
is otherwise so busy dismissing as unimportant.Ý During the early October debates around terrorism in the U.N.
General Assembly, a number of representatives from poorer countries worried
about how they would be able to acquire the resources to make sure they would
not be harboring terrorists in the future:
Speaking for Barbados, Ambassador June Clarke agreed
that no country, however small, was immune from terrorism. "Indeed, small
countries are particularly vulnerable because they frequently do not have the
logistical and intelligence assets to effectively track the activities of
terrorists and other agents of transnational crime", she said.
The Acting Permanent Representative of Botswana,
Leutlwetse Mmualefe, said many developing countries faced enormous social and
economic problems and were "in dire need of resources and technical
assistance to help us upgrade our capacities to effectively participate in the
global coalition against terrorism."Ý
He stressed that conflict-ridden regions of the world had proven to be
easier breeding-grounds and havens for terrorist activities.[40]
In effect, U.S. policy has put poor countries in a
position of long-term vulnerability to American intervention, and it is not
difficult to foresee that, insofar as the U.S. attempts to address the problem,
it will do so by helping countries beef up their security forces.Ý The result may look a good deal like the
pattern of the Cold War: scores of poverty-stricken populations on all
continents held at bay by authoritarian regimes armed to the teeth against the
threat of terrorism. This predicament, growing out of the simplistic hostiles
vs. friendlies policy, is just one of many complicated issues that could well
have been anticipated and perhaps more creatively and constructively addressed
in an international discussion involving more serious efforts at
diplomacy.Ý The insistence on a 'war'
footing, and the ingrained preference for military solutions, continues to relegate
world peace to a more distant future.
C.
Negotiation is for wimps
A third feature of the American 'War on Terrorism',
closely connected with the either/or mentality, makes very clear the link
between the absence of an interest in diplomacy, on the one hand, and the
manhood ideals spelled out earlier, on the other.Ý The most-discussed part of Bush's Sept. 20th speech
was his list of demands "on [sic]
the Taliban".[41]Ý Bush asserts, "These demands are not
open to negotiation or discussion.Ý The
Taliban must act, and act immediately.Ý
They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their
fate."Ý Announcing the military
attack on October 7th, Bush said, "More than two weeks ago, I
gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands.... None of these
demands were met.Ý And now the Taliban
will pay a price."[42]Ý The impression of resoluteness and
"sticking to his guns" is reinforced in an October 15th Washington Post article entitled,
"Bush rejects Taliban offer on Bin Laden".[43]Ý In the opening paragraph, John Harris writes
that in rejecting an overture,
"President Bush .... made clear that military
coercion, not diplomacy, remains the crux of U.S. policy toward the regime.
"They must not have heard: There's [sic]
no negotiations," Bush told reporters..."
Drawing a line in colloquial terms, Bush added:
"There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt.Ý We know he's guilty.Ý Turn
him over.Ý If they want us to stop our
military operations, they just gotta meet my conditions, and when I said no
negotiations, I meant no negotiations.
Bush's reference to eight foreign aid workers held
in Afghanistan was notable because until yesterday he had avoided calling them
hostages, instead using language like "unjustly imprisoned."Ý His decision to strip away euphemism
suggested the rising intensity of the war on the Taliban...
... and of course a President who is a real man,
firmly in control of the situation.
The high price to be paid for such tough-guy
posturing is suggested by another Washington
Post article two weeks later.Ý
Entitled "Diplomats met with Taliban on bin Laden",[44]
this article also merits lengthy quotation, as it imparts a depressing sense of
the constraints placed on the U.S. government's room for maneuver by its own
deep-seated masculinist commitments:
Over three years and as many continents, U.S.
officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban
representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist
Osama bin Laden to justice.
Throughout the years, however, State Department
officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S.
justice system....
Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the
negotiations, the United States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu word for
"face-saving formula."Ý
Officials never found a way to ease the Taliban's fear of embarrassment
if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an "infidel" Western power.
"We were not serious about the whole thing, not
only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair
Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of
Southern California.Ý "We did not
engage these people creatively.Ý There
were missed opportunities."....
"We never heard what they were trying to
say," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S.
covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s.Ý
"We had no common language.Ý
Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.'Ý
They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.'"....
U.S. negotiators started out "very, very
patient", one official said.Ý But
over the course of many meetings, the envoys "lost all patience with them
because they kept saying they would do something and they did exactly
nothing."
[After the Sept. 11th attacks] U.S.
officials launched a two-pronged policy to pressure the Taliban into handing
over bin Laden.Ý On the one hand, the
United States used the United Nations and the threat of sanctions.Ý On the other, it began a hard-nosed dialogue....
"I would say, 'Hey, give up bin Laden,' and
they would say, 'No, show us the evidence,'" [State Department officer
Michael] Malinowski said.....
Others, however, say the cryptic statements [from
the Taliban leaders] should have been interpreted differently.Ý Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban
more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and
communicated its intent by saying he was lost.
"Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost
again,' they are [sic] saying
something.Ý They are saying, 'He's no
longer under our protection," Bearden said.Ý "They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do
signals."
If diplomats representing the world's only remaining
superpower "don't do signals" and can only engaged in
"hard-nosed" dialogue, the world may be in for dark times, because
these are serious handicaps.Ý The issue
of "face-saving" raised in the article is a specific
case-in-point.Ý The concept should be
understandable to a foreign-policy community so steeped in a masculinist
worldview.Ý The attempt to save face can
be understood as a way of reconciling the compulsion to appear tough with the
need for reason and compromise in negotiations.Ý But the masculine behaviors on display in theÝ American response to the current crisis are
so primitive and stripped-down that even the concept of face-saving has no
purchase.Ý As a result, masculine
posturing, which is not automatically harmful in and of itself, is far too
tightly bound up with the actual exercise
of violence.
If we are to avoid dragging the international community more deeply into a medieval international regime based on the rule of barely concealed force and little else, we need to recognize and combat the elements of the American manhood ideal and frontier mythology which togeth