Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The News from Fallujah

(Reprinted from the issue of April 15, 2004)

The killing and mutilation of four Americans in Fallujah — technically civilians, but also vaguely identified as “security” experts hired to assist the occupation — has outraged Americans more than anything, probably, since the 9/11 attacks. American officials from President Bush on down spoke of resolve, retaliation, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and of course the evil of terrorism.

But it was clear that the occupation, unlike the primary conquest, was going to be no “cakewalk.” And the growing resistance to American rule can no longer be plausibly blamed on Saddam Hussein loyalists, since much of it is spurred by Muslims who were bitterly persecuted by Saddam. Chief among these is Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, a popular Shi’ite cleric whose father and brothers were executed by Saddam’s regime and who has now been ordered arrested by U.S. occupation authorities — a step which, of course, only makes him an even more popular symbol of Iraqi and Muslim defiance.

Bush’s “war on terror” has now turned into something he utterly failed to anticipate. The whole idea of attacking Iraq was to decapitate a supposed godfather of terrorism, but it now appears that Saddam, in his own way, was suppressing the forces the American victory has now unintentionally released.

The whole thing defies calculation, because there is no way of measuring Iraqi attitudes; and even if there were, those attitudes are no doubt fluid and volatile. The Bush administration naturally insists that most Iraqis welcome the U.S.-sponsored democracy-in-the-making, but we’ve heard this kind of official happy-talk too often.

One gets the impression, from every possible indication, that the United States is none too popular in the Muslim world, so it stands to reason that a U.S. defeat and occupation of a Muslim country has its work cut out for it when it comes to “winning hearts and minds” (another all-too-familiar phrase from the past). Most conquered people submit to raw force, but the U.S. isn’t prepared to administer the totalitarian cruelty it would take to finish the job.

Bush has not only let a very big genie out of the bottle, but has given him plenty of new energy.
 
Fighting Terrorism

The “war on terrorism” recalls not one, but two, of Lyndon Johnson’s projects: the Vietnam War, of course, with its demoralizing body counts, but also his “war on poverty,” which was equally misconceived, costly, and open-ended.

Misconceived, because the metaphor of “war” doesn’t apply to abstractions like poverty and terrorism. State action can’t “eliminate” them; it can, however, intensify them.

The term “terrorism” is now used indiscriminately, covering too many things to be useful. Destroying the World Trade Center was terrorism, an act of mass murder meant to shock the entire population; attacking the Pentagon, even as part of the same operation, could be seen as striking a military target; so even the 9/11 horrors were arguably something more than pure terrorism.

Killing occupying forces, including civilian workers, is guerrilla warfare, not terrorism as traditionally understood. This isn’t changed by the hideously nasty treatment of the corpses; that is common in guerrilla warfare, and isn’t unknown in “conventional” warfare. It’s a mistake to use the term “terrorism” for anything that arouses horror and revulsion.

The point is not to defend terrorism, but to define it. There have been surprisingly few attempts to define it carefully, but many attempts to use the term to stigmatize and conflate many horrifying but essentially distinct techniques of “asymmetrical” warfare. The Bush team made the blunder of supposing that because Saddam (like many rulers, including some of our “allies” in the “war on terrorism”) controlled his subjects with mass terror, he must have something to do with the shadowy forces of “international terrorism.”

If terrorism comes to mean nothing more than cruel tactics of warfare, it will mean essentially nothing. Of course in the West it has come to be particularly associated with Arabs and Muslims, the targets of many of those who want war on those peoples for their own reasons. Tyrants facing uprisings now routinely call the rebels “terrorists.” Only the most genteel and scrupulous rebels, perhaps, can avoid the label.

But what are we really talking about? Hideous random killings of innocent people in Ireland and Africa never provoked a generalized “war on terrorism.”

Maybe we should think of terrorism as a form of crime — or as a set of forms of crime — rather than warfare, even if its goal is political. It, or they, may be impossible to eliminate. As James Burnham used to say, “When there’s no solution, there’s no problem.” Some evils, that is, aren’t “problems” that can be “solved.” They simply have to be coped with realistically.

Decades ago, when Arab terrorism caught the world’s attention, Burnham (who died in 1984) thought that terrorism was here to stay, and would get worse with the years. Ruthless and fanatical people were finding ways to outwit and provoke the state with unpredictable violence, and many of them were willing to die doing it. For them the state itself is the problem, and violence conducted below its radar is the solution.
 
Easter Notes

This holy season three immensely popular works show that Jesus Christ is still very much on America’s mind.

First, of course, is Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, a stupendous box-office hit in spite of every attempt to crucify it even before its completion. And it’s just opening in foreign countries.

Then there is The Glorious Appearing, the best-selling 12th and final installment of Tim LaHaye’s apocalyptic “Left Behind” series, which climaxes with the Second Coming.

Finally, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, soon to be a movie the Usual Suspects probably won’t protest, has become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It’s not so much a work of fiction as a pack of lies: an absurd and ignorant blasphemy arguing that Jesus married Mary Magdalen and the Church has been covering up the true story ever since.

Brown’s success shows he has fed a deep popular hunger for consolation among the Godless. If Catholicism is just the world’s longest-running conspiracy, we don’t have to worry about God demanding our obedience, do we?

Brown claims his novel is based on deep research in history, but it includes such laughable blunders as the assertion that the Church put Copernicus to death. He might have avoided that one if he’d spent a moment checking a children’s encyclopedia.

Just as there is a huge market for Gibson’s attempt to be faithful to the Gospels, there is still another huge market for desperate anti-Catholic fantasies. In their own way, unbelievers are resisting temptation too.

As the wise Gamaliel said, if the Church wasn’t of God she would soon die out. He might have added that if she was of God, some men would hate her forever.


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Joseph Sobran