Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The War in Proportion

(Reprinted from the issue of January 13, 2005)

The disaster that has struck southern Asia should not only make us count our blessings; it offers us an occasion to view our own troubles with a refreshed sense of proportion. Millions of poor people have lost even the little they had; meanwhile, millions of rich Americans are worrying about the phantom enemy of terrorism, on which we’ve spent many, many times the amount of money that has gone to Asia for disaster relief.

Advocates of the War on Terrorism have inflated both the intentions and the danger of the enemy. They insist that al-Qaeda wants to destroy our freedoms, even destroy all of us physically, and that it poses a threat comparable to those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The more extreme among them, such as Norman Podhoretz, say we are engaged in “World War IV.” In Podhoretz’s words, the enemy’s “objective is not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands.”

By now we are so used to such talk — you can hear the same sort of thing from Rush Limbaugh any day of the week — that we hardly notice what it means or how far it exceeds the reality we know. Osama bin Laden has indeed pronounced a death sentence on “Jews and Crusaders.” And so far this has been executed on a few, most of them in one day three years ago. But after this rather small start — small in relation to the total number of “Jews and Crusaders” — he has managed only scattered and sporadic violence.

Does he want to “conquer our land”? How on earth would he do that? A Muslim occupation of the United States? Bin Laden has never suggested such a thing; even his fantasies don’t go that far. As for “the destruction of everything good for which America stands,” this too is a rather perfervid projection, for which there is no evidence at all. Bin Laden has told us his three chief grievances, none of which has to do with America’s intrinsic goodness: the U.S.-enforced sanctions against Iraq, the U.S. military presence in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and U.S. support for the Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

These are pretty sharply defined (many would even say reasonable) complaints, and they don’t imply a megalomaniac mission of world conquest. Hitler, ruling a large and powerful nation, couldn’t even conquer England. Bin Laden simply isn’t deluded enough to entertain the ambitions attributed to him. At most he dreams of restoring the ancient Muslim caliphate, and he has hinted that this would include Spain — which once again has a large and fast-growing Muslim population.

Bin Laden, in a sense, is bluffing. And after the shock of 9/11, he can afford to do a lot of bluffing. He is helped by the very fact that we know so little about him and al-Qaeda. In the name of security, our government has adopted the practice of treating all of us as suspected terrorists, spending, as he himself has noted, a million dollars (of our money) for every dollar he puts up. You have to respect a man who can get his enemy to pick up virtually the entire tab for the war, while he remains in hiding and on the run. His real triumph has been to make us lose all sense of proportion about him.

Against bin Laden’s supposed dream of world conquest we may set President Bush’s very real dream of spreading democracy, American-style, throughout the Middle East. Which one is the delusion?

Bush would at least seem to have an advantage when it comes to realizing his dream. He commands military power and other resources that dwarf Nazi German and the Soviet Union combined. What does al-Qaeda have? Nobody knows, but in material terms it’s comparatively meager. It doesn’t even have the base of a sovereign nation where it can consolidate whatever strength it possesses. Its actual membership may be only a few thousand volunteers. It can’t attack at will, and it has lost the element of surprise it had on 9/11. It must bide its time, waiting for the U.S. to overreach its power at the hostile margins of empire.

Al-Qaeda will claim a victory over the U.S. if the January 30 elections in Iraq can be disrupted; but that will be a pretty small step toward killing all of us, conquering our land, and destroying everything good we stand for. In short, al-Qaeda is something less than a tsunami.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, continues to insist that we must fight “the terrorists” over there so we won’t have to fight them at home. But who are these terrorists we are now fighting “over there”? Sometimes we are told they are remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime; sometimes that they are Islamists aligned with al-Qaeda. Either way, this has long since ceased being the war we were told we were fighting and has become something else. We all know now that Saddam never posed a threat to the U.S., and nobody still talks about those “weapons of mass destruction,” but the war, like any other federal program, goes on endlessly anyway. Santayana defined a fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his aims.

Bush has been more confident than ever since his re-election. “I have won what I call political capital,” he has said, “and now I intend to spend it.” But it’s only our capital that the government can spend. And this is what is really meant when Bush reiterates our “resolve” to prosecute the war to the end.

Besides, Bush may be overestimating the meaning of his victory. He is the fifth Republican president to be re-elected over the past century, and he won by the smallest margin by far. Theodore Roosevelt won by 17 per cent of the popular vote; Eisenhower by 16 per cent; Nixon by 23 per cent; Reagan by 18 per cent. Bush won by only 2 per cent — against a weak opponent, and with more voters disapproving than supporting the war.

So Bush may have less political capital than he thinks. The war on terror has become a burden on all Americans; the Vietnam war was far bloodier, but it didn’t impose daily restrictions on our freedom at home as this one has. Even anti-war protestors weren’t treated as suspected Viet Cong; but even supporters of this war are regarded as potential terrorists, like everyone else. Sooner or later people are going to ask what we have to show for all this. How will Bush answer?


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Joseph Sobran