from:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=110003990'I Decline to Accept
The End of Man'
What Faulkner had to say about the war on terror.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, September 10, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Today's date, Sept. 10, has become shorthand for an age of innocence, an idyll under blue skies--as the clock ticks toward 8:46 the next morning, when the first hijacked jet hits the first tower and America wakes to war.
In truth, Sept. 10 was the last day not of innocence, but of an era of dangerous delusion. The hijackers were already trained and en route to the targeted flights. The training camps in Afghanistan were in full swing. The malice brewed in the tyrannies of the Middle East had for years been spilling out in acts of terror. Sept. 10 capped a decade in which America under the first President Bush began by walking away from a Gulf War only half won, leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Then we elected Bill Clinton, who declined to confront our worst enemies in the peculiar belief that they would more or less return the courtesy. And so came Sept. 11, 2001.
It was a lesson learned at horrific cost. Which makes it doubly unsettling that as we head into the third year of this war, there's a rising chorus--not only from Democratic contenders, former Clintonites and assorted Frenchmen, but some of it from within George W. Bush's own administration--chanting that we've gone far enough, maybe even too far.
The idea seems to be that except for chasing down al Qaeda operatives here and there, and making us doff our shoes at airports, it's time for America to go back to sleep. President Bush goes on television to update us on the immense task that he accurately describes as "rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization," and the big news is sticker shock over Iraq. Mr. Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, reinventing herself in Foreign Affairs as the rhyming sage of the modern age, aches to remake the Bush administration policy in which--as she puts it--"reliance on alliance had been replaced by redemption through preemption."
France, Germany, Russia and the careerocrats at the U.S. State Department are all insisting that an outfit that until this past March was still colluding in the oil-for-palaces business with Saddam Hussein--yes, the United Nations--is now the best bet for inculcating democracy, or at least passing the buck, in Iraq. And Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has failed utterly to provide leadership in the matter of actually eliminating such threats as the former regime of Saddam or the nuclear dangers now on the front burners in Iran and North Korea, would like us to follow his path to world peace--the path of 17 failed U.N. resolutions on Iraq, the peace of Sept. 10 in New York.
There is a siren lure amid this racket. At its core, it poses a question compelling even to those who believe in facing deadly truths and dealing with them: When will this war be over?
The answer is not pleasant. This war, in the most basic sense of a fight to defend our freedom, our society of liberty and justice, is far larger than Iraq, Afghanistan or even the entire Middle East. The real war here is the old human struggle of good versus evil, a war that is part of what we are, part of the long volatile history of mankind. Never has there been so much to celebrate; rarely has there been more peril. Among individuals, we cannot hope to eliminate entirely all cold and gloating killers, people such as al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, drunk on his dreams of destruction, threatening in recent weeks to launch "an attack that will make you forget Manhattan." There will always be someone who delights in terror and ruin, and seeks ways to inflict it. And as we all know, modern technology, along with its mighty blessings, offers arsenals so terrifying we can all have our moments of wishing to live forever suspended in that last spell of denial, the 10th of September.
But neither is this war hopeless in scope. We are not fighting every psychopath or fanatic in existence; we are pitted against those who have found some organizing structure to foster and arm them. Effective terrorist groups are not as a rule made up of amateurs. Agents need to be recruited, trained, housed, equipped and coordinated. If you are planning to hijack a plane, it helps to practice at a facility such as Saddam's jet fuselage at Salman Pak. If you want to set off nuclear bombs, or spread deadly disease, you will probably need some pals, or at least business partners, in states that care nothing for civilized norms, such as North Korea or Iran.
Tackling the world's worst tyrannies, clearing away the systems that foster terror, is at the heart of this war. It is a daunting, dangerous, costly task; it is far from over, and if we stop short, we are incubating nightmares that will make this Sept. 10, 2003, look as tranquil as the same day two years earlier.
We can debate the precise methods of the very imprecise art of replacing tyrants who threaten us with democracies that do not. But as a price tag for the defense of our own nation, which is the real issue behind regime change in Iraq, $87 billion is small potatoes. If it is used well, the return in terms of a safer world could be vast. In the 1990s, at U.S. behest, and largely with our money, the International Monetary Fund threw more than twice that amount into emerging markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia, not to defend our civilization, but in the less edifying interest of bailing out some bad investments.
On many sides right now, we are hearing the unsavory news that if we continue this struggle, it is only because we have no choice. Actually we do. It is a choice beautifully articulated by novelist William Faulkner in 1950, as the Cold War turned hot in Korea. That year Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in his acceptance speech he laid out one option--I'd call it the dead-end option, the Sept. 10 approach, in which we duck, discuss, deny and just kind of hope to personally survive the next attack:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Then Faulkner offered another option:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
That is what this war is about. If we so choose.
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"But neither is this war hopeless in scope. We are not fighting every psychopath or fanatic in existence; we are pitted against those who have found some organizing structure to foster and arm them. Effective terrorist groups are not as a rule made up of amateurs. Agents need to be recruited, trained, housed, equipped and coordinated. If you are planning to hijack a plane, it helps to practice at a facility such as Saddam's jet fuselage at Salman Pak. If you want to set off nuclear bombs, or spread deadly disease, you will probably need some pals, or at least business partners, in states that care nothing for civilized norms, such as North Korea or Iran."
Mike/wulfie
p.s. I don't agree with this part - "Sept. 10 capped a decade in which America under the first President Bush began by walking away from a Gulf War only half won, leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Then we elected Bill Clinton, who declined to confront our worst enemies in the peculiar belief that they would more or less return the courtesy. And so came Sept. 11, 2001." Clinton did more than is generally acknolwedged in an attempt to disript Al-Qaeda, and George Bush Sr. ended hostilities at a point that the Coalition had agreed on beforehand.
(edit: added p.s.)
