Carter Bundy
This is one of a handful of pieces written by NMPolitics.net columnists reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
9/11 is, for most of us, the worst day in American history in our lifetimes. By any statistical measure it was a disaster, but it was worse than that: It ended nearly two centuries of feeling fairly safe from foreign attack, dating back to the War of 1812.
Sure, Hawaii was a territory on Dec. 7, 1941, and there were patrols for Japanese and German subs, and Soviet nukes were a potential threat, but we’d never been hit directly on American land, this hard, ever.
It is both ironic and partially explanatory that the attack occurred at the height of American power. In 2001, we were the dominant economic, military and cultural force in the world. We still largely are, although China is going to give us a run for the economic title over the next few decades. But we’re the top dog now, as we were a decade ago and for five decades before that, and that means we’ll continue to have some enemies no matter what we do.
We can’t change the fact that there are insane, violent, evil fanatics out there to kill us. We can, however, isolate them from the rest of the good people in the Arab and Islamic worlds (the Arab and Islamic worlds overlap but are by no means synonymous — the world’s largest Muslim country is Indonesia).
We need to strengthen our relationships with the moderate Arab and Islamic worlds, and drive a wedge between them and the merchants of death and hatred on their extreme fringes. There are three major ways we can do this: militarily, diplomatically and economically, but so far we seem to have only focused on the first.
Hit back
The first is to wage a smart and strong war on terror, going after the extremists wherever we can. We have to show that there is the ultimate penalty for being at war with America and the democracies of the world, and that means using our military against Al Qaeda and its often loosely-arranged affiliates.
In order to do this well, most of the time we’ll want cooperation with the non-extremist Islamic world, but sometimes, as in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, we’ll have to go it alone. Whenever possible, though, we should make the war on terrorists a war by, and on behalf of, the local people in each country who are subject to the extremists’ abuses and violent ways as much or more so than even America has been. In that sense, Libya has been a great success. It was a war led by Libyans, for Libyans, to overthrow a violent, extreme dictator.
Our role, to this point, has been perfectly played: We helped the tyranny-fighting Libyans without making it an American war. We enlisted the help of the other world democracies, particularly Europeans, who benefit from a free and moderate Libya at least as much as we do. We empowered local people to do the heavy lifting of ending a four-decade machine without alienating anyone but the dictator himself. And importantly, unlike Iraq, it hasn’t costs a trillion dollars and we haven’t lost a single life.
People on both sides of the aisle talk about how freedom is universally desired; we need to encourage and support that desire rather than force-feeding it down the throats of different cultures and countries with occupying forces. We’re moving in that direction.
Securing Israel through diplomacy
Due to our status as the world’s only superpower, it has largely fallen to us to defend the world’s only Jewish state from the awful people who would annihilate them. We can, should, and must defend Israel, but that means inheriting their enemies as well.
Complicating things on the Israeli front have been legitimate concerns for the treatment of Palestinians, starting in 1948 and continuing through today’s settlements. Rather than seek security through engaging moderate Arabs, Israel has played a major role in stoking fires of anti-Israeli sentiment through aggressive settlements and its treatment of Palestinians in places like Gaza.
No one is saying Israel has an easy hand to play, but any objective analysis would have to conclude that Israel has misplayed its hand often and given the hard-line zealots in the Arab world a great set of issues with which to bully moderate Arabs.
We should be doing everything we can to support moderate Israelis and moderate Arabs to finally secure a Palestinian state and resolve outstanding refugee and land issues. The belligerent warriors like Ahmedinijad will still hate Israel and America, but he will be more and more isolated the less the Palestinians have a legitimate beef.
Unlike Libya, this is an area where I have been disappointed with Obama. While he and Secretary of State Clinton have given speeches and hosted meetings on a Palestinian resolution, it appears to those of us outside the White House and Foggy Bottom that very little is going on. I hope I’m wrong and that there’s a massive behind-the-scenes push happening, but it doesn’t seem like it. If America is the moderator who brings peace and stability to Israel and Palestine — and we’re the only ones who can — then we will empower the moderate, non-violent forces on each side of that conflict and further isolate violent, religious extremism.
Stop being an economic vassal state
The third thing we can and must do to isolate extremists and dictators, and to disempower the religious fundamentalists of the Arab and Islamic worlds, is to disentangle ourselves from our economic reliance on many of those same dictators, extremists and fundamentalists.
As long as places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, and Venezuela are major producers of our top energy source, we are going to have to choose between supporting dictators, going to war with them, or reducing our economic output. When we support violent, tyrannical regimes like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it un-does all the speechifying about freedom and democracy that should be at the center of our foreign policy. It feeds into the religious extremists’ claims that we don’t care about freedom or democracy or human rights, but that we’re in it for the oil. On the other hand, what are we going to do, cut off relations with Saudi Arabia and lose access to a quarter of the world’s oil?
Our energy policies put us in a difficult position, and no, we can’t drill our way out of it. T. Boone Pickens’ plan to rely more heavily on natural gas seems to make sense, but in the long run, we have the most obvious, easy, renewable energy sources on the planet right here in New Mexico: wind and solar. Every year they’re getting more competitive, and if you count the costs of our oil-related wars, our investments in protecting shipping lanes, and our foreign aid to oil nations like Saudi Arabia, they’re already cheaper.
Oil isn’t going anywhere for the next 50 years, so the oil companies and workers in that industry don’t have to worry. World demand continues to grow, particularly as China, India, and other countries develop consumer and transportation habits closer to ours. But why on earth wouldn’t we pursue clean, free, infinite, renewable natural energy sources, especially when New Mexico sits at the intersection of America’s great wind belt and our great sun belt, and where land is cheaper than in other places like California and Texas?
Once we’re energy independent, we can be free to pursue honest foreign policy that consistently supports peoples striving to be free. Heck, we can even gain leverage and power by selling oil to the places too short-sighted to invest in clean renewables. Until then, our oil entanglements and dependency just empower the terrorists and extremists, and push the moderates closer to them and further from us.
Nothing — absolutely nothing — we have done as a country justifies the 9/11 attacks. They were the work of violent, psychotic, religious fanatics who contribute nothing positive to the world, and in fact who contribute to the misery of their own people every day.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything to reduce the power of the violent religious jihadists going forward. Let’s be clear: Nothing relating to our Israeli or energy policies justifies or caused 9/11. But we can empower moderate Arabs and moderate Muslims by taking away the straw men of the Arab and Islamic religious fundamentalists, and in doing so will strengthen our coalition of the sane against the forces of violence and evil.
In 10 years, we’ve had good success in fighting our enemies using one of three avenues: force. Let’s work on improving our diplomatic game and economic independence over the next 10 years and end this war for good.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in New Mexico. The opinions in his column are personal and do not necessarily reflect any official AFSCME position. You can learn more about him by clicking here. Contact him at carterbundy@yahoo.com.