So it should come as a surprise to no one that we have found the images coming from abroad both heartening and harrowing. The picture of the little boy placing a bouquet outside the American mission in London, the buses motionless for a minute of silence in Stockholm, the TV anchors dressed in black in Vienna. All sending the unmistakable message, first uttered by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and repeated in the editorial pages of the French daily Le Monde: “Today, we are all Americans.”
But equally poignant for Americans were the images of Palestinian children “celebrating” our anguish. Small crowds in the West Bank, including children, shot off automatic weapons and danced in the street. Less dramatic, but just as hurtful, were the murmurs coming from countries as diverse as China, Kenya and Algeria. Some survivors of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi noted with disdain that now “America will see how it feels” to be the victim of terrorism.
I covered that bombing, and the subsequent stories about grieving Kenyans who fought to get more than the $43 million aid package that Washington seemed to grudgingly offer. Though Kenyans hardly rejoiced at America’s pain, their sympathy was tempered by what they saw as our indifference to the death of more than 200 Kenyans and the wounding of more than 4,000 more. (Most U.S. headlines paid more attention to the 12 dead Americans.)
Similar echoes came from China, where citizens feel America flouts its power at the expense of their respect; Algeria, where 150,000 have died in a civil war America-and the world-has ignored, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 2.5 million Congolese have died from the brutal effects of “Africa’s first world war.”
Feelings that America reaped the bitter harvest of an arrogant and cold-hearted foreign policy-indifferent to its consequences on the poor and powerless-seem pitiless themselves to Americans, still sifting through the remains of our loved ones. (As does the observation that it was Washington that first recruited Islamic radicals in Afghanistan to dislodge Soviet invaders in the 1980s). But they are a harbinger of something far more worrisome. As the president has said, we are witnessing the “first war of the 21st century.”
And we will need all the allies we can get. This war will not be like the world wars or the Vietnam or Korean conflicts, with their defined combatants, enemy territories and infrastructures, terrain gained and lost. This war will be more akin to the moving targets and battles for “the hearts and minds” of the cold war-only hotter.
This is the new world order. The nations known as “the West” united against a common enemy of shadows and subterfuge. With no country and no rational goal (at least as we understand it), this foe will be harder to watch-and stop. Victory will require a joint international effort. It will demand unprecedented levels of cooperation, intelligence-gathering and military action. But after a discordant decade since the fall of communism disunited the Atlantic alliance, Sept. 11 has given a new sense of purpose to the West. Though the terms of the new war are unclear, it will reunite NATO as another great battle over the contours of civilization’s future takes shape. The only thing that is still uncertain is which countries will line up on which side.
The echoes from Nairobi and Beijing are ominous for just that reason. As are the pleas and threats emanating from Kabul. If America responds with lethal force-as we must-to the carnage wrought by the terrorists, we risk setting the divisions of this new war along the lines of the West against the Islamic world: rich countries versus poor ones, white ones versus brown ones, the North versus the South. We must keep the coming conflict, likely to define our age in the way the confrontation between East and West did the last, from becoming the cold war meets the crusades.
At the end of the Clinton administration, officials in Washington tried to make the case that American “national security” should be redefined to include nontraditional issues like AIDS and poverty in the developing world. The United Nations in its last Development Report warned that global inequalities could spur the poor, who feel marginalized from the benefits of globalization, to attack and disrupt the good life of the wealthy North. Impoverished men and women could lash out at rich countries, seemingly indifferent to their suffering. For that reason, if we do not include the South’s perspectives and needs in our political and military calculations, we are likely to give birth to even more new suicide bombers.
This is just where the terrorists wanted us. Long before their deadly attacks on New York and Washington, they believed we live in a world of “us versus them,” the zealots on one side, the infidels on the other. The majority of what was once known as the Third World is still on our side-including Muslim-dominated regimes in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But if America inflicts death on poor nations in our quest to root out terrorism, guess which side the poor will identify with?
I don’t know how the Bush administration can walk the thin line between retaliation and sensitivity. Certainly, the long-term consequences of whatever actions we take in the coming weeks is the farthest thing from the minds of wounded Americans. Nor are we likely, in these dark days, to turn our attention to ways to alleviate the misery of the billions of impoverished Southerners. But we should.
Not very long ago, Americans-particularly, the practitioners of realpolitik-would have asked, “What does it matter if impoverished populations without treasure or soldiers are not with us?” Today, no one would be foolish enough to make the same argument.
