Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism"

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE “WAR ON TERRORISM”

VIBS Volume 188 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks

Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas Woods Emil Višňovský

a volume in Philosophy of Peace POP William Gay, Editor

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE “WAR ON TERRORISM”

Edited by

Gail M. Presbey

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover Photo: © G. Simon Harak, S.J. Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2196-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

Philosophy of Peace (POP) William C. Gay Editor

Other Titles in POP Laurence F. Bove and Laura Duhan Kaplan, eds. From the Eye of the Storm: Regional Conflicts and the Philosophy of Peace. 1995. VIBS 29 Laura Duhan Kaplan and Laurence F. Bove, eds. Philosophical Perspectives on Power and Domination: Theories and Practices. 1997. VIBS 49 HPP (Hennie) Lötter. Injustice, Violence, and Peace: The Case of South Africa. 1997. VIBS 56 Deane Curtin and Robert Litke, eds. Institutional Violence. 1999. VIBS 88 Judith Presler and Sally J. Scholz, eds. Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. 2000. VIBS 105 Alison Bailey and Paula J. Smithka, eds. Community, Diversity, and Difference: Implications for Peace. 2002. VIBS 127 Nancy Nyquist Potter, ed. Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local and Global Levels. 2004. VIBS 164 John Kultgen and Mary Lenzi, eds. Problems for Democracy. 2006. VIBS 181 David Boersema and Katy Gray Brown, eds. Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. 2006. VIBS 182

Assistant Editors of POP Joseph C. Kunkel Judith Presler

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Dedication In memory of Robin Scott Gildert A young philosopher with much promise, Active Concerned Philosophers for Peace member, And contributor to this volume, Who died while this volume was in preparation.

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CONTENTS Foreword G. SIMON HARAK, S.J.

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Preface GAIL M. PRESBEY

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Introduction GAIL M. PRESBEY

1

Part One: Terrorism Analyzed ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

The New Reign of Terror: The Politics of Defining Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism WILLIAM C. GAY Enforced Homogeneity or Mutual Difference? Luce Irigaray, the War on Terrorism, and International Peace JENNIFER L. EAGAN Responsibility and/in Crisis DIANNA TAYLOR

21

23

35

47

Part Two: Democracy as a Remedy for Terrorism

65

Jihad or the Beloved Community? Benjamin R. Barber on Terrorism and Global Democracy MAR PETER-RAOUL

67

Violence, Power, and Identity: What Are the Conditions of Terrorism? RICHARD PETERSON

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Crisis, Terror, and Tyranny: On the Anti-Democratic Logic of Empire PETER AMATO

113

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Contents

Part Three: The United States’ “War on Terrorism” SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

129

Bush’s National Security Strategy: A Critique of United States’ Neo-Imperialis WILLIAM C. GAY

131

Would the United States Doctrine of Preventive War Be Justified as a United Nations Doctrine? HARRY VAN DER LINDEN

141

Is the United States-led Occupation of Iraq Part of the “War on Terror”? GAIL M. PRESBEY

161

The Mortal God to which We Owe Our Peace and Defense D. R. KOUKAL

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Consequentialism, Negative Responsibility, and Sacrifice: Moral Dilemmas Posed by the Post-September 11th “Shootdown” Policy EDWARD J. GRIPPE Jessica Lynch: Multiple Images, Multiple Realities LAURA DUHAN KAPLAN

211

245

Part Four: Terrorism Case Studies

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Russia, Chechnya, and the Global War against Terrorism OIDINPOSHA IMAMKHODJAEVA

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FOURTEEN

Ethics of Terrorism and the Case of Colombia JOSEPH C. KUNKEL

FIFTEEN

Terrorism and Deterrent Violence: A Critique of Israel’s Justification of Military Violence ROB GILDERT

289

309

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

Contents

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The Role of Central Asia in the “War against Terrorism” OIDINPOSHA IMAMKHODJAEVA

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Securing Human Rights through War and Peace: From Paradox to Opportunity HARRY ANASTASIOU and ROBERT GOULD

361

Part Five: The Ethics of War

373

Dilemmas of Intervention: Human Rights and Neo-Colonialism RICHARD PETERSON

375

War and Peace in Christian Tradition: Why I Am an Engaged Christian Pacifist JOHN DAVID GEIB

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Emmanuel Levinas: From “Innocent Violences” to the Ethical “Just War” WENDY C. HAMBLET

409

About the Authors

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Index

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FOREWORD I live in New York City, but 11 September 2001 was not my first experience of terror. I had had an earlier experience of terror in a classroom of an elementary school in Iraq. I am a professor of ethics by trade, and a lover of primary resource research. I even dare sometimes to accept the challenge of my students to “practice what I preach.” All those things, and probably a few more, led me to Iraq in the late 1990s during the the time when United Nations sanctions against that country were in force. I wanted to see for myself how the sanctions were affecting the people of Iraq. I wanted to bring them medicine, which the sanctions restricted and even forbade. I wanted to bring toys to the children, and books (also forbidden, along with medical journals and all printed material) and pencils (not forbidden, but the graphite in the pencils was). That is how I found myself in an elementary school in northern Iraq. During the twelve years of sanctions, the United States flew hundreds of thousands of sorties over the “no-fly zones” in northern and southern Iraq. American jets breaking the sound barrier over the towns terrorized schoolchildren in their classrooms every day. The children would try to alert and prepare each other: “The Americans!” as they heard the planes approaching. Then one day, one of those American jets dropped a bomb in a schoolyard I later visited. “Thank Allah,” one of the English teachers told me, “The children were not playing outside.” The bomb blast had swept shattered glass and scattered debris through the classrooms, tearing and cutting into the children, severely wounding several. When we arrived, students and teachers spoke “the Americans” in a horrified whisper. Even though we were bearing gifts, we could not overcome children’s terror: “The Americans!” they began to cry. Parents came and took many of their children home. Once, a teacher let two of us into a classroom. But I remember she placed herself between us and her students, prowling back and forth with her eyes always on us, like a lioness protecting her cubs. “What kind of future are we creating,” I wondered. “What are the people in our government thinking?” The terror we were sowing in Iraq so struck me that I decided to leave my tenured university position and work full time against the sanctions. It appeared to me to be the best way to try to assure a safe future for my students. I worked with Voices in the Wilderness, which I helped found with the wonderful Kathy Kelly and others, and eventually the War Resisters League employed me as their national anti-militarism coordinator. Then after 11 September 2001, the United States began its “war on terror.” As I have watched this “war” devolve over the years, I found myself

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repeating the question I began asking back in that Iraqi elementary school. “What are the people in our government thinking?” For example, by now, just about everyone knows that not one of the suicide hijackers of 11 September 2001 was an Afghan. They had not trained in Afghanistan; none had ever even been to Afghanistan. If we are to believe United States’ reports, one of the attackers came from Lebanon, one from Egypt, two from the United Arab Emirates, and fifteen from Saudi Arabia. Yet when United States’ intelligence agencies asked the Saudi government for the files on the attackers, the Saudis refused. So we bombed Afghanistan, attacking a whole country, causing as many civilian deaths as the number who died on 11 September, because we argued—without ever offering any proof—that the terror perpetrators were hiding out there. In 1998, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that the sanctions on Iraq had increased the death rate among children under the age of five by 500,000. The reader might recall the staggeringly callous evaluation of this policy by then-United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright. When Leslie Stahl of CBS spoke of preliminary reports of half a million Iraqi children dead from the sanctions and asked Albright if the benefits were worth the price, Albright responded, “It’s a difficult decision, but the price—we think the price was worth it.”1 Yet after five more years of those genocidal sanctions, people like Karl Rove and Ahmed Chalabi had convinced the United States government–and many US citizens—that the Iraqis would welcome the United States’ invaders “with open arms.” After Colin Powell had failed, in February 2003, to convince the United Nations Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that Iraq was an imminent threat, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Security Council process and called its invasion Operation Iraqi Freedom (after changing from the original title, “Operation Iraqi Liberation” for fear that its acronym would be too revelatory2). One year after the March 2003 “shock and awe” attack of liberation, The Lancet (an independent and reformist global medicine journal) found that the invasion caused 100,000 “excess deaths”—more deaths than if there had been no invasion. Invading forces killed most of the dead, The Lancet reported, mostly by bombing. Most were women and children.3 After the invasion, the United States led an occupation whose goal, the government told us, was to “win the peace.” To accomplish that, the occupying forces disbanded the Iraqi army (thereby releasing hundreds of thousands of unemployed, desperate armed men into the streets of Iraq), seized tens of thousands of Iraqi men women and children without warrant, held them without charge and tortured them. They instituted a totally bewildering election process for a people who had had no experience with democracy in the first place, and ran an election which resulted in an illegal and partisan government led mostly by people who had been out of Iraq for years if not decades.4

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They called this winning the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis, and making Iraq a “model for the Middle East.” Four years into the occupation of Iraq, The Lancet issued another report, this time with even tighter research controls, which stated that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had caused 655,000 excess deaths.5 In the meantime, coalition forces in Iraq continue to suffer about 100 attacks per day. The majority of polled Iraqis favor attacking United States troops, since they see the United States troops as provoking more violence than they are preventing. At the same time, in Afghanistan, now the world’s number one producer of heroin, the Taliban is resurgent and human rights violations are rampant.6 Has any of this stemmed terrorist attacks? In a February 2006 speech at the Naval Academy, President George W. Bush assured his listeners that “we’re winning.” But in April 2006, the National Counterterrorism Center released a report together with the annual State Department Country Reports on Terrorism, which stated, “The number of terrorist attacks worldwide increased nearly fourfold in 2005 to 11,111, with strikes in Iraq accounting for 30 percent of the total.” Then in September 2006, the media reported that a coalition of American intelligence agencies found that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan had increased the overall threat of terrorism. 7 Those assessments do not include state-sponsored terrorism—especially not by the United States and its allies. For example, the United Nations reports that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has left behind some one million unexploded cluster bombs, 90 percent of which were deployed during the last seventy-two hours of the attack, when a cease-fire was close to finalization.8 Such lethal litter has rendered southern Lebanon dangerous to the point of uninhabitable for years. If reports about Israeli use of Depleted Uranium (DU) are true, inhabitants of Lebanon—and eventually the entire Middle East—will be cursed with cancer and genetic deformities for untold generations.9 All the while, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people continues. Back home, the “war on terror” does not bode well for citizens of the United States either. By the time this volume is published, the number of United States’ military dead in Iraq will be well above 3,000, and the number of wounded and maimed hideously higher. The practice of illegal wiretaps has blossomed into the Pentagon’s 1500 incidents of spying on domestic groups considered a threat to United States’ security. This includes a Quaker group in Florida, the Catholic Worker in New York City, and my own organization, the War Resisters League.10 The original outrage against the torture in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places of “extraordinary rendition,” has given way to the suspension of habeas corpus, the legalization of torture, and the use of secret evidence for “alien enemy combatants”—a category dangerously underdetermined by the law.11

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We can observe another economic effect exacerbated by war: the gap between rich and poor is growing in the U.S.12 New Orleans still struggles in scandalous disrepair while the American government appropriates more than $14,000 per second to the Pentagon—with extra hundreds of billions of dollars voted in emergency funds to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Katrina itself is evidence of an alarming trend of “global scorching,” a term that increasing number of critics use. Exempt from even the flimsy United States’ laws for environmental protection, the United States’ military—at home and in its 700+ bases abroad—is one of the greatest destroyers of planetary environment. Each year, the United States’ military generates some 500,000 tons of toxic waste—more than the five leading chemical companies combined do. The fuel consumed by a Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle for one hour, for example, could run a family car for two years. With such levels of consumption and destruction, the military machine must engage in more and more “resource wars” (Michael Klare’s term) to feed its gargantuan and growing appetite. Perhaps then, the answer to our original incredulous and bemused question is, “The government people weren’t thinking at all.” Or perhaps, the answer may be that their thinking was delusional to the point of lethality. Whatever the answer, by now we should see plainly that the rage (however rationalized) that motivated the suicide bombers of 11 September 2001 cannot be countered with more, greater, and more lethal rage (whatever its noble disguise). The way to a proper response—even to the rage of terrorism—is through humble self-assessment, deep reflection, sincere truth seeking. Put simply, by thinking. Now that I am returning to academics after seven years “in the field,” I am encouraged to find a volume like this one, with so many scholars offering reflections of such quality. As global war and the war against the planet rage, to analyze coherently and plan wisely, and to reflect deeply and discuss openly the causes and effects of our actions is more important than ever. Peacemakers, too, were unprepared for the attacks of 11 September 2001, even though some critics shared ample foreboding of such “blowback” (to use a CIA term) from U.S. foreign policy. Peacemakers were unprepared for the United States government’s consummately violent response, even though they had had ample warning when the Project for the New American Century issued its recommendations for “preventive strikes” and seizure of Middle East oil. When Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney and other architects of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) moved into the Executive branch of the United States government, we had more warning. Peacemaking strategies and tactics, remnants of the Vietnam and Civil Rights eras, were, though massive and heroic, unable to prevent the initiation of our twenty-first century corporate-driven wars. Strong analysis and reflection on the nature of

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war in our time is essential for peacemakers as well, if we ever hope to act effectively for peace. The studies in the volume will benefit warmakers and peacemakers alike. An old Muslim saying goes: However far you have gone down the wrong road, turn around and come back. All the authors in this volume, descendents of Plato and emergers from the Cave of Illusions, invite us to do just that. G. Simon Harak, S.J. NOTES 1. Madeleine Albright, interview by Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes, CBS, 12 May 1996. 2. Jim Bunning, “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” 21 March 2003, http://bunning. senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Columns.Detail&column_id=36&Month=3&Year=2003 (accessed 8 December 2006); and Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Gilbert Burnham, “Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet, 364:9448 (29 October 2004), pp. 1857–1864). 3. L. Paul Bremer, “Bremer Discusses Possible Delay of Transition of Power in Iraq,” CNN Live Event/Special, 19 February 2004, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCR IPTS/0402/19/se.01.html (accessed 8 December 2006); and Michael Rubin, “Bremer’s Legacy a Recipe for Instability,” Australian Financial Review, 29 June 2004, http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/5504 (accessed 8 December 2006). 4. Phyllis Bennis, “Iraq’s Elections,” Talking Point #27, Institute for Policy Studies, 20 December 2004, http://www.ips-dc.org/comment/Bennis/tp27elections.htm (accessed 8 December 2006). 5. Roberts, et al., “Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.” 6. Rick Jervis, “Attacks in Iraq Jumped in 2005,” USA Today, 22 January 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-01-22-iraq-statistics_x.htm (accessed 8 December 2006); Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Most Iraqis Want U.S. Troops Out Within a Year,” WorldPublicOpinion.org 27 September 2006, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf (accessed 8 December 2006); Pamela Constable, “Afghan Corps Faces a Resurgent Taliban: Unit Struggles at a Time of Transition,” Washington Post, 10 June 2006, http://www.washington post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/10/AR2006061000006.html (accessed 8 December 2006); and Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, “Country Reports on Terrorism,” http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2005/65353.htm. 7. Mark Mazzetti, “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” The New York Times, 24 September 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/ world/middleeast/24terror.html?ex=1316750400&en=da252be85d1b39fa&ei=5088&p artner=rssnyt&emc=rss (accessed 8 December 2006); and BBC News, “‘Million bomblets’ in S Lebanon,” 26 September 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ east/5382192.stm (accessed 8 December 2006).

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8. “United Nations: Israel Cluster Bomb Use in Lebanon ‘Outrageous,” Reuters, 19 September 2006, http//www.ynetnews.com/articles/0%2C7340%/2CL-330 5802%2C00.html (accessed 8 December 2006); and Doug Rokke, “Depleted Uranium Situation Worsens,” The Veteran, 36:2 (Fall 2006), p. 25, http://www.vvaw.org/vet eran/article/?id=662 (accessed 8 December 2006). 9. Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella, and the NBC Investigative Unit, “Is the Pentagon Spying on Americans?: Secret Database Obtained by NBC News Tracks ‘Suspicious’ Domestic Groups” MSNBC, 14 December 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/ (accessed 8 December 2006). 10. Ibid. 11. Military Commissions Act of 2006, Pub. L. No. 109-366, 120 Stat. 2600 (17 October 2006), enacting Chapter 47A of title 10 of the United States Code; and Amnesty International, “United States of America Military Commissions Act of 2006—Turning Bad Policy into Bad Law,” 29 September 2006, http://web.amnesty.org/library/ index/ENGAMR511542006 (accessed 8 December 2006). 12. “Inequality in America: The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them,” The Economist, 15 June 2006, http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory. cfm?story_id=7055911 (accessed 8 December 2006).

PREFACE To understand why we wrote this book, readers must first know about a dedicated group called Concerned Philosophers for Peace. Members of this society are philosophers by vocation. They are also citizens (primarily from the United States, but also from Canada and other countries) committed to acting as public intellectuals to support peace in our world. In other volumes of the VIBS Philosophy of Peace Series (POP), our members have discussed various wars and military maneuvers that their governments have prosecuted, evaluating those actions according to moral and logical criteria. They have heard many political speeches and have analyzed those speeches for consistency, pointing out contradictions and double standards. They have analyzed concepts used by governments to justify war, such as the “domino theory” and “collateral damage.” The “war on terrorism” (sometimes called the “global war on terror”) is another such concept. Not a “war” in the traditional sense, the concept is problematic. Can we have a war against a tactic? Would it be a military battle, a police action, or a struggle for “hearts and minds?” Questions about the identity of “the terrorists” are also unresolved. In government documents on the war on terrorism, commentators have combined different kinds of attacks into a unity as “the terrorists.” They tell us that these attacks now threaten the “American way of life” and oppose our “freedom and democracy.” How can we know when we have won such a war? Perhaps this war is unending by design. Who are our adversaries? Can we understand them with more precision? Understanding does not mean condoning terrorist actions. Through understanding, we may move toward solutions to the deeper causes of such actions. In this volume, several authors discuss how authoritarianism and indoctrination play a role in creating the violence of terrorists and the violence of counter-terror measures. They suggest that democratic participation gets to the root of problems and offers solutions that people will accept. But “democracy” has many connotations. What do we mean by democracy? What is the role of a government in relation to its people, and how should democratic governments use power? These topics enter into political and democratic theory, although different authors tie their theoretical explanations to concrete cases unfolding in our contemporary world. Along with statements about the war on terror have come new United States government documents, such as the National Security Strategy (NSS), which suggest that in the future, the United States government will be justified in acting preemptively to stop terrorist attacks before they start. The NSS talks about how new “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) will change the tactics and the morality of war. Several of our authors search for clarity in the concept, and they find some problems with its usage. Other authors debate

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whether changes in military tactics based on new technology can still be understood in the framework of long-accepted moral guidelines for the conduct of war as in the just war theory. If not, should we scrap or modify the theory, or should the current war on terror conform to the existing guidelines? The United States is not the only country engaged in fighting terrorists. One section of this volume is devoted to problems related to terrorism in other countries and regions such as Russia, Central Asia, Cyprus, Colombia, and Israel and Palestine. While the United States often plays a role in these struggles, we cannot easily reduce these diverse situations to one global problem, since context-specific aspects to these struggles exist. Our authors shed light on the historical and current details of the violent situation in the countries they examine. Each study rises above the details to explore a broader concept, such as reconciliation, punishment, Islamic identity, human rights, or nationalism. Even without prior knowledge of the countries in question, readers can gain insights about the shape of the “global war on terror” by reading the area studies articles. Many people, including philosophers, often view philosophy as being above the hubbub of the changing world. While some philosophy journals like Metaphilosophy and some philosophical societies like the North American Society for Social Philosophy have commendably devoted special issues of their publications to discussion of the war on terrorism, other philosophical journals and societies have not even mentioned the war on terrorism these past few years. This omission points to the larger questions in our field, such as the role of the philosopher in society. Lack of engagement in issues of the day such as the war on terrorism may be an abdication of our responsibility as citizens and intellectuals. While their more theoretical counterparts sometimes marginalize engaged philosophers, attitudes outside of the field of philosophy sometimes suggest that philosophers have nothing to offer. Many may consider the military experts, the terror specialists, and politicians as exclusively qualified to critique our government’s current approach. So, just what can a volume like this, written by philosophers, offer to the world suffering from its current crisis? Let me describe, as editor, what I think philosophers do best. Philosophers ask questions, especially in situations where others presume to know all that we need to know. Philosophers make observations about undetected or untheorized significant events, trends, or values. Philosophers are alert to ironies created by gaps or contradictions between what people state are their values and their actions. Philosophers care about truth when others are content with hearsay or comfortable lies. They want to know what is real instead of being satisfied with surface appearances. They want to know (and embody or live by) the ideals of justice and goodness instead of being satisfied with prevailing cultural or legal norms. They notice and point out possible long-term effects of a policy when others are only interested in the short-term effects.

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Many philosophers engage in persuasive arguments in which the goal is to persuade others to care as passionately as they do about the issues they address. Philosophers are not rarified beings. These attributes are beneficial to any citizen. Engaging in philosophizing is a good model for citizenship. The philosophers in this volume are human beings interested in the crises facing our world today. They apply their thinking skills to the matter at hand, and put forward their arguments about how we should understand and solve those problems. Their articles are informative and persuasive. The opinion pieces are informed, well supported, and carefully considered. The thoughts of the philosophers contained in this volume will spur readers to think more deeply about these issues. I would like to acknowledge the help of William Gay, the Philosophy of Peace series editor, for his guidance in constructing this book and shepherding it through its various stages. Thanks also go to the members of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, who helped to make this book a reality. Special thanks goes to Larry Bove of Walsh University for organizing and hosting the 2002 conference “War and Peace in a Time of Terror and Terrorism,” which served as the first basis for collecting some articles for this volume; and David Boersema of Pacific University, who organized and hosted the 2003 conference on “Bush’s Security Strategy,” which was the source of other papers. I would like to thank Wendy C. Hamblet for editorial assistance in gathering six papers for this volume from the 2003 CPP conference, sending those articles out for blind review, and working with authors on a second draft. I would also like to thank her for working on a first draft of camera-ready formatting for over half of the manuscript. The volume benefited from the help of a whole team of readers who blind reviewed submissions for the volume, including Patricia Burdette, Duane Cady, R. Paul Churchill, Barry Gan, Ron Hirschbein, Roderick Hughes, Andrew Kelly, Glen Martin, Mar Peter-Raoul, Sally Scholz, Karsten Struhl, Barbara Wall, and Jack Weir. Thank you to our authors, who proof read their fellow authors’ chapters. Thanks also go to Olga Bukhina, Oriare Nyarwath, and Gregory Sumner for reviewing and proofreading. Thanks also go to Elizabeth D. Boepple, for many hours of careful work reviewing the manuscript, doing the indexing, and creating the camera-ready copy. She ensured compliance with VIBS guidelines, did fact checking, and made helpful comments about the clarity of passages. Finally, thanks go to Dean Charles Marske and the College of Liberal Arts and Education of University of Detroit Mercy, for a grant from the Mellon Fund for Humanistic Studies to cover the costs of manuscript preparation. Gail M. Presbey

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INTRODUCTION Gail M. Presbey Each of the five sections of this volume centers on a theme related to the “war on terrorism,” which serves as a focus for philosophical reflection and analysis. In Part One, “Terrorism Analyzed,” our authors explore questions such as, what are the words and concepts we use to describe these times? What do we mean by “terrorism,” and “weapons of mass destruction?” Does the United States’ President’s decision to describe the war on terrorism as an “us” versus “them” and “good” versus “evil” struggle over-simplify and distort the situation? Can we speak out to clarify our ideas through dialogue, or does the government or media attempt to stifle or narrow our conversations? What kind of responsibility do we have as citizens to shape this meaning-making discussion? William C. Gay begins his article by asserting his suspicion of categorical claims. He cautions that we must carefully choose words we use in our descriptions because words help to frame the issues and shape responses. He also warns that lies and euphemisms are rampant in “official” discourse. Through the power of “re-designation,” speakers intend to make the idea of murder more palatable. With these background cautions, Gay looks at the newly popular phrase “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). Typically, speakers intend the phrase to have a negative connotation, covering nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. But he asks what conditions we use to subsume these three things into the term. If WMDs can quickly kill many people at once, and airplanes killed thousands on 11 September, should we conclude that we should classify airplanes as WMDs? Gasoline would be the chemical. The planes would be the delivery system. After all, people or governments choose to use WMDs, not only to inflict military casualties, but also to strike terror in the population. Regarding nuclear weapons, the United States government is using a double standard; they say that the United States use of the atomic bomb during World War II was justified, but in the hands of rogue states, they believe atomic weapons are dangerous. Such thinking fits into a pattern of contrasting Americans with “villains,” in this case, insurgents or rogue states that are unpredictable and irrational. Gay holds that a fair definition of terrorism would allow that governments and insurgents could qualify as terrorists. Governments and rebels routinely call their adversaries “terrorists,” but rarely accept the label applied to themselves. He ends by suggesting that we should challenge a new “reign of terror,” in which the United States government strikes fear into the heart of its citizens and others. We

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must voice our criticism and discourage our government from responding to violent terror attacks with more violence. Jennifer Eagan wants us to rethink democracy in terms of its interpersonal aspects, the mutual respect involved in recognizing people in their particularity. Too often, we think of democracy in terms of individualistic strategic selfinterest. French philosopher Luce Irigaray holds the position that love, respect, and mutuality are the basis of a democracy. Eagan wants to apply Irigaray’s insights to the polarizing politics of the war on terrorism. Eagan argues that fixed categories such as “women” and “men,” while they appear to be sensitive to difference, lump all women together (and all men together), denying the differences within the group. Failure to love across differences results in oppression, exploitation, and violence. To move to the contemporary political situation, if we abstract into two groups “we citizens” and “our enemies,” we are no longer thinking of real men and women. This fundamentalist viewpoint does not listen to ambiguities. This forced homogeneity of whom we should love and hate is the opposite of the freedom of people to value different things. In contrast, George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy document asserts a narrow version of American values, focusing on free enterprise, markets, and trade. This narrow United States view focuses on securing United States interests at all costs. Since the 11 September terrorist attacks, many United States citizens have retreated and become incapable of love; instead, fear of death rules them. In contrast, for Eagan, just relationships are signs of civil maturity. This caring relationship would reduce the kind of competition that creates social ills. Dianna Taylor begins her chapter by suggesting that the tragic events of 11 September 2001 began a crisis of meaning. She asks how United States citizens were supposed to understand the nature of the attacks, and how they should responsibly shape their response. Taylor contrasts two kinds of responsibility: normative and critical. In normative responsibility, we shape our society and political institutions through our meaning making. Critical responsibility, often in tension with normative responsibility, involves the public use of reason; society’s skeptics and doubters who have a crucial role to play often voice this type. Yet times of crises strain people’s abilities to engage in critical responsibility. Anytime something terrible happens, people may find themselves striving to make sense of it. Because of the trauma or magnitude of the crises, people may disengage from meaning making. After 11 September, the United States government promoted quiescence and obedience. This emphasis on conformity was unfortunate, but understandable. In times of crisis, people’s thinking can become distorted; they come to think that the normative response is to obey authority; they depict critique as immoral. But conforming to authority can be dangerous. The United States government decided to invade Afghanistan in search of the perpetrators of 11 September; consequently, many people, especially civilians, died. As citizens of a govern-

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ment, we have collective responsibility for our individual actions and for actions taken by our government in our name. Taylor agrees with Hannah Arendt, who rejected the “cog” theory and the “lesser evil” arguments that people living under totalitarian rule in the mid-twentieth century used to justify their cooperation with Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Taylor warns that some governments condition their people to accept the “lesser evil” arguments to gain cooperation. President Bush tried to simplify the project of giving 11 September meaning by drawing a parallel to to the well-known attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by the Japanese in 1941. By using this narrative, Bush tells us what we are feeling and what our grief over 11 September means. He suggests that the whole country is going through an experience that begins in grief, moves on to anger, and then to a stage of swift reaction against our country’s enemies. Bush simplifies, saying to other countries and Americans, that if you are not “with us,” you are “against us.” He interprets any critical skepticism of his narrative as unpatriotic. Taylor thinks that United States citizens need to regain their sense of critical responsibility. She mentions that during the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, people finally began to hear critical voices, which she believes is an integral part of making meaning of the 11 September crisis and its aftermath. In Part Two, “Democracy as a Remedy for Terrorism,” our authors elucidate the correlation between repressive authoritarian regimes and desperate responses to repression (which sometimes includes terrorism). They suggest that democratic openness, which allows people to voice their grievances and shape their governments into more humane and helpful forms, can reduce the perceived need of some groups to revert to terrorism. They ask what kind of democracy will be helpful. Mar Peter-Raoul explores the implications of Benjamin R. Barber’s insights into the makings of terrorists in the contemporary Middle East. She begins by noting the levels of poverty and disease, which form the background for so many of Osama bin Ladin’s recruits. Jihadist rhetoric and ideology exploit the poor’s frustration with Western imperialism. Those who are impoverished and despairing are tacit terrorists. Time remains to win them over to the movement for “distributive” justice and away from “retributive” justice. A great need exists for political democracy and international economic democracy. While the military battles the terrorists, we need a “second front,” a civic movement for global liberty and equality, undermining terrorism. This would involve changing the main thrust of our capitalist world away from private good to concerns for common good. Peter-Raoul agrees with Mahmood Mamdani, that we should not equate terrorism and Islamic culture. Even so, she is concerned that the madrassa system among poor Muslims, with its narrow interpretation of the Qur’an, encourages extremism and justifies terrorism. The problem is that

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the poor do not have access to schools with a broad curriculum. She also notes that the United States played a role in supporting the mujahedeen fighters in the 1980s, including Osama bin Laden, which led to acts of terrorism in the 1990s and in 2001. The United States should admit that it has contributed to the problem of rising levels of violent Jihadists, and recognize its responsiblity to work for a solution to the problem, instead of dictating the steps for others to take. In contrast to madrassa education and American conformist education, Peter-Raoul wants to encourage education to forge responsible, thoughtful, critical, and competent citizens: education to foster critical compassion. She wants to see schools modeled on this pedagogy in the Middle East and Western countries. She also wants to lend her support to citizen initiatives such as Campus Compact, World Wide Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS), and Alliance for a New Humanity. She warns that without changes such as these, our society might become a “post-democracy.” Peter-Raoul argues for a religious dimension in the struggle to reduce terrorism. She wants faith traditions of the world to ground, as Martin Luther King Jr. did, socio-economic justice in theological understanding. To do so would mean that our choices are between a violent jihad on the one hand and an expansive beloved community on the other hand. Richard Peterson surveys the arguments of most critics of the war on terrorism, and finds that they hold in common two main assertions: first, that the fight against terror should take into consideration social and economic conditions, such as poverty, that lead people to engage in terrorist actions. Second, the critics argue that a violent response to terror should come second to other more helpful measures. There the consensus breaks down. Peterson rejects the first approach as behavioristic. Poverty alone cannot make someone turn to terrorism, because many poor communities do not engender terrorism as a response. He wants people to take responsibility for their agency. Peterson agrees with those who see identity formation as the key ingredient in becoming a terrorist, and he turns to recognition theory to gain insights into the psychological dynamics involved in tying identity claims to violent actions. Recognition theory explains that I only know who I am through my relation to, or contrast to, others. If people do not get sufficient recognition, they could spark conflicts. Peterson characterizes the “Islamism” of bin Ladin and his fellow travelers (not to be confused with the much broader category of the religion of Islam) as an authoritarian collective identity formation. Based on medieval texts, it is rationally unsuited for the modern world, but it still appeals to some people because it allows harmed individuals to vent indignation and selfrighteousness. Offering a decidedly unflattering portrait of the group, Peterson draws parallels between Islamists and European fascists; he holds that the only antidote for the Islamist version of fascism is democracy. Peterson’s suggestion that Islamic fascism should be replaced by democracy has also been on the Bush agenda. Katha Pollit and others have criti-

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cized this conceptualization of the problematic, popularized by Christopher Hitchens. For example, Pollit thinks that the term “Islamofascism” is not intended to shed light on the political problems found in Middle Eastern countries, but is instead intended to manipulate United States citizens into thinking that this new war is just like the “good war,” that is, the Second World War, when Americans fought the evil fascists. Peterson stands by the accuracy of parallels between Islamism and fascism. Distinguising himself from the Bush Administration, he stipulates that he does not necessarily promote a United States based or Western-style democracy. Western society has not lived up to its ideals. In the 1980s, the United States supported Islamist movements, an action that did not promote democracy. The United States engages in terrorist actions, and uses militant language to form United States’ identity as the opposite of its enemies, the terrorists, ironically proving that it has more in common with its adversary than it would like to admit. Peter Amato begins by acknowledging that a great tradition of civic democracy exists in the United States. Regardless, he considers the current United States foreign policy to be anti-democratic, terrorist, and tyrannical. United States’ imperialist adventures encourage terrorism “in the marginalized and immiserated enemy.” Anyone who doubts that United States foreign policy has been imperialistic can find out more about its history of terror and torture in a large, publicly available literature and recently declassified material documenting such actions. Currently, the United States is engaging in actions of rendition and torture while it attempts to redefine torture to legitimate the practices. United States’ actions have made it harder for people in other countries to have democratic power. At the same time, democracy in the United States is an unfulfilled promise. The United States government promotes a style of regime it calls democratic in which it actually fosters local elites that privatize local resources for exploitation by corporations. This is not the kind of democracy other countries need. Amato finds in Socratic philosophy a model of democracy that could provide an alternative to that which United States’ policy promotes. Realizing that most commentators do not interpret Socrates as a supporter of democracy, Amato explains that we should not take passages of the Republic at face value. After all, Socrates stipulates that censorship and propaganda would only be justified if those fashioning it were near gods – an impossible condition. We may interpret Socrates as comparing and contrasting two types of democracy. In the first, citizens reject the importance of truth and the Good. What is “good” is what is “chosen,” as in Athens, and Amato suggests the same is true of contemporary United States democracy. In both cases, the citizens pursue wealth as their highest goal. The second type of democracy aims at a dialogue through which people as a community try to discern the ideal of the Good. Theirs is a life of philosophical examination, guided by reason. Socrates implicitly advocates the second version of democracy.

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Amato suggests that if we were to follow the second ideal of democracy, our search for truth would lead us in a different direction from that of the Bush Administration, and even toward the impeachment of President Bush for his actions in the war on terrorism. Amato concludes that we need to imagine a United States pursuing policies based on a democratic search for the truth. Part Three focuses on the United States’ “war on terrorism”; it examines United States’ policies and speeches of the Bush Administration, describing and defending the policy. Authors describe and evaluate laws such as the United States’ Patriot Act and the National Security Strategy of the United States. They examine United States and United Nations’ actions to discern whether they fit with policy statements. They conclude that United States’ decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and its conduct during those operations, are morally problematic. In William Gay’s second chapter, he evaluates Bush’s National Security Strategy document. He notes that the document, signed on 17 September 2002, is replete with question-begging epithets and false statements. The document uses misleading language; the phrasing of the preemption policy is vague. Gay puts the document in its historical context by noting that the United States did not embrace a “no first use” nuclear policy, which in itself is a declaration of the right of preemption. To assert, as Bush does, that United States nuclear weapons are “defensive” while others are “threatening,” is a case of special pleading. Many presumed that Bush’s National Security Strategy (NSS) document was something new because he claimed it responsed to a new kind of enemy and a new kind of war—on “terrorism.” Bush wanted the idea of “immanent threat” to apply to terrorists and countries. This war on terrorism is not like wars against nations, since we cannot force stateless actors to capitulate. This means that the “war on terror” can continue indefinitely, without closure. Some also thought the document was new because it asserted that the United States did not consider itself bound by United Nations’ decisions, but the United States has voiced this go-it-alone position in the past. In addition to all the above-mentioned continuities with previous United States’ policies, even the NSS document’s assertion that the Bush Administration is ready to engage in military interventions in other countries is not completely new, since almost all United States Presidents since World War II have done so. The difference is that Bush is making a public declaration of the policy. The NSS document says that deterrence policies of the past are no longer adequate to protect the United States because “rogue states” are more willing to take risks than other counties have been. Gay sees this departure from past deterrence policy toward more aggressive intervention as troubling. He thinks that following the United Nations restrictions and upholding the practices outlined by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights would better address United States’ security needs.

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Harry van der Linden raises the question of whether the Bush doctrine of “preemptive” war, as implemented in the war against Iraq, would be justified as a United Nations doctrine. Would the Bush doctrine be morally acceptable once the authority to make the decision to resort to “preemptive” force (or more accurately, preventive force) is placed in the hands of the United Nations Security Council? Kofi Annan raised the issue on the same day that President Bush defended his unilateral preventive war against Iraq in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Annan, speaking after Bush, reiterated his opposition to Bush’s notion that individual states may act preventively to meet the threat posed by the spread of WMD among rogue states and terrorists. Entertaining the possibility that the Security Council may rightfully authorize preventive force to meet this type of threat, Annan said that he would create a high-level panel with the charge (among other tasks) to examine whether the United Nations should adopt a collective preventive war doctrine. Van der Linden first examines the Bush doctrine of “preemptive” war. In the National Security Strategy (NSS), Bush argued that war has changed from the way we traditionally conceive of it. Our new enemies are rogue states and terrorists who seek death as their goal. In conventional wars of the past, we could detect imminent threats, but with new weapons, this no longer is the case. Accordingly, he argued that the rules of war had to change to meet the new exigencies. He claimed that unilateral anticipatory action, even in the face of uncertainty, is justified. We must destroy the enemy’s WMD before they have a chance to deploy them. Bush has obscured a distinction between preemptive and preventive war. Van der Linden observes that, technically, “preemptive” refers to a “quick draw” situation, in which the enemy has already begun to deploy weapons, but a state thwarts the effort before it reaches fruition. We would be more accurate to call what Bush was describing “preventive war,” which entails attacking enemies before they have declared or exhibited hostilities. Such preventive war is never justified, van der Linden argues, because we can never be sure that war is inevitable, until it has begun. Van der Linden is concerned that in the case of unilateral action, a country could have a distorted picture of another country’s intentions. Another danger of unilateral preventive war is that it may be a pretext for a war of aggression, aimed, for example, at guaranteeing access to crucial resources. He grants that these dangers of preventive war will be less likely to materialize in the case that the authority to declare preventive war is limited to the Security Council because the Council can provide a greater degree of objectivity than any one country, despite the Council not being perfectly impartial. Van der Linden argues that we must reject a United Nations preventive war doctrine, insisting that better ways exist to discourage possession of WMD than engaging in war. The countries that already possess nuclear

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weapons must gradually abolish them. Countries in the North should stop propping up dictators in the South and use economic incentives to discourage WMD possession. He questions the need for a preventive war doctrine by arguing that the NSS document overstates the interests of terrorist groups in getting WMD. He says only one known terrorist group has created and used WMD: the use of chemical weapons by a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo. Even this deadly attack had low casualties. The group could have inflicted more casualties with conventional weapons. Obtaining delivery systems for WMD is also quite difficult for terrorists. The Bush Administration and the media popularized the term WMD in the months before the Iraq war, but they did not use it in a fair way. What keeps us from characterizing the United States’ depleted uranium weapons as WMD? We do not term economic sanctions as WMD, although they kill indiscriminately. People resort to terrorism in cases of asymmetrical conflict. United States hegemony plus its previous use of WMD and terrorist methods encourages terrorism. To stop WMD proliferation, we need to stop United States military buildup, since other countries strive to possess WMD to stop United States hegemony. In a postscript, van der Linden examines “A More Seucre World,” the report of the high-level panel created by Annan. He argues that the report, issued in December 2004, offers valuable non-military recommendations for stopping the spread of WMD, but wrongly advises that the United Nations adopts a collective preventive war doctrine. Gail M. Presbey reviews many Bush and Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney speeches and finds that they have conflated and confused many diverse actors into a single category in their descriptions of the United States war on terrorism. For example, a whole range of fighters in Iraq and elsewhere are lumped into a single overaching category of being “terrorists.” Bush and Cheney’s speeches have been misleading in suggesting that there were connections between Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks. Intelligence services, prodded by the Bush Administration to follow a train of assumptions, led the American people to erroneous conclusions about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Bush and Cheney also presume the United States has the power to install democracies in other countries if it so desires. They have been giving inaccurate estimations of the situation on the ground in Iraq. A recent bill passed by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, claiming that the United States will “prevail” in the war on terrorism repeats the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. In contrast to such speeches, we need to understand the insurgency in Iraq. Many of the insurgents are Sunnis and Shiites fighting each other for dominance. Thomas E. Ricks and others suggest that the United States made the insurgency worse by appearing to side with Shiites against Sunnis instead of taking a more neutral and conciliatory role. Harsh treatment of prisoners

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exacerbated the situation, and made insurgents more determined to fight United States occupation of their country. Iraqi leaders and leaders of Iraqi insurgent groups have been asking for a timetable for United States withdrawal of troops, but Bush has been suggesting that such a timetable would amount to leaving before the job is done. In the meantime, the fighting continues unabated. The current policy is not succeeding in reducing terror and death in the area. Presbey’s chapter charges that some of the United States tactics are terroristic, especially torture and harsh treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and holding prisoners without charges or proper trials. The chapter defines terms such as terrorism (centering on the targeting of innocent civilians or their infrastructure to instill fear in the government or civilian population so as to force a political change), insurgents and guerrillas (fighters out of uniform, not necessarily “terrorists,”). She then covers the debate over who should be called a “terrorist” or “insurgent.” States and insurgents can engage in terrorism. In addition, some counter-terror measures are terroristic, while other counter-terror methods are more benign. Presbey suggests that using terror to fight terror is self-defeating and morally inconsistent. We need a more humane and smart approach to the complex problems of the Iraqi insurgency, and more diplomacy and cultural sensitivity. Threatening parties with violence will not go far in solving delicate and deep-seated problems of the region. D. R. Koukal argues that the United States has taken on the role of the “Leviathan,” drawing on Thomas Hobbes, “the mortal god to which the world owes it peace and defense,” master of all and subject to none. He uses the term “Leviathanism” to refer to a paranoid style of geopolitics, which dominates weaker nations and acts unilaterally with a claim to its own superiority. Ironically, Koukal notes, the United States is not even an effective and prudent Leviathan. He grants the truth of Hobbes’ claims that all of us want happiness, which is why we contract with others to maintain peace and preservation even if it means handing over our rights to a common power that is nothing more than a thug. The sovereign is the sole judge of what disturbs the peace, and the sovereign can wage war in pursuit of the good (which departs from just war theory). Ironically, Koukal notes, the United States is not even an effective and prudent Leviathan, because it exercises “bad prerogative.” It is not effectively exercising its might in a way that would result in protected subjects. The United States in Hobbesean fashion has decided to take a leading role in protecting the world from the terrorist threat, in effect telling other countries in what their good consists, but in so doing trampling on the sovereignty of other countries and trampling on the human rights of its own citizens through the United States’ Patriot Act. If those in other countries complain that they did not contract with the United States to fight the global war on terror on their behalf, a

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Hobbesian can retort that contracts can be authored by consent or force, and that even contracts extorted by fear are still valid. The Hobbesian approach opposes the Lockean approach of the United States Founding Fathers and the United Nations. For John Locke, human beings possess inalienable rights, and governments must follow a rule of law, not a rule of force. Operation Iraqi Freedom used Hobbesian means (including state terror) for ostensibly Lockean ends (of Iraqi self-rule). Also, the United States’ disregard of United Nations’ guidelines and much of world opinion (demonstrated by large anti-Iraq invasion protests around the world) when it decided to invade Iraq without United Nations Security Council approval shows a move away from Lockean to Hobbesean foreign policy. The think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC), so influential with the Bush Administration, also advocates a Hobbesean foreign policy. Since then, intelligence sources have shown that the rationale for the invasion was unsound. A policy pursued along Hobbesean lines will not be able to win against an opponent like Osama bin Laden and his followers because, as the attacks on 11 September and other suicide bomber missions demonstrated, they do not follow the Hobbesean rule of being willing to submit to a world sovereign to save their lives. Koukal speculates that bin Laden counted on the United States government responding in a Hobbesian fashion to his provocation. Since United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, these areas have been more troubled than ever before and because of resentment toward United States forces’ actions, the number of enemies of the United States rises daily. Hobbes gave his sovereign much liberty in ruling powers because he counted on the natural prudence of a leader to make wise decisions about when force was necessary. The Bush Administration has not exhibited this prudence. Bush has abandoned the best of our enlightenment tradition in politics, and by doing so, he is bringing on the terror that he says he is eliminating. In Edward J. Grippe’s chapter, he scrutinizes the recent United States “Shootdown Policy,” which declares that United States Forces can shoot down a commercial airliner if they have reason to believe that terrorists have taken over the plane. The moral problem that arises is that the policy would involve United States forces in killing innocent people (including American citizens who they are duty-bound to protect) according to a utilitiarian calculation. If each American life has worth, according to President Bush, then why would he advocate such a policy? While Grippe admits that in some circumstances the ratio of lives lost, if the hijacked plane were to hit a highly sensitive target, would be high compared to the lives lost on the plane if it were shot down (for example, if the plane were heading toward a nuclear power plant), that would not be true of all cases. For example, the ratio involved in the plane that hit the Pentagon was 1:2. What about the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who voluntarily risked their lives trying to stop their hijackers from hitting a sensitive target? If the Shootdown Policy had

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been in effect, they would not have had a chance to succeed or exhibit their heroism. Grippe draws upon the analyses of Samuel Scheffler and Bernard Williams to analyze the Shootdown policy. He argues that an exact parallel exists between Williams’ famous “Jim” case (in which Jim refuses to kill an innocent person to prevent Pedro from killing more innocent persons), and the situation of a United States’ fighter pilot told to shoot down a plane with terrorists and innocent passengers on board to stop the terrorists from killing others. He concludes his discussion of the pros and cons of Sheffler’s view (in which Scheffler appeals to the idea of negative responsibility to bolster consequentialism’s weaknesses) by arguing that the shootdown policy is not morally justified. He draws an analogy: when criminals use hostages as human shields, should law enforcement shoot and kill the human shield in order to also kill the hostagetaker? Our reluctance to kill the human shield is the main way in which we are different from al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group that does not want to make distinctions between the innocent and non-innocent. Grippe appeals to the principle of nonmaleficence to buttress his view. In crises, he notes, the desire to be beneficent (to promote the most good and least harm for humankind) and the desire to not harm the innocent sometimes clash. For example, a “sincere agent” who is an aerial bomber for an army may want to blow up the munitions plant to end the war and help others, though he or she knows innocents will die. How can we resolve this dilemma? The answer lies in the way we order the two moral desires. Grippe argues that the desire to not harm the innocent should come first, because that goal is in harmony with what Charles Taylor calls the trans-cultural sentiment of human importance. Commitment to protect the innocent is also the only thing that distinguishes the sincere agent from the terrorist, since the terrorist presumes he or she is following the principle of beneficence. Grippe calls the commitment to protect the innocent the “bedrock ethical maxim for all sincere agents.” He argues that if, according to Bush, violence directed at innocent Americans is terrorism, then the shootdown policy is wrong. The United States government, in its zeal to protect the lives of Americans, is breaking moral rules and harming non-consenting innocents, not only in this shootdown policy but also in its abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While people can choose to risk their lives for their country, for example in voluntary military service, to non-consensually jeopardize the lives of innocent people is not right. In conclusion, Grippe condemns the shootdown policy because its consequentialist base is not a good moral guideline. Laura Duhan Kaplan’s paper focuses on Jessica Lynch, a private who was missing in Iraq for many days before she was “rescued,” and the media coverage of Lynch’s disappearance and rescue. Why was the Lynch story, of all the United States military wounded, abducted, or killed in Iraq, of such interest to so many people? First, Lynch fit the usual profile of a blonde

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“Miss Congeniality,” while simultaneously defying such a role by joining the army and fighting in Iraq. The ambiguity of her position continued when she was “rescued” by her fellow soldiers while she was rendered passive due to her wounds. Men could feel good about using their power to rescue her. Kaplan asks why the media did not evince similar concern for other wounded female troops. Apparently, racial stereotypes played a role in the media’s focus on Lynch. Lynch herself felt bad about the racist aspect of the attention bestowed on her, and she made a point of drawing attention to the sacrifices made by women of color in the armed forces. Lynch played an active role in ensuring that the media did not use her image to reinforce racism. Despite the attempt to use her image to sell the war on Iraq to the American people, Lynch’s biographer Rick Bragg remains highly critical of the war. Iraqi doctors worked hard to restore Lynch to health; their actions defy the idea of her Iraqi captors as “bad,” further problematizing a simplistic good guys/bad guys picture of the United States role in Iraq. In Part Four, “Terrorism Case Studies,” our authors look at political violence in areas around the world including Colombia, Israel and Palestine, Russia and Chechnya, Central Asia, and the island of Cyprus. While these conflicts are outside the borders of the United States, the United States military plays a role in many of them, through the presence of its bases or through providing weapons and funds needed to fight these battles. Political violence had been ongoing in many of these countries long before President Bush ever declared a war on terrorism. Yet he has now recast much of the understanding of those violences as part of the global war on terror. The idea of a war against terrorism is problematic because it claims to be a war against a method of warfare. Conceptualized in this way, sorting out which of the many ongoing struggles in the world constitute the nebulous war on terrorism becomes difficult. How can we understand these conflict situations for what they are, instead of superimposing a pattern or understanding that may not be appropriate? Further, how can we resolve deeply entrenched conflicts? Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva discusses the problems of Russia and Chechnya in the context of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and recent commentators, Francis Fukayama and Samuel Huntington. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, people hoped that the new countries would be democratic and capitalist. Instead, civil wars and terrorism have plagued the region. While Huntington has asserted that religion is the factor that mobilizes people, others say that economic and political factors are key. According to Karl Marx and Vladimir I. Lenin, nationalism was useful in rapidly implementing capitalism. Still, nationalism and religion were both ideologies that should eventually evaporate. Joseph Stalin said nationalism depends on a national culture, language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup. Stalin advocated Soviet national culture to replace the earlier Russian identity and more local ethnic identities.

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Russians had settled all over the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union disassembled, Russians found that they were foreign nationals within the new countries. Xenophobia emerged against foreigners. The problems of national identity multiplied, as the different ethnic groups in the new countries like Georgia asked for quasi-independence in their territories. Some ethnic groups such as the Chechens did not gain independence, despite their ethnic nationalism, because of their geographic location. Later, in 1994, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin feared that allowing Chechnya to secede would become a precedent for other ethnic groups, so he believed that thwarting their aspirations was wise. Russia undertook a full-scale invasion, in which 10,000 Russians and 15,000 Chechens were killed. Imamkhodjaeva surveys history to demonstrate that the Chechens have been punished for their attempts to assert their independence for many years. In 1944, the Soviet Union deported 500,000 Chechens to Central Asia as a punishment for their rebellion. In the mid 1950s, many began their return to Chechnya, but the area was impoverished and unemployment was high. A long sequence of historical grievances led them to ask for separation. After the Russian invasion of Chechnya, Chechens turned to hostage-taking, hijacking buses and airplanes, and other terrorist tactics. The most famous recent case was the taking of 750 hostages in the Moscow Theater. These tactics have not won any sympathy for the Chechens from the Russian people. “Islamophobia” also shapes public opinion and police engage in racial profiling against those with olive skin and dark, curly hair. In 2004, Russia persuaded the United States to add Chechens on the list of terrorists, but Imamkhodjaeva thinks this categorization is inaccurate; she believes that we are wrong to consider Chechens as international terrorists. Instead, she views them as separatists fighting for a nationalist cause. The issue of integrity of nations contrasted with separatism continues to be debated. Imamkhodjaeva concludes by suggesting that countries must work out a way to articulate national identity while sharing political structures and economies. In the case of Chechnya, if violence can subside, Russia can begin to give Chechnya the authority it needs for its identity, while continuing to help the region economically. Such an approach would be a helpful alternative to the United States’ and earlier Soviet Union approaches of empire and globalization. Joseph Kunkel notes that since 11 September 2001, the United States government has labeled a wide range of rulers and countries as “terrorists.” He demonstrates that this labeling is inconsistent because not all harmful actions that target innocents done by individuals or countries friendly to the United States are called terrorists. This reduces the definition of terrorism to “armed actions by enemy forces.” A better definition would be that terrorism involves calculated violence against the innocent. Accordingly, military forces sometimes engage in terrorism. Kunkel notes that according to

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Hobbes’ philosophy, human beings in a state of nature are involved in a war of all against all, and so may resort to terror to save themselves. But under a social contract, individuals give up terroristic ways. The United States prefers that rights, treaties, or law of the seas not bind it, so that it can use its military might in Hobbesean fashion. Kunkel offers two criticisms of Hobbes. First, he holds that human beings are not naturally aggressive. Second, standards of right and wrong exist independent of contracts and laws. So, even without a contract, we still need a moral standard that would forbid practices of terrorism. Kunkel surveys both deontological and consequential arguments surrounding war and its limits. Deontologists, he notes, make a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and argue that to target the non-combatants is wrong. But some ethicists absolve themselves from moral responsibility for killing noncombatants by using the “principle of double effect.” They argue that they do not intend most of the deaths that result from their actions. Kunkel asserts that in the case of massacres or terrorism, the killings of the innocent are not accidental. According to consequentialism, no need to single out noncombatants for special protection exists. Kunkel says that according to consequentialism, a war against Iraq would have been justified if Iraq was about to use weapons of mass destruction to harm thousands of people. That was not so. The same kind of consequentialist thinking could justify terrorist activity, if it is the only way for an oppressed people to forestall their total defeat and annihilation, such as in the case of the Palestinians. With that moral discussion as a background, Kunkel then delves into the case of Colombia. The United States calls all three leftist insurgent groups there “terrorists.” Kunkel thinks that the military are also terrorists, and so United States aid for them in the fight against the “terrorists” constitutes a case of aiding terrorism. In the past, when some leftists laid down their arms, the paramilitary killed them, and so other rebels are reluctant to do the same. Deaths caused by the paramilitary have grown over the years, yet in 2003, the President of Colombia pardoned them of their crimes. Kunkel thinks that a Hobbesean model of power politics, not ethical considerations, underlies the United States role in Colombia. Kunkel suggests that the United States’ claim to be engaged in a “war on drugs” is just a cover for an anti-terror counter-insurgency operation. The high priority United States troops have given to protecting Colombia’s oil pipeline is a sign of United States self-interest. Practices of fumigating coca crops do little to stop the drug trade and hurt farmers while leaving Colombian and United States mafia, who profit from the business, untouched. He doubts that the paramilitary terrorizing of Colombian people is “good for business.” He finds a hopeful model for peace in the Mennonite community that risks their lives, helping to “reinsert” ex-guerrillas into the community. Kunkel sees the poverty and exploitation of resources by multinational corporations as a key cause of the continued fighting. Solutions to Colombia’s

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problems would entail encouraging alternative crops, and training an effective police force that could stop the high homicide levels. For the United States to take seriously its stated commitment to reducing terror in Colombia, it should address these root issues. Rob Gildert analyzes the entrenched fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Defense Forces practice a “deterrence” policy, in which they expel family members of Palestinian militants and demolish their houses. They argue that undercutting the family approval for militancy will lessen Palestinians’ desire to become militants. Critics of this Israeli policy call this collective punishment and believe that to punish family members when they have done nothing wrong is unfair. Conversely, Israeli forces say that this procedure will deter future militants. The Israeli courts have ruled that the government can deport people for security concerns, but not as deterrents to future militancy. In the context of this debate, Gildert surveys the moral arguments for deterrent punishment, and weighs the supposed effectiveness of the deterrent policies. Gildert notes that North American research has shown that harsh punishments are not effective deterrents against criminal activity. Instead, addressing the needs of individuals at risk of violent behavior is a more effective deterrent to future violence. He notes that many, who turn to violence, do so because they come from communities suffering from economic and social oppression. Reducing violence calls for addressing this social context and rectifying its problems. Deontological moral approaches, following Kant, would argue that punishing the offending person, as a means to an end of deterrence, is immoral because it does not respect the individual. A utilitarian approach does not justify harsh deterrence policies either, since studies show that punishments increase incidences of offending, leading to a net disutility. Moralist Daniel Farrell argues that the state has a right to threaten those who would attack people. If people must suffer, it must be the perpetrators, not the victims. Gildert counters that increasing the suffering of the perpetrators will lead to future violence against, not safety of, citizens. Applying these insights to Israel, he suggests that if Israelis are trying to secure peace, violent measures against the Palestinians will not help. Threats of death do not deter suicide bombers, which is why Israeli policy focuses on terrorists’ family members. But the source of suicide bombers is the poverty and social ostracism of their communities, which drives them to such drastic actions. Demolishing houses increases the poverty of the community, and so is counterproductive in reducing the number of future suicide bombers. Next, Imamkhodjaeva discusses the current situation in the Central Asian republics. She argues that the cause of the current Islamic revival in Central Asia is the Soviets’ previous discouraging of religions, including Islam. The current rulers are secular and in tension with their people. Central Asian rulers have also repressed the democratic movements in their countries—a tactic that only increases the frustration of the people and makes ter-

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rorism more likely. She argues that devout Muslims should be allowed religious expression because most are not terrorists. The Uzbeks mostly practice Sufi Islam and are not “Islamists.” Most movements prefer nonviolence but believe that they must retain the option of armed struggle against repressive governments. This does not make them terrorists. Meanwhile, governments have used state terrorism to subjugate their people. Imamkhodjaeva reviews the background of Sunni and Shiite Islam. She notes that Samuel Huntington’s famous claims of a clash between the “West” and Islam ignore the longstanding Soviet/Russian-Islam tension. Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, offers a description of how Europeans created the Orient-as-other, but Said does not discuss the Soviet attitude toward Central Asia. The Russian Revolution started a social experiment that promoted the social good, but the government took over everything, reducing religion to irrational mysticism. The Soviet Union gave lip service to the flowering of autonomous minorities, but it wanted them to all merge into one culture of socialism. Soviets studied in Central Asia and rewrote their philosophical history from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, for example considering philosopher Ibn Sina a great materialist. Turkestan was the first to rise up against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but its Basmachi rebellion was defeated. Some people migrated to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. In the 1930s, the Soviets engaged in a harsh campaign against the religious class and general followers of Islam. Central Asian countries gained independence and then joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a group of former Soviet republics, in 1991. Since gaining independence, they have been plagued with problems including extremely high unemployment, high inflation, and poverty. The RussiaChechnya conflict has also affected them. Radical Islam flourishes in some countries, not because people are devout Muslims, but because of their dire conditions coupled with authoritarian secular rule. Since 11 September 2001, the United States has been using air bases in Uzbekistan. Russia and China have had mixed reactions to the growing influence of the United States in the region. There have been suicide bombings in Uzbekistan, but Imamkhodjaeva says that these are homegrown movements protesting Islam Karimov’s rule, not members of al-Qaeda. In May of 2003, Uzbekistan armed forces fired on crowds, and many fled the country. She argues that current Central Asian rulers are in the position of the former Shah of Iran. People who want change will struggle, and their struggle will be in many forms. We should understand people’s struggles in the long context of struggles for self-rule and justice, and not misunderstand them as “terrorist” movements. If rulers allowed freedom of speech in their countries, people would prefer nonviolent protest. Harry Anastasiou and Robert Gould look for solutions to ethnic strife exacerbated by nationalism. They explain that under the influence of nationalism, human rights advocacy, a field we usually consider helpful and neces-

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sary can make conflict and fighting more entrenched. In nationalist conflict, each side cites violations of human rights resulting from the violence, while claiming that the need for the restoration of human rights legitimizes the use of violence. The integration of even justified grievances into nationalism’s adversarial perspective perpetuates the violations. They hold that grief and suffering is only shared intra-communally, not inter-communally. As violence is a profound form of inter-group alienation, the plight of the enemy rarely comes into view, while the only feelings that prevail are anger, rage, and retaliation, which nationalism usurps in sustaining its adversarial mindset. Under these conditions, the pursuit of human rights leads to violence, not peace. Examples include the divide between Israelis and Palestinians. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The challenge to make headway in reconciling the belligerent nationalist groups is to dissociate the pain and suffering from the adversarial, nationalist framework in which it becomes embedded. A long path starting from initial, mutual acknowledgement of injury to eventual empathy and compassion for all sufferers is indispensable for addressing human rights issues in a nonadversarial mode and for envisioning a new, peace-seeking, socio-political reality. The authors cite examples of those facilitating this new, common narrative. Such work has the potential of bringing together the rival groups in a more constructive way than the divisive, “human rights” assertions of competing nationalisms, which concentrates instead on the rights of one side over the other. Part Five “The Ethics of War,” asks reflective questions about violence and human nature, and whether humas can decide to forego violence and war. The section covers issues of religion’s admonitions regarding violence and the tricky issues of when intervention in another country’s business is morally right or justified. The section ends with reflections on the human desire for vengeance. We naturally want to subdue adversaries, but is giving vent to such desires the best goal possible? In his chapter on intervention, Richard Peterson charges that since the Cold War, the United States has been involved in wars of intervention, supposedly for humanitarian reasons in defense of human rights. Peterson characterizes these wars as neo-colonial, since they imposed conditions of dependency on the countries supposedly helped by the intervention. Since the time of John Stuart Mill, people have advanced two rationales in defense of colonialism: the first being for the sake of the rewards of empire (as is apparently the case in the current Iraq example), and the second for the sake of the dominated, who need colonial tutelage. While Peterson is skeptical about many governments’ claims to be engaged in the second rationale when they are actually engaged in the first, he agrees that such a thing as “colonial tutelage” can exist. He likes the word tutelage because it admits a power differential is at work. Much of the tutelage going on in today’s cases of intervention is that of leading other countries into the capitalist world order, a practice of

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ambivalent value. Peterson suggests economic plans should be subject to ethical norms. He also suggests that a key aspect of any tutelage should involve sharing the structures and practices of democracy, and reciprocity between both countries, instead of dependency and exploitation. Is intervention for ethical reasons a practical possibility in our world, or is it an impossible ideal? Peterson admits that the cases of truly altruistic interventions motivated solely by concern for human rights will be rare. He also advocates a new conception of human rights that sees them not as timeless universals that express minimum standards of moral and legal behavior, but as the fruit of a consensus among nations, at a particular time, that speak to the protections individuals and groups should enjoy. In the next chapter, John David Geib explains that he is an engaged Christian pacifist. Surveying the variety of Christian ethical positions regarding war, he notes we can identify three positions. The first, drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, asserts that a Christian should not participate in war. The second, following the Just War Theory, advocates participation in some wars under particular circumstances. The third position advocates participation in war as part of a religious crusade in which individuals destroy God’s enemies. Geib explains that he espouses his position in a context of humility, since none of us human beings can know God’s will with certainty. Geib also does not want to deny that the transcendent God can bring something good out of a terrible thing like human-made wars. Geib points to human sinfulness, derived from our finitude, as a key factor in why human beings cannot fight just wars. He also notes that people often conflate Christ’s purpose for the Church and the concerns of their civil nations. He is skeptical of religious motivations for war fighting and concludes by contending with those who argue that the Older Testament justifies war. He prefers to follow the Newer Testament injunctions, pointing to the early Christian Church’s stance on non-participation in war, and suggests that they were closest to the Gospel as preached by Jesus Christ. Geib’s analysis is especially interesting to us, for in our current times, Christianity and some other religions use their faith to exhort their fellow citizens to arms. Wendy C. Hamblet’s contribution explores Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of “innocent” violences. According to Levinas, our globe has finite resources, and each of us exists by consuming these resources. Our existence is inherently violent and even murderous, since we exist in the place of some other being. Yet in the midst of our enjoyment, our egoism makes us blind to our violence. This feeling of innocence during our enjoyment is due to a lack of feelings of guilt or responsibility. Our natural self-interest can lead, in the extreme, to war. The heroes in war, starting with the ancient Greeks, are those whom we admire despite their violent behavior because we judge that their intentions are good. This subjective intention is the source of their innocence;

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but the restrictive egoism, which does not listen to the “other,” helps to construct this innocence. Although stories like the Iliad appear to laud the heroes, they also show the shortcomings of the heroes approach. At some point, each hero has an opportunity to show mercy to someone who pleads for life, and in each case, the hero ignores the plea to refrain from killing the opponent. Accordingly, Hamblet charges that violence, not the hero, is the real victor of the war. Hero stories show that victory in battle is short lived and that the victories are later undone when the other side seeks vengeance. Levinas experienced the same story pattern first hand through the war adventures of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi army, which he thought merely repeated the narratives of early Greek days. While Levinas says that to be such an egoist is only natural, he asserts that we can also rise above this natural state, which we share with the animals, to become “thinking” beings. We cannot wholly transcend violence and egoism, but thinking, disquietude, and awareness set the stage for the possibility of the good. Some commentators insist that Levinas says human beings cannot willfully pursue goodness. But Hamblet points out that to say ethically significant existence can fall upon the subject contrary to their will is consistent with Levinas’ position. A subject can cultivate receptivity to goodness by thinking of others’ freedom, not only theirs. Insofar as someone resists mere life and aims for human life, they can escape from egoism and forego the desire to crush their victim. Hamblet ties these themes to the current war on terror. While Americans rightly felt hurt by the 11 September 2001attacks, the lust for vengeance has resulted in more lives being lost in Afghanistan and Iraq than were originally lost in the attacks in the United States. Those of us in the United States are in the position of the Greek warrior holding a sword over his cringing victim. The challenge is, can we see past our rage? We should not demonize our enemies to justify destroying them. Instead, we should humbly recognize the violence in all of us, and become aware of our guilt and complicity.

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Part One TERRORISM ANALYZED

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One THE NEW REIGN OF TERROR: THE POLITICS OF DEFINING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION AND TERRORISM William C. Gay “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” So begins Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. While he was writing about London and Paris during the turbulent times associated with the rise of the British Industrial Revolution and the French Political Revolution, these lines express the current sentiments of many Americans. Before 11 September 2001, many people thought we were living in the best of times. Baby boomers were relishing in the prospects that through inheritance they would be the beneficiaries of the greatest transfer of wealth in United States history. After 11 September, even more citizens were psychologically shattered when they realized that the terrorist strikes showed that the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, is still quite vulnerable. I do not share the sentiment that we are living in the best of times and the worst of times, even though, along with many others, I recognize that the Industrial Age has been one of both mass production and mass destruction. I find it hard to consider these the best of times when many corporate executives are receiving hundreds of times more compensation than their hard working employees and when a new xenophobia has swept the land that makes us suspicious about receiving new immigrants. I think times would be better, if not the best, when universal health care and genuine welfare for the poor and unemployed are available and when we welcome immigrants and celebrate the value of diversity. I also think times were worse, though not the worst possible, when tens of thousands of innocent civilians died from the dropping of a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki, Japan, and when famine and disease have devastated entire societies. As a philosopher, I am professionally inclined to be suspicious of categorical claims. While I do not think these are the best or worst of times, I think these times are ones in which precision in how we describe our global situation are especially crucial. I fear that government is exercising too much control over the terminology used to describe our situation, often resorting to vitriolic rhetoric, and I fear that the media are adopting this terminology too uncritically, generally handling governmental rhetoric with kid gloves. In what follows, I will offer some critical reflections on the use of the terms

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“weapons of mass destruction” and about “terrorism” that illustrate problems in what I elsewhere term “the language of war” and undermine giving voice to alternative conceptions associated with “the language of peace.”1 Albert Einstein, whose scientific work contributed to the development of nuclear weapons and whose subsequent humanitarian efforts called for the elimination of these weapons, is often remembered for his statement, “Everything has changed save our way of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Is the twenty-first century more likely to move toward an unprecedented escalation in violence, terrorism, and war, or toward an equally unprecedented renunciation of violence, terrorism, and war? In my view, a continuation of the patterns of twentieth-century conflict is not likely to be characteristic of the twenty-first century. The different types of weapons of mass destruction developed over the last sixty years and the types of terrorism and war emerging at the beginning of the twenty-first century do suggest how dramatically our capability to inflict violence has changed. How we think about and respond to these developments will have a lot to do with whether we will drift to further unparalleled catastrophes or whether we can steer away from such horrors. The language we use to frame these issues will fundamentally influence how we think about them. Those who control the language, the terminology and the definitions on these issues, will largely control the politics of how we respond. Beyond its extensive use of euphemism and even outright lies, official discourse imposes itself as legitimate and, thereby, co-opts efforts by critics of war.2 At a basic level, to mark the institutional character of military behavior, most societies use distinctive words to designate the violent acts of warriors and soldiers. The act we designate as “murder” when performed by an individual, we may re-designate as “justified use of force” when carried out by law enforcement or military personnel. This power of re-designation, which allows for legitimation or condemnation of different actions, manifests how political uses of language precede and support the pursuit of war. For example, throughout the Cold War, many Americans regarded their government as the “champion of freedom” and the Soviet government as “an evil empire.” Since perception and behavior are so closely connected with the way language shapes consciousness, the “right of bestowing names,” as Friedrich Wilhlem Nietzsche saw, is a fundamental expression of political power.3 In the twentieth century, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu elaborated theoretically and empirically on the extent of the symbolic power that language can provide.4 Leading scholars who have analyzed in detail discourse about war, such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Haig Bosmajian, contend that language is corrupted in ways that make the cruelty, inhumanity, and horror of war seem justifiable.5 Language becomes a tool employed by political and military officials to make people accept what ordinarily they would repudiate if the true character were known.

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1. Defining Weapons of Mass Destruction What is meant by “weapons of mass destruction”? They are defined in more than one way, and sometimes one and the same person or agency does so to deceive or confuse those with whom they are communicating. This prospect can be illustrated using the attacks of 11 September 2001. First, weapons of mass destruction need to be defined. Typically, weapons of mass destruction refer to nuclear, chemical, and biological means for killing large numbers of people.6 This definition correlates with developments in the history of warfare. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons have all been used in war. Nuclear weapons were used at the close of World War II. Chemical weapons were used in World War I. Biological weapons have been in use in warfare for over two millennia. Several significant treaties have also been ratified that ban the use or even the production and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations and many countries, for example, have called for bans against such weapons, even terming them genocidal; some philosophers have made similar judgments as well.7 Second, the target of weapons of mass destruction needs to be specified. Generally, civilians or noncombatants are the targets of weapons of mass destruction. The possibility remains that, instead of targeting civilians, weapons of mass destruction can have military or political targets. For example, the United States Pentagon would qualify as a military target, while the United States White House would qualify as a political target. Regardless, one intention of those who use such weapons typically is to strike terror into the population, even if they also wish to inflict death and destruction on military or political targets. As one proceeds, clarity in discussions about weapons of mass destruction continues to be elusive. In many discussions, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are no longer considered the only possible weapons of mass destruction. At one extreme, you will discover that in some police jurisdictions weapons of mass destruction are defined legally as ones that potentially can kill two or more people. At the other extreme, a single weapon of mass destruction can be conceived that would kill all life on the planet. Fortunately, such “doomsday” weapons so far remain in the realm of science fiction. Between these extremes, social and political scientists generally use a much higher actual or potential death toll in their definitions than two people and much less than all persons. Often, a figure of 1,000 or more deaths is used. In this case, a weapon of mass destruction would be a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon that has killed or could kill a thousand or more people. When nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are used, they sometimes only kill a few persons or even no one. Regardless, for people to use them, with whatever level of destruction that ensues, a means must be available to deliver them to their targets.

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Having made these observations, I now return to the use of commercial aircraft on 11 September 2001 to attack the New York City World Trade Center. These attacks illustrate the difficulty of anticipating all the means that people can employ to strike terror or to function as weapons of mass destruction. While the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took over 3,000 lives, some analysts deny that commercial aircraft, even when used as weapons to kill thousands, are technically weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, I contend that these attacks underscore the variety of delivery systems possible. The commercial aircraft involved in these attacks carried large quantities of fuel, and gasoline is a chemical. I conclude that the attack on the World Trade Center represents a use of a weapon of mass destruction that meets the criteria of having a nuclear, chemical, or biological composition, a civilian target, and a death tool in excess of one thousand people. Perhaps the most usual aspect of this instance of the use of a weapon of mass destruction is that the chemical agent and the delivery system were hijacked. Government officials accuse terrorist groups of developing and even using weapons of mass destruction, and some regard the attacks of 11 September as ones involving such weapons. In this context, what may need examination is not so much what is said as what is not said. I am not merely referring to the unwillingness of government officials to consider that the attacks on Afghanistan since 7 October 2001 could be regarded as the pursuit of revenge.8 I am referring to the unwillingness to consider past, current, and future United States military action in relation to the same definition of what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction. Fundamentally, weapons of mass destruction are instruments of terror. As moral philosophers have noted (Robert Holmes, in particular), subnational groups and governments can resort to the use of weapons of terror. Wars generally kill far more people than do what are generally termed terrorist attacks. Principles of just war forbid the intentional killing of noncombatants. Especially since the obliteration bombing (strategic bombing) in Europe and against Japan at the close of World War II, cities and their civilian populations have become targets. So, one of the more important ethical lessons about weapons of mass destruction is that they can be (and have been) used by individuals and by governments. In this regard, the difference is not so much one of kind as of degree. The end is the same in the terrorist acts of individuals and governments; the goal is to cause fear among civilians by doing violence to them or threatening them with violence. Given the range of linguistic use, the term “weapons of mass destruction” needs some special philosophical analysis. When we refer to weapons of mass destruction, we are drawing on a condemnatory connotation. We need to highlight the prospect for, and reality of, special pleading in using this term. For example, the United States presented its use of nuclear weapons in World War II as a means to end the war and save lives, yet the United States

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condemns as weapons of mass destruction ones with far less destructive capability when they are being developed by “rogue” states or terrorist groups that are perceived as a military threat. Perhaps, the time has come for us to realize that we should condemn most violence, terrorism, and war, regardless of whether we term their instruments as weapons of mass destruction. 2. Defining Terrorism Assessment of terrorism presents even greater difficulties than those connected with the assessment of weapons of mass destruction. Not surprisingly, commentators have written more on terrorism during the last year than they wrote over several previous decades. This general tendency repeats within philosophy as well. Between 1940 and 2001, Philosophers Index cites about 140 references on terrorism and terrorists. Since 11 September 2001, dozens of references have been indexed.9 I want to provide just a little conceptual and historical clarity in defining terrorism, using primarily pre-11 September 2001 sources since they do not include the emotional and political dimensions of so many post-11 September 2001 treatments. “Terror” is a broader term than terrorism. Terrorism is designed to influence political behavior by the using or threatening violence. In this regard, David E. Johnson defines terrorism as “The strategy of employing violence or the threat of violence to escalate people’s fears to achieve or keep political power.” He continues, “Ordinarily, terrorist acts are thought to be different from military operations, but that distinction is not always clear”; both “treat victims as a means.”10 Robert Holmes echoes this point when he observes, “governments or armies can terrorize as well: ‘What makes a terrorist a terrorist is the means . . . not the ends.’”11 In this regard, even when people think about terrorism, they generally fail to recognize that it has these two major forms, which can be parsed in several ways. “Enforcement terror” is a reign of terror committed by an incumbent power (for example, the balance of terror during the Cold War), while “agitational terror” is a siege of terror committed by an insurgent power (for example, purportedly al-Qaeda relative to the attacks of 11 September). Most citizens and political analysts focus on insurgent over incumbent terrorism. In part, institutionalized forms have less news value and are more dangerous and difficult to report. States seem more predictable and rational, while members of insurgent groups appear to be more irrational and to act in a more random manner. All this fits nicely with a villain view of evil. Most Americans now support increased surveillance of individuals already in, or trying to enter, the United States who are Arab or Muslim. The media aided government in fostering this reaction by quickly simplifying the attacks into an individual villain—Osama bin Laden. The United States, which used to charge the Soviets

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with the cult of personality, has long tended to have a villain of the decade. Previous villains include Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Moammar al-Qaddafi, Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein. After 11 September 2001, Osama bin Laden became the embodiment of evil and THE threat to the United States, until we could not catch him. Then, as the United States war on terrorism continued, Hussein recaptured top billing as the World Enemy Number 1 of freedom-loving Americans. Forget that evil is far too extensive to be personified in one person. Forget that discourse about “good vs. evil” is more characteristic of Manichaeanism than the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. The fallaciousness of the popular response should be obvious to anyone who has studied critical thinking. Stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists is an unfortunate, but far too common, “hasty generalization.” Worse still is the willingness to subject such individuals to a type of “ethnic profiling” that makes “racial profiling,” by comparison, almost appear less unacceptable.12 To those too quick to point a finger of blame, Holmes observes: Terrorism is misleadingly represented as a struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Any people desperate enough are capable of engaging in it. Any government unscrupulous enough, [is] capable of using it.13 In his survey of the scholarly literature, David C. Rapoport notes that over 100 definitions of terrorism can be found in the scholarly literature, and he connects its first use with the French Revolution.14 He states: Terrorism was seen as an indispensable tool to establish a democratic order, and the term “terrorism” initially referred to government acts. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary says the term originated in 1795, meaning either “government by intimidation” or “a (government) policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted.15 While Maximilien Robespierre had little or nothing to do with the organization of the original Reign of Terror, he was responsible for enlarging its scope. During its last six weeks, 1,284 persons were beheaded; then, on 28 July 1794 so were Robespierre and twenty-one of his lieutenants. During the Reign of Terror, which lasted from September 1793–July 1794, 20,000 people were executed. I will contrast this Reign of Terror with the one we are entering, and I am not so much referring to the acts of terrorism of 11 September as I am the United States war on terrorism that followed. The number of persons who died during the initial Reign of Terror is far fewer than the number who die in most civil and international wars.

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The United States Civil War claimed hundreds of thousands, and Napoleon, who ended the French Revolution, was responsible for more than twenty times the number of deaths as the Committee of Public Safety. In Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already addressed the way such events perverted language while taking human lives: The most decent people learned to consider it one of their duties to kill their fellow men. Men were seen massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single day of combat and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the entire face of the Earth.16 Holmes observes, “Once one accepts the premise that violence is a permissible means by which to pursue ends . . . one only needs to accustom people to overcome their natural revulsion to killing.”17 In the two hundred and fifty years following Rousseau’s remarks, governments have not changed much in relation to the practice of large-scale slaughter. What has changed is that the weaker now mimic the strong, though on a smaller scale. Rapaport observes, “Rebels characterized every government that oppressed them as terrorist no matter what tactics it employed; governments returned the compliment, deeming every rebel who used violence a terrorist.” The media, Rapoport noted, corrupted or confused language even further, deliberately refusing to use terms consistently, apparently to avoid being seen as blatantly partisan.18 Since 11 September 2001, the United States media has adopted a new pro-government linguistic partisanship. With both government and media largely using the same terminology and definitions, the politics of how we will respond to terrorism is firmly under the control of the establishment. Putting the emerging war on terrorism into perspective, we need to remind ourselves that, from the obliteration bombing in Europe during World War II through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, governments have used terror and in the process have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. So, quantitatively, if citizens of the world reflect on the most ominous sources of threat, governments should top their list. Still, none of these facts justify the acts of violence perpetrated on 11 September 2001, but neither do they justify the United States invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. In examining the issues, we must hold fast to our moral perspective. Whether we are referring to the conventional and atomic bombings that concluded World War II, the terrorists attacks of 11 September, or the United States response to these attacks, we have what Holmes terms, “acts of terrorism, employing massive, indiscriminate violence against mostly innocent persons.”19 If a rose is a rose, a terrorist act is a terrorist act. Concerning the morality of terrorism, Holmes contends that terrorism is not less moral than war:

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WILLIAM C. GAY The killing of children does not become less reprehensible because done from a plane, by soldiers trained in warfare and acting under orders from a duly elected leader than when done clandestinely by men acting on their own or in concert with a few conspirators.20

I would add, from a moral perspective, differences in degree are also significant. 3. Overcoming the New Reign of Terror Some treaties and agreements exist that aim to prevent the production, stocking piling, deployment, and use of weapons of mass destruction. While supposedly aiming for the elimination of such weapons, government agencies sometimes also set up procedures designed to thwart attacks, which use weapons of mass destruction. One of the tasks of the new Office of Homeland Security, created in the United States following the attacks of 11 September 2001, is to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, including ones that might employ weapons of mass destruction. Whether such efforts can be effective or whether they will be merely quixotic remains to be seen. All attempts to protect populations from existing weapons of mass destruction face formidable challenges. Once delivered to their targets, little help is possible for the immediate victims. Admittedly, some measures are possible for populations significantly downwind from nuclear fallout or airborne chemical and biological agents. The best prospect for protection involves the eradication of such weapons. Since human beings know how to produce these weapons, eliminating them does not prevent their reintroduction. What Jonathan Schell noted about nuclear weapons is also true for chemical and biological weapons—for all weapons. The materials needed for their production and delivery remain, and the knowledge of how to produce them. Philosophers have gone one step further in their assessments. The obstacles are more than physical and epistemological; they are also moral. For this reason, some of the most important work in preventing catastrophic use of weapons of mass destruction may not be what is being done by scientists and politicians but what can be done by moralists. The United States’ response to the 11 September attacks has continued to rely on the strategy of using more traditional military hardware against an enemy. This strategy ignores that this “enemy” is not a state, a government, or even an army and that this “enemy” lacks both a centralized territory and a single hierarchy of command. Matthew Cannon notes: Terrorism, like environmental problems, does not stop at the borders of a nation-state, but instead depends on a network that crosses borders and defies national jurisdictions. Responding to terrorism requires an international effort.21

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An international effort is needed because: Terrorism is transnational and feeds off the inability of sovereign nationstates to monitor their cross-border networks. The nation-state is a blunt tool, poorly equipped to respond to a long-term war against terrorism;22 For this reason, Cannon concludes, Instead of continually fighting the symptoms of terror, the process of building relationships that cross borders and communities is essential to addressing misconceptions that feed terror.23 Philosophers and others have recognized that if we are to avoid devastating wars, especially ones involving weapons of mass destruction, we must first change our attitudes toward one another, especially toward what we regard as alien cultures. We can come to regard diversity in the expression of cultural and religious traditions and economic and political systems, along with the diversity of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, as making up the harmonies and melodies that together create the song of humanity. In this regard, Holmes suggests we “try to understand terrorists,” observing, “they are not subhuman monsters, to be fought with blood and iron and all the righteous fury that civilized people can muster”; instead, “the imperative is to find nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems of injustice, poverty, and oppression that are typically at the root of their actions.” 24 He continues: We do know that resort to war and violence for all of recorded history has not worked. It has not brought either peace or justice to the world. Nonviolence worked in India with [Mahatma] Gandhi, in the U[nited] S[tates] with [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] and in Scandinavia against the Nazis during World War II. No one can foresee what the results might be if a country like the U.S. were to spend $300 billion a year in research on techniques of nonviolent resistance and on training people in their use.25 I wish to end with a few questions, observations, and suggestions. First, here are my questions. Will terrorism be eradicated during the twenty-first century? Will the war against terrorism spawn a new and larger generation of terrorists who continue to find dramatic ways to show the vulnerability of the United States and its allies? What measures will be taken in the effort to fight terrorism? What impact will these measures have on innocent citizens abroad and on civil liberties at home? What will be the future of war? Will the war against terrorism end any pretense of trying to abide by principles of just war? Will the United States go so far as to carry out first-strike nuclear at-

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tacks against nations or subnational groups that do not yet even possess, let alone that have not yet used, weapons of mass destruction? Here are my observations. While we do not know the answers to the questions I have raised, we do know some of the lessons of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath. On the one hand, while we can inflict great harm, we cannot prevent harm—even great harm—from being inflicted on us. On the other hand, a war against terrorism may continue a cycle of escalating violence and terror against others and ourselves. Finally, here are a few suggestions. Despite our lack of answers, let us break the silence and continue to fight injustice. Let us not initiate violence or resort to violence to fight violence. Let us not remain silent when government and media suggest all Americans speak in a single voice. Let us not leave unchallenged a new Reign of Terror in which our government, while mouthing concerns for democratic values and global justice, threatens the initial use of nuclear weapons in our version of holy war.

NOTES 1. William C. Gay, “The Language of War and Peace,” Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, vol. 2, ed. Lester Kurtz (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), pp. 303–312. 2. Ibid. 3. Frederich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals; and The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 5. Aldous Huxley, “Words and Behaviour,” The Olive Tree (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1937), pp. 84–103; George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950, vol. 4, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 127–140; and Haig A. Bosmajian, The Language of Oppression (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1974). 6. William C. Gay, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Global Studies Encyclopedia, eds. Ivan I. Mazour, Alexander Nikolaevich Chumakov, and William C. Gay, (Moscow: Raduga, 2003), pp. 533—538. 7. William C. Gay and Ronald E. Santoni, “Philosophy and Genocide.” Encyclopedia of Genocide, ed. Israel W. Charny. (Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO Publishers, 2000), pp. 459–460. 8. Cf. Joseph C. Kunkel, “Differing with Bush on Afghanistan,” Concerned Philosophers for Peace Newsletter, 21:1–2 (2001), pp. 4–6. 9. Philosophers Index, http://www.philinfo.org/ (accessed 27 May 2006).

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10. David E. Johnson, “Terrorism,” An Encyclopedia of War and Ethics, ed. Donald A. Wells (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishers, 1996), pp. 454 and 455 respectively. 11. Robert Holmes, “Terrorism and Violence: A Moral Perspective,” Issues in War and Peace: Philosophical Inquiries, eds. Joseph C. Kunkel and Kenneth H. Klein (Wolfeboro, N.H.: Longwood Academic, 1989), p. 116. 12. William C. Gay, “Xenophobia and Revenge: Morally Pretentious Backlashes to September 11th,” Concerned Philosophers For Peace Newsletter, 21:1–2 (2001), pp. 2–4. 13. Holmes, “Terrorism and Violence,” p. 118. 14. David C. Rapoport, “Terrorism,” Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, vol. 3, ed. Lester Kurtz (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), p. 498. 15. Ibid., p. 499. 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Origin of Inequality,Classics of Moral and Political Theory, ed. Michael L. Morgan, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), p. 882. 17. Holmes, “Terrorism and Violence,” p. 121. 18. Rapoport, “Terrorism,” pp. 499–500. 19. Holmes, “Terrorism and Violence,” p. 117. 20. Ibid., p. 118. 21. Matthew Cannon, “Terrorism, Prevention of,” Global Studies Encyclopedia, pp. 503–507, quote from p. 503. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Holmes, “Terrorism and Violence,” p. 124. 25. Ibid., pp. 125–126.

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Two ENFORCED HOMOGENEITY OR MUTUAL DIFFERENCE? LUCE IRIGARAY, THE WAR ON TERRORISM, AND INTERNATIONAL PEACE Jennifer L. Eagan Rethinking democracy is useful in the face of political violence and for securing international peace. In this paper, I will contrast Luce Irigaray’s interpersonal approach to the basis of democracy with a traditional individualistic approach. In her later work, Irigaray discusses values such as respect, mutuality, and love as central to the basis of democracy. In I Love to You and the lectures included in Democracy Begins between Two, she suggests we adopt a new basis for thinking about democracy, approaching the concept from interpersonal instead of individual dynamics.1 From this shift in focus, we can come to value a genuine mutuality that recognizes the particularity and differences among persons, instead of a strategic self-interest being the motivation for being a part of and sustaining a democracy and securing international peace. The basis of interpersonal relationships, mutual respect between two, is identical to—not merely an analogy or a microcosmic picture of—the basis for democracy and mutuality. I will also reflect on how the notion of reciprocity has influenced my thoughts about the events of 11 September 2001. Last, I will explore the failure of the George W. Bush foreign policy doctrine from the perspective of Irigaray’s later work. The events of 11 September and the ensuing war on terrorism, especially the United States’ military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, form the backdrop for my discussion. I consider how these events inspire us to rethink democracy, perhaps in a new way. Western political philosophy has been primarily concerned with how civil societies form. Philosophers from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls have shed light on those beginnings from different perspectives. Most accounts of a civil society developing into a democracy have as their central character an individual who makes an individual choice to become a member of the society, a democratic citizen. As Rawls and others rightly point out, this notion that we join a society does not reflect the reality of how we come into the world. This reality puts into question the basis of democracy itself.

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JENNIFER L. EAGAN 1. Love, Interpersonal Relationships, and Sexual Difference

Irigaray’s later work expands her feminist theory to the problem to all political relationships, especially the relationships between democratic citizens. Her feminism is a philosophy that illuminates how to think about difference so that we do not reduce its categories to sameness. She shows us that in the Western philosophical tradition, we are often blind to difference, mostly with regard to sexual difference, but to other differences as well. For example, she would claim that we tend to reduce all women and men to homogeneous and fixed categories, placing every individual into one of the categories, “woman,” or “man.” Though this categorization appears to admit that women and men are different, within their respective groups, all individuals are homogenized. Irigaray shares the feminist assumption that a masculine norm has been the standard for all human beings in patriarchal Western culture. Women, if they are socially or politically visible at all, must become like men to be recognized as political beings. Where women appear as intelligible on the social-political landscape, they are characterized as man-like. Difference disappears altogether. For example, many argue that the United States does not need to revise its Constitution to include an Equal Rights Amendment that specifies that women are claimants to the rights listed in that document because they are already, though not always historically, included in the terms “man” and “citizen.” The fixed categories in which Western thinking places human beings preclude the possibility of mutual and equal relationships between nuanced and different entities because some entities have not yet come into being. Mutuality and equality are ideals in civic relationships and relationships between the sexes. Misperceived differences between citizens can also preclude constructive differences. Many theorists debate over what Irigaray understands sexual difference to mean. They wonder whether her assertion of sexual difference indicates a kind of essentialism. Her later work asserts a utopian political perspective; she asserts that sexual difference is about imagining new identities and relationships. According to Penelope Deutscher: [s]exual difference in this sense is not an ideal for monolithic, radically distinct, sexual identities occupied by men and women. It is an ideal for a culture in which sexed subjects would be primarily oriented toward the other, as opposed to drawing on the other only to provide succor for their own identity.2 Irigaray would argue that women do not yet know what they are or what they can be, since they cannot think of themselves outside of patriarchal

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structures, which either erase them by claiming sameness or devalue and other them by claiming their second-class difference. This process of becoming a woman relates to the project of rethinking all concepts, including democracy. Margaret Whitford observes: [I]n order to become a woman, it seems, it is first necessary to rethink all the categories which structure our thought and experience. It is not just a question of inventing some new terms, but of a total symbolic redistribution.3 Though this appears to be a monumental task, Irigaray gives us some hope that we can achieve the symbolic redistribution by establishing mutual relationships by recognizing genuine and nuanced differences between entities. This process is necessarily imperfect because we must attempt such relationships from an initial position of inequality and such relationships require equality as a starting point. We hope to achieve a genuine mutuality that recognizes that the other is irreducible to me and to my perspective. I am not him/her, and he/she is not me. I cannot lay any claim to understanding the position or perspective of this other, yet I can respect that he/she is different. Irigaray advocates reconceiving our semantics surrounding this expression of love: I love to you means I maintain a relation of indirection to you. I do not subjugate or consume you. I respect you (as irreducible) . . . I speak to you, not just about something; rather I speak to you. I tell you, not so much this or that, but rather I tell to you. The “to” is the guarantor of indirection. The “to” prevents the relation of transitivity, bereft of the other’s irreducibility and potential reciprocity. . . . The “to” is the sign of non-immediacy, of mediation between us.4 For Irigaray, love requires seeing and respecting difference. She claims that this is not yet happening due to unequal relationships. She encourages us to begin our investigation of love with the unequal, yet entrenched, relationship between men and women, as it has existed historically. She writes: [Karl] Marx defined the origin of man’s exploitation of man as man’s exploitation of women and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman. Why didn’t he devote his life to solving this problem of exploitation? 5 Irigaray suspects that Marx did not explore the problem of exploitation based on sex because he did not want to deal with the sticky, intimate nature of love, or lack thereof, in interpersonal relationships. Love is the fundamental problem of sexual difference. When we have disentangled this problem

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of love, we will have some insight into exploitation, oppression, and violent conflict. This failure to love across differences is why she says that men and women do not now know love or think of it in the same terms. In heterosexual relationships, men see love as anonymous sexual intimacy with a woman who is interchangeable with any other woman, while women love the universal category of men that a particular man stands for. Though Irigaray explicitly critiques the relationship between women and men, sexual difference is not strictly a problem of or for heterosexuality. People of all sexualities are subjected to homogeneous and fixed identities of different kinds, the structure of what it means to be sexed in Western culture is powerful such that all form or lose their identities in it. According to Elizabeth Grosz: If Irigaray’s recent texts advocate the creative, mysterious interchange between woman and man, this does not imply that her work is irrelevant to gay and lesbian politics. These texts problematize our culture’s understanding of both homosexuality and heterosexuality in their present forms.6 2. The Social Contract and Mutuality Irigaray branches out from her work on feminism to offer an alternative version of the basis for democracy primarily based on interpersonal love relationships. She makes an analogy between the relationship of men to women and the relationship of citizen-to-citizen. In both cases, the ideal is a mutual respect for difference without a demand for sameness. If we take love relationships as the model for democracy, we would deemphasize the focus on the two individuals or a group of individuals entering into a contract to get what they can for themselves from the relationship. She writes, “[t]he foundations of democracy have to be renewed as being-two, on the basis of a just relationship between two beings.”7 With a traditional social contract, civil justice can only exist after the establishment of the contract. In Irigaray’s view, the preexistence of justice within an interpersonal relationship is a precondition for a social contract. But she believes that the model of a contract establishes democracy as agonistic, so she abandons contract language altogether. Similarly, I argue that intimate interpersonal relationships do not work well if each party is wondering what goods they can secure for themselves individually, as in traditional social contract theory. This sort of gaming or strategizing is not what we would generally want in a love relationship; we would say that this sort of manipulative self-interest would undermine the basis of what we would call love. Instead, I agree with Irigaray when she advocates that democracy emanate from mutual respect and reciprocity among individuals. The central feature of democracy in her sense is not institutional, structural, or procedural, but fundamentally interpersonal. Each citizen would

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retain personal autonomy by virtue of this fundamental respect, but the basis of democracy would be interpersonal, not individualistic, not owned or claimed by either party. The ability of people to take on this perspective and create that inbetween space that constitutes a just relationship is what Irigaray calls “civil maturity.” For civil maturity to be possible, the relative absence of relations of oppression, domination, and especially a paternalism that denies the autonomy and responsibility of individuals is required. She sustains the paradox that the preconditions for relationships among citizens are identical to the conditions that should be the result of the relationship. The preconditions and outcome co-found each other. Irigaray urges that for a true democracy based on civil maturity to form, all citizens in a society must emerge from the infantilized and oppressed states that were generated in what passed for civil society before. To accomplish this goal, citizens must become responsible, recognize others as such, and not reenact old modes of dependence. Irigaray’s movements within this paradox of civil maturity are intriguingly Rousseauian and existentialist. What she calls the state of nature is analogous to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s discussion of corruption that civil society breeds. Like Rousseau, she holds that no original nature to be corrupted exists; corruption results only from a subsumption of freedom under domination.8 To counteract this tendency toward domination, we must assert the rights of individuals to insure their respect. Within this context, rights are an act of placing trust in a genuine other, much as in an interpersonal relationship: Paying attention in this manner to the rights of the individual seems to me also a way of entrusting each man and woman with personal responsibility, and with a means of resistance in the face of danger of a fascist sort. . . . This [recognizing difference within reciprocity] is not easy perhaps, but nor is domination or conflict. . . . Reciprocity refuses this game between two, who remain poles of a unique subject. Reciprocity obliges each woman and each man to remain within the self and to respect that s/he is irreducible, as is the other. This provides another way of emerging from childhood and dependence.9 This emergence is akin to accounts of the true becoming of an existential self, with an identity and life project uniquely ours. Irigaray appears to acknowledge her inheritance of an existentialist tradition. She describes becoming a citizen as parallel to becoming a genuine self. Ideally, we come to define ourselves as individuals not defined by others, but acknowledging that we always exist in relation to others. She argues for a model of citizenship universalizable as an ideal to which all citizens should to aspire, but one that does not insist on homogenization. This is a difficult position to envision, but

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citizenship is not a given state of being, but a chosen activity, a decision about how to live in relationship to others. With Irigaray, I believe that her model for the basis of democracy can ease the problems of sexist oppression, racism, and environmental destruction within a democratic society. First, we can look to interpersonal relationships as an ideal model of all relationships. Then, we can aspire to this ideal in cultivating relationships between citizens. If the relationships between citizens have love as the basis, then we can diminish the competition between citizens that fuels social ills. These ills, critical institutional and societal problems, begin at a simple interpersonal level. Can approaching democracy from an interpersonal perspective help us to bridge the gaps among people who are not fellow citizens in the same way, to resolve international conflicts without war? Yes, democracy is the best way to foster these values on an international, global level. If the love between civil equals takes the same character of “I love to you,” then “[t]he ‘to’ is also a barrier against alienating the other’s freedom in my subjectivity, my world, my language.”10 If I love others in a political sense, I do not demand their sameness to me or their agreement with me. 3. Terrorism and Enforced Homogeneity I am worried about what terrorism does to each of us as individuals and how it affects our everyday thinking, action, and interpersonal relationships that form the basis of, if we follow Irigaray, democracy. Reuters and other news agencies did not designate the 11 September attacks as “terrorism” because they recognized it as a value-laden term. Instead, they used the term “terror attacks,” which speaks more to the existential dimension of lived experience that I will address. Regardless whether these attacks constituted terrorism, they were terrifying. Richard Kearney, reading Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant, notes that the sublimity of terror does what Irigaray warns against: If “beauty is the symbol of morality” (Kant), the sublime is its opposite. For if the category of beauty induces democratic sentiments of universality and “sensus communis”—allied to the “enlarged thinking” which comes from our capacity to imagine what it is like to be others or to engage in concrete moral action–the sublime draws us away from such democratic impulses into an unworldly inwardness.11 Though we had been urged by President Bush and others to “go about our business,” with the emphasis on business, I worry that we turned away from each other as citizens and retreated into a traditional domestic and internal personal sphere. Understandably, any threat of death might cause this sort of retreat. Since terrorist acts can instill the fear that more terrorism could be

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imminent, such acts urge individuals toward this sort of retreat, rendering a return to normalcy quite difficult. Bat-Ami Bar On agrees, saying that terrorism is deliberately cruel, severing our relationships to one another as individuals. Striking at the heart of the mutuality necessary for interpersonal relationships, terrorism can create people incapable of love. Living in the face of such cruel danger entails the risk that we will let the fear of death dictate our actions instead of seeing such events as calls to responsibility for others and ourselves. We run the risk of becoming subhuman devils, clawing away at civil liberties in the name of security and seeking advantage over newly defined and defeated others. Being a citizen requires taking responsibility for our place in the world, not subjecting ourselves to an untrue cultural representation of difference, that we are all alike and have nothing in common with our enemies. This view of citizenship being about sameness serves to dehumanize us, and our alleged enemies. Real men and women are “not individuals in the abstract, impersonal, quite like robots or strange beings beyond the reach of death.”14 Salman Rushdie’s character Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses, symbolizes the sort of devil I fear we could become if we succumb to terrorism: After Chamcha survived a 30,000 foot fall to the ground from a hijacked, then exploded plane, his experience caused him to compare the person he had become with the life he lived before the fall. He realized that he had denied himself, rejected his past, and became a detested creature: I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it happened, it could not be denied. I am no longer myself, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin. Why? Why me? What evil had he done—what vile thing could he, would he do? For what was he—he couldn’t avoid the notion—being punished? And, come to that, by whom? . . . No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more thinking of myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I. Not I: another. Who?15 The story of Chamcha and Irigaray’s analysis of homogeneity suggest that evil has been mobilized as an anti-democratic concept. As Rushdie’s character discovers, evil emerges everyday, in our poor choices and in the generally shabby way we treat one another. If this is evil, then we are all capable of the banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt’s terms. Our shortcomings and ignorance that we do not seek to correct—not some metaphysical power like

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Satan—fuels evil. Whatever we call it, evil is the antithesis of the democratic values of respect, mutuality, and love. Since the events of 11 September 2001, the contrast between the use of force and violence to impose our will and the use of democratic deliberation as a respectful, just mode of engaging and including others as distinct equals, has become increasingly sharp to me. Mutual love and respect for others, not by terrorism, bombs, or the threat of death, should sway us. But we see force used more often than not because force is so compelling. Fundamentalism of any political or religious stripe is fundamentally opposed to democratic thinking. Fundamentalists are sure that they have found the absolute Truth. They believe their conviction gives them license to use force to compel others to accept their truth. This is the nature of tyranny, the forced ingestion of someone else’s (perceived) Truth. Democratic thinking, by contrast, is not morally or epistemologically relativistic. Truth still exists with a lower case “t,” but taking others seriously as people who search for truth with you means always and permanently remaining open to the possibly that they are right and you are wrong. Here reciprocity of the sort that Irigaray talks about comes into play; it insures that we respect our fellow citizens as responsible adults who make independent choices. Fundamentalism in this sense, irrational and anti-social, is currently justifying the use of force on both sides of our “new war.” Whether our Truth is, “Americans are infidels and deserve to die,” or, “We will never negotiate with terrorists,” both positions are impervious to other voices and to the force of a better reason. On the other hand, democracy requires us to accept the ambiguity of our ability to know and make claims. Tolerating other people’s truths and visions of the good life is not easy. Freedom of choice allows us to choose actions that are potentially damaging to others or ourselves. Many things that some of my fellow Americans do trouble me deeply. These include doing violence, driving gas-guzzling Sport Utility Vehicles, buying big houses in the suburbs, not caring where their products are made or by whom, being obsessed with consumerism, ignoring the poverty and suffering of other people, opposing the freedoms of others to live outside the norm, wanting to reduce social services, putting gum under seats in public places, smoking, not respecting the right of way of pedestrians, not picking up after their dogs, and insisting on doing all manner of selfdestruction. This list enumerates what I am against. But I would not have all of the people who do these behaviors or who hold such beliefs summarily shot. I am content to educate my fellow citizens and try to sway them to my position with the force of reason. I deliberate with them out of mutual respect. I also have to realize that others might not accept what I like or value what I do, and yet I have a duty to remain open. After considering their point of view, I am free, as are they, to remain unswayed by their arguments. I continue to stand for the freedoms that I desire for myself and for others.

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After the 11 September 2001 attacks, Rushdie wrote: The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.16 It just so happens that I am for these things, but I am also for others’ right not to value these things. Many of us are questioning the meaning of being a member of Western culture. Rushdie gives us some suggestions: The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war, but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.17 We do not have to agree on the virtue of bacon sandwiches, but on the right of people to choose bacon sandwiches (presuming that in deliberation we determine that bacon sandwiches should be legal and pose no immanent harm). Citizenship is the deliberation of citizens within a relationship of reciprocity. Genuine reciprocity defends the whole spectrum of human choices from the trivial to the sublime. Based on this premise of reciprocity, I am for diversity in every sense of the word; I am against enforced homogeneity. 4. An Irigarian Response to the Bush Doctrine of Preemption Reviewing Bush’s foreign policy reminds me that the notion of being positively convinced of being right and choosing sides is a potentially and perpetually dangerous one. I have asserted that Luce Irigaray’s view on mutuality requires that we not homogenize groups of people and their choices out of hand. This requires that we go beyond respecting or tolerating difference to seeing difference as a resource that we should preserve. In the United States since 11 September 2001, we have experienced the homogenization of all people into two abstract and overly simple categories of the “good” versus the “bad” and the unprecedented erosion of our civil rights under the stewardship of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Each of the two categories serves to fix individuals with essential and unchangeable characteristics without nuance or difference. Ultimately, the thinking behind the Bush doc-

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trine of preemption advocates the limitation of personal choice and expression, as I demonstrate below. “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (NSS), illustrates several homogenizing factors at work.18 First, it asserts a narrow and ideological version of American values. These values, the goodness of which the document arbitrarily takes to be self-evident, are human freedom (narrowly defined), democracy (Western-styled, traditional), free enterprise, free markets, free trade, and economic openness (mentioned most frequently and in a variety of colorful phrasings). This suggests that the American system of belief is univocal and fundamentally incompatible with the view of all terrorists. Next, the NSS document announces the right of the United States to respond with force to all threats to its political and economic freedoms, without suggesting that other countries have a similar right. The NSS states, “[W]e will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.” This suggests that conflict is unavoidable due to fundamental ideological differences, establishing a selffulfilling prophesy. The document reflects the unhelpful polarizing language of the Cold War, which led to the expensive and destructive battle between the friends and foes of capitalism, when a more nuanced understanding between the parties might have averted such a war and found common ground. We should not expect a different result with the war on terrorism. The NSS characterizes our enemy as a secret, covert, shadowy force organized around the hatred of “our way of life”: “The enemy is terrorism—premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocence.” We have a nameless, disembodied, and not personally responsible enemy that mimics and justifies our use of force. We similarly become an abstracted, univocal group of free consumers with no apparent need to dissent. The goods of freedom, democracy (by our definitions), and of capitalism remain both loosely defined and undefended. The homogenization of the “us” and “them,” who are either “with us or against us,” in President George W. Bush’s parlance, remains as both a threat to civil rights at home and to international peace. The Bush doctrine explicitly states this analogy; the White House is leading the way in this interpretation. In the NSS, freedom and democracy are inextricably linked to, if not subsumed under, capitalism. The second subheading, “Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity,” (which could be entitled “Our Way or the Highway!”), contains some liberal rhetoric. But at its core, this goal promises that the United States will use its economic and military strength to force the adoption of “principles we all cherish,” including the “respect for private property.” Section 6 explicitly mentions democracy: “Ignite a New Era of Global and Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade.” It and section 7,

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“Expand the Circle of Development by Opening Societies and Building the Infrastructure of Democracy,” are the longest and most detailed. As we can see from the titles, democracy is synonymous with, if not a mere vehicle for, free trade. Again, the rhetoric is that of compassionate conservatism, but the message is of securing United States’ economic interests at all costs. From an Irigarian perspective, the NSS document shows that enforced homogenization, especially economic homogenization, is the essence of the war on terrorism. Since this position appears to echo both the mistakes of the Cold War and the individualism of appropriation of the social contract, this message is nothing new and may be inherent in Western-style democracies. If democracy begins between two in a mutual recognition of difference, as Irigaray and I see it, the NSS (and the actions and rhetoric of the Bush Administration generally) is not democratic. This document acknowledges no plural voices or interests. Presuming that our leadership wants terrorism to end, I think it will require the mutual understanding that Irigaray is advocating.

NOTES 1. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Democracy Begins Between Two, trans. Kirsten Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2001). 2. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 77. 3. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 165. 4. Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 109. 5. Ibid., pp. 19 and 22–24 respectively. 6. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray,” Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, eds. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 348. 7. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, p. 118. 8. Whitford, Luce Irigaray, p. 174. 9. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, pp. 102–104. 10. Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 110. 11. Richard Kearney, “Terror, Philosophy, and the Sublime,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29:1 (2003), p. 41. 12. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, p.37. 13. Bat-Ami Bar On, “Why Terrorism is Morally Problematic,” Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), pp. 116–120. 14. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, p. 37. 15. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador USA, 1988). 16. Salman Rushdie, “Fighting the Forces of Invisibility,” The Washington Post, 2 October 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55876-2001Oct1 (accessed 25 May 2006).

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17. Ibid. 18. “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” 17 September 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html (accessed 25 May 2006).

Three RESPONSIBILITY AND/IN CRISIS Dianna Taylor How can we measure length if we do not have a yardstick, how can we count things without the notion of numbers? —Hannah Arendt1 We must restore the readiness to think, against the tendency to have everything prepared in advance and, as it were, placarded in slogans. —Karl Jaspers2 Freedom always implies freedom of dissent.

—Hannah Arendt3

Hannah Arendt’s experience of World War II led her to believe that harm stems not only from overt terror, violence, and cruelty, but also from more implicit but no less troubling phenomena. Among the most significant of these was the widespread uncritical acceptance of, and collaboration and complicity with, totalitarian regimes. From her perspective, insofar as uncritical acceptance allowed these regimes to remain in place, it functioned in the service of domination. Uncritical acceptance and the domination it facilitated were exacerbated because totalitarianism threw Western culture into what Arendt terms a “crisis in meaning.” By defying comprehension in terms of existing political concepts and invoking such concepts (most notably freedom, authority, and national identity) in the name of repression and mass destruction, the crisis in meaning simultaneously created a need for the development of new ways of making sense of the world and inhibited such development. Given the connection Arendt perceived between the uncritical acceptance of convention and domination, it makes sense that she also posited a connection between critical reflection upon contemporary reality and emancipation: Critical reflection might elucidate the destructive deployment of traditional concepts, categories, and principles and facilitate their reconceptualization in emancipatory terms. In this chapter, I argue that current conditions within the United States are analogous to those I have described above in the sense that the 11 September 2001 attacks on the New York City World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 produced a crisis in meaning, the effects of which the United States is still experiencing.4 I will also show that within the post-11 September United States, both the federal government and the media have invoked

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prevailing ethical and political concepts and categories in ways that promote conformity with the status quo and inhibit the kind of critical reflection upon and engagement with the present that might facilitate a productive negotiation of the current crisis. Ongoing concerns with identifying and bringing to justice those persons “responsible” for the attacks, formulating and executing a “responsible” governmental response to the attacks, and promoting “responsible” behavior among the United States citizenry illustrate the prominence of questions of responsibility within the post-Sept. 11 context. Given such prominence, my emphasis on the nature and function of the concept of responsibility within the context of a crisis in meaning appears especially instructive. While the country has been preoccupied primarily with the “hunt for bin Laden” and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I focus on the third issue: What might constitute a responsible response on the part of United States citizens to the events of 11 September? If we take seriously the claim that the United States is currently experiencing a crisis in meaning, then a responsible response needs to be conceived in terms of critical reflection upon our present reality, which aims at making sense of, and promoting freedom within it. I will show that government and the media have largely construed responsible action on the part of United States citizens in terms of obedience to authority, a conceptualization that promotes quiescence and the acceptance of prevailing conditions as necessary conditions instead of critical reflection. I begin my analysis by identifying and briefly discussing two broad types of responsibility that I refer to as “normative” and “critical” responsibility. Next, I turn to the work of Arendt, whose conceptualization and analysis of the crisis in meaning she experienced, I will show, provide valuable insight into how the United States crisis in meaning might be productively negotiated.5 This conceptualization and analysis reflect Arendt’s desire to confront and make sense not only of collaboration with the Nazi regime, but also complacency, indifference, and thoughtlessness in the face of its horrors. How, she wonders, could people have performed such acts in the name of responsibility and be perceived as responsible? Arendt also seeks to identify ways in which reflective, critical thinking,—which might have facilitated the production of alternative interpretations of such conduct—was considered to be irresponsible, with the result that such it was inhibited or rendered ineffectual. Finally, Arendt’s analysis reflects her attempt to begin developing new ways of thinking about what it means to behave responsibly within the context of a crisis, such that “responsible action” furthers the practice of freedom.6 Arendt’s work on these issues facilitates my outline of the nature of a crisis in meaning and helps to show that, while normative and critical responsibility are always in tension with one another, under crisis conditions this tension becomes heightened. I proceed by drawing upon Arendt’s analysis of the status of responsibility under crisis conditions to show how such condi-

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tions distort normative responsibility in ways that allow it to function in the service of domination and to inhibit critical responsibility, the performance of which might combat domination and further the practice of freedom. I then analyze current conditions within the United States to show that the events of 11 September 2001 can be understood as producing a crisis in meaning and as a result simultaneously intensifying the need for and complicating the performance of both types of responsibility. The essay’s conclusion reiterates my point regarding the value of Arendt’s work for negotiating the current crisis and identifies three directions in which that work pushes persons committed to the struggle for freedom. As I see it, persons are responsible in two general ways, which I refer as “normative” and “critical.” Larry May points out that responsibility in general arises out of the relationship that persons have to the world in which they live; normative and critical responsibility are not exceptions. Thinking about responsibility in this way is compatible with the work of Arendt, who conceives of the world as a space common to all persons that both brings them together and facilitates their distinguishing themselves as “unique, distinct” individuals.7 She says that the world is like a table at which multiple persons are seated: they form a group insofar as the space they inhabit is common to all of them, yet this same space distinguishes them from one another because each person occupies a separate place at the table. According to Arendt, all persons are responsible for sustaining or “caring for” the world, and we fulfill this responsibility by way of engaging in activities that endow the world with meaning. (The meaning-making activities that most concerned Arendt over the course of her life are understanding, thinking, and judging).8 The performance of normative responsibility is meaning-producing in the sense that it involves participating in, and as a result, supporting, and making meaningful existing social and political institutions and systems. Normative responsibility is akin to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the private use of reason in the sense that it involves persons fulfilling prescribed social roles to which some obligations are attached.9 Examples include professional obligations (tenure requirements, committee work), family obligations (caring for children or a sick parent), or general obligations of citizenship (voting, jury duty). Put differently, the nature and scope of normative responsibility is shaped by the social and political institutions that characterize a particular community. Critical responsibility, like the public use of reason as Kant conceives of it, is not similarly constrained. It is meaning-producing in the sense that it involves the interpretation—in the sense of critical reflection and analysis— of these same social and political institutions and systems.10 Edward Said’s description of the nature and function of “the intellectual” within society provides an effective way of thinking about what I am calling critical responsibility. This type of responsibility involves adopting a particular kind of attitude toward, or orientation within, the world, “a sense of being unwill-

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ing to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-soaccommodating confirmation of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.”11 So conceived, critical responsibility entails persons engaging in and furthering public action and dialogue in ways that raise issues which would otherwise go unaddressed and give voice to opinions which would otherwise remain unarticulated. Said believes that intellectuals are most responsible in a critical sense. But from an Arendtian perspective, since all persons are responsible for the world, critical responsibility extends to all. As is the case with the public use of reason for Kant, from an Arendtian perspective, only critical responsibility is properly political; only its performance functions directly in the service of freedom.12 Arendt does not conceive of politics in terms of participation in existing political institutions. Instead, Arendtian politics consists of persons coming together for the purposes of action and speech and is characteristically spontaneous and agonistic in ways that both the activities of the state and organized “political” parties are not and cannot be. Politics, for Arendt, brings people together in such a way that their “unique distinctness” is preserved and fostered: within the context of normative responsibility, persons are defined, to greater and lesser degrees, as “whats”—in terms of their function within broader systems and institutions.13 This is not the case with critical responsibility, which entails—to some extent—challenging in the sense of critically analyzing and not prima facie accepting—our social roles and their functions; the performance of critical responsibility positions persons as “whos.” All of this is not to say that normative responsibility is politically irrelevant. Arendt observes that the world is full of things that are “the work of [human] hands,” and which endow the “human artifice” with its “durability.”14 By virtue of their durability, the things of the world possess a degree of independence “from men who produced and use them,” and this relative objectivity of things provides human affairs, characteristically unpredictable and unreliable, with a degree of stability: “the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life.”15 Without normative responsibility functioning to give meaning to and thereby support existing sociopolitical institutions, which comprise the structure of society, no meaningful spontaneity and agonism in the sense of politics can exist, merely chaotic activity. Given this function, we need to understand normative responsibility as providing the conditions for the possibility of political activity and, by extension, for freedom. As described here, normative and critical responsibility, both required for world-sustenance, are in tension with one another. But persons are generally able to negotiate this tension without too much difficulty; they can fulfill their institutional obligations while also engaging in some activities that challenge the status quo. Still, under some conditions, to which I refer as condi-

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tions of “crisis,” the tension between the two types of responsibility intensifies. In a crisis, the performance of critical responsibility becomes more crucial and more difficult because under these same conditions the performance of normative responsibility may function in the service of domination. Works such as Arendt’s analysis of the oppressive nature of bureaucratic institutions and Michel Foucault’s examination of the workings of power within the context of modern societies show that good reasons exist for always approaching normative responsibility critically.16 But taking this insight seriously does not mean that crisis conditions cannot be considered unique. Such conditions compromise or even destroy the tools upon which persons have traditionally relied to make sense of the world; crisis conditions prove unique. They also curtail the development of new tools by fostering support for the status quo and inhibiting the kind of critical engagement with the present that might stimulate the development of new ways of thinking and acting. In this chapter, I conceive of a “crisis” in the Arendtian sense of a “crisis in meaning,” as a context in which persons’ ability to make sense of the world, and their existence within it, is greatly compromised. A crisis in meaning is generated by an unprecedented event such as, in the case of Arendt’s life and work, the phenomenon of totalitarianism. She argues that totalitarianism constitutes a new form of government: it arose out of sociopolitical and historical conditions, was characterized by exceptional forms of terror, and produced uniquely destructive effects. Yet newness as such is not totalitarianism’s most problematic aspect. “The originality of totalitarianism,” Arendt writes: is horrible, not because some new “idea” came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; [these actions] have clearly exploded our categories of thought and our standards for moral judgment.17 This “explosion” of existing categories and standards—tools by means of which persons make sense of the world—produces a crisis in meaning. According to Arendt, totalitarianism accomplishes the “explosion” of meaningmaking tools in two related ways. The first is by defying comprehension in terms of existing categories and standards. Totalitarianism cannot be understood as a “lust for power,” for example, nor is it the same as tyranny; likewise, the concept of “murder” (or even “mass murder”) cannot adequately express the nature and scope of its crimes.18 Second, existing categories and standards have themselves been used in the service of totalitarian domination. Under the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, traditional political, legal, and moral concepts and standards were invoked to justify unjust, illegal, and immoral acts. As Arendt puts it, “every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime.”19 Given this (mis)use, such categories and standards cannot be relied

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upon to promote justice, nor can they provide a foundation upon which to base moral and political judgments. Within the context of a crisis in meaning, traditional modes of making sense—meaning-making norms, so to speak— are not merely inadequate but also potentially harmful. Arendt argues that the one meaning-making tool which remains after all others have been seriously compromised is lived experience. “Thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience,” she writes, “and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.”20 Only through engaging reality will persons be able to critically analyze both it and their experiences within it, and so hope to develop new ways of thinking and interpretations, which might aid in making sense of their situation. Yet crisis also threatens the ability of persons to draw upon their lived experience. A terrible reality, of which no readily apparent way exists to make sense, promotes disengagement from reality. Such disengagement, in turn, promotes acceptance of, or resignation to, the status quo. Persons come to view the events of their time as no different from others that exist or have existed in the world and to subsume the new and terrible under the known and familiar. Acceptance or resignation may provide persons with a sense of comfort or normalcy insofar as they can tell themselves they know what they are dealing with, possess or are able to access the tools necessary to negotiate their situation, and can carry on in ways familiar to them.21 As Arendt puts it, we “console ourselves that nothing worse or less familiar will take place than general human sinfulness.”22 But within a context where norms and uncritical adherence to them functions in the service of oppression, humanity pays a high price when it seeks to achieve (or convinces itself that it has achieved) conviction in the face of contingency. The horror of reality causes people to disengage, but in doing so they reject not only horror but also reality, and deprive themselves of their only available meaning-making resource. While she understands why persons would be compelled to turn away from the reality of a crisis, Arendt argues that we must resist such an impulse because disengagement reinforces the crisis and functions in the service of domination. The situation as I have described it thus far is as follows: crises destroy or seriously compromise traditional meaning-making tools in the form of categories of thought and standards of judgment. One tool, lived experience, remains, but is also threatened, because of ways in which crises foster disengagement from reality. Within this kind of crisis context, the significance of critical responsibility is readily apparent: critical thinkers are more likely to engage reality, less likely to succumb to acceptance of and resignation to the status quo and so more able to resist domination and promote the practice of freedom. Arendt argues that within the context of crisis, “much more reliable will be the doubters and the skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examin[ing] things and mak[ing] up their own minds.”23 But as is probably already apparent from my

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description of the intensification of the tension between normative and critical responsibility that occurs under crisis conditions, crises also compromise persons’ critical and decision making capabilities—their ability to perform their critical responsibility—and they do so in two ways that interest me here. The first way is through the distortion and reconceptualization of normative responsibility as mere obedience to authority. The second way is through the subsequent masking of their destructive effects by way of depicting critique (and by extension critical responsibility) as irresponsible or even immoral. I want to turn to the provocative account of the status of responsibility under crisis conditions that Arendt provides in lectures she delivered on the subject of “personal” and “moral” responsibility “under totalitarian dictatorships” to address these two points. In her analysis, Arendt takes care to distinguish responsibility from guilt. She argues that guilt is always and only individual or personal: “It is only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we feel guilty for the sins of our fathers, or our people, or of humankind; in short, for deeds we have not done.”24 If an individual commits an infraction, denying guilt is morally problematic. But Arendt believes that erroneously claiming guilt is just as objectionable. From her perspective, feelings of guilt among the general German population, while Nazi criminals denied culpability during the Nuremburg Trials represents the “quintessence of moral confusion.” “Where all are guilty,” Arendt writes, “no one is.”25 In contrast, insofar as they are members of a community, persons may be held responsible for acts they have not committed. Arendt refers to this type of responsibility as “political” or “collective,” and argues that it can take two forms.26 The first and older form entails community accountability for individual actions. The second and more recent form entails community accountability for government actions committed in its name. For example, I live in a state that practices capital punishment. While I may personally oppose this practice, I can be considered responsible for its continuation, insofar as executions are carried out in the name of the “people of the state of Ohio.” For persons to extricate themselves from political/collective responsibility is virtually impossible. “We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by leaving the community,” Arendt writes, “and since no one can live without belonging to some community, this would mean to exchange one community for another and hence one responsibility for another.”27 For example, I can move from Ohio to a non-death penalty state, or leave the country altogether and no longer be responsible for executions, but I have not left behind my political responsibility as such, given that I take up residence in some other community. Totalitarian states, on the other hand, present a different situation. Persons living within such states are deprived of their political responsibility not because they, like stateless persons and refugees, lack a place in the world, but because the states within which they live are not properly communities:

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persons cannot come together for the purposes of action and speech, and no public sphere exists. Nor is there any private sphere, for everything persons do is open to surveillance and public scrutiny. Under such conditions persons are, according to Arendt, “condemned to impotence.”28 But being deprived of political responsibility does not mean that persons are removed from all responsibility. Arendt argues that “moral” or “personal” responsibility “begins where political responsibility ends,” which is under conditions of impotence where a person either cannot or will not “do anything for the world.”29 With respect to personal responsibility, then, Arendt analyzes two arguments made to excuse or even justify criminal and immoral actions within Nazi Germany, both of which contribute to the distortion and reconceptualization of normative personal responsibility. The first argument relies upon what she calls the “cog-theory,” which was invoked by the defense at the Adolf Eichmann trial to claim that he was only a “cog” in a larger, immoral system and not (or not fully) responsible for his actions. In attacking this argument, Arendt points out that systems cannot be held accountable for anything; if an individual “happens to be a functionary, he stands accused precisely because even a functionary is still a human being, and it is in this capacity that he stands trial.”30 Even if Eichmann were only a cog in a machine, as a human being, he was obliged to justify why he became or remained a cog. Arendt does not mean to imply that systems are completely irrelevant. She argues that they come into play in the form of “circumstances” which can mitigate but not totally excuse our actions. The second argument, and the one which most concerns me here, is that of “the lesser evil.” According to this argument, when faced with two evils persons have a “duty” to choose the lesser one because it would be “irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether.”31 I have chosen to focus on the argument of the lesser evil because not only does it contribute to the reconceptualization of normative responsibility as obedience, but also it functions to distort and inhibit critical responsibility. According to Arendt, persons who cooperated with the Nazi regime invoked this argument to justify their actions. Critics considered persons who, for example, worked for the Nazis so they could covertly aid and provide forged documents for some Jews (persons who chose the lesser evil), to be above reproach because they tried to do something to help. But Arendt challenges the idea that cooperating with the Nazis to engage in subversive activity might be an instance of normative responsibility. She argues that “choosing” the lesser evil is not properly a choice at all. “The argument of the lesser evil,” she writes: is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials and the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.32

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“Choosing” the lesser evil, then, is merely an aping and rearticulation of official, institutionalized norms and values—an instance of obedience to authority. Obedience, Arendt argues, has no place in political or moral discourse. “Only a child obeys,” she states, “if an adult ‘obeys,’ he actually supports the organization or the authority or the law that claims ‘obedience.’”33 Obedience is demanded and, as such, is anti-political; thought, deliberation, and decision making play no part in it. While social and political institutions do shape normative responsibility, Arendt’s work illustrates that they do not determine it. Normative responsibility is still premised upon the ability of persons to decide how they will in undertake it. Demanding obedience to authority in the name of responsibility also distorts and, as a result, inhibits critical responsibility. The argument of the lesser evil allows persons to perform evil because it masks the true character of the “less evil” action: persons believe themselves to be helping others and are able to see their actions as moral and responsible. It follows from the perception of choosing the lesser evil as moral that “those who did nothing”— non-participants—“shirk[ed] all responsibilities and [thought] only of themselves.”34 Non-participants are perceived as selfish, immoral, and irresponsible. Arendt challenges these characterizations by arguing that within a context of impotence or powerlessness—the context in which personal responsibility is relevant—non-participation is an expression of critical responsibility. Under ordinary political conditions, we may rightly consider refusing to participate in public affairs as “irresponsible,” insofar as such participation generally reproduces conditions for the possibility of freedom. Under the crisis conditions described above, no active public realm exists; all social and political institutions are controlled by, and serve the repressive regime currently in place. Insofar as participation is harmful, we can understand non-participation, what Arendt calls “withdrawal of support,” as responsible. Support, not obedience, legitimates political institutions: persons decide whether to give support— critical and deliberative processes form the foundation for support. Since persons give support, they can also withdraw it. Arendt believes that such withdrawal may be, in the case of crises that effect powerlessness, the only responsible course of action. Non-participants both refuse support and, she asserts, “those places of ‘responsibility’ where such support, under the name of obedience, is required.”35 If persons’ ability to perform their critical responsibility, in the sense of openly challenging the status quo, is compromised to the point that doing so functions solely in the service of domination, they may still exercise responsibility by deciding not to act. Arendt argues that through “this admission of our impotence . . . a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved under these desperate conditions.”36 Nonparticipation is a general strategy, but a strategy of last resort. It can be considered a responsible course of action only in situations where any action supports domination (situations where persons are reduced to a position

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of “impotence”). For impotent persons nonparticipation is a decision made via critical reflection on the conditions of our present and must not be confused with mere thoughtless acceptance of the status quo. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the New York City World Trade Center, on the United States Pentagon, and on United Airlines Flight 93 are obviously different from the phenomenon of totalitarian domination. Still, attacks on civilians such as these were unprecedented in the United States. The reactions to, and effects of, the attacks within the country are analogous to those about which Arendt expresses concern.37 (Like Arendt, in making this claim about unprecedentedness, I do not intend to separate events from their broader social, political, and historical contexts. Neither do I intend to suggest that the attacks were somehow more serious than other violent and terrifying acts that have occurred and continue to occur in the world.) As is the case with any trauma, people reacted to the attacks with shock and horror, along with the understandable desire for an explanation, some assurance of safety, and the restoration of a semblance of normalcy. “Providing an explanation,” in the case of a crisis, needs to be construed in terms of making sense of the events by way of critically reflecting upon them— something which is not incompatible with promoting security and restoring social, political, and economic life. Yet the official governmental response to the events of 11 September 2001 greatly inhibited critical reflection among the citizenry. On one hand, the existing concepts of “war” and “terrorism” were invoked to make sense of the attacks in ways that have been not only ineffective but also harmful. On the other hand, the concept of “patriotism” has been invoked in ways that have distorted normative responsibility such that it has come to be conceived in terms of obedience to authority, whereas critical responsibility has been construed as irresponsible or even immoral. While in no way providing an exhaustive account of the complex, post-11 September United States political and moral terrain, I will discuss each of these points in turn. That the events of 11 September 2001 rendered problematic the means by which sense might be made of them is apparent in their (simultaneous) characterization as both acts of war and acts of terrorism. In addressing a joint session of Congress and the United States public on 20 September 2001, the President describes the attacks as “an act of war against our country.”38 Like major network news broadcasts at the time, George W. Bush proceeds to liken the 11 September attacks to Japan’s December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, stating that while the United States had participated in many “wars on foreign soil,” only once since the American Civil War—“one Sunday in 1941”—had an act of war been committed against it.39 Yet in that same speech, Bush states that the attacks were committed by terrorists, naming alQaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. He describes al-Qaeda as being comprised of “thousands of terrorists in more than sixty countries” and

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having ties to many other terrorist organizations. Given the nature of the “enemy” in the war upon which the United States has embarked, Bush states that the “war on terror” will be “unlike any other we have ever seen.”40 Since Bush’s speech, the rhetoric of a “war on terror” has been adopted and expanded to the point of becoming institutionalized within United States culture in ways ranging from the establishment of an Office of Homeland Security and its terror alert system to increased security checks at airports. Yet David Luban argues persuasively that if neither concept—war nor terrorism—alone adequately makes sense of the attacks, combining them in the form of a war on terror(ism) will be no more effective for the purposes of making sense.41 According to Luban, the notion of a war on terror is the manifestation of a “hybrid war-law approach” to dealing with the events of 11 September 2001, an approach that has proven to function in the service of oppression. Treating the attacks as an act of war frees the United States government from traditional legal constraints. Treating them as terrorist—criminal—activity effectively applies those same constraints to persons (and nations) voicing opposition to the United States, even if such opposition in expressed in legitimate and peaceful ways. As Luban argues, “selectively combining elements of the war model and the law model” allows the government to “maximize its own ability to mobilize lethal force against terrorists while eliminating most traditional rights of a military adversary, and the rights of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.” The suspension of the rights of large numbers of persons detained since the 11 September attacks and the situation of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, provide perhaps the most compelling examples of Luban’s points.42 Among the United States population more generally, the official response to the crisis in meaning produced by the 11 September attacks has functioned to promote the kind of disengagement from reality that Arendt finds so problematic. First, the unprecedented phenomenon of the attacks has been subsumed under existing categories that do not adequately or accurately aid in the process of making sense of them. This subsumption was accomplished quickly and effectively by reading the attacks through the lens of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, a reading that both stemmed from and in turn facilitated an interpretation of the attacks as an act of war requiring a military response. But a frightening, complex reality was replaced by an ideology that rendered the situation no worse than an event with which United States citizens are all familiar and which, coincidentally, was eventually (and successfully) resolved through military action. Such a familiar account of unprecedented events is placating, but in uncritically accepting it, persons forfeit the meaningmaking tool of their lived experience. Official rhetoric shaping “our” collective reaction to the attacks is the second way in which disengagement has been encouraged. In the opening

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remarks of his first address to the nation on the evening of 11 September, President Bush states that the attacks “filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger”; he reiterates this point in his 20 September 2001 address where he again states, “our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” 43 Bush employs two rhetorical devices here that have an impact upon the national climate. On one hand, he does not speak of his personal feelings regarding the attacks but voices those of the collective “American people.” In telling people what the rest of the country is (supposedly) feeling, Bush sends a strong message about what constitutes an appropriate response. On the other hand, he appeals to feelings, not thought. At no point in either the address of 11 or 20 September does Bush call for critical reflection upon what occurred; instead, already having provided an interpretation of the events, he emphasizes formulating and implementing a swift and decisive military response against “our” enemies.44 Although President Bush does not explicitly say it, his rhetoric implies that the official interpretation of, and response to, the events of 11 September are the only responsible ones. He articulates this implication most plainly and strongly in his 20 September speech: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”45 “Responsible” action (action opposed to terrorism) is action that supports the Bush Administration; all other action will be seen as supporting terrorism, therefore, “irresponsible” (or worse). While Bush refers to the actions of other nations in his speech, he has also applied these same equations domestically. One of the most effective mechanisms of this domestic deployment has been the rhetoric of “patriotism.” (The conflation of patriotism and obedience has been challenged but is still pervasive, as evinced by, for example, the recent failure of the United States House of Representatives to challenge key provisions of the United States Patriot Act.) Through such rhetoric, supporting the country and United States troops (action generally considered to be patriotic) has become synonymous with supporting the President, his administration, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Patriot Act, which gives broad discretion to the President himself with respect to determining what constitutes “terrorist activity” or even the “aiding of terrorists,” has played a major role in strengthening and institutionalizing the equation of patriotic expression with support of the Bush Administration and its military actions.46 The argument of the lesser evil is at work here: United States citizens are being presented with a choice of either “choosing” the evil of terrorism, or “choosing” the (lesser) evil of participating in political institutions that compromise civil liberties and perpetuate violence in the name of ensuring national security. Under these kinds of conditions, participating in existing social and political institutions and systems—what I have defined as normative responsibility—becomes interconnected with obedience to political authority as manifest in the figure of the executive.47

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While I do not think normative responsibility has been reduced to obedience, pressure in that direction obviously exists. Meaningful participation in political institutions consists of the ability to act in ways that make a difference and that reflect persons’ deliberative and decision-making processes. It consists of persons’ ability to give the support to political institutions, which comprises the source of those institutions’ legitimacy. I believe our ability to give this sort of support has been compromised. The ability of persons to perform their critical responsibility has obviously also been compromised. Given that the United States has not reached the point where all participation in political institutions functions in the service of oppression, critical reflection upon existing political institutions, including expressions of political dissent, is still possible. What we do see is an extremely broad construal of what constitutes political dissent and the labeling of all such expressions as “unpatriotic” or even supportive of terrorism and, by extension, irresponsible. Expressions of political dissent have been inhibited and censored in a variety of ways. Matthew Rothschild chronicles many examples of censorship that occurred in the weeks and months prior to 11 September 2001, including challenges to free speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and academic freedom.48 Opposition to the war in Iraq has been decried as unpatriotic, and persons protesting the war have been accused of playing into the hands of terrorists by presenting to the world the picture of an internally divided and (so the argument goes) weak nation. The Patriot Act has curbed expressions of dissent by defining terrorist activities and the support of such activities so broadly and giving so much individual power to the United States President: a context in which persons are not quite sure whether their words and actions might be considered sympathetic to terrorism increases the likelihood of self-censorship. Individual citizens need not offer interpretations of their present that conflict with the official one; they are actively discouraged from or even punished for doing so. In recent months, the struggle over how to make sense of the post-11 September 2001 United States has become both more intense and more visible. Such struggle is apparent, for example, in the challenges that have been raised against the Bush Administration’s justification for the war in Iraq and the turmoil over photos of United States troops “abusing” Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib Prison. (The conflict over whether to construe the military’s treatment of prisoners as “abuse” or “torture” provides further illustration of this point). That official interpretations of these events are being challenged signals the existence of critical reflection upon prevailing ideas about what the United States stands for, its position in the world and policies vis a vis the international community, and what it means to be a United States citizen. Within the current context of crisis, I see the (re)emergence of intense struggle as a positive development that needs to be expanded for, as Zygmunt

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Bauman argues, “[t]he voice of individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and social discord.” 49 If we take seriously Arendt’s claim that not only the “stupid . . . wicked, or . . . ill-informed,” but also persons who possess the best of intentions—in some instances because of those intentions—may (unwittingly) act in the service of oppression in a crisis, then struggle and discord do not signify, as has been suggested by some, weakness.50 They indicate participation in and support for social and political institutions, as opposed to mere obedience to authority. Struggle and discord help to insure that no single interpretation of reality gains precedence at the expense of all others. Struggle is an expression of (normative and critical) responsibility, and of the practice of freedom. Arendt did not intend to tell people “what to think or which truths to hold.”51 Telling others what to think and do is a way of dictating how they ought to interpret and participate in their reality; it effectively makes meaning for them, removing them from their world-responsibility, and threatening the world. Under conditions of crisis, seeking to provide guarantees or to convince ourselves and others that they are or might be possible are, from her perspective, endeavors that function in the service of domination. Instead, Arendt’s intention was to identify what she referred to as “guideposts,” exemplary lives, actions, and ways of thinking that (re)create the conditions under which the struggle over what to think and which truths to hold is possible at all. Guideposts do not dictate thoughts and actions; they function to prevent us from becoming totally lost as we engage in the practice of thinking, acting, and judging for ourselves within the particularities of our situations. I believe Arendt’s work can serve as a guidepost in the contemporary United States. United States citizens have not become totally complacent, nor are they in a situation of impotence. Because the United States has not reached the point where its citizens must say, “I do not want any part of this world,” we need to be concerned with what can done to prevent the country from reaching that point.52 To continue recreating the conditions under which struggle is possible—conditions for the possibility of freedom—persons need to keep sight of three guideposts to which my analysis here draws attention, each of which deserves further consideration and development. The first involves vigilance about how we perform our normative responsibility: this performance has to be grounded in reality and decision, not reduced to obedience. The second involves vigilance about how we perform our critical responsibility: we must identify current practices that have become oppressive; analyze their oppressive function; and develop new, non-oppressive modes of interacting with the world and with each other. The third involves vigilance about our consciences. “Having a conscience,” for Arendt, entails being in dialogue and “living together with” oneself; it entails “keeping one’s own company.”53 She argues that under totalitarianism persons who refused to

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participate did so not because they adhered to a prevailing moral code, but because “they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.”54 Some people do not keep their own company; they have no conscience. Yet those who do will be able to take responsibility for the world. Persons achieve this by working for emancipatory social transformation which bears in mind Arendt’s counsel about both “the unwilling[ness] [of] the human mind . . . to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference” and the relative ease with which people can be led “to conduct themselves in the unexpected and most outrageous manner.” 55

NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” ed. Jerome Kohn, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 313. 2. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (Bronx, New York: Fordham Univesrsity Press, 2002), p. 6. 3. Hannah Arendt, “Thought on Politics and Revolution,” Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 201–233, quote p. 221. 4. Ibid. 5. See Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Constellations 9(4), 2002. 6. See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Melissa Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Pres, 1997); and Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7. Larry May, “Shared Responsibility and Racist Attitudes,” Sharing Responsibility (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 36–54. 8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 176. 9. See Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” pp. 307–327; The Life of the Mind, Volume I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978); and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 10. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983), pp. 41–48. 11. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996). 12. Ibid., p. 23. 13. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” 14. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 175–247.

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15. Ibid. pp. 136–174. 16. Ibid., p. 137. 17. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1973); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 18. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” p. 310. 19. Ibid., p. 312; and Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” Essays in Undertanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 328–360. 20. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Speeches and Writings File: 1923–1975, p. 32. 21. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), p.14 22. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism.” 23. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” p. 312. 24. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” p. 37. 25. Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James William Bernauer (Boston, Mass.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 43. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., pp. 44, 45. 28. Ibid., p. 43. 29. Arendt, “Moral Responsibility under Dictatorship,” The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Speeches and Writings File: 1923–1975, p. 1 30. Ibid., p. 6. 31. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” p. 19. 32. Ibid., p. 26. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 38 (emphasis added). 35. Ibid., p. 39. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 38 38. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (New York: Verso, 2004). 39. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People” (speech, Washington, D.C., 20 September 2001), http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (accessed 27 May 2006). 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. David Luban, “The War on Terrorism and the End of Human Rights,” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 22:3 (2002), pp. 9–14. 43. See Ronald Dworkin, “The Threat to Patriotism,” The New York Review of Book, (28 February 2002): pp. 44–49; Luban, “The War on Terrorism and the End of Human Rights,” p. 10; Judith Butler, “Guantanamo Limbo,” The Nation, 1 April 2002, pp. 20–22; and Butler, “Indefinite Detention,” Precarious Life. 44. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” 45. Butler, Precarious Life.

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46. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” 47. See Dworkin, “The Threat to Patriotism”; Adrew Arato, “The Bush Tribunals and the Specter of Dictatorship,” Constellations, 9:4 (2002), pp. 457–476; William E. Scheuerman, “Rethinking Crisis Government,” Constellations, 9:4 (2002), pp. 492–505; and Robin Blackburn, “The Imperial Presidency, the War on Terrorism, and the Revolutions of Modernity,” Constellations, 9:4 (2002), pp. 3–33. 48. Scheuerman, “Rethinking Crisis Government.” 49. Matthew Rothschild, “The New McCarthyism,” The Progressive Magazine, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McCarthyism/New_McCarthyism_Prog.html (accessed 27 May 2006). 50. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 166. 51. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 328–360. 52. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 14 (Arendt’s emphasis). 53. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” p. 37. 54. Ibid., p. 36. 55. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 17.

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Part Two DEMOCRACY AS A REMEDY FOR TERRORISM

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Four JIHAD OR THE BELOVED COMMUNITY? BENJAMIN R. BARBER ON TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DEMOCRACY Mar Peter-Raoul Political theorist Benjamin R. Barber in a new, post-11 September 2001, Introduction to his Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy, delineates the global context that made possible al-Qaeda’s “fearsomely unprecedented and altogether astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the cathedral of American military might in Washington, D.C.”1 Furthering a critical understanding of the why of both terrorism and today’s proliferation of terrorist groups, he offers an analysis of the global conditions in which the Osama bin Ladens of the world enlist new recruits into terrorist networks. He also advances a global agenda toward transforming these conditions—conditions in which poverty, disease, and domination are embedded—into those of a society socially and economically just, democratic, interdependent—and safer. Putting into practice his agenda he is a founding member of both The Democracy Collaborative and CivWorld, each working to bring together world alliances to institute democracy initiatives. Long before 11 September, Barber was an advocate for social justice and a participatory democracy rooted in civil society. His An Aristocracy of Everyone and A Passion for Democracy brim with notions of achieving a democratic citizenry taking responsibility for local communities and increasingly for global conditions, and cite academic-based community service as both a critical component of democratic citizenship and a crucial part of the process for achieving it.2 Increasingly, in post-11 September interviews and speeches, he advocates global democracy characterized by global citizenship and an international economic democracy. I will present Barber’s key thought related to global terror, especially the imperative of a “second front” in the war against terrorism; and in attending to his call to defeat the terrorists by creating a political and economic global democracy will consider the efficacy and sufficiency of the agenda he presents for this consummate task. In reflecting on Barber’s thought, I will also draw on ideas of Martha Nussbaum, Maxine Greene, and others who emphasize education for compassion, which is necessary for realizing Barber’s agenda. Finally, I will suggest an alignment of his vision with the prophetic “beloved community” of Martin Luther King Jr.

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Barber makes the sober point that on 11 September 2001, when terrorists compromised America’s sense of security, independence, and power, they disabused us of our illusion of invulnerability. The hellishness of their attack awakened us to a dark night of loss, alerts, threats, and in governmental response, arrests, and the erosion of freedoms. In his 1963 collection of sermons, Strength to Love, Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically warns of the lateness of the hour. In the sermon, “A Knock at Midnight,” he announces, “It is midnight within the social order. On the international horizon nations are engaged in a colossal and bitter contest for supremacy” and many are “left in the frustrating midnight of economic privation.”3 Throughout his sermons and speeches, King prophesied the crumbling of a nation’s edifice that did not live up to its civil and constitutional ideals, nor rid itself of the triple evils of racism, war, and poverty. The urgency of King’s message to America is heard now in Barber’s A Passion for Democracy both at home and beyond America’s borders, and in his critical agenda for confronting the causes and context of a terrorism willing, for its jihadic purposes, to visit terror on children and combatants, alike. Beyond a first military response to terrorism, he calls for a sustained and transforming second front, an essential front working for economic and political democracy, social justice, religious pluralism, and giving critical attention to educating for citizenship. In opposition to unilateral action against jihadic terror, the second front declares the necessity of interdependence. It is a summons to join in alliance with other willing countries to determine global policies, protocols, and combat poverty, a perceived breeding ground for terrorist recruitment. This second front he believes will ultimately be more determinative of the outcome of the war on terrorism than the first front of military force. 1. Terrorism In “The Second Front on the War on Terrorism: Democratizing Globalism,” his inaugural speech upon becoming the Gershon and Carol Kekst Distinguished Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and just days after 11 September, Barber brooks no quarter regarding the terrorists who plotted, activated, and took part in the perfidious attack on the New York City World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “They are to be extirpated root, trunk, and branch,” he declares. This is the “first crucial front”—to apprehend, prosecute, and punish the terrorists. Offering no rationalization and not admitting any justification for their unspeakable acts, he holds the terrorists “beyond the pale of anything but retributive justice,” deserving an “appropriate justice” to be fought for mainly “with military, intelligence, and diplomatic assets.” With no common ground between the terrorists and those committed to a new global order of justice and democracy, he insists that the terrorists in their murderous use of the globalization they oppose are not negotiating the terms of this globalization, but are jihadic warriors fighting

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modernity, enlightenment, and “both the virtues and vices . . . of civilization in its modern, secular incarnation.”4 Theirs is a rabid response to colonialism, imperialism, exploitative capitalism, and to the incessant spread of the culture of “McWorld.” He recognizes that the terrorists are recruiting for terror in a globalized world where at the same time exists almost immeasurable wealth and a radically uneven distribution of goods exists, where those who are desperately poor and have no hope of participating in capitalism’s prosperity and benefits hear the rhetoric of jihad. The poverty in the developing world, on the other side of First World prosperity, fuels rage and despair, and gives a kind of “quasi-legitimacy” to the terrorist call for jihad. Corresponding to Barber’s analysis, Louis P. Pojman, Professor of Philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, writes of the causes of terrorism: although cultural attitudes, such as religious dogma, may be a significant cause of terrorism, despair or a sense of hopelessness rooted in oppression, ignorance, poverty, and perceived injustice may be the contributing causes, the soil in which fundamentalism can grow and flourish.” He continues that 11 September 2001 may become a Day of Opportunity: if we use it to take counter-measures against terrorism and the causes of terrorism, and to begin to ameliorate the oppression and injustice in our nation and the world.”5 Likewise, Nussbaum reminds us “Most of the preventable suffering and death in the world is not caused by terrorism. It is caused by malnutrition and lack of education, and all the ills connected to poverty. . . .” Barber identifies this environment of disenfranchised poor as a locus that “tacitly supports and nurtures terrorism.”7 Here the poor see themselves bearing the cost of America’s imperious reach of military and economic power. For them, globalization is not opportunity but oppression, not prosperity, but anarchy; anarchy as selfserving corporations demand conditions of total freedom from interference in the global markets and freedom from regulations, including minimum wages, hours worked, and workplace safety. Terrorists depend on this noninterference in the engines of globalization to resist Western domination and to attempt the defeat of post-modern civilization, just as they depend upon the interdependence of transportation and communication to render borders porous and sovereign oversight irrelevant. Making a mockery of sovereignty, they have mastered for their purposes the use of the Internet, banks, and modern technologies. They cross borders at will, globalize terror, and create across the world an effective, terrorist syndicate, one group calling itself “mujahadeen without borders.”

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In his 2003 text, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy, Barber makes a case for paralyzing fear as the most destructive consequence of terrorism’s “impressive display of brute power,” fear “seeded with a single and singular act of terror.” He writes, “Fear is terrorism’s tool and catalyst, the multiplier and amplifier of terrorist events that on the global scale are few.” We could argue that from Madrid, to London, to Iraq, to Indonesia, to Saudi Arabia, to Australia, and, horribly, to Russian schoolchildren, terrorism’s singular acts have multiplied, and that fear of mass attacks is not irrational. Still, we might agree with Barber that the “preventive war strategy,” devised by advisors to George W. Bush such as Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, and Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, beginning in Iraq and driven by fear tactics, will not prevent terrorism. Neither will such a strategy alter terrorism’s roots in political, non-state insurgencies, or the radically asymmetrical character of globalization, and as Barber puts it, a terrorism rooted not in the “axis of evil” but in the “axis of inequality.” Further, finding stateless terrorists elusive and hard to apprehend, the “greased logic” of preventive war strategy has elided from the terrorists themselves to “state sponsors of terrorism,” and even further to tyrannical heads of states, “territorial states who otherwise are innocent of an explicit aggressive act” toward the United States.8 Barber does not argue against the necessity of a first forceful front in confronting and targeting the terrorists, employing military means. But on this front, he remarks that most of the world’s people can only be spectators. Civilians around the world can only sit on the sidelines and watch, “holding their children, and hoping that there will be a future.”9 He insists that response to terrorism “cannot be exclusively military or tactical.” He calls on America, Britain, and their allies to “open a crucial second civic and democratic front”10 for what he calls “preventive democracy,” what he insists is the imperative for national security policy today. For Barber, a globalization characterized by justice and democracy offers an antidote to terrorism, diminishes its appeal, and eventually isolates the terrorists. There will always be terrorist zealots he says. But those among whom they have appeal “are themselves almost always impoverished, in despair, marginalized and disempowered and finally . . . humiliated.”11 Barber calls these disadvantaged recruits “tacit terrorists.” He writes, “Preventive war will not in the end prevent terrorism . . . only preventive democracy can do that.” Preventive democracy calls for “democracy within nations and democracy in the conventions, institutions, and regulations that govern relations among, between, and across nations.” To see “preventive war as a means to democracy is to misconceive both the consequences of aggressive war and the requirements for democracy’s founding and development.”12 The second front’s task of preventive democracy is daunting. He asks, “How will peoples who define themselves by the slaughter of tribal neighbors be persuaded to subscribe to . . . abstract

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civic ideals . . . ?” Even with the most strenuous pitched battles of the first front and the most strenuous civic and economic work of the second front, he admits that terror may never wholly disappear. In Albert Camus’ The Plague, evil occurs and reoccurs, disappears and reoccurs again. “It is lodged,” Barber writes, “in a small but impregnable crevice in the dark regions of the human soul.” In our time evil is manifest in the “fires of jihad.” To be sure, in the face of these fires, global democracy “remains a distant dream.” But whatever the odds, Barber summons us to the hard work of global citizenship, as foundational to this democracy, and the urgent task of the second front. The war against terrorism, whatever the first front of tanks, tracking, intelligence, and interrogations must at the same time be fought on a second front as a war for justice and democracy, both political and economic. The second front in which all can participate in building the civic grounds for democracy, is a front that “transforms anxious and passive spectators into resolute and engaged participants.”13 Barber believes that however hard, the achievement of the second front—a global civic, political, pedagogical, and economic front— is the one most likely to determine the outcome of the war against terrorism. 2. The Second Front The second front is not the first front of direct military force but the immense struggle for global liberty and equality. The struggle is about structural regulations to reign in capitalism’s exploitative excesses, to win fair wages in the global market, and to distribute more fairly the profits from capitalism’s productive plenitude. The ultimate goal of the second front is to create a global participatory democracy, one socially, politically, and economically just. Undercutting terrorist appeal it aims to replace hopelessness with hope, exploitation with economic parity, political marginalization with a public voice. “The public voice,” remarks Barber, “turns out to be the voice of civil society, the voice of an American forum, a Russian civic forum, or a global civic forum.” Barber defines a citizen as “an individual who has acquired a public voice” and who actualizes the liberties and meets the obligations of civil society, civil society that grounds democracy, that precedes and makes possible a politically structured democracy. “Citizenship,” claims Barber, “whether global or local, comes first.” To prepare the ground for democracy—in transitional societies or globally—is first to create citizens “who will demand democracy: this means laying a foundation in civil society and civic culture.” To this end, Barber asks, “How can civil society be constructed in an international arena?”14 How does the second front in the struggle for those who are targets of terrorist recruitment finally create a global democracy? To these questions four categories are most central in Barber’s thought: the critical need to eliminate exploitation and poverty resulting from wild, unregulated global capitalism; to move from national independence to international interdepend-

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ence; to create civil society with civic institutions and responsible citizens; and for higher education to return to the mission of educating for citizenship with a focus on academic-based community service. I will briefly set out these lines of thought and consider each in terms of the war against terrorism. The second front is not a war against terrorists, nor a war for retributive justice, but is fully determined action for distributive justice: for the dispossessed, a fair distribution of the world’s goods, and for the labor of the poor, a fair share of economic gain and the end of exploitation. In his op-ed piece in The New York Times, Christian apologist Jim Wallis claims, “defeating terrorism is both practically and spiritually connected to the deeper work of addressing global poverty and resolving the conflicts that sow the bitter seeds of despair and violence.”15 Barber believes that neither brash, arrogant, American assertions dictating the terms of its associations nor manifestations of military might will persuade the poor and vulnerable to resist the jihadic call of terrorism. He sees those without their most basic needs met, as those open to terrorist recruitment, as mostly reluctant adversaries. Given a chance, these people would prefer to participate in modernity’s benefits. Instead, they are subject to the cruel caprice of uncontrolled markets, to little or no corporate restraint, and to the lack of international accountability, all conditions of anarchy that aids terrorism. They see our antagonism to global regulation and global democracy, to global institutions of political oversight, and to a just distribution of the profits of market capitalism, “as brute indifference to their welfare and to justice.” Yet, Barber believes that as these disenfranchised people are vulnerable to terrorist rhetoric, they are also “vulnerable to our actions as citizens, as members of communities and universities throughout the world.” Reclaiming the ideals of citizenship and a public good for all, and extending these notions into the international order, is essential to a civic appeal to those people marginalized by an oppressive globalization. Reclaiming the ideal of public citizenship means halting the increasing “rule of private power over public power.”16 Critiquing America’s past thirty years of privatization ideology, Barber perceives privatization as privileging “the private interests of corporations and banks and delegitimizing the common goods of the community.”17 Claiming that we have made war on the idea of the public per se, “what the ancients called the res publica . . . the things of the public,”18 he reminds his readers that democratic republics are constituted for the good of the public in the first place.19 The common good cannot be left to the caprice of capitalism, with some made into billionaires and others wasted in body and spirit. Private gain must be in parity with the public good. Adequate funds are necessary, through progressive taxation, to support projects and facilities necessary for maintaining a civic level necessary for human dignity and the well-being of all citizens, a bottom line of not only private profits, but of public profit.

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In considering this first of Barber’s categories, I would press him to include jihadic recruitment rhetoric directed toward those who are poor as a root interpretive cause of terrorism. Jihadic rhetoric and ideology, exploiting poverty and Western dominance, not only poverty and imperialism themselves, powers the dissatisfaction of the oppressed who, as Bill Moyers puts it, “subsidize with their labor” first World prosperity. It justifies to the recruit the violence of terrorism, and even the violent self-sacrifice of a suicide bomber. In his essay, “Religious Fundamentalism, Terrorism, and Peace Prospects,” Arun Prosad Mukherjee, former Governor of Mizoram in West Bengal, remarks on the interpretive force of coupling jihadic belief in Islamic superiority with the belief that “the economic and educational backwardness of a vast majority of Muslims . . . is the result of discrimination and global conspiracy.” Though not to deny American indifference to, and actor in, this discrimination, Mukherjee charges Islamic extremists with ignoring that their madrassa system of education has “semi-literate mullahs” teaching only a narrow interpretation of the Koran, which ensures “the continued backwardness of a large segment of their own community.” He finds it no wonder that the madrasahs in Pakistan, Afganistan, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines “have been the breeding ground of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.”20 Mukherjee does not mention that the madrasahs exist in part because schools offering a broad curriculum with critical thinking and substantive learning are not available to the extremely poor in these countries, leaving impoverished youth with little choice of schooling outside the madrassa system. Though responsibility for much of the world’s misery lies with the United States given its wealth, power, and self-interested policies, a more complex jihadic interpretation of world poverty would assign a greater causal role to this educational backwardness of many poor countries, and with authoritarian governments. Peter Berger, author of Holy War Inc., challenges the charge that the madrasahs breed terrorism. He agrees that they breed religious fundamentalism but in a study of the educational backgrounds of seventy-five terrorists both of the World Trade Center attacks and the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania he found most had attended College, including two-thirds of the hijackers involved in 11 September 2001. He concludes that while “madrasahs are an important issue in education and development in the Muslim world, they are not and should not be considered a threat to the United States.”21 Barber would argue that regardless of whether the madrasahs directly support terrorism, they are a source of tacit approval of jihadic extremism. We also need a more complicated interpretation of terrorism by the United States. The scholar of Islam, Omer Taspinar, finds that though “socioeconomic deprivation leaves many young Muslims vulnerable to extremist ideology . . . the rise of terrorism has less to do with Islam than with repressive governance.”22 In a CNN interview, Robert A. Pape, author of Dying to

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Win, reports that data since 1980 on the motivations and make-up of suicide bombers show that “what the vast majority of suicide bombers have in common is not so much religion but a secular strategic goal—to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territories the terrorists view as their homeland.”23 He maintains that al-Qaeda attacks have come overwhelmingly from countries in which the United States has stationed tens of thousands of combat forces. Columbia University political theorist Mahamood Mamdani also argues, “Terrorism does not necessarily have anything to do with Islamic culture.” He sees the roots of terrorism in the United States CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) cold war policy that funded private militias of terrorist movements in Indochina, Africa, Latin America, and Afghanistan. He goes further than other theorists who argue, “American support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s helped pave the way of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s.” He posits a deeper connection of “the violent strain of Islam to a broader American strategy.” John L. Esposito an expert on political Islam cautions explaining Islamic terrorism “through international politics alone. He insists that we must consider religion: “It’s religion and politics together,” he claims.24 Exploring the more complicated roots of terrorism is the charge of the Center for International and Security Studies at at the University of Maryland. Gary La Free, the Center’s new head, sees terrorism as a more complex phenomenon than any single factor “such as poverty, a lack of democracy . . . poor education . . . United States foreign policy.” Terrorism, he says, is “an intricate mosaic that would have to be understood as a whole to be addressed.”25At the center, social psychologist, Arie Kruglanski, is investigating when and why terrorists use violence and asking what policy interventions might be taken. “Maybe it’s up to us to create conditions under which alternative means of attaining those populations’ goal would seem more feasible,” he says: “In the absence of alternatives, this is going to be the only game in town.”26 Creating alternatives with anti-poverty and civil society initiatives and supporting broad education are the tasks of Barber’s second front. A second key element of the second front requires America to join the rest of the world, not only to insist that the rest of the world join America. Barber, together with cultural theorists Greene, Pojman, and other social theorists, expresses pride in America’s democratic institutions and the achievements of its moral traditions. But the cry of global justice is knocking at the door of America’s isolationism and unilateralism, and demanding it open this door and join with other democratizing forces to defeat terrorist intentions. Crucial to this effort is overcoming the myth of national independence and innocence. Barber reminds his listeners that even when we came to this land to establish independence and to begin anew, and established “one of the first truly free constitutions in the history of the modern Western world,” we did it on the backs of slaves and the slaughter of those already

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here. “We were not innocent even then,” he says, “and now too we are no better and no worse than many peoples around the world.”27 To advance the second front, Barber declares that the time for a new Declaration has come. The new society announced with the Declaration of Independence two centuries ago has now to open to a new global society. Barber argues for a new declaration of interdependence that would expressly acknowledge that both humanity and nations are interdependent, which includes depending on the good will of other persons and nations. Key to the proposal is the conviction that in a just world, no one nation would experience prosperity and plenty unless others did as well. Though largely unrecognized, interdependence is already a global reality. The terrorists have made us realize no one stands alone; “we need the world as the world needs us,” he remarks. Yet America has seen itself as supremely sovereign—a sovereignty shattered by the 11 September 2001 terrorists— expecting the rest of the world to join America—on America’s terms. We have made little effort to learn the languages of other peoples, expecting those who would communicate with us to speak English. So many times, we walk out on agreements that do not suit us, saying, “No, we will not join, we will not be a member, we will walk out.” We have problems with the United Nations, so we will not pay our dues. We refuse to participate in UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) because of some differences in ideology. Acknowledging that many of our complaints have validity, he insists that by not staying at the table and continuing to be a voice for our position, we will not be there the next time, when our voice might be better heard. Instead of joining the world in a real give and take, we walk out and invest in the supremacy of a missile shield, wasting American money better spent on language instruction, research into global warming, and better international intelligence. He urges that we make visible the best of America that the larger world knows little about, our jazz, poetry, religious observations, and our democratic institutions. As a substitute for real policy, Barber deems supremacist notions of defense as “dangerous nonsense.” Dependence on technology to keep us free ignores that “technology itself, science itself, is a community proposition,” and already crosses borders, is already interdependent.28 Technology ought not to be thought of as singularly protecting us from everyone else, but a symbol of our interdependence. “It is over,” Barber tells his listeners. “American innocence is over. Our independence is over. Our capacity to protect ourselves is over.” We have only one way now to protect ourselves—”with and through others, not on their terms, not on America’s terms, but on our terms, the community of peoples, the community of nations.” Terms of our interdependence have to be negotiated, not issued unilaterally. Alliances have to be formed and ways of cooperation found. The time has come to declare our interdependence and “to overcome the striking asymmetry of global society today.”29 The Declaration

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of Interdependence that he helped write states, “Without prejudice to the goods and interests of our national and regional identities, we recognize our responsibilities to the common goods and liberties of humankind as a whole.”30 Recognizing the difficulty of what he suggests: nuclear power in the hands of those hostile to the United States; territorial and ethnic hatred with corresponding national conflicts and “threats of retribalization by bloodshed”; closed theocracies; dictatorships antithetical to democracy—all jettisoning hopes of a global civil society committed to the common good, he writes, “Interdependence makes boundaries permeable not just for the good, but for the bad.”31 The Plague’s Oran remarks that plague appears to have the “whiphand.” But reflective Tarrou counters, “We shall know whether that is so . . . only when we’ve tried everything.”32 Barber would agree. Rogue states and other anti-democratic countries notwithstanding, he presses ahead for international, interdependent, and new post-nation-states’ institutions.33 He sees a confederalism of member states as a promising organizational strategy for moving to a more cooperative global order, a confederalism of member states, each strongly rooted in civil society. As an alternative to a centralized governing-frame that requires an international sovereign, he holds out hope that a confederalism, based on a non-compulsory form of association, each with full autonomy, rooted in common interests, will permit already existing nationstates to create a new global association. As a starting place, he suggests a loose alliance instead of attempting a strict uniting. Considering this loose alliance of a global association, a substantial distinction between confederalism and a working-at-its-best United Nations is difficult to discern, though he affirms in his work a robust participation of the United States in the United Nations. Membership in the United Nations is voluntary, but as philosopher Glen Martin, Secretary-General of the World Constitution and Parliament Association, remarks, the United Nations “is a profoundly nondemocratic organization, controlled by powerful nations.” Martin sees that the possibility of actualizing democratic ideals lies in “a nonmilitary world federation in which the nation-states give over their sovereignty to the people of the Earth, who then elect a government that operates in terms of a truly planetary framework.”34 His paradigm for world governance, critical of the organization of the United Nations, moves more radically to a global federation than Barber’s more cautious loose alliance. Both see a hoped-for humane world in the profound realization of an eventual global democracy. Barber’s third thrust of the second front, closely related to confederalism and interdependence, is forging civil society in an international environment. Though an extraordinary challenge, Barber’s first step is to recognize that it needs to be forged, that it demands “a methodical internationalization of civil society.” In the process, discrete parts of civil society “must be aligned by some form of global organization that permits cooperation without destroying their autonomy.” Barber identifies a global civil society as “a foundation for

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but not yet the same thing as a global democratic government.” The first priority is to reconstruct civil society as a framework for democratic citizenship, beginning with “freely associated individuals and groups.” Civil society occupies a space somewhere between formal government and the private sector, yet related to both. Crucial to this process are civic associations and institutions that take responsibility for the public good that create a public sphere concerned with the res publica.35 Barber’s agenda means reconceptualizing, recreating, and repositioning civic institutions already in place nationally into an international setting. The task is to seek “a new set of transnational civic associations that link civic societies to one another and for individual citizens of different countries, across national boundaries, to join together in global civic movements.” He suggests, for example, that citizens take on schools, voluntary associations, churches, temples, mosques, and find ways of working together on social problems. Where possible, we should align these efforts with a larger movement. Achieving a global democracy “demands new-post-nation-states’ institutions” and a new willingness for citizens to take responsibility for their liberties. Taking responsibility for their public world is the “first obligation of both citizens and citizen institutions.” The process of democratization requires citizens, citizens require civil society; and civil society requires associations not bound by identity politics. Barber sees modern conditions immensely complicated for establishing a strong global democracy. As forbidding is this task to link the world through civic institutions and set the foundation for this democracy, since the 1990s, and especially since 11 September 2001, a rising public sector, from formal initiatives to grassroots protest, is drawing millions of participants. Barber sees such active participation as part of democracy’s history of “struggle, civic work, and economic development”36 and an alternative to paralyzing fear. Some of these civil/citizen initiatives include: (1) Campus Compact—an alliance of College and University presidents committed to “the civic purposes of higher education,” promoting service initiatives and helping campuses to “forge effective community partnerships”; (2) World Wide Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS)—“an international alliance dedicated to citizen action and civil society throughout the world,” especially where freedom of association is threatened. It aims to promote alliances among citizens, businesses, and governments, and “to increase the voice of citizens in public life.” Its vision is of a “world wide community of informed, inspired, committed citizens engaged in confronting the challenges facing humanity”;

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A prime example of what we must pursue together, and itself subject to privatization, is Barber’s fourth crucial category of the second front, education. “We do it together or we don’t educate,” he argues. In the face of terrorism, he tells the students at the University of Maryland, “We educators are called back to our mission.” At the heart of the second front is the mission to educate citizens for civic responsibility. “The first aim and mission of any institution of education,” he claims, “has to be to forge responsible, thought-

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ful, critical, competent citizens.”38 For Barber, community service (praxis) integrated into the whole enterprise of civic education is a crucial “spring board for broader reforms.”39 Embedding service in an educational framework, he believes, provides a “training ground for a participatory democracy.”40 Service promotes a realization “of how self and community, private interests and public good, are necessarily linked.” The idea is to “fold notions of community, democracy, and citizenship into pedagogy,” with community service a critical dimension of citizenship education and civic responsibility.41 Advocating service as “an indispensable prerequisite of citizenship,”42 and a condition for democracy’s preservation, he sees individuals learning the meaning of social interdependence and becoming empowered through acquiring the arts of liberty through community service.43 In a complex, challenging world, one often undemocratic, Barber holds that “creating new generations of citizens is not a discretionary activity,” but upon which liberty ultimately depends.44 He asks, “Is it possible . . . that our schools and universities might regain their civic momentum through . . . service-learning programs?” When experience in the community becomes the subject of critical reflection in the classroom, then an examination of the fundamental nature of both democratic communities and the role of the citizen reveal the links among liberty, democracy, and citizenship.45 Education for civic responsibility and participatory democracy is education for freedom: learning to be free citizens, taking responsibility for oneself and others, and making consequential moral decisions. Educating free, caring, public citizens preoccupies Barber as it does other theorists. In her The Dialectic of Freedom, Greene conceives freedom “as an achievement within the concreteness of lived social situations . . . with everything depending on the actions we undertake.” She identifies this achievement as “freedom in compassion for others or in solidarity with others.” She means that it is “important to find a way of developing a praxis of educational consequence that opens the spaces necessary for the remaking of a democratic community.”46 For Barber, the making of participatory, democratic communities of selfgoverning citizens is the entire point, “the beginning and the end of education,” the central concern of learning to be free, and permitting an “identification with others that is compatible with political liberty.” Further, he maintains, “the university is a civic mission . . . a social activity that can take place only within a learning community bringing together reflection and experience,” a communal enterprise.47 Identifying with others is at the core of Nussbaum’s sketch of educational reform. She writes, “We ought to invigorate our educational system . . . to make us more aware of our common humanity.” She finds a danger in the ongoing war on terrorism if we “fail to connect . . . to the daily sufferings of ordinary people . . . unless . . . the daily unremarkable lives of people distant from us become real in the fabric of our daily lives.” She proposes “an education in common human weakness and vulnerability,” one in

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which we learn to decode the suffering of another and connect with distant people, sympathizing with their plight. She calls on her readers to extend sympathy “to the whole of humanity and base our moral policy on such sympathetic cosmopolitanism.” The intent of this reform for Nussbaum is to “cultivate a culture of critical compassion . . . possibly awaken a larger sense of the humanity of suffering, a patriotism constrained by respect for human dignity and by a vivid sense of the real losses and needs of others.”48 Barber challenges higher education to recover this civic mission of critical compassion and to reignite its moral imagination, to ask how can things be better?49 I would raise three questions regarding Barber’s pedagogy. First, in seeing the entire point of education as graduating democratic, self-governing, caring citizens, is he neglecting other aspects of a university education? He might answer that informed citizens need to think critically, be exposed to broad learning, and acquire practical skills for taking responsibility for their world. Still, of the multiple purposes of today’s educational enterprise, he might better delineate the particular aspects of a broad education demanded by global citizens. The second question: is the community service he advocates voluntary or involuntary. Barber does offer a rationale for requiring community service as a necessary part of a broad education. In An Aristocracy of Everyone, he writes that civic education should be an integral part of liberal education, mandatory, and receiving academic credit. “There are certain things a democracy simply must teach,” he maintains, “employing its full authority to do so: citizenship is first among them.”50 Barber might also explain more fully how to implement education for civic responsibility. Apparently, he means that academe should integrate the theory and practice of citizenship across the curricula and reflect it in requirements, the grading system, the expectations of faculty, and in institutional priorities. The third question has to do with the madrasahs educating Muslim youth in the ideology of Wahabi Islam with its extremist reading of the Koran. Though he addresses their underlying poverty, given the radical contribution of these schools to religious fundamentalism and their lean toward tacit terrorism, he might more urgently appeal to moderate and progressive Muslims for alternatives. By increasing incorporation of community service with education on an international scale, including in Jordan and Indonesia, he might direct the same urgency for civic education in conjunction with the madrasahs as he does with education in a democracy. 3. Citizenship and Global Democracy If advocating global democracy appears utopian, Barber suggests that we think of the alternative: peace and stabilization “through foreign invasion, expulsion, partition, resettlement, United Nations Trusteeship, military intervention, or simple dismemberment.” He argues that unless we fight for an alternative to

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extremist jihad and the spreading capitalist hegemony, our epoch—“postcommunist, post-industrial, post-national, yet sectarian, fearful, and bigoted”— may also become “terminally post democratic.”51 He insists, as utopian as it may sound, that global democracy is “the hard imperative for national security policy today.” He urges global democracy because he believes: the security of this nation and its peoples depend on a far more cooperative international environment . . . for large numbers of people who today feel oppressed and marginalized by a run-away wild capitalism that defines the international system.52 The urgent project is to “globalize democracy as we have globalized the economy and terrorism.”53 We must globalize social and economic justice, extend the public good to all peoples, become global citizens; reconstitute civil society toward a global community, and extend democratic oversight to global affairs through the civil and political institutions we create. He suggests that the European Union with its autonomy of nations, yet agreed upon political structure, may offer a beginning model towards a larger international union. Pojman, too, holds that the circle of community and active citizens must extend beyond “prevailing national borders, creating a new informal network of relationships,” making of the world a global village.54 In winning the world for democracy, the course for Barber, King, Nussbaum, and other prophetic voices is constituting a community of compassionate, global citizens, deliberative, participatory, and at work creating a political, civic, and economic public sphere that ensures “the impartiality of citizenship.”55 The trenchant point for Barber in the work of the second front is that democracy—local, regional, global—”starts with individuals taking responsibility for their family, community, and environment in which they find themselves.”56 In An Aristocracy of Everyone, Barber presents the logic of this ultimate project: “no community, no communication; no communication, no learning; no learning, no education; no education, no citizens; no citizens, no freedom; no freedom—then no culture, no democracy, no school, no civilization.”57 With Barber, Pojman sees that fundamentally “we must come to see all humanity as tied together in a common moral network.”58 King, too, held, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny.”59 But, we might ask, whose morality, and a moral network common to whom? The terrorists have an idiosyncratic view of moral mutuality in an extremist Islam. For Barber, a common moral network recognizes the values of liberty, universal personhood, the common good wherein distributive justice resides, and a global, political, and economic democracy to which all have access. The hope of civil society, he writes in the Afterword of Jihad vs. McWorld, “is that the love of liberty will lend to democratic communities the necessary centripetal impetus . . .”60

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King would identify this impetus as soul force, and the community, constituted by citizens of good will and extending beyond America’s borders, as the global “beloved community,” the prophetic community of social, economic, and racial justice that was the aim and purpose of all of his work. The ideal of the beloved community, encompassing global democracy, hears the blazing, galvanizing call of the biblical prophets: Amos, “But let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”61 It counters the fires of jihad with the burning bush of Yaweh’s call to liberation, the spiritual intervention to free enslaved Israelites. In his Where Do We Go from Here? King envisioned this hoped-for beloved-community as made up of all people—black, brown, bronze, red, and white—living together in the same neighborhoods, attending the same schools, mutually respecting one another.62 He envisioned a community comprised of all people of good will, and, ultimately, all nations, characterized by universal justice, and economic, social, political, and cultural well-being. This vision carried forth by King unfolds on the prophetic edge of a dynamic world and is stirred by what he called the power of soul force. In the spirit of this vision, Barber concludes his post-11 September 2001 address quoting an old gospel song: We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for, and our engagement, our energy, our caring, our work make a difference as engaged citizens working to make social democracy real at home and abroad.63 4. Jihad vs. the Beloved Community Barber unmistakably sees the civil carnage of our time and “all the horrors of the ancient slaughterhouse reenacted.”64 With King, he would agree that “evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.”65 The terrorists have hurled an evil flame onto the contested terrain of a hoped-for global democracy—burning, beheading, bombing. In the disguise of martyrdom, they call forth all the dark forces of death, murdering and maiming. Theirs is a war for supremacy of the spiritual, however diabolical, a spiritual vision trafficking in suicide and slaughter. Against this perfidious foe, I ask, is Barber’s agenda—his second front—strong and sufficient to win through to social justice, global citizenship, economic and political rights for all? I suggest that Barber stands at the threshold of the spiritual power with which we must contend on terror’s terrain. Though his second front is constituted by the spiritual values of compassion, economic and social justice, obligation for others, equality of persons, and achieving the “common good,” still, what primordial power does he draw upon in the struggle against both a death-dealing jihad and a predatory and unrestrained capitalism? What impels the struggle of the second front to the core of moral existence? In considering the sufficiency and efficacy of Barber’s pro-

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posal, I urge that he enlist more radically the subversive power that “brings down strongholds,” power pregnant within faith traditions of the world, meeting jihadic warriors with soul force on their self-proclaimed spiritual terrain. To win the war for the common good, to thwart terrorist recruitment, to put global economic disparity on the track toward distributive justice, and to realize the beloved community of global democracy voices are being raised today that call for tapping “the wellspring of humanity’s intrinsic spirituality.” To gather the world’s wisdom, from the suspect Socrates urging the youth of Athens to pursue virtue over pursuing wealth, to the injunction of every worldwide religion to care for the poor, to the radical economic reversal of Jesus—sell all you have and give it to the poor—is to provide, as articulated by the late Harvard scholar, Vittorio Falsina, “an ethical compass to reorient the process of globalization toward a more human, sustainable, peaceful globalization.” Now is time, says Paul Knitter in Subverting Greed, to reclaim the spiritual core of life. He urges that the religious and economic worlds bring into conversation their global powers: “the market and global religions.” Knitter’s co-author Chandra Muzaffa claims, “In the ultimate analysis, it is apparent that the unjust global economy and the greed inherent in it can only be ‘subverted’ through a profound spiritual transformation of the self.” Toward this task of transformation the authors urge an intentional evolving of a “shared universal and moral ethic to under-gird the global economy” and to translate “such an ethic into tangible institutions and concrete polices.”66 Their view resonates with the proclaimed purpose of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, especially with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and of others such as John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer. During the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, King insisted that the real purpose of the boycott, as with the larger movement was healing; “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”67 As today, the terrain upon which King and other civil rights workers struggled was one of rank injustice—rape, rope, biting dogs, billy clubs, bullets, and the bombings by white supremacist terrorists, including the blast that killed four little girls at Sunday School. King connected his dream of racial reconciliation to a transcendent value of right. In a Life Magazine interview, speaking of the movement, King said, “I know this is a righteous cause and by being connected to it I am connected with a transcendent value of right.”68 He understood this right as the spiritual horizon of the beloved community. The task was to translate this “transcendent value of right” into a restructured society, rid of racism and poverty. This goal was not only a local civil rights goal but a national, and increasingly, an international goal, as well. Just a month before his death, he called for a total reconstruction of society. “Let us be dissatisfied,” he rang out, “until every man . . . is lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease.” For this world restructuring, he called for a fundamental shift from

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selfishness to agape believing agape to be the “unifying force at the center of the universe.”69 At the heart of King’s message, he maintains: This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an allembracing and unconditional love for all men. . . . I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.70 Today we ask, whether the beloved community can be reclaimed as an enduring vision with the power to inspire and sustain the spirits of those forced to fight global terror. The Black Church of the Civil Rights Movement proclaimed confidence that it would not be “vanquished by evil in the world.” The communicants regarded themselves as “warriors in the midst of a great and bloody conflict between good and evil.”71 They believed with the Apostle Paul that “our struggle is . . . against superhuman forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”72 In “The Beloved Community: An American Search,” Charles Marsh remarks that Black faith, itself “exuberant, embracing, full of subversive undercurrents . . . spirited with energy, moving into action—might be the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest legacy in the American search for the beloved community.”73 Out of this tradition King is characterized as having “the capacity to engage in utopian discourse and to act boldly to achieve moral causes.”74 It also accounts, in part, for his prodigious faith, expressed in the theme of reconciliation, even to the making friends of our enemies. For King and others in the Movement, the theological mandate, “be ye reconciled” grounded the beloved community “in an ongoing ontology of reconciliation.”75 William Galston in his Justice and the Human Good sees utopian thought serving “as the basis for the evaluation of existing institutions and practices.” The utopian vision of the beloved community stood as an ethical norm for critiquing and inspiring public policy.76 As the theological commitments and religious convictions in the 1960s sustained the ideal of the beloved community, it can be said, they continue today to “shape conceptions of racial unity and civic responsibility. . . .” Recent retrievals of this vision have engendered new initiatives, alliances, “and spontaneous stirrings of the spirit.”77 New communities and coalitions of intention and conscience are forming. One example is the Beloved Community House begun in Binghamton, New York, in 2003, with a chapel open to the community, occasionally hosting communal meals, and engaging in projects locally and for Russian orphans and “pavement people” in Calcutta. Ann Chih Lin of the University of Michigan recently recovered theologically the ideal of the beloved community as a resource to invigorate a “newly configured Civil Rights Movement.” Appealing to religious coalitions to de-

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velop “authentic, distinctive justifications for civil rights struggles . . . specific to each religious tradition,” she suggests that rooting civil rights activity in the sacred of each faith makes of it a “religious commitment, not merely a secular ideal.”78 This spiritually rooted fight for justice becomes not just generous action, but an imperative of faith, a conviction, “essential to creed,” and sustaining during defeat and discouragement. What matters is that the work for socio-economic justice is grounded in a particular theological understanding, creating its “songs, symbols, and practices that reinforce civil rights,” not only borrowing from the evocative and powerful Black Church tradition from which the movement sprung. Civic activities must strengthen a faith community and be local, personal actions, whether signing petitions, attending demonstrations, or aiding Latin American political refugees in the Sanctuary movement, or advocating for humane treatment for undocumented workers. The point, Lin emphasizes, “is to involve the congregation in the community [to] create activities that make a concrete contribution to the Civil Rights Movement.”79 As a direct expression of faith, faith communities can look closely at their neighborhoods, perhaps providing a soup kitchen and other services. For this faith-based civil rights work, Lin evokes the vision of not one beloved community, but plural beloved communities, “multiple faith communities, grounded in their traditions which incorporate civil rights as an essential element of that tradition.” Such a vision, she concludes, “allows the flame of civil rights to burn in many candles and lamps, in sanctuaries too many to ever be totally extinguished.”80 As Barber’s project builds civil society, educates for citizenship, and forms voluntary alliances it may move closer and closer to a larger community, in approximation to a global democratic community, ultimately, to a global beloved community. But we have learned a terrible lesson in Iraq. These civic efforts can become new targets of terror. Even the United Nations was not immune to terrorist murder, nor are humanitarian aid workers, even Doctors Without Borders having to finally leave Afghanistan. As horrific as are these new realities, we can also learn lessons from the spiritual core of the Civil Rights Movement, especially from those who were targets of supremacist terror. Recognizing the spiritual core of the battle for civil rights, those marching with SCLC first submitted to spiritual self-scrutiny, examining their consciences