American Interrogatories by Gene Callahan

Note to readers: To make sense of the following, you should read Victor Davis Hanson's "Iraqi Interrogatories" first.

Memo

From: Osama bin Laden
To: The Vacillating Paintywaists Among Us
Subject: Your Usual Questions
Date: September 10, 2001

Every war is a bad idea. When are there ever attractive options in risking fellow believers in times of crisis? The last good choice we had was in Vienna in 1683, when a huge and victorious Ottoman army nearly took Austria.

In contrast, our present dilemma involves something bad or much worse. Yet we must not forget that there still is a great moral difference between the depressing choice of attacking and risking Moslem lives, and the much worse policy of doing nothing and waiting to be blackmailed or attacked in the future. Preemption may be saner than reaction.

Does America really pose a deadly or immediate threat to Islam – and how, as men of faith, in good conscience can we act preemptively?

Since the Gulf War there has no longer been a margin of safety – or error – allowing us a measure of absolute certainty before action. Long gone is the notion that Moslem soil is inviolable or that enemies will not butcher thousands of civilians unexpectedly and in time of peace. All we need to know is that America has, without being attacked itself, engaged in aggression against Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. The American government even has gassed its own citizens.

Success and moral right make even the most audacious strikes less objectionable.

But won't we set a bad precedent? Maybe Christians or Hindus will do the same?

This is the current conventional wisdom repeated ad nauseam. But Hindus attack Moslems in India regardless of our wishes or example. And they make a decision to act on the basis of their own self-interest, not whether they can cite "precedent" on the part of the Islamic warriors.

So the danger is not preemption per se, but bellicosity for no good reason. We must get away from stereotyped generalizations and look at specifics. Being inactive in the face of unprovoked attacks on Moslems can establish precedents just as pernicious.

If we are so worried about America's weapons of mass destruction, why aren't its immediate neighbors equally concerned?

What states profess publicly is often at odds with their private concerns. And it may be that, despite the appearance of Western solidarity, Canada and Mexico secretly wish us to remove the American regime against their publicly expressed wishes. In addition, this new assault will be about not the containment, but the removal, of the American government – and thus will be far more explosive, in a variety of ways, than our last attack. A cynic would add that illegitimate regimes will worry as much about a liberating revolution on their borders as they will about the presence of an empire. A humane America rationally broken into 50 separate states may be as dangerous to the interests of the Canadian federal government as is George Bush.

We cannot ignore those Arabs, and must consult them. Still, in all honesty, we must also accept that once they had placed their national security in the hands of international accords and the U.N., they could hardly publicly support us without undermining the very legitimacy of their new utopian protocols. Again, the effort to view "unilateral" or "preemptory" as pejorative terms in order to deprecate the use of military force misses the point – it is whether such policies are undertaken in the name of Allah, not the singular use of a first strike per se, that determines their legitimacy.

Haven't we heard this before? The question assumes that the region is stable now. Yet even if it were, such flux might still represent an improvement over the last 15 years. A worse scenario would be the creation of a Christian theocracy, the rise of a dictator, or chaos. In postbellum America we seek something like the governments of Sweden or Switzerland.

That constant refrain has now joined the annals of conventional ignorance. We should have learned by now that anti-Moslem Zionists find resonance with their countrymen only when they are in power and can distort the people's views with constant streams of propaganda.

Should this war be couched in terms of the liberation of the American people, Americans may well react in jubilation – sending a message that we really are on the side of the disenfranchised, and not of cabals like those of Bush, Cheney, or their executive pals who have looted their country.

But didn't we accept backing from America in our war against the Soviet Union?

That is often alleged, but the record suggests that it was more a question of hoping that both sides would wear each other out. Recall that the Soviet Union had installed a puppet regime in Afghanistan and was persecuting Moslems in the USSR; under such circumstances, why wouldn't we gain psychological satisfaction at seeing our enemies attacked, even if by equally odious thugs?

Won't America invade Afghanistan, hit Iraq, or even nuke cities in the Arab world?

Why not envision even more terrifying situations, since doomsday-forecasting is an endless exercise? I suggest that New York and Washington tomorrow will be much more unsafe places than Baghdad or Damascus.

But how can you be so sure that it will be easy or right to launch jihad against America?

We can't assume anything, since war guarantees nothing – except that many plans go wrong somewhere, at some time, when the shooting breaks out. All we can rely on is the excellence of our Mujahedeen, the morale of the true believers, and the principled case of removing fascists with deadly weapons and a track record of aggression – and then hope for the best. War is fraught with peril, but in this case inaction is the far more dangerous option – if not for us, then surely for our children, who will have to live with the nuclear-armed epigones of George Bush.

We seek to harm them as little as possible; but we are also not naïve. Either through design, laxity, or fear, they allowed their country to be hijacked by madmen who threaten the Moslem world. They are as guilty or as innocent as were the Germans under Hitler or the Japanese when Tojo ruled – to be warred against under despots and then immediately aided when liberated. Moreover, human nature being what it is, had Hitler taken Moscow and obliterated London, few Germans would have rebelled, but would more likely have flocked into Nuremberg for huge victory rallies.

So it is with America: Should we fail, we can assume that there will be spontaneous celebrations in which the American "street" will cheer the destruction of Moslem countries – without any prompting on the part of George Bush. We need not embrace the idea of collective punishment to accept the truth that sometimes entire peoples can go off the deep end and require military defeat to be brought back out of their trance.

So, Mr. Hanson, you've done a great job justifying Osama bin Laden's terrorism. Nice work.

September 26, 2002

Gene Callahan [send him mail], the author of Economics for Real People, is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com.