U.S. Strengths Are Terrorist Opportunities

The tragic irony of Tuesday’s day of terror is that America was humbled by its strengths, not its weaknesses. Adept practitioners of strategic jujitsu, the terrorists leveraged America’s technological wizardry and democratic openness to the purposes of destruction.

Imagine such an attack succeeding without commercial aviation, architectural modernism, credit cards, car-rental agencies and the Internet. Terrorism’s success was not just the horrendous and painful body count. It was how it forced the nation to protect itself by abandoning modernity: The terrorists hijacked four air liners and turned them into instruments of slaughter, but America itself closed its skies and halted its financial transactions, yielding to a kind of self-paralysis. Jujitsu. A nation of farmers cannot be terrorized by a blow to the cities; a hard-mail system cannot be interdicted by a single electronic subterfuge. It is the productive and efficient interdependence of our economy, our technology, our communication and transportation systems, and our government that renders them vulnerable.

It is the same with our democracy. Imagine such an attack being successfully organized in a police state, where all rights are suspended, all immigration terminated, identity papers checked on every block, “foreigners” randomly stopped throughout the land. The terrorists turned openness into vulnerability and tolerance into weakness. We could suspend the Bill of Rights, and the war against terrorism would become easier--but the terrorists would then have won, forcing us from the very democratic habits in whose name we make war on terrorism. Jujitsu.

The hard lesson of the war between the forces of fundamentalism--jihad--and the forces of commercial, cultural and technological modernity--McWorld--is that jihad not only detests and combats McWorld, it does so jujitsu style by leveraging its weight and turning its virtues into frailties. For jihadic reaction is not just Islamic, and its enemy is not simply America (or Israel). Jihadic reaction is still trying to combat the Enlightenment and the ambiguous Enlightenment values that America embodies: its wealth but also the materialism that accompanies it; its secularism but also the cynicism about religion and norms that can be part of secularism; its commercial successes but also the hubris with which its flaunts them; its economic globalism but also the inequalities that are spread by it; its addictive pop culture but also the cultural monism induced by the addiction.

America’s understandable instinct in this moment of national agony is to go it alone, strike hard unilaterally, collaborating with others only to the extent we demand a declaration “for us or against us,” only to the degree others do what we want them to. Yet, the age of American independence is over.

We have lived (if hypocritically) with the myth of independence, and the innocence that goes with it, since our founding days, when our “city on the hill” was to be a new beginning to the world, when two oceans were deemed sufficient protection from the torments and tragedies of world history. We were the tabula rasa on which new providential pictures would be painted. Not even the two great wars of the 20th century could alter this dream of independence. Just last week, a national missile shield was to be our virtual ocean to protect us from evil. No more.

Rudely, bluntly, murderously, the terrorists have taught us that there is no standing against interdependence. Terror is fundamentalist violence globalized. It cannot be defeated by unilateral actions, however forceful or pointed. This is not a moral point but an empirical one. When the terrorists proclaim, “There are no innocents!”, and set about their zealous and methodical slaughter, they are saying, “There are no more boundaries between civilian and military, millionaire and proletarian, cynical pol and innocent child; you are all caught up in modernity’s web of interdependence; you will all die.” Frontlines and civilian sanctuaries are all one in the global jihad of virtual warriors whose tools are not just the plastic knife but the Internet, not just the ideological tract but the pilot’s manual. Alone, we can wrestle with anarchy only by surrendering our modernity and giving up our democracy. To preserve them and defeat terror, we have to acknowledge and embrace the reality of our interdependence.

The long-term lesson is as simple to discern as it is hard for Americans, born to independence and proud of their rugged individuality, to accept: America today can be no blessed island, if ever it was one; it cannot survive alone, if ever it could. We will live together in this new globe, or we will die together. We need better bridges, not higher walls; more cooperation, not more missiles; a fuller acknowledgement of our interdependence, not a more complete assertion of our independence.

Jujitsu works only when the powerful try to dominate the weak. When strength is anchored by democracy and weighted by justice, and rules by law rather than by force, it cannot be leveraged by jihad. If in the coming struggle against terrorism we remember that we are engaged, not in a clash of civilizations or a war on fundamentalism, but in a quest to legitimize our interdependence, terror will not win and democracy cannot lose.