Thunder from the Right, Angst from the Left

It was a busy week for the nation’s partisan press. Limbaugh slammed Falwell, doves became hawks and the word “coward” came in for a beating. The terrorist hijacker attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon set new parameters for debate in America’s traditional left and right magazines and websites--and even in the venerable New Yorker. The No.1 topic, however, was as old as civilization: War, yes or no, against whom and for what objective. Below are some of the most provocative commentaries of the week.

From the right:

So, let’s remember.

We breached the Atlantic wall in 1944: Osama bin Laden is a dead man.

We--thirty years ago!--put a man on the moon: Osama bin Laden is a dead man.

We vanquished Saddam’s army in a 100-hour ground war: Osama bin Laden is a dead man.

It may take some time and dirty tactics and unsavory temporary alliances, but given our might, technology and determination, it’s inevitable--all four of his wives will be widowed. Osama bin Laden is a dead man.

*

Rich Lowry, National Review

Bin Laden has been trying to show that a band of faithful Muslims can, with the right weapons in the hands of death-wish believers, reverse the history of the Muslim world. ... If we kill Bin Laden, the champion of the movement will have been defeated in battle. Bin Laden’s awe, which has primarily been built upon dead Americans, will become ours.

Reuel Gerecht, Weekly Standard

*

We should stop using the word “cowards” to describe people who board a 757, ruthlessly kill the pilots, take the controls and fly the plane into the side of an office tower. They are brave and evil. Nor should we pay attention to the pretense of their having some legitimate historic grievance over the loss of territory. Bin Luddites do not care about history or territory. They resent the Israeli demonstration that even a semi-capitalist garrison state can grow flowers and sell them all over Europe, build semiconductors in Herzlia, practice democracy under fire and supply a third of Silicon Valley’s key communications technologies.

American Spectator/Gilder.com

*

Last week, [Jerry] Falwell appeared as a guest on [Pat] Robertson’s daily 700 Club program. He said that, in addition to the terrorists who launched the attacks, others were also responsible. He elaborated by suggesting that it was the feminists, gays, abortionists and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] who had angered God to the point that God allowed this to happen to the United States of America. ... Suggestions of this kind are one of the reasons why all conservatives get tarred and feathered with this extremist, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic label or image that isn’t true.

Rush Limbaugh.com

*

We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Ann Coulter, National Review

*

The Clinton administration refused to recognize the threat, refused to mobilize the nation, refused to arm our security forces to the levels needed to defend us, refused to recognize that we were in a war and refused to declare a policy to win it. The terrorists got the message: America is weak.

David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com

From the left:

If Bin Laden really is the mastermind, then the most devastating attack on the world’s greatest power was launched from what is probably the world’s poorest and most backward nation. That alone should suggest that conventional notions of warfare simply aren’t going to work in this case, unless the United States intends large-scale ground invasions and long-term occupations of most of the Middle East, which could lead to World War III.

David Moberg, In These Times

*

America is under attack from a force or forces that have inflicted on American civilians the kinds of damage that rise to the level of a war... Our government has an obligation, not so much to punish the perpetrators as to keep that kind of violence from recurring. That may mean waging a real war on the terrorists and their sponsors, assuming we can be certain who they are. The only justification for waging a real war against someone, of course, is that someone is waging a real war against you. And someone is.

Harold Meyerson, American Prospect

*

Although there is not yet any clear person or place against whom to retaliate, 90% of the American people want revenge, according to call-in polls (for not even in so great a tragedy as this can we seem to dispense with call-in polls). ... On the ground, there are rumors of hundreds dead at the Pentagon and anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 unaccounted for in New York, but no authority has provided an official estimate. Who knows? Who knows anything, anymore? As during the Gulf War, I sense that we’re facing a great paralyzing white wall of not knowing.

Patricia J. Williams, Nation

*

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world,” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Sept. 11’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

Susan Sontag, New Yorker

*

Dozens of police and emergency medical workers are presumed dead as well. Here in New York, they are not faceless. Two of the police on the scene, who survived, were my older brother and his son...The same is true of the families of the dead in the hijacked planes. They are our brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, cousins and friends. As are those who died in the horrible disaster at the Pentagon. I have fought them on political grounds, as I have railed against the corporate greed of America represented by the Twin Towers, but I have never for a moment wished them harm.

Peter Gorman, High Times

*

They claim to act for the oppressed, against their oppressors; for the “south,” against the “north”; for the world’s poor, against the forces of global capitalism. All these claims are false. There are plenty of people in the world today who need a left politics, but terrorism is not that politics. It is not intended to be a left politics, and men and women on the left should actively repudiate apologists for terrorism.

Editors, Dissent

*

The brains and money behind this operation isn’t a group of penniless refugees living in Palestinian camps. Many of the core terrorists are evil people. But these evil people are often marginalized when societal dynamics are moving toward peace and hope (e.g. in Israel while Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister), and they become much more influential and able to recruit people to give their lives to their cause when ordinary and otherwise decent people despair of peace and justice (as when Israel, from 1996 to 2000, dramatically increased the number of settlers).

Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun