Making Our Stand

Military action against both the al Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban regime now looks certain. What remains to be seen is whether America will seize this opportunity to reclaim her soul.

The strategic justification for military action is clear. Although a forceful response may kindle anger among our sworn enemies, we would be fools to maintain illusions of courting their friendship. We have no leverage over sick fanatics who blow themselves up to win salvation from whatever demons they mistake for gods. They do not respond to incentives, they do not fear death, and they will not stop hating us until we cower away in ignominious isolationism.

Yet we need not hunt down every lone terrorist in order to make the world safe, because these men cannot act alone. We have spoken much of Osama bin Laden, but the Taliban is his sponsor in sin. Without the Taliban’s tacit support, bin Laden would have been incapacitated long ago. Even the world’s most nefarious networks cannot convert their hatred into mass murder unless a government of sinister scoundrels buries its head in the sand and ignores the training camps and financial operations required to do what al Qaeda has done.

Governments, unlike terrorists, respond to incentives and balk at threats. Henry A. Kissinger ’50 wrote on Sept. 12 that “any government that shelters groups capable of this kind of attack, whether or not they can be shown to have been involved in this attack, must pay an exorbitant price.” It is very simple. Every regime has a vested interest in its own survival. When America and her allies demonstrate that the Taliban’s tolerance for terror is incompatible with self-preservation, people like Osama bin Laden will become international hot potatoes so dangerous that no government will dare shelter them. And if some benighted tyrant tests the resolve of the civilized world, we will not rest until he is brought to his knees.

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This, of course, is where our vaunted free thinkers start chalking peace signs. Indeed, they have already begun. Last weekend, thousands of protesters marched in Washington, D.C. to oppose military action. Efforts are underway on campuses across the country to organize a student walkout when allied strikes begin. And, closer to home, the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice has made “finding peaceful alternatives to President Bush’s calls for war” one of its stated purposes.

Instead of championing such crudely nonintellectual ideas as “victory,” the authors of anti-war antics offer a platitude: “Patriotism should be equated with peace, not war.” But true patriotism has little to do with either, and it is folly to force love of country onto the Procrustean bed of a single policy.

My own patriotism is neither tie-dyed pacifism nor jingoistic bloodlust. Rather, it is a burning dedication to the ideals that American democracy embodies and an unflinching determination to defend those ideals through whatever means are most effective. If diplomacy fails—if the call to arms proves inescapable and we must kill to make the world free—patriotism does not prevent us from hanging our heads in sorrow. But it does forbid us from wringing our hands and walking away. And I think all those war-crazed lunatics who, like me, have lined up behind a president supposedly hell-bent on inflicting Mosaic revenge (lunatics like Al Gore ’69, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt, to name a few) would probably talk of patriotism in similar terms.

Current polls leave no doubt that the peacenik naysayers now running to the flowers are but a tiny minority of our people. Yet they scream in a voice that is loud and familiar. The neo-hippies who jeer from their idle repose in academia’s ideological daisy-fields are relics of the slovenly anarchism that was born of our parents’ generation, reached its apogee at the height of the Vietnam War, and survives to this day in tenured faculty positions everywhere. And it is the fantasies of that generation—its moral relativism, its cult of cynicism, its delusion that all of humanity’s ills result from either Western capitalism or U.S. foreign policy—that, in their death throes, kick and scream against the better angels of our nature who yearn to believe in an America that is both strong and good.

I think that we are remembering how to believe. I hear it in conversations everywhere. It is amazing indeed what people can now bring themselves to say without embarrassment: that our leaders are capable of acting with intelligence and rectitude; that the world would not be a better place if America left it alone; that it is impossible to convince a villain to do what is right; that some things really are worth sacrificing for, fighting for, dying for. Nor am I embarrassed to say this: there are certain rare moments when the world’s forces align in a stark opposition of good and evil, and the leaders of free lands invoke the name of God in liberty’s defense, and there are no shades of gray.

In these times, each of us must choose where to make his stand.

Jason L. Steorts ’03 is a philosophy concentrator in Dunster House. His column runs on alternate Fridays.