In a Glass House

National Review Online, October 3, 2001

If there is a word for chutzpah in Arabic, Amr Mussa must know it. Mr. Mussa is the secretary general of that distinguished 22-nation association, the Arab League, and he wants the world to know that he is shocked — shocked — by comments made by Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi last week. This is no small matter; as secretary general of an organization with a membership that includes Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan, Mr. Mussa cannot be somebody who it is easy to upset. But Mr. Berlusconi has succeeded, apparently, where Colonel Qaddafi could not. Amr Mussa is, now, at last offended. Like the despots who pay his wages, the butchers' bureaucrat responds badly, it turns out, to a little criticism. The idea of debate is as foreign to him as it is to his masters. After days of controversy, fury and posturing, what Mussa wanted was for us to understand that the lout Berlusconi had gone too far. It was, said Mussa, "dangerous" and unacceptable" for the Italian to have spoken in the way that he did. Take note of those adjectives, "dangerous" and "unacceptable": they have a jailhouse ring to them. They are the language of the secret policeman, not the rhetoric of democracy.

The Italian prime minister's crime, as we all must now know, was to talk about the "superiority" of Western civilization, a culture that, Mr. Berlusconi had the effrontery to claim, consists of a "value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion," respect, he argued, that was not to be found in Islamic countries.

As Jonah Goldberg noted in Friday's NRO, there is much to be said for this point of view and it is striking that the opposition to it has come neither from democratic Arab parliamentarians (strangely, there do not appear to be any) nor from logic, nor from reasoned argument. Instead all we are offered is the spectacle of a hireling civil servant cleverly brandishing the one word that, in the West, is almost always guaranteed to stop all rational debate: racism. Mr. Berlusconi's comments, were, said Mr. Mussa, "racist." The ploy has seemed to work. Belgium, a country that puts the less in spineless (and is the current holder of the EU presidency) has already apologized.

But Mr. Mussa should be careful. People in glass houses should not throw stones (and, no, before anyone complains, that phrase is a figure of speech: it is not a reference to the rougher edges of Sharia jurisprudence). If he is really so worried about racism, the secretary general of the Arab League should look first to his own membership, to the slaver state Sudan, perhaps, or to Libya, a country where last year's pogrom against black immigrants in the provincial town of Az Zawiyah (50 dead, in case anyone was counting) could initially be described in a government newspaper as no more than a "summer cloud." If not there, perhaps Mr. Mussa would like to look instead to the presses of Egypt and Syria, countries where little that is printed appears without some degree of government approval, countries where there is widespread circulation of the sort of gutter anti-Semitism not generally seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich.

Mr. Mussa does not even have to leave the confines of his own bureaucracy to find racism, or at least racism in the ludicrous way that he defines it. If the secretary general of the Arab League genuinely believes that Berlusconi's attempt to weigh the relative merits of Western and Islamic cultures really represents some form of racial prejudice he should take a look at the website of his own organization, and check out what is written there about the years of Islam's initial expansion.

"These Muslim believers were not merely conquerors. They rapidly established a new and dynamic civilization that for centuries was the only bright light in an otherwise culturally and intellectually stagnant world."

Oops.

On Afghan Plains

National Review Online, September 24, 2001

Afghanistan is, say those here who tell the U.S. to do nothing, a graveyard of empire, a land where American soldiers should not go, a mountainous desolation filled with a savage race of warriors that we would be crazy to challenge, a place, as Kipling so often described it, of terrifying cruelty.

 When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come up to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

 It is a landscape, runs the argument, where technological advantage counts for little. These, we are warned, are the fearless guerrillas who could shoot down a Soviet attack helicopter or defy the best of Imperial Britain.

 A scrimmage in a Border Station —

A canter down some dark defile —

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —

The Crammer's Boast, the Squadron's pride

Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

 The Taliban understand the deterrent power of their country's daunting image. Speaking to the press on Friday, the Afghan regime's ambassador to Pakistan seemed to revel in the country's bloodstained past, "So the only master of the world wants to threaten us, but make no mistake: Afghanistan, as it was in the past — the Great Britain, he came, the Red Army, he came — Afghanistan is a swamp. People enter here laughing, are exiting injured."

 The ambassador's message is as clear as his grammar is shaky, but the truth, needless to say, is rather less forbidding. For a would-be invader, the lessons of Afghan history are not quite so bleak as myth would suggest. Contrary to legend, and for all the undoubted ferocity of the country's defenders, history shows that it is possible to mount a successful attack on Afghanistan. Those fearsome tribesmen can be beaten in a fight. The Soviets often achieved this during their long conflict with the Afghans, and, what is less well known today, so did the British in the course of theirs.

 Britain's first (1838-42) and second (1878-80) Afghan wars saw a good number of battlefield victories by Queen Victoria's troops. The problem, however, then as now, was that winning battles was not the same as winning wars. For all their formidable reputation, the redcoats proved no more successful than the Red Army in establishing any lasting authority over this troublesome territory

 It was a failure that was symbolized for generations of Britons by Dr. William Brydon. The Victorians often took a mawkish pleasure from images of their own failure, so long as that failure was either heroic or tragic. Dr. Brydon, clinging to his pony as he made it into Jalalabad in January 1842, managed to be both. Battered and bruised, the brave surgeon was the sole survivor of a British exodus from Kabul. 16,000 people, the scraps of an army and its camp followers, had fled the Afghan capital the week before. Dr. Brydon was the only person to reach safety. It was possibly the most humiliating moment in the history of the Empire, and a defining moment in the creation of the West's image of the invincible Afghan.

 Poor Dr. Brydon had, in the most horrifying way imaginable, been taught the other main lesson of Afghan history. Don't stay too long. Where the both the British and the Soviets went wrong, militarily speaking, was not in their initial onslaught, but in their attempts to impose alien rule on the country. Afghanistan may be a fissile half-state filled with a number of feuding ethnic groups, but, as much as its Pathans, Uzbeks, and Tajiks may loathe each other, they tend to hate the interfering outsider far, far more. And in their hatred, they have always had an ally in the country's brutal terrain. Those who want to control Afghanistan have to declare war on geography itself.

 The story of the Soviet intervention is well known, but in its failure (if not its motivation) it was not so different from those two British attempts well over a century ago. In 1838, the British succeeded in installing their own puppet ruler in Kabul. The sybaritic and cruel Shah Shujah failed to win any indigenous support, and the English presence was quickly seen as an intolerable infidel insult. "The mullahs," noted one officer, "are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other." It was an almost inevitable consequence of the invaders' arrogance that political ineptitude and cultural insensitivity were accompanied by military incompetence. In a country used to the politics of endless rivalry, the utterly predictable (except it seemed, to the Brits) betrayals, treachery and slaughter followed in due course. It was not so long later that Dr. Brydon was making his melancholy way back to Jalalabad.

 Significantly, however, in terms of current debate in the U.S., it has been forgotten that the last stage of the war, a punitive expedition, went relatively well for Britain. It was an example of how a carefully defined mission with clear and limited objectives can succeed as much in Afghanistan as anywhere else. Shah Shujah was dead (killed, naturally, under a flag of truce) by the time that the British returned to Kabul but the Afghan capital was reoccupied long enough for them to proclaim a somewhat unconvincing victory and return to the comforts of their Raj.

 Britain's second Afghan war followed a similar course. Attempts to reduce the country's independence again came to nothing, despite the occupation of Kabul on a number of occasions (at the end of the first of which, Queen's Victoria representative was murdered in the now traditional way). The invaders also fared little better in the rest of the country, which remained uncontrollable despite some notable British victories, which the Afghans, in their stubborn way, simply chose to ignore.

 London at last got the message. Pride saved by some conventional military successes, the British withdrew, having managed to leave Kabul in the hands of a new ruler, Abdur Rahman. Rahman was (genuinely) independent enough to satisfy local sensibilities, militarily competent (he managed to impose something roughly resembling unity on the country) and not actively hostile. So far as neighbors of Afghanistan are concerned that is about as good as it gets. Thereafter problems on the frontier with British India rarely rose much above a state of vaguely criminal disorder, periodically and effectively policed by the occasional intervention by Her Majesty's military.

 Today's challenge for America is more complicated, and more dangerous than anything ever faced by the British. Much of the solution probably lies in the shrewd and cleverly oblique approach recently advocated by James Robbins on NRO. Nevertheless, if as seems likely, some U.S. troops see action in Afghanistan, the real lesson of history is that they can prevail against this supposedly invincible enemy.

 But they mustn't try and run his country.

After Darkness

National Review Online, September 17, 2001

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

As the sun sets over an outraged Manhattan skyline small groups of people begin to gather outside their apartment buildings. They are holding candles, and they stand together, a little awkwardly, somewhat embarrassed. This is not a city that is comfortable with open displays of sentiment. This is a town where neighbors like to keep to themselves. But this night they stand together, sometimes looking to that new emptiness to the south, as the light cupped in their hands flickers, but never, quite, seems to go out. There's a soft wind, a perfect early autumn breeze that blows against the flags that seem to be everywhere, outside a bar, in the window of a supermarket, on a baby stroller, outside our local firehouse, a base now of brave men in mourning. The breeze also catches this city's newest, and saddest, banners, little paper fliers stuck to the walls, to the phone booths, to the streetlights, each one carrying a name.

Robert Sutcliffe, Larry Boisseau, Gilbert Ruiz, Sara Harvey, Ye Wei Liang…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

Each piece of paper has a story to tell. Each is different, and yet each, heartbreakingly, is the same. They almost all come with that identical, awful heading, "Missing," evidence of tragedy and last, desperate hope. Readers are provided with addresses, ages, height, distinguishing characteristics, jewelry, and, often, a final, doomed location, usually a floor or a stairwell in the buildings that we are still learning to call the "former" World Trade Center. There are photographs, wedding-day joyful, passport unflattering, graduation-day solemn, awkward at a company dinner, smiling happily with a laughing toddler, raising a glass in a restaurant, posing proudly in a fireman's uniform.

Linda Oliva, Taimar Khan, Jan Maciejewski, Gene Calvi, Arnold Lim…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

The Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street has become one of the locations where relatives of the missing can go to give these details to the authorities. The building's monumental beaux-arts solidity gives off a reassuring aura of civic order. It is a red-brick counterpart to the city's tirelessly effective mayor, Rudy Giuliani; it is a place where government is doing what it should do, and doing it well. Kindly ladies sit in little makeshift booths dispensing hot meals and snacks. Military types jump in and out of humvees, shockingly soldierly in a city where camouflage is usually only a fashion statement. Those little fliers are all over the place, attached, seemingly, to every surface, even to the media trucks that line the sidewalks. I see a middle-aged woman reach out to touch one. She strokes the paper, softly.

John Scharf, Terry Gazzini, Alexis Leduc, Jason Jacobs, Vanavah Thompson…

It is not far from the Armory to Union Square, the place where downtown is traditionally said to begin. Despite two decades of gentrification, it is still a little scrappy, still believable in its century-old role as a rallying point for demonstration and protest. Tonight it is, once more, full. Thousands have come here, again carrying candles. Other flames flicker by little makeshift shrines, illuminating the faces that stare out from posters of the missing, pasted, to the trees, to the walls, to the entrance to the subway station, to the concrete of the construction barriers.

Arlene Babakitis, Kevin Williams, Joanna Sigismund, Kristy Ryan, Margaret Echtermann…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

For a city that has got too used to the whiff of acrid smoke wafting up from ruined Lower Manhattan, the sweet smell given off by the candles is gentle relief. There is music too, "We Shall Overcome "sung beautifully by women with intense, clever faces, from NYU probably. Sung tonight, it is a memorial hymn, but also, perhaps, a reproach to those mourners who want justice as well as "peace." In this part of the square that night, there is a taste of future controversy, with banners that protest American bombs rather than the American bombed. Other posters warn against the temptations of racism. Fair enough, but we have no need of lectures, not now, not here. "War is not the answer," read the placards in one corner. We will see.

But we are downtown, a place where people prefer to do their own thing, so others, less political, start to sing different songs, from slow tunes to show tunes ("New York, New York," extempore and ragged, never sounded better), from pop hits to, several times, "The Star-Spangled Banner. " In an age of recorded music, we no longer remember lyrics, but two men who do, lead the way, coordinating the effort for the rest of us. It was a memorial service, Big Apple style, moving and raucous, a wake, a party and a jam session. Someone starts playing a sax. To add to the din, a jet, a fighter, swoops low overhead. In our newly learned reflex, we all look up.

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are cheers too, cheers for the fire truck making its way further downtown, and applause as someone succeeds, finally, in placing a little American flag in the hand of the statue of Washington that stands in the middle of the square. As the Stars and Stripes slide in to old George's metal grasp, the refrain goes out, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A."

Things are quieter in Washington Square Park, ten blocks or so to the south. A few people are sitting there, some, still, with candles, which are guttering now as they slowly burn out. It is late. Someone has a guitar and is playing songs from the Sixties. An appreciative old man, eccentric in baseball cap and Allen Ginsberg beard, spins round and round, dancing to the music in the jig of the irrevocably deluded. At the north end of the park there is a triumphal arch, splendid evidence of Victorian confidence. It commemorates the centenary of Washington's first inauguration (which took place here in New York, of course, not far from what we now know as Ground Zero). Prolonged restoration work means that it is surrounded by a supposedly temporary fence and this fence too now bears the spoor of Tuesday's slaughter, the evidence of our lost confidence, those poor hopeful, hopeless scraps of paper, garlanded with flowers and flags, illuminated by clusters of votive candles.

Sean Fagan, Andy O'Grady, Michael Baksi, Giovanna Gambale, Harry Goody…

Normally, if you gaze south from here, towards Houston Street and beyond, you can expect a view of the Twin Towers. At this time of the evening they glitter and shimmer, transformed from their daytime ordinariness. The blink, blink, blink of the lights at the end of their antennae become Manhattan's lodestars, reassuring against the backdrop of a blank, urban darkness. But not tonight. All that can be seen now is a vast cloud of smoke, transformed by the rescue operation's klieg lights into a ghostly, ghastly unnatural white. And we all know what is behind that cloud.

Nothing.