My Holy War
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MJ: You also describe incremental changes in the texture of life in the city. What have they been?
JR: We move more and more into a surveillance society. The United States used to be the most open and hospitable country on the face of the globe. There is now such a suspicion of strangers, of the other, such a sense that people need to be watched in their movements, such an alertness to the wrong person in the wrong place, such a constant theater of mock terrorist attacks, which have been terribly visible in Seattle. There was the TOPOFF exercise of two or three years ago, which was a supposed dirty bomb going off in a container. Of course, the bigger danger is a massive earthquake, but there aren't the resources to deal with one. You can get billions in federal money if you want to mount an anti-terrorist exercise, but you can't have a bean for earthquakes.
MJ: Sure, but, then again, Seattle is as likely a terrorist target as any, isn't it?
JR: True. Seattle has one quality about it that would make it an extremely attractive target: its container port is more closely integrated with downtown than any other container port is with the rest of a city. If they wanted to use a container-borne device, as they call them, probably the easiest city to get would be Seattle.
MJ: It just so happened that you were in Britain last summer on the day of the tube bombings. How did the British reaction differ from the American one on 9/11?
JR: The British lived through the 70s and 80s with constant IRA bomb scares and occasional IRA bombs and developed a kind of sanity about terrorism—that it's something that's going to happen at some time; that you can take every possible precaution to prevent it from happening, but you acknowledge that terrorism is something impossible to prevent. It can be minimized, you can take precautions against it, and there's a ton of sensible things you can do about it, which is just about what Steven Flynn proposes in America the Vulnerable, which I think is the most underrated, book about post-9/11 terrorism. And what Flynn inveighs against is that the War on Terror is being conducted as a go-to-source war, essentially a pursuit of the bad guys, which admittedly makes much more sexy reading than, say, establishing red lines and green lines to control the import of goods into this country, to bring more or less hidden communications networks out into the open to allow for inspection and fast-tracking and so on.
MJ: Okay, so going back to your first answer, you were seized with a desire to understand the 9/11 hijackers, where they came from and so on. And one thing you found was that they were, most of them, thoroughly westernized.
JR: That's right. What you find with, among others, Mohammed Atta and Sadiq Khan, the leader of the of the London bombers, is that they were brought up in Western culture, educated at western universities, out of which many of their ideas sprung. I think it's very important that we realize that we're dealing not with fanatics but with intellectuals of a sort. I mean, they've been reading the same books we have; they're fans of T.S. Elliot's Wasteland. When they talk about the degradation of the West they're merely echoing the first generation of high literary modernists like Elliot. You can see that the Wasteland is a poem that chimes extraordinarily well with Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. They talk about the same decadence of the West, and that same desire to demolish, which is there persistently in the Wasteland. And they've been reading our own anti-colonial literature, too; they've read Frantz Fanon..
That's why people like, say, Salman Rushdie, are so wrong when they say we're dealing with people who want to drag the world back into the Dark Ages; they see their movement, however much we may dislike the thought, as a modern, reformist movement that is as much political and almost literary-intellectual as it is religious, though certainly religious belief supplies the necessary steel.
MJ: But clearly there is that religious element. And it's mirrored on the US side.
JR: Yes. I don't think it was any accident that the word "crusade" was used right at the beginning, though it was replaced very quickly. I think George W. Bush coming to power, with his Christian fundamentalist base, was to some extent consciously fulfilling their prophecies of the last days; and the religiose rhetoric brought to bear on the war on terror, the war or Iraq, the war of good against evil, was calculated to appeal to the base. But there was something else in it, too, which is that an administration based on elevating faith as a good in itself, which this one very much has done, is an administration that can ignore realism safely, because faith ties in very closely with what I've tried to label "American Platonism," this idealist view of the world—slightly more in its technical sense than its vernacular one—a culmination of Christian faith. It regards realism as being essentially low-minded and putting unnecessary blocks in the way of a greater vision to be achieved.
