Copyright © 2001 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

The United States is presented with a historic challenge and a historic opportunity in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Former enemies have become allies; old allies have become foes.

A strange new world has emerged almost overnight. Before Sept. 11, who might have imagined that Russia, Pakistan, and perhaps even Iran would join the United States in attacking a fundamentalist Muslim regime? Before Sept. 11, how many of us knew that some of the Afghani “freedom fighters” we supported in the 1980s in their war against the Soviet Union had become our deadliest enemies only a few years later?

Many, perhaps most Americans are generally unaware of the history of the rest of the world. We pay for this ignorance when our political views are not informed by a thorough knowledge and understanding of history, and especially our own historical mistakes. In the Middle East, we are now paying for a long history of conflict between Islam and Christianity and for our own policies during the Cold War. The price is being paid in American blood.

While Americans like to think that our nation is the successor to the unbroken chain of Greek-Roman-Western European civilization, they overlook several centuries in which the Arab empire was the leading military, economic, and intellectual power of Eurasia. Indeed, while Western Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, the Arab peoples were at the very center of human learning, developing much of the mathematical theory (and the very system of numbers) and literary forms from which Western Europe’s intellectual and cultural renaissance would emerge.

The Arab peoples were the inheritors of Greek and Roman civilization, and the Western Europeans the inheritors of an Arabian civilization. “Western civilization” as we know it was developed to a considerable degree in the Middle East.

Anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East has deep roots. Needless to say, the Christian Crusades against the Islamic peoples of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries contribute greatly to the anti-Western feeling in many parts of the 21st century Middle East. But consider that the Muslims had crusaded effectively against the Christian peoples for centuries prior to the Christian Crusades, in part for the express purpose of converting other nations to Islam.

Several centuries after the failure of the last Christian Crusade, Western Europe again attempted to dominate the Arab peoples around the Mediterranean Sea in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Each round of conflict provided the combination of legend, myth and genuine historical grievance that fueled the hate-filled terrorists of Sept.11, 2001.

Nor is the United States without its own extensive, albeit more recent history in the region. Our three most treacherous enemies in the world, arguably at least, are Iran, Iraq and now Afghanistan. Americans under the age of 25 have lived their lives with a vague notion that Iran is our enemy, but few have a real understanding of how that came to be.

Prior to Iran’s Islamic revolution in the late 1970s, the United States supported the Shah of Iran, whose government systematically repressed the Iranian people. Throughout the Cold War, we supported the Shah for the primary reason that he was aggressively anti-Communist. The Iranian people ultimately rebelled, drove the Shah from the power, and installed a fundamentalist Islamic government.

The new government wanted the Shah returned to Iran for trial as a criminal, but the United States provided safe harbor for the Shah. Frustrated and angry, the new Iranian government arranged for the terrorist takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran, and several dozen American soldiers and diplomats were held hostage for more than a year. Iran has been our enemy ever since.

One of the ways we expressed our animosity toward Iran was to provide weapons and other support to Iraq when war broke out between those countries. Iraq well might have been overrun by the superior numbers of Iranian troops were it not for the assistance of the United States.

A few years later, Iraq overran Kuwait with an army empowered in no small part by the United States, and we were at war with the very army we had helped less than a decade earlier. Though the international alliance forged by the United States routed the Iraqi army, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein continues to try to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons for use against the United States. Until Sept. 11, Iraq was our primary enemy in the Middle East.

Now our primary enemy is Afghanistan. The Taliban government came to power after the civil war in Afghanistan, which took place immediately after the war against the Soviet Union. The United States aided the Afghani guerrillas in their war against the Soviets. Again, the Cold War strategy of containing communism was the reason for our involvement. We did not know that some of the anticommunist Islamic guerrillas we nourished to fight against the Soviet Union would also be the anti-Western Islamic terrorists who harbor Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, the primary suspects in the attacks against New York and Washington.

I do not second-guess the policies that led us into our current situation for the purpose of criticizing the policy makers. Hindsight is important only for what it can teach us about how we should act in the future. What is important now is that we understand that at least some of the animosity toward us in the Middle East results directly from choices that we made in the past.

How we conduct the war we now undertake against the terrorists will determine whether we end international terrorism as a force in the world forever, or whether we only breed new generations of terrorists to strike at our children and grandchildren.

We must forego our lust for blood vengeance to the extent necessary to avoid the killing of innocents. True, every war kills many noncombatants. Yet, just as America was horrified when Timothy McVeigh referred to the children he killed at the Oklahoma City federal building as “collateral damage,” we also should be horrified at the thought of our soldiers killing innocents as they pursue the guilty.

Most of the world has lined up behind the United States in the war against terrorism. We lose the moral high ground and many of our allies if our war policy does not distinguish between terrorists and innocents. Equally important, public support for the war will wane should Americans be assaulted with images like those from Vietnam of wounded children and massacred villagers.

This is at once the most important and the most difficult aspect of the war. Viewing the scenes of devastation from New York, most American hearts cried for revenge. Mine certainly did. I will not argue the theological point that revenge is wrong, because I just am not ready to feel that way. I do believe, however, that the desire for revenge creates an infinite cycle of violence, and that a war carried out in revenge will only create more of the terrorists we are trying to eliminate.

For once in our history, let us not dehumanize our enemy. In Vietnam, many Americans referred to Vietnamese people a. “g--ks.” In World War II, our enemies were “j-ps” and “kr--ts.” In the 19th century, the American Indians who fought the United States were “r-----ns.” Even as recently as the Gulf War, we heard of “sand n----rs.”

The racist blockheads who since Sept. 11 have attacked American Muslims, defaced their mosques and called them names have embarrassed and hurt our country. I was never more proud of this country than when President Bush went to an Islamic Center in Washington and denounced attacks on Muslims in the United States.

Nothing is more important in demonstrating to the world that we do not hate Islam than our treatment of Muslims in the United States. Nothing will do more to distinguish us from the fundamentalist terrorists we deplore than to demonstrate that religious freedom and nondiscrimination are bedrock principles of our national life.

We must make a long-term commitment to improving the quality of life for people in the Middle East. We should try to prevent the cultivation of future generations of terrorists by trying to eradicate the fury that comes from humiliation and deprivation. No one is more dangerous than people with nothing left to lose.

After World War I, Germany was humiliated, isolated and economically ruined by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s message of hate and revenge found a receptive audience in a humiliated and impoverished German people.

In contrast, after World War II, the United States spent billions to rebuild Germany and Japan. Both countries have been loyal allies and principled competitors ever since. To the extent our war against the terrorists destroys, we should be willing to rebuild.

The countries that previously spawned terrorists must be left after the war with both their dignity and the resources they will need to become part of the global economic system. Otherwise, our children and grandchildren will be fighting their children and grandchildren.

They say this war will be unlike any other. America and its allies will attempt to isolate and contain the terrorists and the governments who aid them. We will attempt to deprive them of the economic means to carry out their plots, both by seizing their assets and by making them spend much of whatever money remains for basic self-defense measures.

The terrorists will be pursued constantly and required to spend their resources and their energy simply to stay a little bit ahead of the pursuers. Military actions will tend to be raids, not grand campaigns of great armies. Computer experts, scientists, doctors and financial experts may prove as valuable as our fighting men and women.

But different tactics will not be enough. Hopefully, this war will also be different because of its strategic objectives. This should not be a war to destroy and subjugate nations. It should not be war to suppress a religious tradition nor to defeat a political ideology.

Let us instead seek to help the peoples of terrorist nations free themselves from tyranny. Let us help them form governments based on principles that make them welcome in the family of nations. Let us help to create opportunities for progress and prosperity for those who are without hope.

Such a war would be worthy of American power, worthy of sacrifice, worth winning. Such a war would honor and make great the memory of each and every one of our 6,000 dead.

Kevin Gover, Esq., is the former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Mr. Gover is a member of the Pawnee Tribe and a native of Lawton, Oklahoma.