Oh, the precarious balance between rationalization and rampant emotions. The argument is not going to go away; it will probably stick with us through our lifetimes. Why did Sept. 11 happen?
The immediate answer is that at the behest of a madman, 19 men decided to commit suicide by flying planes into prominent buildings.
Ah, but we are not satisfied with knowing what happened; we need to know why it happened.
What has largely ensued are spirited debates over the contributing factors to Sept. 11. Listening to the debate, the terrorists may have been: jealous of our freedom; homicidal maniacs; getting even for the Crusades; getting even for Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, or troops in Saudi Arabia, or U.S. hegemony; or desiring to destroy the United States.
It is certainly desirable to determine the motivations behind the attacks. It is also rather interesting to wade through the debates raging on editorial pages throughout the country, such as the interplay between liberals Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, mostly via The Nation Web site. (There is far too much to get into here. Simplistically, Chomsky takes the look at our policies view; as with the title of one recent column, Hitchens is \Against Rationalization."")
But the problem is that we cannot possibly know. Everything is truly speculation. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman almost realized this when he wrote Oct. 5, ""One can only be amazed at the ease with which some people abroad and at campus teach-ins now tell us what motivated the terrorists. Guess what? The terrorists didn't leave an explanatory note.""
But Friedman continued to pose his own dire explanation. ""Because their deed was their note: We want to destroy America, starting with its military and financial centers.""
I do not think I am going out on a limb to surmise that none of us really knows what Osama bin Laden is thinking or what was going through the minds of those 19 men. And quite frankly, if we could, do we really want to understand?
Perhaps we should listen to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man, who said ""one may say anything about the history of the world'anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational.""
What is more pertinent now is how the United States reacts to and interacts with the rest of the world in the present and future.
Though it should have been the case all along, now, more than ever, we need to care about what others think of us. Whether we think it is justified, we need to try to empathize with the worries of people who do not agree with our policies.
Consider the following from an Oct. 28 New York Times article entitled ""U.S. Appears to be Losing Public Relations War So Far:""
""'Talking heads just can't compete with powerful images,' a Western diplomat [in Cairo] said. 'The images touch emotions, and people in this part of the world react according to their emotions.'""
This implies that ""people in this part of the world"" are somehow less inclined to rational thought than people in the West. As if no one in the United States reacted to images of planes being used as bombs in an emotional fashion. As if these emotions have never clouded reason since Sept. 11. As if rushing to the local pharmacy to hoard Cipro is rational. As if cold rationality was necessarily desired when people are dying for no good reason.
It is this kind of us-versus-them supremacist jargon that reinforces the established image of the United States and its allies as pompous and condescending regarding the rest of the world.
The Economist wrote Oct. 20, ""Yusef al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian telesheikh and cleric who is a star on the Al Jazeera television network, epitomizes the moderate Arab view. He is scathing about the attack on Afghanistan, describing it as 'the logic of the bully.' Fighting terrorism by waging a huge war, he says, means using the same logic as the terrorists, punishing the innocent for the crimes of a few. The way to fight, he argues, is with ideas, by showing the way to a middle path in Islam and by trying to understand the psychology of terrorists.""
Some may call this paragraph yet another instance of ""Blaming America First,"" but such trite name-calling dismisses its importance. It does not matter if we feel our actions are justified if, to large swathes of the planet, our actions reinforce the notion that the United States is a bully. As Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation Nov. 5, ""a war can be 'just' ... and also be the wrong way to solve a problem.""
