September 11th opened my eyes to a big difference between college and high school that I hadn't really thought about before. In high school, things are brought to you. There is virtually no necessity for students to seek out their academic experiences - it is the job of the high school to force you into them. With only the notable exception of extracurricular activities, every student in a given high school will have more or less the same experience regardless of how much time outside of classes they put in. This changes radically in college, and I think there's no better example than on American holidays. In high school, you have assemblies to help remind you about what the nation is celebrating on that day, and to focus your thinking. But in college it doesn't work like that. To make something meaningful, you have to go after it yourself - set aside time to think about what the day means, or find an activity that will remind you. College is a lot about freedom, and freedom is a lot about what you do with it.
That being said, I was lucky enough to get an email about a speech taking place today. I don't think I would have done anything unique for the day if I didn't get the email, but instead I attended a seminar by one John Brady Kiesling. He's the author of a new book, called Diplomacy Lessons, and was a former member of the foreign services. He resigned his post in Greece in 2003 prior to the US invasion of Iraq, saying:
“Until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.”Apparently the fact that he was speaking on September 11th was simply serendipitous - it just happened to be when he was in the area and free to speak (he's been on his book tour). But because it was 9/11, he said he decided to center his talk around "How 9/11 Changed Diplomacy." Centered is a loose term, however, because he didn't really center his speaking around anything in particular.
I was a tad worried at first, that this was not at all what I was expecting, that it was a waste of my time. He didn't strike me initially as the greatest public speaker, and his rambling style put me off. There was no way to leave without being incredibly rude, however, so I stuck it out - and I was glad I did. What I was left with, after his unfocused talk and answers to various questions was a startling impression of the world that I hadn't encountered before. (By unfocused I don't mean to imply that there was a problem with the content, it just was a series of very interesting anecdotes that I had to put together into a larger picture myself.)
Kiesling downplayed the threat of Iran, saying that the picture we're getting from the media is hyped up. We don't have an embassy in Iran, he said, so the information we get on them is based on the intelligence we've gathered, on their most dangerous political figures. We don't get an accurate view of what their society is like, what it supports and what it doesn't. You could do the same thing with us, Kiesling said. If you selected certain people to monitor, it would look like we're an unstable, warmongering nation.
And example after example, this is what he seemed to be saying: Americans have hugely distorted views about what foreign nations are like - and for the same reasons, foreigners have hugely distorted views of what Americans are like. When you boil society down to its bare bones, it's simply a collection of individuals, who make decisions in much the same way we do. And foreign policy seems to forget this. It treats situations as black and white, it labels countries and peoples, it simplifies things without justification.
To fight a war on terrorism, Kiesling said, means to fight a war you are going to lose. Terrorism will work as long as it is successful, and it succeeds because of the goals of those who employ it. They aren't trying to achieve a political goal, they're trying to create a polarized world where extreme doctrines, such as their own, flourish. And terrorism is the perfect means to accomplish this. So to decide to wage a war on terror is ignorance. You don't put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. You make sure it doesn't have anything to feed on. You have to create a world where citizens will not tolerate terrorists among them, a world where understanding is promoted among the most diverse of people, a world where extremism cannot and will not live. You don't fight terrorism. You make it irrelevant.
It's been 5 years since terrorism took center stage, and made itself relevant. The United States simply seems to have decided to combat the blaze by throwing logs at it. And predictably, all it has done is feed the fire.
My one wish, for this day, is that 5 years from now we will have learned from our mistakes and grown, as individuals and as a nation. We will have grown towards understanding, and grown towards a world where nothing like what happened 5 years ago today can ever happen again.
(And if you want to read a wonderful and moving novel that will really hammer home the impact of what happened, pick up Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safron Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated.)
2 comments:
Ben, I never told you this but over the summer I actually read Foer's 9/11 book. (You can talk to me about it later) I definitely was not as impressed by it as you were. To much style for style's sake and let down of an ending. But nice post otherwise!
That was a nice post...The one thought I had (which isn't original, I forget where I read it) is that the other reason you can't declare a war on terrorism is that it isn't an enemy, it's a method of attack. You can fight radical Islam who use terror as a tactic, but you can't have a war against terrorism itself, just like you can't have a war to end all wars.
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