America Alone (23 page)

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THE LOOK

One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War comes from its first Christmas: December 1914. The Germans and British, separated by a few yards of mud on the western front, put up banners to wish each other season's greetings, sang "Silent Night" in the dark in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man's Land and share some German beer and English plum jam. After this Yuletide interlude, they went back to killing each other. The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man's Land truce all take for granted the story's central truth: that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footie (i.e., soccer), singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

Now cross to Israel, to Haifa on a Saturday night in 2003: nineteen diners were killed in a packed restaurant by a twenty-something female suicide bomber, her hair attractively tied in a Western-style ponytail, to judge from the detached head she left as her calling card. Try to find the common humanity between the participants in that war. Try to imagine the two sides ever kicking a ball around, swapping songs. The only place in the modern Middle East where Arabs and Jews coexist is in Israel, especially in Haifa. The restaurant, young Hanadi Jaradat blew apart, had been jointly owned by an Arab family and a Jewish family for forty years. It would be interesting to know whether it was targeted for that very reason, in the same way that, in Northern Ireland, the IRA took to killing the Catholic caterers and cleaners who worked at army bases. But the intifada is too primal for anything that thought out. It's more likely that once Miss Jaradat had slipped into Israel proper--through a gap in the unfinished security fence the European Union and the State Department so deplore--she decided that any target would do. She was busting to blow.

The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of Western sentimental pacifism-not least that war is a board game played by old men with young men as their chess pieces: if only the vengeful aged generals got out of the way, there'd be no conflict. But such common humanity as one can find on the West Bank resides, if only in their cynicism, in the leadership. Old Arafat may have showered glory and honor on his youthful martyrs but he was human enough to keep his own kid in Paris, well away from the suicide-bomber belts. It's hard to picture Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi or any of the other veteran terror apologists who hog the airwaves at CNN and the BBC celebrating the deaths of their loved ones the way Miss Jaradat's brother did. "We are receiving congratulations from people," said Thaher Jaradat. "Why should we cry? It is like her wedding day, the happiest day for her."

The problem is not the security fence, but the psychological fence--a chasm really--that separates a sizable proportion of the Palestinian population from all Jews. For one side, there is no common humanity, even with people they know well, who provide them with jobs, and much else: Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a twenty-one-year-old woman who has received kind and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, packs herself with explosives and sets off to blow apart that hospital and the doctors and nurses who've treated her. Oh, well. If you're pro-Palestinian, you shrug that their depravity is born of

"desperation." If you've had it with the Palestinians, you figure that after decades of UN

coddling and EU funding and wily Arab manipulation they're the most comprehensively wrecked people on the planet. In either case, it's a very particular circumstance.
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But what if that "desperation" goes global? What if it's shared by large numbers of other people around the planet?

Here's another death scene. Photographed from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realize that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, over a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

It was a picture from the Beslan massacre--the pupils of a Russian schoolhouse, taken hostage and slaughtered in September 2004. And, as Ken Bigley did, the very last thing they heard as they departed this world was the voice of their killer screaming" Allahu Akhbar!" God is great.

This virus has been a long time incubating. In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, terrorists shot the prime minister of Jordan at pointblank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Thirty-five years later, the Palestinian Authority elections were a landslide for Hamas and among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Umm Nidal-Mother of the Struggle--and, at the rate she's getting through her kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of. She's famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her seventeen-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It's the Hamas version of 42nd Street: you're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back in small pieces.

It may be that she stood for parliament because she's got a yen to be junior transport minister or deputy secretary of fisheries. But it seems more likely that she and her Hamas colleagues were elected because this is who the Palestinian people are, and this is what they believe. After sixty years as UN "refugees," they're now so inured they're electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice. When you're there, in Gaza or the West Bank, that culture of death is pervasive. You go into a convenience store and they're affable and friendly and you exchange some pleasantries, and over the guy's shoulder you're looking at the Martyrs of the Week he's got proudly displayed on the wall. On my last visit, Palestinian schools were in the midst of a national letter-writing competition. Among the education ministry's first-prize winners was twelve-year-old Mahmoud Naji Chalilah for this epistle to the Zionist Entity:

"My heart has turned into a sad block of pain. One day I will buy a weapon and I will blow away the fetters. I will propel my living-dead body into your arms .... " The famously "moderate" mullah Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the favorite imam of London mayor Ken Livingstone, was invited to speak at the 2004 "Our Children Our Future" conference sponsored and funded by the Metropolitan Police and Britain's Department for Work and Pensions. When it comes to children and their future, Imam al-Qaradawi certainly has it all mapped out: "Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation. "

Thank heaven for little girls; they blow up in the most delightful way. We are not dealing with "enemies" like the Soviets, or "terrorists" like the IRA. We are a long way from the common humanity that bound those German and British soldiers at Christmas Eve 1914. Try to imagine what a jihadist feels when he looks at a Russian schoolchild or an Israeli diner or a British contractor or an American pacifist.
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Now try to imagine how he'd feel if asked to participate in a nuclear plot, and to kill vastly greater numbers of Russians and Israelis and Britons and Americans. That moment is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported in 2006:

"Iran's hard-line spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies."

Well, there's a surprise.

WHAT PART OF "KNOW" DON'T WE UNDERSTAND?

In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld made a much quoted rumination. "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me," the defense secretary began,

"because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know." A lot of people jeered at Rummy. The witless twits at Britain's Plain English Campaign gave him that year's award for the worst use of English. But Rumsfeld is perhaps the best speaker of Plain English in English-speaking politics, and it would be a less despised profession if there were more like him. His little riff about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns is in fact a brilliant distillation of the dangers we face. Let's take an example close to the heart of arrogant Texas cowboys: John Wayne is holed up in an old prospector's shack. He peeks over the sill and drawls, "It's quiet out there. Too quiet."

What he means is that he knows the things he doesn't know. He doesn't know the precise location of the bad guys, but he knows they're out there somewhere, inching through the dust, perhaps trying to get to the large cactus from behind which they can get a clean shot at him. Thus he knows what to be on the lookout for: he is living in a world of known unknowns. But suppose, while he was scanning the horizon for a black hat or the glint of a revolver, a passenger jet suddenly ploughed into the shack. That would be one of Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns: something poor John Wayne didn't know he didn't know--until it hit him.

That's how most of the world reacted to September 11: we didn't know this was one of the things we didn't know. For most people in the developed world, terrorism meant detonating bombs in shopping streets, railway stations, and park bandstands--killing a couple dozen, maiming another thirty, tops. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times:

"The failure to prevent September 11 was not a failure of intelligence or co-ordination. It was a failure of imagination."

In other words, it was an unknown unknown: we didn't know enough to be alert for the things we didn't know.

There's a legitimate disagreement about that. Given al Qaeda's stated ambitions, given its previous targeting of the World Trade Center, given the number of young Arab men taking flight lessons in America, one can make the case that September 11 should have been a known unknown--one of those things we ought to have been scanning the horizon for. Friedman insists that "even if all the raw intelligence signals had been shared among the FBI, the CIA, and the White House, I'm convinced that there was no one there who would have put them all together, who, would have imagined evil on the scale Osama bin Laden did." For the sake of argument, concede that. After all, the Cold War was a half century of very well-known unknowns. We didn't know the precise timing or specifics of what would
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happen, but we knew the rough shape--a mushroom cloud--so well that, from Dr. Strangelove on, the known unknowns generated the most numbingly homogeneous body of predictive fiction ever seen.

It's trickier now. This is an age of unknown unknowns. If you've ever been at an airport counter buying a ticket when the computer goes down and the clerk explains that he can't do anything until the system's back up, you'll know that blank look on his face as he sits and waits and sits and waits, an able-bodied man effectively disabled. It wasn't like that if you were at the desk buying your ticket in 1937. He tore the stub off the book in his cash drawer and that was that. Today our system has a million points of vulnerability. Some of those are known unknowns--some type of terrorist-sparked electromagnetic pulse that wipes out every bank account in the United States and Canada and crashes the financial markets. We know some of the other things we don't know--who North Korea's been pitching its wares to, where the missing Soviet nuke materials have gone walkabout, who else has the kind of

"explosive socks" found by Scotland Yard in 2003--but we have no real idea in what combination these states and groups and technology and footwear might impress themselves on us, or what other links in the chain there might be. And we might not know until we switch on the TV and the screen's full of smoke again, but this time it's May 7 in Frankfurt, or February 3 in Vancouver, or October 22 in Dallas. Or we might not be able to switch on the TV at all, because the unknown unknown is a variation of technological catastrophe we haven't imagined.

Yet what we're confronted with in Iran are known knowns: a state that's developing nuclear weapons, a state that's made repeated threats to use such weapons against a neighboring state, a state with a long track record of terrorist sponsorship, a state whose actions align with its rhetoric very precisely. What's not to know?

So the question is: will they do it?

And the minute you have to ask the question you know the answer.

It's the same answer to the same question: Will they go ahead and slaughter the Beslan schoolchildren? Will they decapitate the bumbling Englishman? Will they kill the Iraqi aid worker and the American "Christian peacemaker" In 1993 a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed twenty-nine people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The following year, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly a hundred people died and 250 were injured--the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats and two former cabinet ministers. The chief perpetrator had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous "tri-border" region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a "dirty nuke" shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can't project itself to the Middle East at all. It can't nuke Tehran, and it can't attack Iran in conventional ways.

So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act?