 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Also in this section:
Taking Up the Burden
The New York Post, September 14, 2001
by Jonathan Foreman
In 1850 Don Pacifico, a Sephardic Jew living in Athens, who happened to be a British subject, had his home and warehouse burned by a Greek mob.
The British Foreign Secretary at the time, the great Lord Palmerston, immediately dispatched a fleet to Greece. The Royal Navy then blockaded Piraeus, the Port of Athens, until Don Pacifico received compensation. In a famous speech, Palmerston then declared in Parliament that Great Britain had the right to defend a British citizen's rights anywhere in the world.
He said "As the Roman in days of old held himself free of indignity when he could say civis Romanus sum (I am a citizen of Rome), so also a British subject in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong."
And the Don Pacifico incident was not the first nor the last time that the British Empire sent armies or fleets to avenge a wrong committed against a single citizen somewhere abroad.
(In 1867 the British actually built a railway across Abyssinia to enable an army sent to avenge the imprisonment and torture of a diplomat.)
These were expensive actions in lives and treasure, seemingly disproportionate to the original insult. They enraged foreign powers and even aristocratic cosmopolitans of Palmerston's own class.
But they had a salutary effect: they ensured that distant khans and warlords and kings thought very, very carefully before they harmed or even threatened a Briton.
Victorian Britons could go anywhere in the world, safe in the knowledge that the local tyrant had to consider that the roughing up of a single tourist might well bring about his own destruction.
We in America possess far greater relative power than the British Empire ever had, yet we have failed to protect our people abroad, and this failure has emboldened our enemies to attack us at home.
When our ships in Bahrain and our Marines in Jordan were threatened, we pulled them out. When FBI agents in Yemen investigating the Cole bombing were threatened by bin Laden they quickly returned home.
The loss of 18 soldiers in Somalia, there to do good, was enough to make us turn tail.
And now the State Department closes embassies in fear when we should stand tall. And we make empty, impotent superpower gestures like sending aircraft carriers to New York - which will neither frighten our enemies nor reassure our own people.
It is time we face up to the fact that being a superpower carries with it certain inherent burdens, and one of those burdens is a murderous irrational hatred that cannot be assuaged (the well of grievance is bottomless) but only deterred from action.
We are hated in particular by large parts of the Islamic world, and only partly because of our support for our Israeli allies. Look how Pakistani peacekeepers serving with the United Nations in Sierra Leone high-fived each other when they heard of our thousands of civilian dead. (Can you imagine, even in the wake of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran, Americans rejoicing, say, at the collapse of a Tehran apartment house?) And some of those Pakistani soldiers were probably armed and trained by the United States.
In part we are hated out of envy. We are unforgivably rich, powerful and democratic. We also have a seductive culture and sexual mores that Islamic fundamentalists find disgusting. Finally, there is the fact that, according to their deepest political and theological traditions, we are infidels who should be ruled by them . . .
Some of the people who hate us are willing to commit atrocious acts like Tuesday's mass slaughter. And coming to terms with their hatred requires understanding that our safety lies in being deeply feared by those who deeply hate us.
This means committing to a foreign policy that is at least as active, ruthless and global as it was during the Cold War.
We have to unlearn the lesson from Vietnam that the use of American power abroad is an inherently bad thing: that even when used for good it must end in something cruel and wrong.
The truth is that a global world needs order, order enforced either by a consensus of great powers with the will to fight, or by a strong hegemon.
Today only the latter seems a possibility. A world without such a dominant authority sounds more just, but in fact is much crueler - it is a chaotic world, a world at the mercy of the likes of bin Laden.
In Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, American arms were a force for justice (all wars, incidentally, fought on behalf of Muslim populations). We can, and we should, be a force for the good in the world, defending democracy and justice where we can.
But this entails that ensuring that both our enemies and our friends - including our European allies with their unjustified faith in appeasement - know that there will be no impunity for any foreigner who dares to harm Americans.
Sadly, this is not a matter in which we have a choice. Even if we wanted to withdraw into isolation, our enemies will come to us, as the ruins of southern Manhattan bear witness.