Five questions about terrorism: Responses

...Once again, leftists point to a long history of U.S...

...Communists and their allies in the third world proved themselves to be resilient warriors capable of winning the sympathy of first world liberals...

...In Indochina, party officials who had led a victorious war against the American military were soon courting American business to rescue their economies...

...Much of the response to the attacks of September 11 on the part of the American and West European left has indeed been myopic and shameful...

...His most recent book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s...

...In fact, if Afghan communists, with Soviet backing, hadn't taken power in Kabul in 1979, Osama bin Laden might be known, if at all, only as a fierce opponent of the Saudi regime that rules his homeland...

...The cold war ended only when, to borrow a maxim from Lenin (for a purpose he would have abhorred), communists were no longer able to rule in the old way, and inhabitants of the "socialist world" refused to live in the old way...

...Radical Islam may be a more durable opponent...

...If we hope to avoid another long and brutal war against totalitarian Islam, we had better focus on changing minds as well as dropping bombs and dispatching troops...

...Despite the best efforts of canny liberals and democratic socialists, it took years before Western regimes learned how to counter the appeal of the totalitarian left...

...But an ideology that sanctifies suicide and whose vision of the future is a mythical past is capable only of destroying a society, not of building a stable or prosperous one...

...12 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...

...The masses of young people from Algeria to Pakistan who lack secure jobs and an adequate education need a vision to live for instead of a cause to die for...

...Once again, grim-faced federal officials vow to defeat totalitarian evil-doers and fret about how to counter the enemy's appeal to poor and angry people in the third world...

...The short-sighted left only repeats, albeit in secular language, a list of grievances against EuroAmerica and Israel that Arabs and other Muslims have been updating for decades...

...Michael Walzer understands this...

...But there's no escaping the irony that the United States is now engaged in a new kind of global struggle against would-be saviors of "the wretched of the earth," who helped speed the demise of the last historical forces to claim that title...

...That critique is, in many particulars, masochistic, bigoted, and one-sided...

...For better and worse, the allure of Western modernity—its commodities, its cultural tolerance, its competitive individualism—reduced the communist alternative to ashes...

...Michael Walzer may consider my brief critique during just war a form of appeasement...

...The USSR's debacle in Afghanistan notwithstanding, battle losses had remarkably little to do with it...

...Our government and the corporations whose investments it protects have propped up corrupt monarchies and single-party autocracies...

...There are geopolitical reasons for these policies, of course, but they make it hard to counter the charge that Americans who profess to believe in democracy and self-determination are really just imperial hypocrites...

...And, again, it will be difficult to separate (and foolish to minimize) the battle of ideas from the military confrontations in which Americans mistakenly define victory as the ability to destroy targets and kill soldiers...

...But, it remains, at root, a critique of imperialism and, as such, is not so different from the arguments hurled by Leninist regimes and militants during the cold war...

...At the same time, martyrdom, whether actual or metaphorical, may remain attractive as long as the United States and its allies make no serious attempt to address the grievances that bin Laden and his supporters have been quite skillful at articulating...

...Toward the end of his argument, he mentions the ideological work to be accomplished, the undermining of the friendly environment that makes cold-blooded murderers appear like "freedom fighters," or at least like symbolic redressers of wounds that never heal...

...But the main purpose of his piece is to rebut leftists in the United States and other rich nations who seek DISSENT / Winter 2002 n I I TERROR AND THE RESPONSE TERROR AND THE RESPONSE to shift blame from the stateless bombers of the twin towers and Pentagon to the statesmen who have directed the bombing of Kabul and Kandahar...

...Messianic religious faith has deeper historical roots than does the secular variety and is less amenable to counter-arguments based on material concerns...

...policy blunders and brutalities to explain, if not excuse, the mass sympathy that allows networks of violent men to thrive...

...The atmosphere of American politics since September 11 bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the cold war, particularly during such anxious episodes as the Cuban missile crisis, the Tet Offensive, and the conflict over Euromissiles...

...The beliefs of Muslim terrorists who long to reestablish the caliphate obviously clash with those of Leninist revolutionaries who fought for an egalitarian, secular utopia—and even more with those of Brezhnev-era bureaucrats who acted mainly to secure and extend their creaky empire...

...Most Americans, together with our government, do excuse the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that prevents the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, without which no peace in the region is conceivable...

...How were those forces defeated...

...And the Soviet military, despite its problems, survived the collapse of the political system it was created to defend...

...Instead, I see it as a practical response as well as a moral one to the ideological threat posed by an enemy whose popularity in the Muslim world both alarms and confuses us...

...Yet, one does not defeat a political enemy merely by establishing the immorality of his acts...

...Inside the Soviet bloc, increased knowledge about capitalist societies that both created wealth and, at least in Western Europe and Canada, guarded social welfare gradually undermined the ideology of sacrifice for a future collective paradise, even among the rulers themselves...

...MICHAEL KAZIN teaches history at Georgetown University and is a member of the Dissent editorial board...

...Nothing the United States has done or failed to do in the world can mitigate, in the slightest, the utter malevolence of that highspeed, well-organized slaughter of innocents...