Since the end of World War II, no US administration has indulged American idealism to the degree - and with the recklessness - that President George W Bush has. Previous presidents were better able to balance our raw idealism with our realist objectives, even though they often spoke the language of morality to the American people - telling us that we were the planet's moral beacon - while quietly ensuring that our impulses be checked by a cold dose of caution and realism. For better or worse, it was inevitable that our own idealism (or more cynically, our self-righteousness) would lead us to overreach.
Ascribing moral content to our policies is hardly new, but this has become particularly difficult as America has risen to superpower status and pursued its strategic interests like any other superpower. While most burgeoning hegemonies abandon morality when they become powerful, we have merely integrated our morality with textbook superpower behavior. By insisting that doing "what's right" is the basis for our most important decisions, we become particularly vulnerable to self-delusion in a rough world.
For the same reason, these enemies find our demands perplexing: given their agenda, should we expect terrorists to fight us with methods that will ensure their defeat? Our response, naturally, would be, "if you cannot fight fairly, then you should not fight at all", while the terrorists insist that "if we cannot fight fairly, then we will fight unfairly, as our cause is too important to be hindered by talk of methods".
And could we expect anything less from our enemies? Is this not why they are our enemies, because they see the world through a lens that is incomprehensible to us? Consider, for example, that our insistence that our enemies "come out and fight like men" is really only a ploy to get our enemies to play by rules under which we are sure to obliterate them. In the end, insisting on the moral high ground has tremendous strategic benefits for the more powerful party wedded to the status quo.
No superpower can resist the temptation to take advantage of its advantages, nor would any reasonable beneficiary of that superpower argue in favor of resisting such a temptation. It is important to note, however, that as a nation entrenched in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, America can and often does capitalize on this power to do wonderful and uncontroversial work all over the world. Like American security and prosperity, our morality and strategic interests are not mutually exclusive; we merely have a tendency to frame those strategic interests in the language of morality, for various reasons.
American leaders, for instance, almost always speak the language of morality - sometimes manipulating their constituencies for political purposes, and other times because they genuinely believe in a particular moral imperative. Debate over the American intervention in the first Gulf War in 1991, for instance, was framed in moral terms, but many believed - with reasonable grounds - that our government's decision to intervene was founded on the need to protect our interest in the region's crude oil, and that the first President Bush only spoke of "liberating the Kuwaitis" to garner support that would have disappeared had the explicit agenda been protecting our oil supplies.
Either way, despite being at the top of the geopolitical food chain, we continue to use morality to identify ourselves as the eternal underdog who sticks to its principles, while simultaneously (and bizarrely) we believe that if we are on top, it is only because we are morally superior and deserve to be there. The ascendance of American power-according to this line of logic-is not merely the result, but also the reward, for our moral integrity.
So, it should come as no surprise that we view terrorism through a similar moralistic lens. Yet this hardly mitigates its detrimental effect: if we believe terrorism is terrible for its methods, we cannot recognize that terrorism is just another form of leverage - one that we correctly regard as frightening and dangerous, but hardly monolithic. To understand this dynamic better, it is helpful to consider how other nations regard terrorism and hostage taking - specifically, as a normal form of exerting leverage in negotiations or even high-context "engagement".
Neither approach is "better" or "worse" than the other, but such a comparison is important if only to illustrate that we can exert greater control over our visceral reactions than we might think. We also have greater control over undesirable outcomes than we might think. Armed with such an understanding, we can build a more nuanced approach to the "war on terror", one that acknowledges that victory, in any conventional sense, is utterly impossible in this case.
The two typically moral, American arguments against negotiating or engaging with terrorists are often met with perplexity in non-Western cultures. The first argument is that terrorism (including hostage-taking) is morally wrong because it is an evasive, cowardly form of aggression, and thus not worthy of our engagement. The second American argument is that negotiating with terrorists (sometimes over hostages) is even more offensive because such a negotiation corrupts the integrity of an honorable contractual process. "Bartering in human lives" or "negotiating with a gun to their heads" is the best way to infuriate an American in a negotiation, or even in an argument about the prospect of negotiation. In fact, bartering under duress is so repugnant to Americans that their most common reaction is some form of moral boycott.
Yet while we boycott negotiations with terrorists in the name of morality, the rest of the world negotiates under duress every day. Again, for Americans, a "fair" negotiation is one that is desirable but not necessary, as both parties want to improve their lots in some way; whereas people in other (often developing) countries, who are accustomed to disappointment, settle for merely preventing a worse outcome - having recognized that in times of duress, avoiding disaster is more than enough incentive to negotiate. In fact, many less powerful parties would say that times of duress are the only times in which negotiating compromises is absolutely imperative. After all, if you are not "over a barrel", then you have excellent reason to avoid the negotiating table.
Without a doubt, a party that is accustomed to disappointment in negotiations will often view moral boycotts as luxuries they cannot afford - and that any American refusal to negotiate with certain players is a direct and enviable testament to its unsurpassed power and expectations. In other words, the more powerful party to a conflict is often faced with the question: why should I bother negotiating when I can just take what I want? Ultimately, Americans are just as likely to take (as is the nature of power), for better or worse. Yet the tense dissonance in this dynamic lies not in the hypocrisy of double standards when fighting terrorism, but rather in our inability to see past the moral rhetoric to even determine if terrorist groups like al-Qaeda actually pose enough of a threat to warrant negotiations, or if they are just a severe nuisance that that found good fortune on 9/11.
For Americans, the mere act of "going to war" on anything or with anyone is interpreted as an unequivocal sign that we must be facing a serious threat, and when that paradigm is thrown into upheaval, we simply cannot function. That the presence of a threat is - to most nations - a basis for both negotiation and war (depending on the situation) only confuses Americans even more. We seem to ask, how can negotiation exist on the same behavior continuum as war and peace? That is, if aggression is the name of the game, then to us, war is the only rational choice - a view, again, reflecting our reliance on, and expectation of, hegemony.
Ultimately, our cultural lens clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the more nuanced reality that terrorists have frightening, earth-shaking power but nevertheless pose no strategic threat to us. Put differently, because of this cultural lens (which fuses our morality with our foreign policy to ensure our supremacy), it is hard for us to distinguish between an enemy's power to make us afraid, and the same enemy's power to actually bring about our destruction. In the post-Cold War era, the two types of power are no longer synonymous, and it is hard for us to imagine our fears are anything but the result of a dire and very real threat.
Until 9/11, the Cold War was the last time we had felt genuinely terrified about the security of our existence. Yet in our standoff with the Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear holocaust was infinitely more credible than any threat that al-Qaeda could ever muster. We merely saw on 9/11, for the first time, how truly terrifying terrorism can be. Yet while it might seem depressingly inevitable, our cultural response to terrorism - reaching its apex that September day - was actually the result of factors that can only dictate our fate when we fail to recognize them.
Our culture has often inspired us to bring freedom and justice to millions across the globe, but if we cannot recognize when the seeds of our cultural blessings sprout hemlock, our wars will give us a sense of retribution, but little strategic advantage or humanitarian appeal. Defining the world in black-and-white terms, we will only become more vulnerable, perhaps enough even to bring an end to America's supremacy, though still not enough to threaten our culture and civilization. Nevertheless, the fact that we ignore our culture's inconsistencies (and behave accordingly) means that we see our vulnerability as a fluke. The idea of being vulnerable on a consistent basis is as foreign to us as viewing ourselves as immoral.
In light of our passion and particular breed of morality, our staggering margins of supremacy over our competitors will prevent us from considering that we might need to conserve our power - militarily, politically and culturally - as part of a long-term strategy to ensure that very supremacy. Nothing brings seemingly omnipotent empires to a grinding halt as quickly or dramatically as overreach. At this rate, our cultural expectations will lead us into more battlefields than it will lead us out of. We were shocked by 9/11 and we will be shocked by its sequel, as well. Having already declared a "war on terror", when we endure another terrifying disaster, we will all expect the war on terror to be escalated, no matter who leads our government.
But when we turn to our arsenal of weapons and morale - even if successfully adapted for asymmetric warfare - we will find our resources either nursing civil wars abroad or licking their wounds at home, almost certainly humiliated by the same can-do attitude that inspired their deployment. Sadly for us, our vulnerability is no coincidence of the moment. It is no fluke. We face a dire threat, but not from terrorism. We are our own threat, and not because of overreaction as much as "misreaction". Ultimately, in a world where the brushfire of hatred is no passing fad, our wisest course of action would be to acknowledge our vulnerability and hedge our bets accordingly. This means that we have to radically alter our negotiation paradigm and the acceptable identities of the parties on the other side of the table.