A Different Kind of War
Dr. Gordon S. Black

I returned home Sunday morning after a 28-hour journey from Tokyo to my
home, Rochester, New York, convoluted by the pain and anger of the tragedy
of September 11, 2001.  I came sharing the emotions felt by all Americans -
anger, profound sadness at the losses sustained by so many of my people,
resolve that this should have never happened and should never happen again,
and a growing sense of confusion about what we should do to confront and
eliminate this terrible threat to our children and our way of life.

When I finally could go out on Sunday, I went over to my son's house in
Rochester to see him, my daughter-in-law and my grandson, Adam.  Adam is a
round faced two year old, totally unaffected by the horror that the three of
us had experienced.  We went outside on a beautiful, nearly fall day while
he displayed all of the antics of a two year old, playing with great joy and
abandon on his many toys.  I did not stay long because I was simply too
tired, having lost most of my sleep during the week long visit in Tokyo, but
it was long enough to ask myself the question of what kind of world were we
going to leave for him at the end of what appears to be a long, protracted
struggle to eliminate the enormous threat that now confronts him and all of
the two year olds in the world like him.

My own answer was not what I expected, and I wanted to share that with my
family and other Americans because I have the profound feeling that we are
now going to choose precisely what kind of world Adam and other children
will inherit.

It is easy to hate the people who last week took so many fathers and mothers
away from their children.  I have spent more time crying for these children
and the victims than I have ever cried for anything in my life.  It is easy
to want to eradicate the forces and people that perpetrated this horror on
so many innocents.  I have all of those feelings, but suddenly it was clear
to me that they are simply not enough. Hate never raises healthy children,
not in this Country and not anywhere in the world, and healthy children do
not commit the terrible acts that were inflicted on America. What we must
want, instead, is for the world to produce children that would never
consider committing this kind of act against fellow human beings in the
first place.

If we are going to win a war for healthy children like Adam, military force
alone is simply not the answer, even if we can mobilize enough of the
resources of power and force to impose a violent solution upon the world.
Are we going to reduce Afghanistan to rubble?  It is already rubble from
more than twenty years of war.  Are we going to reduce the children of
Palestine to abject poverty and misery?  They are already poor beyond any
degree that we would ever accept for our children.  Are we going to create
friends in this world for my Adam by killing their relatives?  No, we will
only create more hate and a bitterness that Adam will inherit as his legacy.

Do not misunderstand me.  I am a political scientist by profession and I am
not naive about our need to protect ourselves from the monsters that
threaten us.  I know absolutely that they would have put a nuclear weapon in
Time Square if they could have, killing a hundred thousand times the number
of people that died on September 11th.

I am simply saying that force alone, and hate alone, are insufficient to
resolve this problem.  There are those on television who say that we, all
over the world, have been complacent about this danger to our values and way
of life.  I agree that this has been the case.  We have, all of us, been
equally complacent about the conditions that have given rise to this vein of
hate in the midst of the benign world of the Muslim faith.  We have ignored
the conditions that breed such hate because we have not the will on a
worldwide scale to address these conditions.  I am now not speaking simply
of America because America has always done its fair share of trying to
improve conditions in other parts of the world.  I am speaking of the entire
industrial world that has grown rich from our values, beliefs and resources
only to have millions of other people mired in the most abysmal conditions
of poverty and degradation.

When we look back on World War II, it is easy in America to view that war as
a triumph of our courage and military might.  It is equally easy to overlook
the fact that it was not the war that saved Japan and Europe in the end.
The War reduced those societies to rubble, and it was rubble that the
survivors and we inherited.

What saved Europe and Japan, and their children, was the Marshall Plan, one
of the single most unselfish acts ever undertaken by a victorious
combination of armies.  As the sole remaining prosperous Country in the
world, the United States mobilized huge financial and other resources to put
those defeated societies back on their feet.  We did not let them starve; we
fed them instead.  We did not let their children die; we rebuilt their
schools instead.  In the end, we prevailed not because of our military
might, which we certainly needed, but because of our generosity in the face
of monstrous losses in human life.

Yes, we did this in order to protect our military victory in the face of a
growing threat from communism.  But we are faced with the same choice here;
only we have the opportunity to make this choice before we reduce a lot of
societies to further rubble and poverty.

We have the whole of the civilized world today looking for a way to
prosecute this war against fanaticism and religious extremism.  Some of our
allies in Europe and Asia will undoubtedly flinch in the face of the costs
of a prolonged and bloody effort to eradicate this disease of the spirit,
and we may well find ourselves going it more and more alone.  Moderate
states in the Middle East and the forces of modernity in those societies
will be faced with a backlash that will limit the long-term effectiveness of
our efforts.  Our friends in these countries may lose the very support that
they will require to support us, and they themselves could fall victim to
the forces we are trying to eradicate.  There is simply not enough military
force in the West to impose a solely military solution on that region short
of using nuclear weapons, which we will not employ.
In fact, military force alone is precisely the course that the fanatics want
us to choose, because they believe, perhaps quite rightly, that they will be
the winners in the rubble of the Middle Eastern states that follow such a
strategy.
.
I want a solution that preserves and enhances the world for Adam, and for
all of the Adams in the Middle East and elsewhere.  While I believe as
fervently as every American that we must track down and eliminate this
threat using every resource of force at our disposal, I think we are going
to have go further and spend much more of our resources in a simultaneous
effort that commits hundreds of billions of dollars to the cause of raising
the economic standards of the people of the Middle East and even elsewhere.

The moment is here.  The choice is ours to make.  The emotional commitment
to a permanent solution to terrorism is present nearly everywhere in the
civilized world.  Before we kill a single person, I want the United States
to commit one hundred billion dollars to a fund dedicated to the elimination
of poverty, hunger, disease and ignorance in the Middle East.  I want our
President and our political leaders to challenge the Europeans, the
Japanese, the rich countries of the Middle East and elsewhere to triple
these funds using their own resources.

Together, much as we did with European and Japanese leaders after World War
II, we will make these funds available to reduce the crushing debt in these
societies, build schools and homes, fed the hungry, eliminate disease, and
otherwise attack the conditions that gave birth to such a deep vein of
hatred in these societies.  Four hundred billion dollars seems a lot of
money, but it is a small price compared with the more than four trillion
dollars that the United States spent prosecuting World War II.

For the countries that want this support, the price will be a concerted
long-term effort to eradicate the forces of hate that are breeding inside
their societies.  We cannot do this by killing them all, and we cannot do
this as outsiders and modern day Crusaders.  However, we can give their
leadership the resources to do it themselves, not in the name of some
foreign faith, but in the name of the humanity of the true Islam.

Will the leaders of the Middle East need our military support while they
undertake this huge task?  You bet they will and they will be the first to
realize this.  The fanatics understand as well as we do that our love and
concern will undermine their efforts to destroy the world in which we live.
They want to create conditions that will destabilize all of the nations of
Islam, and they want us to do what they cannot accomplish.  They want more
rubble, starving children and grieving parents because it furthers their
perverted cause.  They think we are too stupid and self-centered to be more
clever and creative than they are.

I remember well during the Marshall Plan the efforts of the communists to
undermine our rebuilding efforts with the contention that we were only doing
it to serve ourselves.  Their argument failed completely.  As the schools
are built, the children fed, and the homes constructed, adults in all of
these societies will simply be grateful that someone finally cared enough to
attack their suffering.  The voices of hate will confront a growing chorus
of Islamic people committed to the gentle and loving faith of Islam, and the
fanatics will find a world in which acceptance of their philosophy of hate
will have fewer and fewer takers.  Given support on this scale, the leaders
of the Middle East will have the support required to track down and
eliminate those who would kill so many innocents.

I started with Adam, and I love him dearly.  But loving Adam is not enough.
Hate will not provide Adam with a world that I would want to leave to him;
not for him and all the Adams in the world - the two year olds and others
who will be the final judge of whether we passed this terrible test.

As we ponder our options, let us reach out to a prosperous world and demand
something more of everyone.  While we may well ask for their military
support, let us demand their humanitarian support on a scale and at a level
unprecedented in human history.  This is the first challenge we should throw
down and not the last; thrown down before we have mobilized all of the bombs
and rockets that we can so easily produce.  Let us make this challenge now
before we expend the arsenal of hate and revenge that the terrorists want us
to mobilize.  America is an enormously generous, humane and decent society,
and we can demonstrate those traits with a gesture that will make all of the
Adams in this world proud of our generation.  They know we have the courage
to fight for them.  Let us show them that we also have the wisdom to win
this war in a manner that leaves the world a better place and not a bitter
place.

***********************

Gordon S. Black, Ph.D., is currently the Chairman and CEO of a public
company.  The company is unidentified because he writes this as a private
citizen.  Dr. Black has an undergraduate degree in Political Science from
Washington University in St. Louis and his Doctorate in Political Science
from Stanford University.  He was an Associate Professor in Political
Science at the University of Rochester at the time he resigned to start his
own firm.  Between 1986 and 1993, the was the unpaid Director of Research
for the Partnership for a Drug Free America, resulting in two White House
presentations of research findings on the subject.  In 1994, he and his son
Benjamin published The Politics of American Discontent (John Wiley and
Sons), an analysis of the potential and the logic of a third party in
American Politics.  He is an Independent not affiliated with either
political party.