Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (15 page)

So, when you hear that an eminent poet is “against the war”—or “for it,” for that matter (though, given the tide of fashionable opinion, the latter is less likely)—all you have heard is an opinion of no greater depth or authority than your own, or the doctor’s, or the video jockey’s.

And if the writer expresses that opinion in language that is not clearly, deeply thought and creatively deployed,
then you may also take it that it is not the writer, as a writer, you are hearing from, but, more accurately, the writer taking a holiday from his muse for the less demanding exertions of politics.

Which is eminently the case with Mr. Pinter’s poems. I can only hope it is not for them, but for his plays—which constitute what there is of Harold Pinter’s craft—that he won the Nobel.

The organized and premeditated slaughter of innocents is the very signature of terror. In the post-9/11 world, there has been Bali. There has been Madrid. And, two days ago, there was London.

As I write, the death count is around fifty, the number of injured approaches a thousand.

Responsibility for the slaughter and mayhem has not been definitely assigned, but most serious analysis converges on al-Qaeda or one of its European tentacles. The London attack surely bears all the vile stigmata of al-Qaeda’s previous slaughters: pre-planning and co-ordination, a series of explosions within a short time at highly vulnerable sites (the London subway and transport system during morning rush hour) and, above all, great moral carelessness over the “targets.” Al-Qaeda demonstrated in New York on that September morning nearly four years ago that it likes to harvest as many as possible in its murderous schemes. It
was but happenstance that the towers were not full, and that a “mere” 2,749 were erased from the book of life, rather than fifty thousand.

Fifty thousand dead wouldn’t have stirred a feather on the conscience of Osama bin Laden and his fanatics, presuming that conscience is a faculty or a concept either he or his followers acknowledge or possess.

The attack on London coincided with the meeting of the G8 leaders. Whatever one’s opinion of the efficacy of these summits, and whatever one’s belief in the professions of intent of the leaders who attend them, both the summits and the leaders occupy a moral universe. They are built around ideas of moral aspiration. They pay homage—whether realized in action or not—to humanitarian ideals. Whatever the shortcomings of individual leaders, and however tormented their progress toward the goals they almost ritually set themselves, these leaders very clearly stand in the sunshine of human political activity.

Terrorists, on the other, dark, hand, have declared the perfect opposite. Death to all outside their own warped mania is all their intent. The terrorist would see the world in ruins, and mutter some perverted hosanna over the spectacle of millions dead, if a ruined world, or millions dead, served his grim and fanatical idea of purpose.

London this week, in a strange and possibly heartless way, tells me we’re still lucky. Lucky only in the chilling sense that the dead hearts of Mr. bin Laden and his likes have not yet found the means, or had the opportunity, to
deal a blow on the scale that all of us must by now know they would wish to deal.

There is no moral reserve in terrorism. If they could have concluded the lives of all Londoners on Thursday morning, they would have done so.

Fifty, 2,749 or many millions—the totals of the dead, and the totals of the ruptured lives of those who are left to mourn those dead, are as nothing to the terrorist, except that the terrorist always prefers the larger figure.

Terrorism is the awful hybrid of nihilism and fanaticism. It has within its seed something akin to the moral squalor of the Hitlerian period, where lives outside the golden bloodstock of the pure Aryan were as nothing—were seen as second-rate, or brutish, or verminous. Hitler’s was a racist ideology in the purest distillate the world had, to that time, seen. Modern terrorism, if such is possible, may be even more bleak.

The terrorism we are only beginning to comprehend may, for the moment, wear the cloak of a certain religiosity, cover itself with the language and rhetoric of militant Islam. But why should anyone accept Mr. bin Laden’s twisted pieties, his rage against the “infidels and Jews” as anything but (for him) a convenient rationalization? He who murders will not tremble at a lie. What really moves him, or his like, despite the ritual jihadi rhetoric is not yet ours to know.

I suspect it all has less to do with “religious” motives, however base and primitive those be, than they profess. The demonic arrogance of these self-styled leaders is its
own motivation. Their mere whim to whip the world to bloodlust and despair betrays the emptiness of no real cause at all. I suspect the religious overlay is a kind of the-atricalism. Nihilism. This is a key component of terrorism, a greater emptiness than normal people are possibly able to contemplate.

They act because, so far, they can. They kill, because that is what they do. And they will continue to do so unless they are stopped. The ability and the wish to take innocent lives, on a vast scale, is off the moral and intellectual radar of most human beings. We have not taken the measure of modern terrorism because it is so far outside our moral spectrum; the spectrum of those without a vestige of conscience is alien to our sensibility as it is to our understanding.

London this week, New York and Washington nearly four years ago, were by no means the full blossoms of modern terrorism. Just the infant rattle of a terrible idea yet to unfold in its full and horrible realization, and therefore a practice that has emphatically to be stopped.

Two terror attacks in two weeks. It’s Londoners who are having the really rough summer. A revealing feature of Thursday’s “rerun” came from the fact that the rucksack
bombs didn’t explode—only the detonators fired. Early speculation built on this failure to suggest that the attack might have been the work of “amateurs.”

Here we are, but five years into the great new millennium, and terrorism has become so familiar, so pervasive, that it can accommodate a couple of categories: typical terrorism—i.e., done by professionals—and the copycat or “incompetent” variety, the work of amateurs.

It was interesting, too, during the early hours of this speculation, that this kind of talk seemed so normal. None of the pundits betrayed the slightest surprise that terrorism might have “migrated” from purely professional nihilists or committed jihadist fundamentalists to a second tier of freelancers, publicity seekers or copycats.

Such talk showed how habituated we have become to the pervasive and diffuse sense that it can happen anywhere, at any time. We all know what “it” is. And when bombs go off, whether in the London subways—as was really the case this month—or in Paris, Washington, Montreal or Toronto, as may well be the case next time, we will all be shocked by the carnage, but not surprised by the event.

We will be shocked because carnage visited on innocent people, from whatever motive, will always shock those who have remained within the circle of civilized humanity. But we will not be surprised because, since the mass slaughter of September 11, the Western world has been on notice that its citizens are targets in an amorphous,
conspiratorial campaign that flies under the accommodating banner of Islamic fundamentalism.

We are similarly on notice that the self-appointed leaders of al-Qaeda and its franchises follow a logic of their own choosing. Whether that logic may be divined with any degree of fidelity from what they actually proclaim as their goals and motives, or whether (apart from the malignant delight they take in the deeds themselves) they have anything that conforms to rational and understandable goals, are wide-open questions.

What we do know is that the logic of fanatics is a specialized product; it does not ape or mime the logic of ordinary people. Efforts to “understand” the terrorists are efforts to bring the calculus and standards of responsible minds as instruments to map their opposites: irresponsible minds that do not acknowledge standards of any kind.

The rhetorical questions that have saturated a thousand news stories since the first London bombings—How could young, homegrown British subjects from Leeds take up the suicide bombing of fellow citizens?—illustrate this point.

People are agape with perplexity that “their own” have ventured mass slaughter of their fellows. These were not “imports” on some desperate mission, sent by the international outlaws of terrorism. These were men, born and bred in Britain, of families who, from all accounts, cherished all that Britain, as a democratic multicultural state, offered them. They were nice. They were friendly.

They did, some of them, good works.

All such questioning is beside the point. The only “understanding” of a terrorist deed is the deed itself. Attempts to find some formulaic shortcut to understanding them—it’s the plight of the Palestinians, it’s Tony Blair’s joining in the armed deposition of Saddam Hussein, it’s American policy in the Middle East—are rote, puzzled stutterings in the face of something, fundamentally inexplicable.

Terrorism will not be understood out of existence. It must instead be challenged, guarded against, and to the degree that arms and intelligence, and the co-operation of nations, will allow, it must be utterly incapacitated. The only logic that fanaticism allows is the expansion of its power to kill. The only logic that will defeat it is force.

Following the second London bombing, it was Australia’s John Howard, not Tony Blair, who best sketched the failings of looking for “cause and effect” to explain terror: “We lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse, through a perverted ideology, of people and their murder.”

I wrote after the first London bombings that the British were lucky the dead and wounded were so few—few only in the context of an appetite for destruction that, should it find the means, would be boundless. London was, by that understanding, even luckier this week.

But luck is thin and fleeting. We temporize with terrorism when we look for root causes. The attacks will continue until they are stopped. Terrorists will inflict misery with
exponential fury when they can. On the one question that counts, the sentence so many are appalled to hear applies: George Bush was right: it
is
a war.

After last week’s Commons vote, I wonder how many people are much clearer in their understanding of our mission in Afghanistan. We have made commitments to Afghanistan. We were part of the operation that rid that country of the Taliban government and pursued al-Qaeda after 9/11. We did that, not only as an ally of the United States after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but also because there were Canadians killed in those attacks. Canada agreed that eliminating a government that had sheltered and nursed the terrorist organization that committed the atrocity of 9/11 was both right and in our own self-interest, that not pursuing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would only leave Afghanistan as a potential site of similar designs in the future.

That mission had UN approval, was composed of a concert of forces, of which our country’s was one. But protection against future terrorism meant more than just displacing the Taliban government. It meant offering, insofar as an international force could offer, the citizens of Afghanistan the opportunity to build a new kind of government, one
elected, one less hospitable to hijacking by sinister forces and more open to the basic civil liberties that people in the democracies take for granted. It was to assist in that effort that Canadian troops remained.

It is not possible merely to wish benevolent government on a nation whose history, both recent and of old, has been a field of war, invasion and lawlessness. So, our troops remained deployed to (a) guarantee a measure of security while Afghanistan citizens went about the first steps to democracy and the extension of basic rights, (b) assist in building the essential elements—schools, a justice system, infrastructure, roads—that any society must have, and (c) offer humanitarian assistance where possible.