Remora

September 11. LI was not going to post today. But then we thought, reading the NYT, and various media, that it might be a good idea to post today. After all, this is the week that Bush has chosen to press forward with his war against Iraq, with his address to the United Nations. And we were surprised to see Bush's comments on the NYT op-ed page -- surprised because we didn't expect to see a Washington Times guy like Bush appearing in same space used by Susan Sontag Monday.

So we decided, one year later, to take a look at Sontag's much condemned response to 9/11. It was easy to find on the web. A NYU finance professor has even taken the trouble to combine Sontag's 9/10 piece in the Times and the New Yorker piece. Here's the first paragraph, the one that drew down the wrath of the heavens last year:


"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose
of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling & depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower; undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards. "

It was part of the disconnect from reality that much of the controversy about this graf had to do with whether or not the hijackers were or were not cowardly. The controversy seems, in retrospect, bizarre. On the one hand, to undertake to kill yourself in a cause can be construed as brave. On the other hand, to undertake to kill others without warning in a cause to which they are not clearly, if at all, connected can be construed as cowardly. It depends, obviously, on which end of the action you look at. In the end, I'd say that the story of war in this century is about the systematic displacement of all of the elements that were once engaged in the semantic field of "bravery." It is a field that fell to the technology of distance. Bombing Iraq is, indeed, another example in the endless story of 20th century fighting -- it is impervious to descriptions of cowardice and bravery. Once cowardice wins wars, and bravery loses them, the virtues begin to lose their luster.

That Bush would reach, instinctively, for the "coward" appelation had to do with forestalling criticism of his own regard for his skin, that day -- criticism that has been so reversed that we are now assured that the President nearly fought with his pilots to take Air Force one immediately to D.C., so brave a hero is he. This is blatantly untrue, and to the extent that Sontag takes on the press for "impression management," she is precisely right. That Sontag, a literary critic, fell for Bush's description of the act and the invitation to descriptions derived from an irrelevant system of virtues -- that in fact she doesn't make the elementary analysis of the coward trope that she, a good Barthesian, could easily have done -- gives us a measure of how confusing -- how stricken -- the period after 9/11 was. Criticism isn't simply opposition, and that, of course, was the whole problem with Sontag's piece.

The other thing to note, after a year, is that Sontag's numerous conservative critics -- who called her various names, like filthy, quisling, etc. -- now essentially agree with her that the whole thing was about Iraq. This would be funny, if it wasn't so not-funny. Of course, what we provisionally know, after a year of probing the Al Quaeda network, is that it wasn't at all about Iraq. It was about Saudi Arabia, first. It was about the perception that still lives, in the Arab world, among certain leaders, that the U.S. is a paper tiger -- a perception that arose from the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 83, and the subsequent American retreat from Lebanon. And if what has been reported about the preaching in the "radical" mosques in Hamburg is correct, it was about "Jewry" -- a soiled, disgusting theme that we are all too familiar with. The WP has an article, today, with the dime novel title, Hamburg's Cauldron of Terror, which quotes a typical sermon of the kind that, apparently, nourished Mohammed Atta's soul:


"The Al Quds mosque opened in 1993 and became a center for incendiary views. "The Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit," said Imam Mohammed bin Mohammed al Fizazi in a pre-Sept. 11 sermon, which was videotaped.

Such preaching has continued. The Post last month purchased a video at the Al Quds mosque in which an Islamic preacher, identified as Sheik Azid al Kirani, shouts out a call for mortal combat against "Jews, Israel and all unbelievers."

There is little common ground between the purveyors of this kind of Islamic ultramontanism and Iraq. There's good reason that none of the hijackers were Iraqi -- the issue between the U.S. and Iraq is definitely not at the center of the thinking of people like Atta, who detest the thought of secular Arabic power. "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?", Sontag justly asks. What she implies, however, is, distressingly, a view that has become very orthodox in right wing circles: the Middle East is one uniform mass, in which the differences between, say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein melt down to a feeble few. This view is just plain wrong: its falsity can be spelled out in body counts.