ON TUESDAY MORNING
Helena Knapp Meyer 16 September
On Tuesday morning (11 Sept), like everyone else I knew, I was watching television. On the West Coast as we turned on, we found we were watching the World Trade Center towers collapse in real time. In New York, the TV reporters were surrounded by fire fighters and policemassing to uncover what life they could in the rubble. It was just the beginning of an agonizing yet vital task of rescue and recovery. New York, a city that is in some sense a capital city to the whole world,was dealing with one trajectory we are all forced into in war: into dreadful human suffering, suffering that will endure for God only knows how long.
Olympia, my home and my own state's capital city, and Washington DC, the nation's capital, were on two quite different war-time journeys. In Olympia, Gary Locke, our Chinese American governor, was reminding us of this state's ignominious racism towards the Japanese who lived here after the real Pearl Harbor. He urged us to stay connected to our neighbors, regardless of where they come from and what they believe.
Today, the front page of a local paper continues the same theme. We Americans clearly do have enemies somewhere who are willing both to kill and to die. Here on the ground in Washington State, many of us are trying hard to remember that even these enemies are human. Above all though, we know that we are surrounded by many other humans whose names and faces should never be confused with the enemy, no matter what the superficial similarities.
In war each of us faces a dreadful tangle of human relations. Our war-time trajectory in Olympia is to try to remember the structures of peace time relations. This gets really difficult. There is a real enemy, in the sense that particular people are using force to get their will.
In Washington DC, they are on a third trajectory in this war. To prime the citizens for further suffering, the national government has begun casting relations with the enemy as a simple fight, which will end when Good prevails over Evil..
Last Tuesday, in that other Washington which is our nation's capital, the streets of the city and the government offices were empty within hours. Tanks went out on patrol and the President's plane was diverted to an air base in Nebraska where they keep another plane that would allow him to "take command" from somewhere up in thin air.
The President's wife and his able Vice President were whisked off to bunkers underground. Our government had taken protective cover. A few hours later, Congress appeared en masse on the Capitol steps. Across the river the smoke from the Pentagon billowed and people began talking about hundreds of dead there too.
As of today, nearly two hundred people in the Pentagon are known dead ormissing. Most were in the Army, none from the Air Force or Marines. They were not the first American military men and women to die in this war. Some died on the USS Cole. Other American officials died in embassies in Africa.
Today the President warned everyone in uniform to "get ready." The third trajectory in this war, the Washington DC trajectory, is the command trajectory. The US constitution turns the President into the Commander in Chief in war-time, and suddenly George Bush is entitled to decide that some people must suffer and die in the interests of US policy.
Having grown up in Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II, I know from the depths of my being, that such decisions sometimes cannot be avoided.
I also know two other things about the command trajectory in war. One is that the commanders, while being prudent, must be willing to connect with the suffering and inspire us to resilience, not merely to using brute force. Churchill and King George are my role models here, people who spoke their minds and their hearts.
I missed Roosevelt and Churchill, Kennedy and even Clinton this week. I found I almost loved a man I have rarely loved before: Rudy Giuliani.
Guiliani has been dealing with the suffering of his city and he knows it is complicated. Brave steel workers insist on helping. Strangely driven people call in fake bomb threats.
The problem with Washington DC's leadership is that so much of it seems too simple. The tactical decisions are obviously complicated. How many allies do we have? Who's steady? What, exactly, is Pakistan agreeing to? How long will it take for aircraft carriers to get to their deployments? These complexities account for the feeling of "phony war" this week. We are all waiting for the next shoe, the next bomb to drop.
If and when the next bomb does drop, in the subsequent waves of violence and retribution, nothing will be simple. Many more people could well be like the people of New York: "innocents" randomly selected to suffer in the interests of political aims.
Even more seriously, ending the violence is most unlikely to be simple. Killing people is not enough. Our enemy is not vermin to be "exterminated." Our enemy is not a fox to be "smoked out" of its "hole." Our enemy is not a wild boar to be "hunted." These are all the President's words, and each one suggests that death and victory are the same. When the Hutu used the very same words in Rwanda, we were appalled at the dehumanization.
Ending the violence will not be simple because our enemies are human. A war between humans cannot end until both sides agree that it is over. Ten years ago, Americans laughed when Saddam Hussein announced that he had not lost. Now we know it was true. A US spy plane was shot down over Iraq on the very same day as the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
Ending a war entails making an agreement to stop the violence. If there is indeed another violent onslaught in this war, against an enemy who in lives his life as though invisible in thin air, I hope the leaders on our side come out of their bunkers once in a while. From inside the bunker they cannot see the complexity. Nor can they see the things they love. Our opponents are terrifying in part because there seems to be no particular place they love.
Our leaders are also scary. Having simplified their terms down to "Good" and "Evil," "exterminate" and "hunt," they too are losing sight of a world I am sure they love. The dead and injured in New York were born all over the world. American citizens and others are intermingled so intimately that any disaster the US perpetrates could sweep the whole world into the journey, whether they want to go to war or not.
Back here, in Olympia, Washington, we think about and connect constantly to what we love: our kids who are thousands of miles away in college, and our cat who needs to go to the vet to get a broken tooth taken out. There's also the garden which needs a final cleaning before the winter comes. Even the knowledge that there is a raccoon living behind the garage seems to be a sign of life.
No matter how long this war lasts, whether a week or 15 years, in the end it is life and love that we will all have to recreate. That is the real task ahead. In New York now, in Afghanistan soon probably, in the bunkers and even in thin air.
Prof. Meyer-Knapp has just completed a book, Fragile Peace, on the challenges of bringing a war to end in an enduring cease-fire.