Know Thy Enemy
By SEAN HANNON

November 17, 2003

 When the president pounds the lecturn and decries the terrorists we’re pursuing as “evil-doers who just love terror and chaos”, there is an attractive simplicity to it. We’re not just witnessing the desperate actions of men who’ve abandoned every ounce of humanity within them, we are seeing true monsters, disciples of the Devil, with only one desire: to create havoc and destruction for no other reason than that’s what they LOVE to do. The president’s resolve is clear in the face of such an onslaught of mindless evil. Search and destroy. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Or, to use his defining words, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the enemy”.

 As beguiling as this clarity of purpose appears, there is extreme danger in responding to events when guided by such an oversimplified view of the enemy. Simple answers are comforting and necessary for children. As adults, we have to strive for a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding us. Especially when success or failure depends on our accurately defining and understanding who the enemy is and why they are out to destroy us. It is not enough to view the enemy as some apocalyptic super-horde of zombies out to get us for no reason.

 Of course there are truly evil monsters in the world that fit the above description, and thankfully these mutants are few. Some, like Saddam Hussein, were defanged and contained and rendered impotent of WMD (notwithstanding all manufactured evidence to the contrary).  Some, like Osama Bin Laden, are not contained, and need to be hunted down. We know that of the 36 groups identified by the U.S. State Dept as foreign terrorist organizations, several hundred of their hardcore inner circle members have been identified and are being tracked by intelligence agencies around the world. But augmenting those numbers on an enormous scale, and possibly of greater concern to us all, are the millions of ordinary people in the Middle East, Central and South America, Africa and Indonesia who have been attracted to their power, not through a shared love of sinister evildom and destruction, but through the intense despair of their own life circumstances.

 Taking off the rubber monster mask and daring to humanize these millions of individuals reminds us that normally peaceful human beings, if sufficiently repressed and stripped of life and liberty, can be induced to resist their oppressor by using terrorist means. This is not to excuse the offense! This is only to ground our understanding that the enemy is not some incomprehensible monster, but human beings like ourselves who’ve been pushed to an edge we can barely comprehend.

 As Iraq spins out of control, the CIA estimates that upwards of 50,000 Iraqis are giving aid and support to the insurgents. Why are so many of the newly liberated trying to resist us? Is there something worse, in their view, than the tyrant they suffered? And how are we supposed to react? Are we now to regard the long-suffering and despairing Iraqis as serpents of darkness that must be smashed beneath our righteous staff?

 Many in our country will cling to the naive notion of evil-without-reason. And the reason here is the most shameful: they will cling to it because it relieves them from having to consider, as responsible adults ought to, our complicity in the state of affairs of people around the world. They will steadfastly refuse to own our actions and look squarely at how other’s lives are negatively impacted through corporate predation of their resources, through degradation of their workplace and our indifference to human rights abuses by our “partners”, and through our direct support of repressive tyrants like Saddam Hussein when they’re useful to us. This, above all else, is what fuels such tremendous ill will towards us. This is what turns good people into our worst nightmare.