What real steps can the US and the world take in the wake of the brutal attack of September 11? Traditional tools of war aren’t enough. Here is a different answer.
Don’t just send the Marine Corps: Send the Peace Corps, too.
For every soldier or reservist, call up a doctor and a teacher.
For every quartermaster, find a civic planner.
For every mess cook, send a civilian cook.
Don’t just send covert operations teams and security experts and a few intrepid TV anchors. Ask AOL to build Afghanistan on Line. Get the top US industries, especially community-building technologists, but also farmers and builders to open and empower the people most in need. They may be refugees, or ghettoized Pakistanis, or homeless Afghan widows. But they desperately need help.
Don’t just spend $40bn to deliver bombs and troops: Deliver billions in aid, openly, visibly, and starting now. Send soap, water, clothes. Don’t do this blithely or foolishly, like a hippy pacifist sticking a daisy in a gun, or without reasonable defenses, but do it vigorously and liberally. Even though it's true that the US is the biggest aide provider in many countries, including Afghanistan, the overwhelming message is asymmetric: it is a message of war. Get the examplary messages out as widely as possible. And do it now.
Here is why.
This is not a fight that can or will be won with bullets and bombs. It is like cancer on a global scale. Since there is no clear target, the target is everywhere. A “war” is going to be like chemotherapy — a process of poisoning the body, blasting away at cells and killing a lot of good with the bad. It will leave people tearing their hair out, ashen, shaken and frail. And after the surgical attacks, after the numbing of anesthesia and chemotherapy wear off, you know what we’ll learn? The cancer didn’t really go away.
How is it that some cancer patients win their struggle? The winners universally have one thing in common: a positively vibrant passion to live. Friends and loved ones who hold them dear and see them through. A healthy joyful outlook. Good living habits. We humans are very touchy-feely animals, and we survive as a species because we draw together and hug each other. We mate for life (or try). We hold our communities and community values dear. That’s the way we’re built. It is the reason for love. This is how humans survive. When no drug or surgery or medical tactic seems to help, doctors are so often astonished when supposedly incurable patients survive and thrive. It happens all the time. They had little more than a healthy mind and a circle of loving friends to see them through.
And that is a way to fight the cancer of terrorism, too.
First, recognize how unhealthy living is the root of disease: look at all the heart attacks in the US, the epidemic rise of diabetes, and look at all the cheese burgers. Coincidence? And just look at the bubble of gluttony and naivete that prosperous countries float on. Or the fact that so few congresspersons even have passports. No wonder global social rifts have grown into bitter, lethal crevasses. No wonder there are desperate souls so willing to become human molotov cocktails, murdering innocents. Like posh penthouse dwellers who don’t hear the traffic noise, wealthy nations have become oblivious to the larger desperate world.
Second, know that surgical strikes and bloodletting (like tumor extractions and chemo) are just not enough. Edwin Land once said: the future may require not so much having a new idea, as stopping having old ideas. Sending troops and hiring mercenaries to grind away with strikes and sieges is an old idea. We tried it on Iraq. Did it work? In fact, we’re probably reaping what we sowed. The cycle of terrorism and anti-terrorism is endless and insidious, like the practice of landmining. Brutal surgery may be necessary. It often is. But it is never sufficient.
Third, see how America’s heart is exposed. Actually, it is humanity’s heart that has been torn open. This is the time to show the world what a big heart it really is. More than any other, this is a war that can be fought and won with visible humanitarian action, not bullets.
Mobilize the Peace Corps. If, god forbid we reinstate the draft, then place half the draftees in the Peace Corps. Ask the Army Corps of Engineers to help rebuild Afghanistan, not just dig trenches. Use the internet, not just branded media and celebrities, to lift community voices in the regions most affected. Persuade the unemployed dotcommies to help. Design a massive humanitarian aid package. It will be needed even more after more people die. Engage providers of food, clothing, health care, and educators to help build it. Hoteliers and urban planners to help what may be millions of refugees. Start on it now before firing the first shot. Urge the media to cover more than the view from the camera in a missile nose cone.
Remember one thing that should be obvious but is easy to overlook. Terrorists can foment war. They can kill innocent victims. Mass murder is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. It makes people suffer and weep, makes them angry, and seething for revenge. It is like lighting a fuse. Terrorist attacks set the stage for conflict, in this case bloody civil and world wars. They seek to draw down the curtain on civil rights and the openness and diversity that has given the free world such compassion, idealism and success.
But: terrorists don’t generally build universities or hospitals. They don't raise cities or industries. They don’t write symphonies. They don’t host olympiads. Terrorists do little that is civil or humane, and lifts the human spirit. What they do do, is complex and funded by sympathizers. It does involve their communities, but their power is with those in dire poverty. Nothing they do is remotely comparable to the level of world aide work done by others, led by the US.
In the face of the bloodiest and most atrocious and insane attack on world freedom and civilization, an utterly nauseating terrorist attack on innocent people, the most disarming retaliation that we could possibly invoke isn't saber rattling, and armadas and air assaults: it is equally blatant, visible, proud, overflowing compassion.
Remember that jihad is not really the word for a mad, suicidal flaming assault on enemies. That’s a bastardization of the term. A jihad is a spiritual struggle, often within yourself, to attain one’s values and reach a more compassionate, more humane, and more elightened state of being. America and the world can teach the world what a jihad really means.
The free world should declare a true jihad against terrorists.
And now more than ever, remember why the Peace Corps was really created (JFK’s words follow to remind us). We need to mobilize that corps, and we need the best and brightest people in it now more than ever. Those people and their actions can help win such a war. We will reap what we sow. We'd better sow exemplary seeds.
Michael Hawley (mike@media.mit.edu)
[Snipped from various public statements and executive orders]
The Peace Corps was designed to permit people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the common cause of world development.
Every participant will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life that is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace...
We cannot discontinue training young men and women as soliders of war — but we also need them as ambassadors of peace...
[Although the Peace Corps is for teaching] the young men and women will learn far more themselves than they teach, and we will therefore have another link which binds us to the world around us...
There can be no better evidence of our good will than days of honest work on behalf of our neighbors...
I believe that the Peace Corps has given us an opportunity to harness the idealism which is, I think, in all free people; has given us an opportunity to be of assistance, not merely in the cold field of economic help, but in the human relations which must exist for a happy understanding between people...
The United States and a few other fortunate nations are part of an island of prosperity in a worldwide sea of poverty. Our affluence has at times severed us from the great poverty stricken majority of the world’s people. It is essential that we demonstrate that we continue to be aware of the responsibility we fortunate few have to assist the efforts of others at development and progress...