Sometimes, Terrorism Doesn’t Happen to the United States

Joshua Micah Marshall made a good point yesterday: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that there may be some intelligence indicating that the Mumbai terrorists were plotting to kill “Americans and Britons.” But all the evidence points to the contrary. Mumbai was attacked due to its prominence, not the amount of westerners there. According to accounts of the violence, the terrorists appeared to be firing indiscriminately, not targeting particular people. Their purpose was to incite general terror with a “no one is safe” tone.

Is it American arrogance that makes Secretary Gates think that the purpose of the attack was to target Americans? Partially; American ubiquity demands it. Just like American clothing and pop culture is everywhere in the world, so too must American tragedies be recognized and venerated, and whenever a roughly analogous local tragedy happens, that tragedy must be understood through the lens of the American tragedy. In this case, since the local tragedy was terrorism, the American analogue is September 11.

President Bush (and now the rest of the country) seems to think that the Sept. 11 attacks were the first time any country has ever dealt with terrorist attacks on its own soil, and furthermore, that the United States, as a result of those attacks, is the only country that has experience dealing with terrorists. Prior to Bush’s tenure in office, the United States was not so cocky: of course we knew that Ireland has been dealing with terrorism since the 1920s, that Israel and Spain have been dealing with it since the 1960s, that India itself has been dealing with it from the Tamil Tigers, Kashmir separatists, and both Hindu and Muslim nationalists. Everyone seems to have forgotten, though, that the United States is not the world’s expert on dealing with terrorism.

So, no, it’s not likely that the attacks in Mumbai were designed to target Americans. But in order for the United States to lay claim to a War on Terrorism, it must lay claim to every instance of terrorism that occurs in the world in order to assert a leadership role in that war. The Bush administration has used the September 11 attacks as a throughway by which the United States may assert a “Me, too!” role in worldwide terrorism, even if the terrorism didn’t directly impact the United States.

It could be called the Cheney Doctrine after Vice President Cheney’s pronouncement earlier this year that the United States has a right to invade any country in the world, even if that country didn’t directly harm the United States, if the United States thinks that country has the capability or intent of harming the United States. Of course, the doctrine is nothing more than a unilateral pronouncement by Cheney and does not have the effect of law, but at least it shows us what he’s thinking. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of the “interstate commerce” clause, the section of the Constitution that has been interpreted so broadly as to allow Congress to control any aspect of business that could conceivably or theoretically impact interstate commerce (protecting endangered species in waterways that, through a series of even small creeks, eventually drain into interstate rivers, for example).

Diplomatic Implications

The United States would especially like to stick its nose into relations between Pakistan and India. Al-Qaeda is or was hiding in Pakistan on the Afghanistan border. Former president Pervez Musharraf didn’t send the military up there to investigate for fear of alienating those populations. The new Pakistani government will not be as America-friendly as the last one, since the United States supported the unpopular Musharraf. Without Musharraf, the United States has no reason or authority to be involved in India/Pakistan relations. Using the terrorism angle allows the United States to remain involved in that relationship.

We still think we are the gatekeepers to all the world’s diplomacy: no one anywhere in the world can have any bilateral talks without inviting the United States, as well. Every talk is necessarily multilateral because every relationship between any people anywhere in the world is relevant to the United States. It’s time for us to get over this attitude. When James Monroe asserted U.S. diplomatic hegemony in the Western hemisphere — essentially telling the rest of the world that, if you wanted to deal with Latin America, you had to go through the U.S. first — the arrogance was apparent, but at least it was confined to America’s sphere of influence in the world.

As the United States’ diplomatic clout has waned — particularly under the watchful eye of the Bush administration — its ability to assert leadership roles in negotiations in which it has no stake has similarly waned. Thankfully, there will always be the War on Terrorism there to insist that, by virtue of the United States being attacked on September 11, and its self-proclaimed doctrine of warfare against terrorism, the United States automatically has a stake in any negotiation that may even be tangentially related to terrorism.

It is a gross disservice to the people in Mumbai who were killed, wounded, and terrorized to narcissistically focus their tragedy in terms of our tragedy. Perhaps going through the same kind of event allows Americans to better understand what Indians are feeling right now, but we should no more shift the focus to our own attack any more than we would eulogize our own losses at someone else’s funeral.