Nightmare of American blowback

KENNETT, Mo. -- I believe most Americans would understand the current events that have turned us from an incredibly affluent society into one that at times seems to take on the appearance of a cowering one if we only had a better grasp of what precipitated the Sept. 11 attacks.

Most of us have enough sense to realize our enemies didn't just decide one day to do away with us because of the way we part our hair or because most of us are of the Christian faith.

In many ways our current security dilemmas are reminiscent of childhood fights that, after the passage of two decades, are remembered as insignificant arguments rather than meaningful, lasting animosities. We're left asking questions such as "What did we say that was so bad?" or "Whatever we did couldn't have been as colossally destructive as the deaths of 5,000 innocent Americans."

Many of the pundits who have deluded themselves into believing they do all of America's intellectual heavy-lifting argue that our enemies coalesced during a zero hour in December 1979. Can you remember what happened that month and that year? If you can, congratulations. If you can't then perhaps you remember who was president at that time. It was Jimmy Carter, whose foreign-policy experts concluded that the world was about to end as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

We're now told that our decision to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to provide weapons for the Afghan resistance, the mujahedeen, was accompanied by our stepped-up efforts to resist communism in the central and southern portions of our own hemisphere. Thus we found ourselves arming revolutionaries in one part of the globe and resisting them in another section, which today may seem rather schizophrenic but back then, under the threat of communist supremacy around the world, seemed perfectly logical.

Further, we're told, President Harry Truman's virtually unilateral decision to recognize the state of Israel earned us the undying animosity of the Muslim world, if not the Arab world.

If there is anything we have learned over the years from World War II to the World Trade Center-Pentagon massacres, it should be there are not simplistic answers to complicated world problems.

Some among us, attracted to the logic of the Russian invasion theory, are seemingly willing to blame the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks. This kind of blowback theory, in which mankind bears the brunt of unintended consequences, seems far to simplistic to be true. It even absolves the al-Qaida and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden of full responsibility for the disaster. These enemies, it's being simplistically argued, are merely our own nation's chickens coming home to roost.

Since blowback exists in absolutely every aspect of life, because nothing comes without some reaction somewhere, we're unlikely to discover what was going through the mind of whoever conceived, in one moment of a lifetime, the idea of hijacking commercial airline planes and converting them into guided missiles. Then does it make sense to blame the destruction of the World Trade Center on a $500 million nonlethal aid program that took place more than two decades ago? We can't even know for certain why the Soviets foolishly decided to invade Afghanistan. Indeed, we can't even know for certain whether our president and his National Security Council believed they could inspire an Afghan resistance to Russian armed aggression.

There seems to be little denial that we more or less abandoned the Afghan resistance when it became obvious the Soviets' invasion was suffering the same fate as our own war against the Vietnamese communists. Make that flat-out abandoned, not more or less. After the Marshall Plan, inaugurated immediately after World War II, we have consistently ignored the postwar conditions being endured by those we sought to aid or destroy. U.S. bombs have rained down on innocents in countries scattered throughout the world from South America to the Balkans, from Africa to the Middle East. This, it seems, may be the realistic blowback retribution on Sept. 11.

It is perfectly natural to rhetorically ask why our leaders, from the Roosevelt-Truman interim to the Clinton-Bush years, committed so many grievous foreign policy errors, but in defense of the seven presidents who served during this period, the information they received was often far from perfect. In fairness, presidential decisions made in the moment of crisis were, for the most part, the obvious and most reasonable ones.

As for the rest of us, we willingly, even eagerly, assigned responsibility to those in the White House and on Capitol Hill, few of whom had the proper information at the proper time and who faced a national constituency that demanded divine wisdom when there was so little available. Generally, the qualities we impatient Americans demand of our leaders are intelligence, wisdom, insight, bravery and honesty, while all we have really demanded of ourselves is the right to escape the blowback of wrong decisions.

Perhaps we are beginning to realize that America's greatest moments in history occur when Americans are challenged to be their greatest, not when they are the most comfortable.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.