September 11, Crisis Resolution

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September 12, 2001: Memo to Students and Colleagues

Richard E. Rubenstein
Prof. of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs

I thought I would communicate in shorthand form what I’ve been saying to reporters and on television since yesterday’s terrorist attacks.

1. This is an enormous national trauma, as well as a personal tragedy for friends and relatives of people killed and hurt. We can expect to go through all the phases that people go through after a serious trauma, including shock, denial, and anger. The anger is natural, but we need to work through it to arrive at a better place — a place where we can think constructively about how to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
   
   

2. Those responsible for killing innocent people should be captured and prosecuted. But short-term security considerations (how to find the perpetrators, how to improve our intelligence, etc.) totally dominate the present discussion, along with calls for vengeance and ferocious war rhetoric. What we need is a new national discussion of our long-term security needs: i.e., what causes this fanatical hatred of and desire for revenge against our country. And this means a new national dialogue about America’s role in the world.
   
   

3. For millions upon millions of the world’s people, America has come to mean violence. Around the world, people struggling for their national or ethnic identities, for human dignity, and for their rights as workers and farmers face massive repression supplied by the U.S. They look into the barrel of a gun, the cannon of a tank, or up at bombs falling on their people, and all these weapons say "Made in the U.S.A." Chances are that the U.S. trained the troops or police wielding them as well. Without the knowledge or consent of most Americans, we have become the world’s leading exporter of violence. Can we go on being responsible for the massive killing of innocents in other countries without paying a terrible price?
   
   

4. What will the effect of these terrorist attacks be on America? People will be angry, of course, but they will also be confused and seeking answers. Our leaders can manipulate and intensify the anger, or they can help people find answers to their questions — this is not a question of leaders responding to any irresistible pressure from below for massive retaliation. People are aware that the U.S. has lost its "cloak of invulnerability." A leadership worth the name would help us to recognize and deal with the fact that we are really part of this world, not magically separated from it. How do we want to define our relationship to the other inhabitants of the globe, especially the poorer nations? Do we want to be the new Rome — or something better? These are subjects for our new national dialogue.
   
   

5. The events of yesterday are an unprecedented tragedy for Americans in terms of the numbers of lives lost and people injured. We need to mourn our dead and to do all that we can to help their loved ones. In this same mood of sympathetic sadness, we also need to mourn the victims of unjustified violence in other societies. 10,000 dead in a country of 300 million is not as high a proportion of the population as the number of civilians killed in the last two years in Israel/Palestine. Nor, as ghastly as the figure is, is it anywhere near the devastation being visited on Sri Lanka, Algeria, Sierra Leone, or many other lands. And what of Afghanistan, after 25 years of civil war and two years of famine, with hundreds of thousands in refugee camps and nine ethnic communities at each others’ throats? Is this not an environment that breeds the dream of revenge?
   
   

6. What makes terrorists do what they do? Is this a case, as the President says, of good versus evil? To be sure, when people deliberately kill thousands of innocents, their actions are rightly called evil. But the world is not divided into good people (us) and evil people (them). For the most part, terrorists are ordinary people living under extraordinary circumstances. Almost all of them have experienced violence at first hand or have close family or friends who have been killed in some social struggle. Most of them are not represented by effective mass movements and feel powerless and humiliated in the face of superior force exercised by their (U.S.-supplied) enemies. So they are desperate and dream of revenge — but they also harbor great hopes, for example, that a dramatic act of violence can remoralize and mobilize their people, or that heroic deeds can make up for decades of humiliation and salvage a lost honor. Terrorist hopes are most often misplaced, but that doesn’t make them satanic or insane.
   
   

7. By the same token, "explanations" of terrorism that focus on pure fanaticism — for example, "the Arabs love martyrdom because they think they will go straight to heaven" — need to be corrected. American soldiers who throw themselves on hand grenades or give their lives to defeat some real or fancied enemy are given medals and heroes’ burials. Every people has its traditions of sacrifice and martyrdom. So, if there is one thing that the terrorists are not, however heinous and disproportionate their actions, it is "cowardly." This us/them rhetoric MUST be deconstructed and de-escalated before we can begin to think clearly about the real threats that face us.
   
   

8. What should we do next? Rally all those capable of resisting the impulse to expand the violence and continue the chain of revenge. Aim particularly at religious leaders and others who should know better. Call for a new national dialogue on the issues, perhaps starting on college campuses. Try to open up the press to alternative voices. And always base our approach on practicality as well as morality. Practically speaking, there can be no defense against terrorism unless we understanding its causes and motives, and resolve to do something about them.