Comparisons to WWII are inaccurate

  Susanna Hecht Hecht is chair of Latin
American studies at UCLA, and associate director of the Latin
American Center. She has published widely on resistance movements
in the developing world and has been the recipient of two MacArthur
Foundation Global Security Fellowships.

The dust from the incinerated victims and collapsed buildings
had not yet settled from the New York sky before we were at
war.

We’ve been told that it’s a new game as the
warplanes whoosh off, but the rhetoric ““ both from the left
and the right ““ is more than 60 years old: “an attack
comparable to Pearl Harbor,” “Wanted Dead or
Alive,” and “With Us or Against Us.” We lack only
Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears” to complete
the list.

Some Pentagon pundits assert, astonishingly, that the role of
Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance might look something like the
French Resistance.

It’s not surprising that World War II images and
ideologies now saturate our consciousness as we are deploying for
war.

The last couple of years have seen an endless parade of war
epics like “Saving Private Ryan” and the most recent
entry in the wartime male-bonding genre, “Band of
Brothers.” Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest
Generation” ““ his uplifting tribute to the World War II
generation ““ is a mainstay on the bestseller list.

But comparing WWII to the current situation is terribly
inaccurate for several reasons.

First, WWII was a battle between nation states who were fighting
over territory, and the point of military action was to take over
places, polities and economies.

If globalization has any lesson to teach, it is that you
needn’t control the actual physical place and have all the
irritations of daily state administration to dominate the economy.
Indeed, it is far more efficient if you don’t.

The USSR discovered this as it gasped and floundered in the
military quagmire and thin air of the Hindu Kush, battling against
the liberation forces funded, trained and equipped by the U.S.
““ the motley Islamic group known as the Taliban.

Second, the WWII analogy deletes from memory the nature of
guerrilla warfare, something at which the U.S. is not masterful. It
also overlooks the fact that U.S. Cold War politics positioned,
trained and financed the monarchies, theocracies and military
dictators of the region as elements of both anti-Soviet and
petroleum politics.

The U.S. has been indifferent or openly supportive when elements
of political liberalization in these countries were routed out,
killed or exiled as insurgents.

The emergence of modern states was aborted in these regions in
the name of oil and geopolitics with our blessings.

Many of these ruling coteries, no matter how outwardly devout,
have not heeded the Prophets’ warnings to redistribute
wealth, but rather invested in lavish estates, Gulfstream jets and
gambling junkets while most of their populations suffer in
poverty.

Well-financed, well-fed militaries keep order over a scrawny
populace that survives on faith more than food, in countries whose
social indicators are among the worst in the world.

The potentates and dictators have abandoned the minimal
responsibilities of the state, and thus a vast army of Islamic
non-government, faith-based organizations are responsible for
education and social services, thus providing the base and
constituency for religious fanaticism.

If one thinks of the large Osama bin Laden network ““
though they may be intimates of the extravagant Saudi royal family
and staunch monarchists ““ it at least appears to be concerned
about redistribution (even if the reality bin Laden embraces bears
no trace of it).

Taxi drivers from Africa and Asia have bin Laden’s photo
dangling from their car mirrors and his picture is everywhere in
the poor shops of the Arab world.

Bin Laden must be understood as an icon of resistance to the
political economy of U.S. intervention and its military and client
states.

While Latin Americans and Americanists may not be happy with the
comparisons, he is this epoch’s Che Guevara, a Cuban
revolutionary and Fidel Castro’s right-hand man. Che, of
course, was a product and a fiction of the Cold War in the tropics.
Bin Laden is his postmodern, globalized desert incarnation.

It’s important to understand how they differ. Guevara and
the guerrilla movements of Latin America were concerned about
taking over and reframing the political and distributive nature of
the states as secular socialist utopias as a way of redressing
inequality.

The U.S. Cold War response was to militarize the region, as it
is now doing in Central Asia. A deadly period of civil wars and
internal repression by client governments for 40 years then
followed, with blinding corruption, hundreds of thousands killed,
widespread human rights abuses and environmental havoc.

It’s worth remembering, however, that except for the
glorious invasion of Grenada, the Cold War period produced no real
U.S. victories there.

But the Gulf and Central Asia are not like Latin America, in
part because of the failure of the secular modern state to develop,
leaving theocracies and monarchies who distribute their wealth
along the lines of clans and cronies.

The reason that bin Laden is so appealing to the impoverished
people of Islam is that his analysis, regardless of what we may
think of it, views the national state as a pointless arena of
contention because globalization makes it irrelevant economically
and profound corruption makes it irrelevant politically ““ a
position largely shared by the poorer inhabitants of the
region.

Because of his disdain for state power, bin Laden is truly the
only warrior in the arena who understands what the nature of modern
globalization means in warfare.

The attack on the Twin Towers, whoever masterminded it, was one
of the most brilliant tactics in military history. It was not about
taking territory in any but the most abstract and emotional
sense.

Its complex meld of low tech/high concept effectively destroyed
both the potent symbols and real loci of U.S. global economic and
military power, and undermined democracy in the U.S. by the
president’s assumption of war powers (with the exciting
subtext of a holy war).

What Bush means by a “new war” is having a sort of
World War II war ““ hence the endless invocation of its
imagery and language.

What Bush wants is a “good war” ““ one that
lacks moral complexity and has a triumphal script.

What Bush speaks of is a “defensive war,” a concept
that triggered World War I, even as we step into a context in which
U.S. geopolitics and revanchist elites have created the most
volatile regimes in the world ““ a region so culturally and
politically opaque to this country that State Department officials
plead on national TV for Farsi and Arabic translators.