Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I'm writing to offer some thoughts and reactions to what has happened this week. Several of you have asked me what I think, given that I write about U.S.-Middle East relations and the media. I want my work to have some relevance here, and I believe it does. But in all honesty, I'm not sure yet how to make sense of the atrocities that have happened or the various dangers still to come. Yesterday, I gave a brief presentation for some folks in the American Studies department, and we had a discussion afterward that was very valuable, but in the end I felt unsatisfied with what I had to say. I think I may not make much of a pundit, since still, 3 days after the news began to unfold, I feel capable of doing little more than attending, again and again, to the tragedy and loss - the stories of final cell phone calls and the images family members carrying pictures of their loved ones. Sometimes I feel as if I can't do much more than stand silent in the face of such pain.

We've seen such images before, of course, and they are usually not Americans. As many of us have said to each other, grimly, now Americans have come to know what it is like to live in a war zone, the kind of place where bombs drop on your neighborhood or (here in DC especially) the military roam the streets. And we know that the United States has quite frequently been a major cause of that pain, from backing military dictators in Latin America (who could see all those photos of loved ones in New York and not remember the mothers carrying pictures of the Disappeared in Argentina and elsewhere?), to bombing raids on cities, from Baghdad to Belgrade, in which thousands of civilians died. Some people are calling the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "blowback" - an entirely predictable consequence of years of U.S. muscle-flexing and arrogance. My partner Carl Conetta and I have talked a great deal about this. Despite what seemed to be the (short-term) experience of the Gulf War, we must now come to realize what we should have known all along, that no nation can expect to consistently intervene militarily all over the world - to literally dominate the post-cold-war political and economic landscape - and not have some profound costs associated with those actions.

This does not mean that the United States deserved what we got. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were horrific, extraordinary crimes against humanity. That they were unconscionable goes without saying, but those of us who are going to find ourselves in the minority over the next weeks and months must make sure to say it very clearly. There are many reasons why people commit terrorist acts; sometimes those reasons are based in situations of profound injustice and deep, justified anger. But morally and politically we must stand firm on this simple notion: it is never acceptable to respond to even the most profound grievances by killing whoever is in reach. This is true in reference to the terrorists who struck last Tuesday, and it will be true when the United States works to craft a response to those murders.

That response will not be long in coming. In the first few days of shock and horror, most of us seemed to be able to do little more than sit mutely in front of our television, watching the nightmarish images of destruction. That was certainly the case for me. But now, as we seem to have so quickly moved from the solidarity of our grief to the politicization of our anger, the government, with the support of the vast majority of Americans, is forging a narrative about what has happened, and what should be our response. As the drum-beating and jingoism is building so rapidly around us, we need to ask some hard questions about the war that seems surely about to come.

Many people in the United States want to get some better understanding of why this happened: what kind of people could take so many innocent lives? Is it something about Islam or the Arab world that encourages hatred? And why do they seem to hate the United States in particular? Most of my friends and colleagues are quite sure that the story is a hell of a lot more complicated than President Bush's assertion that the terrorists acted because they were determined to destroy "freedom." But from our leaders and in the media, there remains a kind of willful ignorance about the larger context that led to this disaster. As was the case in the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80, or in the Gulf War in 1990-91, or in the years since, our news media seem incapable of providing any kind of serious analysis of the dynamics of U.S. power and Middle East politics. Yet it is vital to understand, much more deeply than we do, the political and social situation that has made the United States not only feared but hated in so much of the world, especially the Middle East.

For at least 40 years, the U.S. government has actively opposed most of the major struggles for social justice and national self-determination, in the Middle East and elsewhere, in the name of U.S. "national interests." In the Middle East, those interests have been defined as protecting low-cost access to oil, supporting Israel, keeping Arab allies in place as a base for military and political action (which then could be used to help protect access to oil, as in the Gulf War), and, until the 1990s, keeping the Soviets out. U.S. foreign policy has supported those "interests," sometimes diplomatically (as in the repeated attempts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace, generally on Israeli terms), sometimes politically (the arming of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s), sometimes militarily (the U.S. has intervened militarily in the Middle East dozens of times since WWII, including the stationing of Marines in Lebanon in the early 1980s after the Israeli invasion; backing the Islamic militants in Afghanistan, supporting both sides in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and of course, the Persian Gulf war of 1990-91). In the face of this history, our president's insistence that the terrorists attacked "freedom" infuriates me, not only because I know that freedom is often the last thing the U.S. represents abroad, but because I know this language is the rhetorical justification for what will likely be another war against a Middle Eastern nation - one that will be deadly, disastrous, and wrong.

Writing in the National Review this week (13 September), conservative columnist Ann Coulter called for the United States to just start bombing, and not to worry too much about who the actual terrorists are. "Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response" to the attacks, she wrote. "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." Coulter is a terrifying human being, but she is not alone. And she is right about the nature of war, which is precisely what must stop us from supporting it.

Wars are military battles between nations over political goals. Civilians die in wars, and most of us can accept that as necessary if we believe that the goals are imperatives and that war, and war alone, will meet those imperatives. But just because a given group of criminals want a war, it doesn't mean that we should give them one. When Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma and killed 165 people, he made clear that he intended it as a declaration of war against the U.S. government. The U.S. government, however, responded by treating his action as what it was: a horrifying, vicious crime carried out, not by a government, but by a fanatic. Right-wingers like McVeigh can declare war on the U.S. government, but the terrible level of their violence does not give them the status of a nation state, and we don't go bombing Texas for giving succor to them and their kind. The extraordinary magnitude of what happened in New York and DC doesn't change that calculation. To the best of my understanding (and to the degree that anyone in the public really knows), the perpetrators of this crime were exactly that: criminals. They should be found and captured, using all the tools at our disposal, including the force of law, the pressure of diplomacy, and covert activity if necessary. And then they should be tried, legally, for conspiracy and hijacking - and for 5,000 counts of murder.

If we follow the general call for war, we will do the wrong thing, morally and politically. We will also sow the seeds of many disasters to come. The reality is that the United States already helped to make Osama bin Laden into the force he is today, by backing him and other militant Islamic fighters in the Afghan war. U.S. policy then was to strengthen anyone who would oppose the Soviets - and indeed we did that. But if CIA training and military backing were not enough, then maybe the U.S. government should do them another favor and go ahead and take former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger's advice and just bomb Kabul flat. When that happens, as Bruce Shapiro put it in Salon.com (September 12), "You might as well hand out box-cutters and directions to Kennedy Airport to every kid in Afghanistan unto the third generation." It is a matter of the most basic political realism that we as Americans must begin to understand, finally, that our nation cannot act with impunity. There are of course times when we should be willing to risk "blowback" for the sake of a principle; the principle of war as revenge fantasy is not one of them.

I hope it's clear that none of this is intended as even back-handed support for the world-view of Osama bin Laden and his kind. I know where they came from: Islamic fundamentalism gained strength from the political failures of secular Arab governments in the 1960s and 70s, and from the sense among many people that "Americanization" was destroying their traditions and identity. I believe that the United States has some responsibility to bear for helping to create the climate of anger and fear that is so much a part of the Middle East today, and that has fueled the radicalization of certain people who believe they have little to lose. But I am also convinced that Islamic fundamentalism is dangerous and wrong. I think the same is true of Christian fundamentalism. When Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson go on television as they did this week to sagely agree that the ACLU and gays and lesbians and feminists are all responsible for bringing God's wrath down upon the United States, they are the best argument for secularism I know of.

Yet just as my Christian friends are clear that Falwell's hatred is far removed from their own faith, we also need to know that there is nothing in "Islam" that creates a special inclination toward suicide, violence, or hatred. Despair and alienation breed all of those things: from Jonestown to South Central LA to Beit Jala. It's true that faith is a powerful motivator for extraordinary actions, of all types, but beware, beware of pundits claiming to explain the nature of Islam as the reason for violent actions. Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with adherents whose beliefs and practices are no less varied and no less rich than those of other religions. Christianity is deeply meaningful to many people, but it means something very different to French Catholic socialists than to conservative American Protestants, and something else again to black evangelicals or Coptic Christians in Egypt. Like all religions, Islam is profoundly real as experience, and utterly elusive as explanation.

I also don't want to imply that I think the right foreign policies will lead to a world without violence. Even if the United States were to develop a far more judicious and just foreign policy than we have, it would not stop all the causes of terrorism. While it is obviously true that without attention to causes, there will never be solutions - who can believe that there will ultimately be any end to the violence in Northern Ireland or in Israel/Palestine until the underlying political problems are resolved in ways that most people on both sides can accept as fair? - it is also true that there are a certain number of people who will be opposed to even the best of policies, simply because human beings are unlikely to agree on what is "best." Even if we were somehow able to forge the kind of world I believe in - democratic, anti-imperialist, multicultural, economically just, and as queer as can be - I don't doubt that what is my liberation project would be, for some people, a nightmare. And it might just make a few of them angry enough to kill.

I do know this, however: a world in which there is real progress in forging economic justice within and between countries, where the United States and its allies bomb less and talk more, and where the national rights of others are taken seriously, even when they are inconvenient, will be a world in which there is less terrorism. But that is not why I support those things. I support them because I believe they are right. Because I want a world that is more just and safer for all people, not just for Americans. And because I also realize that, despite my criticisms, I am an American, and I want to feel about my country politically and globally what I feel about it at the individual and human level: that we are remarkably capable of doing the right thing.

This is longer than I intended, but of course it is only a beginning. There are several good resources on the net that I urge you to keep following: Common Dreams Newscenter is an excellent compendium of liberal/left alternative news articles; Salon represents a more mainstream set of opinions, but has some excellent pieces; the home page for Middle East Report has good background information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One group that is organizing a response is Move On, and their action campaign on this issue can be accessed here. My book Epic Encounters came out this week, and to the degree it speaks to a long history of fear, anger, and misunderstanding, I think it speaks to this. But there is nothing right now that feels adequate to me; I trust that we will forge our truths, and our political space, in the days and weeks ahead.

Melani is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University.

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