I decided to focus on American studies, bolstered by my good fortune of landing a freshman seminar with Sacvan Bercovitch. As English professors go, he was famous; my father made it clear to me that studying with him was a big deal. Bercovitch had deeply impacted American studies by pointing out all the ways in which modern America owed its culture to the influence of the early Puritans.
Until then, I had considered the Puritan years to be the most boring period in all of American history, full of dour and interminable sermons by the likes of Cotton Mather. But to Bercovitch, the Puritans were the key to American identity. His seminal book The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become.
The threads of influence are easy to find, if you know what to look for. Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy each used the same phrase, “city upon a hill,” to describe America’s destiny among nations. In doing so, they used imagery that traces back to John Winthrop and the sermon he gave using that same phrase almost four hundred years ago, aboard the ship that would bring him and his followers to America. Bercovitch explained how Winthrop’s image of America as a beacon of virtue would become the basis for an American exceptionalism that helps define our country to this day.
Bercovitch was an unlikely character for Harvard, a son of Canadian Jewish radicals (they had named him after the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti) who began his career as a dairy farmer on a kibbutz in Israel. He described returning to Canada and becoming a manager at a grocery store, where his bosses funded him to attend night school out of embarrassment that someone in management lacked a degree. Though a giant in his field, in person he was unassuming, a little stooped, with big eyes and a permanent, mischievous smile. He was semi-retired by the time I got into his seminar, teaching just for the fun of it.
He took a liking to me, and hired me as a research assistant on his massive project of editing The Cambridge History of American Literature. I was happy to have the work, the pocket money, and the time around such an eminent scholar, though by now I was beginning to realize for certain that I would not become an English professor like him or my parents. Under his influence, I would write my thesis about another Puritan sermon, less famous than Winthrop’s, a paean to the early missionaries’ “errand into the wilderness.”
A generation after Winthrop, in 1670, Samuel Danforth gave a classic jeremiad excoriating his followers and society for forgetting their purpose in coming to the New World:
Now let us sadly consider whether our ancient and primitive affections to the Lord Jesus, his glorious Gospel, his pure and Spiritual Worship and the Order of his House, remain, abide and continue firm, constant, entire and inviolate. Our Saviour’s reiteration of this Question, What went ye out into the Wilderness to see? is no idle repetition, but a sad conviction of our dullness and backwardness to this great duty, and a clear demonstration of the weight and necessity thereof.
If Winthrop saw America becoming a blessed example of godly living to which all others might turn, Danforth spoke of America’s civilizing mission, to go out into wild and savage lands (“over the vast Ocean into this waste and howling Wilderness,” he said) and make them more like the image of heaven on earth.
In my senior thesis, I drew a line from this thinking to America’s Cold War insistence on invading Vietnam to “save” it from godless Communism, leading to a different and doomed errand into the jungle. I compared the American government’s narrative about Vietnam with the views of outside commentators like the British novelist Graham Greene, whose novel The Quiet American bore out his skepticism of America’s purposes. In Greene’s novel, based partly on real events, an idealistic young American intelligence operative winds up contributing to a terrorist attack in Vietnam, all with the best of intentions. “Innocence,” Greene observes in the novel, “is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” Greene’s world-weary, English, Catholic outlook could not have been more different from the Puritan-inflected American understanding of its Cold War mission.
Though my focus was America, I also took courses in Arabic. In high school I had read the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North, which tells of an African graduate student’s romantic conquest of several young British women in a sort of inverted version of the plot of Heart of Darkness. Just from the linguistic rhythm and the poetic richness of the translated language, I could sense how beautiful the Arabic prose must have been, and I wanted to learn the original. Plus, a bit vaguely, I figured that knowing Arabic would be useful for a future career in public service or journalism.
It was hard—much harder than the French and Spanish I had studied in high school, or even the Maltese (also a Semitic language) that I had picked up from my father. But it was also a highly rewarding language to learn. At first the English-speaking learner struggles to grab hold of something, since there are almost no similarities between our words and theirs. But after a year or two of learning, the structure of the language begins to unfold and reveal itself—and unlike almost any other language, you can derive most words you don’t know by using the words you do know. After a while it’s all prefixes, suffixes, and rearrangement of a few vowels to make whole families of words according to strict patterns. It all works by analogy: you can take the same changes you make to the word for “cooking” to get the word for “kitchen,” and do it to the word for “writing” to get the word for “office.”
When I showed up in late 2000, not many people were studying Arabic. I don’t think there were more than a dozen of us in that first-year class my freshman fall. Most were Arab or Jewish students interested in getting in touch with personal roots. We knew the Middle East was important, but we had no idea that one year later the entire trajectory of America’s relationship with the Muslim world would shift.
WHEN THE PLANES HIT, I was facedown on the bottom bunk, oblivious to the sunbeams angling in through the old windowpanes of my sophomore quarters in Leverett House. It was my dorm-mate, Uzo—rarely one to wake before I did—who knocked on the door, walked in, and said, “Hey, Peter, you might want to see this.” Soon there were four or five of us gathered on the futon in the next room, watching the Today Show coverage as the idea that we had lived to see the End of History collapsed with the two towers.
That Tuesday happened to be registration day. At midday, not knowing what else to do, I walked to Harvard Yard to sign up for classes. Everyone seemed to be in a daze, and wide-eyed students everywhere, disproportionately from New York and Washington, were on their cell phones trying to call home, mostly without success. Standing at an interfaith prayer service hastily organized in Harvard Yard, I looked up and saw a lone fighter jet banking in the crisp and cloudless blue sky overhead, as if to advise all of us below that war was no longer going to be distant or theoretical for us.
After trying all day to call home, I finally got through in the evening and reassured my parents that I was all right. It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened. A few days earlier I had turned up at Logan Airport with my bags packed for school; this morning, some men had stepped on that same curb, walked through that same concourse, boarded a half-empty airplane, and murdered their way into a new chapter of world affairs. It was immediately clear that the project of my generation had just been reassigned in some way. The infinite peace of post–Cold War promise was in fact a mirage, and we would be dealing with matters we thought our grandparents’ generation had settled, having to do with war, terror, and freedom. It was hard not to think of that wall in Memorial Hall, and wonder how many of my class
mates would wind up among a new generation of war dead.
There was a few days’ ellipsis in which politics seemed remote. As people were still being pulled out of the rubble and grief provoked us to say things like “We will never be the same,” America felt more decent in mourning. Articles were written about the death of irony, and for a moment it felt as if the vengeful return of history would give us all the seriousness of historians, grappling with the complex forces that had brought us to this point. We seemed, for those few days, not just wounded but morally aware. Within days President Bush was visiting a mosque, eloquently distinguishing between Islamist terrorism and Islamic people. “Islam is peace,” he said, in a speech largely forgotten today. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” Just weeks earlier, the nation had been obsessed with shark attacks and a philandering congressman; now we seemed to have matured overnight.
Perhaps inevitably, that sense didn’t last for long. We might have lost our innocence and learned something about the world, but we did not suddenly become wise. Americans were facing the first case in a generation in which a chain of events that started overseas shook and changed all of our lives. It’s impossible to expect that we would respond by leaping to a new moral plane, or that we would immediately grasp the complexity of the global forces that had just come to harm us. Nor were we remotely prepared for the idea of modern asymmetric warfare.
Scanning AOL Instant Messenger away messages (which in retrospect represented an early-2000s forecast of what Twitter would be like), I saw a message from one friend that summed up how it looked to many: “Doesn’t Afghanistan know we have bombs?” It took a while to catch on to the idea that this was an attack on the United States not by the country of Afghanistan, but by Al-Qaeda, protected by the Taliban, which governed most Afghans but was not exactly an administration. We had been attacked by a transnational network, hosted by a rogue regime presiding over a failed state.
The responses were largely knee-jerk; a PATRIOT Act that undercut the freedoms that define America, and several quick steps down the slippery slope to torture. So slow were we to realize how fundamentally different this was than wars we had studied in school or seen in movies that by October we were bargaining against our own values, moving steadily and surely into the jaws of a trap that Al-Qaeda had laid for us.
IT WAS YEARS BEFORE I would get formal training in counterterrorism as a military officer, but it seemed clear even then as a history student that the new national approach on terrorism was likely to be self-defeating. The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes. We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.
A spectacle of murder and destruction, though it killed far fewer people than ordinary gun violence, car accidents, or even cigarettes, had the power to loosen our commitment to freedom at home and shatter our restraints on involvement abroad. It was clear enough why America had to do something to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it was not clear what American values the administration was willing to compromise in the context of what it was starting to call the Global War on Terror. Would our civil liberties be diminished in the name of protecting us? Would the longtime certainty that America does not torture people hold? Would America commit to supporting freedom and democracy in deed as well as word, or would we back any dictator who claimed to side with us in the new global war, ignoring what was happening in his own country?
The answers started to pour in, mostly discouraging. Soon our government was sending prisoners to third-party countries for torture. It was supporting a grotesque dictatorship in Uzbekistan abroad and checking on people’s library usage at home, all in the name of fighting terrorism. At the same time, little was said about personal sacrifice at home for the purpose of winning a national conflict. Kids in World War II saved tinfoil from gum wrappers for the war effort, women reused nylon stockings as many times as possible, and everyone then knew why they were being asked to pay much higher taxes. This time around, it seemed that the war effort was wholly outsourced to those few Americans who served in uniform. America tripped over itself to salute them, without seeming to consider the possibility that civilians, too, could accept some risk or pay some contribution into the cause of freedom. I thought again of the names on that Civil War memorial wall as it became clear that this time, the task of dealing with this conflict would be assigned to a class of professional soldiers, not shared by all of our society on an all-hands-on-deck basis.
We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom.
Truly grasping and defeating the logic of suicide terrorism was too much for our Congress or administration, which lapsed instead into simplistic rhetoric. Emblematic of this was the sudden adoption, by administration spokespeople and Fox News anchors, of the bizarre term “homicide bomber” instead of “suicide bomber.” It may have scratched an emotional itch, but the terminology was doubly useless, both belaboring the obvious fact that bombers are generally homicidal, and obscuring the tactically useful distinction between those murderers who are prepared to kill themselves in the process and those who are not.
Soon the president was telling us that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” a dictum impossible for America to uphold or enforce in the case of Pakistan and many other states playing the three-dimensional chess game of geopolitics in the Islamic world. Next it was an “Axis of Evil,” and so on. For the home front, the message was that we would be kept safe through the deployment of force and the acceptance of some encroachments on our freedom and privacy. And also, for some reason, we would need to invade Iraq.
As a student, I couldn’t see for myself what this all was wreaking upon our politics until I went home for the summer of 2002 and volunteered on the campaign of Jill Long Thompson, who was running as a Democrat for the U.S. House seat in South Bend. The typical rule is that the president’s party fares badly in a midterm election, but there was no indication that that would happen this year. Democrats, unsure of themselves, were afraid to sound like an opposition at all, and many carefully avoided opposing the Iraq War for fear of looking unpatriotic. (Some, particularly Hillary Clinton, would come to regret this posturing.) Instead they tried to change the subject, emphasizing Social Security and Medicare, even though global security was the dominant issue of our moment—even in Indiana.
One hot day that summer, I was sent to help with the Fulton County Democratic Party’s entry in a rural small-town parade. As we prepared our little float with campaign signs and balloons, I did a double-take at the parade entry next to us, belonging to “Kountry Kidz Day Care.” A group of cute, rambunctious ten-year-olds in red T-shirts proudly showed me their float, which consisted of a large, uneven pair of four-foot-high model skyscrapers made out of foam core. Around the top of the gray rectangular objects a loose wrap of fishnet and mesh suggested dark smoke, while flames made of orange construction paper shot out the side of one of the objects, surrounded by cotton balls representing more billowing smoke. A big American flag shared the flatbed that carried this strange scene, and a sign on the back read UNITED WE STAND. This was a rural Indiana kids’ day-care craft project, circa July 2002:
they had made a little 9/11.
BEFORE THE END OF THE DECADE I would see Iraq for myself, visiting Baghdad as a civilian economic adviser, but back then all I knew was what I learned in class and read in the paper. I saw our president declare that Saddam Hussein must disarm his chemical and biological weapons, and vow, “If he won’t do so voluntarily we will disarm him.”
The tough talk was rousing, but it made no strategic sense. Saddam was a notoriously sinister dictator whose top priority, as with all dictators, was his own survival. It followed that he viewed his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons (as most of us believed he had) as an insurance policy to keep him in power. He would only part with them voluntarily if it would benefit his personal security—an unlikely course for someone who did not trust America. But actually using them would almost certainly lead to his destruction, so he had every reason to sit on his weapons if he had them. The only scenario where he might use them would be if he had nothing to lose by doing so—and now, by invading, we were poised to create that very situation. Logically, this meant that an invasion would be very costly and bloody for American troops. Invited to represent the College Democrats at a rally outside the Science Center at Harvard, I spoke of the difference between necessary wars, like those memorialized in the church nearby, and unnecessary wars that could take young lives for no purpose at all.
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