Dear Mike,

Consider this a rhetorical exercise. Talk me out of it.

Imagine that the World Trade Center and Pentagon had been bombed by a
coalition of secularist Third World leftists. Imagine that they had
identified their group and their demands and said, "Sorry to do this,
but your global capitalism keeps exploiting our labor and resources,
your IMF and World Bank frustrate local and collective initiatives and
keep us in debt, and your client regimes oppress and torture us. We're
really in favor of freedom and democracy but you're the ones who make
them impossible for us. And we've tried repeatedly to tell you all
this, but we couldn't get your attention any other way." In that
circumstance the Western left would a) be justified, and b) have some
slight chance of being heard, if it said "We should pay attention to
these people's grievances. Forget vengeance; start changing the
conditions that lead to poverty and inequality."

But the Tuesday terrorists - and that's the correct phrase, not just
propaganda - are not that coalition. They represent a reactionary
religious obscurantism. In gender terms they are a more overt version
of fascism's war on women. Their only connection to the guerrilla
struggles of the Vietnamese, Nicaraguans, South Africans, Salvadoreans
etc. is a military one: they have learned the weakness of superpowers.
Their aim is not freedom in any sense, certainly not socialist freedom;
their aim is world power, supplanting capitalist ideology with theirs,
and, should they win, imposing their rule on the ruins. The masses of
Moslems who support them are suffering from extremely false
consciousness - and/or taking the same gamble that was taken by millions
of poor Europeans who supported (and again support) fascism.

There is a recurring tendency on the left that might be described as
overcompensation for August 1914 - retroactively refusing war credits.
Multinational capitalism and the Pax Americana are bad; ergo, anyone who
attacks them can't be all bad. Especially if he comes from the
exploited, neocolonial world. Then the attack itself, and his reasons
for the attack, are rhetorically submerged in renewed reminders of
sweatshops, death-squads, international debt-slavery etc. At the
extreme of this leftist mindset, there can be no such thing as a Third
World thug, unless he's a CIA thug. This automatic response - James
Baldwin, in another context, called it "Crow Jimism" - parallels the
kind of multiculturalism for which there is no such thing as a bad
tradition (except perhaps among rednecks), no culture whose cruelty or
repression can't be relativized (except the West's). A related though
more sentimental gambit is to hold that war is always wrong; if Bush
etc. want war, it's even wronger. The effect of these responses upon
the left is that, in crisis after crisis, it isolates and trivializes
itself. Normally it has little chance of being heard; in a crisis it has
none. When wars - Western, American wars - begin to fail, the masses
turn against them, and then the left tells itself that people have begun
to hear it. They haven't; they just want the bodybags to stop. It
happened in '69-'70 and it will probably happen in '05.

Four developments alone will slow or destroy global capitalism. In
descending order of likelihood they are: 1) Ecological catastrophe. 2)
A war for control of the Pacific that destroys both China and America.
3) A new, organized, genuinely international International like the one
imagined above. 4) Action on the part of a new Western left that has
overcome fissiparousness and sectarianism, organized new workers, turned
them away from racism and opportunism, obtained some money, gained
access to mass media and figured out how to use them. I'd like to see
(3) and (4) but doubt they will ever happen. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden
and the terrorists he leads are not better than Bill Gates and George
Bush. They're worse. They are not my friends because they are Bush's
enemy; they are my enemy as much as they are his. They deserve justice
- and in the present instance, as ambiguously and inadvertently and
ironically as in 1941, the armed might of capital represents justice.
The only question for me is not whether war should be waged, but how
effectively, with as little cost as possible to innocents, Americans,
their liberties, my loved ones, and me.

I hope I don't sound like I'm going the way of Max Shachtman, who
insisted he was fighting for socialism all the way into McCarthyism. Or
like Wilhelm Reich, or any middle-aged man who gets off on watching
fighterplanes. Or Gottfried Benn, who wrote in '34 to Heinrich Mann:
"Volk means something! Nation means something! What have YOU people
ever given me to believe in?" Or like any well-meaning liberal, still
desperate for belonging and acceptance, who allows himself to be
overwhelmed, his judgment defeated, by all the flags and tears. Perhaps
that's what I am. I sense, however, that there is a need now - a real,
primary need like the need to piss. I share it with millions; to deny it
would poison us all. If you refuse to call it a need for justice, I'll
call it a need for vengeance. I'm willing to live with that, and for
others to die for it.