JEFFREY HERF
31
radical Islamic group or state come to possess weapons of mass destruc–
tion (chemical, biological, or nuclear) and the means
to
deliver them,
there is no reason
to
assume that the prospect of nuclear retaliation by
the United States would deter war. This is so because, in their view, their
own death is a prelude to certain entry to a better life in the heavenly
paradise
to
come. For people with such belief, nuclear retaliation may be
a blessing rather than a threat.
Hence, as in World War II, we are in a race against time. However
complex, long-term, and multi-faceted our assault on terrorism will be,
it must include, as the Bush administration has made clear, the military
defeat of this network. In contrast
to
the response of the authoritarian
Austro-Hungarian empire
to
the assassination of June 1914 in Sarajevo,
the United States is responding
to
the mass murder of September 1 Ith
as it should, namely by seeking
to
isolate the terrorists from the rest of
the Islamic world, to underscore that they have no solutions
to
any of
the problems they mention, that the era in which they can kill others
with impunity has come to an end, and that the democracies which they
regard as decadent and weak are in fact capable of a judicious and pow–
erful capacity
to
make a war which will end in their destruction. Ter–
rorists in the twentieth century repeatedly made the error of assuming
that liberal democracies were weak and vulnerable. Al Qaeda is making
the same mistake of believing its own propaganda about our reluctance
to
fight and defeat them.
After World War
II,
European intellectuals turned away from the orgy
of violence of 1914
to
1945 . This is evident in Albert Camus's
The Rebel
and in Jurgen Habermas's work on the priority of discussion over force.
In the late 1970S and 1980s, another generation again turned away from
the romance of revolution and cults of violence of the 1960s New Left. A
key question of the months and years
to
come will be whether and
to
what
extent the opinion-shaping elites of the Islamic world will offer a similar
liberating discourse of disillusionment with ideological fanaticism and a
realistic assessment of the values of reform and compromise. As the expe–
rience of twentieth-century Europe following the defeats of Nazism and
Communism suggests, sobriety and common sense may very well be the
consequence rather than the cause of the defeat of the fanatics and terror–
ists now claiming to speak for Islam. Be that as it may, it is important that
in our country, intellectuals and scholars do what they can to eliminate the
last pathetic shreds of legitimacy to the terrorist tradition which con–
tributed
to
the crimes of September lIth in New York and Washington .
-October
8,
2001
