As a career civil servant I always try to keep partisanship out of my analysis -- even in a private and anonymous memoir of this sort. However, I am sure it is safe to declare as a certain truth, across the three administrations in which I have served, that the events of 9/11 fundamentally reshaped the politics of our globe.
This is not to say that there had not been warning signs earlier. Small scale attempted bombings -- as well, of course, as the far more serious and costly attacks that our allies the United Kingdom had endured, long before the violence reached our shores.
At the time, though, none of us appreciated the magnitude of the new threat facing our shared civilization. The Cold War had been won. Our nation enjoyed unrivaled supremacy of military and economic power, and our values of democracy, prosperity, and industriousness -- the heritage of those immortal theses that had once been nailed to the door of a cathedral in Wittenberg -- appeared to be triumphant.
The fact that there was a civilizational conflict awaiting us -- one with roots stretching back centuries in our collective history, and the essential fissures of which had already long been discernible to our best minds -- eluded us. Eluded me, at any rate. I say it with chagrin.
I confess that I even recall conversations with my British counterparts, in which -- in a tragic reversal of roles -- I and my department played the role of something of a Neville Chamberlain.
They were trying to persuade us even as early as the 1990s of the threat posed by radical Catholicism, but I did not listen. At the time, I was still laboring under the delusion that the IRA was waging something along the lines of a classic national liberation struggle. Their methods were brutal and iniquitous, to be sure, but I thought they were motivated at least by some recognizable political demands. I even tried to convince my English confreres that their long-term strategic interests might be better served by making calculated concessions to the terrorists' demands -- offering a bit more autonomy here and there to Northern Ireland.
I did not yet realize that we were dealing with an ideology that, by its nature, could brook no compromise. That's why we -- I, at least -- did not see it coming when the IRA bomb went off on September 11.
Their choice of target was telling. In video-taped recordings after the attack, IRA members speciously asserted that the bombing was in retaliation for our government's strategic alliance with the British government. Our analysts knew better.
By setting fire to a center of finance and trade, they were in a sense going after the ultimate symbols of the industriousness that had long been the most distinctive and salient feature of our shared Judeo-Protestant heritage.
In the weeks after the attack, I recall, our supervisor in the corps went around the office and left copies of Weber on everyone's desk. I'm told that his works enjoyed a newfound vogue in the Pentagon as well. Indeed, his analysis was penetrating, and provided a context for the struggle in which he suddenly found ourselves that -- for myself at least -- was truly eye-opening. The Catholic members of the team too read and admired the arguments, and they acknowledged -- to their credit -- that their tradition had much to learn from the example of the historically Protestant countries (much as we, no doubt, have something to learn from them).
In my own desultory reading, I came across a passage in Ford Madox Ford that fell like a ray of sunlight on my clouded brain. Seeing a copy of Luther's immortal theses, a character in his novel, The Good Soldier, exclaims to a fellow Protestant, "It's because of that piece of paper that you're honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived."
It hadn't occurred to me until then that it all traced back to that source. But seeing it all written there so lucidly, I put the book down and never resumed it, so overcome was I by the clarity of the vision. Luther, Gutenberg, the free spread of ideas, democracy, human rights, the triumph of industry and the market economy, each leading to the next by logical necessity. It all started there, on that door in Wittenberg.
This is not at all to say that the War on Terror was conceived as a struggle against Catholicism tout court. We were very careful from start to distinguish between the moderate and extremist varieties of Catholicism, and to insist that our fight was solely with the latter. In this struggle, we always welcomed moderate Catholic allies who shared our commitment to freedom and peace.
And indeed, I think there is much to admire in the Catholic tradition. It has given to the world great works of art and literature. And I am well aware that many -- probably most -- individual Catholics have no sympathy whatsoever with the goals and methods of the Irish Republican Army. I have worked with many of them directly, and I have known them to make even the ultimate sacrifices for the sake of the struggle in which we find ourselves.
No, there's nothing wrong with being Catholic in itself. And certainly the more liberal and modernizing tendencies within that tradition are to be encouraged, wherever they have made their nascent appearances.
However, the trouble with the Catholic tradition is simply that it never had a Protestant Reformation. Therefore, it has in some ways remained mired in a premodern outlook. And indeed, when I began to look back through the writings of Catholics from the perspective of our present struggle, I began to realize that the IRA attacks were in many ways only the most recent expression of a far deeper conflict within Western civilization. If you look back to Hilaire Belloc or Chesterton, you see that many writers in the Catholic tradition saw themselves from the start as engaged in an effort to reverse the tendencies of modern Judeo-Protestant civilization -- as opponents of liberalism and capitalism alike.
As for non-Catholic writers who have weighed in on the Irish question -- George Dangerfield, say, or Swift, or Caroline Blackwood's memories of an Ulster childhood -- I confess that many of them today are scarcely readable. Taking an approach that at the time was regarded as "liberal" and large-spirited, they in many ways offered an apologetic for the violent tactics of the Catholic extremists.
They thus have the craven and queasy tenor of those British intellectuals of the early '30s who tried to persuade everyone that the Germans had just been treated unfairly at Versailles, and had every right to try to dust themselves off and adopt a more bellicose posture on the world stage. In short, they smack of appeasement.
Indeed, many things from history start to make a different kind of sense, in light of the events of that fateful day in early September. Hitler was Catholic, was he not?
One of the few writers who holds up well now is Orwell, I'd say. He perceived the dangers of "Catholic nationalism" in his writings on Chesterton. I feel confident that -- however far to the Left he was in his time -- he would be with us in this fight.
But our struggle, I repeat, was not against Catholicism; still less was it in opposition to the Irish. Indeed, the Irish Republic was one of our first allies in the War on Terror. They were as anxious as our Protestant allies to extirpate the dangerous extremist sect of violent nationalists that had taken root in their soil.
We did, however, have to invade Poland, as it was widely suspected to have given shelter to at least some of the bombers.
It is said that errors were made in the conduct of this war. Some of our Ulstermen allies resorted to extreme measures that resulted perhaps in needless civilian casualties, and may even had lost us the sympathy of some otherwise good-hearted Poles, who had no natural inclination to support terrorism. However, our U.S. forces acquitted themselves well. To be sure, some of the more alarmist reports from NGOs estimated hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, but I have no idea how they gather and inflate this data. Some have also condemned our use of white phosphorus in Krakow. But I'd like to ask them whether they would have preferred to see us lose thousands of American soldiers in storming this frigid redoubt. Many do not realize that war cannot be waged in ideal conditions, and without involving hard choices.
What's more, I know that the Polish people themselves -- many of them at least -- welcomed us as liberators. I myself worked with a Polish translator whom I helped to receive a visa to the United States, and he tells me stories to make your blood run cold about what Poland was like before the U.S. occupation.
I can, however, state in this journal -- anonymous as it is and must remain -- that I believe we made a major strategic blunder in invading Cuba in 2003. Many of us at the time privately believed that this war had little to do with our larger objectives in the struggle against radical Catholicism. Some pointed out that the regime in Cuba was not even Catholic, technically -- at least not at the higher levels. We therefore suspected that this invasion had more to do with the private hobbyhorses of some members of the administration, who believed that Kennedy's softness on his Latin fellow Catholics had been the cause of our losing Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and who believed that Protestant-style democracy could still have a chance to flourish in that country if it could be given a chance to breathe from beneath the boot-heel of the Catholo-Communist dictatorship.
We didn't fully appreciate then, as we do now, how deeply engrained are certain cultural habits among the world's Catholic peoples. Even when their rulers have formally renounced the faith, many of its folk customs and beliefs die hard. I now sincerely believe that the Cuban people were not ready for democracy and industry. By trying to foist these hallmarks of modern Protestant civilization upon them, it was as if we were expecting adult responsibilities of people who were still in the childhood of the historical process.
All of this became even clearer to me as we failed to find the nuclear weapons that we had been ensured by senior intelligence were being stockpiled on the island, and as the Cubans themselves --as soon as they had been freed of the yoke of Castro -- whose carcass we dragged from the back of a burro through the streets of Havana -- descended into violent factional conflict, and then civil war.
This is the price that we bear time and again for the largeness of spirit and purpose that animates our country. The United States is -- uniquely among nations -- a superpower driven -- not by lust for our own gain -- but by desire to work the good of all. In this great-hearted endeavor, we sometimes go too far. We offer goods and opportunities to people who are not ready to understand them -- let alone make full use of them.
I also am prepared to admit now, with the benefit of hindsight and the blessed immunity of retirement, that the administration made a mistake in introducing torture and extraordinary rendition into the conduct of the war. Now, I fully embraced the arguments made at the time that certain enhanced interrogation techniques would be necessary to extract information critical to saving American lives. However, I have been told since by military commanders whom I respect that this is not the best way to gather intelligence. Therefore, left to my own choice, we would not have repurposed our military base at Guantanamo as a place to hold those suspected of taking part in radical Catholic terror -- however convenient it was to have it right there on the edge of the nation where we were primarily waging war.
I also would not have worked with the Ulstermen to set up the network of secret prisons. I am told that those Irish Protestants -- in their understandable zeal, and motivated no doubt by a desire for vengeance for the attacks they had long suffered at the hands of Catholic terrorists -- long before we knew about such a menace -- went too far in their interrogation of suspects.
Some NGOs have reported alleged incidents of Protestant guards pissing on crucifixes, driving nails through the hands of Catholic prisoners, making lewd portraits of the Virgin Mary, mixing meat in with the prisoner's meals of Fridays, and similar excesses. But I never know how far to trust these allegations, many of which are made by people with an interest in promoting the radical Catholic cause.
At any rate, I was very relieved when the next administration came into office, as they clearly understood all of these things. In one of my first conversations with the new Secretary of State -- my boss -- she reassured me that she recognized that implanting democracy among the Cubans was a lost cause. They did not yet recognize its value, having for so long been surrounded by a Catholic culture. She told me that her administration recognized that we must keep our energies focused on the true threat of Catholic terror, wherever it appeared around the globe, and not be distracted by grander schemes of promoting democracy, industry, and principles of fair play among people whose mentality was so much under the shadow of Rome.
The wisdom of all of this is so easy to perceive in retrospect, of course. At the time of the Cuba Invasion, however, you will recall that it was not only those of us in government who favored the intervention. Many neoconservatives of course endorsed it, but some liberals and leftists too -- wisely, I think -- understood that the struggle against radical Catholicism was a logical extension of their political tradition. It was the modern version of the fight against Franco. They recalled to mind the Lincoln Brigades and the sacrifices they had made.
Some of the major feminist organizations likewise endorsed our conflict with Cuba, noting that the Catholic nations treated their women abominably, and had an agenda of restricting access to reproductive freedom around the globe.
In fact, many liberals and feminists reasoned, it was actually the anti-war faction of the Left that was betraying their political and ideological heritage. They had allied themselves, in essence, with the forces of reaction. Some of the anti-war contingent could be seen linking arms at rallies with members of "Tradition, Family, and Property" and other fringe Catholic groups. In many respects it was they who had forgotten what the Left was supposed to be about.
For many on the Left, this was their "Kronstadt" moment, to borrow the phrase from Louis Fischer. They were willing to toe the party line only so far. As soon as the rest of the Left was supporting reactionary forces of priests and patriarchy, it was time for them to jump ship.
A number of these "maverick" Leftists even published a manifesto together -- the Medford Manifesto -- to clarify their position as people of the Left who were nonetheless -- or rather, for that very reason -- whole-heartedly committed to the destruction of radical Catholicism as an ideology. Some of them, such as Christopher Hitchens, even went so far as to demand the end of Catholicism in any form, seeing in it the quintessence of the religion and God-worship that inspires the vast majority -- if not all -- of the violence in the world.
And I'd be lying if I said that his Missionary Position didn't seem remarkably prescient, in light of our 21st century experience.
I myself never went so far however. I had, and have, many Catholic friends, and I was very pleased by the approach adopted by the incoming administration. I think it is a testament indeed to the pluralistic attitude of our democracy -- the fact that we are a nation of religious freedom, where even Irish people and Catholics can find a home, so long as they embrace our fundamental institutions -- that we elected a president in 2008 whose name was so evocative -- to put it indelicately -- of "the enemy."
He even made a joke about it, citing the initial "O" of his name, and saying that he was clearly "an Irish president."
No, the new administration didn't go about confusing the issue or getting us mired in wars intended to rebuild and remake Catholic societies (a hopeless cause, if ever there was one). Rather, they took the fight to the enemy directly -- the small bands of Catholic terrorists who could be found in many parts of the world. They did not declare war on Italy or France -- even as we launched targeted strikes against individual radical Catholic leaders within their borders -- because our war was not with those countries.
Indeed, their governments remained our allies throughout the struggle, and were willing to bear the withering criticism of their populace, many of whom opposed the use of drone strikes on their territory. (I suppose they'd rather live under the sway of Canon Law every day? Can you imagine the promiscuous French actually tolerating such a thing? But that of course is what would happen if the radical Catholic elements in their country were to gain control. And no one is ever willing to weigh difficult choices in war. They want their camembert and adultery to remain untouched, without having to sacrifice anything for it.)
Once again, the NGOs made a fuss. They didn't think we should be launching strikes in countries with which we were not at war, and once again they dredged up rumors of civilian casualties. I am forced back to my earlier query: what exactly would they prefer? That we put boots on the ground? That we storm the beach at Normandy, with all the loss of blood and treasure it would entail?
I do have grave concerns, however, about the direction our foreign policy has taken under the current administration -- the third and final one under which I served. It was these concerns, in truth, that led to my retirement.
When Robert Durst began his candidacy, he completely overlooked the distinction between radical Catholicism and the Catholic moderates. Indeed, his rhetoric alienated many of the decent moderate Catholics that we needed to win this fight -- like the Le Pen dynasty in France and the Alessandra Mussolini principate in Italy, both of which had been crucial security partners in Europe throughout the War on Terror, and whom I had been pleased to see returned to power in multiple elections (though the NGOs once again raised some specious concerns about the credibility of the results).
Instead of preserving our relations with these moderate Catholic allies, Durst called -- in the first months of his candidacy -- for a "total and complete shutdown on Catholics coming into this country, until we can figure out what the hell is going on."
Once he had assumed office, he proceeded to pass an executive order that temporarily halted travel from seven countries -- Italy, Spain, Mexico, Poland, Cuba, France, and Guatemala. In an interview the next day, he explained to reporters that when he had "talked Catholic ban," his advisors had urged him against it, so he had decided to "start talking territory instead." The courts placed this executive order under an injunction, after which the Durst administration announced a new version of the order, which banned travelers from these same seven countries, as well as Estonia and Bhutan.
This second executive order laid out the security rationale for banning nationals from these nine countries, and I found it persuasive, so I thought the Supreme Court made the right choice when it ruled later that year that the order was not motivated by discriminatory animus against Catholics.
However, I must truly disagree with the Durst administration's approach to drone warfare. Removing many of the safeguards to ensure precision and minimize civilian casualties that we placed around the use of these machines under the previous administration, the Durst government vastly expanded the number of drone strikes in Italy and France, targeting Cathedrals and Catholic weddings.
This approach is in line, I'm afraid, with Durst's promises on the campaign trail. "We have been too soft with the IRA," he said at one of his rallies. "We've been weak. We need to be strong. I'll bring a strong approach. We are going to show strength. We are going to wipe out the IRA. We are going to crush them. We are going to hunt them down and rip out their guts. We are going to kill their wives and children. We are going to burn their churches and their schools where they train them up to learn about radical Catholic terror. It's not going to be play time anymore." This was met with loud cheers.
I'm sorry to report that many parochial schools have recently had some crude hate speech sprayed on their windows and walls. I don't approve of that sort of thing at all. Some of my Catholic friends have told me they are now afraid to go to mass.
I think it was also a grave mistake for Durst to appoint Ian Paisley as Secretary of Defense. His views on Catholicism have always been a bit immoderate and needlessly absolutist.
I'm not sure where all this is going to end. Many state governments are now passing anti-Canon Law statutes, to ensure that Canon Law cannot be used in our courts. Proposals have even been floated among the more extreme fringes of the Protestant Right suggesting that we need a registry of Catholics. Durst has recently taken aim out our nation's asylum laws, saying that Catholics can use them as loopholes to enter our country from the South.
I really feel that we have lost our sense of what this War on Terror was supposed to be about. Some have even suggested that we identified the wrong threat to democracy and Judea-Protestant civilization from the beginning, and that we should have looked within. Though I wouldn't go that far.
I recently sat down for a conversation with a former friend from the Pentagon, by the way. He too shared my sense that things had taken "a turn for the worst under Durst" (my own little joke). He was also in a position to provide me with an update on the security situation in Europe. We haven't found any declared members of the IRA in many years, he tells me. Indeed, it's not clear that the IRA exists anymore, at least not in any organized way.
Still, I am sure that radical Catholicism persists in other forms, and under other guises. It is a beast with many heads. And perhaps it always will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment