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PART I: A BRIEF
HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
PART II: A BRIEF
HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE
PART III: FROM HERE TO
ETERNITY
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[Published in the New York Times, April 26,
2005]
Terror in the Past
And Future Tense
By ROBERT WRIGHT
TIMOTHY
McVEIGH'S bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City seems
as if it happened less than 10 years ago, but its 10th anniversary,
which happened a week ago, seems as if it didn't happen at all. And for
practical purposes it didn't. Lots of stories made a bigger ripple in
the week's zeitgeist -- some of them understandably (new pope chosen),
some less so (on ''American Idol,'' Anwar's journey ends).
This attention deficit is partly explained by what took place in Lower
Manhattan six years after the bombing. Osama bin Laden's atrocity
dwarfed Timothy McVeigh's along several dimensions -- more Americans
killed by more killers with a larger political base. Though the McVeigh
bombing seems not so long ago, it also seems like part of a simpler era,
before we knew real danger.
But letting the memory of Mr. McVeigh fade has its own dangers. In a
crucially instructive sense he and Mr. bin Laden represent the same
threat. Though their ideologies differ (I'm guessing they wouldn't have
hit it off), both were empowered by a force that will empower tomorrow's
terrorists even more. Unfortunately, it's a force that the Bush
administration has a deep aversion to confronting. And there's no better
illustration of this aversion than one of the many people who got more
press last week than Timothy McVeigh: John R. Bolton, Mr. Bush's choice
for ambassador to the United Nations.
The force I'm darkly alluding to is technology, and, to be sure, it's
been much discussed since 9/11. Productively, even. Lots of people now
see how stubbornly the threat from weapons of mass destruction grows.
Progress in biotechnology, for example, will put more bioweapon tools
and ingredients within reach of more people at pharmaceutical companies,
universities, and so on. There's also more appreciation of how advances
in information technology help terrorist groups hatch plans and
orchestrate them, and even help these groups form and grow in the first
place.
But if we really appreciated how stubborn these trends are and how
ecumenically they abet terrorists, we'd keep Mr. McVeigh's image not
just alive but right next to Mr. bin Laden's. And we'd see the tolls the
two men took -- more than 150 in 1995, nearly 3,000 in 2001 -- as the
first two entries in an ominous sequence. Timothy McVeigh may seem
primitive (a bomb made of fertilizer?), but he's primitive in the
classic sense of the word: he represents an early phase in a natural
growth.
Even in the spring of 1995, microelectronics was helping extremist
groups coalesce and harden. They circulated videotapes like ''Waco: The
Big Lie,'' a McVeigh favorite. It was incendiary and dishonest, like an
Al Qaeda recruiting video, just not distributed online. After Mr.
McVeigh accomplished his mission, the far right used shortwave radio to
tell the faithful that the American government had done the deed in
order to discredit their cause. (Sound familiar?)
Similarly, Mr. McVeigh's fertilizer bomb may seem quaint compared to the
post-9/11 anthrax or the nuclear materials we fear Al Qaeda has, but it
falls into their lineage once you reduce all three to their basic
source: growing ingenuity in the concoction of lethal force; wider
availability of the ingredients in an ever-more-industrialized,
interconnected world; and growing access, via information technology, to
the knowledge needed to use them.
Of course, Osama-era technologies are more menacing than McVeigh-era
technologies. That's the point. What today's Internet is to shortwave
radio and mailed videotapes, tomorrow's Internet will be to today's. As
streaming video penetrates the most remote parts of the world, every
Web-cam-equipped terro-vangelist will have global reach. And information
technologies, like the advancing weapons technologies whose use they
make more likely, are equal-opportunity empowerers: radical Islam,
radical environmentalism, neo-Nazism, whatever.
Yet America's war on terror defines the threat more narrowly: out there
in the ''Muslim world'' or the ''Arab world,'' things need to change.
And of course they do. But that won't be enough. Suppose this approach
succeeds wildly -- that in 15 years, ''Muslim rage'' has evaporated. If
we haven't addressed the generically growing part of the terrorist
threat -- the technology and its consequences -- we still won't be
secure. Whether the next unprecedented trauma comes from right or left,
from abroad or at home, 9/11 will fade to sepia, as Oklahoma City did
after 9/11.
Not everything about America's antiterrorism policy is Muslim-centric.
The administration's homeland security policy pays attention to nuclear
power plants and biotech labs. But leaving aside whether it does so
adequately (short answer: no), you can't secure the homeland by focusing
only on the homeland. As President Bush has stressed, we have to worry
about weapons of mass destruction abroad, given how hard it is to detect
every vial of germs, or even every suitcase nuke, that enters America.
Yet his most salient approach to the problem -- invade a country if we
suspect it has such weapons -- is too costly (in various senses) to
apply universally.
UNLESS I've overlooked an option, there is ultimately no alternative to
international arms control. It will have to be arms control of a
creatively astringent, even visionary, sort. And achieving it will be a
long haul -- incremental, halting progress, over many years, through a
series of flawed but improving agreements that are at first less than
global in scope. But for now the details don't matter, because the Bush
administration opposes the basic idea.
Why? Because John Bolton is not just the undersecretary for arms
control, but the guiding spirit, so far, of the administration's arms
control philosophy. To get other nations to endure intrusive monitoring,
America would have to submit to such monitoring. People of Mr. Bolton's
ideological persuasion insist that this amounts to a sacrifice of
American sovereignty. And they're right; it's just a less objectionable
sacrifice of sovereignty than letting terrorists blow up your cities.
Weeks before 9/11, the Bush administration antagonized much of the
civilized world by rejecting an arduously negotiated protocol to the
Biological Weapons Convention. The protocol would have put teeth in the
treaty, making member nations, which forswear the possession of
bioweapons, open their soil to inspectors.
Would 9/11 and the ensuing anthrax attacks soften the administration's
opposition? Or -- since the protocol was no doubt imperfect -- might the
administration at least suggest an alternative international inspections
regime? Two months after 9/11, Mr. Bolton told a gathering of member
states that the answers were no and no. (Who needs inspections? Mr.
Bolton told the assemblage that the existence of Iraq's bioweapons
program was ''beyond dispute.'')
Mr. Bolton's signature arms-control achievement is the ''proliferation
security initiative,'' which encourages the interdiction of ships
suspected of carrying illicit munitions. Mr. Bolton says there have been
interdictions under the pact. What he doesn't say is that they could
have happened without the pact, because it grants no new powers of
interdiction. Any such powers would have to apply not just to foreign
merchant ships but to ships sailing under an American flag -- which, of
course, would be an unacceptable erosion of American sovereignty.
If the world 20 years from now is to be safe from the technology of 20
years from now, we'll have to address not just the supply of illicit
weapons but the demand for them. The upshot of the technological trends
that empowered Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden is that over time
hatred will morph into lethality with growing efficiency. Dampening
hatred is a disconcertingly vague challenge, but there are things we can
do at home and abroad.
At home, this is an argument for civil discourse, since you never know
when there's an excitable boy, a potential Timothy McVeigh, tuned in.
Abroad, it's an argument for exercising power with grace. Sometimes you
have to antagonize the world to do the right thing, but more than ever
we should avoid antagonizing the world gratuitously. Why is the prospect
of John Bolton representing America at the United Nations again
springing to mind?
Robert Wright, a fellow at the New America Foundation and at Princeton
University's Center for Human Values, is the author of ''The Moral
Animal'' and
Nonzero:
The Logic of Human Destiny.
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