I came across the estimate the other day that, in response to the killings in the U.S. on September 11, the Americans have killed about 8,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters and about 1,000 Afghan civilians. That’s about four times more people than the September terrorists killed. The writer – a right-wing columnist in the New York Times – was making the argument that the Afghan deaths were worthwhile, not, as you might think, for whatever retaliatory or exemplary power they might have over other terrorists, but because of the benefits they had brought to Afghanistan.
Besides counting the dead, he had collected other statistics, such as the number of children vaccinated against measles who would not have been vaccinated while the Taliban were in situ, and the number of women who will not die in pregnancy and children who will not die pitiably young, because the aid agencies have got back into Afghanistan, and social and health programs are getting off the ground.
The writer claimed that people who object to American bellicosity should reflect on those gains. Above all, he said, an accelerated teacher-training scheme will lead to more than a million children receiving an education who, previously, would have had none. People should recognize, the writer said, that there can be humanitarian gains from military intervention.
I was thinking about this as I walked past the local high school here in Brooklyn, where a sign beside the front door tells you that firearms are forbidden on the premises, and all visitors must understand that they may be randomly scanned. It’s not that I doubt the value of the education provided in even the most embattled school. But I think there’s more than a mote in our American writer’s eye. You can see the superficial logic of his position, but the powerful have a duty to be self-conscious. How would he like it if Russia bombed the U.S. into doing something about its disadvantaged people? Because, in fact, there isn’t an American hospital without its distraught suppliants at the Accident & Emergency entrance.
More than 41 million people in the U.S. don’t have health insurance, and although health-care provision is highly local and in some places excellent, in other places it shares a standard with Kabul. In Texas, a homeless pregnant woman, for example, is in dire straits because almost all the hospitals will turn her away. Nor is there a bit of wasteground in the cities of this great and wealthy country that hasn’t its population of lost souls wrapped in cardboard and rags. We in Ireland fail in the same ways, of course. But we’re not, I hope, so familiar with our failure that we don’t even see it any more.
The writer who is so pleased with America’s actions belongs to a secure consensus. He is cocooned within a majority view. The element of thoughtful doubt that was part of the initial media discussion of America’s response to September 11 has disappeared. Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky have, it seems to me, been taken out of the dialogue available to the masses here. And even at home, voices such as Niall O’Dowd, wildly accusing us of anti-Americanism, have stifled discussion.
It may be that everything the American government and military have done and are doing is better than any of the alternatives. It may be that history will applaud. It is true that the Taliban regime was vile and that its values – which are widely held – need undermining at every opportunity. But we are not much better than zealots ourselves if we do not allow the articulation of views critical of the majority view.
In the same issue of the New York Times there was an article about the compensation offered by the religious orders to Irish victims of institutional abuse. Several people over here asked me, in shocked voices, to explain. Which I did, I hope, in a measured way, with emphasis on the range of thankless social tasks that Irish governments left to the religious, without whom the history of the powerless in Ireland would be even more painful than it is.
But privately I was thinking that the worst abuses came down to the facts that individual women and men let themselves go in callousness and sadism, and that the groups of which they were members allowed them to let themselves go. The religious orders were unchallenged on their territory in their day, and what is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within.
This is the infinite value of the dissenting voice: that wherever it is not allowed to flourish, an institution – a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus – begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play. And the slide begins with the kind of blindness to nuance that, it seems to me, is displayed in the argument about the humanitarian value of sending destroyers and fighter planes and missiles to Afghanistan. What was to stop America from sending the Afghans the price of them long ago? Are not the intelligence and patience that should have gone into American foreign policy the true alternatives to despotism? What’s so great about being the better-armed despot?
The Irish Times Magazine, February 16, 2002